ISBN: 0-7603-2349-6
Pages: 304

Acknowledgments; Prologue; maps; photos; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   Anyone familiar with the war in the Pacific will know before opening Bruce Gamble's book on the loss of Lark Force on New Britain that there will be few happy endings for the defeated Aussies. The author further foreshadows the fate of the majority of the troops with his brief Prologue about the USS Sturgeon moving into position and firing a spread of torpedoes toward the Montevideo Maru "...with more than a thousand Allied prisoners crammed into its hold." Knowing what these men have coming only makes the story more touching and more difficult to put down.
   The book is also difficult to put down because Gamble is a very accomplished writer, as he proved with The Black Sheep and Black Sheep One. Those two books set a high standard, difficult for any author to sustain, but Gamble has definitely produced another winner.
   Following the Prologue, Darkest Hour chronicles formation of the Australian 2/22nd Battalion, especially focusing on musician, composer, and arranger William Arthur Gullidge and his Salvation Army bandmates who enlisted in the battalion en mass. Although the Diggers expected to be shipped to North Africa where they would join their mates in the war against Rommel, by April the battalion had sailed to Rabaul on New Britain. Gamble performs his usual excellent job as he gets the book off the ground, especially when describing the lives and routines of individual Aussies. Unfortunately, within the span of a few paragraphs the book, while looking at larger issues, miscounts the number of Australian divisions in North Africa, mistakenly refers to Malaya as Malaysia, and mischaracterizes Douglas MacArthur's position in the Philippines. Those are just about Gamble's only misfires in the entire book.
   With the 2/22nd having arrived in Rabaul, the third chapter of Darkest Hour turns to a history of New Britain and vicinity, explaining its discovery and settlement and discussing in particular the highly active nature of the local geology, with frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Nevertheless, prior to World War I the seat of the German administration of the Bismarcks and Papua New Guinea was located at Rabaul within an ancient caldera. By the mid 1930s Rabaul was a bustling and prosperous colonial town under Australian mandate with a population of 800 Europeans, 1000 Asians, and 3000 natives. In May 1937, however, earthquakes, tsunamis, and eruptions devastated the town and killed more than 500 natives. By the time the 2/22nd arrived as the main component of Lark Force, Rabaul had recovered its tropical prosperity, but within a few weeks the Diggers were entertained by renewed volcanic activity within the caldera.
   Chapter Three covers the last weeks of peace on the island, describing the routine of the troops and the extremely limited efforts to turn Rabaul into a position that could be defended against Japanese attack. With the advent of war, the Australian government confirmed the decision—not transmitted to New Britain—that the 2/22nd would be written off: neither reinforced nor withdrawn. In fact, neither Canberra nor Lark Force would even consider creating contingency plans for evacuating the troops should it become necessary in an emergency. On the other hand, almost all civilian women and children were ordered to depart the Bismarcks before the end of December 1941. Only Lark Force and a Royal Australian Air Force composite squadron remained, along with a vast store of tinned food sufficient for two years.
   The next chapter segues into Japanese planning and the first air strikes against Rabaul on 4 January 1942. Although the raids killed or wounded thirty natives, little or no damage was done to the defenders. Bombers reappeared on 6 January, this time causing damage to airfield facilities and destroying an Australian plane, and they arrived again the following day. After a break in the action, bombers struck again on 16 January in an effort to destroy the limited Australian airpower protecting Rabaul. On 20 January Japanese aircraft, this time flying from aircraft carriers, launched their biggest attack, shooting down most of the RAAF machines, sinking the Norwegian freighter Herstein, and knocking out Australian positions around the town.

   Forty-five minutes after beginning the attack, the Japanese concluded it with a deliberate pageant. Zeros showboated with aerobatics and bombers wheeled overhead in formation, flaunting their power. Down below, plumes of smoke rose from the burning wharves and the red-hot hull of the Herstein, and clouds of dust swirled above both airdromes. Luckily there had been few casualties aside from the Norwegian sailors, but the crewmen from the crash-landed Wirraways were hospitalized with an assortment of broken bones and bullet wounds.
   At Vunakanau, Squadron Leader Lerew was doubly frustrated. Not only had the Japanese destroyed most of 24 Squadron, but his own superiors at Port Moresby were becoming antagonistic. Soon after the attack, a message from RAAF Operations and Signals ordered him to strike back at the enemy with "all available aircraft." Lerew had two Wirraways remaining, but one needed repairs and neither was fitted with universal bomb racks. The lone undamaged Hudson would have to do the job, a suicide mission against the powerful enemy fleet. A crew bravely manned the bomber and took off to find the Japanese ships, but they failed to find anything before darkness blanketed the ocean.
   Glad to have the Hudson back, Lerew sent a message to Port Moresby stating that he intended to use the bomber to evacuate his wounded men. Headquarters had other ideas, and their next message instructed him to keep the squadron in a combat-ready status. Exasperated, Lerew turned to his intelligence officer, Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey R. Lempriere, for help in drafting a suitably sardonic response. The two men decided that a particular Latin phrase seemed appropriate, especially in light of their current situation. Lerew encrypted just three words: "MORITURI VOS SALUTAMUS." At Port Moresby, the staff was at first puzzled by the message, but eventually someone recognized it as the gladiators' legendary hail to Caesar: "We who are about to die salute you."

