Accordingly, Marines landed at Cape Torokina, on Bougainville, on November 1st. Their mission was to capture enough of the island to build and protect a fighter strip. The rest of the island could be left to the 15,000 Japanese soldiers who defended it. Nobody cared about them. Rabaul was the real target.
The Japanese high command at Rabaul sent down a cruiser-destroyer force with the mission of getting among the American transports in Empress Augusta Bay, off Torokina, and tearing up the helpless train ships like a pack of wolves in a herd of sheep.
An American cruiser-destroyer force met them just after midnight on November 2nd, and sank one Japanese cruiser and a destroyer. More important, the American flotilla ran off the Japanese marauders before they reached the transports.
American reconnaissance planes, however, spotted a massive concentration of heavy cruisers and destroyers building up in Rabaul Harbor, a concentration too great for American naval forces then in the South Pacific to handle, because most American capital ships of the Pacific Fleet had been pulled back toward Hawaii to support an operation in the Gilbert Islands.
Admiral Halsey scratched together a carrier task force, and even though a carrier raid near a land-based airfield was then against doctrine, he sent the carrier’s planes into the harbor. They damaged the cruisers badly enough to relieve the immediate threat to the Torokina landings. The carrier raids stirred up a hornet’s nest around Rabaul.
Eighteen Japanese torpedo bombers took off to smash the brazen carrier task force. Just before total dark they found American ships and attacked. Radio Tokyo broadcast, with jubilation, that the score in this “First Air Battle of Bougainville” was “one large carrier blown up and sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.” Rabaul’s torpedo bombers won a group commendation.
An American staff officer, hearing the account of this First Air Battle of Bougainville as reported by Japanese pilots, could only hold his head in his hands and hope his own pilots were not feeding him the same kind of foolishness.
Here is what really happened in the First Air Battle of Bougainville.
A landing craft, the LCI 70, and the PT 167, were lumbering back from a landing party on the Torokina beachhead. Just after sunset the Japanese bombers struck in low-level torpedo runs. The PT brought down the leader by the novel method of snagging him with its mast. The plane’s torpedo punched clean through the PT’s nose, leaving its tail assembly, appropriately enough, in the crew’s head.
The torpedo boat’s 20-mm. cannon shot down a second torpedo bomber so close to the ship that the sailors on the fantail were soaked.