Larrikins in Khaki

by Tim Bowden

  There were two rivers not far from Lae—the Busu, and the Butibum. One had a suspension bridge over it made out of lawyer cane in the shape of a V. It had a sapling on the bottom to walk on and lawyer cane handrails on each side to hang on to. Rivers in New Guinea run very fast. ‘When you looked down you got the illusion you were shooting up the river at 30 miles an hour.’

  The Japanese had a hospital dug in under Lae Hill, and mounted a 6-inch gun on top.

  When our fellows took the hill, two Japanese came out holding their dresses up to their chins—they had no pants on—to let our blokes know they were females. As it turned out our fellows shot them and then found out they had a grenade in each hand. Two soldiers were sent into the hospital to get the Japs to surrender. If they didn’t come out within a certain time our troops would blow up and seal off the entrances. They didn’t come out so the entrances were sealed off.

  From there Sibson and his fellow troops walked their way up the Markham Valley to an area called Nadzab. It was big open kunai grass country with a small hill in the middle. They walked all the way in muddy and steamy weather. Sibson took his recently issued tin hat and respirator, spun them three times around his head and let them go into the jungle. ‘I thought a gas attack couldn’t be worse than that bloody heat,’ he said. ‘You can imagine what a tin hat felt like. You might as well put your head in an oven. The best thing to wear was a cotton khaki beret, as it acted as a sweat rag and hat. You could dip it in the creek and wash yourself with it and also have a drink out of it.’ Sibson sold his army slouch hat to some bush natives for six New Guinea shillings.

  When they reached Nadzab they waited in the kunai grass, and a DC3 landed nearby and taxied over to where they were. A black American soldier opened the door and told them to ‘hop in’. Sibson thought the plane was going to taxi on some sort of an airstrip, but it wasn’t so. ‘He just took off from where he was in the kunai grass. It wasn’t until many years after that I read in the paper that the Yanks flew over the day before, grass high, to find a place where there were no logs or stones!’

  (Three months later Sibson and his fellow engineers flew back from Port Moresby and landed at Nadzab and there were so many bitumen strips and bomb bays that the driver they sent to take them back to town took an hour to find the road to Lae. By then there were four-engine bombers taking off. ‘The most bombers I saw at any one time was 100. Our DC3 was the first to take off and land from Nadzab.’)

  On that first flight from the makeshift kunai grass airstrip, they flew over the Owen Stanley ranges back to Port Moresby. During the flight Sibson saw many places where planes had crashed and burned. At Port Moresby they landed at the Seven Mile Aerodrome, which was more than 1.6 kilometres long and covered with interlocking steel mesh.

  Sibson was then sent to Napa Napa to work on small ships in the watercraft workshops.

  It was a terrible place, very isolated and there was at least one soldier a week taken away troppo and put in Ward 15 for the insane. I nearly went mad myself there, as I tried to split a New Guinea native’s head open with a tomahawk, but two mates held me down and took the axe off me. After I cooled down I thought I was qualified to be sent to the funny farm as well.

  Sibson thought he was lucky to get perforated eardrums and thus spend more than a week in the Port Moresby Hospital. While there, he was transferred to another unit on the Loloki River.

  At that stage I hadn’t been in New Guinea very long, but this new unit on the Loloki had been there for over 12 months. I thought they were very strange, as they would get up in the morning and start calling their imaginary dogs—Bluey, Snip, Carlo and so on. They would make out the dogs weren’t obeying them and that the dogs were lifting their legs on every tent, and would shout at them. They would make it sound so real. Some would also walk down to the ablution block in the morning in the nude, with an erection and hang their towel over it like a bathroom peg. The more boastful would tie their boots together by the laces and have bets to see who could balance the boots nearest the end of their stiffies before they slipped off the end! Cripes, I thought they should all have been in Ward 15. But after being there a couple of months I thought they were perfectly normal. I must’ve caught up with them.

