War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  The Finschhafen invasion convoy left Lae just after sundown on September 21. As it did, it came under attack from six enemy bombers that were evidently on a bombing mission against Allied ground forces. The surprise sighting of the ships proved too tempting for the Japanese pilots, but they released their bombs too soon, missing the convoy by a quarter of a mile. Unfortunately for the bombers and their fighter escorts, the American destroyer Reid, still on picket patrol in the Huon Gulf with a complement of fighter-directors on board, picked up the Japanese flight on its radar and recalled a homebound patrol of American fighters that swept in on the Japanese. The American pilots reported shooting down five of the bombers and several of their escorts.11

  A few minutes before the landing at Scarlet Beach was to take place, the escorting destroyers bombarded the beach to drive any defenders under cover. At 4:45 a.m. on September 22, the assault began in earnest. As had been experienced at the earlier landings at Nassau Beach and Lae, confusion reigned. Some craft missed the beach entirely, forcing their troops to wade or in some cases swim ashore. Nevertheless, overall the landing was a success.

  The few Japanese defending the beach put up fierce but brief resistance. Overwhelmed by the invading force, they soon retired to the jungle-covered mountain to the rear. Meanwhile, the Australian units began moving south toward Finschhafen. Reinforcements arrived at Scarlet Beach over the next few days, and Barbey’s ships kept up a steady run of supplies.

  Following the successful landings, General Adachi ordered General Yamada to pull in his now-almost-useless southern and western defense line and concentrate on nearby Sattelberg. Situated fifteen miles north of Finschhafen on a 3,200-foot mountain, the town overlooks a large portion of the north coast of the Huon Peninsula, especially the Finschhafen sector. Adachi instructed Yamada to hold the town pending the arrival of the 20th Division, which continued struggling through the jungle to support him but was still one hundred miles away. It was expected to arrive about October 10.

  Meanwhile, the landing zone came under attack from Japanese aircraft. While bad weather over New Guinea kept most of the Imperial Army’s planes grounded, the Navy’s 11th Air Fleet from Rabaul attacked Barbey’s ships and the beachhead several times over the next few days. Each time, the Reid gave early warning of the approaching enemy and Allied fighters generally drove them off with little or no damage to Allied ships.

  Following days of heavy fighting across several rivers and through thick jungle and kunai grass, the lead elements of the 20th Australian Brigade entered Finschhafen on October 2 and made contact with the 22nd Australian Infantry Battalion, which had marched up from Lae. Faced with encirclement by an overwhelming force, the Japanese defenders, who were primarily naval base and combat troops, had begun their withdrawal the day before. In less than a week, Allied aircraft were flying into and out of the Finschhafen airfield. This left the primary Japanese force in the area at Sattelberg, especially after the arrival of Lieutenant General Shigeru Kitagiri and three thousand troops from the 20th Division.

  Determined to drive enemy forces off Scarlet Beach—where they busily unloaded supplies, several Australian Matilda tanks, and additional troops—General Adachi ordered bombing raids that were repelled by Allied fighters before they could do much damage. He also attempted to send more troops in by using motorized barges to land on the beach. His spies may have told him that only two companies of Australians, along with some American soldiers who operated the landing craft of the 532nd EBSR, defended the beach.

  At about four a.m. on October 18, in a driving rain, four barges filled with 155 Japanese soldiers from the 10th Company of 79th Infantry Regiment quietly moved in toward the beach. With their engines muffled in the pitch-black darkness before dawn, they were less than two hundred yards from shore when they were spotted. First to see the approaching landing craft was Brooklyn native Sergeant John Fuina and Corporal Raymond J. Koch of Wabasha, Minnesota, both members of the 532nd. Fuina bolted to his nearby .37mm antitank gun as Koch ran through the area whispering for the Americans and Australians to wake up and man their guns. Unfortunately, the heaviest weapon the Australians had was a Swedish-designed Bofors 40mm antiaircraft gun. Because its primary use was against aircraft, its long barrel could not be lowered enough to fire at the barges.12

  As the first barge hit the beach, Sergeant Fuina opened fire with his antitank gun, accompanied by several Australians with Bren guns. They disabled the barge, killing several of the enemy. Survivors were pulled aboard the other barges, which quickly moved down the beach, away from the firing. What they did not know when they touched beach sand again and dropped their ramps was that they were clearly in the sights of a .50-caliber heavy machine gun manned by nineteen-year-old Private Nathan Van Noy from Grace, Idaho, and his twenty-nine-year-old loader, Corporal Stephen Popa. Wounded the previous month, the baby-faced Van Noy, called “Junior” by his friends, had insisted on returning to his unit.

