Fortress Rabaul (2 page)

Prologue
Melbourne, Victoria,
2350 Hours, Friday, January 23, 1942

A
T TEN MINUTES
to midnight, the lights still burned brightly at Victoria Barracks, the stately combined headquarters of the Australian armed forces. On a normal evening, the military staffs were shooed out promptly at 1700 (5 p.m.) so that the cleaning crews could get in, but on this balmy night, many of the Commonwealth’s top leaders were gathered in the Central War Room. They had a crisis on their hands.

For the past thirty hours, no one had heard from the small garrison at Rabaul, the former capital of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, 2,300 miles to the north in the Bismarck Archipelago. The garrison, code-named Lark Force, consisted of a lightly armed infantry battalion, a battery of small antitank guns, and a field ambulance detachment, the latter staffed by two doctors, twenty orderlies, and six nurses. Heavy weapons were limited to a pair of coastal defense guns, manned by a detachment of Royal Australian Artillery, and two aging antiaircraft guns—one with a cracked breach—manned by young militiamen. With a grand total of about 1,400 troops, Lark Force was tasked with defending two airdromes, a large harbor, and more than fifteen miles of New Britain’s rugged coastline.

The prolonged silence from Rabaul was ominous, but the men at Victoria Barracks had a fairly clear idea of what had transpired. In early January, planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy based at Truk had initiated a series of bombing attacks against Rabaul, receiving little opposition
despite the presence of a Royal Australian Air Force squadron. Then on January 20, a raid by more than one hundred Japanese carrier planes practically wiped out the squadron and badly damaged the fortifications at Rabaul. Two days later, another attack by carrier planes destroyed what remained of the fixed defenses.

At noon on January 22, an enemy invasion fleet was sighted on the northern horizon. Hours later, all communications with Rabaul abruptly ceased. It was all too apparent that New Britain had been invaded.

The outcome should have been no surprise, for the fate of Lark Force had been decided long before the Japanese arrived. On December 12, 1941, only a few days after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the government decided not to risk any ships to deliver additional men or material to Rabaul. There would be no evacuation, no resupply. In a secret cable to diplomats in Washington D.C., the chief of naval staff attempted to rationalize the cabinet’s decision, writing, “
Under the circumstances
… it is considered better to maintain Rabaul only as an advance air operational base, its present small garrison being regarded as hostages to fortune.”

Incredible as it seems, the Rabaul garrison was given up as lost more than a month before the invasion occurred.

The government’s one concession was to evacuate the noncombatants. Over a period of eight days beginning just before Christmas, approximately eight hundred women and children were taken from the Mandated Territory by commercial ships and aircraft. The civilian men—more than two hundred at Rabaul alone—were left behind to face an uncertain future. They included Harold Page, the acting administrator of the territory, whose older brother was a former prime minister and one of Australia’s most prominent citizens. Despite his connections, Page could do nothing to help himself or the others left behind. As the weeks went by and the threat of invasion loomed, he sent urgent messages requesting instructions for the evacuation of the men, but the bureaucrats in Canberra had ignored his pleas for help.

Now it was too late. The last ship capable of providing safe passage from New Britain had been set ablaze by Japanese dive-bombers on January 20.

DOWN IN THE DIM basement corridors of Victoria Barracks, newspaper correspondents waited anxiously for an official statement about the
situation at Rabaul. As midnight approached, some were concerned about the deadline for the morning editions, but additional minutes dragged by while staff officers argued over the wording of a press release. Finally a brief communiqué was issued. It stated simply that all radio traffic from Rabaul had ceased at 1600 hours on January 22, and a Japanese invasion force had landed before dawn the next morning. The remnants of Lark Force, driven from their fortifications, were believed to be putting up “resistance in the hills.”

Over the next few days, the Australian government carefully controlled the information provided to the general population, much of it presented by Francis M. “Frank” Forde, the deputy prime minister as well as minister of the army. On the evening of Friday, January 23, he preempted the military communiqué by several hours in stating that the “only known landing” had occurred at Kieta, on the big island of Bougainville in the northern Solomon Islands. Acknowledging the presence of a Japanese fleet near Rabaul, he told the press, “Australia was facing the most serious threat in its history.”

To ensure that his statements were taken seriously, Forde continued to emphasize the magnitude of the situation.

The Premier of Japan (General Tojo) had declared that Japan would show no mercy if we continued to resist, but resist we will to the utmost of our capacity. If the enemy lands at Rabaul two events of tremendous gravity will occur. These were that territory under the control of an Australian Government will be assailed for the first time, and that Australian militia will be in action for the first time. We cannot delude ourselves about the fact that Australians will have to fight as they never fought before for our very existence.

The next afternoon, Forde stated that the Japanese had presumably landed at Rabaul, based on the loss of communication with the garrison. But in the wake of the initial report, nothing more was learned. After several days of silence, some newspapers resorted to speculation. “
Military experts believe
that the Rabaul garrison should be able to hold out until sufficient aid arrives,” invented the Sydney
Sun
on January 28.

But it was pure propaganda. Nobody in Australia, least of all the press, knew what was happening at Rabaul.

CHAPTER 1

Volcanoes, God, and Coconuts

A
FEW WEEKS AFTER
the Pacific war began, newspaper correspondent George H. Johnston posed a rhetorical question about Rabaul: “
Why are the Japs striking
at this little tropical outpost less than five degrees below the equator?”

The short answer is that Rabaul boasts one of the finest harbors in the Pacific. Its numerous deepwater anchorages are ringed by rugged mountains, with a relatively narrow passage in the southeast quadrant that opens to the sea. The main basin, measuring approximately seven-and-a-half miles long by five miles wide, is surrounded with volcanoes that stand shoulder to shoulder like sentinels. They are magnificent reminders of the extreme geological violence that formed the landscape and its anchorage.

