The ‘Hiyoshi Maru’ which carried the ‘Matsu Kikan’ Intelligence unit to Western Australia ( SOURCE: NAVAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA)
By the end of 1943, Japan was getting pushed back. It’s bases were getting overrun, it’s carriers sunk and it’s defensive positions across the Dutch East Indies were breaking up. Ongoing Allied offensives, on islands close to Australia including Timor, were beginning to take their toll. Put simply the Japanese were losing the war. The Dutch East Indies, present day Indonesia, were one of the crown jewels of the Japanese conquest providing raw materials and resources like rubber and oil.
The capital of West Timor, Kupang, was only about 800KM North of Darwin. It the homebase of some specialised Japanese intelligence units such as the ‘Kempeitai’, Military Police Corps, Tokkeitai Naval Secret Police and combined Military Intelligence agencies called KIKAN. The head of one of the Kikan units was career military intelligence officer, Captain Masanobu Yamamoto.
Yamamoto’s Unit was named ‘Matsu’ meaning ‘Pine Tree’ because pine trees symbolised longevity in Japanese culture. It was a small, joint Army-Navy group, specialising in localised reconnaissance. Controlled administratively by the Ambon-based Japanese Second Area Army, their parent unit ran out of the Tokyo-based Second Bureau Headquarters. Considered a reserve force, and basically second rate the Second Area Army was close to the bottom of Japan’s operational pecking order. However within the Second Bureau Army, Navy and Foreign Intelligence units were given priority.
Yamamoto’s unit consisted of himself, along with two fellow veterans of the Sino-Japanese War. Lieutenant Suzuhiko Mizuno and Sergeant Shinobu Furuhashi the fourth member was wireless operator Lance Corporal Kazuo Ito, a fresh arrival from the Taiwan battlefront.
BY the time World War 2 officially broke out Japan had been at war in Manchuria since 1931 and in China since 1937. Yamamoto and his colleagues were all graduates of the benign sounding ‘Army Correspondence Research Centre’ the cover name for Japan’s Nakano School of Intelligence. This was essentially a spy and unconventional warfare school. It taught counterintelligence, sabotage, foreign languages, martial arts and Guerilla warfare among other skills. Nakano trained Japanese paratroopers helped capture intact the Dutch oil facilities at Palembang and were active in the Burma, India and Okinawan campaign.
By end of 1943, leading Japanese strategists had already dismissed as any invasion of North Western Australian as just too difficult. However the ability of allied long range bombers to operate out of Northern airstrips and threaten Japan’s entire Southern defence perimeter was concerning. Japanese intelligence had some knowledge about Northern airstrips like the remote Drysdale Airfield but were concerned there were other airbases being constructed. With an absence of any hard in-country information on the matter, the Japanese needed reconnaissance. In January 1944, that task fell to Yamamoto’s ‘Matsu Kikan’ Unit.
The mission was planned using captured Allied charts and Japanese pearling maps. The sailing route was South across the Timor Sea, towards the rocky coral outcrops of the Ashmore Reef, and then on to Browse Island for initial observations. Landfall on the Australian continent was to be made a day or so later. The team were to visually record everything they saw and so took with them eight-millimetre film and cameras.
On the evening of the 14 January 1944 the Reconnaissance team left Koepang, in Timor we believe on board a 25 ton fishing vessel called “Hiyoshi Maru”. This was a former civilian coastal carrier requisitioned in December 1941 and converted into an gunboat fitted with machine and anti-submarine guns. Since early 1942, it had been under command of Lieutenant Tazaki Sueo, a highly experienced small boat officer. He and this vessel had already been involved in a variety of Japanese special operations, mostly in and around the Eastern fringes of the Dutch East Indies. (End ocean sounds here)
The team included Lieutenant Susuhiko Mizuno, 2 Sergeants, a radio operator, 6 sailors and 15 native Timorese to create the fiction they were a local fishing vessel. Their mission was extremely dangerous. Apart from the elements they had to risk being spotted by allied air and sea patrols in the heavily trafficked Timor Sea. Some air cover was to be provided for the Hiyoshi Maru as far South as the Australian territory of Browse Island, after that they were on their own. Browse Island for context is about 14 hectares and is 180KM off the Kimberley coast. About Perth to Bunbury in distance.
From here on they risked running into Japanese sea mines, or misidentification by Japanese submarines. They also risked sightings by Coastwatchers or Royal Australian Navy (RAN) intercepts. To maintain their cover the vessel carried an Australian flag, and was camouflaged as a Timorese fishing boat, Given that a plethora of non-Australian fishing vessels, were still operating in and around Australian waters at the time.
Their orders from the 19th Army Headquarters on Ambon Island were to land on the North West shore of Western Australia and: look at the possibility of landing in Australia, Investigate the location for a landing place, look for the existence of military establishments like ports or airstrips.
On the first attempt to reach Australia there were heavy seas and the team had to turn back to Koepang on the morning of the 15 January 1944. They departed again on the evening of the 16th. The aircover was provided by a single Aichi Type 99 light bomber known to the allies as the ‘Val’.
It was from the 7th Air Division based at Kendari in South Sulawesi and crewed by Staff Sergeant H. Aonuma with Hachiro Akai as Co-pilot. On 16 January 1944, the aircraft was heading South directly for Cartier Island when it saw an Allied submarine heading in the general direction of the “Hiyoshi Maru”.
