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ISBN 978-0760323502
xviii + 398

Preface; Acknowledgments; Rank Abbreviations; maps; photos; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   We try not to gush over books and authors like undiscriminating fanboys, but it has always been tough to do anything except rave about Bruce Gamble's excellent contributions to the field of WWII history. With The Black Sheep, Black Sheep One: The Life of Gregory 'Pappy' Boyington, and Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul, Gamble has penned consistently readable and informative books about very interesting aspects of the war.
   Now he's delivered another top-notch book requiring a new barrage of superlatives.
   Picking up where most of the events of Darkest Hour left off, Fortress Rabaul finds Gamble bringing together all the threads of strategic thrust and counter-thrust, deadly air missions and dogfights, and the sometimes heroic, sometimes melancholy stories of individual participants caught up in the storm of war in the southwest Pacific. Every reader will learn something new and eye-opening, and few readers will be able to resist Gamble's account of the onrushing torrent of events from the Japanese assault to the death of Admiral Yamamoto.
   The opening chapters briefly recapitulate some of the material from Darkest Hour with information about the discovery of New Britain and development of Rabaul, the opening rounds of the war in the Pacific, Japanese plans for the Bismarcks, and the Australian decision to neither defend nor evacuate the archipelago. Instead, Lark Force and 24 Squadron, far too weak to halt the Japanese landing, remained in place, sacrificed for no good reason. The aircraft of 24 Squadron, little more than glorified trainers, fought bravely but in vain against the highly skilled Imperial Japanese Navy pilots in their modern fighters, far superior in numbers and performance.
   These chapters are not as fully developed as later ones—no need to repeat the gory details from the previous volume—but do a good job of setting the stage for what's to come.
   While the Japanese set about securing their new conquest and turning Rabaul into a major base to dominate the southwest Pacific, the Australians promptly launched their first aerial counterattack. Taking off from Port Moresby harbor, on 24 January 1942 five RAAF Catalinas conducted a night raid against Rabaul, or at least the general vicinity of Rabaul, and "...unable to locate targets in the night, simply aimed their bombs at the antiaircraft fire coming from below." Setting a glum pattern for many more missions to come, it was only a pinprick, and an unsuccessful pinprick at that.
   Gamble continues to chronicle the weak RAAF attempts to strike Rabaul, but his account also moves beyond the immediate confines of Rabaul and New Britain to the wider arena of events of the southwest Pacific, including the invasion of New Guinea and landings in the northern Solomons. The author makes the importance of Rabaul more and more apparent as Japanese military strength projects toward the east, southeast, south, southwest, and west from the fortress, covering land and sea in a wide arc of airpower.
   The importance of Rabaul doesn't escape the Allies, either. In an extended part of the book, Gamble discusses the first attempt by the US Navy to attack the enemy base with carrier-based aircraft. Approaching the Bismarcks from the east, north of Bougainville Island in the Solomons, Task Force 11 hoped to get close enough to launch a surprise attack. However, the approaching naval force was detected by recon aircraft and land-based Japanese bombers immediately launched an attack, but without fighter escort. In a stunning defeat for the Japanese, only two of their bombers returned safely to Rabaul, and the American fleet remained unscathed. It was in this engagement on 20 February 1942 that Lt Butch O'Hare was credited with shooting down five IJN bombers, and he was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor for his defense of USN Task Force 11. Gamble does a terrific job of covering this small but critical battle, displaying his skills with important strategic and operational matters as well as telling details from individual participants, and he also displays his mastery of material from both Japanese and Allied sources.
   A few days later, a handful of US B-17 bombers, based in Australia and under US Navy control, conducted the first American attack against Rabaul, landing at Port Moresby to refuel afterwards, then returning to Australia. Mechanical difficulties and bad weather interfered with the mission. One B-17 turned back. One crash-landed in a swamp in northern New Guinea. Four returned safely with various damage inflicted by IJN Zeros. "For all the effort, the first American raid on Rabaul was a big disappointment." It seems that no one on the ground noticed any bombs that day.
   Nevertheless, Allied airpower continued to make the effort. Gamble's descriptions of pitiful raids against Rabaul are almost painful to read. Time after time, the airmen struggle to find a handful of airworthy machines, encounter difficulties assembling them, lose planes to accidents at take-off, have planes forced to turn back due to mechanical problems or weather conditions, and blindly drop bombs in the general vicinity of Rabaul.
   Here's an example.

   In Melbourne, Lieutenant General Brett placed the Northeast Area on high alert in response to the Japanese threat and ordered a significant increase in the number of patrols over the Coral Sea. He also ordered more bombing raids on Rabaul and the advance bases at Lae, Salamaua, and Gasmata. In compliance, the 22nd Bomb Group scheduled a mission against Rabaul for the first day of May. Taking off from Reid River, a new airbase outside Townsville, the Marauders flew up to Port Moresby on April 30 with plans to launch the attack the next morning. But in yet another dismal effort, only three Marauders made it all the way to the target. The rest turned back early due to "a variety of electrical and hydraulic problems."