  The beer ration for the men was only two bottles of beer a week—with luck. Jungle juice made out of coconut milk and hard liquor made in illegal stills filled the gap, although, according to Sibson, it nearly sent them mad.

  One bloke in my tent who was about 45 years old showed me the photo of his wife. She was a woman of the same age and had her hair done up in a bun. To me, she looked like the motherly type and was old enough to be my mother. This fellow also got a Dear John letter, saying she was leaving him for a Yank. He’d been with her for over 20 years. I would have thought he’d be hard pushed to give her away, even if he threw in a Christmas hamper and a bottle of rum. But he was devastated and took it hard.

  Another of the blokes in our company met his wife through a lonely hearts club. He went home on leave to see her and he wanted her to go to Western Australia to live where he came from. She wouldn’t leave her mother.

  The unfortunate Western Australian got a Dear John letter to say his wife was divorcing him. He had tears in his eyes as he went around the camp, showing his mates the letter. He said to Sibson, ‘I would like to kill that mother-in-law bitch and bury her so her backside stuck out of the ground so every time I went past I could kick it.’

  From Loloki, Sibson went to a place called Koitaki, where there was a spectacular waterfall. From there they were flown back to the Markham Valley. ‘It was very rough on the plane, as we were getting pelted with hail. The plane was bucking and diving all over the sky and the troops were very quiet. When we landed in the Markham Valley, some of the soldiers got out and started to skite how good the trip was. I was just bloody pleased to get back on the ground.’

  They were driven to Lae in lorries. The lorry driver that came to pick them up got lost on the aerodrome as there were so many runways for the four-engine bombers that were landing by now—all built in three months. ‘That’s how quickly the Yanks got things done. Things were quite safe there by then.’

  Sibson’s next job was driving a steam plant for the armoury, repairing rifles. He had time on his hands so he took in washing, using the steam from the plant to steam clothes. He charged threepence an item, and had a good business going, making up to 8 shillings a day. ‘Like everywhere else, when I started to make money I got shifted and had to start another racket.’

  He then made bracelets out of New Guinea shillings in his spare time. What silver was left he would melt down with other silver coins and make rings of different sizes to sell to the troops so they could add bits of coloured toothbrush handles in lieu of diamonds. One weekend he melted up to £37 worth of silver coins—pure silver in those days. He also made knives with fancy handles out of brass and Perspex, with the blades made of old files sharpened on both sides. He got £2.10 shillings for each of them.

  Craftsman Roy Sibson’s next move was to New Britain, where the Australian Fifth Division replaced the US Fourtieth Infantry Division in October and November 1944 and continued the New Britain campaign with the aim of confining the large Japanese forces on the island to the area around Rabaul.

  They were loaded onto a Liberty ship called the Francis Parkman for a landing in New Britain. The swells were around 3.5 metres high, and they had to climb over the side and down the net provided into a barge as it came up to wave height—then clamber up again very quickly because on the next swell the barge would crush the descending soldiers against the ship. The ship had a Malaccan crew and Sibson said, ‘They cooked on an open fire on deck, mostly curry so strong it used to burn your eyes as you walked past.’ All fires and lights had to be out by sundown, and not even cigarette smoking was allowed.

  The Australians were landed at a place called Waterfall Bay on the south coast of New Britain, and went over the side on nets again, into barges onto the beach.
They dug themselves in, and would sneak down to the beach at night to have a bath. The troops were there for seven days before supplies arrived.

  They got the first barges into us with supplies on Christmas Eve and it had mail and parcels. I got a parcel which was posted in July for my birthday which is in August. Some of the things it had in it were a bottle of mango chutney, a bottle of Rosella jam and a big marshmallow tart which was so hard I had to smash it with a bayonet. I put it out amongst my mates and it disappeared like a snowdrop in hell. This parcel took over four months to reach me. Out of this barge, I also got a letter from the Taxation Office informing me that they had taken 10 shillings out of my bank for back taxes. After they did that there couldn’t have been much left!

