War at the End of the World Read online

  Deputy Administrator Page again cabled Canberra, pleading for permission to put some three hundred civilians aboard the Herstein for evacuation. When the response came in, Page stared at it in disbelief. The authorities wrote that all essential personnel must remain at their posts in Rabaul, and nonessential personnel could not board the freighter. The orders were explicit: “No one is to take the place of the copra aboard the Herstein.” Page crumpled the cable in his hand. That settled it. No one was getting away before the invasion.18

  —

  About the same time the Herstein was loading her cargo, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo sailed from Truk with a large and powerful fleet that included four aircraft carriers, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and nine destroyers. Always a cautious commander, Nagumo sent two squadrons of submarines ahead to patrol the St. George’s Channel. The fifty-four-year-old Nagumo, who suffered from severe bouts of arthritis, was described by one contemporary as “an officer of the old school.” Although he had disagreed with the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had carried out the mission as commander of the First Air Fleet. Nagumo was gruff and often uncommunicative, but many of his junior officers looked up to him as a father figure. Navy officers who knew him considered the pug-faced admiral to be Japan’s leading advocate of combined sea and air operations. His carrier pilots were fresh from their Pearl Harbor victory and anxious for more combat. As the First Air Fleet sailed south toward its rendezvous with General Horii’s transports, Nagumo obsessively studied the operational plans for the invasion and conquest of New Britain and New Ireland.19

  —

  Life aboard Horii’s transports was miserable—cramped and hot. Temperatures inside the holds that housed most of the ranks often reached one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Nevertheless, senior officers kept morale high with speeches that reminded the men of their samurai heritage and their absolute obedience and devotion to the emperor.

  The monotony was briefly broken at 6:25 p.m. on January 17. A lookout on the minelayer Tsugaru reported seeing the mast of a ship under sail on the horizon, about eighteen miles distant. The Tsugaru’s captain later wrote, “At first . . . we suspected it to be MacArthur fleeing from the Philippines to Australia in a small vessel.” The minelayer picked up speed and “pursued it with great excitement.” Crew members rushed to the rails to catch sight of the enemy general as the small, distant vessel put on more sail in an attempt to escape. In the end, however, it turned out to be Japanese fishermen who had thought the pursuing warship was an American destroyer. The fishermen were so relieved that they gave the Tsugaru’s crew four large tuna from their catch.20

  In the early-morning hours of January 20, the South Seas Detachment became the first Japanese army in the nation’s history to sail across the equator. The crews marked the event with celebrations and praise for the emperor. That afternoon Horii’s and Nagumo’s fleets rendezvoused according to plan, and more than one hundred aircraft took off from the decks of the four carriers under the command of Japan’s top pilot, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the commanding officer of the squadrons that had attacked Pearl Harbor.21

  Once all aircraft were airborne, they separated into three formations. Based on the plan prepared by Fuchida, they were to approach Rabaul from three directions: east, west, and north.

  —

  At 12:48 p.m. that same day, January 20, Con Page informed Port Moresby by wireless that he had seen a formation of twenty bombers heading toward Rabaul. Port Moresby relayed Page’s message to Lark Force, which again sounded the air-raid siren. People ran for cover or to battle stations. The seven remaining Wirraways took off and flew east, in the direction of Page’s plantation on Tabar Island.

  Suddenly a second group of thirty-three enemy aircraft appeared, approaching from the west. Minutes later another fifty Zero fighters approached from the north. The sky filled with a mix of fighters, bombers, and dive-bombers. According to their commander, Lieutenant Selby, Rabaul’s antiaircraft gunners were awestruck that “the Japs had a plane capable of anything like three hundred miles an hour.”22

  The Wirraway pilots were quickly under attack from all directions. Despite a daring and aggressive defense, the pilots were doomed. Selby later wrote that he and his gunners watched in stunned silence as their compatriots fought with “desperate gallantry” against the enemy. They all knew that “there could be only one conclusion to this fantastically uneven combat.”23

  In a matter of minutes, Japanese aircraft commanded the skies over Rabaul. Three Wirraway pilots perished in dogfights against the much faster and more maneuverable Zeros. Two others crashed while trying to land. One other plane did land successfully, but could no longer fly, with a portion of its tail shot away. Only one of the defenders managed to touch down safely and intact. All that was left of the squadron were two Wirraways and one Hudson bomber.

