Hell's Battlefield: The Australians in New Guinea in World War II
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Hell's Battlefield: The Australians in New Guinea in World War II
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| ISBN-13: | 9781743430644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Hell's Battlefield
The Australians in New Guinea in World War II
By Phillip Bradley
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2012 Phillip BradleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-064-4
CHAPTER 1
'See you in hell, fellers' New Britain and New Ireland January to April 1942
Billy Cook was waiting to die. Bayoneted eleven times through his back, neck and head, the nuggetty young medical orderly saw no other way out of his agony. Then he heard the flies, droning as they descended on the corpses of his comrades scattered all around him in the coconut plantation. No, he thought. I don't want to die this way.
Japan's finest samurai warriors could catch a fly on the wing and smoke a cigarette standing on their head. Sharp eyes and superb balance were essential qualities for any would-be pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Those who completed the rigorous course of training were given their country's finest weapons. The Mitsubishi Zero fighter was their sword, the mobile carrier fleet its scabbard. On the opening day of the Pacific War, this airborne elite had struck the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Now they carried the battle to the shores of New Guinea.
Like birds of prey, the Zeros swooped across Kavieng Harbour soon after dawn on 21 January 1942. New Ireland, the long, narrow island that shielded mainland New Guinea from the north, was about to suffer its first blows of the war. Three of the Zeros targeted the ketch Induna Star, which was being used by Australian commandos from the 1st Independent Company to ferry men and supplies between Kavieng and Rabaul, on nearby New Britain. When the raid began, the ketch left the government wharf and moved out into the harbour to present a more difficult target. Ray Munro hunkered down behind a Bren gun mounted atop the ketch's cabin, but as the cannon shells lanced through the boat, he was hit and slumped to the deck. George Anderson, who had been handling the ammunition, took over firing. When his elbow was shot away, he moved the gun to his other shoulder and continued to shoot until he, too, was felled. He and Munro would both die from their wounds. They and fellow commando Lex Noonan, who was shot in both legs, were among the first casualties of the fighting that would rage across the New Guinea islands for the next three and a half years.
From his weapon pit near Kavieng airfield, Captain Lex Fraser watched as the planes attacked in groups of nine and then worked over their targets in groups of three. They bombed and strafed the airfield and wharf area for thirty-five minutes, sending the defenders scurrying. Armed with only Vickers and Bren guns, the woefully outmanned Australian defenders claimed to have downed five aircraft; the Japanese later admitted to losing seven. Expecting a follow-up landing, the Australians began to withdraw from Kavieng. Later that day, a message was received that a Japanese naval force was approaching New Britain, destination Rabaul.
Rabaul was the capital of the mandated Territory of New Guinea, which had been ceded to Australian control after the First World War. The decision to defend the town had been made before the outbreak of war with Japan, when the threat of further Japanese expansion was an increasing concern; the force allocated for the task was designated Lark Force. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Carr's 2/22nd Battalion, detached from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 8th Division, had arrived to garrison Rabaul in March and April 1941. The battalion was nicknamed 'Little Hell,' after the poker hand of three twos. Hell would come to Carr's battalion soon enough.
Colonel John Scanlan took over command of Lark Force in October 1941. Scanlan had an outstanding military record from the First World War; he had landed at Gallipoli on the first day of that campaign and later, aged just 27, commanded a battalion on the Western Front. To augment the Rabaul defences, two 6-inch guns had been emplaced at the entrance to Simpson Harbour, while a pair of obsolete 3-inch guns was positioned on Frisbee Ridge to provide anti-aircraft defence. The 2/22nd was augmented by about eighty local men from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (NGVR), who had been called up for full-time duty. Lark could be considered only a token force but, as Carr observed after the war, it was enough to compel the Japanese to launch a set-piece attack and thus help to delay the feared attack on the Australian mainland. All expatriate women and children were evacuated from Rabaul in mid-December 1941, though some nursing sisters remained.
