“From the book: ”
Concealed behind coconut log fortifications, the Australians could clearly hear the rumble of diesel motors and the scrape of steel hulls on coral. John N. Jones, a twenty-three-year-old corporal from New South Wales, was patrolling the perimeter at 0225 when he saw the barge-like landing craft approaching the beach, their silhouettes faintly backlit by the fires burning in Rabaul. The first boatload displayed remarkably poor discipline. Some of the Japanese were talking, others laughing, and one even shined a flashlight. Jones pointed a Very pistol skyward and pulled the trigger.
Seconds later, the flare cast a bright light over the beach, catching the Japanese troops by surprise. “ We allowed most of them to get out of the boats, ” recalled Kenneth G. Hale, another corporal in A Company, “ and then fired everything we had.”
The Australians cut loose with a withering blast. The staccato chatter of machine guns and the popping of Enfield rifles blended into a solid roar. Some of the newly delivered Thompson submachine guns added their distinctive rattle, and Captain Matheson' s antitank guns joined in with a nasty whip-“crack,” Lost among all the gunfire was the metallic thumping of mortar rounds leaving their tubes. Additional flares whooshed skyward, lighting up the beach just as the mortar shells began to land near the barbed wire. The Japanese, thrown into disarray by the explosions and concentrated firepower, twice attempted to rush the wire and twice were driven back.

January 23, 1942, New Britain. It was 2: 30 a.m., the darkest hour of the day and, for the defenders of this Southwest Pacific island, soon to be the war's darkest hour. Fifteen hundred men and six nurses, Lark Force, had been deployed to New Britain to fortify and defend Rabaul, capital of Australia's mandated territories. Once they'd completed their work on the strategic port and its two airfields, the group-mostly volunteers from Victoria-had settled into the routine of garrison duties, confident of being relieved within a year. But the Japanese had other ideas. Rabaul was the linchpin of their campaign to conquer the Southwest Pacific—and in the early hours of January 23 their invasion force swarmed ashore. What ensued is the story told in The Darkest Hour, a gut-wrenching account of courage and sacrifice, folly and disaster, as seen through the eyes of the few who survived. Bruce Gamble, the critically acclaimed author of Black Sheep One, follows key individuals—soldiers and junior officers, an American citizen and an Army nurse among them—through their experiences in Lark Force. Together their stories comprise a harrowing picture of the Australian forces overrun and driven into the jungle, prey to the unforgiving environment and a cruel enemy that massacred its prisoners—and tormented further by fate, when a Japanese ship transporting prisoners to Hainan Island was torpedoed by an American submarine. The dramatic stories of the Lark Force survivors, told here in full for the first time, are among the most inspiring of the Pacific War.

Review
WW2 Database "(online), “ February 2007”Exhaustively researched and descriptively written, Gamble's narrative of Darkest Hour“ is rich in detail but yet still easy to read. Pick up a copy, settle into your favorite chair, and be careful not to get lost in the wild growth of the South Pacific jungles.”

Lark Force of the Australian Army were deployed to guard the capital of New England, Rabul, against Japanese invasion. After reinforcing the island, a period of garrison duty was shattered when the Japanese attacked in overwhelming numbers on January 23, 1942. Finally told to evacuate the island, the Australian troops had no alternative but to flee into jungle to survive as best they could in the unforgiving territory. Of fifteen hundred men, only around 400 survived to be captured by Japanese forces, and 141 were summarily executed. Placed in a transport ship - the Montevideo Maru- bound for the Hainan islands, the survivors were bound for even more tragedy when the ship was torpedoed by an American submarine with the loss of a further 1000 Australian lives.