The Battle of Milne Bay (from August 25 through to September 7, 1942), was the defence of the eastern New Guinea by Australian and US forces against a Japanese invasion. It would become the first time that Japanese forces had been defeated on land, shattering the myth at the time of Japanese invincibility. The Royal Australian Air Force played a particularly important role in this battle, maintaining air superiority over the region and inflicting serious damage to invading forces.
Interviews are taken from Australians At War Film Archive (https://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/):
Peter Booth-Jones (ID: 421)
Bruce Watson (ID: 42)
Robert Crawford (ID: 112)
Bruce ‘Buster’ Brown (ID: 556)
Arthur ‘Nat’ Gould (ID: 1431)
John Clark (ID: 18)
Introduction
The Battle of Milne Bay (from August 25 through to September 7, 1942), was the defence of the eastern New Guinea by Australian and US forces against a Japanese invasion. It would become the first time that Japanese forces had been defeated on land, shattering the myth at the time of Japanese invincibility. The Royal Australian Air Force played a particularly important role in this battle, maintaining air superiority over the region and inflicting serious damage to invading forces.
_______________________
Milne Bay is a large, wide and deep bay at the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea where the Australians, in 1942, were building several airstrips for a strategically important defence outpost.
The Japanese, having a strong foothold in the Pacific region by December 1941, aimed to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea. However, strong US and Australian forces in the Coral Sea prevented the capture, which would have been an ideal corridor for Japanese forces to invade northern Australia.
The Japanese realised the Allied base at Milne Bay was a major obstacle to Japanese plans to advance on Port Moresby. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, made a plan for the Japanese 8th Fleet capture the new Allied base at Milne Bay. However, the Milne Bay invasion plan was put on hold after the American landings at Guadalcanal on the 7th of August.
The fortification of Milne Bay started in June, 1942, when the first troops and engineers arrived from Port Moresby. They quickly started building the infrastructure needed to support the defence, including several airstrips. The first troops arrived at Milne Bay from Port Moresby on 25 June, 1942, and engineers built number one airstrip and associated taxiways and accommodation, as well as docks and roads. By the end of July numbers 76 and 75 squadron RAAF were working out of the operational airstrip.
Peter Booth-Jones
76 Squadron went in first, and 75 went in next, not very far apart. But the strip had only just been finished, in this plantation. Bulldozed out of this plantation with this steel matting on it. It was quite exciting. When you lobbed on that stuff, particularly after rain and what have you, the spray would go up, water would go everywhere. It was very primitive those very early days in Milne Bay.
Bruce Watson
Flying conditions were very unusual. We were we were using a metal strip and this in itself was a was the first time that we’d ever seen it although the Americans had used to frequently in other places in other islands but without the strip they would never have been able to build the strip in Milne Bay. Without the metal strips I mean they would never have been able to put in an aerodrome but the ground was so boggy and so wet that the mud used to or the water would just ooze up from the mud but they did lay this matting which is mesh and links into each other and although the aircraft went up and down as you landed and taxied along it and the water came up through it eventually it went back to almost being fairly level. It was a bit tricky land on it and taking off but it worked and we even had that that mesh down through the parking areas for the aircraft and even leading up to our huts so that wherever you could you walked on that mesh otherwise you might have been walking on three inches or six inches of mud and water but it was very effective and it certainly saved the day at Milne Bay.
Robert Crawford
We arrived in Milne Bay I think about ten days before the Japs arrived in Milne Bay. And we all got down there and settled in and just back to the mud and slush and tents and whatnot and oh awful conditions Milne Bay. It was a muddy, bloody hole, rained and rained and rained all the time. 76 Squadron they settled down, we settled down. We were away out in the bush and that was that. But eventually we did training there and then I think it was about a week and a half till they started to raid Milne Bay.
On August 4, Japanese aircraft began to bomb and strafe Milne Bay with four Zero fighters accompanied by a reconnaissance aircraft. Attacking the airstrip, the Zeros destroyed one Kittyhawk on the ground. Fortunately, eight Kittyhawks from 76 Squadron were airborne on patrol at the time. They responded to the attack and shot down the reconnaissance aircraft – the first confirmed kill above Milne Bay.
