All of these factors had to be taken into account in determining the lines of advance in 1944. None of the senior officers present had been in post more than a few weeks and the senior air officer had been relieved following the destruction of his air forces at the beginning of April. . While MacArthur sought eight days worth of support from the fleet's powerful fleet carriers, Nimitz would only agree to commit this force for two days after the landings. [1] Among them were the Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center (SEATIC)[2]; the Sino Translation and Interrogation Center (SINTIC)[3]; and, the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA). The plane in which Fukudome was flying also crashed into the sea, near the island of Cebu. The Japanese 18th Army (equivalent to an Anglo-American corps), under Lieutenant General Hataz Adachi, was responsible for Japanese operations on mainland New Guinea. Landings were made at two points in the Hollandia area on April 22, 1944, with the U.S. 24th Infantry Division moving ashore at Tanahmerah Bay and the 41st Infantry Division pushing inland at Humboldt Bay, 25 miles (40 km) to the east. The forces of the Southwest Pacific Area were ready to move on to the Philippines. The Allied victories in 1943 set the stage for the strategic advances of 1944, but they did not determine the exact lines of attack. [38], General Imamura and his naval counterpart at Rabaul, Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, commander Southeast Area Fleet, resolved to reinforce their ground forces at Lae for one final all-out attempt against Wau. This success was attributable to Milne Bay's Australian and US defenders together with the crews of the (mostly Dutch) merchantmen that had delivered vital supplies and reinforcements to the garrison. It was a new kind of combined operations warfare in which the Allies consistently outclassed their Japanese opponents. During mid-May American forces intercepted a Japanese landing craft near Arare that carried material for reinforcing the Japanese-held islands offshore of New Guinea that were to be attacked as part of the Wakde-Sarmi Bay Operation. This was usually done in the form of listings (usually termed bulletins) that provided a brief description of the records and various types of publications containing full or partial translations of specific documents and publications containing full or partial translations of documents relating to a general or specific topic. In many instances these organizations were staffed with translators trained in military and naval language schools in the United States. On December 7, 1941, Japan staged a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, severely damaging the US Pacific Fleet. [16] In the resulting 48 May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, the Allies suffered higher losses in ships, but achieved a crucial strategic victory by turning the Japanese landing force back, thereby removing the threat to Port Moresby, at least for the time being. In December 1943, an operational order indicating the times and dates at which Japanese submarine were scheduled to appear in designated spots in the Arawe area, New Britain, was translated by ATIS and immediately forwarded to Naval Intelligence where prompt action was taken. [14] The 18th Army did not plan for the defense of Hollandia, and the Army Air Force and Naval units stationed there had little opportunity to develop plans due to the rapid turnover of their leadership. JICPOA personnel also served, beginning in January 1945, at the Advance Intelligence Center (AIC), established at the CINCPAC Advance Headquarters at Guam. In early April 1943, a Japanese map was captured showing hidden positions of 87 barges at Labu, New Guinea. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, who later became the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [24] A gradual improvement in their numbers and skill forced the Japanese bombers up to higher altitude, where they were less accurate, and then, in August, to raiding by night. A force of 800 Australian troops landed on 22 October on either side of the Japanese position. Over 170 were published, including many extracts from diaries and notebooks. Later, the procedure was altered again to cope with the tons of documents captured at main Japanese bases. At Sanananda the swamp and jungle were typhus-ridden crawling roots reached out into stagnant pools infested with mosquitoes and numerous crawling insects every foxhole filled with water. formId: "13b57390-1d3c-43b8-b8c2-4570bb51abe4", In the Southwest Pacific Area, aside from the creation of the Far Eastern Air Force, there were few changes. The sinking of over 25,000 tones of Japanese ships earned the unit the nickname . ATIS was directed to make available to the board any and all information having to do with the identification of Japanese war criminals. [33], Initial operations commenced in the second week of March 1944 with air raids by aircraft of the U.S. 5th Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force attacked Japanese airfields along the New Guinea coast from Wewak to the Vogelkop and on Biak Island. The umbrella term for the series of strategic actions taken by the Allies to reduce and capture the vast Japanese naval and air facilities at Rabaul was Operation Cartwheel. Combat boundaries were listed. This bombing operation was also the moment in the New Guinea campaign when Japanese air power no longer threatened the Allies. The report contained 