In May 1942 King had created the Amphibious Warfare Section within the Navy Department and appointed Barbey to command it. In this role, he was responsible for coordinating amphibious warfare training programs and overseeing the design and construction of landing ships and landing craft. Within months the construction budget grew to a billion dollars. The main difference between a “landing ship” and a “landing craft” was the size of the vessel. Anything over two hundred feet long was a “ship,” while anything of lesser length was a “craft.” The best known of the ships was the LST, or landing ship, tank, which their crews often referred to as “long, slow, targets” due to their bulky size and slow speed. Best known among the smaller vessels was the LCI, or landing craft, infantry; and LCT, landing craft, tank. Many of these vessels were designed by Higgins Industries of New Orleans, and became widely known as “Higgins boats.” Barbey not only oversaw the design and construction of these vessels but also participated in testing many of them. Rear Admiral Barbey was exactly the man MacArthur needed.
With MacArthur in New Guinea when Barbey arrived in Australia on January 8, 1943, he met first with Admiral Carpender, who described his own strained relationship with MacArthur over the Navy’s lack of support during the Buna-Gona campaign. Carpender remained adamant about not sending any of his ships into the area until General Kenney had better control of the skies and better charts were developed.
Next, Barbey met with the operations officer, Brigadier General Stephen J. Chamberlin, who outlined MacArthur’s timetable for moving up the New Guinea coast to Lae, then across the Vitiaz Strait, a narrow waterway between New Britain and New Guinea, and invading New Britain. He told Barbey that MacArthur “expects you and your amphibious force” to take an active role in maintaining the schedule. At that moment, Barbey’s amphibious force was composed of himself, one other officer, and one ship, the attack transport Henry T. Allen, which was in such poor shape that Barbey dared not send it into a combat zone.6
When he returned to Australia, MacArthur met with Barbey, describing in detail his plans for driving the Japanese out of New Guinea and then out of the Philippines. Using a map on his office wall to highlight where the coming campaigns would take place, MacArthur turned to Barbey and said, “Your job is to develop an amphibious force that can carry my troops in those campaigns.”7
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On February 8, General Adachi, commanding the Eighteenth Army at Rabaul, issued orders for the assembly and evacuation by barges of all remaining Imperial troops in the Buna-Gona area to Lae and Salamaua. The South Seas Force—which had invaded Guam, Rabaul, and New Guinea, almost making it to Port Moresby—had been so devastated that it was dissolved as a unique formation. Only 1,951 survivors remained of the 7,383 troops originally assigned to the South Seas Force when it arrived at New Guinea.8
When Imperial General Headquarters recognized the possibility that Buna-Gona might be lost to the Allies, it had begun issuing orders for the movement of additional troops from Rabaul to Lae and Salamaua, and the establishment of new bases on New Guinea’s northern coast. Lieutenant General Imamura, Eighth Area Army commander, received instructions to occupy a number of sites even farther north than Lae. Making use of recently arrived units of the 5th Division, he sent one infantry battalion to Wewak, 382 miles northwest of Lae, another to Madang, halfway between Lae and Wewak, and the 31st Road Construction Unit to Tuluvu at the western end of New Britain. Another infantry battalion was shipped from Kavieng to Finschhafen, about one hundred miles northeast from Lae on the Huon Peninsula. Construction of air bases began at all locations as soon as the troops and their equipment landed. The convoys carrying these troops suffered some losses from air and submarine attacks, but for the most part the majority made it to their destinations.
