TL;DRAbstract
The glassy blue surface of the Bismarck Sea shimmered beneath a cloudless sky, the morning mist gone ‘as though wiped away’ by the sun. Major-General Kane Yoshihara, the Chief of Staff of the Japanese Eighteenth Army, was aboard the destroyer Tokitsukaze, part of a fifteen-vessel convoy afloat on the Bismarck Sea, headed for Lae. Although Tokitsukaze translated as ‘favourable wind’, the weather would do the Japanese convoy no favours on this morning. Yoshihara was below deck discussing debarkation procedures with the troops when disaster struck from the sky. The destroyer then stopped dead in the water, ‘as though the ship had struck a rock’. By the time he reached the deck, a bewildered Yoshi-hara could see that only half the convoy vessels were left afloat and, like the Tokitsukaze, smoke billowed skywards from most of them, signifying their fate.
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The glassy blue surface of the Bismarck Sea shimmered beneath a cloudless sky, the morning mist gone ‘as though wiped away’ by the sun. Major-General Kane Yoshihara, the Chief of Staff of the Japanese Eighteenth Army, was aboard the destroyer Tokitsukaze, part of a fifteen-vessel convoy afloat on the Bismarck Sea, headed for Lae. Although Tokitsukaze translated as ‘favourable wind’, the weather would do the Japanese convoy no favours on this morning. Yoshihara was below deck discussing debarkation procedures with the troops when disaster struck from the sky. The destroyer then stopped dead in the water, ‘as though the ship had struck a rock’. By the time he reached the deck, a bewildered Yoshi-hara could see that only half the convoy vessels were left afloat and, like the Tokitsukaze, smoke billowed skywards from most of them, signifying their fate.
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