VII.

FORTRESS RABAUL

In important ways the diminutive General Kenney, a bantam rooster with an aggressive, perhaps bombastic streak, complemented Douglas A. MacArthur. Kenney gave MacArthur his real education in the use of airpower, and the two forged strong links in the fires of New Guinea. MacArthur had always wanted Rabaul. More than a year had passed since Kenney promised to burn it to the ground. That never happened. Preoccupied with SOWESPAC’s New Guinea struggle, for two months during the high summer of 1943, the Fifth Air Force sent not a single bomber against the Japanese bastion. But as summer turned to fall and SOPAC girded to invade Bougainville, Rabaul’s outer redoubt, the moment for action fast approached. Both generals realized that for Halsey to operate so close to the fortress he was going to need the strong arm of Kenney’s bombers.

MacArthur wanted Bougainville too, because Allied aims in the South Pacific had changed again. Since June, Admiral Nimitz had been pressing for an offensive across the Central Pacific to match MacArthur’s thrust from the south. The Joint Chiefs accepted CINCPAC’s bid. Conducting a Central Pacific offensive, among other things, required drawing away Marines plus amphibious shipping from the South Pacific, as well as most newly arriving warships. The 2nd Marine Division, specifically slated for an invasion of Rabaul, went away. Reduced emphasis on the South Pacific meant changing the Cartwheel concept from capturing Rabaul to simply masking it by means of a ring of air bases. Strikes from them would suppress the enemy and make it impossible for the Japanese to supply the place. In August a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved that strategy.

Bougainville, with its complex of bases around Buin plus facilities on the eastern and northern coasts, protected Rabaul and had to be smashed. At meetings between SOWESPAC and SOPAC staff, and in direct contacts with MacArthur, the general made it clear the capture of Bougainville was Halsey’s highest priority. The Japanese withdrawn from the Central Solomons had mostly been deposited on Bougainville. Though Halsey had not been able to stanch the pullout, SOPAC intelligence understood the new dispositions. Admiral Kusaka would react promptly and in force to any move against that island. His response would come from Rabaul. Hence the need for a serious effort to contain the Japanese fortress.

The fifty-four-year-old George Kenney knew when his boss was serious, and it was clear that MacArthur was serious about Bougainville. SOWESPAC had spent a year pushing up the northern New Guinea coast, but before MacArthur could go much farther, Rabaul had to be dealt with. Kenney might be bombastic, but he was also resourceful and imaginative. An MIT grad who had honed his skills at the air engineering school and led the Army Air Corps technology development command, Kenney had put his Fifth Air Force in a position to undertake a serious aerial assault. The general not only had backed skip bombing, but he introduced new weapons, like incendiaries and the latest innovation, the parachute-fragmentation (“parafrag”) munition, designed to enable bombers to hit from very low altitude without being blasted by their own ordnance. Kenney eagerly pressed for P-38 aircraft in his Fifth Air Force, and he prevailed on his airmen to accept the newer, even more powerful P-47 Thunderbolt, which SOWESPAC fliers initially resisted as inadequate. In April 1943 the Fifth Air Force had had 516 aircraft. Kenney planned for 1,330 before the end of the year, with a reserve of 25 percent on top of that. He sought a crew-to-aircraft ratio of two to one. General Kenney also obtained bases for the assault on Rabaul, championing the amphibious landings at Woodlark and Kiriwina islands, where other SOWESPAC staff viewed these as diversions from the war in New Guinea. Construction started within days of the June landings. Army engineers built the airfields at Kiriwina; Seabees, those on Woodlark. The first airplane alighted at the latter barely two weeks after the beginning of site clearance. Australian air force wings were based on the islands, and they served as recovery points for damaged aircraft or those low on gas.

Airmen had no illusions about Rabaul. The place was formidable. It was defended by 376 flak guns, both Navy and Army, including 118 of large caliber. The Japanese had nearly two dozen radars with ranges up to ninety miles. And there were fighters to repel the attacks. One B-25 pilot for the Fifth Air Force recalled, “Rabaul was the hardest target without a doubt.” Years later at a squadron reunion a friend remembered how the crews looked scared to death before their first sortie against the fortress. General Kenney himself, writing of one of these Rabaul strikes, recorded it as “the toughest, hardest-fought engagement of the war.” Though they flew for AIRSOLS, not Kenney’s outfit, Halsey’s aviators agreed. They began to hit Rabaul starting in November, when MacArthur, eager to return his focus to New Guinea, made the fortress an AIRSOLS concern. Edward Brisck recalled, “You would just grit your teeth and hold your position in the formation and concentrate on your job.” Or LeRoy Smith: “In the early days when we hit Rabaul, it was a real killer.” Or Charles Kittell: “You’d look around and you couldn’t see the other airplanes because the sky was so full of flak.” But the airmen went back again and again. They understood their purpose.

The men of the “Black Sheep Squadron,” Marine Fighter Squadron 214, are representative. Led by the effervescent Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, VMF-214 was a first-team unit that could fight anybody. They reached the Russells in August and went on their initial mission against Bougainville on September 16. The squadron flew from Munda and Vella Lavella. Pappy Boyington, himself shot down over Rabaul just after the New Year, spent the last part of the war in prison camps. Boyington’s intelligence officer, Frank E. Walton, later wrote, “Rabaul was the keystone to the entire Southwest Pacific. If we were able to neutralize it…the enemy would have to pull in their horns all the way back to the Philippines and the Marianas.”

Allied airmen began their siege of Rabaul on October 12, when Kenney sent everything he had that could fly and go that far. The general had told one of Halsey’s staffers that by the twentieth Rabaul would be “dead.” That did not happen, but the fortress would be sorely tried. Kenney’s strike force included 87 B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers, 114 B-25 mediums, 125 P-38 fighters, some 349 warplanes in all. Only fifty-six Japanese interceptors opposed them. Kenney thought there had been massive destruction to Japanese shipping, several of Rabaul’s airfields, and other targets. The field at Vunakanau, at least, was indeed hit hard. There the Japanese 751st Air Group suffered its worst ground losses of the campaign. Caught in the open servicing planes, more than twenty of its scarce maintenance men were killed and more than fifty wounded. Adding to Captain Sato Naohiro’s difficulties, a single squadron of his group lost a half dozen Bettys—and more 751st aircraft were undoubtedly among the thirty bombers smashed at Vunakanau that day.

Over the next week Port Moresby was socked in, precluding further attack, though the Japanese struck Oro Bay and mixed it up in dogfights over Wewak. Low cloud cover turned back most of the fighter escort on October 18, but fifty-four B-25s made it to Rabaul. From October 23 to 25, the Fifth Air Force raided the fortress every day. For the Japanese during the second of these raids, the ace Nishizawa Hiroyoshi led one of the intercepting formations. On the twenty-fifth the three P-38 squadrons of “Satan’s Angels,” the 475th Fighter Group, swept over Rabaul with the bombers and wreaked havoc. The JNAF opposition proved somewhat weaker than in the first big raid. Distances and aircraft range were such that escort fighters typically had to refuel at Kiriwina on their return leg before flying on to Dobodura. Another bombing took place on October 29. The weather zeroed out a Halloween attack. Though weather repeatedly interfered with planned raids, during October some 416 sorties by Kenney’s bombers dumped 683 tons of munitions on Rabaul. Kenney’s aerial offensive combined with Halsey’s invasion to confront Kusaka with his greatest challenge.

PRELUDE TO DISASTER

Baron Tomioka had known Admiral Kusaka Jinichi since before the war. Tomioka thought him a cool customer, great in a crisis, never flinching. Kusaka needed all his powers now. In the Solomons the Imperial Navy faced oblivion. The difficulty of conducting surface operations had mounted steadily. But the dangers to ships almost paled next to those confronting the Japanese Naval Air Force. In the summer, already beset by mounting losses, the Navy had committed its Carrier Division 2, flying from Buin. The carrier men shared the Bougainville bases with the fliers of Rear Admiral Kozaka’s 26th Air Flotilla. Half a dozen air strikes were carried out against the Allies on Vella Lavella and four against Rendova. As the planes flew off and did not return, the Navy finally merged the remnants of both flotillas and put Division 2 commander Rear Admiral Sakamaki Munetaka in charge of the combined unit, re-creating the carrier air groups in Singapore. With the merger, Commander Okumiya Masatake, Sakamaki’s air staff officer, who had been planning the night missions, now found all distinction between day and night gone. The men ran on fumes. Malnutrition added to exhaustion, with particular effect on pilots, whose peripheral vision, nerves, and alertness were affected. Okumiya mourned one officer, a well-known ace, flying since the China Incident, who simply crashed into an Allied plane. Okumiya suspected the pilot had never even seen the aircraft with which he collided.

