Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  The men of Rabaul had often pondered the growing menace of Japan. But men who won’t run away from volcanoes don’t run from Japs, either. They organized a crude militia and begged Australia for planes. They got six.

  Desperately, as if waiting for Matupi to explode, Rabaul awaited the Japs. They came. Women and children—no Chinese allowed—were evacuated, and the men of Rabaul hitched up their belts.

  It is difficult to find a more hopelessly gallant behavior than that of the Rabaul garrison. Pathetically outnumbered, betrayed by the Australian Government and confused by conflicting orders, they marched out to oppose the landing. Their six useless planes waited on the airstrip till the last minute—to save gas—and then went lumbering aloft to meet ace Zero pilots. It was sickening, but the citizens below still marched on to their positions.

  They met the Japs at a small beach, and for one day they irritated the invaders. Then they were overwhelmed. Many were shot. The rest were herded onto a hell ship, the Montevideo Maru. Some days out on the way to a Jap prison she was sunk, and there was hardly a family in Rabaul that did not suffer loss.

  A few of the militia escaped into the jungle and tracked their way across New Britain. They were beset by fevers, by starvation, by the death of their comrades. Some of them, without shoes, reached New Guinea and Australia, where they enlisted in the regular army. One of these men became a notable hero. John Stokie looked and walked like a polar bear, a great hulk with a bullet head. They said he was too awkward to make a soldier, but they let him go back into the bush as a coastwatcher. The Japs sent many expeditions to capture him, but he set up a good system of spies and eluded them for three years. He rescued many Americans and was decorated by several governments. He lived through many hairbreadth escapes to become once more a prosaic copra planter.

  Meanwhile the Japs had a great time in Rabaul. They started by serving the Chinese leaders a sumptuous banquet and then shooting them. They executed a few natives to scare the rest. The Germans who had stayed behind to welcome them were tossed into jail, and the Japs built themselves an impregnable base which was never taken by the Allies.

  They intended to conquer Australia from Rabaul and moved down more than 100,000 of their best soldiers. They assembled an immense arsenal and a full invasion fleet.

  In March, 1943, they launched their armada. Eight warships, eight transports, between 20 and 30 planes, and more than 6,900 invasion troops set out for a quick run across the Bismarck Sea. But this time Allied search planes spotted them. From bases in Australia and Port Moresby fighters and bombers roared out to begin one of the world’s critical air battles. First the Jap planes were eliminated. Then, in sickening power the bombers swept back and forth across the fleet. They destroyed it. More than 3,000 Jap soldiers drowned. Others, on rafts, looked up to see machine guns blazing at them, fired by American pilots whose friends had been beheaded in Jap camps. It was, up to then, the most one-sided defeat ever suffered by the Japanese nation. It was, up to then, the most astonishing victory for air power opposed to a defenseless fleet.

  But Rabaul seems to breed courage. The Japs assembled a new fleet, new stores. Then one day from the Pacific itself carrier-based aircraft swooped in and started the total destruction of Rabaul.

  Soon, after a ring of wonderfully placed airfields—Munda, Sterling, Bougainville, Green, Emirau, Manus, and great Nadzab with its dozen fields—the town was mercilessly annihilated. For days on end there were bombers over Rabaul almost every hour in the twenty-four, sometimes a single nuisance visitor to ruin sleep, sometimes fifty searing Mitchells.

  No more ships from Japan entered Rabaul. No planes flew down from Truk, and now no Zeros were left to contest the skies. Day after day the shattering bombs came down. It was of Rabaul that the phrase was coined, “We’ll bypass it and let the Japs wither on the vine.”

  Many of them did perish, but those that were left held on doggedly. They did something that had never before been done. They moved their entire town underground. In soft rock they dug deep caves, some three stories high. All were interconnected, and along the shore huge caverns were constructed for hiding ships in daytime. Trucks and guns were moved inside mountains, and it was said, “Rabaul has the largest underground force in the world.”

  When war ended the Japs were still holding on. Some had gone mad. Others had been sealed into their caves by Allied bombs. American investigators studied the fortifications and said, “We might have been able to take Rabaul. It would have been terribly costly.”

