Canadian Virtual War Memorial

Rabaul lies on Blanche Bay inside the hook-nosed north-eastern tip of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, the largest and most important island of the Bismarck Archipelago. The Memorial is situated in Rabaul (Bita Paka) War Cemetery, which is located approximately 50 kilometres south of Rabaul, and approximately 5 kilometres south-west of Kokopo. The Rabaul Memorial commemorates over 1,200 members of the Australian Army (including personnel of the New Guinea and Papuan local forces and constabulary) and the Royal Australian Air Force, who lost their lives in New Britain and New Ireland in January and February 1942, and in New Britain from November 1944 to August 1945, and who have no known grave. Men of the Royal Australian Navy who lost their lives in the south-western Pacific region and who have no graves but the sea, are commemorated on Plymouth Naval Memorial in England along with many of their comrades of the Royal Navy and other Commonwealth Naval Forces. The Memorial takes the form of an avenue of stone pylons leading from the entrance building of the cemetery to the Cross of Sacrifice. Bronze panels bearing the names are affixed to the faces of the pylons. A central stone lectern at the commencement of the avenue carries a bronze plate with the following dedicatory inscription: AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM IN THIS PLACE ARE RECORDED THE NAMES OF OFFICERS AND MEN OF THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS WHO DIED DURING THE 1939-1945 WAR IN THE NEW BRITAIN AREA, ON LAND, AT SEA AND IN THE AIR, BUT TO WHOM THE FORTUNES OF WAR DENIED THE KNOWN AND HONOURED BURIAL GIVEN TO THEIR COMRADES IN DEATH.