The warplanes themselves were worn out and beset with problems. Maintenance crews could hardly keep up with the damage. Spare parts were scarce and being run into Rabaul aboard destroyers. On paper the Eleventh Air Fleet was supremely powerful, with 144 Betty medium bombers, 96 Val dive-bombers, 24 Kate torpedo planes, an equal number of patrol aircraft, and 312 fighters, an aggregate of 608 aircraft. Yet Admiral Kusaka’s serviceable strength amounted to barely 200 airplanes. Two-thirds of his flying machines were useful only as a boneyard to scavenge for parts to keep others in the air.

Commander Okumiya presently departed to help reorganize the Carrier Division 2 air groups. In the Solomons the fight went on. Heavy fighting over the Buin complex took place almost daily. By late July AIRSOLS was striking with eighty bombers at a time accompanied by more than a hundred fighters. In mid-September JNAF interceptors had to repel five air raids in a single day. The cumulative effects told. “Prior to the beginning of 1943,” noted Chief Petty Officer Iwamoto Tetsuzo, Rabaul’s top ace, “we still had hope and fought fiercely. But now we fought to uphold our honor…. We believed that we were expendable, that we were all going to die. There was no hope of survival—no one cared anymore.” In a postwar study for the Occupation, former Imperial Navy officers, considering morale at this stage, chose to compare mid-1943 with that fall in order to set a baseline permitting them to conclude that until this point morale had remained stable.

Equally problematic, losses among the dive-bomber and torpedo plane units, combined with low production, condemned the JNAF to a critical shortage of striking power. That spring, attack formations like those in Yamamoto’s big offensive were already being sent off with two to four fighters per bomber. By the fall, ratios of fighters to attack planes as low as two to one were unheard-of. Five or more fighters per bomber had become typical. Partly attributable to JNAF desperation to penetrate the curtains of Allied air patrols, partly to simple numbers of available aircraft, the trend took hold. Since the Zero had yet to evolve any significant fighter-bomber capacity, this deficit in Japanese attack capability was even greater than raw aircraft numbers suggest.

Not least among Kusaka Jinichi’s worries was keeping his excitable cousin Ryunosuke in check. It was the other Kusaka who was the aviation expert, and he watched with increasing concern as the Eleventh Air Fleet proved completely unable to blunt Halsey’s advance. The Rabaul command also faced continuing demands for action in New Guinea. Kusaka Ryunosuke coped by focusing Sakamaki’s 26th Air Flotilla on the Solomons while the Rabaul-based 25th concentrated on New Guinea. The Japanese Navy was serious about New Guinea, continuing raids there even as Rabaul came under siege. Rear Admiral Ueno Keizo’s 25th Air Flotilla attacked Buna, Lae, Oro Bay, Finschhafen, Woodlark, and Goodenough islands, and other targets. Finschhafen, just occupied by Australian troops, became a focal point, struck more than a half dozen times. The last significant offensive missions in the Solomons were against Munda and Vella Lavella at the end of September and beginning of October.

But the Allies compelled Japanese attention to the Solomons. Bull Halsey’s air commanders, Rear Admiral Marc A. Mitscher of AIRSOLS and Brigadier General Nathan F. Twining of the Thirteenth Air Force, gave the enemy no respite. The proportion of Japanese supplies sunk in the Solomons, which had hovered at one-tenth the previous year, was up to a quarter. AIRSOLS carried out 158 attacks during October for a total of 3,259 sorties. Twining’s Army air force was right behind. In that month the Army airmen flew 684 bomber sorties and 1,659 with fighters. The recently formed Thirteenth, though working through teething troubles, was emerging as a powerful force. Through the end of October Twining’s airmen were credited with sinking nearly 20,000 tons of shipping, with a few more vessels rated as “probable,” and to have damaged another 60,000 tons. Admiral Nimitz would recall Mitscher to lead Pacific Fleet carriers, with Twining left in the top command. AIRSOLS and the Thirteenth Air Force made the combination of Army, Navy, and Marine aviation that finally turned Rabaul into a smoking ruin.

Before that happened, the South Pacific airmen advanced the Allied aerial curtain to Rabaul’s very gates. On October 4 the “Sun Setters” of the 339th Fighter Squadron swept in on Kahili with their P-38s ahead of a B-24 attack. Commander Shibata Takeo’s 204th Air Group pulled out of Buin on October 8. AIRSOLS continued its harassment and threw a punch there on the tenth, in tandem with a Thirteenth Air Force attack on Kahili. By October 15 the enemy was reeling under another major attack on Buin, then similar raids almost daily. Japanese plane counters were tabulating 150 to 250 aircraft per mission. Each time, runways at the JNAF bases became unusable for hours at a time. Both Kusakas agreed conditions had become intolerable. Kusaka Jinichi ordered Rear Admiral Sakamaki to withdraw his 26th Air Flotilla to Rabaul. The last fighter unit, Commander Nakano Chujiro’s 201st Air Group, retreated to the fortress after October 22. The forward detachment of Captain Sato Naohiro’s medium bomber group held on at Buka until November 1, then abandoned it just before the base was creamed by a U.S. cruiser bombardment. Japanese power had shrunk to the hard kernel of Rabaul.

However, the Buin complex remained formidable, with the fields of Buin itself, Kahili, Ballale, and a new one at Kara. The Imperial Navy had real resources. In addition to almost a dozen big pieces of coastal artillery and twenty-one smaller cannon, a powerful array of flak guns defended the complex. These included ten 4.7-inch antiaircraft guns, seven 3.2-inch guns, twenty-seven 70mm weapons, seventy 25mm AA machine guns, and another forty of the 13mm variety. There were also sixteen searchlights. Protected by strong defenses, the Japanese could still slip planes through to strike the Allies farther south. Therefore SOPAC did not let up. By October 18, Japanese air commanders had to rate Ballale as beyond repair. Two days later they concluded that Buin itself could serve no further purpose. A week later Admiral Samejima moved Eighth Fleet headquarters from Shortland back to Rabaul.

In the meantime something happened in the Central Pacific that affected the siege of Rabaul. Combined Fleet C-in-C Koga, sensitive to an American advance, stood ready to implement his decisive battle scheme. For his part, Admiral Nimitz had created a Central Pacific Force in early August, and put his newly invigorated carrier unit to work raiding Japanese-held islands. Marcus was hit late in August and Tarawa in September. Admiral Koga sortied from Truk in response to the latter attack. In early October the Americans—now with six flattops—struck Wake. Radio traffic analysis convinced Admiral Koga that Nimitz was about to raid the Marshalls. Koga led the Combined Fleet out of Truk on October 16. Measures of how seriously Koga took the threat lie in his orders for an I-boat to reconnoiter Pearl Harbor, in his air reinforcements to the Marshalls—for which planes were actually recalled from Rabaul—and in a surge of radio traffic on Imperial Navy command circuits, combined with a change in the JN-25 code, making it temporarily unreadable. But there was nothing for Koga to find. Disappointed, he returned to Truk on October 26. This is important, because the frustrated Koga, having twice chased phantom menaces, suddenly faced an actual threat in the Solomons.

Without a doubt the acceleration of operations, from the Japanese perspective, had become quite disturbing. Barely three weeks before, on October 6, the Imperial Navy had fought a sharp destroyer engagement in The Slot to protect its withdrawal from Vella Lavella. Then in short order Fortress Rabaul had been attacked massively, the Japanese air force had been driven out of Bougainville, and JNAF attacks in New Guinea had continued ineffective. When flagship Musashi dropped anchor off Dublon in Truk lagoon, Rabaul had just endured three straight days of Allied air raids. Shortly after dawn on October 27, a JNAF scout just south of New Britain saw the fleet carrying New Zealand troops to invade Stirling and Mono islands in the Treasuries.

Koga Mineichi had a contingency plan for something called the RO Operation. This involved rapid reinforcement of the Southeast Area Fleet to regain the initiative in the Solomons and New Guinea. Admiral Koga decided to put that into effect. He alerted Vice Admiral Ozawa of the Kido Butai to prepare to send his carrier planes to Rabaul. Allied codebreakers recorded a high volume of priority traffic on the Truk-Rabaul circuit. The next day’s Ultra summary noted “what appeared to be a short directive possibly modifying, canceling, or putting into effect a prearranged plan or phase of operations, possibly as a result of recent Allied activity in the northern Solomons.” The message originated with the C-in-C of the Combined Fleet. It was addressed to commands charged with “frontier defenses.” The fat had gone into the fire.

INVASION

The Bougainville invasion was the Big Show. Everyone was there. Bull Halsey moved his SOPAC headquarters up to “Camp Crocodile” on Guadalcanal for the occasion. There he met with Rear Admiral Wilkinson, the amphibious force commander, and Lieutenant General Alexander A. Vandegrift, leading the I Marine Amphibious Corps. Even Vandegrift came back for Bougainville, though his participation resulted from tragic circumstances. The general leading the corps had fallen to his death from an open window at Nouméa. Vandegrift, headed to Washington to take charge of the entire Marine Corps, made a detour to help Halsey. But the selection of a new permanent commander had already been made—Major General Roy S. Geiger, once the Cactus air boss. The Bougainville landing was a gathering of the clan. On October 30 Vandegrift and Wilkinson embarked on transport George Clymer for the last leg of their voyage to the invasion area. The George Clymer too had been at Guadalcanal, where she had landed supplies and brought back Japanese prisoners.