Bruce ‘Buster’ Brown
We were only there a short period of time and first alarm went off, it was a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, SPS [?], escorted by a couple of Zeros. Came in to see what was going on. 76 Squadron were on patrol at that time, they were keeping standing patrols up all the time there. Anyhow, they shut down the reconnaissance aircraft and thought they also shot down one of the Zeros but that was not confirmed. So that was that day. From that day on the alert was on all the time and there were numerous skirmishes between Zeros and Kittyhawks. And between 76 and 75 Squadron we lost six pilots in a matter of a few days there, shot down, including one of my particular mates, Mark Sheldon, also an ex-Windsor boy too, by the way, who had also learned to fly at Camden Drome Aero Club when I did in the early days before the war.
Midday on 11 August, a second air raid did not take the Australians by surprise. A dozen Zeros met with 22 Kittyhawks from both RAAF squadrons. By the end of the fight, three RAAF pilots were missing and a fourth, Sergeant George Inkster, crashed and died on Gurney Field.
The Kittyhawks being flown by 75 and 76 Squadron were Curtiss P-40Es. Here is what some of the pilots thought of their Kittyhawks:
Peter Booth-Jones
I flew the early Spitfires of course, but even the early Kittyhawks, I think they were just as manoeuvrable, they were great. I enjoyed flying Kittyhawks and I think they should have got a lot more credit than they did. But the Spitfire boys won’t say that. They’ll have a different story. But certainly up at height, that was one of the drawbacks of the Kittyhawk. We could get it up to twenty-two, twenty three thousand feet, the earlier ones. But even at that height, we were starting to waffle in the air. Quite different, whereas the Spitties would go a lot higher than that. If you wanted to do anything you had to use twice or three times as much pressure, to make an impression. Because nothing…The air gets so thin up there that nothing works on your controls. And you’ve really got to give her plenty of movement to do anything, and then to correct it, it’s the same thing. You go back miles the other way, but you squash away a long time before she’d react. Quite difficult, when you’ve got twelve airplanes up there.
Bruce Watson
It was a beautiful aircraft the Kittyhawk for strafing because it had 6.5 cannon and so from that point of view it was far more effective than a Spit. The Spit was alright while the cannons worked but the cannons tended to get a lot of stoppages and so you were down to 303s but the Kittyhawk with the .5s was quite a quite a deadly aircraft to strife with and we did a great deal of that particularly on Japanese barges apart from strafing of course the Japanese troops in Milne Bay but we went to other places and we caught up sometimes with some of their small craft and the Kittyhawk was an ideal aircraft and I think for those conditions particularly because of the landing on that metal strip it was a better aircraft perhaps than the Spit. The Spit is much more solid than people give it credit for in the undercarriage but it wasn’t built to land on a strip which floats in and out of mud and water so I don’t know just how it might have taken.
Arthur ‘Nat’ Gould
Our first impression of Kittyhawks was not very good. I was telling you how delightful Spitfires were. You’ve got a Kittyhawks and we described it as a bulldozer. It was a great big heavy aeroplane. Not as nice to fly as any of the others I’ve flown, but it’s pretty reliable. Hefty and strong. Could take a real belting. Thank goodness it could, cos after we’d fought up there a little while we got sent up to Milne Bay with a sister squadron called 76. I was in 75. That was one of the worst wars I’ve ever been to. Russia was a picnic compared to Milne Bay. Milne Bay was bloody awful. Never stopped raining. The mountains came straight up from the strip. The strip was just mud with steel planking on it. When you landed it used to do this sort of thing and mud would fly up. Spitfires wouldn’t have lasted.
In the end, up in places like Milne Bay and so on, we got to be very fond of it for many reasons. First of all it could go a lot further than the Spitfire could. Secondly it was far more robust. One of our chaps came back, he’d been shot up by some ground fire somewhere. He had a hole in the fuselage down near the rudder that I could put my head and shoulders through. He flew it back. A Spitfire that would have been the end. It was that big a hit it would have knocked it off. The Kittyhawk had some failings which you could turn into successes. At one stage, this is not during Milne Bay, but the Australians captured a Japanese Zero, their fighter. So they flew it and worked out combat manoeuvres with our own aircraft. One of the things we found out was, if you could get above the Japanese fighters and trade off your height for speed, you could peck. You could come down and peck and climb up again. Whatever you did, don’t mix with them, because they turned inside within a couple of turns and knock you off. The Kittyhawk had not a vice, but a strange thing that in a dive it’d be at high speed, it wanted to roll one way and yaw the other, which an aeroplane shouldn’t do. It was very uncomfortable in the cockpit. We found out that if you were bounced by a Jap and you dived full bore, got up over the speed where these things happen, take your hands and feet off and the aeroplane did manoeuvres that nobody could ever shoot you down, because it was rolling one way and yawing the other. It would be impossible to shoot.
