Fortress Rabaul (31 page)

Lutz and Reed spent three more weeks in the Kempeitai compound before another attempt was made to move them. On May 26 they boarded the merchant ship
Naruto Maru
, which had arrived four days earlier with a load of ammunition. The two Americans saw Sergeant Brown on the wharf, but he did not board the ship with them.
Naruto Maru
departed for Japan later that day and docked at Yokohama after an uneventful week at sea. Lutz and Reed faced an uncertain future in Japan, including months of harsh interrogations at a secret intimidation camp run by the Imperial Navy. But both men survived the duration of the war and would learn years later that they had been most fortunate to leave Rabaul behind.

TWO DAYS PRIOR to the departure of Lutz and Reed, Marauders appeared over Rabaul for the last time. Six were scheduled to take part in the attack on Vunakanau airdrome, but in a familiar reprise, half of the assigned bombers either failed to get off the ground or turned back because of mechanical trouble. Only three aircraft of the 408th Bomb Squadron reached Rabaul on the morning of May 24, and they found much of the Gazelle Peninsula obscured by a layer of clouds. Locating a hole in the overcast, the trio dived down and attacked Vunakanau out of the northwest at just 1,500 feet. Heavy, accurate flak damaged two of the three B-26s over the target area, but they dropped their bombs and caused considerable damage of their own, burning down the Genzan Air Group’s headquarters and damaging four land attack aircraft, one of them severely.

Although there was no interference from Japanese fighters, 1st Lt. Harold L. Massie realized within minutes that the right engine of his B-26,
Imogene VII
, had been mortally damaged. Feathering the prop, he kept the Marauder in the air long enough to reach Wide Bay. Once again the B-26 proved difficult to ditch on just one engine—the landing speeds were simply too high.
Imogene VII
hit the water hard, and two enlisted crewmen went down with the wreckage. The six survivors, helped to shore by native villagers with canoes, suffered an assortment of injuries. Corporal Dale E. Bordner, the radio operator, was unconscious; 2nd Lt. Marvin C. Hughes (navigator) lay in a native hut with a deep gash in
one leg and cuts on his feet; Staff Sgt. Jack B. Swan (photographer) had a broken shoulder. The other three—2nd Lt. Eugene D. Wallace (copilot), 2nd Lt. Arthur C. King (bombardier), and Massie—had sustained an assortment of cuts and bruises.

What truly dismayed the survivors were the things they lacked: food, weapons, and adequate clothing. They had no flashlights, no matches, or any of the simplest tools for survival. All the men except Gene Wallace had discarded their shoes or boots in the water. For six men with one pair of shoes, the odds of survival were not just grim, they were downright alarming.

As the Marauder men would soon discover, the jungle would not feed them despite its lush growth. Eric Feldt, the director of the coastwatching network, likened the jungles of the Southwest Pacific to “a desert,” and he had the collective experience of twenty years in the islands to prove it. “At its best,” he wrote, “the food the jungle can supply is only enough to sustain life, and under a prolonged diet of jungle food, mental and physical vigor decline until there is no ability left to do more than barely support life itself.”

The survivors’ one stroke of luck was that they came ashore in Wide Bay, where some of the native villages still showed allegiance to their former white
mastas
. Learning to communicate with the natives using Pidgin English, the flyers heard about a man who looked like them and lived “nearby.” Wallace had the shoes, so he hiked for three hours with native guides to meet Father John Meierhofer, a missionary from Salzburg, Austria, who ran the Roman Catholic mission at Kalai. Months earlier he had stubbornly refused to help the soldiers of Lark Force, but now he gave Wallace some disinfectant and bandages and told him about another white man who might help.

After three days’ rest it was Massie’s turn to set out. He was gone for two weeks but succeeded in locating Leslie John Stokie, thirty-nine, a hardy transplant from Victoria who had lived on New Britain for many years as a plantation manager and a territorial police officer. Returning to Wide Bay, Massie learned from the headman of the local village that food was running low. The Americans began a series of moves between other villages and John Stokie’s hideaway, dividing themselves into small groups to lessen the demands on their hosts, never staying too long in one place. Gradually they worked their way inland, intending
to cross New Britain at its narrowest point, the twenty-mile neck separating Wide Bay on the south coast from Open Bay on the north. Unfortunately the native foot trails became strenuously steep in the island’s interior. They also passed through the domain of a mysterious warrior tribe, the Molkolkol, rarely seen but widely feared for their stealth and ferocity. Meanwhile the castaways were gradually becoming weaker. By late June they were on the verge of collapse, both physically and emotionally, and within a few weeks only two men still had the strength to walk. On July 27, Massie and Art King journeyed northward alone, hoping to find Stokie, but that was the last their crewmates saw of them.

The remaining four Americans didn’t budge for weeks. They rested, hoping to conserve enough strength to survive in New Britain’s inhospitable jungles, not realizing that their nightmare had just begun.

IN EARLY JUNE, rumors began to circulate through the Malaguna Road stockade that the Lark Force POWs were going to Japan. Many a nervous prisoner hoped the rumors were true, if only because the American bombing attacks were coming ever closer to killing them. The Australians had cheered the bombers at first; now they were deeply concerned for their own safety. “On [one] occasion,” wrote Hutchinson-Smith, “a large number of men was employed in the copra shed at Toboi Wharf when it was strafed with incendiary bullets by low-flying aircraft. A few men were slightly wounded and scorched, but serious casualties were not sustained. There were other occasions when machine-gun and cannon fire sprayed the camp, and the notable June 4, 1942, when incendiaries landed in and around the camp, one penetrating the cookhouse roof and knocking the handle off the soup pot containing the next morning’s breakfast!”