In early January a reinforced infantry regiment from the 51st Division that had arrived from China in December reported to the Eighteenth Army. The regiment was attached to the newly named the Okabe Detachment, commanded by Major General Toru Okabe. General Okabe quickly received orders to leave Rabaul to bolster the defenses at Lae and Salamaua. Meanwhile, General Adachi was ordered to “secure important areas to the west of Lae and Salamaua.” The most important of these areas was Wau, currently held by the Allies. Both Okabe and his commander, Adachi, were confident they would succeed.9
Code breakers had informed MacArthur that Japanese radio traffic indicated the movement of large numbers of troops from China, the Philippines, and the Japanese Home Islands into the South West Pacific Area. They also told him a convoy of troopships would soon leave Rabaul, heading to Lae. Allied planners determined that these troops were intended for an assault on Wau. MacArthur instructed Kenney to attack the convoy before it departed from Rabaul, and to fly in men and supplies in support of the Australians holding the area around the airfield at Wau.10
General Kenney ordered his bomber commander, Brigadier General Kenneth Walker, to increase reconnaissance of Rabaul and prepare a full-scale attack on shipping located in its busy harbor. Reconnaissance reported that since late December the number of ships at the powerful base had increased substantially. Photoreconnaissance revealed the presence of ninety-one ships, including twenty-one warships. They estimated that merchant shipping totaled 300,000 tons.11
General Blamey was concerned about losing Wau to the enemy, so he decided to reinforce the area’s defenses. On January 4 he requested that Kenney fly the 17th Infantry Brigade, stationed at Milne Bay, to Wau. Commanded by forty-three-year-old Brigadier Murray Moten, a former bank officer, the brigade had fought in North Africa and Greece prior to its return to Australia and transfer to New Guinea. Blamey instructed Moten to assume command of all forces in the Wau area.12
The Wau airfield was deep in a valley 3,300 feet above sea level. Surrounded by mountains, no roads led to it, just native foot trails. The landing strip was 3,600 feet long, with a width starting at 450 feet at its northeast end, where aircraft came in, and narrowing to 250 feet at the southwest end. Landings were made on a ten-degree uphill gradient, and takeoffs downhill because of the nearby mountains. Little more than a grass strip, it suffered from drainage problems. During the rainiest season, mud was as deep as eight inches, making landings and takeoffs problematic at best.
Wau had once been the center of a great gold-mining boom, whose miners included Errol Flynn. All supplies then had come in by aircraft, including the heavy equipment used in the mining operations, and even the pool table in the hotel. Now soldiers, rations, and military supplies were heading into Wau.
As with the airfield at Kokoda, the one at Wau, despite its dangers, was valuable to both sides. For the Allies it offered a base from which to attack enemy forces along the coast and in the Bismarck Sea. For the Japanese it offered a place from which to attack enemy concentrations throughout New Guinea, especially Port Moresby, less than 150 miles to the southeast. During the fight along the Kokoda Track and at the Buna-Gona beachheads, neither side paid a great deal of attention to Wau. The Allies occupied it in March 1942, and aside from the occasional supply flight, it had sat nearly forgotten, except by the men stationed there, the members of the Kanga Force.
The Kanga Force was a composite formation consisting of men from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (NGVR), and troops from the 1st and 2/5th Independent Militia Companies. During the months of March and April they had conducted reconnaissance missions on the enemy forces at Salamaua and Lae. In May 1942, General MacArthur ordered Major Norman Fleay, the force’s twenty-four-year-old commanding officer, to start harassing raids at Lae and Salamaua. Fleay, who was promoted to lieutenant colonel in June, had served in the Middle East in 1941, where he was wounded, before returning to Australia. MacArthur wanted the Kanga Force to destroy enemy facilities and even possibly capture one of the airfields that Japanese fighter planes were using. At the time, only a small number of Imperial Navy troops defended both bases.13
In one attack launched during the early-m
orning hours of June 29, seventy-one Australians from 2/5th and the NGVR assaulted the Japanese at the airfield near Salamaua. Of the two hundred fifty defenders, the Australians reportedly killed one hundred, suffering only three men wounded. Although they failed to occupy the airfield, they did destroy several buildings and an important nearby bridge. Japanese aircraft raced along at treetop level, strafing and bombing various foot trails in their frantic search for the attackers. Over the next few days an additional two hundred Japanese troops arrived from Lae, where two thousand troops were stationed, to reinforce the garrison.14
Because an Allied airpower buildup at Wau would make the Japanese positions at Lae and Salamaua untenable, General Imamura, commander in chief of the Eighth Area Army, was determined to drive out the Australians. His biggest problem in achieving this was that he had only 3,500 troops at both locations, and many were ill and insufficiently supplied. They just were not strong enough to push the Australians out of Wau.15