On the ground, Malaria was an enormous problem in the Milne Bay area. The Malaria threat was well known long before Allied forces occupied the area. There was an alarming ineffectiveness of preventative measures, primarily because such measures were pushed down the list of priorities. By September there were 33 infections per 1000 soldiers per week. Given an army of over 10,000 soldiers at Milne Bay, over 330 solders were being treated for malaria each week, and during an epidemic in December there were 3000 cases diagnosed.
Peter Booth-Jones
I liked the tropics, having been there for a while. But when we first went into Milne Bay, it’s a beautiful little spot, bay, but rain. Very humid. It seemed to always rain everyday. And we had a lot of initial troubles. The strip had only just been finished. If you slid off the strip, people would have to try and dig you out of the mud. And camping was primitive. We were under tents. Quite primitive to having been in England and lived in mansions and beds and everything else and battement. We got a rude awakening up there. This was a different kettle of fish altogether. We were in tents, mind you, and we had these camp stretchers. You had to have mosquito nets.
Malaria was very bad in Milne Bay.
Arthur ‘Nat’ Gould
We all had malaria and dysentery. I had both at one stage. Just unpleasant. Our living conditions were so squalid. We had 6 in a little bloody tent and a little bit of timber on the floor, but mostly it was mud. I had malaria and the squadron doctor, I saw him the other day, fella you’d come in and see. I got down to 8 stone 7 [pounds] in New Guinea. Phil said “Don’t you get out of that stretcher.” I couldn’t have got out anyway. He walked out and the boss came in and said “airborne” and you’d go out, have a little vomit on the tail wheel, get in the cockpit. I’m not exaggerating this, truly, and you’d get airborne and I was doing one of these patrols. You take your oxygen mask off and have a vomit all over the place and out it back on again. You’d have diarrhoea and it’d be seeping down the back of your legs into your flying boots. You had another hour and a half to sit up there in all this. That was unpleasant.
By early August the 55th Infantry Battalion had become so badly afflicted by malaria and other tropical diseases that they were sent back to Port Moresby.
Major General Cyril Clowes was appointed to command Milne Force, which was placed under the control of New Guinea Force, commanded by Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell. By the end of August about 600 RAAF personnel occupied Milne Bay with around 4,500 infantry and just as many other personnel from Australia and the US. The Japanese had completely underestimated the size of this Allied force, however the Allies had superior intelligence about Japanese plans, size of attacking forces, and which units and ships were allocated for the assault.
On 23 and 24 August, Japanese aircraft carried out pre-invasion bombing around the airfield at Rabi. The main Japanese invasion force left Rabaul on 24 August, made up of two light cruisers, three destroyers, two transports, and two submarine chasers.
At 8:30 am on 24 August, Milne Bay General Headquarters was alerted by a RAAF Hudson bomber near Kitava Island, off the Trobriand Islands, and coastwatchers that a Japanese convoy was approaching the Milne Bay area. Reports of the second Japanese convoy, consisting of seven barges, sailing from Buna was also received. The RAAF could not intercept the barges at that time as Milne Bay itself was under air attack and it would be the next day, at midday that two flights from 75 Squadron would go out to investigate. The barges were spotted beaching at Galaiwa Bay on the south west tip of Goodenough Island where the 350 troops had gone ashore to rest.
Robert Crawford
We were despatched to go in the bad weather to fly over sort of north or west by north to Goodenough Island. Because the coast watchers had said there was about eight or nine or ten barges were coming down the coast loaded with troops and whatnot. And were sort of going down our way towards Milne Bay. And I think there was eight of us took off from 75 Squadron and like two flights of four. And Jeff Atherton was leading ours, Johnny Piper was leading the other one. We flew, the weather wasn’t very good but the way we flew from Milne Bay was across in a north-westerly direction. And then we arrived, got on Milne, over to Goodenough Island. And we just got there, just in time to see the barges just getting ready to pull in onto Goodenough Island and we immediately four went in and strafed and strafed and strafed. And did untold damage on the barges and we used up all our ammunition on that and the other four that were top cover, they came in after us. And they did the same and the end result from that as we’ve heard later was that nobody got off the island. They were marooned on the island. And we flew back the same way as we went and those barges and troops were supposed to coming from Goodenough Island would have hit the mainland and come in across the back door into Milne Bay and would have met up with the others coming in the front door. So that was that.