Tip Merrill had his cruisers at the invasion; Arleigh Burke, his destroyers. Sailor Jim Fahey, fresh from liberty in Australia, manned his 40mm flak tub on the main deck of the Montpelier. As a result of Halsey’s recent visit to Pearl Harbor and appeal to Admiral Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet had left the light aircraft carrier Princeton in SOPAC, and she, along with the Saratoga, were providing the carrier support, under Rear Admiral Ted Sherman, another South Pacific stalwart. Ray Calhoun aboard his destroyer Sterett soon arrived in a carrier group screen. Nimitz was now so flush with flattops he promised Halsey the loan of another group, even though he was set to kick off his Central Pacific offensive. John F. Kennedy had his PT-59 working in the simultaneous Marine diversion on Choiseul. Ace pilots Pappy Boyington, with his “Black Sheep” squadron, and Jimmy Swett of VMF-221 were flying over the beach providing air cover. It seems the only ones not at the party were the Japs.

Admiral Halsey made an inspired choice of invasion site, Cape Torokina, at one end of Empress Augusta Bay. Bull Halsey was to secure airfields on Bougainville to aid in the suppression of Rabaul. Though Bougainville was replete with Japanese bases, those were the very places where the enemy concentrated. At the southern end, around Buin there were more than 12,000 Imperial Navy sailors and 15,000 Japanese Army soldiers with their coast artillery, strong flak, and the stockpiled supplies that had supported all the Solomons. The main strength was the 6th Infantry Division with 17th Army headquarters under General Hyakutake Haruyoshi—the Japanese veterans of Guadalcanal, hardened by their ordeal. At Kieta on the east coast were another 6,000 troops plus some naval personnel. At Buka in the north were 6,000 more men, most of them from the Army. Across the island as a whole there were some 40,000 Japanese Army troops and 20,000 Imperial Navy men—again outnumbering a native population of about 40,000—but in the Empress Augusta Bay sector there were only two to three thousand of the enemy, and in the actual invasion area just 270 Japanese with a single gun.

So the landing would be easy. Even though scout parties had recently discovered swampy land behind the beaches, due to the prowess of the Seabees, who had refined their airfield construction techniques into an engineering marvel, the airfield part would be relatively easy too. While this gets ahead of our story, the 71st Seabees completed the first of two Torokina airfields in just forty days with the war raging all around them. Ground crews arrived the day before the Seabees finished, and Marine Fighter Squadron 216 became the first occupants of what became key bases for the siege of Rabaul.

Getting from here to there was still the problem, but Halsey began with a smart choice of objective and funneled the entire 3rd Marine Division and 2nd Raider Regiment through a narrow beachhead on L-Day, November 1. In the amazingly short time of eight hours the invasion fleet landed 14,000 men and 6,200 tons of supplies. The worst aspect was dangerous reefs and currents that swamped a number of landing craft. The Marines fought their way inland. Japanese troops inflicted some casualties but fell back before this host. The Americans soon had a mile-deep beachhead they continued to expand. The real fight on Bougainville would not take place until weeks later, once Hyakutake had had time to march big units down from Buka and up from Buin. During that interval, in a series of transport echelons, General Geiger, who replaced Vandegrift shortly after L-Day, brought in additional troops and equipment. A great novelty would be the return of the coastwatchers, infiltrated from submarine Guardfish, the first time these spies inserted behind enemy lines as part of an invasion.

Japanese commanders knew the threat posed by Allied forces on Bougainville. They reacted instantaneously. Nothing was possible from Buka—Tip Merrill with his cruiser group administered a drubbing to that base area the night before the landing. During the predawn hours Merrill raced south to do the same at Shortland. Sherman’s carrier planes busted up Buka too, and AIRSOLS helped suppress the Buin complex with a nightmarish succession of air strikes—more than a dozen, totaling 344 planes.

That left Rabaul. On the basis of an air scout’s report the previous day, Admiral Kusaka had already sent a surface action group to intercept the invasion fleet. Rear Admiral Omori Sentaro with his Cruiser Division 5 had just escorted a convoy to the fortress, so his heavy ships formed the fleet’s backbone. Omori believed the Allies bound for the Shortlands. A succession of confusing reports pulled him in different directions and finally he returned to Rabaul, arriving on L-Day morn. Admiral Samejima thought it better to hustle Omori back to Truk, but Kusaka overruled him. Omori’s chance to meet the Americans in a battle royal at just the point when they were nearing Cape Torokina was lost. But Southeast Area Fleet now learned the invasion had begun. Kusaka ordered troops assembled for a counterlanding, and Samejima instructed the Omori fleet to escort them. The cruiser commander received his orders in the early afternoon.

Rabaul’s airfields were busy that day. Admiral Ozawa’s Carrier Division 1 planes were streaming in. Ozawa departed Truk and flew off his air groups 200 miles north of the fortress. Vice Admiral Ozawa brought Kido Butai headquarters to Rabaul, establishing his command post on land on November 1. Receiving this substantial reinforcement of 173 warplanes, Kusaka might yet smash the Bougainville landing. Air strikes could soften up the enemy; Omori would hit them with a compact but powerful force. Allied intelligence made up the fly in this ointment. On October 30, traffic analysis indicated aerial reinforcements en route to the Southeast Area. Then came Halloween. Ultra revealed Kusaka informing Koga that his disposable force numbered only seventy-one fighters and ten dive-bombers. A series of messages discussed urgent reinforcements. The Allies detected movement of a number of fighter and bomber squadrons alongside “possible” deployment of Kido Butai carrier planes. Kusaka’s increased air strength would be no surprise. Another decrypt disclosed the arrival of Admiral Omori’s cruiser unit. On November 1, Ultra reported the Japanese expecting a surprise U.S. landing, perhaps even on the coast of New Britain. Bougainville happened instead.

The Japanese response could just possibly have worked. A one-two punch might drive Halsey’s fleet away. Bougainville could then be sealed tight by Kusaka’s pumped-up air force. Roy Geiger’s Marines would become beleaguered the same way the Americans had been on Cactus in that now dimly remembered past. General Hyakutake could assemble his ground troops and obtain revenge. The Japanese were in an excellent position to do this. But since August 1942, their power had deteriorated markedly. The consequences became apparent in the air strikes against Empress Augusta Bay. The first came early in the morning. The JNAF mustered only seven dive-bombers with forty-four Zero fighters. Then came a pure fighter sweep by eighteen Zeroes. Early in the afternoon there was a mission flown by seven Vals accompanied by forty-two fighters. Though JNAF fliers claimed sinking cruisers and transports and setting many landing craft afire, the Allies seem to have suffered no damage whatsoever. Against that nugatory result, the Japanese lost seventeen fighters and six bombers, with ten more planes damaged, two of them seriously.

That night Kusaka sent seven torpedo-armed Bettys accompanied by scouts and flare planes against Sherman’s carriers off Buka. Admiral Sherman recounts that his crews had reached the point of complaining they never saw any action, grousing that land-based air got the juicy assignments. The Buka strikes supplied a corrective, while the pyrotechnics of a Japanese torpedo attack at night woke them right up. Several attack aircraft were splashed.

The daring of Halsey’s landing at Empress Augusta Bay is demonstrated with blinding clarity by the fact that the invasion site was but a few hours’ voyage from Fortress Rabaul, all of it under the Japanese air umbrella. This would be no Tokyo Express. A Japanese Navy force could leave Rabaul at speed, engage in a surface battle, and return in the space of a single night and dawn, before the bulk of Allied airpower could respond. The other major action of L-Day illustrates the point. That was Admiral Omori’s sortie to Empress Augusta Bay.

In a fitting bookend to Guadalcanal—and Mikawa’s triumph at Savo—Omori intended to go after the invasion transports that his predecessor had missed. Indeed, at the mission briefing in the gun room of heavy cruiser Myoko, Omori referred to the earlier battle and indicated they might surpass Mikawa’s achievement. One participant was Captain Hara Tameichi, who would bring along all three vessels of his division. Hara found it far-fetched that Omori Sentaro, who had not been in battle since Santa Cruz, could perform under the new conditions. A torpedoman par excellence, Omori had passed out with a distinguished record and returned to the torpedo school as an instructor no less than three times, in all spending more than a decade familiarizing Imperial Navy officers with the intricacies of these weapons. Omori had commanded destroyers, destroyer squadrons, and big ships too, including battleship Ise and now the heavy cruiser unit. It was Omori who had led the Kido Butai’s screen at Pearl Harbor, and he had played a role in the Japanese seizure of the Aleutians. But perhaps Hara was right. What Japan needed that South Pacific evening was a Blackbeard, a pirate destroyerman along the lines of the British Napoleonic hero Sir Edward Pellew. Omori Sentaro, well-informed and conscientious, better fit the mold of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Admiral Omori gamely accepted the mission. In addition to the heavy cruisers Myoko and Haguro he would have two destroyer squadrons, each with a light cruiser and three tin cans. Hara’s unit sailed under Baron Ijuin of Squadron 3, who was in the Sendai. Ijuin made a point of telling his captain that he would depend especially on Hara, for the baron did not trust his aged flagship, which Ijuin had left behind on many previous missions. Squadron 10, under Rear Admiral Osugi Morikazu in the Agano, added another unfamiliar unit, though his light cruiser was among the most modern in the fleet. Admiral Omori himself noted the lack of experience working together as a disadvantage when the senior officers met, but pointed out that this had also been true for Mikawa off Guadalcanal.

