The landings on Woodlark and Kiriwina

Just after midnight on 23 June 1943 two American fast transports – the converted old destroyers Brooks and Humphreys – hove to in Guasopa Bay off Woodlark Island in the Solomon Sea. At 12.32 a.m. an advance party of the 112th Cavalry Regiment under Major D. M. McMains went ashore from six landing craft. There were no Japanese on the island. On the night of 23–24 June a similar party from the 158th Infantry Regiment landed near Losuia on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. Both were to prepare beaches, roads and airfield sites for the main forces, which went ashore on 30 June. The whole operation bore the code name Chronicle and was the first step taken by General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the great offensive against the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul.

Popular chronologies speak under this date of a landing in the Trobriand Islands and of the continuation of the American “island-hopping” strategy. This calls for two clarifications. On 23 June the first landing was on Woodlark, which does not belong to the Trobriands – it lies some 180 km further east; Kiriwina received its advance party on the night of 23–24 June. Both islands, moreover, were empty: they were occupied rather than captured, and the deliberate bypassing of strongly held Japanese bases, later dubbed “leapfrogging”, was to begin only several months later.

The Cartwheel plan

After the victories on Guadalcanal and at Buna, the Allies could at last think of attacking Rabaul – the main base of the Japanese army and navy in the South Pacific, taken in January 1942. A directive of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff of 28 March 1943 ordered MacArthur and Admiral William Halsey to close in on it along two routes: along the coast of New Guinea and through the Solomon Islands. On this basis MacArthur’s staff reworked the earlier Elkton plans; the third version was issued on 26 April, after the two commanders’ first face-to-face meeting in Brisbane. The operations were named Operation Cartwheel. It provided for some thirteen landings and captures over eight months.

Woodlark and Kiriwina were chosen to open it. Neither side had occupied them, and their position was valuable: from Kiriwina to Rabaul is about 270 nautical miles (some 500 km), and from Woodlark to Bougainville about 200 miles (some 320 km). Airfields on these islands would allow Allied fighters and medium bombers to reach targets that until then only unescorted heavy bombers could reach, while also tightening control over the Solomon Sea and the Bismarck Sea, where in March Allied aircraft had destroyed a Japanese convoy bound for Lae.

Alamo Force and the advance parties

MacArthur entrusted the operation to General Walter Krueger, born in Flatow (now Złotów in Poland), commander of the Sixth Army, which had just arrived in Australia. His headquarters operated as Alamo Force and reported directly to MacArthur’s headquarters, bypassing the Australian General Thomas Blamey. According to John Miller, author of the American official history, it was the first landing in the South West Pacific to be planned in such detail that its procedures became the model for those that followed. Some 16,800 men were assigned to the operation. The landings were commanded by Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey, while cover from the sea was provided by the force of the British Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley, which included Australian ships. During this period the heavy bombers of the US Fifth Air Force were to attack the airfields at Rabaul, and fighters of the Australian RAAF were to cover the convoys.

The ground had been reconnoitred beforehand. At the beginning of May small parties of engineers slipped onto both islands, surveyed the beaches and airfield sites and confirmed that there were no Japanese there. In May an Australian radar station also began operating on Kiriwina. The troops, however, had to be gathered from a vast area: the 112th Cavalry Regiment (fighting dismounted) came complete from the South Pacific and was waiting at Townsville, but the units for Kiriwina were scattered from Port Moresby to Australia. The main landing was therefore put back to 30 June – the same day fixed for the landings at Nassau Bay in New Guinea and on New Georgia. On 20 June Krueger’s headquarters opened at Milne Bay, where a year earlier the Australians had repelled a Japanese landing. MacArthur and Barbey soon arrived there as well.

The advance party for Woodlark left Milne Bay at 4 p.m. on 22 June. Disembarking in a strong wind and heavy swell went on until 4 a.m. No one had warned the local Australian coastwatcher about the landing: on hearing of foreign soldiers, he deployed his band of native guerrillas in a skirmish line and prepared to fight. Only when he heard American accents did he join the newcomers.

