The Japanese Raid...
The 127 aircraft of the two light carriers Hiryu and Soryu had been considered ample to deal with Kerguelen's scant defences, Japan wishing to demonstrate to Germany that it could succeed where the 'Admiral Scheer' had so signally failed. The destroyers Kikusuki and Uzuki acted as escorts and plane guards, but no troop landings were planned; with transports needed elsewhere, the crushing of the naval and air bases was deemed sufficient, the losses of ships, aircraft and trained servicemen, sure to hamper Britain and Australia. The submarines I-3, I-4, I-5 and I-6 were to deal with any large surface units using their Type 95 kerosene/oxygen torpedoes and if necessary using their 14-cm deck guns. When this force arrived near Kerguelen in mid-May 1942, they faced a minimal force of Ansons, Hudsons and Buffaloes, with visits by RAAF Catalinas. A Hudson sighted the force on its radar and got off a sighting-message about a minute before a Zero shot it down; the news sent the garrison to action stations and civilians to shelters, whilst the Governor and his two colleagues had to reluctantly disperse their air and naval assets.
The light cruiser, the four destroyers and five sloops, could either be used as a rather weak 'gun line' or sent out of harm's way to randomly-chosen fjords elsewhere in the Kerguelen archipelago. They had been dispersed weeks ago to various inlets, enduring lonely dispersal, constant vigilance and occasional returns to base for resupply and refuelling. As a result, only a destroyer and two sloops were in Port Menzies on Norway Bay when the alert sent them out and round to protect Port Resolution. Ashore, the sirens sounded 'Attack Warning Red', the rising and falling note ordering shelter for civilians and dispersal or AA duties for the military; pilots asked for vectors to attack the approaching raid, but were told to follow orders to go to dispersal strips.
"An attack on the carriers hasn't a snowball's chance in hell." Captain Dowling explained. "We need our pilots alive for afterwards. We will have to use the AA guns - and keep our forces for a counterattack."
But he did authorise arming the forces under Krancke, mostly to defend civilian areas like Scheerstadt, Molloy and Port Resolution; West Dunedin and Port Menzies were almost as well defended as RAAF Kerguelen, although the defenders were soon to discover how poor that defence was. The truth was that the Imperial Japanese Navy was an efficient fighting force and at this stage its airmen had not suffered the attrition that ruined them later in the war. Krancke and his men had few illusions about Japanese respect for German lives; covering Scheerstadt in Swastika symbols would only provide points for dive-bombers, so instead they prepared machine-gun nests and auto cannon positions. Families were sheltered in underground shelters, built carefully by the British, Australian and German residents; they were well aware that a heavy attack would kill many of them, but meant to sell their lives dearly.
The Royal Australian Navy headquarters had been informed, but had nothing to send in support, even the Netherlands Navy submarines being in the wrong locations to sail and help; all there was to hand was HMAS/M K-9, a very creaky dockyard queen of a Dutch submarine used to train anti-submarine escorts. Kerguelen was on its own again, this time faced by a force that had no compunction about pressing home a potentially-devastating air attack. The RAAF had had the sense to make mock ups of its aircraft to place in airfield dispersals and the RAN had reefs dressed up as ships. This at least concealed the bulk of the air and naval forces at the island's disposal, but Kerguelen itself was too big to hide.
Hiryu and Soryu launched their attack at dawn when still fifty miles north of the coast of Kerguelen, the Val dive bombers, Kate torpedo bombers and Zero fighters forming up into attack squadrons; most of the Zeros remained to guard the carriers, but that still left 36 torpedo bombers, 36 dive bombers and 20 fighters, to attack Kerguelen, with full weapons-loads. As against that, they were facing the latest trained and part-trained Australian naval conscripts manning the AA guns of the naval and air bases, and the determined crew of the 'Admiral Scheer'. This was not going to be a walk-over for the IJN, as it, too, was to discover that the enemy knew how to fight.
When no fighters rose against them, except for one disobedient Buffalo pilot, the Zeroes reckoned they had achieved complete surprise and the bombers moved in, only to find AAA shells bursting amongst them and downing three of the planes before they bombed the first dummy aircraft at the dispersals. Other bombers wasted bombs on the dummies, but the rest went for hangars, fuel tanks, barracks and the control tower, hitting only one air-raid shelter; the naval base was hit rather worse, for the carrier torpedo-planes only 'sank' two reefs before Zeroes test-strafed the rest and detected the fraud. The torpedo-bombers broke radio-silence to report the fraud and went into a holding-pattern whilst the Zeroes went hunting for the missing ships and detected a lonely corvette, which was soon fighting for its life in a fjord that was too constricting for torpedoes and was nailed by the second bomb. But it shot down a Zero and damaged a Val, so its sacrifice was not in vain.
