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Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul - Australia's Worst Military Disaster of World War II

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The book "Darkest Hour: The True Story of Lark Force at Rabaul" is a compelling historic accounting of those Australian men and women on the southwest Pacific island of New Britain that was run over by the invading Japanese Army. Their fateful encounter began at the early morning hour of 2:30 a.m. on January 23, 1942. The Japanese rushed ashore to completely overwhelm the 1500 men and six nurses in the garrison; thus begins one of the most tragic tales of WWII.

Less than 25% of those in the garrison were able to escape and evade and after many weeks of hardship found their way off the island to safety. However, those that remained were captured and endure cruel and sometime lethal treatment at the hands of the Japanese. In one incident alone, two hundred POWS were executed. But a worse fate was still awaiting 850 of the survivors when they were torpedoed by an American submarine and went down with the ship while locked in their holding cells below deck.

The book is obviously researched very well. Author Bruce Gamble writes this historic story as if he were an eyewitness to the events. It is a most compelling and entertaining tale that shows the courage, sacrifices and horrors of war first hand. Gamble makes us feel the emotions of that group as he shares with the reader some of the small details of the events by the people involved. The writing is top notched and goes beyond a mere reporting of what happened. It captures the heart and soul of that time and place. Reading this true story will change you; you cannot help but be moved by what happened to these men and women.

This book is one of those that once you begin reading it you do not want to pout it down until you are finished with it. I give this book my personal endorsement and highest recommendation. It has also earned The Military Writer's Society of America's top book rating of FIVE STARS! This book is more than just history--it is also a tribute to those fine soldiers and nurses of Lark Force who gave their lives for freedom.

Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Stalingrad, Iwo Jima. These are just a handful of the battles that come to mind when people think about World War II--and rightfully so. Thankfully, though, Bruce Gamble extends his vision to one of the most gripping, and tragic, stories of the entire war. The story of Lark Force. Not only a true page turner (Gamble is an excellent story teller), Darkest Hour is obviously well-researched and filled with detail. Put simply, their story deserved to be told, and Bruce Gamble provided a fitting tribute to their legacy.

Darkest Hour is a moving book about one of Australia's least known World War Two incidents.
My grandfather died on the Montevideo Maru and for years I've searched for information about his death and his time on Rabaul. This book provided me with many answers others haven't.
Bruce Gamble writes about the members of Lark Force as real men and honestly discusses the controversy surrounding their fate.

A compelling, disturbing book that brings this darkest hour in Australian war time history into the light.

Darkest Hour is not only an excellent historical account of one of the most important "battles" at the beginning of World War II but also an entertaining read that is hard to put down. The author does a good job at character development, which is often something lacking in these kinds of books. He follows the Lark Force from its inception in Australia to its demise (mostly) in the wretched hold of a Japanese cargo ship. All is not hopeless as the stories of those who did manage to escape the island and get back home are told in adequate detail. This book made we want to read more about this period of World War II in the Pacific theater.

Darkest Hour very well captures the actions and consequences of life and death decisions by Australians in the World War II Pacific theater. A page-turner, I lost track of time while reading the book following the Australians and their Japanese pursuers through the jungles and waters around New Britain. Mr. Gamble's writing is able to relate historic events, the battleground geography, the environment, military plans and decisions (or lack thereof) with the personal struggles of the men and women caught up in a one-sided fight. It was a great reading experience that is most highly recommended.

With few exceptions the Japanese attack in the South Pacific and South-east Asia was met by British Commonwealth or American troops fighting under poor leadership, using older equipment and facing a psychologically superior enemy with a demoralised mindset. Lark Force at Rabaul was such a force. Their collapse was perhaps even more poignant and certainly more speedy, than almost any other in the region -- within two hours of the Japanes landing at Rabaul, the entire force of 1400 men was completely dislodged from their initial positions. Within 24 hours the rag-tag remnants were running in every direction, some through dense trackless jungle to avoid the fate of imprisonment or worse...

The author reminds us that none of this was foreordained. The dispositions of the Australians were poor, their leadership abysmal and their planning probably some of the worst in the theatre. In Bataan the Americans set up a jungle base to battle the Japanese, without support for 6 months. At Rabaul, the requests of the junior officers to build up just such jungle redoubts was regarded as defeatist and overuled.

When the storm struck however, there were innumerable tales of individual courage, treks through the jungle, encouters with headhunters, and the individual resources of few sometimes triumphing over the hundreds of Japanese soldiers trailing them.

