The Royal Navy gave it a ship's name even though it never went to sea. HMS Nabaron was a stretch of coral and palm trees on Ponam Island, a speck of land north of Manus in the Admiralty group, where the US Navy had scraped a 5,000-foot runway into the reef and then, in early 1945, handed the keys to the British. For nine months in the last year of the Pacific War, the Fleet Air Arm borrowed this island from its allies and called it a ship. The fiction was not just bureaucratic. Under the Naval Discipline Act, a shore station had to be a commissioned vessel to enforce Royal Navy rules, so a stretch of reef two degrees south of the equator became, on paper, a warship.
The personnel and gear for Mobile Operational Naval Air Base IV began assembling at RNAS Ludham in Norfolk on 15 November 1944, half a world away from the reef where they would end up. HMS Nabaron was designed as a Type A (Small) MONAB, capable of supporting up to 50 aircraft. The idea was simple and, for the Royal Navy in 1945, urgent. Britain had fewer Pacific bases than she needed and her ally had more than she could run, so the RN learned to set up airfields in prefabricated pieces and ship them forward. In June, when the island's population peaked, roughly 1,700 officers and ratings were crammed onto Ponam - 785 base crew plus 930 airmen from Fleet Air Arm squadrons flying in from carriers. The overflow slept in reed huts along the lagoon's edge, and the war diaries note, almost cheerfully, that these were "quite adequate for short-term lodging."
The planes that came and went from Ponam were a catalogue of Allied Pacific aviation. Vought Corsairs with their bent gull wings operated from the American strip for British squadrons. Grumman Hellcats and Avengers lent their bulk to carrier deck-qualifying practice. Fairey Fireflies and Supermarine Seafires - the naval variant of the Spitfire, salt-proofed and strengthened - completed detachments between carrier deployments. Twenty-one Avengers from 828 Naval Air Squadron disembarked here on 29 May 1945. Six aircraft from 801 Squadron arrived from HMS Implacable a few days earlier. In an odd twist, even Fairey Barracuda torpedo bombers from 812 Squadron appeared in late August - arriving for training just as the war they had been training for ended.
The announcement of Japan's surrender reached Ponam on 14 August 1945, and the men commemorated it the day after. Whatever celebrations took place, the paperwork began almost immediately. Captain A.N.C. Bingley, the station's founding commander, had been declared unfit for duty; Captain C.J. Blake arrived on 30 August with instructions to shut the place down within a month and also close the Royal Navy's forward aircraft pool on nearby Pityilu Island. What followed was one of those undramatic endings that define the hinge of history. Escort carriers appeared in sequence - one on 3 October to take on the air-sea rescue flight, HMS Unicorn on the sixth to load a storage unit, SS Empire Charmain for the torpedo maintenance vehicles, then Unicorn again on the 24th. The last ships departed on 31 October 1945 carrying two Supermarine Walrus amphibians and everyone left behind.
HMS Unicorn reached Sydney on 6 November, and that arrival dissolved MONAB IV. On 9 November, the men of Nabaron boarded an escort carrier for the long voyage home to Britain, arriving in time for Christmas 1945. Most had been away for a year. Some had been away much longer. The reed huts along the lagoon would have stood for a while after that, gradually returning to the sea and the forest, but the runway - the American strip that had been an Australian-British-American shared workspace for less than twelve months - lingered for decades. Ponam Island is tiny, barely more than a kilometre long, and the old airfield is still visible in satellite imagery. What remains physically is not much. What remained operationally was everything needed to support a Pacific fleet in its final months of war, then, as suddenly as it appeared, gone.
HMS Nabaron occupied Ponam Island at 1.91 degrees south, 146.89 degrees east, on the outer northern rim of the Admiralty Islands chain. Approach at 3,000 to 5,000 feet for best visibility of the narrow reef and the faint rectangular scar where the 5,000-foot runway once cut across the island. Nearest active airport is Momote (IATA: MAS, ICAO: AYMO) on Los Negros Island, about 50 nautical miles east. Seeadler Harbour - the massive sheltered anchorage that made the Admiralties strategically indispensable - opens to the south. Weather is tropical year-round with a heavy monsoon from December to May; afternoon thunderstorms are common. From the air in clear conditions, Ponam appears as a pale, palm-fringed line of reef between darker water on both sides.