It was not only Imperial Navy officers who had Guadalcanal on their minds. Bull Halsey code-named the Bougainville invasion Operation “Shoestring II.”

The Omori fleet sailed from Rabaul about 4:00 p.m. on L-Day. Before he could exit St. George’s Channel, Admiral Omori learned of a delay in loading troops aboard the five destroyers that were to transport them. He was forced to mark time in submarine-infested waters, already distressing him. It was past dark when the units finally joined together. As they exited the channel there was a contact Omori understood to be a real submarine. The southerly course he adopted to skirt it further delayed the mission. The admiral’s ambition to catch the Allied amphibious ships had already been frustrated—Halsey made sure those precious craft cleared before nightfall.

Awaiting the Japanese instead was Rear Admiral Merrill with his light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, Columbia, and Denver, along with eight destroyers in Empress Augusta Bay. The tin cans were under Captain Arleigh A. Burke, commanding Destroyer Squadron 23, the “Little Beavers.” Burke himself led the van of the American formation. Tip Merrill’s worst problem was that Burke’s destroyers had gone to refuel, but they rejoined before midnight. Halsey had carefully saturated the channel from Rabaul and the northern part of The Slot with night snoopers. The sea was calm. It was dark and drizzly, with the moon setting early and overcast obscuring the stars except where they shone through holes in the cloud. Captain Hara estimated visibility at about 5,500 yards but thought the night murky. A fateful encounter impended.

Omori’s cruisers were barely out of the channel when they began to overhear radio contact reports. In view of the delays in loading the troop force and avoiding the submarine, and the slower (twenty-six-knot) speed of the transport destroyers, Admiral Omori recommended that the counterlanding be canceled. Kusaka agreed—but ordered Omori ahead to attack the Allied invasion fleet anyway. The dispatch came through at 11:30 p.m., with Omori less than two hours from the invasion area. The fleet commander leaped ahead at thirty-two knots.

The Americans had radar-equipped aircraft (of the 5th Bomb Group) watching from above the clouds. Tip Merrill made a point of commending the accuracy of the aerial scouts in his after-action report. Early on one plane dived to bomb the Sendai; later a bomber tried its luck against Haguro. She was hit amidships, opening up some side plates. Omori altered course to follow one mistaken sighting report, then pressed forward at a reduced speed of eighteen knots. Scouts claimed several battleships plus many cruisers and destroyers were in Empress Augusta Bay. At 1:40 a.m., a Haguro floatplane reported ships only twenty miles away.

The Omori fleet went to thirty knots after another erroneous report that U.S. transports were unloading off the invasion beaches. The admiral discovered that the Haguro’s damage now restricted him to that speed. With the conflicting reports Admiral Omori ordered a course reversal to await clarification. Rain pelted the warships. After about ten minutes Omori again headed for Empress Augusta Bay. The double course change threw the formation into confusion. Shortly after they came about the second time, Captain Hara spotted a red flare in the distance and ordered a warning message.

At about the same moment, 2:27 a.m., American radars spotted the Omori fleet, beginning with Baron Ijuin’s column. Tip Merrill intended to withhold fire with his cruisers while the tin cans executed a torpedo attack. Burke, whose estimate of when the Japanese would be seen was almost precisely correct, took his “Little Beavers” ahead immediately, and without further order launched half salvos of torpedoes. Commander Bernard L. Austin, with the trailing tin can unit, Destroyer Division 46, waited his own attack until Merrill came around to a southerly course. Omori’s task force had more difficulty detecting the Allies. Some of his ships were equipped with modified air search radars, but the admiral had little confidence in them. But Merrill watched the enemy carefully. The Japanese prompted his course change after Shigure detected warships at 2:45, and Omori began to react. All three Japanese columns turned to starboard, which Merrill interpreted as their assuming a line of battle. Admiral Omori never commented on his intentions. Hara saw the maneuver simply as turning away from torpedo water. Merrill’s cruisers opened fire four minutes later.

The Japanese fleet never regained its poise. Cruiser Sendai narrowly avoided colliding with the Shigure and became the prime target for Merrill’s cruisers. Following behind the Shigure, Lieutenant Commander Sugihara Yoshiro’s Samidare sideswiped the last destroyer in the column, Shiratsuyu. The latter’s hull crumpled under the shock. Her guns were disabled. Both ships, their speed now restricted to only fourteen to sixteen knots, simply left the battle area. Seaman Fahey on the Montpelier had a ringside seat, as only the five-and six-inch turrets were involved. He watched an inferno. “You sense a funny feeling as both task forces race toward each other,” Fahey told his diary. “It is very dark and heat lightning can be seen during the battle along with a drizzle. Our ship did not waste any time.”

Captain Shoji Kiichiro’s Sendai was surrounded by shell splashes and hit at least five times. Her rudder jammed. She coasted to a halt while the battle moved southward. Baron Ijuin signaled Captain Hara in the Shigure to come alongside and take off the crew, but the destroyer leader could not see any way to close with the blazing Sendai, and he hesitated to put his own destroyer in the American crosshairs. Hara conformed with Omori’s movement instead. Commander Austin came upon Sendai a half hour later and finished her off with torpedoes. Baron Ijuin and thirty-seven sailors were rescued by an I-boat. The rest went to Davy Jones’s locker.

Admiral Omori made the best of a bad lot. Captain Natsumura Katsuhiro’s Myoko, the flagship, saw Task Force 39 at 2:49 a.m. Natsumura ordered torpedo action to starboard, then to port as the ship circled and steadied on a southwesterly heading. At 3:07 the destroyer Hatsukaze collided with the heavy cruiser, scraping her beam to port, tearing off two torpedo tubes. The destroyer was cut in half. Captain Natsumura ordered star shells to illuminate the scene, but apparently they were duds. He opened fire with armor-piercing shells at 3:17. Myoko launched four torpedoes and the Haguro six more. Captain Matsubara Hiroshi’s Agano fired eight torpedoes from 2:51. American shells fell thick around her starting seven minutes later, and Matsubara’s evasive action confused the formation, which could not re-form until a half hour later. Squadron commander Osugi ordered torpedo action, but the Haguro now lay between Agano, her consorts, and the Americans, so Rear Admiral Osugi canceled it. Cruiser Haguro fired on Merrill’s ships. Jim Fahey saw shells falling all around. The Montpelier was struck by two torpedoes, duds at the end of their runs, which bounced off instead of opening her hull. The Denver caught a shell that fell right down a stack but apparently was a dud too. She was hit four more times. Destroyer Foote, crippled by a torpedo, lay dead in the water. The tin can Spence absorbed a shell hit without serious damage, and she too was sideswiped, by another American destroyer.

To maintain a steady course for gun laying, Admiral Merrill coolly ordered a series of simultaneous turns by his cruisers, despite his fifty-year-old navigation charts and a near collision with a U.S. destroyer. Fahey recorded, “They say the maneuvers Admiral Merrill pulled off in this sea battle would put German Admiral Scheer of World War I fame to shame. Scheer pulled his tactics in daylight off Jutland but Merrill had darkness to cope with and twice the speed.” In a display of their enormous capacity for volume gunfire, the American cruisers fired more than 4,500 six-inch shells, the Montpelier alone accounting for a third of that total. Considering that Merrill had just carried out surface bombardments of Buka and Shortland, and that his crews had gotten only two hours’ sleep, this gunnery is remarkable. The cruisers also fired 700 five-inch shells, while destroyers expended 2,600 rounds.

At 3:37 a.m. Admiral Omori ordered his fleet to withdraw. He told U.S. interrogators after the war that he based his decision on several factors. He remained uncertain of the composition of Merrill’s force, and feared it might have as many as seven cruisers and a dozen destroyers. Omori himself had already lost the equivalent of one of his two destroyer squadrons—Sendai and Hatsukaze sunk and two tin cans disabled by collision. Formation speed was down due to the Haguro’s bomb damage, Myoko had sustained structural damage in her collision, the supply of star shells had been exhausted—and Omori wanted to be beyond the range of Allied airpower, or at least under a Japanese air umbrella, before dawn. Merrill pursued until about 5:00 a.m. Omori’s battered ships entered Simpson Harbor that afternoon. The crippled destroyers Shiratsuyu and Samidare arrived the next day.

