Battle for Noemfoor

Battle for Noemfoor
(Operation Tabletennis)

Allied attack plan

date	July 2, 1944 to August 31, 1944
place	Noemfoor - Dutch New Guinea
output	Allied victory
consequences	Recapturing Noemfoor

Parties to the conflict
United States 48 United States Australia Netherlands Australia Netherlands	Japanese Empire Japan
Commander
United States 48 Walter Krueger Edwin D Patrick Russell S Berkey Frederick Scherger United States 48 United States 48 Australia	Japanese Empire Suesada Shimizu
Troop strength
about 10,000 soldiers	approx. 2,000 soldiers
losses
63 dead 343 wounded 3 missing	1,730 dead, 186 prisoners

Overview - Pacific War

McArthur and Nimitz planning operations on Japanese bases in New Guinea - late March 1944

The battle of noemfoor was a landing operations of the Allied forces under the code name Operation Table Tennis on the from Japanese -occupied island units Noemfoor in Netherlands New Guinea during the Pacific War in World War II .

prehistory

Noemfoor, located in the Geelvinkbaai and belonging to the Schouten Islands , was occupied during the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia . The exact date is unknown, as the island did not play a role until the newly reconsidered Japanese defense strategy in September 1943. The completely surprised natives , who were "ungrateful" at the liberation from western imperialism by the Japanese and were appalled to work for them, withdrew to the mountains of the island. The Japanese therefore relocated around 3000 Indonesians from Java to Noemfoor so that they could expand the airfields . At the end of the war, only 403 of them survived. Everyone else had died of disease or malnutrition .

The Japanese use Noemfoor as a gathering point for the relief of their troops on Biak . The supply ships leaving Manokwari were able to travel the 110 km distance to Noemfoor during the night and the next night to Biak, which is a further 140 km away from Noemfoor.

Allied planning

On June 5, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur , commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) , informed General Walter Krueger that it was necessary to take Noemfoor. On June 14th, he directed his direct subordinates to work out a plan for a June 30th landing operation . Admiral Kinkaid appointed Admiral Fechteler to command the maritime task force. The landing units consisted of the 158th Regiment of the 6th Infantry Division under Brigadier General Edwin D. Patrick , supported by artillery , tank units , engineers and service units. These 7100 men were named Cyclone Task Force . The 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment stood ready as a relief . MacArthur rescheduled the start of the operation to July 2nd at the start of the planning phase.

The maps of Noemfoor available to General Krueger were based on older aerial photographs of the island. Therefore, he decided to send some scouts in PT boats to the coast near the Kamiri airfield. On the night of June 22nd to 23rd, the boats reached their destination, but were discovered relatively quickly by the Japanese and had to turn back with little useful information.

Admiral Fechteler used two cruiser squadrons in his planning for landing support , which operated under commanders Berkey and Crutchley . There were also fourteen destroyers and the ships for the landing forces.

American bombers had already approached Noemfoor on June 10 and dropped around 800 tons of bombs by July 1, most of them in the area of Kamiri airfield. The defending Japanese had few fighters to oppose this, as their main force had been withdrawn to Saipan . Air defense from the ground was also poor. Although hardly any Japanese planes were to be expected in the area around Noemfoor, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) patrolled day and night. If they did not find any targets, low-level targets were announced on the return flight to the base , which were then attacked.

On June 21st the organization of the CYCLONE task force of the RAAF with the temporary headquarters in Finschhafen . General Krueger released the plan of attack the following day. The announcement to the troops then took place on June 23. General Patrick returned with his staff to Wakde - Sarmi to finally complete the preparations. On June 28, the landing craft carried out one last test run and shortly afterwards the loading of the ships was completed.

The Japanese occupiers

Towards the end of 1943, about 2000 Japanese soldiers (parts of the 35th and 36th Divisions ) under Colonel Suesada Shimizu were stationed on Noemfoor . After Noemfoor was included in the defense network of western New Guinea, they began to develop three airfields with the help of Indonesian slave laborers:

Kamiri - on the northwest coast of the island, near the village of Kamiri
Yebrurro (now called Kornasoren) - on the north coast and
Namber - on the west coast, near the village of the same name

The airfields should serve, among other things, to support the defensive measures against the Allied advance. Furthermore, the Japanese bases on the Vogelkop peninsula could be reached from Noemfoor .

