The landing on Vella Lavella

At dawn on 15 August 1943 American landing ships approached the beach near the village of Barakoma at the south-eastern tip of Vella Lavella, the north-westernmost island of the New Georgia group in the central Solomon Islands. Some 4,600 soldiers went ashore that day, mainly from the 35th Infantry Regiment, which together with attached artillery and engineers formed the 35th Regimental Combat Team (RCT). The landing was the result of Admiral William Halsey’s decision not to capture the strongly garrisoned neighbouring island of Kolombangara but to bypass it and strike where the enemy was weak. It was the first such clear, deliberately planned example in the South Pacific of the strategy the Americans later called “leapfrogging”. That day saw the start of the fighting for Vella Lavella, which went on until October.

Why not Kolombangara

After the capture of Munda airfield on New Georgia on 5 August, the natural next objective seemed to be Kolombangara, a round, mountainous island lying just north-west of Munda. The Japanese, however, had concentrated there, by various estimates, 10,000 to 12,000 soldiers and sailors under Major General Noboru Sasaki, and they had an airfield and fortifications by the harbour at Vila. The course of the New Georgia campaign – six weeks of jungle fighting for a single airfield, four divisions committed instead of one, thousands of cases of combat fatigue – was no encouragement to repeat it on even more difficult terrain.

On the staff of Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Area, another solution was already being considered in July. Vella Lavella, some 65 kilometres north-west of Munda, was held by the Japanese only nominally, offered better ground for building an airfield than Kolombangara, and at the same time lay within range of American fighters from Munda and Segi. An airfield on Vella Lavella would make it possible to cover the next step towards Rabaul – a landing on Bougainville – while Kolombangara, cut off and deprived of supplies, would cease to matter. In his memoirs Halsey presented the decision as a direct lesson from the costly experience at Munda. The decision was made easier by the Battle of Vella Gulf on the night of 6–7 August: the sinking of three Japanese destroyers carrying troops showed that the American fleet was capable of cutting Kolombangara off from supplies.

At the end of July a small reconnaissance party was sent to Vella Lavella; for a week, with the help of an Australian coastwatcher, a New Zealand missionary and local guides, it explored the island without being detected by the Japanese. It returned on 31 July with word that the best landing site was the area around Barakoma. On 12 August an advance party of soldiers from the 103rd Infantry Regiment was taken there by motor torpedo boats, reinforced on 14 August, to mark and secure the beach. By American estimates there were then about 250 Japanese on the island – scattered soldiers evacuated from New Georgia and survivors of the destroyers sunk in Vella Gulf and in the Battle of Kolombangara – with no organised defence.

The landing of 15 August

The landing force (Task Force 31) was commanded by Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, who in July had succeeded Richmond Turner at the head of the South Pacific amphibious forces. The ships sailed from Guadalcanal and the Russell Islands in three groups: seven fast transports converted from old destroyers, a dozen or more landing craft, infantry (LCI) and three large tank landing ships (LST), screened by twelve destroyers. P-40 fighters and Corsairs from Munda and Segi circled overhead. The land forces were commanded by Brigadier General Robert B. McClure of Major General Joseph Lawton Collins’s 25th Infantry Division; the combat unit was Colonel Everett E. Brown’s 35th Infantry Regiment.

The landing met no opposition on the beach; men and equipment were unloaded in successive waves throughout the day. The Japanese responded from the air: Zero fighters and Val dive-bombers from the airfields on Bougainville attacked the tank landing ships around noon and tried again towards evening, and in the evening and during the night torpedo bombers and seaplanes made further attempts. Massed anti-aircraft fire from the ships and American fighters broke up these attacks: no ship was sunk, the Americans lost two aircraft and the Japanese – according to various tallies – between 17 and 44. Losses on the beach amounted to 12 killed and about 50 wounded. By evening some 4,600 soldiers were ashore with supplies for a dozen or so days.