  Among the first enemy soldiers to leap off the barges were two men equipped with flamethrowers. Too dark to see anything other than muzzle flashes, the soldiers swept the area with their weapons, starting small fires ahead of their advance. It was then that Private Van Noy let loose with his heavy machine gun and cut the two men down. As the Japanese poured out of the barges, they dove to the sand for protection from Van Noy and other Allied soldiers who were firing submachine guns, rifles, and handguns from out of the dark. Several of the enemy attempted to silence the heavy machine gun by lobbing hand grenades in its direction.

  From behind the camouflaged machine-gun position, Australians with Bren guns fired over the heads of the two Americans and shouted for them to pull back. Van Noy and Popa ignored their calls until a grenade wounded the latter. Popa, thinking his buddy was right behind him, crawled out of the gun pit they were in, and two Australians pulled him to safety. Van Noy kept firing, continuing to ignore calls to fall back. In front of him, the bodies of enemy soldiers piled up. Then, as Fuina watched in shock, a grenade exploded right inside the pit. The blast ripped Van Noy’s leg from his body, yet he kept up a steady stream of fire until suddenly everyone, Allied and Japanese alike, heard the loud click as the machine gun ran out of ammunition. The men behind him continued to call for Van Noy to retreat, but the private simply reloaded and began firing again.

  After a while, the shooting slowed as surviving Japanese slipped into the water and swam up the shoreline, pursued by Australian and Papuan soldiers. As the sun rose over the water, the Australians and Americans roamed the beach, finishing off the enemy. When they approached the pit occupied by Van Noy, he was dead. His gun having run out of ammunition again, his finger was still on the trigger of the empty weapon. A rifle bullet to the temple had finally done in Van Noy. He had killed at least half of the thirty-nine Japanese soldiers lying dead on the beach.

  For their actions that morning on Scarlet Beach, Private Van Noy was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and Corporal Popa was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry.13

  Meanwhile, Australian units prepared to attack the Japanese stronghold at Sattelberg. Not one to sit around waiting for the enemy to strike, General Kitagiri launched a series of attacks from Sattelberg against Scarlet Beach. When General Wootten learned through captured Japanese documents that Kitagiri planned a major counterattack, he requested that a reserve brigade be sent to support his exhausted troops. On October 20, American landing ships delivered the Australian 26th Brigade to Scarlet Beach. Over the next five days, Kitagiri attempted to drive the Allies off the beach, but failed. With food supplies running low, he decided to regroup back at Sattelberg to plan further attacks. The action cost the Australians 49 dead, but the number of Japanese killed exceeded 675.14

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  Located five miles from the coast, Sattelberg had once served as a German mission, but was now estimated to hold close to five thousand Japanese troops. From its perch high above the surrounding countryside, Sat
telberg gave its occupiers an excellent view of the entire coast. What’s more, it could serve as the base from which to launch future attacks against Allied lines of communications and resupply. The Allies had little choice but to attempt to capture it, despite its obvious strong defensive position. The Japanese there could not simply be bypassed—left alone, they could create a danger to future operations.

  Strong defensive positions around Sattelberg were aided by the fact that an attacking force not only had to climb steep hills to reach its target but also had to deal with nature herself. The surrounding hilly countryside consisted of thick woods of tightly packed bamboo and betel nut palm trees. Bulldozers had to clear paths for the Matilda tanks that had recently arrived. Designed to support infantry troops fighting in close proximity to the enemy, the Matilda was slow moving but heavily armored. Its 40mm main gun and 7.92mm Bresa machine guns proved devastating against Japanese pillboxes that dotted the area surrounding Sattelberg.