  Now without defending aircraft, the members of Lark Force fought on with the weapons they had, although they knew that their rifles and Bren guns were no match for the high-flying bombers. For more than a half hour, the bombers circled far out of range and dropped their loads at will, targeting the two airfield runways and buildings, as well as any aircraft on the ground. The dive-bombers and the Zeros focused their attention on the waterfront, looking for ships, wharves, docks, and anything that resembled a military installation.

  Once the enemy planes departed, the gun crews fell silent. Gone were the clamoring schoolboys. They were now subdued veterans who had witnessed one of the worst days in Australian military aviation.

  Unbeknownst to them, however, their two antiaircraft guns had done some damage. Ensign Haruo Yoshino, who had commanded a torpedo bomber at Pearl Harbor, reported nearly fatal damage to his aircraft from the two old guns and serious damage to five planes in his group as he limped back to the carrier Kaga. He later described that day’s mission as “frightful.” Tokyo radio reported, “Seven of our planes failed to return.”24

  The courageous performance of Selby and his young gunners came to the public’s attention a few months later when ABC war correspondent Haydon Lennard wrote, “Military officers in New Guinea are still talking about this man Selby and his unit. Selby’s fate is unknown. But one thing is certain: Selby and his men behaved like heroes.”25

  From high above the action, Commander Fuchida had watched and realized with regret that he could have taken the port town’s air defenses with far less airpower. The attack, he later said, was “like a hunter sent to stalk a mouse with an elephant gun.”26

  Historian Gordon W. Prange, who interviewed Fuchida in 1947, reported that the pilot, on his return to the carrier Akagi, told Admiral Nagumo that it was “ridiculous” to use so many aircraft against the target. He believed it was a waste of “time, gas, and bombs, none of which Japan had to spare.”27

  At the time the attack began, the Herstein had already loaded two thousand tons of the highly flammable copra. Three “Val” dive-bombers swept down on the ship, each dropping a single bomb. All three hit the target. One slammed into the engine room, and a fuel fire erupted, quickly reaching the cargo. Trained crew members operating the two old antiaircraft weapons mounted on the freighter kept up a continuing fire at the airplanes until the spreading flames forced them to jump overboard and swim to shore. Captain Gundersen was ashore meeting with the shipping agent when he saw his vessel explode.

  The ship’s steward, Karl Thorsell, ran down the gangway to escape. He almost succeeded, but suddenly turned and inexplicably ran back to the ship, vanishing into the inferno. The lines tying the Herstein to the wharf caught fire, and the vessel drifted free into the harbor. She burned all night and into the next morning.28

  Wing Commander Lerew radioed RAAF headquarters in Townsville about the attack. “Waves of enemy fighters shot down Wirraways. Waves of bombers attacking aerodromes. Over one hundred aircraft seen so far. Will you now please send some fighters?” The response was not what he hoped t
o hear: “Regret inability to supply fighters. If we had them you would get them.”29

  Lerew’s reply was straightforward. “Wirraways and Hudsons cannot be operated in this area without great loss and sacrifice of skilled personnel and aircraft. As fighters cannot be obtained only one course of services of trained personnel valued.” The wing commander informed his headquarters that he planned to withdraw what personnel he had left from Rabaul with the hope they would live to fight another day. At this time, he had only three undamaged aircraft left, two Wirraways and one Hudson. He planned to use the Hudson to fly wounded men to Port Moresby for treatment.