   The weather over Rabaul was terrible, so the Marauders bombed the alternate target, Gasmata. Returning safely to Port Moresby, the crews were ordered to remain overnight while additional Marauders flew up from Townsville for another crack at Rabaul. Early in the morning on May 2, the B-26s departed hastily to avoid an incoming Japanese raid. One Marauder did not get off the ground before the enemy attack commenced, but the remaining seven planes headed for New Britain.
   The mission leader, 1st Lt. Christian I. Herron of the 33rd Bomb Squadron, had an older and vastly more experienced officer beside him in the copilot's seat. Although not qualified to physically fly the B-26, Charles Raymond "Bob" Gurney, a thirty-seven-year-old RAAF squadron leader, flew with Herron's crew to share his extensive knowledge of the region. Raised in New South Wales, Gurney had joined the air force in 1925 and later flew freight to the Morobe goldfields for Guinea Airways. Eventually he became a captain in Qantas Airlines, flying four-engine Empires between Sydney and Great Britain. Recently, he had been given command of 33 Squadron, which operated ex-Qantas Empires out of Townsville.
   At some point during the flight to Rabaul, Herron became separated from the other Marauders, which pressed on without him. Thus, he not only reached Rabaul well behind the others but the Japanese were fully alerted. Despite the odds Herron made a daring solo attack. During his run over Simpson Harbor, one of the Marauder's engines was hit hard by antiaircraft fire, and Herron briefly sought shelter inside a large thunderstorm brewing over St. George's Channel. Inside the turbulent storm, however, he struggled just to keep the crippled bomber airborne. He ordered the crew to toss overboard anything that wasn't bolted down, which made the aircraft marginally easier to control; he then flew south almost three hundred miles, trying to get closer to friendly territory. Approaching the Trobriands, Herron instructed the radio operator to begin broadcasting their position and intentions to ditch. Gurney, knowing the Japanese would likely intercept the uncoded message, suggested a simple but clever deception. The radioman tapped out: "Making a forced landing where Francine used to live," which the staff at Port Moresby recognized. A woman of that name had lived on Kiriwina Island, the biggest in the Trobriand group. Now headquarters knew where to send a rescue plane.
   But the B-26's flight did not end happily. Evidently hoping to save the airplane, Herron attempted a conventional wheels-down landing on a patch of flat terrain that "looked like a meadow." Unfortunately it was the wrong call. The B-26 was extremely tricky to handle on one engine, and because of its tricycle landing gear, not just any field would do. As a rule, pilots were trained to leave the wheels retracted for emergency landings on unfamiliar terrain. The rationale was simple: if the ground proved to be anything but smooth, the extended nose wheel could strike an unseen obstacle and cause the aircraft to flip. For that very reason, belly landings were considered safer and usually caused less damage to the aircraft. Furthermore, the emergency procedures section of the B-26 operating manual explicitly cautioned that the airplane would not "maintain altitude on one engine with the landing gear extended."
   Nevertheless, Herron put the wheels down, necessitating an approach speed much higher than normal to maintain control of the crippled bomber. Not surprisingly, the appearance of flat, solid ground on Kiriwina was deceptive. It was actually a bog, much like the one on New Guinea where the "Swamp Ghost" came to rest. When the B-26 touched down and decelerated, the nose wheel plowed into the marsh. The front strut ripped loose, and the Plexiglas nose of the Marauder buried itself in the muck, causing the bomber to flip over onto its back. Moments later five of the crewmen emerged from a hatch in the bomber's belly. Shaken but unhurt, they struggled through waist-deep ooze to the crumpled nose. They found Gurney dead, but Herron was still alive, trapped in the upside down cockpit as it slowly began to fill with swamp water. He called out, anxious to know if anyone was hurt. The survivors clawed desperately at the wreckage, trying to pull Herron to safety, but he drowned before they could reach him. Soon thereafter, a Catalina arrived from Port Moresby and flew the anguished crew back to base.

   Meanwhile, the book moves further afield with a chapter about the rescue of General MacArthur (and his staff and family) from the Philippines and his long sojourn to take command in Australia. Chapter 15 covers the Battle of the Coral Sea, which Gamble rates as even more of an Allied victory than most other historians have indicated. The material in this part of the book features Port Moresby almost as much as Rabaul as the experienced but thinly stretched Japanese air units trade punches with weak Allied squadrons.
