Last night I dreamed I saw a dragon rising out of the sea," an unknown Japanese soldier wrote in his diary on February 24, 1943. He was sailing aboard Tosei Maru, a passenger-cargo ship traveling to Rabaul, on New Britain, to deliver soldiers and supplies for transport to New Guinea. The Japanese were preparing to launch a flotilla of eight transport ships and eight destroyers destined for Lae, on the eastern coast of New Guinea, to reinforce the garrisons tenuously defending Japan's grip on the Southwest Pacific.
A week later, now aboard the 6,896-ton Teiyo Maru, the author of the diary would indeed encounter a fire-breathing foe, but it would emerge from the heavens rather than from the sea. "Discovered by the enemy," his final journal entry reads. "At night, enemy planes dropped flares and reconnoitered." The next day, more than one hundred Allied planes swarmed and decimated the Japanese convoy.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur called the Allied victory in the Bismarck Sea "one of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time." The three-day battle on March 2–4, 1943, simply stunned the Japanese military and changed the course of the Pacific war. "Japan's defeat there was unbelievable," one of the destroyer skippers, Capt. Tameichi Hara, said. "Never was there such a debacle." Thereafter, the war in New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomon Islands was a losing fight for Japan. Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa, the commander of the Japanese Eighth Fleet at Rabaul, lamented shortly afterward, "It is certain that the success obtained by the American air force in this battle dealt a fatal blow to the South Pacific."
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