Late on the night of 25 August 1942 Japanese naval landing troops came ashore at Milne Bay, on the south-eastern tip of Papua, to capture the airstrips the Allies had just built there. They expected a few hundred defenders and found almost 9,000 Australian and American troops under Major General Cyril Clowes, with two RAAF fighter squadrons on the spot. After a week of night fighting along the narrow northern shore of the bay, a final Japanese attack on the airstrips failed on 31 August, and by 7 September the survivors had been taken off by sea. Milne Bay is remembered as the first defeat of Japanese forces on land in the Pacific War.
Airstrips at the tip of New Guinea
In June 1942 the Allies chose the sheltered harbor of Milne Bay for an air base, and by August three airstrips were being built and fighters were flying from them. For the Japanese, who were already advancing on Port Moresby over the Kokoda Track, the bay was a stepping stone, and an airfield there would let them threaten Port Moresby from the east.1
The garrison had grown fast. The Australian 7th Militia Brigade arrived in July, and the experienced 18th Brigade on 21 August. The Australian War Memorial counts almost 9,000 Allied troops; the historian John Rickard gives about 8,700 soldiers, Australian infantry and American engineers and anti-aircraft gunners, plus 664 men of the RAAF. Nos. 75 and 76 Squadrons of the RAAF flew P-40 Kittyhawk fighter-bombers from the strips.2
The landing
The Japanese set out on 24 August. One group, sent from Buna in seven large landing barges, was caught on 25 August by the Kittyhawks while beached on Goodenough Island, and all the barges were destroyed. The main force from New Ireland landed on the north shore of the bay late that night, about 11 kilometers east of the intended landing area. The Memorial puts this first landing at 2,000 naval infantry; Rickard counts a smaller force that reached 1,170 men after more troops landed the next night. Japanese intelligence had expected no more than a few hundred defenders.3
That night the Japanese ran into the Australian 61st Battalion near K. B. Mission. Supported by two light tanks, they pushed slowly west along the coast road, fighting mostly at night and pulling back by day, when the Kittyhawks attacked them constantly. On the night of 27 to 28 August a renewed attack broke the 2/10th Battalion, which the Memorial says disintegrated in a confused withdrawal, and the Japanese reached the edge of the easternmost airstrip.4
The attack on the airstrip
The Japanese paused to bring in reinforcements, about 800 men according to the Memorial and 775 according to Rickard. In the early hours of 31 August they charged the airstrip, held by the Australian 25th and 61st Battalions and the US 43rd Engineer Regiment and 709th Anti-Aircraft Battery. Machine-gun and artillery fire cut them down, and by dawn they were falling back.5
Clowes counterattacked the same morning, though reports of more Japanese troops on his flanks and in his rear made him cautious, and at first he sent only the 2/12th Battalion in pursuit, later joined by the 2/9th. The Japanese fought a skilled rearguard action, but their commander, seeing his men worn down by sickness and exhaustion, recommended withdrawal.6
The first defeat on land
Between 4 and 7 September the Japanese were taken off at night by ship. The Memorial records that of about 2,800 Japanese landed, only 1,318 re-embarked; up to 750 were estimated to have died around the bay, and most of the rest were killed trying to escape overland to Buna. Allied deaths included 167 Australians and 14 Americans.7
Both the Memorial and Rickard describe Milne Bay as the first defeat suffered by Japanese land forces in the Pacific War. Rickard notes that it showed the Japanese soldier was not invincible in the jungle, even if the defenders had outnumbered the attackers several times over and enjoyed constant air support. A month later the Australians began the counteroffensive on the Kokoda Track. The wider war in the Pacific is surveyed in our guide to the greatest battles of the Pacific War.8
Also on this day
- 1904: Battle of Liaoyang. Outside the fortified city of Liaoyang in Manchuria, Japanese armies under Ōyama Iwao attacked Russian forces under Aleksey Kuropatkin in the Russo-Japanese War.
