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Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul - Australia's Worst Military Disaster of World War II, by Bruce Gamble
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Review
WW2 Database (online), February 2007“Exhaustively researched and descriptively written, Gamble's narrative of Darkest Hour is rich in detail but yet still easy to read. Pick up a copy, settle into your favorite chair, and be careful not to get lost in the wild growth of the South Pacific jungles.” World War II, June 2007“The author takes a grunt’s-eye view of not just the battle, but its horrid aftermaths for POWs.”WWII History Magazine, May 2007"For whatever reason, far too few books about Australia's participation in World War II make it to these shores. Had it not been for Bruce Gamble's remarkable history of Aussie courage at Rabaul, comparable at least with the American and Filipino doomed defense of Corregidor Island or the brave but futile U.S. stand at Wake Island, few Americans would know what went on there...Author Gamble pored over forgotten files and official reports and conducted interviews with the handful of surviviing veterans to craft this tragic, heroic story. A terrific tale about a little-known (to Americans) battle."
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From the Inside Flap
Barely a year after pilots of the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain in “their finest hour,” the little-known tropical island of New Britain was the site of the Australian Army’s darkest hour. Fourteen hundred men and six nurses had been deployed to the Southwest Pacific island in mid-1941 to fortify and defend Rabaul, capital of Australia’s mandated territories. The bulk of Lark Force was the 2/22nd Infantry Battalion, which was equipped with World War I-vintage weapons. They were a close-knit group, mostly volunteers from Victoria. After completing their fortification of the strategic port and its two airfields, they settled into the routine of garrison duties, confident of being relieved within a year. But the Japanese had big plans for Rabaul. It was to be the linchpin of their campaign to conquer the Southwest Pacific, providing them with a major military complex that would support future offensives against the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and possibly even Australia itself. At 2:30 A.M. on January 23, 1942, the darkest hour of the day, an overwhelming Japanese invasion force swarmed ashore. Overrun in a matter of hours, the Australian defenders withdrew deep into the jungles of New Britain, where the unforgiving environment, the cruel Japanese, and even fate were against them. The invasion cost the Japanese only sixteen dead and forty-eight wounded, but the toll among Australian soldiers climbed to staggering proportions. Ultimately, less than a fourth of the garrison escaped from New Britain after enduring months of deprivation; the rest were taken prisoner. Of that number, approximately two hundred were executed, the majority in one horrific massacre. The worst was yet to come. Five months after the invasion, 850 enlisted POWs and approximately 200 civilian men were crowded aboard a Japanese ship for transportation to Hainan Island, off the China coast. In a terrible twist of fate, an American submarine torpedoed the ship at 2:30 A.M. on July 1, 1942. The prisoners, locked in the holds, had no chance of escape. The sinking of the Montevideo Maru remains the worst maritime disaster in Australia’s history. Ironically, Lieutenant Chester W. Nimitz, Jr., the son of the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, participated in the attack. Darkest Hour follows several key individuals through their experiences in Lark Force. One is an American-born soldier, Private Jim Thurst, a musician in the renowned battalion band. Another is Lieutenant Lorna Whyte, a small but tireless Army nurse. Others include affable soldiers and sharp junior officers who used keen ingenuity to overcome numerous hardships. Special attention is devoted to the dramatic stories of the men who escaped. Their accounts of survival and heroism are among the most inspiring of the Pacific War. Based on exhaustive research, Darkest Hour is a gut-wrenching account of courage and sacrifice, folly and disaster. Bruce Gamble, a retired Naval Flight Officer and former historian with the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, is the author of two critically acclaimed books about the Pacific War, The Black Sheep, a complete combat history of Marine Fighting Squadron 214, and Black Sheep One, a definitive biography of Greg “Pappy” Boyington. He lives on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida.