  Another new weapon introduced in New Guinea was the 4.5-inch barrage rocket manned by the American amphibians. Launched from a metal frame that held twelve rocket guides, or sleeves, it could be fired from a vehicle or landing craft or from the ground. Each rocket weighed thirty pounds and had a range of twelve hundred yards. The concussions from the rocket’s extremely loud explosions were known to kill men fifty yards away. Commanded by Maryland native Major Charles K. Lane, the rocket team mounted its launchers on a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier that pushed its way through the jungle and up a steep hillside to within range of Sattelberg. From there the team launched its rockets into enemy forces with laudable results. Surprised by this new weapon, the Japanese were at a loss to locate the launcher’s position and wasted much of their limited artillery ammunition seeking to silence, without success, the rockets. When the fighting ended, many dead enemy soldiers had no visible wounds, evidently victims of the terrific concussions caused by the exploding rockets.15

  Following intensive Allied bombing and the relentless push of Australian and American forces on the ground, Sattelberg finally fell on November 26. In one of the final actions of the battle, twenty-nine-year-old Sergeant Tom Derrick, commander of the 3rd Platoon of B Company, Australian 2/48th Battalion, led his men up to the edge of the plateau on which the town is located. Previous attempts by his and other platoons had been turned back by heavy machine-gun fire and the Japanese tactic of rolling live grenades down the hillside. Crawling ahead of his pinned-down platoon, Derrick lobbed grenade after grenade into the Japanese positions while the enemy tried to kill him with their machine guns. After eliminating ten enemy positions, he called his men up. The Australians soon occupied the former Japanese gun posts and settled in for the night. The following day they discovered the enemy had withdrawn from the town under the cover of darkness. For his actions, Sergeant Derrick, who was first to raise the Australian flag over Sattelberg, was award the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth’s highest honor.16

  Describing Sattelberg as a “ruin,” an Australian war correspondent wrote that “practically every building now is only twisted sheet iron and splintered wood.” He claimed that the battle “will always remain a classic example of the skill and ‘guts’ of the Australian Imperial Forces infantry. They have rarely fought under worse conditions.”17

  Another Australian newspaper wrote that the relationship established during the Finschhafen and Lae campaigns “have provided a fine example of the effectiveness of Australian-American cooperation” between the Australian soldiers and men of the 532nd Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment. “These Yanks have fought and some have died alongside Australians and have done both so gamely as to win the respect and affection of the Diggers.”18

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  Finschhafen and Sattelberg proved to be among the early moves to reach two of MacArthur’s goals. First, he wanted to take control of the Vitiaz Strait away from the enemy to enable Allied ships to sail up the New Guinea coast relatively unmolested. A longer-term goal was to develop what he called a “loop of envelopment” around the Japanese Eighteenth Army and its sixty thousand troops stationed around Wewak and Madang, isolating them from reinforcement and resupply. His next step toward the latter goal was to push fifty miles up the coast to the next concentration of enemy forces, Sio. Moving along the coast, he would land forces at locales they could use as temporary bases from which to push the enemy along, and eventually herd them together, much as cowboys round up and herd cattle.

  After clearing the Nadzab area of enemy forces, General Vasey’s Australian 7th Division pushed its way eastward from the Ramu Valley toward the coast, crushing small units of enemy troops who were not fast enough to get out of the way of the Australians rushing across the mountainous jungles. Meanwhile, General Wootten’s 9th Division turned away from Sattelberg and fought running battles along the rugged coast toward Sio. In what one Australian newspaper called a “daring flanking movement,” soldiers, supported by Matilda tanks and artillery, cut off a main escape route called the Bong-Wareo Trail by capturing and occupying Pino Hill, an irregular promontory overlooking the trail and the surrounding countryside.

  Determined to close the loop around the Japanese fleeing Finschhafen and Sio, General MacArthur instructed General Krueger to put American troops from his Alamo Force, newly renamed as the U.S. Sixth Army, ashore at Saidor, approximately 110 nautical miles from Finschhafen and only 52 nautical miles from Madang. He set January 2 as D-Day for the invasion, which was code-named Michaelmas. MacArthur suggested, and Krueger agreed, that the landing force should come from the U.S. 32nd Division, which had been recuperating from the fighting around Buna. The commander in chief also assigned an engineer boat and shore regiment, two engineer aviation battalions, and an amphibious truck company to the operation. In addition to cutting off the Japanese retreat, a second value of Saidor was a small airfield with potential for expansion.

