Pacific · Australia and United States vs Japan
Battle of Milne Bay
25 August 1942 – 7 September 1942
Japanese marines landed at the eastern tip of Papua to seize the Allied airfields at Milne Bay, only to run into a larger Australian garrison dug in around the strips. A week of night attacks through the coconut plantations and swamp failed to break the defence, and the survivors were taken off by sea. It was widely reported at the time as the first outright defeat of a Japanese landing force on land.
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Day by day
— The landing
Some 1,200 men of the Kure 5th and Sasebo 5th Special Naval Landing Forces, with two light tanks, come ashore after dark near Waga Waga, eleven kilometres east of the airstrip they mean to take. Clowes has 8,800 men at Milne Bay, a militia brigade and an AIF brigade, with two RAAF Kittyhawk squadrons on the strip; the Japanese think there are a few hundred.
— No. 3 Strip
The Japanese overran the 2/10th Battalion at KB Mission with their tanks on the night of 27 August, then bogged the tanks and left them. At about 03:00 on 31 August they attack across the open end of No. 3 Strip in the rain and are shot down by the 61st and 25th Battalions and the American engineers' machine-guns; Hayashi is among the dead. By day the Kittyhawks strafe anything that moves on the track.
— The withdrawal
The 2/12th and then the 2/9th Battalion push east along the track from 1 September, past the abandoned tanks at KB Mission; at Goroni on the 4th Corporal John French silences three machine-gun posts alone and is killed at the third. Rabaul orders the force out, and the cruiser Tenryu and destroyers lift about 1,300 men from the beaches on the night of 5 September. Around 600 Japanese are left dead in the plantations, and the Australians lose 167 killed.
