Why Japanese Naval Command Couldn’t Explain How Milne Bay Became Their First Defeat

Two or three companies of infantry, 20 or 30 aircraft, that was the estimate Rabaul worked from, and nearly 9,000 Allied troops were already there. 1,943 Japanese naval infantry came ashore at Milne Bay. 1,318 came off. Their commander, Shojiro Hayashi, died in front of an unfinished airstrip. Militia held that airstrip.

At home, they were called the chocolate soldiers. On the second night, a Japanese destroyer stood inside the bay in the rain, signaling into the trees for a force that had stopped answering its radio that afternoon, and left at half past two without landing a single crate. The Australians won. Then their general was told he had been too slow.

He spent the rest of the war commanding a supply area in Victoria, and the number that finished him came from an Allied headquarters in writing while he was winning. On the afternoon of August 24th, 1942, [music] 12 Kittyhawks came over Goodenough Island and found seven landing barges drawn up on the sand with their crews ashore,  resting and cooking.

The strafing lasted two hours. Every barge burned. 350 men of the Sasebo [music] 5th Special Naval Landing Force were left on that island with no boats, no stores, and no radio. [music] Nobody took them off until late October. Four days before that, at Rabaul, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa had allotted about 1,500 men to the operation.

1,171 sailed from Kavieng under Commander Hayashi. Some sources render his given name Masajiro, with orders to land at a place the Japanese called Robbie, roughly 3 miles from the wharf at Gili Gili. The estimate they carried was not the worst number in this story. They came ashore near Wagawaga just after 10:00 at night on August 25th.

Two small luggers were moving a company of the 61st Battalion west along the same shore in the dark, and ran straight into the landing wave. The Bronze Wing was holed. 11 of the men aboard her died in the fight or afterwards as prisoners. Corporal Frank Fraser went over the side, spent the night being hunted through the bush, and by dawn had climbed to a ridge with his feet cut to pieces and leeches on him.

From up there he watched the Kittyhawks come in low over the beach and start work on the Japanese supply dumps. He cheered out loud. Then he remembered where he was. Milne Bay takes about 200 in of rain a year. The road was a dirt track 10 to 12 m wide laid on coconut logs, and it dissolved. When staff cars slid off it, Papuan laborers took station on both sides and sang, [music] and on an agreed note they lifted together and put the vehicle back.

Number one strip was steel mesh over a poorly drained base with water standing on it, and aircraft skidded off and bogged. Malaria was everywhere, and the quinine had arrived late. On the night of the 26th, the destroyer Hamakaze came into the bay to put stores ashore. The landing force had gone off the air at 2:00 that afternoon.

She called by radio, [music] then by lamp, and got nothing back out of the trees. At half past 2:00 in the morning, she left with her cargo still in her. What was waiting inland was 7,459 Australians and 1,365 Americans with about 4,500 infantry and some 600 RAAF. Major General Cyril Clowes had formally taken command of Milne Force on August 22nd, 3 days before the landing.

He put the militia of the 7th Brigade forward and held the 18th Brigade, 2/9, 2/10, 2/12 back in reserve. Two companies of the 61st Battalion were the whole of the line on the north shore, Queensland militiamen, the kind of troops Australian newspapers had spent two years apologizing for. The Japanese landed 5 to 7 mi east of the point they had been ordered to take, and for some time afterwards they believed the shore east of KB mission was Robbi.

That was not carelessness so much as ignorance. Their aircraft had only found the airfields on August 4th, and the base sits under cloud most of the time. They had photographs of a coconut plantation and a strip of matting, and no way to count the men under the trees. If you want more of these, a like and a subscribe genuinely help.

Stay with this one, though. The number that ruined the Australian commander’s career was not sent to him by the enemy, and when it finally gets checked 65 years later, the correction is worse than a scandal because nobody had ever bothered to look. Then there is the composition of the force itself. The Japanese army had refused this job.

Its officers expected the barges to be caught from the air, and after an argument the navy agreed to take the landing on alone using whatever naval troops were at Kavieng and Buna. Of the 1,171 who sailed, 362 belonged to the 16th naval pioneer unit, construction labor. They were carried in to build an airfield that had not been captured yet on the understanding that capturing it would be a morning’s work.