  A follow-up order the next day, January 21, instructed Lerew to send “all available aircraft” to attack a Japanese fleet reported to be sixty-five miles southwest of Kavieng on course for Rabaul. This meant Lerew should send his one remaining bomber to attack a Japanese fleet reported to include two aircraft carriers, three or four cruisers, a large number of destroyers, and between five and seven transports packed with Japanese soldiers.30

  Despite the foolhardiness of the order, Lerew and his men, along with about a hundred local tribesmen, managed to push and pull the one patched-up Hudson and one Wirraway from their hiding place beneath a grove of trees. The second Wirraway was found to be too damaged for flight. They moved the planes slowly along a taxiway and onto the bomb-cratered muddy remains of the Vunakanau runway as the day neared its end, reducing the likelihood of further enemy attacks until the following day. With no bomb racks, the Wirraway was to fly as cover for the bomber. A short time later, both aircraft took off on what was a suicide mission. The Japanese carriers were sure to have a dozen or more fighters on their decks, ready to lift off and oppose any approaching planes. Fortunately, the darkness set in quickly and eliminated any possibility that Squadron Leader John Sharp and his crews on the two Australian aircraft would find their targets, so they soon returned to the field.31

  Before making a final decision on evacuating his remaining air and ground crews, Lerew met with Colonel Scanlan to determine whether his men could be of assistance to the army. Scanlan told him the unarmed and untrained airmen would serve no purpose, and, besides, he had only about a thousand inexperienced men left to defend against what was likely to be between fifteen and twenty thousand combat-hardened enemy veteran fighters. The colonel did agree to send some army engineers to both airfields to blow up anything the Japanese might find useful, including the runways themselves.

  A new order arrived shortly after Lerew and Scanlan met that instructed Lerew to use his men to “assist Army in keeping aerodrome open.” Lerew had had enough of this foolishness and sent a now famous response, which the RAAF cipher clerks could not immediately understand until they realized it was in Latin. It read, “Morituri vos salutamus,” which means “Those who are about to die salute you,” quoting doomed Roman prisoners forced to fight in a mock naval battle before Emperor Claudius in A.D. 52.32

  —

  Meanwhile, fifty-two fighters and dive-bombers lifted off the decks of the Japanese aircraft carriers Kaga and Akagi on January 21 and attacked the harbor facilities at Kavieng on New Ireland. There they seriously damaged the island’s escape vessel.

  That same day, seventy-five planes from the carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku attacked Australian positions on the coast of New Guinea at Lae, Salamaua, Bulolo, and Madang.33

  On the morning of January 21, the Lark Force radio operator picked up a transmission from a patrolling Catalina, which had sighted a large enemy naval force west of New Ireland heading directly toward Rabaul. Colonel Scanlan gave orders for all companies to prepare to move out on a moment’s notice and for the troops stationed on a promontory overlooking the harbor to withdraw immediately. He did not intend, he told his second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Howard Carr, to allow his troops to be “massacred by naval gun fire.”34

  When the surviving crew members of the Herstein learned of the impending Japanese invasion, they held an impromptu meeting to discuss their future. Captain Gundersen and one other man wanted to leave Rabaul when the Australian forces withdrew, but all the others thought that because Norway was not at war with Japan, the Japanese might send them home as neutrals. They were badly mistaken—those who remained would suffer harshly as slave labor during the next five months, and then perish when an American submarine sank the vessel on which they were being shipped to Japan.35

  Following the invasion, Gundersen joined a group of Australians that spent seventy-eight days trekking over three hundred miles along the New Britain coast in search of rescue vessels. When the motor yacht Laurabada from New Guinea found them, half the party had perished from hunger or illness, and several had died in Japanese ambushes. Gundersen joined Lieutenant Selby and 155 other escapees aboard the vessel. The captain was the only member of the Herstein’s thirty-six-man crew to survive and return to Norway.36

  Thursday, January 22, dawned with showers and dense clouds, limiting visibility for lookouts aboard the Japanese invasion fleet. An unwarranted fear mounted among the invaders that enemy submarines or aircraft sent from Port Moresby might attack their ships from out of the gloom. Rear Admiral Shima wrote in his diary, “We were very much worried about being taken unawares by the enemy. Indeed, it was truly by the aid of the gods that we were not troubled by them.” That they were not troubled was due less to the gods than it was to the defenders’ lack of weapons.37

  The admiral’s concerns about an enemy attack were seconded by the intelligence officer of the South Seas Force, Major Toyofuku Tetsuo, who in March 1941 had slipped into New Guinea on a spy mission disguised as a merchant seaman. “We didn’t fear attack from enemy naval units because we had control of the sea at the time. It was suspected, nevertheless, that attacks would come from submarines.”38