  When they were at Waterfall Bay and on guard duty, they had to watch the tides carefully. Parts of New Britain were in volatile volcanic areas. For example, if the low tides went out suspiciously far, this could mean a tsunami (tidal wave) was imminent due to undersea seismic activity, so they had to sound the alarm enabling the troops to get to higher ground. The mountains in New Britain were smoking all the time, and some of the springs were near boiling point. During one violent earth tremor, trees near their camp had branches broken off, and coconuts rained down from above. ‘Everything on the ground seem to be moving about three feet back and forth. You never camped under trees in that area.’

  One night Sibson was woken up by gunfire. ‘The bullets were coming through the tents everywhere. I rolled out of my bunk and buried myself in the mud. As it turned out, the cook had gone berserk and cleared out into the jungle. They wanted us to go and look for him. I told the warrant officer, “Bugger that, leave him till morning”.’ But the crazed cook had time to reach the cookhouse and pick up a meat cleaver. A sergeant went in and tipped a table over him and brought him out and they all had a peaceful night.

  Shortly after that Sibson and 24 other troops were pulled out for a long and arduous voyage around the island of New Britain from the south to the north, as a reinforcement to another unit. They boarded a 20-metre pearl lugger, Miss Townsville. They travelled close to the coast all day and anchored every night. It was difficult to avoid the many coral reefs, and they were lucky to scrape their bottom only once. They passed Gasmata and Arawe. At Cape Gloucester they went ashore and camped for a night and a day. They had run out of tea and sugar and got some from the Americans. Before the Americans had taken Cape Gloucester, it had some of the thickest jungle in the world. Sibson said when they finished bombing and shelling ‘it looked like a ploughed field’.

  The next stop was Talasea, where there were hot springs running into the sea from the volcanoes inland, and the troops luxuriated in hot baths. The following day they arrived at Hoskins Bay.

  First impressions were it was a lovely place. The rain fell conveniently at night, and the days were always sunny. It had been a Japanese airstrip, and there were still a few stray enemy about.

  One night some got into our camp looking for food as they were starving in the jungle by that stage. I was camped in a ‘sack-sack’ [grass] hut where most of the food was kept. One night I woke up about 10 pm to find what I thought was a Jap looking through my net. I was sleeping in the nude with my net tucked under me and my rifle at least three yards away. I had thoughts of a big sword coming down on top of me. The sweat was standing out on top of my brow like threepenny pieces. In the dark, he disappeared and I thought I must’ve been dreaming.

  Sibson grabbed his rifle, but could not hear or see anything. At 3 am some of the other sleeping men also heard intruders. Sibson and his mate scored the job of looking around for them. They heard a noise in the cookhouse, so Sibson’s mate went around one side and he went around the other. The idea was to shoot anything that came out. However, all Sibson saw was a big white dog. As the dog came out he fired one shot and missed him in the dark. Later they realised there must have been at least three or four Japanese because at daylight the marks of their sandshoes where they came up the beach were clearly visible. Their sandshoes had a cloven design—a covered shoe with the big toe separated from the other four.

  ‘After that we had one of our mob “go off ”. He would sit on his own and tell people he had it all worked out. The Japs used white dogs on black nights, and black dogs on moonlit nights. It wasn’t long after that he was a candidate for Ward 15.’

  While he never got dysentery on the islands, Sibson said, most of the troops did. They would go to the latrines with one mate on each side of them as they were weak and passing blood. Sibson believed he avoided dysentery by not washing his dixie in the cook’s washing up water, ‘which was like soup’ after a dozen men used it. He always went down to the beach or river and scrubbed it out with sand and clean water. He did not contract tinea either, as he wore no socks because they kept his feet wet all the time. ‘I saw some of our lads come off patrols, take their socks off, and there would be skin stuck to their socks like rag off a Christmas pudding.’ At Hoskins Bay, there was even time for some fishing, soldier style:

  One day a Japanese bomb landed but didn’t go off. (When one did, a whole house would have fitted in the hole.) We dug out the dud bomb and took the explosive out for blowing fish. I got about eight meris [native women] from the village to help me find the fish after discharging it. I gave them the little ones and was supposed to get the big ones. They got plenty of little ones and they would say lik-lik masta [just little ones, master], but I wasn’t getting any big ones. Then I found out they were pushing all the big ones under a log with their feet. I suppose they would come back later to pick them up. After that I gave a couple of meris a kick up the backside and then they seemed to be able to find more big ones.