One of the strafing attacks was probably the work of
Suzy-Q
, a well-known B-17E piloted by Maj. Felix M. Hardison, commanding officer of the 93rd Bomb Squadron. Making a rare solo night attack on May 26, Hardison took advantage of a full moon and dropped his bombs on the wharf area from five thousand feet. He then circled around and descended to just one thousand feet so that his gunners could strafe ground targets. During the run, one or more of the B-17’s gunners shot up “a military camp at the edge of town.”

By some miracle, no prisoners in the Malaguna Road stockade were killed or even seriously injured by the Allied attacks. Nevertheless the Japanese decided to move them, though the reason had no apparent link to the close calls. Instead, according to captured documents and diaries, the POWs were moved to alleviate an acute food shortage that developed only a few months after the Japanese occupied Rabaul. Every week, the stronghold’s population swelled by the thousands as the troop buildup continued—but there was not a corresponding increase in the delivery of food. The Japanese relied heavily on shipments of rice, which provided the vast majority of their daily diet. The rice was augmented with a small amount of fish and vegetables (primarily tubers, such as sweet potatoes) obtained from local villagers, but the supplements by themselves were not nearly enough to sustain tens of thousands of Japanese and their prisoners. The main problem was that the Japanese concentrated on the delivery of troops, weapons, and ammunition rather than food. The records of the General Shipping Transport Headquarters tell the tale: of the 1,750,000 shipping tons allotted to the Southern Offensive, more than 80 percent were reserved for troop movement. It is not surprising, therefore, that stockpiles of food ran low in less than four months. On May 16 a Japanese soldier wrote, “
There is no food left
to requisition and there is nothing good to eat nowadays.”

To alleviate the issue, more than a thousand enlisted POWs and civilian internees were roused from their barracks in the pre-dawn hours of June 22. As they formed into ranks on the parade ground, the noise and activity awakened the officers in their separate hut. When the latter tried to exit from their long barrack, however, they found machine guns trained on both doors. The message was plain: Stay inside.

The prisoners assembled on the parade ground were in miserable condition. Virtually all showed signs of malnourishment, their khaki uniforms hanging from bony frames. Many were sick with malaria, dysentery, or beriberi. Those who could stand swayed on their feet while the guards counted them several times and then separated them into groups. Finally, at 0900, the prisoners were marched toward the main gate. Happy to leave, they moved forward “with cheerful grins and banter,” waving to the officers as they shuffled past. Some of the sick leaned on the shoulders of their stronger friends; others were carried on improvised stretchers or even dragged on doors removed from the barracks.

In the officers’ barrack, Chap. John May picked up his bible. Having been transferred to the main stockade from Kokopo two months earlier, he began to read Psalms in a loud, clear voice for the benefit of the troops: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”

In a ragged line, 845 soldiers and 208 civilians marched down Malaguna Road toward the waterfront. Along the way, they passed throngs of onlookers interspersed with squads of machine gunners. At one of the main wharves, the prisoners filed aboard
Montevideo Maru
, a large cargo liner, and descended into its cavernous holds. After watching them board, Japanese soldier Jiro Takamura wrote in his diary: “Since there is insufficient food, [the prisoners] are to be sent to rear echelons. They left on a naval ship in the evening. Saw them off and watched the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.” Four days later he added, “Seems all military [POWs] with the exception of officers were sent to Hainan Island.”

Takamura was only partially correct.
Montevideo Maru
sailed on June 22 with its cargo of prisoners, bound for Hainan Island off the South China coast, but the men were never delivered to their new work camp. At 0229 on July 1, a torpedo fired by an American submarine, USS
Sturgeon
, slammed into the starboard side of
Montevideo Maru
as it exited the Babuyan Channel off the coast of Luzon. The explosion ripped open the aft two holds, igniting a secondary blast in the fuel tank. The ship sank in eleven minutes, giving the Japanese crew only enough time to launch three lifeboats, none of which contained POWs. All available evidence indicates that the entire contingent of prisoners and civilian internees drowned when
Montevideo Maru
went under.

Congratulating themselves for sinking a large enemy merchantman, the
Sturgeon’s
crew had no idea they had caused the worst maritime disaster in Australian history.

FIVE DAYS AFTER the sinking, Captain Mizusaki visited the nurses imprisoned at Vunapope and instructed them to collect their belongings. “You are going to Paradise,” he told them. Within hours, the eighteen women were escorted aboard
Naruto Maru
, which had recently returned from Japan.

A nearly identical scene unfolded at the main POW stockade in Rabaul, where the Australian officers were still held. Chaplain May,
Captain Hutchinson-Smith, Colonel Scanlan, and fifty-seven others were ordered to gather up their meager holdings. They, too, were taken aboard
Naruto Maru
, where the nurses greeted them with a happy uproar. For more than a week, the Australians shared a crowded hold while the ship traveled north to Japan. But at Yokohama, the men and women were separated again.

Like Lutz and Reed, the captives were destined to face three more years of deprivation. Conditions were truly miserable, especially as the war dragged on and food shortages became routine; nevertheless all of them survived the ordeal and were repatriated after the war.

They were the lucky ones.

CHAPTER 17

Fading Glory

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER
the Battle of the Coral Sea, Admiral Yamamoto led approximately two hundred warships—almost the entire strength of the Combined Fleet—out of Japanese waters to begin the next big operation. In terms of gross tonnage, it was the largest armada yet assembled in the history of naval warfare.

Emotions ran high. Not only had Yamamoto dreamed of this moment for years, his entire war plan was predicated on it. He was certain that the American carriers would come out from Pearl Harbor to face his bold offensive, which called for diversionary landings in the Aleutian Islands (AI Operation) in addition to the capture of Midway atoll (MI Operation). Here was the perfect opportunity to crush the Pacific Fleet, and for the first time since the war began, Yamamoto himself was sailing into battle.