Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (7 page)

An official of the civil administration, Read had been hastily commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy. New to Bougainville, he had a dozen years’ service on New Guinea. With Sohana even more exposed than Buka itself, Read moved to the mainland with the help of natives and some Australian commandos. He made a brief excursion into Kieta town, where, backed by a few native policemen, Read used his official powers to stop looting and rioting by indigenous people that had erupted after the colonials left. The coastwatcher settled down. The Japanese nearly caught Lieutenant Mackie back on Buka planting demolition charges. Read warned him and sent a Fijian missionary, Usaia Sotutu, to rescue Mackie. Sotutu hid him under palm fronds in a canoe and smuggled him across Buka Passage in the dead of night. That marked the start of a game of hide-and-seek that went on for a full year. Japanese patrols visited villages to ask about the whites. The indigenous would pretend ignorance, give false leads, or, when friendly natives provided the Japanese real information, Read, Mackie, and their “missionary boys” would disappear deeper into the jungle.

As chief on Bougainville, Jack Read assigned Paul Mason to work from Kieta. Mason had been an islander for over two decades and, a radio hobbyist, he joined the coastwatcher organization soon after Australian Navy Lieutenant Commander Eric A. Feldt set it up. Mason prepared his ground carefully, caching supplies widely. In early March, Japanese warships put in at Kieta. A former Japanese resident, now employed by their base
force at Rabaul, landed with the troops and threatened the indigenous people. Japan had come to stay, he warned; the whites were through. Afraid of betrayal, Mason moved to one of his hide sites, only to be felled by malaria. He recovered slowly, joined by four Australian commandos who had fled their position at Buin, at the southern tip of Bougainville, when the SNLF arrived there. The Buin-Shortland-Faisi complex featured fine natural harbors and had an airstrip. The Imperial Navy coveted it, and Paul Mason realized that it needed surveillance. Having recovered, Mason asked Commander Feldt for permission to relocate there. Australian aerial reconnaissance had already established that the enemy were setting up installations at this Bougainville complex. Feldt, pleased, readily agreed. Mason set up his teleradio and a lookout post.

From June 7, when the Bougainville coastwatchers received their first supply airdrop from Australia, the network functioned as a pillar of Allied intelligence. This had been envisioned long in advance by the Australian naval staff, which made provisions after World War I for what became the coastwatchers. Eric Feldt, himself a naval reservist and civil official on New Guinea, was recruited by Lieutenant Commander Rupert B. M. Long, the director of Australian naval intelligence, in 1939. More than 800 persons worked in the “Ferdinand” organization, as it was code-named. Commander Feldt set up shop at Townsville on the Australian east coast. When the U.S. Marines were plotting their Guadalcanal invasion, they sent officers to Ferdinand to learn everything the coastwatchers could tell them. In August 1942 there were a hundred teleradios sending to assorted control centers. Some circuits Feldt handled directly. Many reported through a Ferdinand station at Port Moresby. Tulagi was a net control too until it was lost. Once Marines were ensconced on Guadalcanal, station KEN there became a new net control. There were others. When the Allies established a combined command for the Southwest Pacific, an Allied Intelligence Bureau under Colonel C. G. Roberts would be created to manage operations, including the coastwatchers.

Coastwatchers Read, Mason, and Mackie were by no means Ferdinand’s only principals. Henry Josselyn and John H. Keenan reported from Vella Lavella; Nick Waddell and Carden W. Seton from Choiseul; Arthur R. Evans from Kolombangara; J. A. Corrigan and Geoffrey Kuper from Santa Isabel;
Dick Horton from Rendova; David S. McFarlan from Florida; Sexton and William S. Marchant from Malaita; F. A. (“Snowy”) Rhoades, Hugh Mackenzie, and Martin Clemens from Guadalcanal. Snowy Rhoades, Commander Feldt records, was the only one who truly looked the part, though what a coastwatcher
should
look like he never says. Donald G. Kennedy reported from Santa Isabel and later New Georgia. From time to time replacements or supplementary personnel would be sent to them. Other coastwatchers worked from New Guinea. Their hide-and-seek with the Japanese was more than a game; it was deadly. Thirty-eight coastwatchers perished in their dangerous pursuit.

