When Australia Was Under Siege

In the spring of 1942, the people of Australia felt that they were under siege. They had every reason to believe so. In the opening months of the Pacific War, Australians had watched one Allied bastion after another fall to the forces of Japan’s Rising Sun. Hong Kong collapsed almost immediately. The key American islands of Wake and Guam quickly followed. But the earthquake than shook the defense of the entire region occurred when the British Army in Singapore, which included Australian troops, surrendered to a numerically inferior Japanese force. Conquest of the Dutch East Indies came quickly afterwards. Only in the Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur’s Filipino-American army on the Bataan Peninsula stubbornly held out, had the Japanese been held in check.

By this time, Australia had already come under direct attack. With the usual supply lines already cut, all Allied support to the Philippines and Dutch East Indies had to be funneled through the northern Australian port of Darwin. Japan’s planners took notice of Darwin’s importance. As Japanese forces prepared to wrap up their East Indies conquest, Tokyo sent Admiral Nagumo’s powerful carrier force, Kibu Butai, into the Indian Ocean to strike the British Royal Navy at Colombo, Ceylon, and block all lines of Allied retreat from Java. Sailing close to Australia, the six carriers launched a devastating air raid against Darwin, essentially destroying the town.  Savaging ships and aircraft in the area, the Japanese sailed on to pummel the Royal Navy near Ceylon and chase the remaining ships out into the Indian Ocean.

Many people in Australian coastal ports panicked. With Kibu Butai roaming the Indian Ocean at will, residents feared further air attacks or even bombardment by battleships. Many relocated as far inland as they could afford. Such fears were prevalent in the southwestern cities off Perth and its port, Freemantle.  These offered the only practical haven to the defeated Allied Naval forces trying to escape Java.

The situation to the north continued to deteriorate. Extending their East Indies conquest, the Japanese seized the Admiralty Islands and New Britain, with its magnificent harbor of Rabaul. Landings soon followed at Lae and Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea.

In Mid-March, 1942, President Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to break through the Japanese blockade and take command in Australia. When he reached Melbourne, he was appalled to discover that he had few forces at his disposal. Australia’s Army was in the Middle East fighting Rommel or in Japanese POW camps in Singapore. Australia was, in fact, very vulnerable to invasion. Continued air strikes against Darwin from the former Dutch East Indies and the appearance of enemy submarines off both the east and west coasts of Australia emphasized its vulnerability.

This is the situation into which I thrust my characters in my new novel, Endure the Cruel Sun (working title). Those who have read my second novel, Hold Back the Sun, will remember some of them at once. Dutch officers, Colonel Jan Dijker and Captain Garrit Laterveer, are prisoners of the Japanese. Unfortunately for the two officers, the Nazi Gestapo had asked that they be returned to Europe by submarine. Nurse Catherine van Zweden, Garrit’s fiancé, is in a civilian internment camp. What fate does the cruel Japanese Colonel Katsura Okuma have in store for her?

Dutch intelligence in Australia learns of the Gestapo’s request as a result of Allied codebreaking. They scramble to determine if there is any possibility of rescuing the former master spy and air ace.

Jack Sewell, promoted to Lieutenant Commander, now commands the old four-stack destroyer, Rust. With Japan marshaling for a full scale invasion of New Guinea, Allied naval commanders dragoon Rust into the Royal Australian Navy for the looming naval battle to seal Australia’s fate.

I plan to publish Endure the Cruel Sun early next fall. Those who have yet to read HoldBack the Sun may want to check it out before release of the new book.

On Amazon.com, Hold Back the Sun has 131 reviews with a 4.2 out of 5 stars overall rating. Forty-three percent of the reviews are five-star.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, was released on Kindle on September 15, 2015, and a paperback version will be following.  For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.  

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Return to the Southwest Pacific

After venturing into different genres and different decades, I am returning to my first writing subject—The Second World War. Although my muse deserted me for a few months, she is back in full force, churning out scenes of combat, self-sacrifice, espionage, and romance. The venue is once again the Southwest Pacific Theater in the crucial middle months of 1942.

When I published my bestselling novel, HOLD BACK THE SUN (HBTS), I left several pieces of unfinished business in Java and Australia. My principal Dutch characters were in the hands of the Japanese conquerors. Having lost almost their entire strike force in the battles around Java, Allied naval forces were in disarray. Only in the Philippines, where General MacArthur’s Filipino-American Army still held out stubbornly on the Bataan Peninsula, had Japan’s forces been held in check.

My next novel, ENDURE THE CRUEL SUN (working title), begins about the time that HBTS concluded. Java has just fallen. Japanese forces seize islands north of Australia from the Allies. Steadily advancing eastward, a string of Japanese island air bases threatens to cut the essential shipping lanes between Pearl Harbor and Australia and New Zealand.

Having lost their Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy responds with their last ace-in-the-hole: the four aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet.  Air strikes against Japan’s outlying island bases culminate with a raid on landings in progress in New Guinea. Heavily outnumbered in ships, the Americans have one tremendous advantage: Their newly-won ability to read JN25b, the principal Japanese naval code. The Coral Sea east of Australia becomes the pivotal battleground of the Pacific War. Jack Sewell, the destroyer officer from HBTS, is in the middle of the action.