Squadron Leader John 'Kanga' Lerew's force of ten Wirraway fighters and four Hudson bombers had flown to Rabaul in December 1941, within a week of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The limited resources allocated to Lerew reflected the burden that the RAAF carried at this stage of the war. It had to deal not only with heavy commitments in Europe but with escalating conflicts in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Lerew's Hudson bombers were tasked with reconnaissance missions to the north, while the Wirraways were split into two flights with the unenviable role of defending Rabaul from air attack.
Kavieng had only a notional garrison, some 150 men from Major James Edmonds-Wilson's 1st Independent Company. Their heaviest weapons were two Vickers machineguns, positioned to defend the airfield. The forces at Kavieng and Rabaul, together with even smaller detachments at Namatanai, near Kavieng, and on the islands of Manus and Bougainville, could only be termed a forward observation party, a mere skirmish line against the expected Japanese sledgehammer.
The 21 January raid on Kavieng was not the first air attack on New Guinea. On 4 January the 24th Japanese Air Flotilla — fourteen large flying boats, nine fighter planes, and eighteen bombers — had opened the air campaign against Rabaul. The two anti-aircraft guns on Frisbee Ridge did not even have the range to reach the bombers' altitude. The battery commander, Lieutenant David Selby, watched as they flew over Rabaul in arrowhead formation, 'flashing silver in the bright sunlight.' Then the earth 'leapt and danced in a huge swirling column' as Lakunai airfield was bombed. Fifteen people in the native hospital and native compound were killed in the bombing, the first fatalities on the ground in the battle for New Guinea. Just before dusk, eleven Kawanishi flying boats returned to bomb the other major airfield, at Vunakanau, but damage was minimal. Follow-up raids on 6 and 7 January caused more significant damage at Vunakanau, destroying three Wirraways and a Hudson and damaging other planes. Four Wirraways managed to take off during the 6 January raid and one, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Bruce Anderson, engaged one of the flying boats, though it escaped. After more raids on 15 and 16 January, the Mobile Carrier Fleet steamed south from Truk Island and on the 20th, the day before the Kavieng raid, launched 109 planes in its first air attacks. Lerew's tiny force had helped draw Japan's main carrier fleet to Rabaul at a time when it should have been used to keep the boot firmly on the throat of the United States Navy in the eastern Pacific.
Of eight Wirraways sent aloft to challenge the air armada, three were promptly shot down, two crash-landed and another crashed on take-off. Watching from up on Frisbee Ridge, David Bloomfield wrote in his diary, 'It was like hawks attacking sparrows. We had never seen aircraft with such speed.' On the ground at Vunakanau, a frustrated Lerew notified Port Moresby that he would use his sole remaining Hudson bomber to evacuate his wounded. Then, receiving an operations order to keep the squadron at flight-ready status, Lerew responded: 'Morituri vos salutamus.' It was the refrain of the Roman gladiators: 'We who are about to die salute you.' Lerew did not die in these battles, but with most of his squadron lost, the rationale for the RAAF to remain in Rabaul had gone. Lerew's men prepared for evacuation. Late on 21 January the last two Wirraways departed, followed the next morning by the last Hudson bomber, carrying the wounded. The secretary of the Returned Services League at Rabaul, Albert Gaskin, drafted a cable to Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, protesting about the sparseness of the radio news on the bombings. He ended: 'Send us fighter planes if Rabaul worth holding.' None would be sent.
Meanwhile, the 5th Japanese Air Flotilla, comprising the carriers Zuikaku and Shôkaku, was tasked with destroying air and naval forces on the New Guinea mainland. The seventy-five available planes were split into two groups. On the morning of 21 January, they attacked installations, parked aircraft and other vehicles at Lae, Salamaua, Bulolo and Madang before returning unscathed to the carriers.
It was clear that the air raids on Rabaul were a preliminary to invasion. As early as 9 January, a Hudson piloted by Flight Lieutenant Robert Yeowart had spotted large concentrations of ships and aircraft at Truk. After the longest sea reconnaissance undertaken by a RAAF land-based aircraft up to that time, Yeowart had confirmed that the Japanese were preparing to strike south. Rabaul was the obvious target. Aware of the development of the B-17 heavy bomber by the United States, the Japanese commanders in Imperial Headquarters feared that Truk would be vulnerable to attack by aircraft stationed at Rabaul. Occupying the town would prevent this. Rabaul, with its fine land-locked harbour — the crater of a flooded volcano — would also serve as an excellent air and naval base for extending the war south to the Solomon Islands and the New Guinea mainland.