After the Japanese had discovered the Allied reconnaissance boats off Kamiri, they assumed a planned invasion during the first week of July and began to add obstacles to the coast in front of the Kamiri airfield. This included around 300 land mines , the location of which was marked by the Japanese to protect their own troops, so that they were quickly discovered by the Americans when they landed.

The battle

The three cruisers and 22 destroyers of Task Force 74 under Commodore Collins and Task Force 75 under Rear Admiral Berkey prepared the landing by bombarding the beaches on Noemfoor, primarily at Kornasoren and Kamiri. The shelling began eight minutes before the landing craft launched on July 2nd. Shortly before, B-24 Liberator bombed the beach with 300 1,000-pound bombs.

The landing

LST's on Noemfoor beach

At 8:00 a.m. on July 2, the main force landed near the Kamiri airfield with little Japanese resistance. Around 7,100 men were brought ashore in seven waves. However, the LCM's could not overcome the offshore reef , so they relocated the landing craft to the beach. They were quickly redirected west to a shallower place, from where the cargo had to be laboriously carried to the operational area. After the ebb tide set in two hours after the start of the landing , all vehicles could be brought ashore.

The first Japanese defensive measures began at 9:05 a.m. with about two hours of mortar fire on the landing zone, but this caused only minor damage. The American pioneers paved the beach with mats to prevent the vehicles from sinking into the wet sand. Shortly after the organization of the landing area was finished, the repair of the Kamiri airfield began.

On the first day the landing forces lost 3 men. 21 were wounded. This small loss can be attributed to the air strikes prepared and carried out that prevented the Japanese from reaching the beach. The Japanese lost 115 men and three Japanese were captured by the Allies .

In the evening General Patrick came to the conclusion that there were 3,500 to 4,500 Japanese soldiers ready to fight on Noemfoor and that the entire enemy garrison of the island comprised around 5,000 men. This new estimate was largely based on the testimony of a Japanese prisoner who heard that 3,000 infantrymen had landed on the island as relief on June 25. He had never seen these units and his statement could not be confirmed by other prisoners. With little resistance, plans for July 3 included patrols to track down the main Japanese force under Colonel Shimizu. They were stopped by a minefield during the day, but were able to advance more than 1.7 km by the afternoon. Some Japanese defense posts were found, but all of them were abandoned. On the western flank, the patrol was shot at by some dispersed Japanese, with 3 men being wounded. 14 Japanese were killed.

Use of the paratroopers

Paratroopers of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment land on Kamiri Airfield

At 11:15 am, General Patrick sent the message to General Krueger that the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment would be deployed and should be deposited over the Kamiri airfield. He cited the confusing situation and the faster processing of the operation as the reason for the operation. The decoding of the message took place at the Alamo headquarters at 2:10 p.m. Twenty minutes later the verbal order to deploy to the paratroopers came. One battalion was to be deployed on July 3rd and the other two on the following day.

At around 5:15 a.m. on July 3, the loading of the 38 C-47s began on the Cyclops airfield near Hollandia . Armament and supplies were housed in three B-17s . The first machines left the airfield at 6:30 a.m. At 7:47 a.m., all the machines were in the air.

After a little more than three hours of flight time, the machines reached the take-off point above the Kamiri airfield on Noemfoor. Since the first C-47s only flew in at a height of just over 50 m, the next only maintained a height of around 120 m and also flew in a formation of two, many paratroopers injured themselves during the jump. They were often unable to land in the prepared zone, which was only 30 m wide, and fell between vehicles parked at the edge of the runway, bulldozers , wrecked Japanese planes and storage boxes. Of the 739 men who jumped on July 3, 72 sustained serious injuries such as complicated fractures, so that they could no longer be used as parachutists later. Due to this high loss rate, General Krueger requested another battalion for July 4th and gave orders to remove all vehicles and construction machinery at the airfield from the jump zone. He also ordered that the following approaches should only take place in single formation. At 10:25 a.m. on July 4, a further 685 paratroopers were on the Kamiri airfield. Despite all the instructions, there were again 56 injured. For this reason, the plan for further jumps was discarded and the remaining soldiers of the 503rd Paratrooper Infantry landed on 11 July by landing craft on the beach of Noemfoor.

