Target: Rabaul (52 page)

WHEN THE POWs arrived at the site near Tavurvur, coolies had already dug a trench six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and four feet deep. Standing off to one side, ten graduates of reserve officer cadet school tensely awaited what was probably their first “cutting test.”

Mangett and Vetter, the two stretcher cases, were offloaded first and carried to the south side of the hole. Next, the other ten POWs shuffled into a line facing the length of the trench. Behind them, the naval infantry formed a semicircle. And then everything stopped. Agonizing minutes dragged by while the condemned prisoners stood quietly, their wrists bound with wire that dug into their skin, their minds racing with the realization that they were about to be killed. Several feet away, the two wounded men lay on their backs. The Japanese guards, the adjutant, and the cadets stood by as well.

Ten minutes passed. Finally, a big American sedan pulled up. One of the spoils of war, shipped all the way from Guam or Singapore, it carried Vice Adm. Naosaburo Irifune, commanding officer of the Eighth Naval Base Force, along with his chief of staff, a high-ranking representative of the Eleventh Air Fleet, and then Captain Kiyama.

When the senior officers were in position to observe, the adjutant barked orders. The two wounded airmen were lowered into the pit. More commands sent two of the guards to edge of the hole. Aiming their long bolt-action rifles downward, they shot the two fliers where they lay.

Next, five of the blindfolded aviators were led to the edge of the pit and forced to their knees. Five cadets carrying katana swords stepped into place, each standing to the side of and slightly behind a prisoner. One at a time, bracing their legs widely, the cadets raised their swords high over their heads and decapitated the POWs.

The remaining five captives had it worst. Although blindfolded, they could smell the nauseating, metallic stench of spilled blood, as gallons of it soaked into the ground around the five headless corpses. Kicks and well-aimed rifle butts sent the fliers to their knees in the soft, sticky earth. And one by one, they were murdered in the same fashion.

Irifune, Kiyama, and the others watched to see if the cadets performed their “test of courage” unflinchingly. After the prisoners’ heads and corpses were rolled into the pit and buried, Kiyama gave a brief speech to the assembly. Finally, as one of the enlisted observers noted gladly, the proceedings concluded “just in time for the midday meal.”
^*

*
This total number includes deaths that occurred at sea during the transit from Singapore to Rabaul.

*
A postwar statement by Corporal Yasuo Sato of the Special Naval Landing Forces yielded most of the execution details presented here. However, the last portion of his statement seems patently embellished. Sato claimed that two POWs tore off their blindfolds, jumped up, and started to run, only to be cut down by rifle fire. But the gravesite was later unearthed, revealing that the corpses had been bound at the wrist and the legs—making that part of Sato’s story implausible.

CHAPTER 18

Transition

A
FTER THE SECOND
carrier raid on Rabaul, the Allied campaign shifted. The Fifth Air Force would never again return to the stronghold in an offensive capacity. An unplanned lull ensued.

Kenney, happy to focus his efforts elsewhere, later wrote, “About this time the Torokina field at Empress Augusta Bay was completed sufficiently to base SOPAC fighters there to cover strikes by the B-24s of the 13th Air Force from the field at Munda on New Georgia. By agreement between General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey, SOPAC took over the responsibility for continuing the neutralization of Rabaul, leaving me free to devote more attention to Wewak, which was beginning to build up again.”

Kenney’s recollection was inaccurate. Halsey did take over responsibility for the next phase of Cartwheel, but the airstrip at Torokina Point was nowhere near completion. Only ten days had elapsed between the invasion of Bougainville and Halsey’s second carrier raid; although the 71st Construction Battalion began bulldozing a new airstrip almost immediately, the Seabees could not perform miracles. It would take them until mid-December to complete the field—a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering that the field was scraped out of an uninhabited jungle in less than six weeks.

