In 1943, the Japanese Navy massacred a group of non-combatant civilians—mostly made up of their own German allies.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Bishop Josef Lörks
photo from WikiCommons
In the late 19th century, the newly-unified nation of Germany was looking to establish a global empire that would rival that of England, and had obtained colonial possessions in the Pacific, mostly around New Guinea, known as “Kaiser-Wilhelmsland”. In 1884, Germany declared a “protectorate” over the “Bismarck Archipelago”. Almost immediately, the Germans dispatched missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, to “civilize” the natives. The missionaries were active in the islands and also in New Guinea.
After the German defeat in World War One, though, her colonies in the Pacific were distributed to the victorious Entente Allies, with Australia assuming control.
When the Second World War broke out, the Japanese targeted New Guinea and invaded in January 1942. The island became the scene of intense fighting, mostly against Australian troops.
By 1943, the Japanese had occupied the town of Wewak, on New Guinea’s northern coast. As was their standard practice in occupied territories, the Japanese military imposed harsh rule onto the native people. But this area was also inhabited by a number of German civilians, including a group of around 20 Protestant missionaries and another 40 or so Catholics in Wewak headed by Bishop Josef Lörks, who had been living in New Guinea for the past 40 years.
On paper, Japan and Germany had been allies ever since the Tripartite Pact had been signed in 1940. In reality, this “alliance” existed only on paper. The two nations were not cooperating militarily and had not provided any aid or support to each other. The Japanese, with their heavily race-based ideology of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, never really trusted any Europeans, and they were also aware that several German officials in Nanking had been protecting suspected Chinese guerrillas from Japanese police during the fighting there. So, although the Germans on New Guinea were treated as “neutrals” and were allowed to continue their missionary work, the Japanese kept a close eye on them.
By 1943, however, the war had begun to turn against the Japanese. Their offensives in New Guinea had stalled, and the Imperial Navy had suffered a defeat to the Americans at the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Japanese Navy commanders began to suspect that the German missionaries were providing information on Japanese ship movements to the Australians and Americans, and were helping downed enemy pilots to evade capture. And, they knew, two of the missionaries working with the Germans were actually American citizens. So, as a precaution, the Japanese gathered up all of the Catholics and moved them to Kairiru Island off the coast of Wewak.
In March 1943, perhaps at the insistence of the Tokei Tai naval military police, the Japanese Navy decided to remove the “threat” entirely. The destroyer Akikaze, which had been ordered to Wewak on a supply mission, was directed to take on board all of the members of the Catholic Mission, about 42 in total including Bishop Lörks, some Papuan and Malaysian servants, the two Americans, two or three infants, 18 nuns, and a number of German priests. The explanation that was given to them was that they were being relocated due to construction of a new seaplane base on Kairiru. Upon leaving Wewak, the Akikaze was directed to Lorengau, where approximately 20 more Germans (and one Hungarian) from the Protestant compound there were taken aboard.
Akikaze was then ordered to the port town of Kavieng in New Ireland. Here she was met by a naval officer who hand-delivered a sealed envelope to the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Tsurukichi Sabe, with secret orders direct from the headquarters of the Imperial Navy’s 8th Fleet. Following his instructions, Sabe waited until the ship was out at sea until he read the sealed orders to a conference of the ship’s officers. They were being told to kill all of the civilian passengers on board and dispose of their bodies. According to later accounts, Sabe called the orders “regrettable”, but in the Imperial Japanese Navy orders were orders and were to be carried out without question.
Sabe began making preparations. Crew members quickly erected a wooden scaffold at the stern of the ship, screened by a large piece of cloth. The passengers, who knew nothing of what was going on, were now taken, one by one, to the Akikaze’s bridge, where they were asked some questions about their name and nationality, then were blindfolded and led to the makeshift scaffold. Here, their arms were tied over their head and they were hoisted up into the air by pulleys, and were shot by a squad of four riflemen and a light machine gun. The body was then lowered and rolled off the stern of the ship. (The infants were simply thrown overboard into the sea.) It took about three hours to execute all 60-odd passengers.
When it was done, Sabe ordered the entire crew to secrecy about the incident. The Akikaze continued on to the Japanese harbor at Rabaul, where they held a brief Shinto ceremony for the souls of the dead. Meanwhile, Japanese troops on New Guinea were carrying out a series of raids which attacked all of the Christian missions, burning the churches and hospitals and executing most of the Papuan converts.
Commander Sabe would be killed just five months later, when the Akikaze was damaged by American bombers. In November 1944, the destroyer was escorting the Japanese carrier Junyo near the Philippines when they were attacked by the American submarine Pintado, and the Akikaze’s commander rammed into the torpedoes, sacrificing his own ship to save the carrier. The entire crew of 205 men was lost.
After the end of the war, investigators for the Australian war crimes tribunals began to look at the sudden disappearance of the Christian missions from New Guinea during the war. The probe was crippled by the fact that nearly all of the participants and witnesses had been killed during the war, and the Japanese Navy had attempted to hide the incident by destroying documents, but after a time the Australians managed to piece together the story, aided by two former Akikaze crewmen who had survived the war.
The only name that appeared in the surviving records was Lieutenant Shigetoku Kami, a low-ranking 8th Fleet staff officer. The Australians, however, were convinced that such an order would require a higher level of authorization than a mere lieutenant, and they interrogated Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, who had been in command of the 8th Fleet, and his chief of staff Vice Admiral Shinzo Onishi. Both denied any involvement in the massacre and blamed Kami for acting on his own (Kami, meanwhile, had been killed during the war and could not defend himself or tell who may have given him his orders).
In the end, the Australians were not able to find enough hard evidence to charge anybody with war crimes over the incident. In any case, since no Australians had been involved, it was questionable whether they had any jurisdiction in the matter, so in 1947 the investigation was taken over by the Americans (since two of the victims were reportedly US citizens). But the Americans were already swamped with hundreds of war crimes prosecutions against Japanese military officers, and, perhaps due to the paucity of evidence in this case, no further action was ever taken.
Today the Akikaze massacre remains mostly unknown and forgotten.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)