The submarine saw the aircraft approaching and immediately began to dive. The Val managed to fire two bursts of its machine guns.
and bullets could be seen impacting the Submarine, it then dropped it’s bombs near the submarine as it was submerging. The aircraft then circled the area and it’s likely the submarine sustained some damage but this is unconfirmed.
The Val continued south flying low to avoid Allied radar situated along Northern Australia. They sighted the “Hiyoshi Maru” and continued south to try to locate Cartier Island, an external territory of Australia, about 600km North of Broome.
At 9 am on 17 January 1944 the “Hiyoshi Maru” made their first Australian landfall reaching East Island about 30KM off the WA Kimberley coast, it’s a coral reef which is only visible at low tide and is one of 4 islands called the Lacepedes.
They then made it Browse Island at about 10 am on 18 January 1944 where they found the ruins of a watch house, probably a lot of bird poo, the island was mined for Guano in the late 1800s and not much else. They stayed for about 3 hours leaving the island at 1pm on the 18th of January to time their arrival on the Western Australian mainland the next morning.
The Japanese spotted some white smoke rising from a large hill to the east of their location. They anchored by the shore at about 10 am on 19 January 1944. The landscape in that area was rocky, covered in the Iron rich, granite and sedimentary rocks typical of the Kimberley. They camouflaged the ship with tree branches and ate dried biscuits.
Three landing parties led by Lieutenant Susuhiko Mizuno, Sergeant Morita and Sergeant Furuhashi, went ashore and explored different areas of the coast for about two hours. They took some 8mm film of what they saw.
Unbeknownst to them they had landed very close to what they were looking for, only 25 kms away from the site where the RAAF were to soon start building their secret Truscott airfield on the Anjo peninsula close to the Northern Territory border. Their call was closer than they knew as in mid January 1944, Sgt “Clarry” Castle and Sgt. Bill Martin of 1 Mobile Works Squadron RAAF were left near the site to act as “Coast Watchers” until a forward party arrived to begin construction.
They claim to have heard a diesel motor out to sea while they were walking along the west coast of the Anjo Peninsular. It’s asserted that to prevent the Japanese learning of this new airbases location they didn’t investigate the noise. They reported their story to North-Western Area Headquarters who assumed it could’ve been a Japanese submarine running on the surface to charge its batteries but it’s believed they heard the engines of the nearby ‘Hiyoshi Maru.’
It was extremely hot and humid, the average temperature in January in the Kimberleys is the mid-30s in degrees Celsius so about 95 – 100 degrees Fahranheit. All 3 parties returned to the ship and reported to Lieutenant Susuhiko Mizuno on what they had seen which was not much. Besides some old campfires all they saw was lots of red rocks, mangroves and small trees. They slept on the ship that night and on 20 January 1944 they went ashore again and patrolled the area until about 2 pm. After finding nothing further they returned to Timor safely.
The operation of the Matsu Kikan into Northern Australia didn’t achieve much materially but it was still a massive feat for Japanese intelligence. It showed a small boat could reach Australia undetected and safely depart. This meant theoretically that small parties could land on the coast, and conduct diversionary operations, sabotage missions and small unit raids into Northern Australia. It’s interesting to consider that the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan with some very spectacular exceptions like the midget sub raid on Sydney harbour, operations of Otto Skorzeny or the Italian 10th Light Flotilla didn’t have the same culture of small unit unconventional warfare.
If the war had gone on longer and the Japanese had held their bases close to Australia the Matsu Kikan might’ve morphed into a role like that carried out by the ‘Z’ Special Unit or the Special Air Service and conducted Commando operations on the Australian mainland. But to raid a target you first have to know where it is! And the vastness of Northern Australia made this extremely difficult, the tyranny of distance and harsh climate are paradoxically is one of the country’s main defences.
A bit about the Truscott airbase that the Japanese might’ve seen had they arrived 6 months later and 25KM further. In mid – 1943 Australia had identified the need for infrastructure to operate long-range bombers. The Drysdale airstrip was too small and because of the geography couldn’t expand. In August 1943 personnel from the RAAF started to study photographs and maps to find a location for an airfield on the neighbouring Anjo Peninsula. This is the closest part of Australia to Java and so made it an ideal staging point for the heavy and medium bombers that were based at airfields further inland.
In October 1943, Flying Officer Thomas Oswald Butcher of RAAF 12 Survey and Design Unit, started to survey the area about 50KM north west of Drysdale airfield.
On 1 January 1944, Senior RAAF Officers including W/Cdr Rooney and S/Ldr Chesterfield, the CO of 1 Mobile Works Squadron RAAF (1MWS) inspected the area for the airfield and camp. The Construction and subsequent operations were conducted under complete secrecy and the existence of the base was never formally acknowledged until after the war.This new airbase was named Truscott in memory of Squadron Leader Keith “Bluey” Truscott of 76 Squadron RAAF who was killed in the Exmouth Gulf on 28 March 1943, when his Kittyhawk fighter crashed into the sea.
By mid-1944 the Truscott Airfield would begin to prove its worth helping, destroy, and disrupt Japanese forces throughout the region, it allowed US, Dutch and Australian medium and heavy bombers as well as Catalina Flying Boats to attack Borneo, Java, Timor and the Celebes.
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