XVI: Out of the Mountains, September 1942
Operating so far from their major bases, the Japanese in Fiji could not hope to be fully supplied with everything that an army needed at all times. Cargo ships, often forced to choose between carrying food, ammunition, fuel and other supplies, were ordered to focus on delivering those items that could not be easily found on captured islands: while soldiers could carry some rations on the voyage from Rabaul, they would be expected to get their food from the Fijians. Sometimes this meant paying the Fijians with yen and other occupation currencies, other times the army would resort to theft. As long as the Navy could keep the guns firing, Imperial Headquarters would be satisfied.
The capture of Allied supply dumps at Suva thus proved incredibly important to the Japanese war effort. Their takeover of the southern coast had yielded only a small amount of farmland, hardly sufficient to support the 20,000 or so soldiers, and for much of the campaign the Japanese had been close to starvation. Suva changed that: equipped with enough rations to keep a division fed for more than three months, and with plentiful farmland just to the east of the town, the base could keep the Japanese fed when their own Navy could not.
Leaving some men behind to defend the newly-captured Suva, the rest of General Yi’s army headed west, following the coast road once again in order to take over Nandi and Lautoka. While General Mead had destroyed thousands of documents before his surrender, enough of them had survived to alert the Japanese to the presence of the greater part of the US 37th Infantry Division. Having overcome the New Zealanders, Yi was unconcerned.
Until the Navy returned however, Yi would have to wait. While his ammunition stocks were large enough to keep the Fijian guerillas at bay, he would need bullets from Rabaul to fight the Ohio National Guard. On the night of September 13th, a small convoy of ships arrived at the original landing site on the southwestern coast of Viti Levu, delivering everything from rifle rounds to spare parts for the handful of tanks that could still be operated on the island. The convoy had maintained a higher speed throughout much of its journey, burning more fuel than normal in an effort to finally finish the conquest of Fiji as quickly as possible. Arriving a week earlier than the Americans predicted, it avoided any significant American attack.
The Imperial Navy did not stay around Fiji long this time. So soon after the defeat off Samoa, the admirals were wary of leaving a carrier, and more importantly the cargo ships, exposed to enemy attack. Their forces were also split as another detachment patrolled the waters around Efate as that base was readied for use in the New Caledonia operation. Two airstrikes were launched against Nandi and Lautoka, leaving the Allies with few serviceable aircraft still able to operate from Fiji. The final battle of Viti Levu would be fought without airpower: victory there would have to be written in the blood of the infantry.
Once resupplied, General Yi moved quickly to cross the mountains that effectively divided the island into Japanese and American zones. Still several dozen kilometres from the American Defence Zone, the movement occurred without incident, and scouts were sent forward to locate the enemy positions. Now using captured maps of Fiji taken from the New Zealanders at Suva, Yi knew that a second, smaller range of hills lay between him and the Americans, and beyond that the landscape opened out into a flat plain with Nandi almost at its centre. At this point, the coastal road turns inland to cross the hills, and Yi suspected that the enemy defences would be strongest there: he had followed that road for the entire campaign so far. His tanks would have no choice but to stay on the road, but his infantry were not so limited. He ordered them into the hills.
General Beightler was sure that the Japanese attack would come within a matter of days of the third supply run, and had his forces on high alert from the moment that convoy was spotted. Deployed in accordance with standard US Army doctrine, the 37th Division was concentrated around several strongpoints, most notably the coastal village of Momi just behind the hills. Between those points, the landscape had been mapped out, with artillery crews ready to bombard the likely Japanese routes of advance. His own artillery was far superior to the Japanese artillery, equipped with heavier 105mm guns instead of the Japanese 75mms, and far better supplied: able to unload both shells and the guns themselves at a port instead of a beach in darkness.
Yi had also realised that Momi would be an important objective: it was far enough west of the coastal road that any large defences on the road could be avoided, while its capture would allow him to outflank the hills through which the road passed, giving the Japanese a straight path into Nandi. Furthermore, while the inland hills had hosted numerous native Fijian guerillas, a persistent source of trouble for the IJA, they would be less likely to threaten him nearer the coast, where the Navy could bring destroyers in to provide naval support if that proved necessary. While those destroyers were at Efate or even further away right now, the mere threat of them could be used to the Japanese advantage.
Like most of the fighting in Fiji, the Battle of Momi was extremely bloody: two Japanese regiments each lost a whole battalion to the National Guard’s artillery and machine gun fire before the village’s defenders were cut down by rifle fire and officers’ katanas. Japanese infiltration tactics, having worked to such deadly effect in Malaya and many other places across the Pacific, once again tore up another Allied strongpoint, and once Momi fell the rest of the Japanese army stormed through the gap left behind. The feared Allied position on ‘Road Hill’ proved much weaker than expected, and collapsed in face of a pincer attack striking from north and south. Beightler’s force, outnumbered from the beginning, saw their ranks dwindling as the western half of the Defence Zone was overrun, and the general ordered those units still in the hills to fall back on Lautoka.
The Japanese would meet the retreating Americans somewhere just south of Nandi, where a four day long battle erupted, now known simply as the Battle of Nandi. Although the Americans managed to break in to the Japanese lines on the second day, the arrival of more Japanese forces, fresh from their victory at Road Hill on the third meant that Beightler was eventually overwhelmed. The fall of Nandi and the Lautoka soon followed.
Beightler was not prepared to surrender to the Japanese however, and ordered his force to continue retreating. With the help of local guides, survivors of Nandi would trek towards the northern village of Tavua. Fletcher, now in command of three carriers after the arrival of the Enterprise, finally felt that he had enough resources to attempt an evacuation, intelligence indicating that the IJN was not near Fiji in strength. With the carriers sent to suppress the Japanese position on Vanua Levu, Fletcher’s smaller ships collected nearly 5000 American soldiers from the beaches near Tavua. They would bring back invaluable combat experience, and a determination to one day return to liberate Fiji.
- BNC