The Okabe Detachment, preparing to leave Rabaul for Lae, numbered more than five thousand men. They included three infantry battalions of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the 14th Artillery Regiment, the 3rd Company of the 51st Engineer Regiment, and the 3rd Company of the 51st Transport Regiment. It would attempt to drive out the Australian defenders and capture the increasingly vital airfield at Wau.16
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On January 5, General Walker sent six B-17s and six B-24s against the shipping targets at Rabaul. Results were minimal, with only one Army transport sunk, but two attackers were lost to enemy fighters, including a B-17 in which Walker himself was a passenger. Kenney had ordered the general not to go on missions, but he disobeyed and was never seen again.17
At noon that same day, the convoy carrying the Okabe Detachment left Rabaul for Lae. It comprised five transports, escorted by five destroyers, and above it flew a large protective cover of fighters. Several of the transports were armed with antiaircraft guns. The five destroyers were from two different squadrons and sailed under the command of Captain Masayuki Kitamura. Because the transports had an average speed of only eight knots per hour, the 466-mile trip would take fifty hours.
At ten thirty the following morning, when the convoy was less than halfway to its destination, searching RAAF Catalinas located it. Over the next two days Allied bombers attacked the ships while dozens of Allied fighters tangled with dozens of Japanese fighters in prolonged dogfights. One transport, Nichiryu Maru, sank in flames, taking with her a large quantity of medical supplies and equipment. Destroyers rescued fewer than eight hundred of the twelve hundred soldiers aboard.18 During the early afternoon on January 7, a second transport, Myoko Maru, was so badly damaged that its crew beached her some nine miles east of Lae. No casualties were reported, although several Army crew members did suffer wounds. The next day a flight of Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, each equipped with a single three-hundred-pound bomb, attacked the Myoko Maru. One direct hit dropped down the transport’s stack and destroyed her engine. She remained on the beach for the next fifteen years as scavengers and salvagers hauled away anything of value.
Late in the day, the remaining three transports dropped their anchors less than a mile from shore and rapidly transferred troops, equipment, and supplies into motorized barges that ran back and forth between the ships and the beach. Once ashore, soldiers moved a half mile inland and set up camp under the protective cover of the jungle canopy.19
After completion of the landing of about four thousand troops and their supplies, the three transports and their destroyer escorts left during the night and sped, as fast as the empty transports could, back toward Rabaul, harassed by Allied planes during most of the return trip. Also harassed by bombing and strafing were the soldiers who had been landed. For several days, the beach and nearby jungle were targeted by Allied planes flying out of Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and airfields in Australia. Large quantities of supplies waiting for removal under cover were destroyed, including an ammunition dump.20
Over the next week, General Okabe moved almost his entire force down the coast to Salamaua using motorized barges. With a garrison now numbering about 6,500 troops, Salamaua was no longer a target for the small harassing patrols from Kanga Force. As he prepared to launch his attack on Wau, Okabe selected Colonel Yasuhei Maruoka, commander of the 102nd Infantry Regiment, for this task. Maruoka took half the men of two full battalions and one partial battalion (it had suffered losses during the Allied attacks) and headed toward Wau on January 16. The second half of the force followed the next day. Because so many of their supplies had been destroyed in the air attacks, each man carried only enough food for fourteen days.21
Although Wau was only thirty miles away, neither Maruoka nor any of the 2,500 to 3,000 men he led had any idea what the countryside they were entering was like. What’s more, they had neither reliable intelligence on the location or size of Australian forces between Salamaua and Wau nor a clear-cut route to take them there. At times, due to fear of ambushes by roving Australian patrols, they were forced to leave a long-established foot trail called the Black Cat Track and cut their own path. There was also the danger of attack from Allied aircraft searching for them. Every open stretch of terrain left them vulnerable to such strikes.22
As the Japanese made their way toward Wau over the next two weeks, fighting both Australian patrols and the jungle, Allied aircraft brought reinforcements into Wau. Elements of the 17th Brigade began arriving by Dakotas on January 14. This ferrying of troops from Port Moresby kept up each day that the weather cooperated. They brought in 535 men and 28 officers, well rested and ready to fight. Until victory was declared at Buna on January 23, fewer than a dozen Dakotas were available for this duty. The number quickly doubled when troop flights to the Buna front stopped, and with the arrival of new Dakotas from the United States.23
On January 27, Maruoka’s forces reached a ridge overlooking the Wau airfield and Wau village. His men were exhausted from struggling through muddy trails and almost continual fighting with relentless Australians, but more than anything else, the soldiers were hungry—they had not eaten in days and were beginning to show signs of starvation. In their weakened condition, the Japanese troops were quickly driven back by Wau’s growing number of defenders, who now had twenty-five-pound artillery pieces that had been flown in and assembled by their crews.