  The next move up the coast was to a place called Ponda Ponda at Open Bay, all swampy and mangroves. Sibson and his party had to build places to sleep a couple of feet off the mud, using bush sticks. The barges they had arrived in were built of steel, were flat-bottomed and had big powerful motors that could drive them up onto the beach to load 4WD lorries and troops with all their gear. They would then reverse their motors and with the wash from the engines extricate themselves from the beach. Those steel barges were stiflingly hot and had no shade.

  They had captured some Japanese barges which had twin hulls and were made of plywood. Before the Japanese abandoned them, they put sand in the engines then ran them until they seized up. The Australians’ job was to pull the engines out and fit Thorneycroft motors in their place. They had to spread Australian flags on top of the wheelhouses so that Allied planes would not bomb them. ‘One of our blokes got hold of a Jap two-inch mortar, which had a curved base. He thought it was fired from resting it on your knee, but when he tried it found it should have been fired off a log and it broke his leg.’

  By now the Japanese were being pushed back towards Rabaul. Sibson had been in the jungle for eighteen months, and it was time for his group to be relieved and sent home. But they could not get in ships to pick them up, so the only way out was over 7000 feet mountain ranges to the southern side of New Britain. It promised to be a very rugged trip indeed, with no native carriers prepared to go with them.

  We had to carry everything—ammunition, rifles and stores. Our loads included a tin of canned heat, like a tin of boot polish, made of methylated spirits and fat, that could be lit for boiling the billy as it made no smoke. There were also tins of bully beef, a packet of hard biscuits and bars of compressed fruit and nuts—plus a handful of tea and sugar a day.

  In total 135 of them set off to cut a track across the island. It never stopped raining, day or night, for five days.

  If I live to be 1000 I will never forget that trip. The first nine miles was through mangroves and roots and mud. We had to get through that day to reach higher ground to lie down away from the mosquitoes. When we left, most of the blokes, knowing we were on our way home, carried far too much to my way of thinking—but my upbringing stood me in good stead as I travelled light. Before I left I discarded my pack, shaving
gear, half my dixie, all my clothes bar one set and all my socks. I also cut the sleeves out of my shirt, and the pockets out of my trousers and shirt, and all surplus buttons. Also all the islets and flaps off my groundsheet. My towel and soap went out and I put my side haversack on my back, took my bayonet off to stop it from flogging my leg and put it under the flap of my haversack. All this was to stop anything from catching water and adding to the load.

  They had no help from the islanders. As frightened as they were that the inland natives would kill them, none were seen. The first day’s trek sapped the troops’ stamina and before marching on the next day they threw away a lot of gear, but according to Sibson, who’d already streamlined his load, that was not nearly enough. The next night they threw out even more, but by then they were much weaker.

  Then I knew some of us were in big trouble. That night on guard, you lay in the mud in groups, arms-length apart. You did an hour on guard, and when your time was up you touched your mate and made sure he was awake before you went to sleep. You didn’t stand up and walk around, only sat up. If you wanted to relieve yourself, you rolled over on your side and did it over the edge of your groundsheet.

  On the third day the leading scout spotted a Japanese patrol but they didn’t see them, and in any case they were in no condition to fight so simply let them through. When they took up action positions in case the Japanese did see them, Sibson was behind a big fig tree. When he looked around to see who his backup was, he found he had six stretcher bearers, conscientious objectors who would not bear arms. ‘I made sure I never got caught like that again and worked myself up to the front of our mob and became Number 2 Scout the rest of the journey.’