By February 1944, Rabaul was no longer the offensive springboard it had been. The Japanese had poured tens of thousands of troops and multiple airfields into the Gazelle Peninsula, planning from here the push toward Australia that the Coral Sea and Guadalcanal campaigns had blunted. Then Allied strategy shifted. Rather than assault Rabaul, Admiral Halsey's planners chose to bypass it - to isolate the fortress and let it wither. Heavy air raids had hammered Japanese aircraft from the skies; now the idea was to press in with warships and prove the place could no longer defend itself. Task Group 38.4 was the messenger. Their orders called it an anti-shipping and harassment sweep. The goal, as Simpson later wrote, was to hasten enemy evacuation.

At 0107 Farenholt opened fire on Praed Point's shore battery. Eight minutes and 141 rounds later, Praed Point fell silent. Simpson shifted his guns to Raluana Point; 56 rounds silenced that battery too. Then came the torpedoes - low-speed runs fired through what American intelligence guessed was the channel in a Japanese minefield, aimed at the anchorage inside Karavia Bay where shipping lay vulnerable. At the same moment, heavy gunfire began coming out of Simpson Harbor from somewhere inside the bay. Simpson realized, later, it was from two Japanese destroyers sheltering inside. Woodworth and Buchanan swung broadsides onto them. The engagement was chaotic - American torpedo wakes running alongside American destroyers, Japanese salvos landing fifty yards off the starboard bow of the Farenholt. One bloomer canvas on a 5-inch gun mount caught fire and was beaten out. A hang-fire had to be unloaded through the muzzle. Combat is always, up close, small problems of this kind.

Then Cape Gazelle opened up. Heavy-caliber shells began passing overhead, continuing to arc over the American formation as Simpson shifted fire to silence that battery too. Black funnel smoke now mingled with white chemical smoke - FS, the petroleum-based curtain destroyers laid behind them to break the firing solutions of shore guns. An observation plane from one of the American ships dropped a stick of bombs on Cape Gazelle. By 0159, having expended 284 rounds at that last battery, Farenholt ceased firing. At 0155 Cape Gazelle was abeam to starboard, receding. Simpson increased speed to thirty knots and turned for home. Until 0515, unidentified aircraft - bogies, in radio parlance - shadowed the retreating ships. One dropped flares at 0310. None attacked. The overcast and the rain squalls Simpson had been glad for at the start held long enough for his force to be clear.

The Battle of Karavia Bay was, the Navy later noted, the first surface engagement ever fought in the Rabaul area during the Solomon Islands Campaign. It marked a psychological pivot as much as a tactical one. The Japanese had occupied Rabaul as the anchor of their South Pacific defense; now an American squadron had walked up to the harbor mouth, destroyed two transports, silenced three shore batteries, and walked away. Two Japanese destroyers inside the bay did not pursue. The port remained blockaded for the remainder of the war. Tens of thousands of Japanese troops on New Britain - the ones who would never be evacuated, who would wait out the war eating garden vegetables in tunnels under the volcanoes - would spend the next eighteen months not as the tip of the spear, but as its garrison.

Karavia Bay today is part of the broader Simpson Harbor system, still one of the most striking natural anchorages in the Pacific, still ringed by the volcanic cones that have defined Rabaul's history for longer than any war. The 1994 eruption of Tavurvur destroyed the old town and coated much of the Gazelle Peninsula in ash - a burial, in some ways, of the battlefields. But divers still find the wrecks. Local historians still tour the shore battery positions at Praed Point, where concrete emplacements crumble back into the tropical growth. Simpson's report survives as it is - a long, numbered, precise record of one night's work, the kind of document in which combat is always reduced to bearings, courses, and rounds expended.