Carlson's Raiders force action

A Last Secret 9

It was August 1942 and in the European theatre, the war was in the balance. In North Africa, the German General Erwin Rommel had reached El Alamein, bound for the Suez Canal. He was halted by the Allies, including the men of 2NZEF. Arthur Heenan's brother Eddie was there. In early August General Bernard Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army at El Alamein and, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill put it, took action marking it was ‘the end of the beginning’. The Nazis were rolling across the Soviet Union, on 3 July 1942, seizing Sevastopol in the Crimea and driving toward Stalingrad. 

A Last Secret

In the Pacific, the picture was dark. On 7 May 1942 US forces holding out on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines surrendered, ending all American resistance there. On 7 and 8 May 1942 the Battle of the Coral Sea, off New Guinea's eastern tip, had been fought inconclusively between aircraft from carriers that never saw each other. USS Lexington was sunk. USS Yorktown damaged. The Japanese had two aircraft carriers damaged. Significantly the Japanese, for the time being, were halted in their thrust towards the southern New Guinea coast and north-eastern Australia

A month later, 4-7 June 1942, and to the north, the Americans in the Battle of Midway turned back a Japanese bid to take the island. The Japanese lost four carriers and 322 planes. Japanese plans to dominate the Pacific  were still in place. Indeed in June 1942, they had even reached up into the Aleutian Islands and seized one. A Japanese force had landed on the northern coast of New Guinea and a Japanese marine battalion had started southward across the Kokoda Trail in a bid to take Port Moresby on the southern coast. The Australians stopped them. On 3 May 1942 another Japanese force, operating out of Rabaul, had seized Tulagi, the capital of the Solomon Island Protectorate. The Japanese had landed in other parts of the Solomons in March 1942 and were building an airfield on Guadalcanal Island. It was here the American strategy determined that they had to stop the Japanese and start the long haul back to Japan. This was to come with Operation Watchtower, the US Marine Corps landing on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942. It was unopposed on the beach and the Marines quickly seized the nearly finished airfield, renaming it Henderson Field after an aviator killed at Midway. In the Gilberts, Butaritari, where John Jones had been based, had been developed as a Japanese seaplane base and a lookout station for more developed bases in the Marshall Islands. The Allies were well to the south and in no position to challenge, effectively leaving the whole of the Gilberts a Japanese sphere.