The coastwatchers effectively spied on the enemy. Submarines and seaplane patrol bombers succored the watchers when necessary, and sometimes picked up aviators Ferdinand’s people had rescued—at least 118 by the best count. The American sub
Gato
took in supplies and brought out people. In the summer of 1943 the Japanese made a concerted attempt to wipe out the Read-Mason organization. They captured several, but others were rescued by the
Guardfish.

Japanese commanders not only made efforts to neutralize coastwatchers; they knew a good thing when they saw one. In his secret order for defense and civil policy in the Tulagi area of April 28, 1942, Captain Kanazawa of the 8th Base Force directed that lookout posts be set up on Guadalcanal and other islands, including Florida, San Cristobal, Malaita, and Santa Isabel. Kanazawa also ordained that all Japanese enclaves be hardened for defense. Florida should be occupied if possible. Tulagi would become the seat of Japanese civil administration in the Solomons. White missionaries and others were to be removed, Germans left alone but watched closely (thus the freedom—after questioning—the Japanese had permitted an Austrian planter on Bougainville—and the suspicion with which the Ferdinand spies then viewed him). Influential persons in the community were to be co-opted and used. Captain Kanazawa envisioned Tulagi, with its floatplane base on adjoining Gavutu-Tanambogo, as a rendezvous point for schemes aimed at Australia, “the farthest advanced base for conducting operations in the Coral Sea and against New Caledonia and the New Hebrides.”

PILLARS IN PLACE

As the Imperial Navy looked ahead to second-phase operations, it reconsidered the strategic question of the continent down under. At Combined Fleet headquarters, Admiral Ugaki anticipated completing initial operations by March 1942. As early as the New Year he turned to thoughts of the follow-up. Others did too. Baron Tomioka at NGS thought more and more of Australia and developed a plan to invade the continent. His basic idea was to use the newly seized Dutch East Indies to catapult five Army divisions into western Australia and then springboard along the coast grabbing ports and bases. As Tomioka saw it, Australia was really a facade—half a dozen cities along the coast with desert behind them. Had he consulted the Australian general staff in the spring of 1942 they might have agreed. At the time, their defense forces in toto numbered 12,000 regulars (a little more than eighteen battalions of coast defense and internal security troops) backed by 116,500 citizen militia. Not much to defend an entire continent. The brilliant baron thought his plan a practical one.

The main action took place at Imperial General Headquarters. There, Tomioka’s Army counterpart was Colonel Hattori Takushiro. When his operations section of the Army general staff looked at Australia, the planners gagged. They calculated that an invasion would consume as many as ten to fifteen Army divisions and require 1.5 million tons of shipping for the Army alone. That was a larger contingent than the Army had allocated for the entire Pacific war; in fact almost a third of the full force and nearly a quarter of Japan’s entire merchant fleet. Hattori could not fathom how the Army could fight in China while invading Australia. It simply could not be done. Apart from anything else, the diversion of merchant shipping would reduce raw material imports, affecting production of all manner of war matériel, most disturbingly aircraft.

Hattori lunched with his naval counterpart at Tokyo’s Army-Navy Club. Tomioka pointed out that the Army had a huge force doing nothing in Manchuria. Hattori countered that those men deterred a Soviet invasion. He raised a cup of tea. “The tea in this cup represents our total strength,” Hattori said. He inverted the cup and the tea puddled on the floor. Of course the puddle did not cover the entire floor. “You see, it goes just so far,” the
Army planner continued. “If your plan is approved I will resign.” The Navy would not get its way.

Admiral Ugaki also did not think much of the plan, although, as already recounted, he also had difficulty with the alternatives, the FS Operation or thrusts into the Indian Ocean. Soon enough the Combined Fleet presented its Midway-Hawaii scheme. But IGHQ had still to reach a compromise, which led to the concept of isolating Australia. The FS Operation had been part of this, but there was another element—to complete the conquest of eastern New Guinea by taking Port Moresby. This became the “MO Operation,” and both services approved it. On March 13 the Navy and Army chiefs of staff presented their program to the emperor. The MO Operation would solidify the defensive perimeter. Port Moresby would be captured by amphibious landing through the Bismarck Archipelago. The Navy General Staff released its directive on April 16. As in the occupation of Rabaul, the Army’s South Seas Detachment provided the main ground forces, and, with Eighth Fleet not yet created, the Navy’s Fourth Fleet was the executive authority. Admiral Inouye Shigeyoshi would come down from Truk to direct the maneuver. He would have part of the
Kido Butai
to neutralize the Allied carriers that had revealed themselves. Admiral Inouye issued his fleet secret order number thirteen, which provided for the MO Operation a week later. Inouye’s forces began to gather at Truk and Rabaul.

