World Battlefronts: Demonstration at Rabaul

On Sunday General MacArthur said: “If God stays with me I may get some remarkable results.” By Thursday, the results tabulated, he said: “Almighty God blessed our arms.”

Between the prayer and the thanksgiving, the U.S. Fifth Air Force had scraped together enough aircraft to dump 350 tons of bombs on Rabaul, Japan’s Southwest Pacific air-sea bastion. The surprised Japs lost 60% of their Rabaul air force—100 planes destroyed on the ground, 51 others damaged, 26 shot down. “Sunk or destroyed” were 119 ships ranging from tiny harbor craft to destroyers.

Lieut. General George C. Kenney, Commander of the Fifth, said that the attack “marks the turning point in the war in the South Pacific.” MacArthur, more restrained, said that it broke Rabaul’s back.

The Scheme. It was a vital goal of the counteroffensive which MacArthur began last June 30. Inch-by-inch land fighting had brought MacArthur’s men laboriously to Lae, to Finschhaven in New Guinea, to Munda and Vella Lavella in the Solomons. Americans who toiled in the rain and heat to build airfields, Australians who fought to clear the enemy from Huon Gulf, made the aerial climax possible.

Fighter airdromes on the Trobriand and Woodlark islands and on the edges of Huon Gulf gave MacArthur and Kenney fighter protection for their bombers on the Rabaul run. The Fifth had already hit the right flank of the divided Japanese air strength at Wewak, where the Japs have lost about 500 planes since mid-August. Next, the Thirteenth Air Force in the Solomons softened the Japs in an aerial battle over Kahili, southeast of Rabaul.

Then came the Fifth’s blow at Rabaul. At least for the moment, Jap air power in the Southwest Pacific seemed to have been destroyed. But the Jap was still able and willing to send planes into combat. Over the weekend he lost 104 aircraft in the Solomons-New Guinea area.

The Test. Wake was a test of seaborne air power in island assault with ample forces. Wewak and Rabaul were tests of land-based air power with concentrated but still insufficient forces. Wryly and eloquently, a correspondent with MacArthur remarked that General Kenney’s only reserves were “the planes that came back.”

A U.P. correspondent cabled: “[MacArthur] may have decided to risk his military future to bring home to London and Washington strategists what can be achieved by imaginative methods. . . . Success [at Rabaul] was calculated to make sponsors of alternative strategies reconsider the claims of the Southwest Pacific for a prominent role in the offensive against Japan.”