Target: Rabaul by Bruce Gamble Page B

coast to Wewak, arriving the third week of March. Any relief the Americans may have felt about becoming prisoners quickly evaporated. They were held in awful conditions at Wewak, first in cramped caves for several days, then in two deep, muddy pits for a week. Finally the prisoners were moved to a hilltop enclosure.
    Living conditions improved, but in early April, a noncommissioned officer of the 6th Field Kempeitai arrived from Rabaul with a military police squad. Interrogations commenced. Several Japanese army officers asked questions through an interpreter. Perhaps because of the officers’ presence, the interrogations did not include beatings or torture, although threats of execution were frequent.
    After approximately a week of interrogation, the Kempeitai sergeant and his squad escorted the Americans across the narrow channel to Kairiru—the same island reconnoitered earlier by Mot. His report turned out to be accurate: the 2nd Special Naval Base Force occupied the former Catholic mission. During their brief stay, the American captives saw only a few Europeans and wondered anxiously about Mot, hoping his communication with Father Manion a few weeks earlier had not led to trouble.
    Unfortunately, it had.
    Tipped off that Allied airmen were hiding on Wokeo, the Japanese sent a patrol to the island. The soldiers arrived the second week of March, mere days after McMurria and his men departed. Mot denied all involvement, and the Japanese found nothing incriminating during a cursory search. The patrol moved on after Mot gave them a couple of chickens for their trouble; thus the islanders escaped punishment.
    The same could not be said of the missionaries on Kairiru. Mot’s trip to visit Father Manion may have precipitated a heinous war crime.
    AMONG THE DOZENS of church-based missions in New Guinea, some of the oldest were German organizations established before World War I, when New Guinea was a territory of Imperial Germany. During World War II, Japanese forces in New Guinea did not regard German missionaries as allies, even though Nazi Germany and Japan shared a military allegiance. Instead, missionaries came under the jurisdiction of the minsei-bu as neutral civilians. Soon after the Japanese occupied Wewak, they rounded up the local missionaries and transported them to Saint John’s Catholic mission on Kairiru. At first the civilians were free to move about the island, but the situation soon changed.
    Some missionaries and natives were willing to risk their lives for the Allied cause. At least two clergymen, Father Manion and Brother Victor Salois, members of the Society of the Divine Word, were American citizens. According to postwar testimonies, the Japanese discovered that several downed Allied airmen were not only hiding in the region, but had contacted the mission with the help of “local people who harbored anti-Japanese sentiment.” Mot’s visit to Kairiru fits this description precisely, and the timing of his trip is more than coincidental.
    On the morning of March 17, a few days after the Japanese patrol failed to find the Americans on Wokeo, forty-two civilian men, women, and children were rounded up at Saint John’s and escorted to the destroyer Akikaze , anchored at Kairiru. Included among the mission staff were the two Americans; there were also Chinese nationals, at least one native girl, and two Chinese infants, thought to be orphans. All were treated as neutral civilians aboard Akikaze , which sailed from Kairiru at noon. Late that afternoon the warship stopped at Manus in the Admiralty Islands, where another twenty civilians boarded—again mostly European missionaries, including six women. The next day, Akikaze arrived in Kavieng Harbor, New Ireland, stopping only long enough to receive a message delivered by boat. Akikaze then steamed south, navigating a maze of small islands until it reached the Bismarck Sea. Once safely in open water, the warship headed toward its Eighth Fleet base at