28 pages of translations, each translation accompanied by a photostatic copy of the original document and authenticated under oath by the translation. This document was immediately translated and subsequently provided new bombing targets for the B-29s over Japan and during the early occupation provided a means of quickly locating and seizing armaments. Wrecked Japanese planes litter Hollandia field, largely the victims of USAAF attacks earlier in the month (80-G-325109). The brief spurt of books in 1943 and 1944, when Japanese were able to visit the occupied Dutch East Indies, dealt mainly with Dutch New Guinea, and then only in a very rudimentary way. [67], Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}23158.8S 140431.2E / 2.533000S 140.717000E / -2.533000; 140.717000. [15] Under a memorandum of August 27, 1945, CIC was ordered to cease its investigation of wartime collaborators in the Philippines on September 2nd and turn over all records, together with over 5,000 interned Filipinos charged with treason, collaboration and subversive activities, to the Department of Justice of the Philippine Commonwealth Government. The quantity and type of documents captured from the Japanese varied widely. This information was immediately translated, relayed to naval and air units, and, coordinated with the translation of a captured map showing enemy positions, resulted in the repulse of the enemy attack by naval and aerial bombardment. Japans strategy in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, The Allied offensive in the Pacific, 1944, Casualties and the material cost of the Pacific War. I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive. As their number grew, and the volume of available intelligence increased, such a procedure became unnecessary, and also impossible due to the limited number of linguists available. Current Translations were publications containing complete translations of documents classified A, B, C, or D in ATIS Bulletins. Exact tracings and translations were supplied to XXIV Corps prior to attack on these positions. The Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies began on 10 January 1942, and the Imperial Japanese Army overran the entire colony in less than three months. Base G played an important role as a staging area for subsequent operations in New Guinea and the Philippines. Adachi ignored this order, and instead decided to concentrate his troops at Hansa Bay and Wewak. the strategic base on New Britain (now part of Papua New Guinea), on January 23, 1942. I Corps, became commander of the newly formed U.S. 8th Army. The information contained in these reports were bibliographically indexed. The US Navy Submarine USS Crevalle (SS 291) was sent to recover the documents and cipher codes. Before June, between 20 and 25 P-39s had been lost in air combat, while three more had been destroyed on the ground and eight had been destroyed in landings by accident. [50], Three transports were assigned to the operation, Westralia, Gunston Hall and Ganymede. Two major moves were planned for the end of June: Eventually, the Joint Chiefs of Staff realized that a landing and siege of "Fortress Rabaul" would be far too costly, and that the Allies' ultimate strategic purposes could be achieved by simply neutralizing and bypassing it. The Japanese at Rabaul and other bases on New Britain would have easily overwhelmed any such effort (by mid-September, MacArthur's entire naval force under Vice Admiral Arthur S. Carpender consisted of 5 cruisers, 8 destroyers, 20 submarines, and 7 small craft). Document numbers and a brief description including authority, title, date, area of reference and similar essential data were set forth under seventeen headings, such as 1) Diaries, Field; 5) Letters, Postcards; and 16) Technical Documents. Also produced were ATIS Publications. [24][25] The operation was the 24th Infantry Division's first combat assignment after home defense duties in Hawaii and training in Australia,[26] but the 41st Infantry Division had previously taken part in the fighting in New Guinea in 19421943. As the body of available material continued to grow, individual studies based on information available to ATIS were produced as Information Bulletins on subjects of general interest. It was captured and was found to be carrying a Japanese message. In the meantime another landing was made at Aitape in Australian New Guinea, about 125 miles (roughly 200 km) southeast of Hollandia, where Australian engineers soon completed an airstrip. American military leaders knew that while the number of prisoners (and thus information) taken in the Pacific would be relatively small, compared to the war in Europe, Japanese records would become all that more important as an intelligence source. Furthermore, the Milne Bay affair demonstrated once again that an amphibious assault without air protection, and with an assault force inferior to that of the defenders, could not succeed. ATIS was established on September 19, 1942, and was headquartered in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. Hollandia was a port on the north coast of New Guinea, part of the Dutch East Indies, and was the only anchorage between Wewak to the east, and Geelvink Bay to the west. [8] At the start of 1943, ICPOA was basically dealing with intercepted messages because not that many prisoners of war or documents had been captured. However, using 27 tons, at 40 lbs. On October 22, 1944, X Corps captured four sketches, one of gun positions north of Dulag, Leyte, and