The taking of Noemfoor

Due to the deployment of the paratroopers, the operations to capture the islands could begin earlier than planned. The main force of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment was used to control the Kamiri airfield. Part of the 158th Regiment of 3rd Infantry Division advanced east of the Kornasoren airfield. They did not encounter any Japanese resistance on July 4th. Well-equipped but abandoned Japanese positions were discovered on both sides of the road and the area around the Kornasoren airfield had been hastily mined by the Japanese. The poorly buried mines were quickly discovered and rendered harmless by the pioneers, so that the units could dig in at the eastern end of the airfield in the evening of the day.

American soldiers on Noemfoor on July 12, 1944

Meanwhile, Kamiri was taken by other units. To the southeast of the city at a distance of one and a half kilometers they discovered a garden laid out by the Japanese. Around the early afternoon of July 4th they reached an area at the western end of this garden that they named Hill 201. Until then, there had only been isolated gunfire from hidden Japanese soldiers to ward off those advancing. Hill 201 was occupied by some Japanese and from the back of the hill a supply route could be explored over the weapons, such as a heavy machine gun and mortar. The American soldiers built a defensive area at the foot of the hill. In the early morning it was heard how more Japanese units were brought in. The attack from Hill 201 began at 5:20 a.m. on July 5 with mortar fire, but it struck 180 m further west. The Americans responded with instructed artillery fire from the airfield on the hill and the surrounding swamp. Machine gun fire that flared up briefly could be quickly switched off. At around 6:30 a.m., the Japanese stopped their attack and the battle was over. Reconnaissance patrols found more than 200 Japanese dead during the day.

The following day at 9:00 am, the Namber airfield was taken with another amphibious landing operation. The airfield was in Allied hands from 12:40 p.m. and shortly afterwards the first small liaison aircraft landed on the runway.

From July 7 to 10, there were only minor skirmishes with the Japanese during further patrols , which led to the conclusion that another large-scale counter-action from the Japanese side was not to be expected. Therefore, from July 11th, the island was divided into two areas for further action on Noemfoor. The northern part was assigned to the 158th Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division and the southern part to the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment. By August 31, the Japanese had lost 1,730 soldiers and 186 were captured. A total of 403 Javanese slave workers were freed. The Allies lost 63 men, 343 were wounded and another three were missing.

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Samuel Eliot Morison: New Guinea and the Marianas: March 1944 - August 1944, Chapter X: Noemfoor and Sansapor . Retrieved January 5, 2013.
↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ US Army in World War II - The Aproach to the Philippines (Chapter XVII, Operations on Noemfoor Island) . Retrieved January 5, 2013.
^ Stanley Sandler (Ed.): World War II in the Pacific: An Encyclopedia . Retrieved January 6, 2013.
↑ George Odgers: Australia in the War of 1939-1945. Series 3 - Air - Volume II - Air War Against Japan, 1943–1945, Chapter 15 - To Noemfoor and Morotai (PDF; 1.7 MB). Retrieved May 9, 2013.

Web links

Commons : Battle of Noemfoor - album with pictures, videos and audio files

[morison-1] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Samuel Eliot Morison: New Guinea and the Marianas: March 1944 - August 1944, Chapter X: Noemfoor and Sansapor . Retrieved January 5, 2013.

[ibiblio-2] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ US Army in World War II - The Aproach to the Philippines (Chapter XVII, Operations on Noemfoor Island) . Retrieved January 5, 2013.

[wwiipacific-3] Stanley Sandler (Ed.): World War II in the Pacific: An Encyclopedia . Retrieved January 6, 2013.

[awm-4] George Odgers: Australia in the War of 1939-1945. Series 3 - Air - Volume II - Air War Against Japan, 1943–1945, Chapter 15 - To Noemfoor and Morotai (PDF; 1.7 MB). Retrieved May 9, 2013.