Located at the northeastern tip of crescent-shaped New Britain, largest of the more than two hundred islands that make up the Bismarck Archipelago, the town of Rabaul sits atop a seismic time bomb. This is largely because Rabaul lies within a huge circular fault line—a geological phenomenon known as a ring fracture—which defines a fragile, loose-fitting lid over a subterranean chamber of magma. The ground is highly unstable. Rabaul is shaken routinely by earthquakes—a hundred per
month is not unusual—and during “crisis periods” of heightened seismic activity, they sometimes come in swarms. During the mid-1980s, for example, Rabaul was rocked by tens of thousands of quakes, with one extraordinary spike of nearly fourteen thousand measurable tremors in a single month—an average of well over four hundred quakes per day.

For all the excitement they cause, the earthquakes that rattle New Britain are not particularly damaging. The inherent danger lies in the potential of the ring fracture to violently erupt. More than thirty such events have occurred in just the past five hundred thousand years, some lasting for days or even weeks as enormous amounts of magma burst from the ring fracture. In several cases, so much material was ejected from the magma chamber that the loose-fitting lid above it collapsed like a soufflé. With each subsequent eruption the depression grew larger, and is known today as the Rabaul
caldera
. TheSpanish word for caldron, it is an appropriate description indeed.

One of the most devastating volcanic events occurred a mere 1,400 years ago. In the estimation of Dr. C. Daniel Miller, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, “a very violent eruption” ejected approximately ten cubic kilometers of magma and debris from the subterranean chamber. The amount of destructive force necessary to blast so much material from the earth is almost inconceivable. “It would be like hundreds of H-bombs going off—one every thirty seconds for ten hours,” says Miller. “That’s the kind of energy we’re talking about.”

The subsequent collapse of the empty magma chamber must have been spectacular, but there was no one alive to see it. Virtually every human being within thirty miles of ground zero had been killed, including those on nearby islands. One can only imagine the stupendous sight as twenty square miles of terrain suddenly dropped six hundred feet or more. That event was followed by flooding of biblical proportions as the ocean poured through a breach in the southeastern quadrant of the depression. Once the dust settled and the waters calmed, the result was a large basin of seawater surrounded by a bizarre moonscape of pumice and ash.

Thanks to the tropical climate with its copious amounts of annual rainfall, the volcanic soil was covered by fast-growing kunai grasses and other vegetation in a relatively short time. Native islanders eventually returned to the area, building new villages and resuming the familiar patterns of their ancestors. They tended gardens, defended their villages,
and practiced the timeworn rituals passed down from generation to generation. For the next thousand years, the giant caldera remained silent, and eventually the great eruption was forgotten.

THE FIRST KNOWN European to sail completely around the crescent-shaped island, English explorer William Dampier, arrived in 1700. He named the island New Britain and charted its coastline, but for many years thereafter, explorers avoided the island because of justifiable fears of malaria and cannibals. Seafarers may have anchored in the caldera on rare occasions, but their shore parties did not stray far from the beach. For the next 150 years, the island remained shrouded in obscurity.

By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the fear associated with headhunters and malaria had been overcome by the inexorable spread of Christianity. After bringing the gospel to Polynesia, white missionaries headed for Melanesia, the “black islands,” with noble ideas of turning the savages into children of God. In 1872, Capt. Cortland Simpson of the Royal Navy sailed HMS
Blanche
into the caldera and claimed its “discovery.” He named the inner harbor for himself and the outer bay for his ship, thus adding Simpson Harbor and Blanche Bay to the nautical charts. Contrary to Simpson’s claim of discovery, the caldera had been mapped a full century earlier by another English explorer, Philip Carteret, who had named the volcanic mountains surrounding the basin. The largest was the North Daughter, soaring 1,600 feet above Simpson Harbor; the South Daughter anchored the southeastern tip of the volcanic peninsula; and the Mother stood between them, her twin peaks resembling breasts.

After Simpson’s visit, dozens of traders and missionaries began to settle New Britain, and its population steadily increased throughout the late 1800s. Competition between Catholic and Protestant missionaries sometimes confused the natives, but the practices of headhunting and cannibalism gradually waned. Interestingly, the Christians failed to change the islanders’ beliefs in the supernatural. Thanks to the earthquakes
(gurias
in the native Tolai language) that shook New Britain almost daily, the islanders were convinced that malevolent spirits called
kaia
inhabited the volcanoes. Some of the big mountains were long extinct, but there was still plenty of volcanic activity. In 1791, English explorer John Hunter observed a vent near the South Daughter erupting a large column of steam; and sixty years later another eruption occurred
along an odorous gully known as Sulphur Creek, which empties into Simpson Harbor.

There was nothing supernatural about the eruptions, of course. Hot magma still occupied the subterranean chamber, which alternately swelled and contracted over the centuries. One odd-looking result, the Davapia Rocks, protruded like obelisks from the middle of Simpson Harbor. Locals called them “the Beehives.” A mile to the east stood another geological phenomenon, Matupit Island, which had risen from the caldera like a blister until it reached more than thirty feet above sea level. Nearby squatted an ugly, menacing volcano named Tavurvur, which Hunter had witnessed erupting in 1791. Yet another volcano, Rabalanakaia, was nestled in the shadow of the Mother, which in turn was flanked by the North Daughter and South Daughter, and at least three unnamed vents lined the banks of the aptly named Sulphur Creek. With so many different vents and fumaroles present, the finger of land around Simpson Harbor and Blanche Bay became known as Crater Peninsula.