Operation FS: Japan's Final Strike

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

 

XVII: Occupation, October 1942

In planning the FS operation, the Japanese had made few official plans for the occupation and administration of the islands they sought to control. The final draft of the plan stated that the occupiers would use yen in any dealings with the native populations of most islands, the exception being New Caledonia where occupation currency was to be used instead. Even this very basic plan was only rarely enforced: in Fiji, yen, pounds and dollars were all circulated during those times when the occupation force bothered to pay at all.
Only in early September, after the fall of Suva, did any clear Japanese occupation policy emerge. On Tokyo’s orders, the islands were to be administered in a manner similar to that occurring on Guam and other islands taken from the Americans in the early days of the war. The Fijians were to be more or less ignored except when they would prove either useful or dangerous. The population was allowed to trade for what it needed, although food was officially rationed (although rarely enforced in the villages) and the few radios on the islands were taken by the Japanese. Schools were required to begin teaching Japanese customs, most importantly bowing to the occupation troops, and occasionally the Japanese would conscript the locals to do manual labour. Many disappeared into the hills, joining a resistance movement that would give the Japanese many troubles. Those unfortunate enough to be captured from the resistance were treated as prisoners. Japan having never signed the Geneva Convention, that could mean anything from months in a poorly built prison camp with appalling conditions, to a bullet in the back of the head.
Unfortunately, even as the Japanese began withdrawing their forces from Fiji in early October, General Takeo Ito was left behind. A brute of a man, he had been merciless to prisoners in China and again in the East Indies. Officially, he was following orders from Tokyo at all times, but when junior officers acted contrary to that policy he was more than willing to look the other way.

Manpower for the occupation would prove to be an issue from the very beginning of the campaign. From early October, the Japanese began pulling troops out of Fiji to use them in the upcoming invasion of New Caledonia, leaving Ito with just 3000 troops to control a population of a quarter of a million. His ranks would be gradually boosted as wounded men left to recover in Fiji were able to return to duty, but even at its strongest point the occupation could never really control anything too far from Suva, Nandi or Savusavu. The jungle belonged to the resistance.
While the resistance could not hope to throw the Japanese out by itself, the Allies still intended to make the occupation efforts as difficult as possible. As Japanese attention shifted to New Caledonia, Admiral Fletcher ordered his B-17s to drop supplies to the resistance fighters. While many of these efforts resulted in crates of weapons landing in the jungle, those that reached the Fijians proved a considerable nuisance for General Ito. As word was sent back to Rabaul and then Tokyo, Ito’s call for reinforcements went unheeded. Every available man would be needed at New Caledonia, which was intended to be used as a base from which Australia and New Zealand could be placed under siege. Fiji’s use to Japan was seen primarily in their ability to deny it to the Allies: as long as Ito could keep hold of the major ports, Tokyo would not see reinforcement as necessary.

Tokyo did present a potential solution to Ito’s problems however, in its announcement of the formation of a Fiji Battalion for the Indian National Army.
Beginning in the 1870s, the British had transported thousands of Indians to Fiji, where they served as indentured labourers, working on the sugar cane fields in the north and west of the islands. When their terms were finished, many stayed behind, and by 1939 they represented around three eighths of Fiji’s population. The British however continued to treat them as lower class citizens than the native Fijians, paying them only two shillings per day when a Fijian would receive four, before banning them from military service in 1940. These actions caused considerable resentment and division in Fiji, and the situation was far from resolved when the Japanese took over.
The Japanese leadership had already decided that Indian people were an important part of their ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ by the fall of Singapore, with Hideki Tojo making several references to Indian independence in his speeches to the Diet. Fiji’s place in the Sphere was much less well defined, but the fierce resistance shown by native Fijians from the early days of the invasion convinced the Japanese that they would not prove to be loyal allies. Knowing of the divided state of Fiji’s population, Japan decided to attempt to side with the Indians. So far, the Indians had shown much less opposition to Japan’s efforts than the native Fijians had, and few joined the resistance movement. They were rewarded with preferential treatment by the occupation forces.
The Fiji Battalion, nominally a unit of the Indian National Army but in practice a separate force altogether, was the result of Japanese attempts to further turn the Indians against their former masters. Equipped largely with weapons taken from the New Zealanders, this all-volunteer force served as both a propaganda tool and an additional occupation force for the Japanese. Posted in Suva, the site of the British administration of Fiji, they often antagonised those who had recently treated them as second class citizens, and among the volunteers a desire for revenge more often than not dominated any sense of nationalism, Indian or Fijian. Japan had made no promises of independence, and often proved remarkably short-sighted in their policies and actions in Fiji, content to stir up trouble while holding the islands as a bargaining chip, ready to give the British even more trouble once a satisfactory peace had been made.
Like the Indian National Army, the Fiji Battalion did not live up to the great expectations of its masters. Even with preferential treatment, barely half a battalion’s worth of volunteers actually joined the force, far from the massive wave of support that the Japanese had hoped for. Most Indians in Fiji recognised that while the Japanese controlled the islands in a different way to the British, they were still substituting one colonial overlord for another. Matters were not helped by the effective disbanding of the INA itself as 1942 drew to a close, although the Fiji Battalion would be maintained until the end of the Japanese occupation.