The Imperial Japanese Army would send Major General Tomitar Horii's South Seas Force to assist the navy's invasion of Rabaul. The force was built around Colonel Masao Kusunose's 144th Infantry Regiment, with extensive support from divisional units including a mountain artillery battalion and a company of engineers, some 5000 men in all. Its first action was at Guam, where Japanese troops landed before dawn on 10 December and captured the island the same day. Orders for the landing at Rabaul were issued on 4 January. Any enemy forces were to be destroyed and a base for naval air operations established. Naval support was overwhelming. It included four heavy cruisers, six submarines and a mobile fleet based on four carriers (with approximately 300 aircraft), two battleships and two more heavy cruisers. After leaving Guam on 14 January, the invasion convoy crossed the equator at dawn on 20 January. Late on the evening of the 22nd, all formations had arrived at their designated anchorages off Rabaul.
Major Mitsunori Ikezoe had been working with the naval reconnaissance flights since early January, identifying the Australian defensive positions. Acting on Ikezoe's information, Horii planned a three-pronged attack on Rabaul, focusing on both airfields and the coast between Tawui Point and Praed Point, overlooking the entrance to the harbour, where the main strength of Kusunose's regiment would land. Before daylight on 23 January, one detachment would attack Lakunai airfield from the sea, while an infantry battalion would land to the south of Vulcan, a small crater on the edge of the harbour, and advance inland to Vunakanau airfield. Though engineer units carried stocks of Akazutsu poison gas, authorisation for its use was not given.
On Emirau Island, 120 kilometres northwest of Kavieng, Ken Chambers heard the sound of planes before dawn on 21 January. They were heading southeast, toward Kavieng and Rabaul. After daybreak, he sighted three Japanese vessels passing close to Emirau: an aircraft carrier, a destroyer and a merchant ship, also heading southeast. When another forty-six planes flew over in the same direction, Chambers sent a warning message, only to be told to wait until 0800. Unfortunately, the Japanese did not keep office hours.
On the afternoon of 21 January, Colonel Scanlan called a command conference in Rabaul. Captain Stewart Nottage, an officer from the heavy battery at Praed Point, raised the point that defending the town would not be worth the cost in lives. With the invasion expected that night, the position was all but hopeless. Concerned by the prospect of naval gunfire, Scanlan ordered the evacuation of Malaguna Army Camp, the site of Lark Force headquarters. He told the men, 'Most of you lads are very young and we haven't a chance against this big stuff outside.'
Lieutenant Ben Dawson was the intelligence officer with the 2/22nd and one of only a handful of men told that the invasion was imminent. Scanlan added that the troops would be kept ignorant of the invasion and be deployed as if on an exercise. It was a strange order by Scanlan, showing little faith in his men, and it resulted in many of them failing to take hard rations and quinine with them. Scanlan's directions got worse. 'Well, it looks as if all we can do now is withdraw and attack the enemy's L of C,' he told Dawson, who replied, 'That is a good idea, but what are we going to eat?' Some 2000 tons of stores, including food, had been destroyed the previous day. Three months earlier, when it had been suggested that supply caches be set up in the hinterland, Scanlan had simply channelled Winston Churchill, saying, 'You will fight on the beaches.' With over 1000 men now leaving Rabaul, the ramifications of Scanlan's abysmal lack of forward planning would soon be felt. Billy Cook, a medical orderly with the 2/10th Field Ambulance, helped evacuate the hospital. 'You don't try to stop an avalanche,' he later said. 'We put as many patients as we could on the trucks at our disposal and moved off up to Kokopo,' the former capital of German New Guinea, about 30 kilometres away.
Scanlan had decided to concentrate all his troops south of Malaguna to cover the high ground leading to Vunakanau, which was defended by Captain Ernest 'Pip' Appel's C Company. Major William Owen's A Company was deployed to cover the coastline north of Vulcan crater, with the 2-pounder guns of the 17th Anti Tank Battery and the NGVR detachment covering the road up from the coast to Four Ways junction. Lieutenant Eric Almond's R Company covered that junction, with Captain Colin McInnes's B Company at the nearby Three Ways. Major Richard Travers' D Company covered the road up from Taliligap Mission. By 1700, the Australian troops were in position, though some still believed it was only an exercise.