After returning to Milne Bay, the same two ships picked up the advance party for Kiriwina on 23 June – a signals platoon of the 158th Regiment, part of the 59th Engineer Company and a beach party under Lieutenant Colonel Floyd G. Powell. They sailed four hours late, at 6.10 p.m., and arrived off Kiriwina at midnight. The island is almost entirely ringed by coral reef; a winding channel eight kilometres long leads to the beach at Losuia. At low water the boats ran aground several times in the dark, and Admiral Barbey also blamed the troops’ poor training. Dawn found the ships still not unloaded, and for fear of aircraft they sailed away with part of their cargo; they came back for the heavy equipment three nights later. On Kiriwina, where in 1915–1918 Bronisław Malinowski had carried out the research that became a classic of anthropology, the inhabitants now helped the Americans build a coral causeway on the north shore, about 2 m high and about 270 m long, carrying the coral in baskets. The Japanese either did not notice the advance parties or did not think them worth attention – they attacked them neither from the sea nor from the air.

The main landing of 30 June

The real landings took place a week later. On Woodlark, from 9 p.m. on 30 June, six LST landing ships that had left Townsville on 25 June put ashore some 2,600 men under Colonel Julian W. Cunningham: the 112th Cavalry Regiment, the 134th Field Artillery Battalion and the 12th Marine Defense Battalion. All the equipment had been loaded beforehand onto lorries that drove straight onto land, so the ships left before dawn. On Kiriwina, from the morning of 30 June, some 2,250 men under Colonel J. Prugh Herndon came ashore from twelve infantry landing craft (LCIs), which grounded on the shallows 200–300 yards from the shore; downpours and the ebb tide further delayed unloading. The Japanese response was limited to reconnaissance flights and two small air raids on Woodlark. According to the American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the Japanese were preoccupied with the simultaneous landings in New Guinea and New Georgia.

Seabees began building an airfield on Woodlark on 2 July; on 23 July the first squadron of American fighters flew in. On Kiriwina, where the work was bogged down in mud, Krueger replaced Herndon with another commander, and the Australian No. 79 Squadron RAAF, flying Spitfires, began operating from the island on 18 August. Motor torpedo boat bases were also set up on both islands.

Place in the war

The occupation of Woodlark and Kiriwina was the quietest possible opening to a great offensive. Two days before the advance party reached Woodlark, Halsey’s marines had gone ashore at Segi Point on New Georgia, and on 30 June – simultaneously with the main landings on the two islands – the Americans landed on Rendova and at Nassau Bay in New Guinea. From that day both arms of Cartwheel advanced at the same time. General Hatazō Adachi’s Japanese Eighteenth Army, whose reinforcements had been pouring into Lae since January, was concentrating on defending the New Guinea coast and lacked the strength to defend distant islands.

The military value of the two bases in itself proved modest. The front quickly moved west and north, and the airfields on Woodlark and Kiriwina served mainly as staging posts, supply bases and sources of fighter cover for subsequent operations. Morison and the Australian official historian G. Hermon Gill nevertheless stressed that Operation Chronicle was a valuable dress rehearsal: in it the army and navy tested the organisation of amphibious landings, which in the months that followed became routine in the South West Pacific.

The “island-hopping” strategy mentioned in the chronologies took proper shape only later. In August 1943 Halsey bypassed heavily defended Kolombangara and landed on Vella Lavella, and the Quebec Conference decided that Rabaul need not be captured – it was enough to cut it off and neutralise it from the air. After the capture of Lae and Salamaua in September, and the landings on New Britain in December 1943 and in the Admiralty Islands in February and March 1944, the base with its nearly one hundred thousand Japanese troops was cut off and survived in isolation until the end of the war. This way of waging war – bypassing strongholds and seizing weakly held points for airfields – went down in history as leapfrogging. The bloodless occupation of Woodlark and Kiriwina was its modest forerunner.