Anniversary: The Fall of Rabaul — January 23, 1942

On 23 January 1942, a Japanese invasion force of roughly 5,000 troops, backed by more than 100 aircraft, overwhelmed the 1,400-man Australian garrison defending Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. Twenty-eight Australians died in the fighting; around 800 were taken prisoner. Less than two weeks later, some 160 soldiers who had surrendered under a white flag at Tol Plantation were killed by bayonet or gunfire — a massacre the Australian government did not fully disclose for 47 years.

Japan turned Rabaul into the anchor of its South Pacific position, garrisoning it with tens of thousands of troops behind a tunnel network dug for hundreds of kilometres into the volcanic rock. Rather than pay the cost of storming those defences, Allied planners bypassed Rabaul entirely from 1944 onward, leaving a garrison of roughly 100,000 men isolated and starving for the rest of the war. It surrendered whole in September 1945, without ever having been invaded.

The Rabaul’s tunnels entry tells the invasion, the tunnels that followed it, and the eighteen months the Allies chose to wait rather than fight.