   With headquarters fully aware that invasion was imminent, Lark Force was ordered to depart the vulnerable encampments around the bay and move into defensive positions. Curiously, the troops were intentionally told this was only an exercise, with the expectation they would be returning within a few days. Consequently, most of the troops moved without all the equipment they would need for long-term survival in the jungle. As the Aussies prepared airstrips and facilities for demolition, Japanese aircraft conducted a surprise attack early on 22 January. Both the coastal guns protecting Rabaul were destroyed. Soon afterward the Japanese invasion fleet was spotted as it steamed steadily toward Rabaul. With the town practically abandoned, Lark Force's pair of AA guns, immobile on the high mountainside, were destroyed and the gunners withdrew.

   While the gunners made their way around the caldera to Three Ways, other elements of Lark Force were also in motion. Scanlan rearranged his defenses like a nervous chess player, pulling some rifle companies away from the beaches to new positions astride key roads, ordering others to dig in at sites where the enemy might land.
   As soon as the wrecked gun emplacements at Praed Point were cleared of the dead and wounded, Scanlan ordered R Company and the survivors of the Royal Australian Artillery detachment to evacuate Crater Peninsula. Captain Silverman checked himself out of the hospital and returned to Praed Point in his pajamas to help with the exodus. Most of the men walked around Simpson Harbor to Four Ways, where Scanlan had established his new headquarters near Noah's Mission, a small native church. R Company dug in alongside the intersection, while Captain Travers and D Company awaited orders to move forward toward Kokopo or reinforce Captain Appel at Vunakanau, whichever was necessary.
   A Company, having completed the rigging of Lakunai airdrome, deployed to new positions inside the caldera just north of Mount Vulcan. Major Owen had his men dig in just behind the beach, which gave them a good field of fire across the harbor. Joining Owen's company was the local detachment of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, whose eighty-odd troops had been called to active duty two days earlier in a brief township ceremony. While some of the volunteers unrolled bales of barbed wire along the beach, others sighted in their single Vickers machine gun. Behind them, Major Matheson of the 17th Antitank Battery aligned his 2-pounder guns. Nearby, three mortar teams set up their weapons, setting the angle to drop their rounds just outside the wire. Finally, "Doc" Silverman erected a first did station alongside the command post. Assisting him as medic was bandsman Bert Morgan, who had recently been promoted to corporal.
   A few miles to the south, Captain Mclnnes directed B Company to dig in next to Three Ways. His orders were to prevent the Japanese from penetrating inland from Mount Vulcan while also blocking their attempts to approach up the Kokopo Ridge Road. Two Vickers machine guns were set up to flank both sides of the road, and the rifle platoons fortified their positions with coconut logs.
   Finally, Scanlan ordered Captain Shier to take over the hastily formed Y Company and fortify Raluana Point, the only other defended beachhead besides Vulcan. The new company was supposed to be used only as a last resource, yet for some unfathomable reason Scanlan placed it on the exposed right flank of the Australian line. Not only was Y Company isolated from the next closest unit by seven miles of bad roads, but the phone line laid that night proved unreliable. The only positive element Shier could count on was the experience of his junior officers. Lieutenant Lennox "Len" Henry, for example, was one of the few professional soldiers in Lark Force. An excellent instructor, he had only a short time to prepare the "odds and sods" for combat.