After we got back after strafing the barges 75 Squadron and 76 Squadron took off in the afternoon and appalling weather and went out flying east to meet the oncoming invasion force. And in and out of bad weather, they did sight the convoy coming in. And they bombed and damaged a corvette I believe or a, one of their destroyers. But they didn’t do much damage. There was some 36 Squadron, 32 Squadron I think it was, Hudsons, they were trying to bomb them and whatnot. But they finished up getting back late, landing in the back of Moresby late in the evening when it was dark.
This successful attack on the Japanese barges at Goodenough Island was a decisive blow to the Japanese and certainly dampened the ensuing invasion of Milne Bay.
The main invasion force, (a heavy naval screening force and two transports), were not seen until the next morning of the 25th. US B-17s operating from bases at Mareeba and Charters Towers in Queensland, were to intercept the Japanese force, but bad weather prevented them. Later that afternoon, a number of Kittyhawks and a single Hudson bomber strafed the convoy and attempted to bomb the transports near Rabi Island. Only limited damage was caused to the convoy and no ships were sunk.
Peter Booth-Jones
It wasn’t quite unexpected. First, they had picked up the convoy coming in. And that’s when we went out with bombs to try and bomb it, or bomb the transports mainly. See it came with, from memory, two cruisers and three destroyers. But I think there were four or five troop ships, carrying the troops. So we went after the troop ships, naturally. But we weren’t very successful. They got one near miss, I think.
Another thing that we had trouble on that one, was they weren’t found till mid-afternoon, I suppose, and the first fellows went out on a bombing raid. And the weather also, there was huge clouds sitting on top of all this convoy. So we didn’t have much room to manoeuvre, clearly. But we could get in and try and drop a bomb, but we couldn’t really get the proper angle of attack to drop them properly. So you could only go down and try and strafe the top of the boats then disappear out. Because one does not normally take on a cruiser. That’s fatal, or could be.
At around 10:30 pm, the Japanese main force, consisting of over 1,000 men and two Type-95 Ha-Go tanks, had made landfall near Waga Waga, on the northern shore of the bay way further east than intended. This error in navigation meant the force was now an extra 3 kilometres further from their objective. Nevertheless, they established a beachhead and pushed west along the north shore of the bay.
John Clark
When we arrived things were, well the Japs had landed when we got there, the Japs had already landed. Both the Kittyhawks and the Hudsons, well the Hudsons had two jobs: A, they were helping the Kittyhawks to strafe the Japanese positions. The Japanese landed on the northern coast of Milne Bay. Fortunately they made a mistake. They were landed too far away from where they really wanted to land. We know from Japanese intelligence on that, they wanted to land close to what was to be No. 3 air strip, it was called Turnbull air strip. It had all been cleared but it hadn’t been made into a strip and they wanted to be landing there and then they wouldn’t be too far from the operating strip, which was called Gurney No. 1 strip. It was more to the, let’s say more to the south of the Turnbull strip and so they didn’t land there. They landed further up along the north coast so they had more jungle to fight through to get to the Australian bases
The next day the Japanese suffered a serious setback when a daylight RAAF raid hammered their base area with Kittyhawks and a Hudson aircraft, accompanied by B-25s, B-26s and B-17s from the US Fifth Air Force. Without any Japanese aircraft to be seen, Allied Air Forces were free to destroy Japanese supplies, barges, and pursue escaping ships. The RAAF Kittyhawks obliterated 12 barges, barrels of fuel and other equipment within a 45 minute strafing spree.