- BNC

 

XVIII: Turning South, October 1942

Operation NK, the invasion of New Caledonia, was the final stage in Japan’s plan to control the South Pacific. Half way between Fiji and Brisbane, the island was perfectly positioned to control the sea lanes between Rabaul and Japan’s recent conquests, and between Australia and the United States. Japan wanted the island to protect the flank of those vital routes that would allow it to defend its recent conquests; the Allies knew that a fallen New Caledonia would be a dagger aimed at the heart of Australia. The location of the island alone was enough to know that this would be the site of a fierce battle.
Like the rest of the FS Operation, the planning for NK was in chaos months before the operation began. Yamamoto’s grand vision of the South Pacific offensive had declared that Fiji would fall with the arrival of the second wave, and the conquest would take just three weeks. Instead, it had taken two months, and cost a third of Japan’s effective strength in the area. With disturbing reports of an entire US Division on New Caledonia and a detailed map of the island’s vast coral reefs among the documents captured at Suva, Yamamoto had felt himself forced to call upon the Army to transfer the 48th Infantry Division, the last readily available reserve, to the operation. The request was resented among the Army’s higher command, but New Caledonia was too important to not invade, and in early September they released the division for the 17th Army’s use. Timor, the 48th Division’s previous basing, would gradually fall under the effective control of Australian commandos, reinforced by MacArthur once the weakness of the remaining garrison was realised.
With a series of hurried and complicated manoeuvres throughout the South Pacific, Yamamoto was also able to transfer almost 15,000 troops out of Fiji, deploying them on Efate before returning the fleet to Truk for urgent refuelling. Efate, less than forty-eight hours from New Caledonia, would be a vital staging point for the invasion: the fleet could be stationed around New Caledonia for a little over a week, enough time to land two or possibly even three waves of troops if they were only coming from Port Vila. Most of the reserves were still only in Rabaul by this time, and would have to be deployed later. Yamamoto would deal with that when he had to, but NK needed to begin as soon as possible: the invasion had been marked for early September, but it was already the middle of October.

The impending invasion was no secret to the Allies, who had been rushing reinforcements to the island while also building up the base at Noumea. The 23rd “Americal” Division, under the command of Major General Alexander Patch, had been stationed on the island for several months, and they were expected to be joined by the newly-formed 3rd Marine Division before the end of the year. Two airfields were also operational on the island: Magenta just outside Noumea, and Tontouta fifty kilometres to the west. Both were equipped with radar sets, and a continuous air patrol was maintained around the island whenever conditions allowed.
Noumea harbour had also seen a huge amount of activity, with everything from underwater defences to fuel being delivered in a desperate effort to expand and fortify the base. So much shipping was flowing into the harbour that congestion became a serious problem, made more difficult by occasional Japanese air raids out of Efate or aircraft carriers in the region, and the ever-present threat of submarines added yet another level of danger. Fletcher’s naval forces were rushed to the island’s surrounding waters as soon as the evacuation of Fiji was completed, arriving little more than a week ahead of the first Japanese landing ships. As the threat to New Caledonia became urgent, Fletcher also secured control of several submarines that until now had been under MacArthur’s command.

Yamamoto and General Hyakutake were still debating the plan for seizing New Caledonia itself well into early October. Early drafts of FS had planned for the landing to take place near Noumea itself, on the south-eastern coast, and until well into the Fiji campaign this remained the intention. All of Japan’s objectives: both airfields, the port and the huge nickel mines, were located at the southeast of the island, and the coral reefs would pose a considerable obstacle no matter where on New Caledonia the landing took place.
Noumea however was sure to be heavily defended. Owing to shipping constraints, the first wave of the invasion could not be larger than 10,000 men, too small to overpower an entire division, while the second wave, even from Efate, could not be landed for at least another three days following the first. The battle of Savusavu had also reinforced the lesson learned at Port Moresby, that an opposed landing was sure to be costly, and general and admiral both decided that attempting Savusavu on a much larger scale at Noumea would likely end in an expensive defeat.
If Noumea was considered a bad landing site, New Caledonia had a noticeable lack of good ones. The closest location to Noumea that saw considerable attention was a flat area just south of the Tontouta airfield, barely forty kilometres away. The open landscape there was a rare sight on the mountainous island, and would be an ideal beachhead if the US Army wasn’t using it as an encampment (what the Americans were doing there was unknown to the Japanese). A short march from Tontouta, it would allow for the airfield to be taken in a couple of days, which would make the rest of the campaign much easier. However, several islands close to shore would make an organised landing more difficult, and moving around the islands would expose the vulnerable landing ships to air attacks for several more hours than an open beach would. After much discussion, the Tontouta site was shelved.
The site eventually chosen had much more in common with its counterpart on Viti Levu than any of those initially planned on New Caledonia. Near the village of Thio on the northern coast, 75 kilometres from Noumea as the crow flies, or 100 by a more practical route, the beaches were far enough from Noumea that the Japanese expected only minimal defences, while also being close enough to their objectives that a ground offensive would not require an unsustainable amount of supplies. Being on the northern coast, the area could be more easily covered by aircraft flying from Efate, and Japanese ships would not need to sail around New Caledonia to support the invasion, saving fuel and time. With a gap in the mountains not far from the village that opened the way to the south, the site was as well positioned for an offensive aimed at Noumea as anywhere on the northern coast could be. A choice made only days before NK began, it was not discovered by the Allied codebreakers until it was too late.

- BNC