   On at least two occasions permission was refused to have food supplies moved to secure inland locations where they could have been used to sustain troops, and the stores were eventually destroyed to prevent them from falling into Japanese hands. As engineers demolished the airstrips and supply dumps, explosions accidentally smashed Lark Force's remaining radio equipment, cutting off contact with the outside world. In a pouring rain along blocked roads the hospital staff attempted to evacuate all the wounded from the Japanese air strikes. Numbers of soldiers, airmen, and civilians—some with permission and some without—fled south and attempted to escape to safety before the invasion commenced. Given the confusion and disorder, Gamble rightly titles the chapter on the evacuation of Rabaul "Chaos."
   The next chapter turns the focus back to the invading Japanese. With no aircraft, coastal guns, or AA weapons remaining to oppose them, Japanese troops began landing at 0110 on 23 January. Despite taking casualties from Aussie mortars and machine guns, by daybreak Rabaul and environs were firmly in Japanese hands and the defenders were retreating, mostly in disarray.
   From that point, Darkest Hour becomes less a book of military history and more a horrifying adventure story as bands of Aussies—without food, equipment, or maps—struggled through the mountainous jungle in an effort to find safety. Occasionally they were offered succor at various villages and missions, as well as advice about the best routes to take to the points most likely to be used for rescue by RAAF flying boats. Decisions about how to proceed became matters of life and death for tired, hungry men in tattered rags of uniforms. For many, the only choice was to sit down and wait for the Japanese to arrive and capture them. The invaders, however, encountered their own difficulties with jungle, rain, and malaria, enabling some groups of Diggers to trek desperately beyond the grasp of the enemy.
   Not everyone was so lucky. Many were captured. Some were taken back to Rabaul as POWs. Some were executed on the spot. Gamble devotes a full chapter to the massacre at Tol on Wide Bay where Japanese troops landing by boat on 3 February found more than two hundred members of Lark Force. Most of them were taken into the jungle the next day and bayoneted to death.

   The mass murders at Tol and Waitavalo plantations on February 4 represented a turning point. Prior to that Bloody Wednesday, no one from Lark Force had successfully gotten off New Britain, which seemed to validate Major General Horii's warning that they could "find neither food nor way of escape." (About twenty troops had been airlifted with 24 Squadron two weeks earlier, but that was technically an evacuation, not an escape.) In the wake of the massacres, however, some 385 soldiers and sixty civilians escaped to Port Moresby or the Australian mainland over a period of ten weeks. They were the lucky ones. The accounts of their courage, ingenuity, and perseverance not only gave the Commonwealth something to cheer about, but rank among the most compelling escape stories of the entire war.
   The dark side of their story is that they endured long weeks or even months of the harshest conditions imaginable before they reached safety. During that time, an estimated sixty-five evaders died from starvation or disease—more than were killed during the invasion itself. Most of those deaths could have been prevented with timely assistance from Canberra, but none came. No Australian warships were sent to rescue the remnants of Lark Force, no flying boats returned to pick up stragglers. The War Cabinet, aware for weeks that the troops were on the run, did nothing to help them.

   The next two chapters follow the fortunes of evaders trying to escape New Britain. Some simply gave up. Some died trying. Some, despite all the odds stacked against them, succeeded in reaching safety in New Guinea or Australia. Whatever their fate, Gamble infuses the proceedings with a sense of immediacy that makes the reader care about each of the groups and each of the battered men he highlights. Unprepared, in inhospitable terrain, in the midst of an unmerciful enemy, and with little or no help from higher headquarters, that any sliver of Lark Force survived to tell the death-defying tale seems incredible. More than 300 troops eventually reached safety but, as Gamble describes, in almost every case the men were so stricken by malaria and malnourishment that very few were ever able to return to duty.
   Notwithstanding the difficult but uplifting tales of those who escaped, the bulk of Lark Force was captured. Those not immediately executed were held in Rabaul in appalling conditions, forced to perform heavy work, and fed food poor in quality and quantity. Chapter Thirteen details what the POWs endured, and further describes some of the Japanese activities as they built Rabaul into a major base. Many of the familiar 2/22nd faces reappear here. While the Aussies "...took pleasure in stealing [from the Japanese] whatever they could carry off and sabotaging what they couldn't," in fact they suffered relentless beatings and worse. Engineering officer John Gray was beaten and vivisected, his still-beating heart removed from his chest. More commonly, Aussies, natives, and imported laborers were beheaded, sometimes simply as a way of testing swords and strokes. The prisoners were also at risk from the increasing frequency and power of Allied air attacks.
   As those attacks accelerated, the Australians found themselves spectators not only to the bombing of Rabaul, but also the comings and goings of Japanese warships. The fourteenth chapter, in fact, shifts the perspective slightly to include some of the broader events with a bearing on the POWs, such as the Battle of the Coral Sea. Most importantly, due in large measure to food shortages on New Britain, all the male Australian prisoners, except the officers, were loaded like cargo into the holds of the Montevideo Maru for transport to Hainan Island. In parallel with those developments, Gamble traces the activities of the USS Sturgeon as the submarine departed for its fourth war patrol and eventually entered the South China Sea. Likewise, the hellship with over a thousand Australians aboard passed through the Babuyan Channel and steamed within sight of the Sturgeon. Here the book comes full circle, artfully reaching the same moment in time as Gamble's Prologue. This chapter describes the same maneuvering in more detail, as well as the firing of a spread of torpedoes. This time, however, the gut-wrenching events don't pause, the Montevideo Maru is fatally hit and sinks in eleven minutes, and all the Australians, trapped in the sealed holds, perish in a black nightmare of twisted steel and unstoppable water.