   In Chapter 16 Gamble turns his attention back to Rabaul and the deteriorating conditions for Allied POWs and civilian internees. Threatened by increasing Allied air attacks and weakened by dwindling food supplies, most of the enlisted POWs and internees were evacuated aboard Montevideo Maru in June. Their full story appears in Darkest Hour. Here Gamble condenses the sad loss of more than 1000 troops and civilians when their vessel was torpedoed by USN submarine Sturgeon on 1 July. The Australian officers and nurses at Rabaul were transported separately to Japan, "destined to face three more years of deprivation."
   The book doesn't cover the Battle of Midway, but describes the consequences of the IJN disaster as further offensive plans were mostly shelved in the Solomons and beyond when Japanese military leaders—despite outrageously misleading propaganda fed to the Empire—realized they were running out of steam and resources in the southwest Pacific.
   After their amphibious offensive against Port Moresby was turned back in the Battle of the Coral Sea, in July the Japanese landed troops at Buna and Gona on the north coast of New Guinea for an overland attack across the Owen Stanley Mountains to take the Allied base. Airpower for offensive and defensive purposes would prove critical for both sides in the campaign.
   In addition to Japanese planning, Gamble spends much of one chapter reviewing MacArthur's shortcomings and the dysfunctional command system and bitter personal relationships among various staff officers, culminating in General George Kenney replacing General George Brett as air commander in the theater. Kenney seems to have met with approval from most everyone, including Gamble, and the decidedly rocky situation of USAAF units and personnel in the theater soon began to improve.
   On Kenney's orders, after weeks of pinprick attacks, his airmen amassed the hitherto unknown concentration of sixteen B-17 bombers to attack Rabaul. Although not every bomber made it to the target, this amounted to the largest raid yet on the Japanese fortress. Even so, it caused only superficial damage. Gamble quotes Kenney's autobiography which "...exaggerated almost every facet of the mission," especially damage supposedly caused to dozens of bombers on the ground and more than ten Zeros supposedly shot down by B-17 gunners. Similarly, despite Kenney's claim that his raid prevented Japanese aircraft from attacking US forces at Guadalcanal and Tulagi, such a result was far from the truth.
   Nevertheless, despite SNAFUs and unimpressive results, in some ways this "massed" mission marked the introduction of serious professionalism into the bombing effort, with designated primary targets, secondary targets, mission leaders, formation flying, "initial points," etc.
   While USMC landings in the Solomons stretched Allied air and naval resources, attacks against Guadalcanal cost Japanese air forces heavily and forced them to fight on two fronts. They attempted to build new airfields around Rabaul and in the Solomons and increase their air strength, but at this point the Allies were gradually—very gradually—winning the war of attrition, due to faster replacement of machines and aircrews.
   Kenney continued to put his stamp on the 5th Air Force. At the same time, the 5th also lost some important airmen, including Kenneth Walker and William Benn, the former when he disobeyed two of Kenney's direct orders (including an order not to go on combat missions) and didn't return from a raid against Rabaul, and the latter when he crashed into the Owen Stanley Mountains.
   Meanwhile, experiments and disagreements remained concerning day bombing vs night bombing, skip bombing, instantaneous fusing of bombs vs 1/10th second delayed fuses, and so on. Although Gamble doesn't mention it, in some ways the 5th was learning the same kinds of lesson the RAF learned with Bomber Command earlier in the war. Night attacks proved less costly to attacking bombers, but operations in the dark also made it considerably more difficult to find and hit targets. While improved techniques and tactics were being worked out, new types of aircraft were introduced to 5th Air Force, and Gamble describes Pappy Gunn's field modifications to turn the A-20 and B-25 into gunships (although Kenney seems to have attempted to take credit for the idea).
   Some of the new enhancements and tactics were put to use in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, which Gamble describes in considerable detail in one of the longer sections of the book. Despite the usual overestimates and claims by airmen (and their commanding generals), this was undoubtedly a major victory for Allied airpower and an important turning point of the war in the southwest Pacific, with an entire Japanese convoy wiped out, half the escorting destroyers sunk, and thousands of Japanese troops killed at sea. Gamble doesn't flinch from reporting the repeated strafing and bombing runs made by aircraft against troops in the water.
   Determined to turn the tide in the theater once and for all, and establish Rabaul as an impregnable fortress, Admiral Yamamoto took the drastic step of ordering his carrier-based fighter units transferred to New Britain to serve as a land-based force, hoping to use his cadre of crack pilots to destroy Allied airpower in a series of strikes against the Solomons and New Guinea in April 1943. However, despite professional planning and execution, the raids failed to achieve their goals. The pilots reported tremendous results, but their claims were grossly inflated and relatively little damage was caused in relation to the effort exerted. Worse yet for the Japanese, their top-notch carrier-based aircrews suffered heavy losses.
   Even worse was to come.
