Battle of the Bismarck Sea
By Lawrence Spinetta

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Last night I dreamed I saw a dragon rising out of the sea,” an unknown Japanese soldier wrote in his diary on February 24, 1943. He was sailing aboard Tosei Maru, a passenger-cargo ship traveling to Rabaul, on New Britain, to deliver soldiers and supplies for transport to New Guinea. The Japanese were preparing to launch a flotilla of eight transport ships and eight destroyers destined for Lae, on the eastern coast of New Guinea, to reinforce the garrisons tenuously defending Japan’s grip on the Southwest Pacific.

A week later, now aboard the 6,896-ton Teiyo Maru, the author of the diary would indeed encounter a fire-breathing foe, but it would emerge from the heavens rather than from the sea. “Discovered by the enemy,” his final journal entry reads. “At night, enemy planes dropped flares and reconnoitered.” The next day, more than one hundred Allied planes swarmed and decimated the Japanese convoy.

Allied soldiers discovered the diary some time later, washed up on the shores of Goodenough Island.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur called the Allied victory in the Bismarck Sea “one of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time.” The three-day battle on March 2–4, 1943, simply stunned the Japanese military and changed the course of the Pacific war. “Japan’s defeat there was unbelievable,” one of the destroyer skippers, Capt. Tameichi Hara, said. “Never was there such a debacle.” Thereafter, the war in New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomon Islands was a losing fight for Japan. Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa, the commander of the Japanese Eighth Fleet at Rabaul, lamented shortly afterward, “It is certain that the success obtained by the American air force in this battle dealt a fatal blow to the South Pacific.”

More than that, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea would become an enduring milestone in modern air power history, a lopsided naval defeat that involved not a single ship on the victorious side.

The battle immediately convinced the Japanese that they could not operate even strongly escorted convoys in areas within range of land-based Allied airplanes. From then on, they were forced to rely on barges, small coastal vessels, and submarines to provide a lifeline to their vital strategic outposts in the archipelago. Aerial attacks continued to exact a dreadful price on Japanese ships, even as they hugged the coasts in desperate attempts to escape detection from above. Submarines met with more success but could not move significant quantities of men and materiel.

Without the necessary supplies or reinforcements, the Japanese shifted to a defensive strategy and never would regain the initiative for the rest of the war. Admiral Mikawa had planned to “carry out lively air operations at the strategic moment” in mid-April by sending four hundred carrier-based planes to Lae, Rabaul, and the Salamaua area but gave up these plans after Bismarck Sea. Because one of the supply ships lost during the battle, Kembu Maru, had carried a large shipment of aviation fuel, the Japanese navy’s ability to conduct offensive operations there was crippled. And the Japanese army never received the reinforcements, artillery pieces, antiaircraft guns, and ammunition it desperately needed. Allied air power decimated the ranks of the Japanese 51st Division and sent the bulk of their equipment to the bottom of the sea, thereby setting the stage for a successful Allied ground campaign.

Yet the Allied victory at the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was far from inevitable and might not have occurred at all were it not for a humiliating failure Allied air forces suffered just a few months earlier. In January, a Japanese convoy of five transports and five destroyers successfully delivered the main body of the 20th Division, almost ten thousand men, to forces fighting in Wewak, on the north coast of New Guinea. This was particularly embarrassing for Maj. Gen. George C. Kenney, commander of the Fifth Air Force, who had personally vowed to cut off and isolate the enemy forces fighting in New Guinea.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Aerial Combat, Historical Conflicts, Naval Battles, World War II

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