Captain Uozumi Jisaku’s Haguro absorbed half a dozen shells—Omori notes that four of them were duds—and the Myoko had been hit twice. Morison mentions hits on the Agano only as a possibility, and indeed that cruiser’s action record notes none. The Hatsukaze, crippled by her collision with Myoko, sank with all hands. In terms of breaking up the invasion, Admiral Omori accomplished nothing. The Imperial Navy’s vaunted superiority at night combat had eroded. In fact, Admiral Omori would cite a lack of training in night operations as the main reason for the hapless collisions among his vessels that night. The Japanese warships smashed into each other like kids playing at crash cars in a theme park. The Americans had perfected the marriage of technology and manual efficiency that made their radar-controlled gunnery so formidable.

Inevitably the Allied riposte went against Rabaul itself. George Kenney’s air force returned determined to make good for the weather that had bedeviled its strikes. On November 2, Kenney’s airmen executed a large-scale low-altitude attack. Using B-25 bombers adapted for strafing, skip bombing, and all the tricks in the bag, the raid aimed at Simpson Harbor, not just the airfields. This was the action Kenney recalled as his toughest. More than a hundred JNAF fighters rose to fight, half of them crack carrier pilots. The assault formations had seventy-five B-25s and eighty P-38s—Japanese plane counters tabulated more than a hundred of each.

The Slot

Imperial Navy fliers had begun calling Rabaul the “graveyard of the fighter pilots,” and this battle shows why. Captain Jerry Johnston led the P-38s. His deputy was Dick Bong. Then the Army’s leading ace, Bong had splashed two Japanese during the October 29 attack. This time he came up empty-handed. “Fate determines at birth where and when you will die,” ruminated Petty Officer Tanimizu Takeo. “Since there was nothing I could do about it I didn’t worry too much.” P-38s of the 431st Fighter Squadron had a field day. Lieutenant Marion Kirby saw Zeroes hammering a B-25 and swung in on them, flaming two. The third got behind him, but wingman Fred Champlin came from nowhere and flamed it. Elsewhere a determined Japanese trying to ram P-38s was taken on by Leo Mayo of the 432nd. Mayo’s P-38 was actually crippled when the JNAF fighter exploded in front of him, shearing off his wing. Ensign Okabe Kenji off the Shokaku, an ace since the Coral Sea, added to his score. But the heavy flak made the air as dangerous for JNAF interceptors as for the Americans. Most of the action took place between 4,000 and 7,000 feet altitude, where even light AA could be lethal. Americans claimed forty-one Zeroes destroyed plus thirteen probables (with thirty-seven more destroyed or probables by the bombers). By Japanese count their loss amounted to twenty aircraft.

It was early afternoon, so the sun blinded pilots when the enemy dived on them from above. Petty Officer Tanimizu notes, “P-38s at low altitude were easy prey…. Their weakest spot was their tail. A 20mm hit and their tails would snap off.” The Japanese kept up the fight past the end of the attack, pursuing retreating aircraft for sixty miles beyond Rabaul. But no one had a lock on accurate reporting. The Japanese claimed to have downed thirty-six B-25s and eighty-five P-38s. General Kenney admits to nine bombers and ten fighters lost.

The bombing was another matter. Omori’s flotilla, just returned from the debacle at Empress Augusta Bay, was a juicy target. Captain Hara got his destroyers under way quite quickly. His Shigure sat right under the attackers’ flight path. “The enemy planes practically flew into our gunfire,” Hara wrote. “I saw at least five planes knocked down by Shigure.” The bigger ships were equally alert. Captain Uozumi of Haguro had her on emergency standby and immediately raised anchor. He used all his guns—eighteen rounds of eight-inch fire, 158 shells from the high-angle weapons, more than 3,000 rapid-fire rounds—and claimed eight bombers. The Myoko recorded a dozen B-25s for twenty-seven heavy shells, seventy-seven rounds of high-angle fire, and 3,200 25mm and 13mm rounds. Captain Nakamura’s ship endured a near miss that cracked the cradle of a low-pressure turbine.

Major Raymond H. Wilkes, who led one of the B-25 squadrons and was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, went in with the last attack wave. By now the Japanese were blanketing the harbor with flak. According to his citation, Wilkes blew up a destroyer with his 1,000-pound bomb, hit a transport, and then strafed a heavy cruiser to attract her fire and enable his mates to escape. Kenney claimed to have wrecked half of Rabaul, blown up depots with 300,000 tons of supplies, taken out thirty planes on the ground, and destroyed or damaged 114,000 tons of shipping. All of this in twelve minutes. George Kenney wrote, “Never in the long history of warfare had so much destruction been wrought upon the forces of a belligerent nation so swiftly and at such little cost to the attacker.” Given the evolution of the strategic balance, this hyperbole was not necessary. It was also transparent. Before Kenney wrote, developments such as the atomic bombs or the fire raids on Japan had occurred. Postwar record checks put actual losses at a minesweeper plus two small freighters aggregating 4,600 tons. Samuel Eliot Morison comments, “Never, indeed, have such exorbitant claims been made with so little basis in fact—except by some of the Army Air Forces in Europe, and by the same Japanese air force which General Kenney believed he had wiped out.”

Disputes over results aside, there could be no doubt Rabaul was besieged. If the October strikes had not made that clear, the attack of November 2 put the writing on the wall. With grim determination Combined Fleet now poured its most mobile surface asset into this cauldron. Admiral Koga believed himself following up on Omori’s achievements—to save face the latter had reported sinking and damaging cruisers and destroyers. Koga wanted to send Vice Admiral Kurita’s fleet to administer the coup de grâce. Area commander Kusaka, aghast at the vulnerability revealed in the latest attack, tried to dissuade the C-in-C. Koga let the maneuver proceed. The heavy cruisers of Kurita Takeo’s Second Fleet sailed. About to put his head into the lion’s mouth, Kurita believed in victory. The Kurita fleet weighed anchor at 9:00 a.m. on November 3, departing by Truk’s south channel.

BROKEN ARROW

Admiral Kurita’s voyage at first went without incident. Unknown to him, however, before the day was out so was his secret. In his memoir William F. Halsey makes a point of noting that the first he learned of the Kurita fleet, “the most desperate emergency that confronted me in my entire term,” was when it was sighted by a scout plane. Written soon after the war, this was for public consumption, intended to preserve the Ultra secret. In reality, as early as October 28, Halsey exchanged messages with Nimitz predicting a Japanese fleet move from Truk in response to the Bougainville invasion. Nimitz promised a carrier group to reinforce the South Pacific, but it was still on the way. Ultra furnished concrete opportunity to craft an actual plan—on November 3, with the Second Fleet barely out of Truk, the codebreakers placed Kurita at sea headed south. Better than that, they reported his time of departure and the precise composition of Kurita’s force—eight heavy cruisers plus Destroyer Squadron 2. Ultra had again broken into JN-25.

The CINCPAC war diary records Halsey’s request for fast battleships as a result of “information that a force of cruisers and destroyers left Truk headed south.” Halsey’s dispatch noted that Merrill’s task force, while still effective, needed rearming. Nimitz sent some additional cruisers and destroyers to the South Pacific but warned he would have to call them very quickly to the Central Pacific. He added, “IN CIRCUMSTANCES BELIEVE REINFORCEMENTS BEING FURNISHED COUPLED WITH HEAVY AIR SUPERIORITY HELD BY COMSOPAC AND CinCSOWESPAC WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS.”

In return Halsey objected that actions would undoubtedly be fought at night, when air superiority could not be applied, that the Japanese could reinforce from Truk more quickly that he from Efate, and that fighting on many fronts “usually” prevented “consistent attacks on Rabaul.” The date/time group on this cable, sent on November 3 from the South Pacific, makes clear that SOPAC was lining up an air assault against Rabaul before Kurita’s cruisers ever arrived there. Until then the conventional wisdom saw carrier units at a disadvantage striking powerful land bases, but Rabaul had been battered already, and the opportunity to wipe out Kurita was too good to pass up. Halsey ordered Ted Sherman to prepare the carrier attack. The premeditated nature is clear in what the Halsey memoir does say—that he had sufficient time to coordinate with Kenney for a near-simultaneous Rabaul strike by the Fifth Air Force. Halsey’s dispatch to Nimitz finished: “AS IN THE PAST WE WILL HURT JAPS AND ATTACK THEM WITH EVERYTHING WE HAVE BUT HATE TO GIVE THEM AN EVEN BREAK.” Thus the admirals planned a trap for the Imperial Navy.

Kurita Takeo steamed blithely into this iron storm. That an aerial snooper had not simply made a preliminary sighting that November 4 might have become clear when an air attack followed almost immediately. North of New Ireland the two tankers detailed to fuel the Kurita fleet were set upon. Both were damaged, one badly enough to be towed into Kavieng. The other returned to Truk accompanied by heavy cruiser Chokai and a pair of destroyers. Chokai was lucky. Otherwise she would have been on the hook with the rest of Kurita’s vessels. Half past noon the cruiser Mogami actually fired her main battery at a scout 23,000 yards distant. No one attacked except a snooper near New Ireland late that night. Allied aircraft avoided the Second Fleet for a reason. A warship maneuvering at sea always had better odds against aircraft than one tied up in port. Halsey wanted the Kurita fleet inside Rabaul.