  Krueger selected Brigadier General Clarence A. Martin’s 126th Infantry Regimental Combat Team for the task, and Admiral Barbey sent the 532nd Amphibians to put the 7,500 troops ashore. The invasion task force—comprising fifty-five vessels, including six destroyers for shore bombardment, four serving as escorts for the landing craft, and five as a covering force farther out to sea, watching for enemy ships and planes—approached Saidor in darkness. Although Japanese Coastwatchers reported sighting the ships, by the time reconnaissance planes arrived overhead, the combination of darkness and scattered rain showers shielded the entire fleet from the enemy. Admiral Barbey led the way aboard his flagship, the destroyer Conyngham. Accompanying him was General Martin and several of his staff officers.19

  On January 1, forty-eight B-25s and sixty B-24s slammed the intended beachhead and surrounding area with 218 tons of demolition bombs. At 7:05 the following morning, with the rains stopped and the sun slipping above the eastern horizon, the six destroyers bombarded the Saidor beaches with 1,725 five-inch shells. Several LCIs equipped with rocket launchers joined in by firing over six hundred rockets. Once the firing ceased, the landing craft put the men and their supplies and equipment ashore with no opposition worth reporting. By noon, the landing vessels had withdrawn and the riflemen who had hit the beaches were headed inland, seeking Japanese. Later reports claimed that 120 to 150 enemy soldiers in the landing zone who survived the shore bombardment fled as the landing craft roared onto the beach.20

  Steel matting laid by the 542nd Shore Battalion swiftly covered the landing site at Saidor, allowing vehicles to be quickly unloaded from the large LSTs. The original plan called for the Americans to move south toward Sio, blocking any escape routes the enemy might use. Unfortunately, monsoon rains swamped the troops and their vehicles, delaying their departure long enough that thousands of Japanese managed to make their way north to the next main base at Madang.21

  Fearing the loss of too much of his dwindling manpower resources, General Adachi boarded a submarine at Madang and made a run past the busy Americans at the Saidor beachh
ead to Sio during the night of January 7. The sub came under attack by U.S. Navy PT boats hunting for enemy barges, but the submarine skipper managed to dive to safety and brought his valuable passenger into Sio on January 8. Once there, Adachi oversaw the evacuation of several thousand troops of the 20th Division on motorized barges. Thousands more, unable to find a place in the barges, were ordered to make their way north toward Madang as best they could. In all, fourteen thousand bedraggled Japanese troops began slogging through the swamps, jungle, and mountains, urgently trying to gain the relative safety of the Madang stronghold.22

  During the night of January 10, Japanese submarine I-177 arrived off Sio to take Adachi and Rear Admiral Kudo Kyuhachi, commander of the 7th Base Unit, along with ten staff officers to Madang. While awaiting the passengers, the submarine came under attack by PT-320 and PT-323, but armored barges fitted with tank gun turrets drove off the Americans. The two PT boats backed out of range just long enough for Adachi and his party to board the sub and flee the area. They arrived at Madang shortly after noon.

  The headquarters detachment of the 20th Division withdrew from Sio in such haste that it left behind an incredible gift for the Allies. Unable to carry a large steel trunk containing the division’s cryptographic materials, and fearful that the smoke caused by burning such a large quantity of mostly damp paper would draw enemy fighters, the radio operators decided to bury the trunk in a nearby streambed. Before doing so, they tore off the covers of the codebooks and substitution tables to show their superiors they had destroyed the books. Despite their efforts, an Australian trooper sweeping for mines discovered the trunk. When an intelligence officer recognized its contents as codebooks and other related materials, it was quickly flown to the Central Bureau in Brisbane. Once there, code breakers and translators found they had an intact version of the Japanese Army four-digit code. All of a sudden, Allied intelligence officers, thanks to the code breakers and that trunk, could read tens of thousands of Japanese Army communications, including a thirteen-part message outlining decisions concerning New Guinea made at a high-level conference of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers. The impact of the trunk contents would be felt in coming months as MacArthur continued his climb along the New Guinea coast.23