  In the predawn hours of the same day, Wing Commander Lerew had as many injured and sick men as he could removed from the army hospital and placed aboard the last Hudson bomber. He ignored an order to relinquish his command to Flight Lieutenant Brookes and return with the Hudson to Port Moresby to assume command of a newly formed squadron. Brookes was to place himself and his men under Colonel Scanlan to serve as infantry to defend the airfield.39

  From their perch on the mountaintop, Selby’s gunners caught sight of the enemy fleet’s smoke through their gun telescopes. They sent a message to Colonel Scanlan, who sent two officers to investigate. By the time the two arrived and peered through the lenses, they were able to count twenty-two ships of all sizes heading straight toward them. The Japanese invasion was only a matter of hours away.

  After the two officers rushed back to Scanlan and explained what they had seen, the colonel began withdrawing the thin defense line he had placed along the beaches. Scanlan recognized that such a large assembly of ships had to be bringing more troops than his small force could hope to stop. Besides, there was not much for his men to defend when the enemy arrived. They had heavily mined both airfields with bombs to prevent the Japanese from using them immediately; the coastal defense guns had been lost to bombing raids; and virtually all the radio transmission equipment had been destroyed in explosions. All that remained were the two old antiaircraft guns manned by Selby’s gunners. Scanlan ordered Selby to destroy the guns and withdraw.40

  When Selby inquired about transport vehicles for his men and their equipment, he was told no vehicles were available. This meant he would have to load his Vickers light machine gun, an antitank rifle, and as much ammunition as possible, along with all his men, into two decrepit trucks and drive the twenty miles of “bad road” to a rendezvous place before nightfall. Selby later wrote, “With a heavy heart I supervised the preparations for the destruction of the guns.” He went on to describe them as “faithful friends” that had never let him down. Sadly, the men placed charges in each gun’s muzzle and chamber and ran wires to a nearby shelter. Unable to give the order to fire, Selby simply nodded to the two men holding the ends of the wires. The r
esulting explosion split each barrel open for several feet. Painful as the act was for men who had pushed and pulled and nursed the two guns up the mountain, and watched them perform flawlessly, it was better, Selby wrote, than the “deep disgrace of letting them fall intact into enemy hands.”41

  Watching the enemy fleet approach from the Mission Station high above the harbor, a party of nurses, Catholic sisters, and priests were shocked. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,” said twenty-six-year-old army nurse Lorna Whyte from New South Wales. “There were submarines, aircraft carriers, troop ships.” Within days, Whyte, along with seventeen other nurses, would be prisoners of the Japanese invaders and transported to Yokohoma. Known as the “Lost Women of Rabaul,” for three years and nine months their fates would remain unknown.42

  By ten thirty that night, all the Japanese ships were poised at their assigned anchorages, ready for the landings. The westerly wind had died down, the sea was calm, the night moonless, just as the planners in Tokyo had predicted. It was an ideal night for an amphibious assault.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Every Man for Himself”

  At 10:35 p.m. on January 22, the order to “commence landing operations” passed between the ships in the anchorage. Twenty-five minutes later the troopships began lowering their landing barges into the quiet sea.1

  Packed together in the landing barges, Japanese soldiers looked toward the land ahead of them, but could see little in the pitch-black. A few small fires still burned from that day’s air raid, and a nearby volcano periodically spewed flames and smoke into the air. Gray volcanic dust laid a thin blanket on the ships, the barges, and the men.

  Troopers of the 1st Battalion of the 144th Infantry Regiment under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hatsuo Tsukamoto were the first to land at their objective a few minutes after one a.m. This was a beach near a place known as Praed Point, the site of the two now-destroyed coastal defense guns. The Japanese planners had considered it an ideal location for landing, with an accessible beach, but the feat proved to be more difficult when the soldiers found there was a six- to ten-foot-high cliff behind the beach, with dense woods beyond. It took the men more than thirty minutes to find a way through to the road leading to the Lakunai Airfield, one of their two primary objectives.2