Rabaul

• 1. Introduction

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  Rabaul is a township on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, and it has been destroyed by volcanoes not once but twice. It sits directly on the edge of the Rabaul caldera, a flooded remnant of a large pyroclastic shield volcano, with the crater of an active cone rising from the harbour itself. The harbour that made Rabaul one of the finest ports in the Pacific is the same body of water that has swallowed its futures. What kind of place keeps rebuilding inside a danger zone? What draws cruise ships and scuba divers to a town that is still smouldering? And how did a small colonial outpost become, for a few pivotal years, the most strategically important military base in the South Pacific?

• 2. Built on Mangroves

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  In 1910, Governor Albert Hahl of the German colonial administration ordered government offices, a district court, a hospital, and customs and postal facilities moved from Herbertshöhe, the settlement now known as Kokopo, to a harbour called Simpsonhafen. The new town was enlarged with official buildings and housing, and it took the name Rabaul, which means "mangrove" in Kuanua, the local language. The name was fitting: Rabaul was partially built on reclaimed mangrove swamp. Germany had formally controlled the region since 1884, and in 1905 Rabaul had been selected as the administrative capital. By 1910 that choice was made physical with mortar and timber.

  The colonial transfer brought something unexpected with it. Gunantambu, the house of a woman known as "Queen" Emma Forsayth, stood in Rabaul during this period and contained furniture that had previously belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson, left to her family in Samoa. It was that kind of town: a crossroads of empire where the extraordinary turned up quietly. Writers and anthropologists took note; Margaret Mead was among the authors who described visits and stays in Rabaul in books written during the Australian period that followed German rule.

  At the outbreak of World War I, Australia, acting as a British Dominion, sent its volunteer Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force to defeat the German garrison and occupy the territory. After Germany's defeat, the League of Nations delegated the territory to Australia in 1920 as a Class C Mandate, and Rabaul became the capital of the Territory of New Guinea. In 1929, workers in Rabaul staged what became the first industrial strike in Papua New Guinea's history, a milestone that speaks to how developed and populated the town had become by then.

• 3. 1937: The First Destruction

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  On the 6th of June 1937, two volcanoes on the edge of Rabaul's caldera, Tavurvur and Vulcan, exploded. The eruptions killed 507 people and destroyed the town. Rabaul caldera has an elliptical form measuring 14 by 9 kilometres, surrounded by a steep volcanic ridge several hundred metres high. The twin blasts were catastrophic enough that the Australian administration for the Territory of New Guinea decided to relocate its headquarters to the safer location of Lae.

  The destruction of 1937 consumed Gunantambu too. The famous house and its Stevenson-linked furniture were gone, though the ruins later became a tourist attraction after World War II, only to be wiped away again by the 1994 eruption. The plan to permanently move the territorial headquarters away from Rabaul never reached completion. The plans were still being argued when the next calamity arrived.

  A government volcanological observatory was established on the northern ridge of the Rabaul caldera in the 1950s, and a team there has maintained a continuous watch over the town and the volcanoes ever since. That observatory also carries responsibility for monitoring other volcanoes across New Britain and the nearby islands.

• 4. Japan's Pacific Stronghold

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  Japanese aircraft began bombing Rabaul on the 4th of January 1942. By the 23rd of January the battle of Rabaul was under way, and the town fell to thousands of Japanese naval landing forces shortly after. Allied forces then bombed the town again later that same month.

  Military personnel and most civilians still in Rabaul were loaded onto a ship called the Montevideo Maru, which was sunk off the Philippines in June 1942. About six planters who had remained hiding in the bush gave themselves up to the Japanese and were executed in July 1942. Twelve men with technical skills were held in Rabaul under imprisonment but executed at the end of 1944. Only four men were found alive in a camp when Rabaul was eventually liberated.

  By 1943 an estimated 110,000 Japanese troops were based in Rabaul. The Japanese army dug many kilometres of tunnels as shelter from Allied air attacks, including the heavy bombing of November 1943. Rabaul's enclosed harbour, Simpson Harbour, had been one of the motivations for the invasion from the start. The Imperial Japanese Navy needed that port.