In the early-morning hours of February 1, Colonel Maruoka finally concluded that he was never going to capture the airfield. Over the previous three days, he had watched as 130 transport planes landed at Wau, bringing in about a thousand fresh troops, as well as field artillery pieces, heavy machine guns, and mortars. He was now outgunned and outnumbered.24
Maruoka began moving his troops back in preparation for a complete withdrawal, which Eighteenth Army headquarters in Rabaul finally ordered on February 13. The withdrawal began the next day. By then the troops were in extremely bad shape. They had suffered in battle and from lack of food. Estimates of numbers lost to combat and starvation reach as high as twelve hundred men. Over 70 percent of the survivors suffered from malnutrition, malaria, dysentery, and other diseases that left them unfit for combat duty.25
Yet the Okabe Detachment’s failure to capture Wau did not lessen the airfield’s value. Another attempt had to be made to drive the Allies from that airfield. What’s more, now that Japanese forces had been driven from the Papua section of New Guinea, Eighth Area Army commander General Imamura recognized the importance of strengthening their position in northern New Guinea, including the territory once controlled by the Dutch.
He had already begun doing so in January. On the nineteenth, 13,700 men from the 20th Division arrived at Wewak, having come directly from Pusan, Korea. The entire 41st Division, previously stationed at Tsingtao, China, would join them in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of troops at Wewak close to 25,000. Additional troops, especially units specializing in road building and airfield construction, landed at Madang
and other locations farther up the coast. Imamura’s plan was to build a 135-mile-long coastal road linking all these places with Lae and Salamaua so that the movement of troops and supplies would not have to rely on small vessels prone to attack by Allied planes, submarines, and PT boats. He also wanted airfields that would accommodate a large number of fighters. His final goal was to ship 100,000 troops into New Guinea.
Convoys to New Guinea were vulnerable to attack by the increasing number of Allied aircraft, and to the low-level bombing of ships that General Kenney had instituted for his pilots and crews. Both sides recognized that one of the most important keys to victory was control of the air. Convoy schedules relied more on weather reports than on any other form of intelligence. It was safest to sail when the skies filled with storm clouds, and when heavy winds kept Allied aircraft grounded.
Once masters of the air over the Bismarck and Solomon Seas, the Imperial Navy and Army air forces were now losing more planes than could be quickly replaced. Even more important was the loss of experienced pilots, whose replacements soon turned out to be recruits with limited training and few actual flight hours. This change in dominance of the skies was not lost on many of the officers, especially air force officers, at Rabaul. One, FPO First Class Hisashi Igarashi, a pilot with Air Group 705, wrote in his diary, “Just several months ago we had the mastery, but to our regret we retreated enormously and the situation reversed. Yet, looking at the reality of the front, I am really irritated.”26
War at the End of the World Page 21