At a quarter to 8:00 on the evening of August 27th, a tank came up the track towards the 2/10 battalion with its headlights burning, and behind it a voice began a slow recitation in the dark. A second group answered. Then a third, closer, several hundred strong. It ran three times. Then the infantry came in behind two tanks whose lights lit up the Australians and hit everyone else, and the sticky bombs the men had been issued would not stick to the armor in that humidity.

By midnight the Japanese were inside the position. By 2:00 in the morning, the battalion had been split, part of it walking back over the hills and not reaching the head of the bay for 3 days. Clothes had no landing craft, no coastal guns, and no searchlights. His signals equipment failed in the wet, so his headquarters ran on cable telephone, and where there was no cable, on runners.

After dark, the Japanese navy owned the water, which meant a second landing could come in on the south shore or at the head of the bay itself, behind everything he had. His aircraft could not fly at night. Their aircraft could not reach him by day. The fighters sent from Buna were shot down shortly after taking off, and the ones from Rabaul turned back in weather.

So, the Kittyhawks flew all day at treetop height, and on the ground, the armorers pulled in cooks and anyone else with hands to belt ammunition, 35,000 rounds in a single day, judging which aircraft had just landed by which gun barrels were still smoking. At 3:00 in the morning on August 31st, the Japanese came at number three strip.

The Australians put flares up and lit the far side of the runway, and the men there were caught in the open with mortars and machine guns, and the 25-pounders of the 2/5 Field Regiment working into them. They came three times. Hayashi was killed in front of the strip. Commander Minoru Yano, who had arrived with reinforcements two nights earlier, took over what was left, tried the flank along Stevens Ridge, ran into a platoon with Bren’s, and pulled back before first light to the sound of bugles.

They left roughly 160 dead on the ground. Brigadier John Field, who had commanded the defense, wrote up what he had learned on September 17th. The strip had been an ideal position precisely because it was unfinished, a wide clearing with no cover and a sea of mud at the eastern end, deep enough that the tanks [music] had bogged in it and been abandoned.

The engineers had accidentally built the best killing ground in Papua. Now, the other number. While this was happening, intelligence reaching Kleist put 5,000 Japanese ashore in his bay. There were fewer than 2,000. He was also being ordered to hurry. General MacArthur had directed on the 26th of August that the north shore be cleared at once, but the signal traffic was so poor that New Guinea Force did not have it until late on the 27th, and Kleist apparently not until the following morning.

On the 1st of September, another warning arrived from MacArthur’s headquarters predicting a fresh attack from the west and northwest. Kleist held his positions and delayed the 2/9 Battalion a day. The attack never came. >> [music] >> Writing privately to Sydney Rowell on the 30th of August, he said he had never properly understood until then how thick the fog of war could be.

Rabaul was counting companies. Brisbane was counting an enemy that did not exist. Blamey told Rowell on the 1st of September that by not moving faster, Kleist had probably missed his chance to finish the enemy. MacArthur’s staff had already formed a view. Major General George Vasey, writing privately to Rowell on the 28th of August, described the mood at General Headquarters as a barometer in a cyclone, up and down every 2 minutes, and warned that a wrong impression of Australian troops was hardening at the top.

Rowell asked why the men who kept criticizing never came to look at the ground. The clearing of the north shore cost more than the defense of it. On the morning of the 3rd of September, the 2/9 Battalion went at a Japanese position on a creek west of Elevala and lost 34 men killed or wounded in a few minutes.

The next afternoon at Goroni, Corporal John French of Crow’s Nest, Queensland, silenced two machine gun posts with grenades and went at the third with a Thompson. His section found him dead in front of it. He was given the Victoria Cross. 36 Australians were taken prisoner during the battle and none of them survived it.

And at least 59 Papuan civilians were killed on that shore between the 25th of August and the 6th of September. Late on 28th of August, some accounts place it on the 29th, an RAF crash boat crossing the bay was caught by a Japanese warship and sunk. Leading aircraftman John Francis Fitzgerald Donegan, service number 41879, badly wounded in the arm, drifted for 18 hours and washed up near Divinai Village on the shore the Japanese were holding.