With his fleet carrier Saratoga and light carrier Princeton taking on fuel from oiler Kankakee not far from Rennell, Admiral Sherman received Halsey’s dispatch late in the afternoon of November 4. Sherman was to make an all-out attack on shipping in Rabaul and to the north of it. The SOPAC commander, in keeping with his private Ultra, explicitly made cruisers, then destroyers the priority targets. Halsey did not reveal his source, but the reference to cruisers and the instruction to focus on Rabaul plus the waters north of it—the sea between that fortress and Truk—are a dead giveaway. To maximize striking power, he directed AIRSOLS to furnish Sherman’s defensive cover, freeing all of Task Force 38’s planes for the attack. Ted Sherman sped through the night, coming up from the south. The weather cooperated. Overcast protected the carriers from JNAF snoopers, and calm seas enabled destroyers to keep station. At Sherman’s maximum practicable speed of twenty-seven knots he reached a dawn position 230 miles southeast of Rabaul in time to put a morning strike over Simpson Harbor.

Carriers began launching at 9:00 a.m. Air Group 12, of the Saratoga, sent out twenty-two SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, sixteen TBF Avenger torpedo planes, and thirty-three F-6F Hellcat fighters under air group boss Commander Henry H. Caldwell. The Princeton’s Air Group 23 put up seven TBFs and nineteen F-6Fs under Commander Henry Miller, its chief. The rain and cloud at the launch point gave way to clear skies as the aircraft thrummed toward New Britain. Approaching Rabaul, visibility was estimated at fifty miles. It was a brilliant day for a killing. The strike wave swung into St. George’s Channel on its final approach shortly after 11:00 a.m. Commander Caldwell led the overall force and directed it from his Avenger torpedo bomber.

Admiral Kurita also voyaged through the night. His Second Fleet skirted the eastern coast of New Ireland, crossed north of Bougainville, and entered St. George’s Channel to make Simpson Harbor. Predictably, around dawn there was another aircraft contact. The fleet began entering Blanche Bay, Rabaul’s roadstead, around 8:00 a.m. Kurita had with him the heavy cruisers Atago, Takao, Maya, Suzuya, Mogami, and Chikuma, the light cruiser Noshiro, and destroyers. Within fifteen minutes of entering Simpson Harbor, the first ships, cruisers Chikuma and Noshiro, thirsty for oil, were tying up alongside tanker Kokuyu Maru. At 11:16 a.m., flagship Atago and the Maya took their places. Captain Takahashi Yuji’s Suzuya was gulping fuel from fleet oiler Naruto. Some destroyers fueled from cruisers. Takao apparently pulled away shortly before the moment of crisis. Kurita wanted to be ready to sail that evening.

There is some confusion about Japanese warning. Morison’s official history indicates that the Rabaul area command issued a brief warning at 11:10. Suzuya’s action record, however, records first sighting of aircraft at 11:15, notes verification of identity and then the alert by 8th Base Force at 11:18. Cruiser Chikuma’s record agrees the sighting was at 11:15; Mogami makes the time 11:16; Maya 11:20; the Noshiro puts the clock at 11:21. Light cruiser Yubari, just back from an escort mission to Kavieng, saw enemy planes at 11:23. Other ships’ action records are missing or lack detail. In any case the key point is that the Americans achieved surprise. Rabaul on November 5, 1943, would be Pearl Harbor in reverse.

Lack of warning impacted Japanese air defense. The number of fighters on patrol is variously cited as fifty-nine or seventy. JNAF pilots are reported to have held back, expecting escorts to break away to engage them, whereupon they could pounce on the bombers. Instead, American fighters stuck to the strike aircraft right into Simpson Harbor. Japanese air patrols were effectively useless. The escort fighters made their own contribution. One Hellcat peeled off to strafe the small boat carrying Commander Ohmae Toshikazu out to flagship Atago. The staff officer’s routine delivery of a message from Kusaka to Kurita almost cost him his life.

Morison notes that one cruiser used her main battery in a desperate effort to obliterate the attackers. Kurita’s vessels had the time to do this because Commander Caldwell circled the shoreline past Crater Peninsula to come in over Rabaul town. This gave his dive-bombers an approach vector enabling them to attack fore-to-aft, the most effective target aspect for dive-bombing. Available Japanese records show that all the warships fired their big guns, the heavy cruisers expending more than 356 eight-inch shells, the light cruisers at least ninety-five six-inch munitions. The cruisers also put up a hail of fire from five-inch high-angle guns, more than 1,421 rounds. And they expended nearly 24,000 light cannon and machine gun bullets in close-in defense. No doubt destroyers put up storms of fire also, since they collectively claimed downing ten aircraft. All this was in addition to the flak from Rabaul’s extensive antiaircraft array. Given the curtain of fire, it is amazing that total American losses amounted to just five bombers and an equal number of fighters.

On the flagship, Captain Nakaoka Nobuyoshi ordered AA action to port and cast off from the tanker. His Atago was just under way when Commander Caldwell split the attack into several units headed for different parts of the harbor. One element aimed at Nakaoka’s cruiser. At 11:28 three SBDs dropped on the Atago. All scored near misses to port, forward of the beam. Splinters opened steam lines and set fire to torpedo oxygen flasks. The ship listed. A splinter shot across the bridge, carrying away half of Captain Nakaoka’s face. Sailors bore him from the bridge on a stretcher. The flag captain managed a weak, “Banzai!” as he passed Admiral Kurita. There were more dive-bombers—with another near miss—and seven Avengers launched torpedoes without effect. By 12:11 p.m. counterflooding had returned the Atago to an even keel. By then Captain Nakaoka was dead. Twenty-one seamen were killed and sixty-four wounded. Kurita was stunned, as was Nakaoka’s classmate Rear Admiral Komura Keizo, Ozawa’s chief of staff; and Baron Tomioka, another Etajima comrade. His friend had died senselessly in the harbor of the impregnable fortress for which Tomioka was now responsible.

Cruiser Takao exited to Blanche Bay. Captain Hayashi Shigetaka watched the attack planes turn in over Rabaul town. Every gun on his ship was firing by 11:25. As the Takao gained speed, destroyer Wakatsuki cut in front of her. Hayashi ordered hard right rudder. The bombers came as the 12,000-ton cruiser responded. She shuddered with an impact starboard of the number one gun turret that holed its side, pierced the deck, and damaged the barbette of the next turret back. Twenty-three sailors were killed and another twenty-two wounded. A torpedo attack followed but obtained no result. By 11:50 Hayashi’s ship was out of Simpson Harbor and the enemy had disappeared.

Next to the Atago, the worst affected would be Captain Kato Yoshiro’s cruiser Maya, caught just casting off from her oiler. Kato had held command for less than a month—not so familiar with his vessel as he could have been. His ship was a sitting duck. Lieutenant Commander James Newell, leader of VB-23 of the Independence, put a bomb right down one of Maya’s smokestacks. The weapon detonated in her engine rooms. The Maya suffered the most severe casualties, with seventy dead and sixty wounded. Fires blazed into the night.

On the heavy cruiser Chikuma, Captain Shigenaga Kazue ordered AA action just two minutes after the initial sighting. By 11:24 his main battery and secondary were both engaged. Any hope of escape evaporated in the two minutes starting at 11:30 when, in close succession, the Chikuma was hit next to her forward turrets and abaft the beam on her catapult deck. The latter explosion started a fire that spread to the engine spaces. Shortly thereafter came a near miss off the stern. The Chikuma was among the first to reach speed and attain Blanche Bay, at 12:10, where Captain Shigenaga’s violent weaving put off the Americans’ aim. Her damage turned out to be only superficial.

Captain Aitoku Ichiro of the Mogami was also quick on the trigger, and for a little while it seemed his ship might escape. But SBDs re-formed overhead at 11:32, and a minute later Dauntlesses dropped on Aitoku’s vessel. He ordered full left rudder, and the Mogami was turning when a bomb hit between the forwardmost turrets. Black smoke billowed into the sky. A glide bomber and a torpedo attack were fended off by destruction of the aircraft, which crashed in the harbor nearby. The Mogami reached the wider waters of Blanche Bay fifteen minutes later, but at 11:45 a.m. Aitoku had to stop engines and flood the forward magazines. Crewmen extinguished the fires before 1:00 p.m. An hour later Mogami was pumping out. In all, thirty-one sailors were wounded.

The other Japanese warships proved luckier. Breaking away from the oiler that had been fueling his Suzuya, Captain Takahashi Yuji ordered full speed and joined the stampede for the harbor exit. His ship put up flak and endured only strafing attacks that wounded eight men. Also strafed was light cruiser Agano, which had stayed at Rabaul after Admiral Omori’s debacle at Empress Augusta Bay. One sailor was killed and seven wounded, her damage bullet holes in the hull. Captain Tahara Yoshiaki’s Noshiro sustained a near miss, which wounded a single sailor and damaged one high-angle flak gun. The Yubari also came through with nothing worse than a couple of men wounded. Destroyer Fujinami was hit by a torpedo that failed to explode, but dented her hull, killing a sailor and injuring nine others. Another tin can, the Wakatsuki, sustained damage from a near miss.

