On this day in military history…
On 11 September 1914, little more than five weeks after Britain and Germany went to war, Australian forces landed on the island of New Britain in the south-west Pacific. Their objective was a German wireless station at Bita Paka, near Rabaul, in what was then German New Guinea. The fighting that followed became the first significant Australian combat action of the First World War and cost the lives of some of the first Australians to fall while serving under Australian command.
When war was declared in August 1914, Germany possessed a number of strategically important colonies and communications stations across the Pacific. German New Guinea included the north-eastern part of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and several surrounding island groups. Although these territories were far removed from the battlefields developing in Europe, their wireless stations could communicate with German naval forces operating across the Pacific. Britain therefore requested that Australia seize German installations in the region as quickly as possible.
Australia responded by forming the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, usually abbreviated to AN&MEF. It was a hastily organised force combining naval reservists, infantry and supporting personnel. Around 1,500 men eventually sailed towards German New Guinea accompanied by a powerful Royal Australian Navy presence. The expedition represented one of Australia's first independent military operations following the creation of the Commonwealth only thirteen years earlier.
The principal objective was the German wireless station at Bita Paka, situated inland from the coast near Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Destroying or capturing the station would prevent it from transmitting information to German warships and remove an important link in Germany's Pacific communications network.
At dawn on 11 September, Australian ships arrived off New Britain. Naval landing parties went ashore around Kabakaul and began moving inland towards Bita Paka. One of the first groups consisted of approximately twenty-five naval reservists whose orders were to locate and neutralise the wireless installation several miles inland.
The Australians quickly discovered that the operation would not be an uncontested occupation. The Germans had organised a small defensive force consisting largely of locally recruited New Guinean soldiers commanded and trained by German officers and reservists. Defensive positions had been prepared along the narrow road leading through thick tropical vegetation towards the wireless station.
The jungle presented serious difficulties. Visibility was restricted by dense vegetation and the Australians were advancing along a confined route where defenders could fire from concealed positions. German-led troops had established trenches and ambush positions along the road, forcing the landing force to fight its way forward.
During the advance, Able Seaman William "Billy" Williams was hit by enemy fire and seriously wounded. Captain Brian Pockley of the Australian Army Medical Corps immediately went forward to assist him. Pockley gave his Red Cross armband to another man who was helping to carry Williams away, believing that it would give the wounded man additional protection. Pockley was subsequently shot and mortally wounded himself. Both men died later that day.
Their deaths became particularly significant in Australian military history. Williams was among the first Australians killed during combat under Australian command during the First World War, while Pockley's actions became an early example of the courage shown by Australian medical personnel throughout the conflict.
The fighting continued as more Australian sailors and soldiers arrived to reinforce the advance. Small groups worked their way through the jungle and around German defensive positions. Some defenders were captured and persuaded to reveal the locations of further positions and obstacles along the route.
The Germans and their local troops had attempted to slow the Australians by digging trenches and placing obstacles along the approach to Bita Paka, but the attackers continued forward. Despite the unfamiliar terrain and confusion of jungle fighting, the Australian force gradually overwhelmed the scattered defensive positions.
By later in the day the wireless station at Bita Paka had fallen into Australian hands. The station's mast and equipment represented the principal strategic objective of the operation, and its capture severely reduced Germany's ability to communicate with naval forces operating in the region.
The battle was small when compared with the enormous engagements that would later take place at Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele and elsewhere, but the casualties were significant for a country only weeks into the war. Australia's official history records six Australians, one German and around thirty New Guineans killed during the fighting associated with the advance towards Bita Paka.
The capture of Bita Paka opened the way to Rabaul. On 12 September Australian troops occupied the town without opposition. The German colonial administration withdrew inland towards Toma, but its position rapidly became impossible. Australian forces advanced while naval gunfire from HMAS Encounter added further pressure. On 17 September the German authorities surrendered, bringing organised German resistance in New Britain effectively to an end.
The campaign was brief, but strategically important. Germany had lost one of its Pacific colonial bases and an important wireless station, while Australia had demonstrated its ability to mount and support an expeditionary operation thousands of kilometres from its main population centres.
The events of 11 September 1914 are sometimes overshadowed by Gallipoli, which would become central to Australia's memory of the First World War the following year. Yet several months before Australians landed at Anzac Cove, Australian sailors and soldiers were already fighting and dying in the tropical forests of New Britain.
Bita Paka was Australia's first major land action of the war and the beginning of an Australian military presence in the former German territories of New Guinea that would continue long after the conflict ended. The area would once again become the scene of bitter fighting during the Second World War when Australian and Japanese forces fought across New Britain and New Guinea.
Today, the Bita Paka War Cemetery stands close to the site of the former German wireless station. Australian servicemen killed during the 1914 operation are buried there alongside men who died during later campaigns. It remains a reminder that Australia's experience of the First World War did not begin on the beaches of Gallipoli, but months earlier on a remote tropical island in the Pacific.
On 11 September 1914, the men advancing along the jungle road from Kabakaul towards Bita Paka became the first Australian force to fight a land battle in the First World War — beginning a military commitment that would eventually take hundreds of thousands of Australians to battlefields across the world.