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Product details
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Zenith Press; 1st edition (December 15, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0760323496
ISBN-13: 978-0760323496
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
65 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,669,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
If you want to know how NOT to fight a war, this is the book you should get. The whole event of Rabaul is a testimony to Australian troops who were left there to fend for themselves when the Japanese started the Pacific version of WWII. Their only hope was their belief that the American's were heading their way to rescue them. Unfortunately, most of the US Pacific Fleet was trying to save themselves in the western Pacific. The whole narrative of Rabaul is formed around a comparatively small group of soldiers, doctors and nurses trying to stay alive. The other primary storyline is the butchery by Japanese soldiers who would rather murder the Aussies instead of keeping them as prisoners, which I might add, sealed the fate of the Japanese once they were found still alive by American Marines in their own battles of hell. Some of the prisoners were placed in an unmarked Japanese ship and sent to Japan, whereupon the ship was sunk by an American submarine in the South China Sea. The whole event of Rabaul was only the first step in the Japanese attempted conquest of Borneo and New Guinea later on in 1942.This book is the first of the long, bloody war of attrition between the Japanese and the Australians and eventually the Americans who met the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail in northern New Guinea early on in 1942.
A gem of a book which covers a little documented period in which the lives and fortunes of those who stood in the way of Japan's conquering Armies in the South Pacific were lost, and perhaps more accurately in this case, sacrificed for little if any good.Most readers of WWII History recognize Rabaul as a Japanese Naval stronghold which ultimately was bombed into nothing but an occupied atoll with no strategic value and ultimately 'left to wither on the vine.'Few know the pre-invasion history of the island and its place as an Australian Territory in the pre war years. More importantly, few have ever read of what happened to those unfortunates at the start of the War.Gamble's book provides a well written story of the fates of the Australian civilians, Administrators, and ultimately its defenders (i.e., Lark Force), a weak battalion of Diggers sent at the last minute to oppose what was an overwhelming Force sent by the Japanese to establish their doomed stronghold.The Australian government's decision to abandon these citizens and soldiers is examined and that decision, together with the fact that over 1,000 of their citizens were killed in a U.S. torpedo attack on an unidentified Hell Ship is the horrific beginning and end of Lark Force. That the deaths were not known or revealed to the public until after the War was both a tragedy to families and friends of the deceased, but also, as is revealed in the book a cause for mourning countrywide.It's good to reflect on the sacrifices made by so many Allies at the outset of the War. One can only imagine the terror and frustration of those who by circumstance found themselves caught in that crucible so many years ago in an age which is rapidly becoming a lost human memory.Bruce Gamble's book is a good read and a needed reminder.
Mr. Gamble has written two books about this early WW2 battle. "Fortress Rabaul" covered this conflict from the perspective of the antagonists on both sides; this book tells the story as lived by the unfortunate forces of the Australian Army garrison in New Britain, known as "Lark Force". This force, totalling about 1,400 personnel, was woefully inadequate for the task of defending against an overwhelming Japanese invasion force, but their requests for reinforcements, aircraft, artillery, and finally, evacuation, were adamently denied by Australian Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet; they were told to hold their ground and fight to the last man. Among their number were 6 women of the Australian Army Nursing Service, who were captured by the Japanese along with many of the other garrison personnel, and were eventually shipped off to Japan for internment.This is the story of the heart-wrenching hardships endured by these people; some managed to escape through the jungle, many died trying, and many were executed in terrible ways by their Japanese captors. Those who survived the murderous treatment by the Japanese were used as slave labor, subsisting on starvation rations. Many were sent to Japan aboard "Hell ships"; One of these ships, the "Montevideo Maru", was hit by a torpedo from a US Navy submarine and went down with 800 POWs locked in the holds below decks.There are terrible accounts of brutality and massacres by the Japanese soldiers, who considered any warrior who surrendered to be less than human; therefore, they did not hesitate to beat, bludgeon, bayonet, shoot, and starve their POWs. Many men starved to death and others were worked to death. This book is well researched and massively documented: it is the 4th book about Japanese POWs I have read in the past 2 months, and the last for awhile. I need some less-dark reading. I recommend this and the other Gamble book, "Fortress Rabaul", especially to those who think America was wrong to drop those two bombs. We were the "good guys".
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