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Cartwheels

With the Allies on the south coast of Papua New Guinea, and the Japanese on the north coast, both sides engaged in a protracted air war across the interior, attacking each other in tit-for-tat bombing raids, back and forth over the Owen Stanley mountains. United States army fighters and bombers that had been damaged in combat above the rugged interior or over the Bismarck Sea to the north would sometimes make it back to the Port Moresby airfields, only to crash on their return as they tried to land.

The steady toll of these accidents had an impact on the interceptors at Fordet — the 1 Wireless Unit ‘Forward Detachment’ near Port Moresby. Keith ‘Zero’ Falconer, an artist, drew pictures of the wrecks. Vic Lederer described a particularly devastating event when an aircraft failed to land on the runway, crashing into an encampment and killing numerous servicemen.

The wireless unit couldn’t stop the death of Allied air crews, but with their access to the Japanese air-to-ground radio traffic they could help in a significant way: the unit was efficient at detecting incoming air raids. The enemy aircraft would typically fly in radio silence on their way to a bombing raid, but even in this situation increased activity at their base would often give the raid away.

Air-raid alerts were sent to the local Port Moresby headquarters, but Taff Davis, an officer at Fordet, found an even faster way of alerting the nearby troops and air bases. Whenever one of his interceptors learned of an incoming raid, he walked outside with his rifle and fired three shots into the air. After the raid was over or the threat of a raid had passed, he walked out and fired a single shot.

All the nearby bases learned what Taff Davis’s three shots meant. They must have wondered how he knew — but nobody ever came and asked.

There were two notable times when the wireless unit thwarted large air raids. The first was on 12 March, when a large incoming attack on Port Moresby was detected. The local commanders were notified, and MacArthur’s air chief, General Kenney, sent fighters out to meet them, destroying one-third of the bombers.

In mid-August, the wireless unit picked up a series of radio messages about Japanese aircraft movements at Wewak on the north coast across the mountains. According to these naval air-to-ground intercepts, numerous bombers had arrived at Wewak airstrip and were preparing for major raids on Allied air bases. The information was passed to Kenney, who wasted no time in responding. He ordered an immediate air raid on Wewak. All available aircraft were organised for a bombing run. They took off in the middle of the night, arriving in the skies over Wewak at dawn the next day.

The Allied bombers arrived in the nick of time. The Japanese bombers were sitting on the airfields, wing to wing, about to depart on a massive bombing run: hundreds of aircraft were ready for take-off, their pilots and crew aboard, their engines running.1 Kenney’s planes plastered the airfields of Wewak with bombs before the Japanese bombers could get into the air. The Allied bombers also inflicted damage on the runways, and struck nearby fuel depots, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky.

They did as much damage as possible before circling back to the Allied airfields at Port Moresby and Buna. Then, learning that his surprise reverse air raid had been a success, Kenney decided to keep going. Realising that the airfields at Wewak were now in such disarray that they would likely to be vulnerable to more bombing runs, he sent waves of bombers across the mountains to Wewak and back for three days. By the time they were finished, 150 Japanese aircraft were destroyed, mostly as they sat defenceless on the ground.

Questioned about the raids after the war, Major-General Tanikawa of the Japanese Fourth Air Army at Wewak, said,

At the time of the air attacks on Wewak on 17th and 18th August our defences were not alert. We lost 100 planes including light bombers, fighters and reconnaissance planes. It was a decisive Allied victory. We were planning to regain the balance of air power and were making plans to bomb Port Moresby and other areas. A few days before our projected plan was to materialise, we were bombed at Wewak and our air power was severely crippled. Consequently our air power was rapidly diminishing and was unable to aid our ground forces effectively which, in the end, constituted one of our chief reasons for losing the war.2

The Wewak raid had been unplanned. It was a gift that had been handed to MacArthur and Kenney by Central Bureau’s 1 Wireless Unit. In fact, prior to Central Bureau informing them of the build-up, the Allies had no idea that Wewak was becoming a major enemy base. MacArthur, impressed by this unexpected windfall, ordered the formation of five new wireless units. Given the rigors of recruitment and Kana training for wireless units, there would be considerable time-lag before they were operational, but the process of signals-intelligence expansion had begun.

Before MacArthur’s order came in, two new units were already being formed in Townsville — named, naturally enough, ‘2 Wireless Unit’ and ‘3 Wireless Unit’. The more experienced operators of 1 Wireless Unit, which now had over 200 personnel, moved to Port Moresby and joined its forward detachment — Fordet — in September.

The Wewak raids happened only weeks after the US 6th Army division captured the Woodlark and Kiriwana islands to the east of New Guinea, with air cover from US and Australian air forces. Once the islands were captured they were turned into air bases to allow Kenney to launch air raids on Rabaul. This was the first step in MacArthur’s new strategy, Operation Cartwheel, a series of battles across the north coast of New Guinea and nearby islands with the goal of capturing Rabaul.

But as Cartwheel got going, and with increasingly useful intelligence coming in from both Central Bureau and FRUMEL, MacArthur changed his objective. An invasion of Rabaul would involve a series of large-scale battles with heavy casualties on both sides. Instead of capturing the Japanese stronghold, would it not be better to bypass it?

This suited MacArthur’s personal objective of recapturing the Philippines, where America’s great general had suffered a resounding defeat, and from where he had had to flee to Australia. And having been reported in newspapers across the globe as promising ‘I shall return’, MacArthur was resolved to do so.

