Fortress Rabaul

Rabaul is a township built around a deep-water harbor in Simpson Bay of the Gazelle Peninsula at the northeastern tip of the island of New Britain.

Formerly administered by Australia under the League of Nations mandates system, Rabaul was invaded and fell under Japanese military control on January 22, 1942. Thenceforth, it served as the principal forward operating base of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in the war against the Allied Powers. The Allied forces’ two-prong counter-offensives in the Solomon Islands and eastern New Guinea starting in August 1942, however, blunted the Japanese offensives. Devastating losses, defeats, and retreats of the Japanese followed upon the Allied launching of Operation Cartwheel since June 30, 1943.

By the end of September 1943, Japanese leaders at Tokyo deemed the South Pacific a lost cause and gave up on its retention. By late March 1944, some 100,000 Japanese army and navy servicemen, along with war prisoners who had been brought over for forced labor, were completely isolated at Rabaul and cut off from the rest of the theater of war.

This storymap draws upon the Japanese war history series, Senshi sōsho, to illuminate the story of the unlikely survival of those numerous Japanese servicemen trapped in the Rabaul area.