A local man, recorded as Kitloni Luka, >> [music] >> found him, got him into a canoe and carried him back to the village. He was handed to a mission trained nurse named Mayo Garu Gimolea Talibona. She hid him in the bush and under an upturned canoe while Japanese patrols worked the villages for information.

And the killings on that stretch of coast in those days were not rumors. They were the reason a Queensland judge would later be taking depositions about it. She kept him alive and when it could be done, he was rowed across the bay to his own side. The airmen of his unit did not wait for anyone’s permission.

They held their own unofficial ceremony for her first. The official one came at Ahioma where Major General Basil Morris of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit presented loyal service medals to six local men and women, five of them from Milne Bay. Morris is the same officer who on 15 June 1942 had signed the order conscripting Papuan labor for the war effort 10 days before the first ships arrived and the reason there were men at Gili Gili to build a wharf out of petrol drums and clear the ground for number one strip. A photograph survives of the

six standing in a line for the camera. What does not survive is a single sentence from any of them in their own words. Her name is spelled two ways in the national record and Lucas is spelled two ways as well. [music] She died in 1986. The fullest account of what she did was published in 2022 in a children’s picture book 80 years after the fact.

Tokyo, meanwhile, had settled on an explanation. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, put the failure down to the quality of the men sent, [music] a landing force with too many in their 30s, not fully fit, short on fighting spirit. It is a tidy answer, and it never mentions the estimate.

The returns say something else. Japanese figures record 1,943 men landed, 1,318 taken off, including 311 wounded, and 625 killed. Klaus had reported around 700 enemy dead. Australian estimates ran to 750. >> [music] >> The Australian War Memorial’s public account still says 2,800 came ashore. Those Japanese numbers were published in 1980, and the relevant volumes of the Japanese official history were not translated into English until 2007.

>> [music] >> For 65 years, the winner’s arithmetic stood unopposed because the paperwork that contradicted it was in a language nobody at the memorial was reading. Whose count went on to the record? The one written by the men who were still standing. Even the phrase on the sign has been quietly narrowed.

The memorial’s own commemorative address concedes that the Japanese garrison on Tulagi had been beaten earlier that same August, so Milne Bay was not literally the first defeat on land. Rowell’s formulation is the one that survives contact with the file. It was the first time the Japanese were beaten at a time and on ground of their own choosing.

And on September 5th, the signal from the 8th Fleet ordering the evacuation was intercepted and read by the Allies, who were still bracing for another attack from a force that was already loading its wounded. Then the bay tried to finish the job the Japanese hadn’t. Malaria took more than a sixth of Milne Force in the following weeks. Close among them.

In late September Blamey dismissed Rowell, Close’s closest ally and friend of 30 years, and appointed another officer over him. He was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in May 1943 and left at Milne Bay while the war moved north. In October 1943 he went home to command the Victorian Lines of Communication Area and stayed there until the end.

His youngest half-brother Captain Trevor Close had been killed at Gona on November 22nd, 1942. He retired in 1949 a lieutenant general and died in 1968. The Allied codename for Milne Bay was Fall River. Some of the supplies consigned to it were delivered to Fall River, Massachusetts. Sir William Webb, Chief Justice of Queensland, took depositions on the killings and his report went to the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1944.

Evidence about Milne Bay was put before the Tokyo Tribunal on 2nd January, 1947. No Japanese personnel were ever prosecuted for anything that happened on that shore. The first memorial there was a piece of tin nailed to a coconut stump saying that this marked the spot of the first land defeat of the Japanese Army in the Pacific.

Nobody knows where that tin is now. Before the 61st Battalion left in March 1943, its men nailed up their own signs at the edge of the strip recording the western limit of the Japanese advance and 85 unknown Japanese Marines buried in the ground beneath. >> [music] >> The permanent memorial that stands on that grave today, put up by Australian troops in June 1944, says 83.

One sign says 85. The other says 83. Nobody has ever gone back and counted. If this is your kind of thing, a like and a subscribe. Help me keep going. And if your family had someone at Milne Bay, 61st Battalion, the engineers, the Kittyhawk squadrons, or one of the popular families around Alotau who hid men on that shore, I’d like to read about them in the comments.