Captain Frank Shier's improvised Y Company was placed on the coast out at Raluana Point. The company, made up of rear-area men such as clerks and cooks, manned hastily prepared and inadequate defences. Lieutenant Selby, whose gunners had been ordered to support Shier, observed that there was no wire on the beach and only one short trench had been dug. A Vickers gun was positioned, more trenches were hacked out, and more wire was laid, but it was obvious that any resistance here would be token at best.
* * *
On 22 January, the aircraft from the Mobile Carrier Fleet screamed over Rabaul once more. They came just after dawn, attacking Vunakanau airfield and the two 6-inch gun positions at Praed Point, which were clearly visible from the air. The guns had been emplaced one above the other to allow each a full arc of fire. When the upper gun was blown from its emplacement by the bombing, it landed on the lower position, neutralising both weapons. Eleven men were killed in the attack. With the guns silenced, engineers destroyed the magazine, water supply, stores and huts, and the battery was evacuated.
There was no point now deploying troops to protect the harbour entrance. By afternoon, Scanlan also knew the invasion was imminent: the anti-aircraft battery telescope up on Frisbee Ridge had spotted the convoy. Within an hour, the Australians had destroyed both anti-aircraft guns, and the fifty-three men on the Ridge had boarded two trucks and were headed for Three Ways. Demolitions had already been carried out at Lakunai airfield early on 22 January. Two thousand aerial bombs that had recently been landed were also blown up. Unfortunately, the blast also put the radio station out of action.
Driving through Rabaul late in the afternoon of 22 January, deputy chief air raid warden Albert Gaskin found the town deserted. After spending the night at Kokopo, where many of the evacuees had gathered, Gaskin awoke at 0200 to the sound of davits being lowered in the harbour. Out to sea, small searchlights were flashing. The Japanese invasion force had arrived off Rabaul.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hell's Battlefield by Phillip Bradley. Copyright © 2012 Phillip Bradley. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Maps,Abbreviations,
Introduction,
INVASION,
1 'See you in hell, fellers' New Britain and New Ireland: January to April 1942,
2 'Whacco' Port Moresby and Salamaua: March to August 1942,
KOKODA TO MILNE BAY,
3 'An army in retreat, my boy. Not very pretty, is it?' Kokoda Trail: July to September 1942,
4 'Like rats in a bag' Milne Bay: August to September 1942,
5 'The eyes of the Western world are upon you' Kokoda Trail: September to November 1942,
THE PAPUAN BEAC HHEADS,
6 'A murderous curtain of lead' Gona: November to December 1942,
7 'Where are my boys?' Buna: November to December 1942,
8 Ducit Amor Patriae Buna: December 1942 to January 1943,
9 'We sleep and eat amongst the dead here' Sanananda: November 1942 to February 1943,
WAU — SALAMAUA,
10 'They came like the rain' Wau: January to February 1943,
11 'A horrible dream' Bismarck Sea: March 1943,
12 'Hell, what chaps these are' Bobdubi Ridge: February to July 1943,
13 Given up for dead Bobdubi Ridge: June to September 1943,
14 'Come on, boys' Mount Tambu: June to August 1943,
THE NEW GUINEA OFFENSIVES,
15 'A sense of hell' Lae: September 1943,
16 'We were just bloody good' Kaiapit: September 1943,
17 'I know it's hard, son, but it has to be done' Markham and Ramu Valleys: June to October 1943,
18 'They didn't know the country was impassable' Finschhafen to Saidor: September 1943 to February 1944,
19 'Some bastard is going to pay for this' Shaggy Ridge: December 1943 to February 1944,
ENDGAME,
20 A great leap American operations: August 1943 to September 1944,
21 The waiting game Bougainville: November 1944 to August 1945,
22 'This hellish business doesn't make headline news' Aitape to Wewak: October 1944 to August 1945,
23 Endings,
Appendix 1: Casualties,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,