Again, I am dealing with an international cast of characters. Besides Jack, Dutch officers Jan Dijker and Garrit Laterveer, are again in play. Nurse Christine van Zweden, Garrit’s fiancé, finds herself facing an impossible choice dictated by HBTS’s arch villain, Japanese Colonel Katsura Okuma. And across the globe in Germany, the Gestapo lusts to get its hands on Dijker, formerly the British Special Operations Executive’s key spy in Occupied Holland.

Jack Sewell’s new love interest is an American Navy nurse. Her adventures include being a surgical nurse in the jungle hospitals on Bataan, escaping to Corregidor just before Bataan surrenders, and then boarding a submarine to Australia on the night before Corregidor capitulates.

I’m about a third of the way through writing ENDURE THE CRUEL SUN. I hope to publish it sometime next fall.  Look for promotional posts near the end of summer.

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Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, was released on Kindle on September 15, 2015, and a paperback version will be following.  For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.  

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Recalling Another Lost Airliner

Today’s headlines and TV news are filled with speculation about what has happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370. The Boeing 777 vanished from radar last Saturday. Each day brings new evidence and new theories of the fate of the plane and the 239 souls aboard. A map in this morning’s Washington Post shows the entire Far East with circles drawn showing how far the plane could have flown on the fuel aboard. While reading the accompanying article, I was struck by how eerily similar the MH 370 mystery is to one I uncovered while doing research for my latest novel, Hold Back the Sun.

Hold Back the Sun begins with a Pan American Clipper flying boat flight across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila in the Philippines. When this service was begun in the 1930s, the Pacific was a vast stretch of open water with few aids to navigation, as we understand them today. Fuel capacity limited the flights to daylight island-hopping. Nights were spent in posh hotels ashore. The four-engine aircraft rode radio beacons from island to island.  The price of a passenger ticket was the equivalent of about $5,000 in today’s currency.  Only airmail contracts with the U.S. government made the flights profitable. For businessmen, cutting the trans-Pacific travel time from 30 days on a ship to five days flying made the flights attractive.

The last stop before Manila was on the U.S. controlled island of Guam. About 136 miles to the north, the Japanese-owned island of Saipan was home to a major base of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN).

At about 12:15 p.m. Manila time on July 29, 1938, The Pan Am flying boat, Hawaii Clipper, reported its noon position by radio to airline stations in Guam and the Philippines. At that time, the plane was about 582 nautical miles east-southeast of Manila and on schedule for arrival in the Philippines. No contact with the aircraft ever occurred after that transmission. The Martin 130 aircraft and its passengers and crew simply vanished. A widespread air and surface search of the projected course found no wreckage, but an oil slick was encountered. Samples of the oil were taken and tested, but proved not to be oil from the aircraft.  With war raging in China and about to begin in Europe, the fate of Hawaii Clipper and the people aboard soon faded from the news. It remained a total mystery until the end of the Pacific War.

In the late 1940s, rumors began to circulate among the relatives of the people lost on Hawaii Clipper. One story attributed to a U.S. Navy admiral was that the plane had been found in Japanese colors at Yokosuka Naval Base by occupying forces.  Another rumor suggested that IJN naval intelligence officers has alleged that they had hijacked Hawaii Clipper west of Guam and flown it to their new seaplane base on the island of Truk.  The purported motives behind this theft were to stop over three million American dollars aboard the flight from being delivered to the Chinese government by a prominent Chinese-American businessman.  Stealing the details of the latest Pratt and Whitney engines that powered the clipper was another possible reason.

The similarities of Hawaii Clipper’s loss to that of Amelia Earhart barely a year before soon spawned a number of theories and enthusiasts.  In 2000, after many years of research, Charles N. Hill published a book entitled, FIX ON THE RISING SUN: The Clipper Hijacking of 1938 –and the Ultimate M.I.A’s. Mr. Hill’s thesis was that two Saipan IJN officers hid in the plane’s baggage compartment, emerged soon after liftoff from Guam, and commandeered control of the flight. He believes that they then diverted the plane to Truk. While enroute, the Japanese officers supposedly forced the Pan Am navigator, George M. Davis, to file false position reports to make Pan Am believe that the plane remained on its planned course. Mr. Hill presents a fairly convincing case that the false position reports contained clues to point investigators to the actual destination—Truk Lagoon. Mr. Hill also documented conversations with native people on Truk in which they told of helping to bury a number of Caucasians in the foundations of an IJN hospital being built at the time.  He was unable to get government permission to dig under the foundations to test the veracity of the stories.

Mr. Hill died without ever getting to prove or disprove his theories.  Guy Noffsinger, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, has taken up the quest for the missing clipper. He has a website on the subject at http://lostclipper.com. Mr. Noffinger has also traveled to Truk and believes that he has identified the slab beneath which the crew and passengers of Hawaii Clipper are allegedly buried. He plans to return to Truk this year and is optimistic that he will be able to examine the site with ground penetrating sonar and perhaps excavate. I hope that Mr. Noffsinger is successful. Bringing closure to the descendants and relatives of the nine crew members and six passengers lost with the plane would be well worth the effort.

Note: Warren Bell is a historical fiction author with two novels for sale either for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. Both are set during WWII, with Fall Eagle One taking place in Europe, and Hold Back the Sun set in the war in the Pacific.