Admiral Kurita’s ships were milling about, some in Blanche Bay, the others headed there, when another wave of American planes arrived. The Takao reports sighting these at 12:02 p.m., the other vessels variously between 12:17 and 12:19. This was General Kenney’s complementary land-based attack, with twenty-seven B-24 bombers plus sixty-seven P-38 escorts. To Kurita’s relief they made for Rabaul town, not the fleet. The action incensed Admiral Halsey, who notes Kenney had promised an attack in strength that would “lay Rabaul flat.” His formation not only lacked the strength to do that, it arrived only as Navy carrier planes were leaving. In fact, Sherman’s fliers could see only eight Army planes as they made off. The poor timing and weak strength, Halsey felt, were not the promised maximum effort. General Kenney’s defense is that, after the exertions of recent weeks against Rabaul, his forces had damage that outstripped repair capacity. Kenney maintains he told MacArthur, “[M]y maximum effort would be pretty low until I got some replacements and repaired all the shot-up airplanes.” The SOWESPAC commander, Kenney writes, told him to proceed on that basis, and the actual attack force would be a bit larger than Kenney had estimated he could field. But the general was aware from communications with Washington that no replacements were in the offing and he should not have left Halsey expecting major cooperation.

Kenney notes his attack had excellent results. Japanese materials available at this writing, however, associate no particular damage with the bombs of November 5 other than the destruction of the Kurita fleet. Even the codebreakers had little to show except that Rabaul radio went off the air from 11:29 a.m. until 2:18 p.m.—less than two hours after the end of Kenney’s attack. Two Japanese fighters fell to P-38s, both to the ace Dick Bong. Navy fighters claimed over two dozen more in dogfights as the carrier planes made for Sherman’s task force. Over the two attacks, the Japanese claimed to have destroyed forty-nine American planes. The attack stirred Rabaul like a hornets’ nest. By dint of strenuous efforts the Japanese made a sighting and sent as many planes as they could. Radio Tokyo would assert that a fleet carrier and a light carrier were both sunk in what the Japanese would term “the First Air Battle for Bougainville,” but in fact the JNAF attack completely miscarried, going against a PT boat and a couple of landing ships. The most they accomplished was to damage one. It was an ignoble performance. At the Imperial Palace, where Nagano Osami reported the same claims for American carriers sunk, the news was believed and greeted with joy.

As for Admiral Kurita’s glorious purpose of mopping up the Americans off Bougainville, that evaporated in the heat of Halsey’s daring raid. Captain Shigenaga left for Truk almost immediately with his Chikuma and the destroyer Wakatsuki. Admiral Kurita sailed for the same place with most of the fleet that night. Heavy cruiser Suzuya stayed with the Mogami, making temporary repairs to her plant. Those vessels departed the next day. Captain Kato also stayed to effect temporary repairs to his Maya. Combined Fleet recalled a reinforcement unit it had sent from Truk direct to Bougainville. The heavy cruiser Chokai, hastening from Truk to rejoin the Second Fleet, reversed her course. The Imperial Navy never again sent heavy ships to Rabaul. The light cruisers Agano, Noshiro, and Yubari, now the backbone of the Southeast Area Fleet, did not have long left to them in the Solomons either. The players were already taking their places for the last act of this story. The Empire had crossed the event horizon, entering a state of negative entropy: Under this condition enormous efforts generated picayune results. How pernicious the situation had become would be demonstrated almost immediately.

“A FUNERAL DIRGE FOR TOJO’S RABAUL”

Bull Halsey exulted at the results of the carrier raid. Though the next time they met, the admiral would complain to MacArthur of George Kenney’s performance, in the moment he expressed himself quite clearly to Ted Sherman, signaling, “IT IS REAL MUSIC TO ME AND OPENS THE STOPS FOR A FUNERAL DIRGE FOR TOJO’S RABAUL.” Admiral Nimitz, pleased too, immediately assigned Rear Admiral Alfred E. Montgomery’s Task Group 50.3 to the South Pacific and directed that officer, who had fleet carriers Essex and Bunker Hill, along with light carrier Independence, to make his best speed. Nimitz wanted exploitation, taking action “WITH VIEW EARLIEST POSSIBLE STRIKES REPEAT STRIKES ON DAMAGED AND OTHER SHIPS IN AND AROUND RABAUL.”

But a campaign of repeated carrier raids on the Japanese fortress proved unnecessary. Ultra revealed the Japanese heavy units withdrawing and Koga hunkering down at Truk. On November 9, CINCPAC modified his order to provide that Montgomery, after a single strike, should proceed to the Central Pacific for Nimitz’s offensive.

The last act of the Rabaul drama took place in the air, with the evolving Bougainville campaign in the lead. The Japanese would actually fight six “air battles of Bougainville” in the course of their RO Operation. The air battles afforded Kusaka’s and Ozawa’s pilots no greater success than the ineffectual attack on the American carriers following the November 5 raid. But JNAF losses were painful, eighty-three aircraft. Emperor Hirohito’s satisfaction with the claimed (but false) U.S. carrier losses in the Rabaul raid continued when Admiral Nagano updated the palace on November 9. Hirohito joined Captain Jyo for toasts in the aide’s duty office. But those combat results were illusory too. Throughout November, on 869 sorties flown (many of which were, however, fighter patrols over Rabaul), the fruit was a single transport sunk and a few ships damaged. Halsey’s infusion of South Pacific forces onto Bougainville proved more supple and enduring than Japanese efforts to blockade the island.

For the Marines, Seabees, and others on Bougainville—including the Japanese—there would be plenty of mud, mayhem, and misery. But enemy efforts to drive the Allies into the sea were no more successful than they had been on Guadalcanal. Imperial Navy support activities would be subject to the existing operational environment—now highly dangerous to the Japanese. The light cruisers left at Rabaul furnish a good example. The fleet ran a counterlanding mission to Torokina coupled with a supply run to Buka. Both succeeded. On the next Buka run the Natori was torpedoed and left the Solomons for the last time. Again like Cactus, the Japanese on Bougainville became isolated.

While action off Bougainville continued, George Kenney sent several more small air strikes against Rabaul, and Bull Halsey geared up for another big attack. That aerial assault took place on November 11. Kenney’s follow-up strike was canceled due to weather, which had also dramatically reduced his activities during the previous forty-eight hours. On the appointed day, Sherman flung his carrier planes at Rabaul from the east, and Montgomery from the south. Overcast hampered Sherman’s planes, which got in just a small attack on a few ships they spotted through a break in the clouds.

Montgomery’s 199 aircraft stormed into Rabaul through rain. Kusaka’s defenses put up sixty-eight Zeroes to contest the airspace. In an echo of Santa Cruz, Jim Vose, who had planted the damaging bomb on the Shokaku’s flight deck that terrible day, was now a lieutenant commander leading the Bunker Hill dive-bombers. But Vose got no major decision this time. Not only was the weather uncooperative, but the pickings were nothing like they had been. Most important of them was the Agano. She sighted the attackers at 8:57 a.m. Captain Matsubara ordered his flak gunners into action ten minutes later. At 9:12 Avengers began their level runs for torpedo attack. One tin fish hit the bow but failed to explode. Another struck the after section and detonated in crew quarters, leaving part of the structure dangling in the sea. Dive-bombers achieved no results. With the detritus acting as a stationary rudder, Matsubara lost steering control. The Agano had many casualties. Heavy cruiser Maya, still repairing, emerged unscathed. The Yubari also rode at anchor. Captain Sakai Takumi’s light cruiser saw the approaching planes at 8:54. Sakai ordered his main battery into action and got off twenty-six 5.5-inch shells. But by 9:13, U.S. planes were close enough to strafe the Yubari and several tin cans with her. The cruiser’s luck held and only a couple of seamen were wounded. The destroyer Suzunami was caught while she was loading torpedoes. She sank near the entrance to Simpson Harbor. The Naganami reached Blanche Bay but suffered a torpedo hit and had to be towed back.

Admiral Montgomery’s instructions were to make a second strike. He had begun rearming when Kusaka struck back. At least the JNAF waves were detected on radar more than a hundred miles away. Montgomery launched some of his follow-up strike planes beginning at 1:25 p.m., but shortly after that defensive action began to predominate. The Japanese force included sixty-seven Zeroes, twenty-seven Vals, and fourteen Kates, with a unit of Bettys trailing behind. By 1:54 action was joined. Montgomery canceled his second strike and concentrated on the air battle. For the first half hour Japanese dive-bombers held sway; then came the torpedo planes. Some Bettys that missed the carrier task force found Tip Merrill’s cruisers instead and put a torpedo into light cruiser Denver. But that would be it. The Japanese strike groups lost a few Bettys, all of their Kate torpedo planes, and all but ten of the Val dive-bombers. The loss of several dozen attack planes in exchange for a single torpedo hit against a nonessential U.S. warship measured Japan’s decline in the year since Santa Cruz.