  Completely disgusted were the old residents of the town. For three years they had predicted that the volcanoes would explode and destroy the Japs. There hadn’t even been a guria, although Allied bombers tried bombing the craters to get things started.

  It is difficult to imagine how Rabaul looked at surrender. Not one major building remained. Not one. There were not even foundations left to show where homes had been. Often there was not a stick of wood, no trees, no cement floor—absolutely nothing. It seems impossible, but many families could not determine where their homes had been.

  The stately trees had been bombed away, the wharves, the warehouses, the schools, the gardens, the botanical park. In proportion to its size Rabaul had led the Empire in four categories: “Number of volunteers. Number killed. Number of decorations for bravery. Extent of war damage.” The last is misleading. Rabaul was not damaged. It was erased.

  Now it is once more a flourishing tropical town. Two banks are doing business. The harbor welcomes ships from many nations, and the roads are jammed with jeeps brought in from Bougainville.

  The scars of war have been bulldozed away. Jap prisoners did the work at first but were too expensive to feed. They were shipped home, “where they could starve in their own language.” An occasional pillbox still hides in cruelly clever position to remind Australians and Americans how costly it would have been to storm this town. But along the bay there will be ugly reminders of war for generations: more than 160 big Jap ships lie wrecked and rotting in the sun.

  And the houses! Probably nowhere else could you find so many attractive people living in such awful housing, not even in the United States. Temporary shacks, monstrously ugly, have been thrown together from scrap iron and discarded wood. In Chinatown, still segregated, the housing is a civic disgrace.

  The hotel is typical. A converted army building, its cast iron roof collects a broiling heat. You’ve heard of hotel walls that were paper thin. Here the walls really are paper! They start one foot from the floor and stop three feet from the ceiling, so that a whisper in one room becomes a brass band in the next. Said one planter, “It’s worse than a goldfish bowl. There you can see what’s going on. Here you’ve got to guess.” At five in the morning boys begin to sweep the rough concrete floor with stiff brooms that sound like cannon, and at six tea is served in cups with built-in sound. Some rooms have no windows at all, and there the temperature stays at a reliable hundred. Toads hop in at night, birds explore during the day, and any man wishing to use the toilet has to walk a good city block, smack through the middle of the lobby. There’s only one consolation. It’s a magnificent hotel compared to the one at Lae.

  And yet life there can be deeply moving. That man in the corner is a tropical alcoholic, hopeless at 47. His friend says resignedly, “He can either go to the poorhouse or commit suicide.” The pretty woman at the table lost her husband on the Montevideo Maru, her son at Tobruk. She’s running a plantation by herself. The tall man bought disposal jeeps at 24¢, sold them for $860. The young chap at the bar has written a play but is afraid to show it to anyone. It might not be good. The old codger too drunk to sit up is a remittance man with a hot idea for making a million. I know that similar types abound in any city, but in the tropics I seem to have more time to listen to their stories.

  For example, my last night in Rabaul some Swedish sailors started a ruckus, so the woman who runs the hotel hauled off and planted a right hook to the leader’s jaw. The rioters retreated. I started to excl
aim, when an old man said, “Take it easy, Yank. Rabaul has always had capable, strong women ready for anything. The toughest of them all was an American. One of your consuls in Samoa took up with a native girl and had a slew of children. One became Governor of Guam. But the prettiest girl, Emma, came to these parts. She had three or four legal husbands, a string of plantations, a fleet of ships, many stores. She settled along the bay and became known as Queen Emma. When the Germans came she fleeced them and wound up with millions. She was a law to herself and had a string of beautiful Samoan girls attending her. Remind me to tell you about one of them that went to the Mortlocks. Finally she took her last husband off to Monte Carlo. He died suspiciously. There was talk of murder, and shortly after Queen Emma herself died. In Rabaul we’ve always liked women like that.”

  Today Rabaul is unforgettable. To it come men from the plantations to sell their copra. Fred Archer has a plantation about 170 miles from Rabaul and he is often seen about the streets. Lean, handsome, unmarried, he always has two desserts and hates whales. “So far as I’m concerned,” he says, “every whale in the world could drop dead.”