  On the 18th of April 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, took off from Rabaul on an inspection tour. United States Navy cryptographers had intercepted and decrypted Japanese communications that contained his full flight itinerary. Because revealing what the Americans knew would have exposed their ability to read Japanese radio traffic, the intelligence moved up the chain of command. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was said to have approved the resulting action, though this is not formally documented. Sixteen United States Army Air Forces P-38 Lightning fighters flew from Guadalcanal and intercepted the two bombers carrying Yamamoto over south Bougainville, shooting them down. Yamamoto was killed. One P-38 was lost in the operation. The mission was called Operation Vengeance.

  The Allied strategy toward Rabaul itself was unusual. Rather than capturing the base directly, Allied commanders chose to bypass it. They built a ring of airfields and naval bases on the surrounding islands and cut Rabaul off from resupply. The campaign, known as Operation Cartwheel, rendered the base militarily useless through isolation and continual air attack. The neutralisation of Rabaul stretched until the Japanese surrender in August 1945.

• 5. Postwar Recovery

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  After World War II, eastern New Guinea was returned to Australian administration, and Rabaul recovered its role as the principal city and port of the archipelago. By 1990 Rabaul's population stood at 17,044. The harbour remained one of the finest in the world, and the town became a trading hub for the New Guinea Islands region, covering East and West New Britain, New Ireland, Manus Island, and Bougainville. Rabaul held that position even after Papua New Guinea became independent from Australia in 1975.

  But Rabaul never regained its pre-1937 status as territorial capital. That role passed to Port Moresby for the entirety of the two territories and did not return to Rabaul. The Japanese tunnels dug as wartime shelter, the scattered wrecks accessible to divers, and the layered scars of two wars and two eruptions made Rabaul a distinctive destination rather than a conventional administrative centre. The ruins of Gunantambu still drew visitors. The volcanoes were still there.

• 6. 1994: The Second Destruction

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  The volcanoes had given warnings before the 1994 eruption. In 1983 and 1984 the town had been placed on evacuation readiness when volcanic activity increased, but no major eruption followed. Then, on the 19th of September 1994, Tavurvur and Vulcan erupted again. There were only 19 hours of warning before the eruption began. Because of evacuation drills and planning, the city and most nearby villages were emptied before the ash arrived. Five people were killed, one of them struck by lightning from the eruptive column.

  Ash was sent thousands of metres into the air, and 80% of the buildings in Rabaul collapsed under its weight. The destruction was heaviest in the south-eastern half of the town. Rabaul Airport was destroyed and then abandoned; flying over the Tavurvur crater on approach was no longer considered viable. A replacement airport was built at Tokua, about 50 kilometres to the southeast, though even that facility has been closed occasionally by ash driven by northwest monsoon winds.

  The provincial capital moved to Kokopo, the former German Herbertshöhe, roughly 20 kilometres away. Rabaul began a slow rebuilding inside the same danger zone. Vulcan has stayed quiet since 1994. Tavurvur has not: small and large eruptions occur intermittently from its cone, with a notable eruption recorded as recently as the 29th of August 2014. The observation team on the northern ridge of the caldera has continued its watch through all of it.

• 7. Living at the Caldera's Edge

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  Rabaul's average annual temperature is 26.9 degrees Celsius, and the town receives an average of 2,201 millimetres of rainfall each year. Its tropical rainforest climate, classified Af under the Koppen and Geiger system, is relentlessly hot, humid, and overcast. The physical setting that makes the climate oppressive also makes the harbour spectacular.

  Before the 1994 eruption, Rabaul was a busy destination for commercial and recreational boating. Private small craft visit less frequently now, but between 10 and 12 cruise ships call at Rabaul each year, among them the Queen Elizabeth, which can carry up to 2,000 passengers. Visitors come for the volcanoes, the scuba diving and snorkelling, the World War II history, the surrounding flora and fauna, and the cultural life of the Tolai people. Tourism has become a major industry for Rabaul and for East New Britain as a whole.

  Rabaul's harbour may have predisposed it to destruction, but that same geography is what an eruption in 1878 produced: a new volcano that formed inside the harbour itself, years before the town existed. The 1994 eruption was not the first time the harbour tried to swallow Rabaul, and the volcano observatory on the northern ridge, staffed and operational since the 1950s, will be watching when Tavurvur decides to speak again.