Bruce ‘Buster’ Brown
On 25th I was made duty pilot down on the strip. The duty pilot always stays there plus a cook and the operations sergeant. He allocates the aircraft that were serviceable to the pilots that were going to fly them the next day. And the cook’s job was to make us coffees, for what it’s worth, when the pilots and the crew get down there in the morning before dawn. So about one o’clock, it would have been, on the morning of 26th, between twelve-thirty and one-thirty, let me say, but we’ll say one o’clock, I heard the gun fire start and obviously it was naval ships, not our gunfire. And they were looking for the airstrip to start off with, but the shells were going right over the top. So I got on the land line and phoned the CO, Les Jackson, and said, “The convoy’s in the Bay, they’re shelling us, they’re trying to find the strip.” And he said, “Okay, that’s all right, get the cook up and the op sergeant, we’ll be down there very shortly and we’ll get off the ground just as dawn breaks.” So, anyhow, they arrived down and we had our cup of coffee and a talk, and just as it was breaking dawn, about, I think there were six of them, Flying Fortresses went over the top, not very high. And they’d been brought in from Mareeba in North Queensland, refuelled at Moresby and then they were coming in. So they attempted to bomb the convoy as it was leaving the Bay, which it was. It had landed the troops that night, well, the first lot of troops, anyhow. Leaving the Bay and one Fortress just disintegrated, it was a direct hit on it, disappeared. The others didn’t get hit evidently and they did drop their bombs, they damaged one transport, so I’m told in the official history. So we then got off as soon as we could, as soon as it was daylight, enough light so that it wasn’t dangerous and we were heading out of the Bay and saw the convoy and went over the top of it and then turned around and saw where they’d been landing the troops because there were barges there, motorised barges. So we got stuck into these barges and destroyed them all except one, I think the Army got hold of one which only had a few holes in it, and they used it afterwards for themselves, the Australian Army. Then we started strafing all the fuel dumps that they’d established, the stores depot they’d established in amongst the coconut trees, and we set fire to a lot of it and burned it up and so forth.
Nevertheless, the Japanese maintained pressure on the Australian forces countering the push west, and planned to advance at night when the Kittyhawks were grounded. That night Japanese ships came into shell Australian positions as the Japanese pushed forward.
Over the next two days of the 27th and 28th, the Japanese force continued to push west toward Airstrip number 3 and Gili Gili, inflicting serious casualties to the Australian forces who had to eventually pull back and establish a defence at airstrip number 3.
Bruce ‘Buster’ Brown
The fighting went on and arrangements had been made for an operation between the RAAF, Kittyhawk squadrons and the Army for strafing the Japanese ahead of them as they were, as the Japanese were advancing. And the Australians were pulling back every now and again, fighting very hard. And it was a terrific arrangement because when they got right back, we were being told where to strafe by the Army, firing what we call “Very pistols”, which fire a flare, and they were landing them about a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards in those days, not meters, ahead of their own troops, the Australian troops, and that’s where we would start strafing. The Japs were in the tops of coconut trees, they used to climb there as, you know, picking off the Australian troops where they could. We were knocking the tops off the coconut trees with a 6.5 and they were falling very heavily.
Bruce Watson
They came to us they came to us squadrons one day and said we’re having trouble we are losing lives because the Japanese are climbing up in the tops of the coconut trees and the snipers are firing as we advance through the plantations and we can’t see them and we’ve tried we can’t shoot them can’t do anything can you help? So we thought about their problem and we came up with a plan where we would go in four aircraft abreast and we would strafe just the tops of the coconut trees. The army would release a smoke signal and we were not to fire till we had flown past that smoke signal and then we would just go four abreast and go you couldn’t do it for very long because you realise you’re going into the trees so you had to pull out and then another four came in and both 76 and 75 squadrons did that in fours for two days. It was extremely effective and they said that after we had gone past and when all was quiet you’d suddenly hear thump in the and it was the Japanese falling out of these trees but we did save lives fortunately and it it was but it was very difficult country for the army to really to fight in because the jungle was so thick and so heavy and these coconut trees gave the perfect hiding place for the Japanese snipers but we did fix that.
The airstrip proved a perfect defensive location for the Australian forces, offering a wide, clear field of fire, while at its end, thick mud served to prevent the movement of Japanese tanks. The Japanese tanks did indeed get bogged in the mud and were abandoned, and the Japanese were repelled from their advance on the airfield, back 2 kilometres from where they had came. Strafing and bombing runs from the Air Force also forced the Japanese back into the jungle to take cover.