Aware now that their prey could fight, the carriers recovered planes that had dropped bombs and re-armed them to continue the attack, going for the poorly-defended towns and finding that they could be attacked, but would try to fight back. By great bad luck, the Vals hit Scheerstadt first, thinking it was a small army base and being shot at by accurate Kriegsmarine naval gunners. Ten planes were to fall to German gunfire, but twenty-seven men died from bullets and bombs, the headquarters and the Church were flattened, forty-nine houses were badly damaged and over eighty others so damaged to be unusable without repairs. The Kate torpedo-bombers were re-armed with small bombs and their follow-up attack flattened half of the houses and AAA, causing further death and injury, at the cost of another five aircraft. But Scheerstadt had shot its bolt; Krancke was injured beside his men and his gunners were very low on ammunition.
Resolution and Molloy were as well armed as Scheerstadt and suffered similarly, undoing a year of good work in their reconstruction, whilst the naval base and the airfield had been put out of action. West Dunedin suffered as badly as Scheerstadt and in some respects rather worse; the IJN force dropped bombs enough to wreck nearly four-fifths of the town and killed a hundred and fifty two civilians of all ages; they had not built as effective shelters as the other towns, so suffered badly. Nobody wanted to surrender to 'a pack of slit-eyed murderers', to quote one angry widow, so the Japanese were faced with either an attempt to massacre the entire population or to find and destroy every single warship, aircraft and serviceman.
"These people are Samurai." Admiral Chuichi Nagumo said. "Send them the order to surrender." But he was not surprised when told they would not surrender, although dismayed by a further message in German. Krancke had prepared a message before he went to the hospital shelter; in it, he told Nagumo that the Kriegsmarine would neither forgive nor forget the deliberate bombing of Scheerstadt and that Berlin would be informed.
"...German families and children have been killed. Hundreds of matrosen are dead or wounded. We will resist to the end beside the Kerguelenvolk..."
Nagumo was dismayed by this disaster, for it threatened the alliance between Japan and the Axis Powers; he had to order his men to keep clear of Scheerstadt, but the damage had already been done and Hitler would be displeased. Instead, he concentrated upon Molloy, Resolution and West Dunedin, trying to destroy all three towns, but aware that he was running out of bombs. Strafing damaged virtually every building on Kerguelen, bombs and incendiaries destroyed them, but the day was passing, the seas were getting rougher and Nagumo had reluctantly to break off his attacks as night fell, recovering his planes. He had been aware that Admiral Sir James Somerville had 'A Force' to the north-west at Addu Atoll, including two modern fleet carriers, HMS Indomitable and HMS Indefatigable, so he had to leave before they could catch his much smaller force and its battle-damaged aircraft. Kerguelen had been very badly damaged, but the bulk of its ships and planes had escaped damage by dispersal and camouflage; if he was not careful, the Germans might order U-boats in the Indian Ocean to hunt his force as well.
Somerville had indeed sortied his force, hoping to intercept Nagumo, but failed to make contact; by an ironic twist of fate, it was HMAS K-9 that was to intercept the withdrawing force three days later, to put a torpedo into Hiryu and the destroyer Uzuki, the destroyer sinking after a day of fighting to stay afloat, whilst the carrier limped back to the Japanese home islands. Little K-9 survived a nasty depth-charging to head for Fremantle and be docked for repairs. Somerville tried hard to intercept the Japanese force, but sent elements of his Force B to relieve the devastated people of Kerguelen - two of the virtually-obsolete Revenge class battleships, two cruisers and several destroyers. HMS Revenge and HMS Ramillies arrived a week later to discover West Dunedin a ruin and the other two coastal ports not much better, the airfield and naval base base being reconstructed with great difficulty and the population in hardship. The German contingent had suffered nearly as badly as Port Resolution, but tried to do their best to help; Krancke had lost his left arm below the elbow and was confined to hospital with many of his men and their families.
"Do? Stay here and rebuild, of course!" The Lieutenant-Governor and his wounded colleagues met Vice-Admiral Tait aboard Revenge and refused to be evacuated. "Your assistance will be vital!"