In the end however, 1000 soldiers of Lark Force went into the bag.
About 200 were massacred outright after being taken prisoner, further down the coast. The rest were aboard the Montevideo Maru being transhipped to Hainan Island when they were torpedoed by the USS Sturgeon. Not a man survived. It is still the worst marine tragedy in Australian history.

The fact that I read this book in 48 hours should be testament enough to how thrilling and engrossing it is. Highly recommended. The author, an American, also does a very good job in his retelling of the AIF story of Lark Force and is well at home with Commonwealth Command, and colourful language and Digger culture.

This book goes deep into the experiences of the Aussie soldiers after they enlist into the army in 1940 and 1941, and then are sent to the nearby island of New Britain, the soldiers vainly defending their posts as the Japanese invade the island, and then once their colonel and his staff flee from their command post, the whole command disintegrates and scatters into the jungle. Most of the soldiers are caught by the Japs and nearly 200 of them are executed. A lucky few manage to survive these massacres, badly injured, and managed to tell their story in the end after their horrifying struggle to survive. Only a couple hundred soldiers and other personnel manage to be rescued from their imprisoned island, even after the Australian government had abandoned this garrison to their fate, but the most tragic part of the book is the journey of about 1000 POW's on a Japanese "hell ship" until it is torpedoed by a lucky shot from an American submarine and sent to the bottom in just barely 12 minutes. None of the POW's managed to survive, and even the author of this book gives you a pondering thought on what the last moments of these poor men might have been, locked in the holds of a ship that is already on it's last journey to the bottom. It also makes you wonder how the submarine captains might have felt once they discovered that the Japanese ship they just sunk, and most likely got commended for, had been carrying Allied prisoners of war by the hundreds, and in some cases like the tragic "Junyo Maru" incident in 1944, prisoners by the thousands.

This book is a must-read for those who feel like they need to read stories involving soldiers that had been abandoned by their own government and having to go through a terrible ordeal to survive in order to tell their stories, which end up getting published in books like these. Jungle warfare is no joke, and in this book, you'll find out why.

It was hard to put the book down. It is a very well written account of a part of Australia's Second World War history that is not at all well-known. I recommend it highly.

Darkest Hour, by Bruce Gamble, details the history of Australian forces at Rabaul in WWII.

The beginning of the book, focuses logically on pre-deployment. In forces deployed at Rabaul, musicians, most of whom were affliated with the Salvation Army church, were very much over represented, In the early chapters, we are told that these musicians, because of thier faith, had near concscientous objector beliefs. Yet, the later chapters do not address how, if at all, these beliefs were challenged when fighting broke out.

Darkest Hour is subtitled "Australia's worst military disaster of WWII." The phrase "miliatry disaster" connotes an outcome that could have been avoided. While the author, Bruce Gamble documents that the miliatry leadership on Raball was ineffective, he concedes, given the superioirty of Japanese forces, the outcome of the battle would have been the same whomever had been in charge. Further, he takes issue that military planners for did not make plans for a better defense of the island. Yet given the superiority of Japanese forces, even if miliatry planners had doubled, even tripled the defenes, the outcome of the battle would still have been same -- only more Australians would have died. That military planners sacraficed the men on Rabaul so that others may live, was bona fide "stratgeic decision" not strictly speaking a "disaster." Similarly Gamble does not fault an American commander for firing on a Japanese ship that carried POWs from Rabaal. The american commander made a decision, which resulted in "disaster" but which given the information available at the time was a decision any competent commander whould have made.

A more accurate subtitle for Darkest Hour would be "the atrocities at Rabaul." The atrocities carried out by the Japanese on Rabaul is one of the major themes of the book. Documenting such atrocities is demanded for an accurate telling of the story, but is unpleasant to read, espeically as there is no implication of such stories in the title of the book.

Most of Darkest Hour concerns the fate of soldiers fleeing into the jungle. Gamble provides a detailed map of Rabaul, but the map does not have a distance key! This, and a lack of reference to distances in the text itself, makes for a confused retelling. In the later chapters, Gamble does, in the text, provided distances involved. This and better storystelling improve readability in the later chapters.

Gamble does try to work in the names and stories of as many soldiers as possible. While neither he, nor others, could document the exact fate of every solider, his ability to reconstruct events for so many soliders was remarkable. His adherence to detail honors those that served.

Still, while Darkest Hour honors those that serve, the title is misleading, the map is inadequate, and the storytelling, at times, confusing.

I really wanted to rate this book higher. I appreciated the author's desire to honor the fallen members of Lark Force. Portions of the book were quite enthralling but other sections seemed to drag a bit and were somewhat confusing to keep track of. I presume that this was in part due to the scarcity of source material for some of what is recounted. The book could, in my opinion, have benefited greatly from more and higher quality maps.