John Clark
That same air strip by the way, No. 3 air strip, because it had been cleared, it was a marvellous defensive position and in a sense that’s what helped, or two things helped to defeat the Japanese. The Japanese had landed two tanks and they were making progress until I think they got something like fifteen inches of rain, tropical rain one night and the tanks got bogged and the AIF were able to sneak up on them and throw hand grenades or other ordnance into them and stop them, but also the Japanese did land some reinforcements from the warships that came at night and they got to the edge of this air strip, but because it was such a cleared area and the allies, the Australians mainly and some American engineers were given machine guns and so on and they were all lined up in the coconut trees on the other side of the strip, so they had a clear field of fire and when the Japanese rushed to get across the strip they were all shot down and all killed and that was in a sense that, and the stopping of the tanks was a turning point and after that the AIF pushed the Japanese back and all the time, whenever we could, the Kittyhawks would be strafing them.
The next two days saw a lull in the fighting and this gave the Australians time to consolidate their defences. However, at around 4:30 pm on the 28th, a RAAF patrol spotted a Japanese convoy – consisting of one cruiser and nine destroyers – and subsequently reported this to the Allied headquarters. Believing that further landings were about to occur, Major General Clowes cancelled his plans to begin a counterattack and considered what he should do with the Air Force. Group Captain William Garing, senior RAAF officer in Papua, consulted Clowes and they decided the 30 Kittyhawks at Gili Gili should be flown to Port Moresby in case the Japanese should overrun the airfield.
John Clark
A rumour started that the Japs had broken through the Australian lines and even this went right to the top and they were talking about in fact there was one night where and I think it mainly was a rumour, oh in fact what I’ve read about it since I’m sure, I know it was a rumour, that there was one night there that the heads of the of the Milne Bay operation decided that we would fly the aircraft out in case the Japanese got to the strip you see, so we happened to be there with our Hudson, our crew. We flew out to Moresby. We took some of the spare Kittyhawk pilots with us and the Kittyhawks flew out and we all went up to Moresby for that one night and then the message came the next day “Come back it’s alright. The Japs didn’t break through.”
Robert Crawford
What was happening, the Japs were coming in and shelling us every night. And they shelled a ship that was in there and sank it this night. And they were shelling us every night. They’d come in and just sort of pump shells into it for all hours of the day and night. And what happened then the Japs looked like over running us. And to save the aircraft they decided to, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, to evacuate 76 Squadron aircraft with their pilots and those pilots that weren’t on aircraft or had aircraft they flew them out in a Hudson. And same with 75 Squadron. Then all the old blokes of 75 Squadron, which was not very happy, they were all given aircraft to fly out. And some of the newer pilots, they had to fly out in Hudsons. They left round about three o’clock in the afternoon, three thirty. But what happened, the 75 Squadron they had two aircraft that were unserviceable. And Bill Cowie and myself were left there to fly them out when they got them serviceable. I think it was about four o’clock in the afternoon mine became serviceable, the aircraft, and I flew it out, backed up to Moresby and I arrived at Moresby just in as it was getting dusk. And I parked my aircraft and got in a truck that was there. And it was just dark then as Bill Cowie flew in in his aircraft. It was the only aircraft flying and as he came around he had nav lights on and whatnot. And he had the clear path out and we were sitting all the 75 Squadron blokes were sitting. And the seven mile strip it ran from east to west and the eastern end of it was a bootless inlet, which was an inlet and on each side of it, it had high hills. On each side of the runway and Bill Cowie came and he flew from the east up along the strip and flew a cross wind leg which took him sort of flying south. And then flew from west to east to come in and land, land from the east to the west. But we think he must have put his wheels down in the dark and didn’t realise that the nose of the aircraft went down and as he turned to come round he flew into the hill and was immediately killed. Which was a great tragedy and it upset a lot of people. And so that was that. And that same night the, from what I’m told they carried, the Japanese carried out Kamikaze attacks across the strip with the wonderful effort of the army. They killed hundreds of Japanese in their Kamikaze and from then on they pushed them back out of a, right back past the KB Mission and eventually they were evacuated the, about three or four days later. We flew to Milne Bay again and we took up the usual thing of strafing them all the time. And then they withdrew the, the cruiser came in and withdrew them on a transport and away they went. And I think it was only about a matter of a few weeks after that the 75 Squadron, 76 Squadron were withdrawn back to the mainland again.
At 8:15pm on the 29th of August, the Japanese convoy arrived off Waga Waga and began landing troops and supplies. At the same time Japanese ships shelled Allied positions around Gili Gili.