The air battles of November 11 marked the effective end of Rabaul as a Japanese offensive base. Combined Fleet recalled Ozawa’s Kido Butai aircraft the next day. The proud legions of the “sea eagles” were heavily thinned. Hirohito issued an imperial rescript congratulating the carrier-and land-based airmen on their achievements. Only after the war would the Japanese discover how meager these had been. But the numbers tell their own story: 173 planes had gone to Rabaul; fifty-three returned to Truk. The losses included half the fighter planes, 85 percent of the dive-bombers, 90 percent of the torpedo planes. Every single scout plane had been destroyed. Between damaged planes that had managed to land and airmen rescued, the personnel losses were not quite as bad: 50 percent of scout crews, 40 percent of the torpedo-plane crews, 30 percent of the fighter pilots. But among the dive-bomber crews, three of every four had perished. Fighter sorties were expensive, but effective to some degree. Attack sorties were prohibitively costly regardless of their effectiveness, which was considerably less than the Imperial Navy believed.

Admiral Kusaka, unable to protect major warships any longer, ordered them to Truk. Captain Kato sailed with the Maya on November 12. The Agano also cleared harbor, with some help, then was torpedoed en route by the American submarine Scamp. She had to be rescued by the Natori and her destroyers, which towed Captain Matsubara’s ship the rest of the way. The Yubari was bombed at sea. Captain Arleigh Burke with his acclaimed destroyer squadron put the finishing touch on Japanese surface activity in the Battle of Cape St. George on November 25, when he annihilated three ships of a five-destroyer Tokyo Express bound for Buka. Thanks to Ultra, Admiral Halsey gave “31 Knot Burke” twenty-four hours’ advance warning of the Imperial Navy sally. Allied forces had achieved complete surface superiority.

From Rabaul, Admiral Kusaka continued to throw his Eleventh Air Fleet against Bougainville and New Guinea, at enormous cost. JNAF losses in the Solomons for November 1943 are estimated at about 290 warplanes. Without the carrier aircraft, Kusaka’s attacks were even less potent. His effort almost immediately suffered cutbacks. Once Nimitz opened his Central Pacific drive—on November 20, barely a week after the second Rabaul carrier attack—the pressures on JNAF strength multiplied. Ironically, some of the last aerial reinforcements to Rabaul were planes drawn from JNAF forces in the Marshalls and Gilberts—precisely where Nimitz struck—and the less experienced fliers added little to Kusaka’s capability, while, in return, very soon the Combined Fleet withdrew the 26th Air Flotilla, removing some of Kusaka’s best air groups and reducing his serviceable strength to about 160 aircraft. Other reinforcements were composites, as in late December, when the three ships of Carrier Division 1 each sent seven fighters to augment the 253rd Air Group. That was the period of the largest JNAF defensive efforts, when formations of seventy-two, ninety-four, and even ninety-eight fighters attempted to blunt the raids. The Japanese enjoyed a degree of success through the end of the year.

While Kusaka did what he could, General MacArthur began to confect a siege ring, surrounding the beleaguered fortress with Allied garrisons supporting air bases that kept up a constant rain of bombs. In December, MacArthur landed SOWESPAC troops at Arawe and Cape Gloucester, at the western tip of New Britain, for the first time putting Allied troops on the same island as Rabaul. In January 1944, the target was the Green Islands, to the east, which Halsey captured using New Zealand troops. At the air station planted there, Lieutenant Commander Richard Nixon served as a supply officer for the SOPAC Air Transport Command, his most substantive wartime assignment and one for which he received a citation. Nixon is said to have been popular with the natives. The supremo seized Emirau and Manus islands, west and north of Rabaul, in March 1944, completing the encirclement.

The war had reached a juncture where the Imperial Navy, even in its bases, could no longer be safe. For a Christmas present in 1943, Rabaul received another of Ted Sherman’s carrier attacks. Shortly after the New Year, fighter ace “Pappy” Boyington, hit over the fortress, had to ditch in St. George’s Channel and would be rescued by an I-boat. The pilot was held prisoner at Rabaul for some weeks and then sent on to Japan by way of Truk. In the meantime, flying from the brand-new U.S. airfield at Stirling in the Treasury Islands early in February, Marine photo planes took pictures of Truk. Admiral Koga viewed this as an omen of worse to come, and sailed away with his Combined Fleet. Sure enough, on February 17, Truk was subjected to a massive attack by the American fast-carrier task force. Prisoner Boyington’s air shuttle from Rabaul landed amid this chaos. Boyington became an American witness to the demise of Truk as a center of Japanese power.

The Allied siege strategy was infinitely preferable to direct attack on Rabaul. By the time MacArthur completed his ring, the Japanese had had two years to fortify the place, and its defenses were formidable. The Japanese Army had 76,300 troops in two infantry divisions, two brigades, an artillery brigade, and a tank regiment. Supporting weapons included 237 big guns or howitzers, plus eighty-eight 75mm cannon. Special Naval Landing Forces contributed another dozen cannon, and the Navy had thirty-eight coast defense guns, almost half of them six-inch weapons. Kusaka’s naval personnel amounted to 21,570 men, including four garrison units and an SNLF. The forces possessed nearly 5,000 vehicles. There were 30,000 tons of ammunition and 45,000 tons of food. Stocks included roughly 2,900 tons of aviation gas and 3,600 tons of motor fuel. An invasion of Fortress Rabaul promised more heartache than anything ever done in the South Pacific.

The reduction of Rabaul by means of aerial attack posed far fewer difficulties. This became the main function of AIRSOLS and the Thirteenth Air Force. The air campaign began immediately after the carrier raids. During November, the Thirteenth Air Force flew forty-one sorties against Rabaul, but a month later the overall scale of Allied effort increased to 394 flights, and in January 1944 to 2,865. This was overwhelmingly an effort of the South Pacific forces—George Kenney sent exactly nine airplanes to Rabaul from the time of his Fifth Air Force raids through November 1944. Within SOPAC, Marine Corps airmen carried much of the burden. The height of the suppression campaign occurred between January and July 1944. It peaked in February, when 4,552 sorties dumped 3,324 tons of munitions on the Japanese. To put that figure a different way, at this level of effort the Allies were hitting Rabaul with a 150-plane raid every day, rain or shine. Marine air flew more sorties against the fortress in every month except May, and its effort amounted to nearly 44 percent of the entire Allied tally. After April the Rabaul missions were considered “milk runs.” Targeteers divided the town into more than a dozen sectors, and strikes tried to level them. Efforts to burn out the town were abandoned once photo interpreters determined that just 122 buildings were still standing—less than 10 percent of the town. Through July, Allied air forces delivered an average of more than 1,800 tons of bombs on Rabaul every month. From July 1944 through the end of the war, the Allies kept heads down with some hundreds of sorties each month. By the end of the war the Allies had plastered Rabaul with 30,000 tons of munitions.

The weight of that attack could not fail to have effects. In January 1944, Koga sent in the planes of Carrier Division 2 once more, recalling some of the land-based air units. Shortly after the American carrier raid on Truk, the Japanese pulled out these planes, plus the last of their 26th Air Flotilla. As many mechanics as possible left with them, and some more departed by submarine or the few aircraft and blockade runners that sneaked in. Several hundred mechanics of the 751st Air Group crowded onto a pair of ships at Rabaul on February 20. Its commander, Captain Sato, boarded an escorting subchaser. AIRSOLS planes sank both the transports north of New Ireland the next day. Sato’s subchaser escaped. Tug Nagara rescued a number of survivors. She, in turn, was caught and sunk by Arleigh Burke’s destroyers not far away a day later. Burke’s “Little Beavers” picked up about half the Japanese survivors, including more than forty men of the 751st Group. Others drowned themselves or resisted capture. Rabaul was truly isolated. Operation Cartwheel had succeeded.

After February the JNAF managed to field only a guerrilla air force, a handful of planes assembled from the boneyard, patched together with parts from the wrecks that littered Rabaul’s airfields. The Imperial Navy gave up trying to maintain Lakunai Airfield in July 1944. Several other fields of the fortress complex fell into disrepair much earlier. Strenuous efforts kept Vunakanau operational through the end of the war. It was last used on May 27, 1945, when the JNAF slipped two bombers into Rabaul to stage a raid on Allied shipping in the Admiralties. Japanese soldiers and sailors went into farming, raising food to supplement their rations. The emperor’s expressed fears of brave men starving had proven prescient. Admiral Kusaka and General Imamura exerted themselves to buck up morale. The Army had the best farms, and they graciously shared food with the Navy. As Fortress Rabaul declined to an isolated backwater, left behind by a ferocious war, the Japanese Army and Imperial Navy finally achieved cooperation.