   The final chapter of the book, "Death of a Warrior God," deals with Yamamoto's inspection tour to the Solomons, where he wanted to raise morale by visiting his men, and the American mission that shot down his aircraft over Bougainville Island. Gamble deals with sigint aspects of the mission, the actual shoot-down, and controversies about which pilots should be credited with the kill, as well as exactly how the admiral died. Gamble indicates the official Japanese autopsy report was probably falsified to minimize the shock and horror of his death in Japan.
   This marks the end of Fortress Rabaul, except for the Epilogue, which sets the scene for resumption of battle—and worsening conditions for prisoners—in the next volume.
   The book clearly centers on Rabaul, but the subtitle, "The Battle for the Southwest Pacific," takes the account across a wider swath of territory. Likewise, the book focuses on airpower, but Gamble doesn't ignore ground or naval forces. He also spends a significant proportion of the book on POWs and civilian internees at Rabaul, including downed airmen captured by the Japanese. He even tells the story of British artillerymen captured at Singapore and transported to Ballale Island off Bougainville. None of these POW/internee stories are very pleasant.
   Throughout the book, on all the subjects, Gamble demonstrates he has mastered the writing of big operations and small details.
   Some of his small details are especially interesting asides from the main thread. He includes notes such as information regarding the "command" B-17 named "The Swoose" (from the popular song about the half-swan, half-goose) flown by Olympic medalist Frank A. Kurtz Jr. who subsequently named his daughter Swoosie. Swoosie Kurtz went on to become a well-known actress. He discusses the connection between gangster Al Capone and Butch O'Hare's father. Several pages explain how the Allied codenames for Japanese aircraft came into existence, and even notes the real people behind names such as Betty, Nell, and Val.
   Gamble also goes a bit far afield to explain some of the difficulties behind Japanese aircraft production.

   Due to a combination of industrial congestion and inconceivable shortsightedness, the aircraft factory [in Nagoya] had been built miles from the nearest airfield. As a result, the plant was restricted to producing subassemblies rather than whole planes. The engine, wings, fuselage, and tail section all had to be transported thirty miles to an airfield big enough for assembly and testing. There were no rail lines available, and the streets of Nagoya were too narrow for large trucks. Horse-drawn wagons had been tried, but their speeds over the narrow, rough roads caused too much damage to the aircraft components. Thus, the Japanese resorted to using primitive oxcarts to haul the subassemblies of their modern fighter to Kagamigahara airfield. It took twenty-four hours for each team of lumbering oxen to cover the thirty miles through the crowded streets. No improvements were made to the roads, which deteriorated as production rates increased and more oxcarts were employed. Determined to build more Zeros, the Imperial Navy contracted with another aircraft manufacturer, Nakajima, whose plant eventually exceeded Mitsubishi's in monthly production; but even at their highest output, the two factories averaged only 140 fighters per month.

   On peripheral issues, Gamble appears to make an occasional minor mis-step. He states 5th Air Force was "officially activated" on 3 September 1942, when in fact the Far East Air Force was redesignated 5th Air Force on 5 February 1942 and it was at most "remanned" (per Maurer) in September. One of the later chapters also mentions in passing how the "Japanese advance on the Kokoda Trail had been halted by American and Australian infantry," which probably comes as a surprise to the Diggers who defended Port Moresby and might not have noticed a lot of Yanks on the trail. Likewise, the description of the death of General Horii doesn't quite ring true. Various sources report at least five or six different dates for his death. Some books indicate he drowned while attempting to cross the Kumusi River (aka Kamusi River) during the withdrawal along the Kokoda Track while others say he rafted down the Kumusi and subsequently drowned at the mouth of the river while trying to make his way back to Buna. Gamble states the general was driven out to sea by a squall and drowned "while scouting the coastline of New Guinea in a native canoe."
   But those are minor quibbles in a book packed with great information and many human interest stories.
   Gamble's original working title for this book was "Ring of Fire." However, Fortress Rabaul fits very well. Although the action spreads out considerably in multiple directions, including the Solomons, Coral Sea, New Guinea, and Australia, Rabaul proves to be the strategic focus and plays an overwhelming role in almost all developments in the area. Gamble altered the title because he decided the full account of the campaign wouldn't fit into a single volume. Thus, while Fortress Rabaul concludes with the loss of Yamamoto, the story will continue in another volume with the resurrected title of Ring of Fire. We look forward to the arrival of the second volume.
   In the meantime, Fortress Rabaul upholds Bruce Gamble's reputation as one of our best WWII writers. The book will captivate anyone who picks it up. Definitely one of the best new books we've seen so far in 2010, and probably destined to be one of the top books of the year.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Zenith Press.
   Thanks to Zenith for providing this review copy.

Reviewed 6 June 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Bill Stone
May not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Stone & Stone