John Clark
One of our jobs at Milne Bay was to try and find the Japanese warships that used to come in each night to shell the place so we’d be particularly looking for them at dusk when they’d be trying to sneak in and get there by the time night fell and we’d caught them and so we went in to bomb them and the tropical weather was closing in so we only had a fleeting glimpse of them and they were firing like anything at us and we couldn’t, there was too much cloud for us to get a good bombing opportunity, so we came and we flew back up into the clouds and in the clouds of course, being tropical weather, it was very rough and bumpy and having to sort of dodge the ack-ack [anti aircraft fire] from the warships we sort of lost our bearings and it was difficult to go up, particularly knowing that the Japanese ships were going to come in and shell the air strip and the facilities at Milne Bay. We decided, or the pilot decided, we’d better go back on to Port Moresby. The navigator because of all the dodging around and that and the cloud we couldn’t work out just what our position was, so it was one occasion where again as I mentioned earlier we came back home on the radio bearings. We called up the direction finding station in port Moresby and came in and it was a rough ride because of the tropical weather you know, the plane bouncing around and that and so forth and so on, so it’s a I suppose an example of the difficult situation, particularly trying to work a wireless set when your aircraft is you know, dodging around and so forth yes, and on that same if I can digress a little bit, on that same night it was rather hairy. At one stage the pilot said, “Oh look.” he said “We may have to bail out because the engine is dropping revs.” so he told us, “Look get your parachute harnesses on.” and so I was, I forget who was operating the wireless, either myself or the other WAG, but we were both in the wireless compartment, which is just behind the pilot and the navigator and so putting our harness on unbeknownst to us at first that the generator which provided the power for the wireless set was on the floor beside us and in putting our harness on, one of us must have must have flicked the fuses of the generator, we flicked the fuses off so when we sat down to work the set it was dead you see. Now you know you think, “Oh everything’s going wrong.” you know. “What’s wrong?” and so anyway we looked around to try and work out the trouble and then we saw the fuses on the on the floor, so we put them back in and by calling up the direction finding station they knew we were in a bit of trouble so they arranged with the army, the search light unit and what they did they shone a beam straight up in the air from the strip and so we saw that beam and the pilot managed to circle the beam and come down and land in sort of a half an hour or an hour of rather fraught situation.
Later in the night of the 30th, the Japanese began forming up for an attack again on No. 3 Airstrip. And at 3:00 am on 31 August they launched their attack. The airstrip was heavily defended and the Japanese were repelled by heavy machine gun and mortar fire. The Japanese withdrew just before dawn, shocked by the heavy firepower the Allied forces had been able to deploy.
Early on the 31st the Australians began what would be a slow and bloody counterattack, pushing the Japanese back east along the north shore of Milne Bay. During the early morning of the 6th of September, 933 of the surviving Japanese were evacuated by ship at 3am, with an unknown number of survivors left on the battle ground.
The day before, on the 5th, six Beauforts of No. 100 Squadron had arrived at Milne Bay, to be followed by an additional three Beaufighters of No. 30 Squadron RAAF on the 6th. The Beauforts were tasked with providing additional support against further landings and anti-shipping strikes.
The bombers were a welcome addition to the theatre at Milne Bay as shipping attacks in the bay were still a serious threat. For example, just after 10pm on the evening of the Japanese evacuation, the freighter Anshun, Unloading cargo at Gili Gili, came under fire from the Japanese cruiser Tenryū and the destroyer Arashi with Anshun receiving about ten hits from the cruiser and rolling onto her side. Waga Waga was also shelled as the Japanese troop evacuation operation was underway. The next night, two Japanese warships – a cruiser and a destroyer – bombarded Australian positions causing several casualties for 15 minutes before leaving the bay. But for the most part, the battle at Milne Bay was over, and a remarkable victory for the Allies.
AFTER THE BATTLE OF MILNE BAY
Bruce ‘Buster’ Brown
And because the Japanese were defeated there by the Australian Army and the Kittyhawks, for that matter, who played their important part there, General Slim came over from the Far East, the Commander-in-Chief, addressed his troops either directly or by telex, saying the Australians have proven that the Japanese are not invincible. Because that is the first invasion force, not matter how big or how small it was, that had ever been defeated, Japanese invasion force, that had ever been defeated during World War II. And that opened everybody’s eyes.