The Japanese did not want Rabaul for its copra plantations. They wanted it for its proximity - to Truk in the Caroline Islands, where the Imperial Japanese Navy kept one of its most important forward bases, and for the natural anchorage at Simpson Harbor, a drowned volcanic caldera that could shelter a fleet. Major General Tomatiaro Hori commanded the South Seas Force tasked with capturing Kavieng and Rabaul under Operation R. The landings on New Britain preceded by a heavy aerial bombardment designed to gut Allied air power in the region. It succeeded almost completely. Of No. 24 Squadron's ten CAC Wirraway training aircraft and four Lockheed Hudson light bombers, few survived the initial strikes. The squadron's radio message out of Vunakanau was not a pose. The defenders had been given an impossible task.

Across the Gazelle Peninsula the Japanese would eventually operate four major landing grounds and several smaller strips. Lakunai Airfield - known to the Japanese as Rabinjikku, or Rabaul Lower - sat near the harbor mouth, its runway later covered in volcanic ash from the nearby cones. Vunakanau, the old RAAF strip inland, was expanded and reinforced. Rapopo and Tobera came later. Rapopo's single runway was completed by January 1943 using primitive methods - tanks pushing palm trees into hand-dug trenches. Its defenses eventually included roughly 29 heavy anti-aircraft guns, 21 medium, 13 light, and 5 searchlights. Mud was a constant problem, as were Allied reconnaissance aircraft, which by early 1943 had catalogued every hardstand and revetment. Tobera - begun in July 1943 with a 3,600-foot concrete runway - was the shortest and was dedicated primarily to A6M Zero fighters of Imperial Japanese Navy air units.

The unit names read like a roll call of Japanese naval aviation's last effort. 201 Kokutai, 252 Kokutai, 253 Kokutai - fighter groups flying A6M Zeros out of Tobera through late 1943 and into February 1944, when losses became so severe that the remaining aircraft of the 2nd Carrier Division's Zuikaku Detachment were funneled in as replacements. On 17 February 1944, American carrier strikes decimated the remaining Japanese air strength. From that point on, the airfields were kept barely serviceable - the 105th Naval Base Air Unit, 2,000 personnel in March 1945, struggling to keep Tobera usable while fuel and ammunition ran out. The 28th Construction Unit brought in to maintain the fields consisted of 200 civilians and convict laborers. By the last months of the war, Japanese personnel stationed around the fields were planting and tending gardens, simply to eat. Fifty-man air raid tunnels, dug three miles north of Tobera, became their living quarters.

After the war, the airfields were abandoned. Vegetation overtook the taxiways. Beside Vunakanau's runway lay the wreckage of Japanese aircraft - a Ki-21 Sally, Ki-48, Ki-43 Oscar - and among them an American P-39 Airacobra and a TDR-1. The TDR was an assault drone, one of the earliest uses of remote-controlled aircraft in combat; its cockpit was intentionally empty. In 1966, locals who had come to fear the cockpitless aircraft as a vessel for evil spirits destroyed it with a 2,000-pound bomb. The rest of the wreckage remained. At Tobera, a house now stands on the old runway apron, hardstand poured over palm trees. Nearby sits a small collection moved from Vunakanau in the 1980s for safekeeping: a Ki-43-II Oscar, an A6M3 Zero, a G4M1 Betty. At Rapopo the runway is coated with volcanic ash from Tavurvur's 1994 eruption, which rebuilt much of Rabaul's landscape.

In the early 1950s Douglas Joycey bought half of the old Tobera Airfield land, renamed it Vimy Plantation, and began planting coconut palms for copra - the familiar New Britain trade. In the 1980s a crane was used to recover a Type 10 120mm anti-aircraft gun and a searchlight from the Vimy land; both were sent to the Kokopo Museum. In the early 1990s, a company called Golden Dolphin 3 bought part of Vimy and renamed their section Vunatung Plantation. The airfields have become plantations again, and the plantations have been renamed and sold again, and the wreckage has become a tourist attraction. The cycle is familiar to the Gazelle Peninsula, which has lost its towns to volcanoes, and its peace to invasions, and its skies to bombing raids, and has repeatedly returned, stubbornly, to copra and cocoa.