three of San Roque, Catmon Hill Area, Leyte, containing gun and coastal defense positions. Also captured on January 19th was a radio chart that was used by I Corps Signal officers to gain highly satisfactory results in the monitoring of Japanese radio communications. After the cessation of hostilities, the War Crimes Echelon, a separate part of ATIS, was established. The landings were undertaken simultaneously with the amphibious invasion of Aitape ("Operation Persecution") to the east. The remote but crucial airfield lay 25 miles south/southeast of the port town of Salamaua. Although one line of attack was carried out primarily by ground forces and the other by naval forces, the main feature of both undertakings was the close coordination of land, sea, and air power. Documents recovered from the bodies of dead Japanese, members of a Special Suicide Penetration Unit, killed near San Fabian, Luzon, on January 19, 1945, gave full accounts of the units and personnel involved. On 17 September, the Japanese had reached the village of Ioribaiwa, just 30 kilometres (20mi) from the Allied airdrome at Port Moresby. This information was put to immediate tactical use and resulted in the capture of the position by the US 7th Cavalry Squadron. Achieving complete surprise, they were able to destroy 340 aircraft on the ground and 60 more aircraft in the air, leaving the 6th Air Division unable to resist the planned invasion. [20], I Corps under Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger provided most of the ground forces for the combined Operations Reckless and Persecution. Task Force 74, under British Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley, consisted of the cruisers HMAS Australia and Shropshire plus several destroyers, while Task Force 75 was made up of three U.S. cruisers, Phoenix, Nashville and Boise under Rear Admiral Russell Berkey. The Allies proceeded to turn the island into an air base. Late the next month at Biak, an island in Geelvink Bay, New Guinea, CIC agents seized the records of the finance office, post office, bank, and Japanese headquarters. In January 1944, during the New Britain-New Guinea operations, captured Japanese code books enabled radio intelligence staff to determine the intentions of Lt. Gen. Hatazo Adachi, commander of the Japanese 18th Army. The gunners got a lot of practice; Port Moresby suffered its 78th raid on 17 August 1942. Researchers should, of course, use the National Archives Catalog. [18] For more information regarding the Z Plan see my article The Z Plan Story: Japans 1944 Naval Battle Strategy Drifts into U.S. Hands, Part I and Part II in Prologue, Vol. The Allied Air Forces acted promptly on this information and sank both Japanese submarines and supply barges. The destroyer Yayoi, sent to recover these men, was itself bombed and sunk on 11 September. While it was beyond MacArthur's capabilities to deny Buna to the Japanese, the same could not be said of Milne Bay, which was easily accessible by Allied naval forces. "[19] Thus was the overland threat to Port Moresby permanently removed. They arrived off Hollandia during the night of 21/22 April and about 20 miles (32km) offshore, the convoy split again with the Central Attack Group preceding for Humboldt Bay while the Western Attack Group turned towards Tanahmerah Bay. [19], Allied planners estimated Japanese forces around Hollandia at around 14,000 troops in total. 3, Glossary of military terms encountered in Japanese documents; No. [46], On landing, the U.S. troops came under sporadic small arms and machine gun fire, but this was quickly suppressed. Also that summer, the 441st CIC unit established a clinical laboratory, which, among other things, restored charred documents. The students were mostly second-generation Japanese-Americans (Nisei) from the West Coast. This contest produced a number of valuable documents and propaganda leaflets. Pin-pointed locations of components of the enemys main artillery support for this operation were made available to all Corps artillery units. [18]. 117, Infringement of the Laws of War and Ethics by the Japanese Medical Corps, contains information on violations of the Geneva Convention on the rules of warfare and points out how, time and again, medical personnel put to death their own patients. The work contains a complete study on the collection, translation, and processing of captured documents. [13], Due north of Port Moresby, on the northeast coast of Papua, are the Huon Gulf and the Huon Peninsula. [citation needed]. 1, List of Japanese Military Conventional Signs and Abbreviations (March 4, 1943); No. [5], According to John Laffin, the campaign "was arguably the most arduous fought by any Allied troops during World War II". 4, to acquire Japanese records, staged a contest, making awards to Burmese or Chinese turning in the most documents. They totaled 104 in number. All elements, with the exception of the twenty-man garrison had returned to Bantam Bay by 3 April. The unit was in effect a miniature ATIS, with various sections, coordinating the production of translation and interrogation reports of immediate operation value. [4][23], The main landings at Hollandia would be made at two locations. Except for some fairly heavy air raids, the Japanese reacted feebly to this penetration of their last defenses before the Philippines. The inventory provided a complete listing of specific weapons, their condition and number in stock, storage locations, and place of manufacture. 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