Those weeks were important. On November 12, the day after the second carrier raid, Admiral Koga ordered the remaining aircraft of the 1st Carrier Division back to Truk. During their time at Rabaul, the carrier-based planes and the Eleventh Air Fleet
rikko
units had sortied every few nights to attack American convoys shuttling back and forth from Torokina. The surviving crews kept submitting excessive claims, which aviation historian Osamu Tagaya would later ascribe to “crew inexperience and the chaos and confusion of explosions in the night.” The result was a twisted naiveté: with every bright flash, the bomber and torpedo crews assumed they had sunk a mighty ship. And of course the
Johokyoku
kept releasing fantastic stories to the press, resulting in a whole series of “Air Battles Off Bougainville”
that were ballyhooed in the newspapers for weeks. Nobody in Japan, it seemed, doubted the combined claims, which added up to five battleships, ten aircraft carriers, nineteen cruisers, seven destroyers, and nine transports—all supposedly sunk during Operation
Ro-Go
.

Emperor Hirohito even issued a rare Imperial Rescript to praise the units involved, but in reality, the airmen had scored only a few torpedo hits, causing repairable damage to cruisers
Birmingham
and
Denver
in the 2nd and 4th Air Battles Off Bougainville, respectively. Sandwiched in between was the attack on Montgomery’s task group, which went down in Japanese lore as the third great air battle in the series.

After the withdrawal of the First Carrier Fleet’s aircraft—which had lost 120 planes and about half its aviators in two weeks—Vice Admiral Kusaka had to rely on the planes of the Eleventh Air Fleet. He reported a strength of 202 aircraft on November 12, but Operation
Ro-Go
had greatly reduced his combat readiness. Out of 113 Type 0 fighters on hand, for example, twenty-five needed major repair and twenty-nine others needed lesser maintenance, leaving only fifty-nine
Reisens
operational—a readiness rate of just over 50 percent. Among the land-attack units, the ratio was similar: only seventeen serviceable
rikko
out of thirty-six G4Ms were parked on the airdromes. Accounting for the operational Vals, Kates, Judys, and a handful of
Gekko
night fighters assigned to the Eleventh Air Fleet, Kusaka had perhaps 110 aircraft available for combat.

Even if the fleet’s readiness status jumped significantly, another problem was the debilitation of men due to illness. At any time, approximately one-third of the aviation personnel were grounded with malaria or other diseases; thus, the maintenance crews that fixed the planes were understrength. If they managed to raise aircraft availability above 67 percent, there wouldn’t be enough healthy fliers to man the planes. The combination of environmental factors and combat attrition created a cyclical drawback that the Eleventh Air Fleet could not overcome.

Given such limitations, Kusaka had difficulty mounting further counterattacks against the American beachhead on Bougainville or the convoys supporting it. Yet he continued to try. Shortly before 0400 on November 17, a flight of nine Bettys and five Kates initiated a torpedo attack on a convoy of LSTs and APDs escorted by destroyers, which the Japanese glorified as a large carrier force. Superior Flight Petty Officer Gintaro Kobayashi of Air Group 702 put a torpedo into
McKean
, one of the APDs. The destroyer-transport sank in about fifteen minutes, prompting the Japanese to claim another hugely inflated victory known as the 5th Air Battle Off Bougainville. Four
rikko
did not return from the raid, and a fifth, along with one of the Kates, “suffered great damage.”

In a raid later that morning, ten Vals escorted by fifty-five Zekes found and attacked another convoy, claiming to have sunk three transports, beached a fourth, a left a destroyer burning. No ships actually sank. A large CAP intercepted the Japanese planes, ten of which were shot down. The day’s two raids cost
the Eleventh Air Fleet fourteen aircraft and their crews, with two more planes badly damaged.

Thereafter, except for small-scale night harassing attacks on Bougainville, enemy air raids ceased. Conversely, with the Fifth Air Force out of the picture, the Japanese enjoyed another extended break in daylight bombing. Their only disruptions were periodic nighttime attacks by the three squadrons of RAAF Beauforts in No. 9 Group, based on Goodenough Island. Throughout November and the first few months of 1944, the twin-engine Beauforts alternated between low-level torpedo attacks in Simpson Harbor and medium-altitude bombing attacks against the airdromes, wharves, and business district. The raids were unescorted. Aircraft that incurred battle damage or became separated from their squadron faced a long, lonely return flight in the darkness.