As Japan coiled to strike, a new factor entered the equation. For many years the United States, Great Britain, and Australia had all had intelligence organizations intercepting the radio communications of other nations, breaking their codes, including the Japanese. There had been major successes in the 1930s, but as the world moved toward war the Japanese introduced new code and cipher systems. The Imperial Navy changed its codebook. Here is not the place to debate whether the Japanese naval codes were being read before Pearl Harbor—in my view they were not—but by early 1942 the Allies had made much progress.

A brief description of radio intelligence activities is useful. All the Allied communications units listened to Japanese transmissions and recorded their messages to provide the raw material. The British and Australians separated these specialist radio monitors and knew them as the Y Service, with codebreakers
in another entity. The United States ran interception operations as part of the same unit of the Office of Naval Communications—called Op-20-G—that was responsible for actual codebreaking. The U.S. Army had its own organization known as the Signals Intelligence Service. In addition to intercepting radio transmissions, the services took bearings on the emitters to ascertain their locations—called radio direction finding—and counted messages from the emitters to maintain traffic profiles.

The radio units produced three types of intelligence. The first consisted of decoded and translated decrypts of actual messages. The second kind of data embodied the results of pattern analysis—radio traffic analysis—wherein emitter locations and traffic volume profiles permitted conclusions on the identity, movements, and sometimes the intentions of forces. During the initial months of the Pacific war, when codebreaking had yet to hit its stride, and later when codes changed, radio traffic analysis would be the most valuable element of communications intelligence. The third type of information consisted of analysis applied to all this material.

The British codebreaking operation formed part of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), and the Australian one a part of its Directorate of Naval Intelligence. Each had field units. The British, with commonwealth participation, had the Far East Combined Bureau, originally located in Hong Kong, then Singapore until the Japanese threatened that place, then Ceylon and East Africa. The Australians formed a small Signal Intelligence Bureau at Canberra. The Americans had Station Cast in the Philippines at Corregidor, subsequently evacuated to Australia as Station Belconnen, though during the prelude to the Port Moresby battle, that unit functioned in both places. Pearl Harbor had Station Hypo, while in Washington Op-20-G ran its own communications intelligence element, called Station Negat. The U.S. field units would later become Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne (FRUMEL) and Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC), FRUMEL being a joint Australian-American activity. All the stations and home offices had their own private, top-secret communications channel, or “circuit,” to exchange information using a machine-encryption device known as Copek. In the Allies’ drive to crack the Japanese codes, the first decrypts from JN-25, as the Allies called the Imperial Navy’s fleet code, came from messages sent in early March 1942. “Ultra” became the generic term for data derived from communications interception.

Radio intelligence fed its information to high commands and fleet commands. In the U.S. system, Op-20-G reported to COMINCH, the commander in chief of the fleet and chief of naval operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, and through him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester Nimitz, leading the Pacific Command and the Pacific Fleet, received his data through his fleet intelligence officer, Captain Edwin T. Layton. Though this gets a little ahead of our story, Nimitz ordered the creation of “advanced intelligence centers,” starting with a Combat Intelligence Unit plus FRUPAC at Pearl Harbor, to meld data from all sources, including radio intelligence. The British Far East Combined Bureau, upon evacuation from Singapore, mainly served the chief of the British Eastern Fleet. In Australia the information came through their own units, which benefited from the findings of all the Allies. General Douglas A. MacArthur, after March 1942 the leader of the theater that included Australia and New Guinea, was served by his intelligence officer (G-2), Major General Charles A. Willoughby. All this apparatus came into play when the Japanese aimed at Port Moresby.