a much more powerful base than the Australians had planned after the 1937 volcanic eruptions, with long term consequences for the town in the post-war period. The Japanese army dug many kilometres of tunnels as shelter from the Allied air forces. By 1943 there were about 110,000 Japanese troops based in Rabaul. The Japanese army also set up brothels in Rabaul where "perhaps 2,000 or more women were deceived and forced into prostitution of a most demanding kind," according to Emeritus Professor Hank Nelson from the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS).
On 18 April 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was shot down and killed by a United States P-38 Lightning over south Bougainville after taking off from Rabaul. Japanese communications giving Yamamoto's flight itinerary were decrypted by United States Navy cryptographers. Sixteen United States Army Air Forces P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal and destroyed the two bombers of the Yamamoto flight and damaged some of the escorting Japanese fighters.
Instead of capturing Rabaul, the Allied forces bypassed it by establishing a ring of airfields and naval bases on the islands around it. Cut off from re-supply and under continual air attacks as part of Operation Cartwheel, the base became useless. The Japanese held Rabaul until they surrendered at the end of the war in August 1945.
1994 eruption.
In 1983 and 1984 the town was ready for evacuation when the volcanoes started to heat up. Nothing happened until 19 September 1994, when again Tavurvur and Vulcan erupted, destroying the airport and covering most of the town with heavy ashfall. There were only 19 hours of warning before the eruption and the city's inhabitants evacuated before the eruption. Only five people were killed�several of them by lightning from the eruptive column. The planning and evacuation drills helped keep