A mission on the night of November 14–15 provided a prime example. In what was described by contemporary newspapers as “the heaviest all-RAAF raid on Rabaul ever launched,” thirty-two Beauforts attacked in three waves, spending a total of two hours over the target. In the first wave, a crew from No. 6 Squadron reported sinking an eight-thousand-ton transport, which they bombed from 150 feet. (No corresponding loss was reported by the Japanese.) In the second wave, half the Beauforts carried a torpedo, but the attacks fared no better. One aircraft from No. 8 Squadron failed to return and was last seen circling a tiny island fifty miles due west of Kiriwina. A search for the missing plane the next day failed to turn up anything except a floating fuel tank. Then in 2000, noted Australian diver and historian Rodney Pearce discovered the wreck in sixty feet of water near the island. About a year later, after suctioning out sand, divers discovered the remains of all four crewmen inside the cockpit.

Joseph Hewitt continued to send Beauforts to Rabaul, mostly to keep the Japanese uneasy. Warrant Officer Stanley J. Mars, a gunner-radio operator, reported on the moonless night of November 30: “As we approached Rabaul, we could see our target very faintly. Then the searchlights came on, and we picked out the bay clearly. We dodged around the lights and dropped our bombs, but there was no antiaircraft fire till we were on our way out. It was half a mile away by then, and didn’t worry us.” One of the pilots spotted enemy night fighters aloft. Their navigation lights were on, making them easy to avoid.

For the Beaufort crews, who typically flew low-altitude attack profiles, the Japanese and foul weather were not the only hazards. On the evening of December 4, a torpedo strike by six aircraft of No. 8 Squadron ended unexpectedly for one crew. Flying over Saint George’s Channel, Squadron Leader Noel T. Quinn hit an unknown object at 150 feet, which made the Beaufort nosedive into the sea. Quinn must have slowed the plane before it hit, because he and the navigator, Flying Officer Ross B. O’Loghlen, survived the crash—even though both were ejected from the cockpit on impact. Suffering from concussions, both men were picked up by the Japanese and taken to the 81st Naval Garrison Unit POW compound. The
other two crewmen, severely injured, were allegedly rescued as well but died in the naval hospital on Namanula Hill.

Less than three weeks after the mishap, Quinn was flown to Japan. Joining him were two U.S. Navy pilots from the Kempeitai compound, Bill Welles and Stefan Nyarady. As the only known carrier-based pilots (both from
Saratoga
) held at Rabaul, they were undoubtedly of top priority to the enemy’s intelligence community. In Japan they would undergo thorough interrogation, but all three POWs survived.

During the last weeks of 1943, in light of the heavy bombing in October and November, Lieutenant Matsuda, 6th Field Kempeitai, professed concern about the well-being of the local civilians, conscripted prostitutes, and even the captives in his unit’s compound. Years later he would write: “As planned in advance, Commander Kikuchi visited chief of staff Kato to advise [him] that non-combatants, such as nurses and ‘comfort women,’ be sent back to the homeland at the earliest opportunity. His suggestion was accepted. The reason for it was that keeping women on the battlefield in the fight to the finish was not a humane thing.…”

Despite Lt. Gen. Rimpei Kato’s apparent agreement, the response by high command was sluggish. Two months later, nothing had been done to send noncombatants away, or to provide air raid shelters for POWs. During an RAAF attack in mid-December, Matsuda was sheltering in a slit trench with two Japanese nurses when a heavy bomb detonated nearby. The concussion tossed all three of them out of the trench. Realizing that their safety was getting more tenuous by the day, Matsuda urged his superiors to send the comfort women and nurses elsewhere: