"Don't Tell Them How Many We Are" — The 30 Australians Who Bluffed An Entire Japanese Division

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]In October 1942, the best soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Navy controlled a strategic island in the Pacific. What destroyed them wasn't a battle.

[00:00:10]It was a lie.

[00:00:12]I spent weeks going through AWM archives, records of the 5th Sasebo Naval Landing Force, and campaign diaries of Operation Drake to bring you this documentary.

[00:00:22]What you're about to hear doesn't appear in the great narratives of the Pacific War. But the tactic the Australians used at Goodenough Island is studied today in military academies as one of the most perfect examples of combat deception in the entire Second World War. Goodenough Island is part of the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea.

[00:00:45]32 km east of the eastern tip of New Guinea mainland. A dot on the map that before August 1942 appeared in no Allied or Japanese strategic plan. But in the autumn of 1942, that island became one of the most critical points in the South Pacific.

[00:01:04]Why?

[00:01:05]Because Goodenough Island controlled the sea lanes between Milne Bay and Buna.

[00:01:10]Any force that occupied it had early warning of all naval movements in that section of the Pacific. And its grassy plains in the northeast Vivigani were perfect for building airfields, runways for fighters and bombers from which to attack Rabaul and support operations on the New Guinea mainland.

[00:01:28]Whoever controlled Goodenough Island controlled the air and sea in that section of the Pacific.

[00:01:33]In August 1942, Japan got there first.

[00:01:37]On the 25th of August, 1942, a Japanese convoy of seven landing craft was sailing toward Milne Bay.

[00:01:47]On board, 353 marines from the 5th Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force, elite of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commanded by Commander Torashige Tsukiyoka.

[00:01:58]They weren't going to Goodenough Island.

[00:02:01]They just stopped to rest.

[00:02:03]It was the most costly mistake Tsukiyoka would make in the entire campaign.

[00:02:09]The Kittyhawks of the RAAF's No. 75 Squadron found the convoy on the southern tip of the island and destroyed the landing craft.

[00:02:19]All of them.

[00:02:20]353 elite marines of the Imperial Japanese Navy stranded on an island that wasn't their objective without transport back, without any possibility of advancing toward Milne Bay, without any option except to stay and wait.

[00:02:38]The Japanese tried to evacuate their wounded. The submarine I-1 managed to take out 71 of the most seriously ill men in October.

[00:02:47]But those who remained were 285 marines with malaria, hungry, with supplies arriving by air and submarine [music] in quantities that were never enough.

[00:02:58]Stranded on an island they controlled but couldn't use for anything that mattered strategically.

[00:03:04]On the 22nd of October, 1942, two Australian destroyers approached Goodenough Island.

[00:03:12]HMAS Stuart HMAS Arunta On board 640 soldiers of the 2/12 Battalion, 18th Brigade. Men mainly from Queensland and Tasmania commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Arnold.

[00:03:28]Operation Drake.

[00:03:30]They landed at Mud Bay and Taleba against 285 Japanese marines.

[00:03:38]The numbers were on the Australian side.

[00:03:41]But here's what makes this story different from any other Pacific campaign story. Before the 2/12 Battalion landed, before the 640 men set foot on Goodenough Island, someone had already been there with far fewer men and had convinced the Japanese they were facing a force that didn't yet exist.

[00:04:02]That's what turns Goodenough Island into something more than a tactical victory on an island nobody remembered.

[00:04:09]What those Australians did before the battalion arrived is what no history book has fully explained.

[00:04:15]And to understand it, you first need to understand who the Japanese were that they had to deceive. And what made them especially dangerous despite being stranded, hungry, and sick on an island they couldn't leave?

[00:04:28]There's an easy temptation when telling this story to present the Japanese on Goodenough Island as a weakened, starving force with no options.

[00:04:37]As soldiers who had already lost before the battle started. That temptation is a mistake.

[00:04:44]The 5th Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force wasn't conventional infantry.

[00:04:49]>> [music] >> It was the Japanese equivalent of elite marines, men trained specifically for amphibious operations in hostile terrain, to fight in conditions that would have paralyzed conventional units.

[00:05:01]Commander Torashige Tsukiyoka had commanded them in operations that no conventional sailor would have completed. And on Goodenough Island, despite everything that had gone wrong for them, they were still exactly that.

[00:05:15]Elite marines.

[00:05:17]With machine guns, with mortars, with enough ammunition to make any direct assault cost more than it should.

[00:05:24]What they didn't have was transport or enough food or medicine. 285 men trapped on an island they couldn't leave.

[00:05:34]But that they could defend.

[00:05:37]From the 25th of August to the 22nd of October, 1942, almost 2 months, Tsukiyoka's marines lived on Goodenough Island without any real possibility of getting out.

[00:05:50]The submarine I-1 arrived in October with rations, ammunition, medical supplies, and a new radio because the original radio had been destroyed.

[00:05:58]Two months without direct communication with command.

[00:06:02]Two months receiving supplies by air in quantities that were never enough [music] for 285 men on a tropical island with endemic malaria.

[00:06:11]Malaria was doing what no Australian could do from the shore.

[00:06:15]Reducing the effective Japanese strength day by day.

[00:06:19]Not all at once, slowly. [snorts] One man with fever who can't shoot accurately. Two men too weak to carry ammunition.

[00:06:28]10 men who need care and reduce the capacity of those still standing.

[00:06:33]By October 1942, the 5th Sasebo SNLF was a fraction of what it had been in August.

[00:06:39]But, it was still dangerous.

[00:06:41]On the 15th of October, 1942, 1 week before the Australian landing, the Japanese radio on Goodenough Island received an intelligence message.

[00:06:54]The allies were showing considerable interest in the island.

[00:06:57]An invasion was probable.

[00:06:59]That was all Tsukioka knew.

[00:07:02]Considerable interest.

[00:07:04]Probable invasion.

[00:07:06]Not how many men, not exactly when, not from which direction.

[00:07:12]Japanese intelligence on the Allied force was imprecise at best.

[00:07:16]Their estimates, based on aerial observation and the fragmentary reports [music] arriving by radio, calculated approximately 300 Australians concentrated in the southeast.

[00:07:27]The real figure was 640.

[00:07:30]Double.

[00:07:31]But, here's what makes the Japanese intelligence error relevant to this story.

[00:07:35]The Australians knew the Japanese didn't know exactly how many of them there were. And before the 640 men of the two over 12th Battalion landed, someone had decided to exploit that uncertainty in a way that no amphibious operations manual described.

[00:07:52]Because the Battle of Goodenough Island didn't start on the 22nd of October.

[00:07:57]It started before.

[00:07:59]With fires the Japanese could see from their positions.

[00:08:03]With movements suggesting a force far larger than what was actually there.

[00:08:07]With a lie constructed systematically [music] to make 285 elite Marines make decisions based on a reality that didn't exist.

[00:08:16]And the question that defines everything that follows is simple.

[00:08:20]Did it work?

[00:08:21]There's something that the dramatic headlines about Goodenough Island don't fully say.

[00:08:26]The deception didn't win the battle.

[00:08:29]The fighting did.

[00:08:30]On the 22nd of October, 1942, the two over 12th Battalion landed at two simultaneous points.

[00:08:40]520 men with Lieutenant Colonel Arnold at Mud Bay.

[00:08:44]120 men with Major Gategood at Taleba Bay.

[00:08:48]640 Australians split into two forces advancing into the island's interior from different angles.

[00:08:55]And the 285 Marines of the fifth Sasebo SNLF, hungry, malaria-ridden, stranded since August, didn't surrender.

[00:09:05]They fought.

[00:09:07]On the 23rd of October, the Australians encountered Japanese resistance at Kilia near Mud Bay and at Nubulu Creek near Taleba Bay.

[00:09:16]Real resistance. Machine guns, mortars.

[00:09:19][music] Marines who had spent two months on an island they couldn't leave and who had had two months to prepare their defensive positions.

[00:09:27]The Australians were repelled with casualties.

[00:09:31]13 Australians killed. 19 wounded. In a five-day operation against a force that history books describe as weakened and without options, weakened didn't mean defenseless.

[00:09:45]And without options didn't mean without the will to fight.

[00:09:49]On the 24th of October, the Australians launched an attack against the Japanese positions at Killia.

[00:09:55]It failed.

[00:09:56]Tsukiyoka's Marines had chosen their defensive positions with the precision of men who had spent two months studying the terrain.

[00:10:03]The fields of fire were registered. The Australian approaches were covered.

[00:10:08]The attack on the 24th didn't take Killia.

[00:10:12]But, it did something more important.

[00:10:15]It told Tsukiyoka what he needed to know.

[00:10:18]640 Australians, two landing points, pressure from multiple directions simultaneously, and his own men, 285 Marines, reduced further by malaria and two months of hunger with no real possibility of receiving reinforcements.

[00:10:36]The calculation was simple.

[00:10:38]They could keep resisting. They could inflict more Australian casualties. But, the final result wouldn't change.

[00:10:45]Goodenough Island was lost.

[00:10:48]In the darkness of the night of the 24th to the 25th of October, Tsukiyoka ordered the evacuation.

[00:10:55]The two landing craft that the submarine I-1 had delivered weeks earlier, which the Australians didn't know existed, were loaded with approximately 250 Marines. They sailed toward Ferguson Island in the darkness.

[00:11:09]They arrived at dawn on the 25th.

[00:11:12]On the 26th of October, the light cruiser Tenryu picked them up at Ferguson Island, bound for Rabaul.

[00:11:20]On the 27th of October, the Australians took complete control of the island.

[00:11:25]They found 39 Japanese bodies and empty defensive positions that told them the battle had been closer than any official report fully captured.

[00:11:35]The 2 over 12th battalion left.

[00:11:38]And the 75 Australians who remained looked at the island they had to defend and calculated what any man in that situation would have calculated.

[00:11:47]They couldn't defend it by force.

[00:11:50]But they could make nobody want to attack it.

[00:11:53]The anti-aircraft guns came first.

[00:11:56]Timber logs cut and positioned pointing at the sky at angles that from the air from Japanese reconnaissance aircraft looked exactly like what they weren't.

[00:12:05]Anti-aircraft artillery.

[00:12:07]The kind of artillery that only a large force planning to stay would deploy.

[00:12:12]Then the hospital.

[00:12:13]An entire structure designed to look like a field medical facility with the scale of a unit with thousands of men to treat, not 75.

[00:12:23]The jungle vine barricades that from the right distance with the right light were indistinguishable from the barbed wire any serious defensive position to protect its perimeter.

[00:12:33]And the campfires.

[00:12:34]Not one.

[00:12:36]Not five.

[00:12:37]Multiple fires distributed strategically across the island. Each one representing a field kitchen. Each field kitchen representing a unit of specific size.

[00:12:47]Japanese observers watching from neighboring islands or from reconnaissance aircraft saw an island with the heat and light pattern of 3,000 soldiers.

[00:12:57]There were 75.

[00:12:59]But the most sophisticated part of the deception wasn't visual.

[00:13:03]It was electronic.

[00:13:05]The 75 Australians transmitted messages in deliberately easy to break codes.

[00:13:11]Not from carelessness.

[00:13:12]By design.

[00:13:14]A code easy enough to crack that the Japanese would break it is better than no code at all because it gives them the illusion of having obtained real intelligence. When in reality, they're reading exactly what someone wants them to read.

[00:13:27]The volume and pattern of the transmissions were consistent with the radio traffic of a complete brigade.

[00:13:32]Coordinates of units that didn't exist.

[00:13:35]Situation reports from fictitious companies.

[00:13:39]Supply requests for 3,000 men.

[00:13:42]All designed to be intercepted. All designed to confirm what the campfires and log cannons were already suggesting.

[00:13:49]That Goodenough Island was occupied by a force not worth attacking. The AWM archives don't record the name of whoever designed the plan. There's no officer listed as the architect of the deception. No report documenting the initial decision to build the false brigade.

[00:14:05]No recorded moment where someone said out loud the idea that would keep the Australian position alive for months.

[00:14:12]It was an initiative of the occupation contingent.

[00:14:15]75 men who looked at the situation they had alone on an island surrounded by potential enemies with massively superior forces and decided that the only viable option was to make the enemy believe the situation was different. And during the months that followed, while Allied engineers built the Vivigani runways, >> [music] >> while the airfields took shape on the grassy plains of the island's northeast, while Goodenough Island became the attack base the Allies needed for the Pacific campaign, the Japanese didn't attack. Not because they couldn't, but because they believed they couldn't. Because 75 Australians with logs, jungle vines, campfires, and a radio operator had built a brigade that didn't exist. And the brigade had worked exactly as if it had 3,000 real men.

[00:15:04]On the 27th of October, 1942, when the Australians took complete control of Goodenough Island, they gained something that at the time didn't seem especially dramatic. A small island in the South Pacific. 32 km of coastline. Grassy plains in the northeast, difficult terrain in the interior.

[00:15:24]What wasn't obvious in October 1942 was what that island would make possible in the months and years that followed.

[00:15:32]Immediately, in November 1942, the Japanese loss of Goodenough Island facilitated the Allied offensive at Buna-Gona.

[00:15:41]The Japanese had lost their observation point between Milne Bay and Buna. Their naval movements in that section of the Pacific could no longer go undetected.

[00:15:51]The intelligence advantage that Goodenough Island would have given them disappeared the day Tsukiyoka evacuated his men in the darkness [music] of the 24th of October.

[00:16:00]In 1943, Goodenough Island became a central piece of Operation Cartwheel, the Allied strategy to isolate Rabaul and cut Japanese supply lines in the Pacific.

[00:16:12]Field hospitals, staging facilities, a logistical base through which 60,000 Allied troops passed on their way to other operations.

[00:16:21]60,000.

[00:16:23]On an island that 75 Australians with logs and campfires had defended while the airfields were built.

[00:16:30]The temporary Vivigani runway was operational in October 1942, practically at the same time the battle ended.

[00:16:38]In June 1943, the 5,100-ft fighter runway was ready.

[00:16:43]RAAF Nos. 76, 77, and 79 squadrons operated from there.

[00:16:49]In October 1943, the 6,000-ft bomber runway was operational. Beauforts, Beaufighters, aircraft attacking New Britain and New Guinea from a base that in August 1942 was just grassy plain and in October was territory controlled by stranded Japanese Marines.

[00:17:08]Every sortie that took off from Vivigani between 1943 and the end of the war was possible because 75 Australians had kept the island in Allied hands while the runway was being built.

[00:17:22]With logs that looked like cannons, with vines that looked like barbed wire, with campfires that looked like the kitchens of 3,000 men, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Arnold, commander of the 2 over 12th Battalion, was mentioned in dispatches.

[00:17:38]Lieutenant Clifford Hoskins received the Military Cross for his actions at Taliba Bay.

[00:17:44]The battalion was collectively decorated.

[00:17:47]And the 75 Australians who built the false brigade, those who designed the log cannons, who lit the campfires, who transmitted radio messages in deliberately vulnerable codes, have no name in any archive that historians have found. The initiative that kept Goodenough Island in Allied hands during the critical months of Vivigani's construction was a collective decision without a documented author.

[00:18:11]Not because it didn't matter, but because it was exactly the kind of decision that the men who made it didn't think about in terms of individual credit. They thought about whether anyone would attack the island tomorrow.

[00:18:24]And tomorrow, nobody attacked the island. The Australian War Memorial preserves the photographs, >> [music] >> the log cannons, the false structures, the positions that from the air were indistinguishable from a real brigade.

[00:18:39]In the archives, AWM historians describe the Goodenough Island deception with a phrase that doesn't usually appear in formal military documents.

[00:18:48]A masterpiece of bluff.

[00:18:51]Today, in special operations doctrine and military deception [music] programs, Goodenough Island appears as one of the most efficient examples from the Second World War of what the military calls deception operations.

[00:19:04]Not because the deception was technologically sophisticated, but because it worked with minimal resources, [music] without documented formal authorization, and without any of the men who executed it leaving their name in any record. 75 men, logs, vines, campfires, a radio, and a brigade of 3,000 soldiers that never existed. Today, Goodenough Island is a quiet island in Milne Bay Province.

[00:19:32]The Vivigani runway still exists, though not in military use.

[00:19:37]And in the AWM archives, among the photographs of log cannons pointing at the sky and vine barricades that look like barbed wire, there is a story that no dramatic headline fully captures.

[00:19:49]That sometimes the best defense isn't the man with the rifle.

[00:19:53]It's the man who convinces the enemy there are 3,000 rifles when there are only 75.

[00:19:59]There's something about this story that the formal archives don't capture.

[00:20:04]Not the casualties, not the airfields, not Operation Cartwheel or the 60,000 troops who passed through the island.

[00:20:12]It's this.

[00:20:13]75 men looked at an island they couldn't defend by force and made the only decision that made sense.

[00:20:19]>> [music] >> They didn't defend it by force.

[00:20:22]They made nobody want to attack it.

[00:20:24]Without a documented name, without a formal order, without individual credit in any archive historians have found.

[00:20:32]Just logs that look like cannons, vines that look like barbed wire, campfires that look like the kitchens of 3,000 men.

[00:20:41]And an enemy that looked from the neighboring islands and decided it wasn't worth the effort.

[00:20:45]Every aircraft that took off from Vivigani, every sortie toward Rabaul, every operation that the Goodenough Island base made possible between 1943 and the end of the war.

[00:20:58]It all started [music] with 75 Australians who didn't have enough men to fight.

[00:21:03]And who won anyway.

[00:21:05]There's another story just as buried as this one. A group of Australians who also won without having enough men to win.

[00:21:13]In different terrain.

[00:21:14]With a different tactic.

[00:21:16]And with an outcome that changed something bigger than an island.

[00:21:20]It's in the next video.