The Japanese response

The Japanese command at Rabaul considered a counter-attack but soon gave up the idea. It lacked men and ships, and the troops on Kolombangara were themselves in danger of being cut off. Instead it decided to set up a barge station at Horaniu on the north-eastern coast of Vella Lavella, to serve as a staging point for the evacuation of Kolombangara. On the night of 17–18 August four Japanese destroyers under Rear Admiral Matsuji Ijūin, escorting a convoy of barges carrying about 390 soldiers of the 13th Infantry Regiment and a platoon of naval infantry, clashed with four American destroyers under Captain Thomas Ryan. In the Battle off Horaniu two Japanese destroyers and several smaller vessels were damaged, but the barges took cover along the shore and landed their troops the following day.

Further American convoys bringing supplies and reinforcements on 17 and 20 August were again targeted by air raids; the tank landing ship LST-396 was sunk and several other vessels damaged. By 6 October the Japanese had carried out 121 air raids on Vella Lavella, countered by the anti-aircraft artillery of the 4th Marine Defense Battalion. On land, by contrast, both sides long avoided a clash: the Americans consolidated the beachhead, while army engineers and naval construction battalions (the Seabees) began building an airfield at Barakoma.

The later fighting

At the end of August an American patrol looking for a site for a radar station came upon a larger concentration of Japanese above Kokolope Bay. McClure then advanced along the east coast with battalions of the 35th Regiment, supported by local guides and Fijian scouts, while a battalion of the 145th Infantry Regiment, sent from New Georgia, took over the defence of the beachhead. The Japanese avoided a decisive engagement and fell back northwards; on 14 September the Americans occupied the abandoned Horaniu.

In the second half of September the Americans were relieved by Major General Harold Barrowclough’s 3rd New Zealand Division. From 21 September its 14th Brigade (about 3,700 soldiers) advanced in two columns along the west and east coasts, moving units by barge from bay to bay and clearing the jungle with patrols. The fighting, conducted in torrential rain over terrain where tanks could not be used, pushed the Japanese garrison of a few hundred men onto the north-western cape of the island. Before the New Zealanders could destroy it, the Japanese navy evacuated about 600 men from Marquana Bay on the night of 6–7 October. Ijūin’s destroyers covering the evacuation then clashed with American ones in the Battle of Vella Lavella; the Japanese lost the destroyer Yūgumo, the Americans USS Chevalier. Earlier, between 28 September and 4 October, the Japanese had also used barges and destroyers to evacuate the bypassed Kolombangara – some 9,000–12,000 men, most of them to Bougainville.

According to figures cited in the literature, about 150 American and New Zealand soldiers and sailors were killed in the fighting for Vella Lavella. The New Zealand official history estimates Japanese losses on land at 200–300 killed, the American historian Gordon Rottman at fewer than 150; the Japanese air arm’s losses in the raids on the beachhead were much greater.

Place in the war

The landing on Vella Lavella brought the New Georgia campaign to a close and became a model for later operations in the Pacific. Bypassed Kolombangara, with a garrison several times larger than all the Japanese on Vella Lavella, proved useless, and the Japanese had to abandon it without a fight, while the Americans spared themselves a bloody assault. The airfield at Barakoma, opened at the end of September, served the fighters covering the next steps of Operation Cartwheel: the landings on the Treasury Islands and at Cape Torokina on Bougainville (October–November 1943).

The same logic soon shaped the whole Allied strategy towards Rabaul. Instead of capturing this powerful base with its garrison of some 100,000 men, the Allies decided to ring it with airfields and cut it off, a course finally approved at the Quebec Conference in August 1943. General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific used “leapfrogging” until the end of the war, bypassing dozens of strongly held islands whose garrisons – as on Kolombangara – were left without supplies and often without any chance of evacuation. On that same day, 15 August 1943, at the other end of the Pacific, American and Canadian soldiers were landing on Kiska in the Aleutians, unaware that the Japanese had already left it.