   There is no evidence that any of the hatch covers were unfastened during the eleven minutes that the Montevideo Maru remained afloat. The Japanese were concerned only about saving their own lives. Dozens got safely into the water, but twenty crewmen and guards were either killed by the explosions or drowned. The surviving Japanese righted the capsized boats and climbed aboard. One boatload headed west; the other two remained more or less stationary until daylight, and then headed east toward Luzon.
   For the prisoners down in the pitch-black holds, those last eleven minutes were measured quite differently. If any men were confined in the aft two holds, they did not suffer long. Those not killed outright by the exploding torpedo were knocked senseless by its concussive effects, and then quickly drowned as tons of seawater rushed in.
   The truly unfortunate victims were those in the forward holds. Before the end came, they endured eleven minutes of mind-bending terror. No one could see what was happening; they could only feel the ship canting steeply, and their ears were assaulted by the screech of collapsing bulkheads and painful pressure changes as air was forced from flooded spaces. Some men probably attempted to reach the hatches, but as they groped upward they found no escape. The effects of adrenalin gave them strength only for a short time. Then, as their black world tilted ever more crazily, they slid aft and piled up against the lowest bulkhead. Under the crush of filthy bodies, those at the bottom quickly lost consciousness.
   The panic that surely accompanied those final minutes can only be imagined. Sentimentalists would like to believe that some of the prisoners calmly faced their impending death, but the circumstances strongly suggest that a contagious, mass hysteria swept through the black holds. And who could blame the victims: in the middle of the night they were plunged into an unfathomable nightmare, each second filled with the tormenting sounds of water rushing in and the ship breaking apart. As the minutes wore on, the men who were still conscious would have instinctively tried to claw their way upward, their shouts and screams only adding to the freakish pandemonium.
   The terror mercifully ended at 0240. With a final hiss of foul-smelling air, the bow of the Montevideo Maru slid beneath the waves.

   Although after the sinking of the Montevideo Maru it seems in some ways like a denouement, Gamble finishes the book with a solid chapter on the transport of Lark Force officers and women from Rabaul to Japan, and the sad years of imprisonment and labor there, as well as their eventual return home. He also investigates some of the discrepancies in the accounts of the loss of Montevideo Maru and the Lark Force enlisted men, and the conspiracy theories spun by some, but finds little reason to doubt the official story.
   Gamble takes a deliberate, detached tone with his book. For example, he unambiguously identifies atrocities committed by the Japanese, but he doesn't explicitly judge them or condemn them. Likewise, the weight of evidence he presents makes it clear the leaders of Lark Force were not up to their task, even though he's circumspect in most of his comments. For example, Colonel John Scanlan, commanding Australian forces in New Guinea and the Bismarcks from his HQ in Rabaul, made multiple missteps. When his officers suggested caching food and supplies in the jungle in case the 2/22nd was forced to withdraw, he denounced them as defeatist. Although he was fully aware of the imminent invasion, when he ordered troops into defensive positions he insisted they be told they were only being deployed on a training exercise. After initially informing the Diggers that every man would be expected to fight to the last, and there would be no withdrawal, he suddenly declared that it was every man for himself, and he fled into the jungle with full kit carted by his native servant. Gamble leaves it to readers to draw the conclusion that Scanlan's inept, unbalanced decisions cost the lives of many of his men.
   Although military events form the backbone of the book, the actual combat was limited to a few hours, and Darkest Hour reads more like a ghastly adventure tale and a painful human drama. Gamble never allows readers to forget that these were real, living, breathing men and women who faced hardship and death. As much as possible, he also includes recollections from survivors, but this is a case where most of the participants died suddenly and unexpectedly without leaving any record of their activities on New Britain.
   If Darkest Hour doesn't quite measure up to Bruce Gamble's previous books, it's only because he set the bar so high with his first two. This is still an excellent piece of work, at the same time informative and dramatic. As always, Gamble manages to evoke a sense of bittersweet memories across a chasm of many years, as though the reader personally knew all these Aussies long ago and suffered at their loss. There are other books on this sad episode, notably the Australian official history and Little Hell, but Gamble's book certainly stands as the most complete, most engaging, and most poignant account, in many ways similar to Gregory Urwin's award-winning volume about Wake Island, Facing Fearful Odds. Like all the best World War II books, Darkest Hour transcends military matters and illuminates the human dimension and utter tragedy of warfare.
   Highly recommended, and certainly one of the best new books of the year.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Zenith Press.
   Thanks to Zenith for providing this review copy.