Fortress Rabaul by Bruce Gamble Read Free Book Online

the easy conquest of Guam, Major General Horii and the troops of the South Seas Force were already en route by the time Page got his answer. R Operation commenced on January 14 whenthe invasion fleet, escorted by a powerful screening force of three light cruisers, nine destroyers, and two large minelayers, departed Guam and headed south toward New Britain.
    Three days later, according to plan, a much more powerful fleet of warships sailed from Truk lagoon. Commanded by Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, the aircraft carriers of the First Air Fleet had just replenished in Japan after their triumphant return from Pearl Harbor. The fleet was reduced from six aircraft carriers to four for R Operation, but these were four of the best. From the 1st Carrier Division came the big flattops Akagi and Kaga , with a combined complement of fifty-four Type 0 carrier-borne fighters (Mitsubishi A6M2s), forty-five Type 99 carrier-borne bombers (Aichi D3A1s), and fifty-four Type 97 carrier-borne attack planes (Nakajima B5N2s). Zuikaku and Shokaku of the 5th Carrier Division brought an additional thirty A6M2s, fifty-four D3A1s, and fifty-four B5N2s. To protect this floating arsenal, Nagumo had battleships Hiei and Kirishima for fleet support, which in turn were shielded by the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma , the light cruiser Abukuma , and nine destroyers. Additionally, two squadrons of submarines were deployed from Truk to secure the sea lanes around the Bismarcks.
    Nagumo planned to rendezvous with the South Seas Force on January 20 at the equator. Horii’s invasion fleet crossed the line at 0500, whereupon the South Seas Force held a ceremony to commemorate their achievement as the first army force to cross the equator in Japan’s 2,600-year history. Nagumo’s fleet joined them at mid-morning, and soon thereafter the carriers began launching a massive strike against Rabaul. The attack force consisted of eighteen horizontal bombers and nine fighters from Akagi , twenty-seven horizontal bombers and nine fighters from Kaga , and nineteen dive-bombers each from Shokaku and Zuikaku .
    The strike leader, thirty-nine-year-old Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, was trained as an airborne observer rather than a pilot. A 1924 graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima, he was renowned for his brilliant tactical ideas and leadership of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eminently qualified to lead the first carrier strike against Rabaul, he coordinated the assorted air groups by radio from the cockpit of a B5N2.
    Fuchida’s trademark method was to attack the target from multiple directions simultaneously. For the strike on Rabaul, he separated the attackers into three groups—the smallest numbering about twenty planes,the largest more than fifty. The groups headed outbound from the carriers in three different directions; then, on Fuchida’s cue, they converged on the target from the east, west, and north.
    AT 1214 ON JANUARY 20, Cornelius Page reported twenty aircraft passing over his plantation. Half an hour later, the antiaircraft gunners at Rabaul watched slack-jawed as Zeros roared overhead in flights of three.
    The militiamen’s reaction was not uncommon. All across the Pacific, the Allies were stunned by their first encounters with the celebrated fighter known to the Japanese as Rei Shiki Sento Ki (Type 0 carrier-borne fighter), commonly abbreviated as Rei-sen . No other aircraft better represented the dominance of Japanese air power at the beginning of World War II. Designed in the late 1930s and accepted by the Imperial Navy in 1940, the Zero was a marvel of economical engineering. The A6M2 Model 21 weighed only a little more than 5,300 pounds fully loaded (about the same as a modern-day SUV), yet its 950-horsepower radial engine gave the diminutive fighter tremendous speed, an astonishing rate of climb, and superior aerobatic capability. The Zero’s armament—a pair of rifle-caliber machine guns in the nose and two 20mm automatic cannons in the