The next move in Operation Cartwheel was to capture Lae, a town on the New Guinea north coast about 200 miles directly north of Port Moresby. On 3 September, paratroopers from the US army 103rd Infantry Regiment and the Australian army 2/4th Field Regiment dropped into Nadzab, a village inland from Lae. Meanwhile, the Australian 9th Division landed on beaches near Lae. After putting up a brief resistance, the Japanese withdrew from Lae. The town itself was captured five days later.

Soon after Lae was captured, a forward detachment from 1 Wireless Unit was moved there, with more of the unit following later in the year. Joining them was the 53 Wireless Section from the Australian Special Wireless Group, who flew by bomber from Port Moresby to Nadzab on Christmas Day, 1943.

Jack Brown, who wrote about his experiences as a Kana operator in his book Katakana Man, described the journey there:

Normally aircraft today would fly over the mountains, but the aircraft moving us were not capable of this and the only way to get there was to fly through the valleys and gaps. Going there was rather hairy because of the twisting and turning. Sometimes it looked as though the aircraft’s wingtips would hit the cliffs on the side. If the clouds had dropped there was no way you could get out; you would have to crash.3

Nearby, another coastal village named Finschhafen had also been captured and occupied by Allied forces. Fifty-three Wireless Section was relocated there, along with an ASIPS unit. According to Doug Pyle, one of the ASIPS personnel, they were initially camped with the US army air force, who were well provisioned and ‘provided us with everything we needed’.

The airstrip was made of punched metal laid over bleached coral. The US Kittyhawks made a zinging sound when the wheels made contact with the metal as they came into land. If it was a bad landing, instead of a zing there would be a woomp as the plane bounced up off the metal before coming back down to make contact again. Sometimes they would return with visibly damaged wings, or parts missing. Sometimes they would not come back at all.

Reception along the coast was too poor for the wireless section, so they moved to the top of a nearby escarpment, where they could pick up messages from far across the sea. They were now an all-Australian unit. They still had their American tents, cots, and other equipment, but no longer had the luxury of US army air force food — only bland and monotonous Australian army-issue meals. Their only connection to the outside world was a dirt road back down the hill to the US army air force base.

The units at Finschhafen and Nadzab were getting brilliant reception from enemy units. Nadzab, in particular, was a terrific location for interception. The reception of enemy radio signals was much clearer without the towering Owen Stanley Range in the way. Here, the interceptors could listen to signals on a range of frequencies, including low-power transmissions that had until now frustrated them so much. And Nadzab itself, up the valley from Lae, was higher above sea level, providing an unencumbered radio view of Rabaul.

While radio reception was of a high quality, the living conditions unfortunately did not match. The region hosted a range of tropical diseases, including typhoid, malaria, and a sometimes-fatal disease transmitted by grasshopper mites known as ‘scrub typhus’:

At Nadzab we had a good supply of running water, which we thought was great until we discovered that the stream flowed over two dead Japanese bodies just up the hill.4

Jack Bleakley, another Kana operator in Nadzab, who later wrote The Eavesdroppers, a book about Second World War signals operations, recalled that the camp was plagued by rats and bull ants. He recounted how the wireless units kept the bull ant problem at bay with an improvised solution. They split open bullets from machine-gun cartridges, planted them in the ants’ nests near the camp, and then ignited them.5

Rats and mice were a problem, too, according to Jack Brown:

The rats were big. They were possibly eating dead bodies and were everywhere. To catch them we used kerosene tins. We would fill the tins with water and sometimes with 100 octane petrol. We put a bottle over the top of the tin and then put the bait in the end of the bottle. Where the neck was leading into the middle of the tin we would put tropical spread to make it a bit slippery so the rats and mice could run along the top of the bottle and when they got to the neck to get the bait they would fall off into the liquid. We used to catch a lot this way, and some chaps produced traps from 44 gallon (200 litre) drums.6

When he was not in the signals tent taking Kana code, Brown would go exploring the nearby wilderness — a habit of his at every intercept site. The jungle was thick, hot, and wet from the constant rain, and littered with the bodies of dead soldiers. There were also exotic, beautiful butterflies. Brown recalled, ‘One in particular I remember was the Blue Emperor. It was a magnificent butterfly; its iridescent blue-black wings were so beautiful. I did manage one day to catch one, but I let it go after I had had a close look at it.’7

As was the practice at other intercept sites, intelligence officers from Central Bureau attached to the wireless units decrypted air-to-ground messages on the spot. One day, an interceptor at 53 Wireless Unit intercepted a message from Wewak about a high-level Japanese official who was travelling to Wewak and would arrive soon. They passed the information back to Port Moresby, where the decision was taken not to act on it, as they would not be able to organise an interception in time.

A US army air force contingent operating at the airstrip at Nadzab was camped nearby. Apparently, the secrecy provisions of the signals unit were more relaxed in remote jungle bases, because the interceptors told the local American pilots, two of whom took it upon themselves to take out the high-ranking officer.

The American pilots, Tom Lynch and Dick Bong, were in a competition with each other to see who could score the highest number of kills. Lynch arrived first, but found that in his haste he had forgotten to install a gunsight. It was up to Bong to take the shot, and he did, destroying the aircraft and strafing it with gunfire. They learned afterwards, again from Ultra decrypts, that they had killed not just one high-ranking official, but several more, as well as many staffers.

Lynch died in action the following week. Bong continued to fly throughout the war, and was eventually promoted to major.8