The geography around Henry Reid Bay is shaped by two river systems that keep drifting. The Mevelo - also called the Mavelo or Mävlu in older maps - is the main drainage, with tributaries that merge inland before emptying near the head of the bay. The Waitavalo, known variously as the Henry Reid River, the Wulwut, or the Vulvut depending on which colonial cartographer you trust, once entered the bay at a distinct point some distance from the Mevelo. Recent satellite imagery shows that the Waitavalo has shifted, and the two river mouths now appear almost indistinguishable. Brown Island, northwest of Cape Turner, is connected to the mainland by a causeway but is still called an island on every map. Coconut palm plantations producing copra had been established at Tol, Waitavalo, and Kalai before the Second World War. Kalai also hosted a Roman Catholic mission.

The people Brown met at Henry Reid Bay in 1878 were not the same people his earlier visit had found there. Two tribal language groups had long shared this coast. The Gaktei, coming down from the mountains of the Gazelle isthmus, had been in what Danish anthropologist Richard Parkinson described as a state of feud with the Sulka. The Sulka had been pushed out of Henry Reid Bay toward Cape Orford to the south in an act of violent displacement that Brown could see traces of on the ground - signs that the previous inhabitants had been recently driven from the area. Brown's accounts, read now, capture a moment before colonial administration reached this coast, when the peoples of the Gazelle Peninsula were still sorting out territorial conflicts on their own terms. A few decades later, the German colonial period, the Australian mandate, and the Second World War would reshape all of that.

When Japanese troops landed at Rabaul on 23 January 1942, the small Australian garrison known as Lark Force was quickly overwhelmed. The survivors scattered, trying to escape along New Britain's north and south coasts in small groups. On the morning of 3 February, five barges carrying Japanese troops from the 3rd Battalion of the 144th Infantry Regiment landed near Tol Plantation on Henry Reid Bay. Twenty-two Australian soldiers surrendered under a white flag. Others were captured over the following hours as Japanese patrols swept the area. The next day, the prisoners were killed in four separate groups - approximately 100 men in one, 6 in another, 24 in a third, 11 in the last. Not all were soldiers. Some were medical personnel from the 2/10th Field Ambulance, wearing red-cross armbands. A small number survived by feigning death after being shot or bayoneted, their accounts later forming the foundation of an Australian court of inquiry convened in May 1942.

The men who died at Tol were left where they fell, their bodies covered with palm fronds by the Japanese troops who killed them. For three years their remains lay scattered through the plantation and the jungle around Henry Reid Bay, with no way for the Australian Army to reach them. In March 1945, as the Australian 14th/32nd Battalion conducted operations against Japanese positions near Waitavalo and Tol, they began finding the bones. The scattered remains of 158 victims were recovered and reinterred. The Australian War Memorial records the total at approximately 160. The families who learned that their men had been killed in 1942 now learned the specifics - where, how, by whom. A generation of Australians came to know the name of Tol Plantation as a symbol of what the early Pacific War had cost.

The same ground that had been the site of massacre in 1942 became a contested battlefield in 1945. The Australian 6th Brigade, pushing north from Jacquinot Bay, needed to cross the Waitavalo - the river also known as the Wulwut - to reach the high ground above Tol and Waitavalo plantations. The Japanese had fortified the ridgeline running northeast from the river mouth, with pillboxes, mortars, and machine-gun positions. The 19th Battalion made the river crossing on 5 March 1945. The 19th and 14th/32nd then fought their way up the slopes for two weeks, taking the position on 20 March. At Tol, the 2/3 Railway Construction Company of the Australian Army built a small airfield in early August 1945, just as the war was ending. The airfield is listed today as disused but serviceable, and some reports indicate it is still in use. The bay is quiet again, bracketed by the memory of what happened here and the small villages of Lamarien and Marupa Mission that still dot its edges.