  When war threatened he marched into the government office and plunked down his savings of four thousand dollars. “Use it as you see fit,” he said. The Government couldn’t find any regulation that would let them keep the money. “Besides,” they said, “Hitler can’t possibly attack Rabaul.” Archer volunteered but was rejected as too old.

  When the Japs landed near his plantation he tried to impress his native boys with his British aplomb by eating soup as the cruisers went past. “But when I got the spoon to my mouth, there wasn’t any soup in it, so the boys lit out for the bush, followed by me.” He became a coastwatcher and saw two men killed on either side of him as he led a scouting party into Green Island.

  His plantation covers 500 acres and yields a good return. His trees bear coconuts six years after planting and if tended will continue to do so for nearly a century. They are planted about 30 feet apart in squares. To keep the earth between free of weeds, Archer cultivates a nitrogenous creeper called puraria, which makes it easy for the boys to find the fallen coconuts.

  The average tree drops about five nuts a month—4,500 make a ton of copra—and the crop falls all the year round. Coconuts are never picked, but do fall most heavily during stormy seasons, when they must be gathered at least every six weeks to forestall sprouting.

  The dirty brown husk is ripped off and in the Ceylon system the shell is split in half. (The milk, bitter in old nuts, spills on the ground.) The half shells, still containing the oily meat, are placed in a kiln and baked until all water is driven out. By this time the meat—now called copra—pulls away from the shell. If no smoke has reached it, the copra is nearly white and commands top prices.

  In order to keep smoke from staining the copra, the kiln burns only the thoroughly baked shells of the previous day’s run. It takes about four days’ constant baking to dehydrate copra, which is of course quite inedible. It is used solely as a source of oil, chiefly for margarine, soap and glycerine. Coconut for eating is dehydrated in a different way.

  Copra is packed in expensive sacks made in India, and if properly ventilated may keep for six years. Crammed carelessly into heaps, it turns rancid or bursts into spontaneous fire.

  Many pests and about a dozen diseases attack coconut palms, but to humans the most unpleasant is the copra bug, a small insect that likes to leave copra and scramble madly over human beings. Two dozen in the hair can drive a man crazy.

  To keep his trees clean Archer employs about forty native helpers—no white men—and would like to find twenty more. It costs him about $300 a year to pay and feed each boy. (The Government hates this word and especially forbids the old term for a house that has bars, “boy proof.” The recommended phrase is “burglar proof.”)

  Like all planters, Archer is a confirmed individualist, yet he works in a business which is completely government-controlled. He may not hire natives without permission. When he does find some willing to work, he must conform to the rigid labor code, which protects natives from the gross abuses of an earlier age. His copra he must sell to the Government, transport it in government boats, and house it in government warehouses. And out of each dollar he gets, he must turn 20 cents back into a government fund to insure against price fluctuations in some future depression.

  Archer doesn’t like socialism, but he does prefer the present $144 a ton for his copra—break-even point $94—to the old days of free enterprise when whales drove copra down to $9 a ton and planters went broke.

  As for the whales, somebody discovered that their oil made just as good margarine as copra did. Besides, it was cheaper. Archer says, “Anyone who wants to eat whale oil can.” He quotes a lot of Omar and says that at fifty a man oughtn’t to live on a remote island any longer. “Too many of my friends commit suicide.” What he would like is a secure job where he could take things easy, preferably in Rabaul.

  The Macdonalds were my favorite volcano people. He’s an eager little scientist who works in the medical laboratory. She’s a very pretty Sydney girl who says, “Only a crazy person can live in Rabaul.” Too many volcanoes, too few good books. She finds one of her husband’s habits very annoying. He jumps out of bed each morning, rubs his hands excitedly and studies the horizon. “Wonderful day for volcanic activity! Lots of rain last week. Not a breath of air. Heavy atmospheric pressure.”

  He’s a nut on volcanoes. He gave up a good job to get service in Rabaul. He loves to recount the great disasters of the past. He figures the best explosions have been Mount Pelée, where the loss of life was terrific; Krakatoa, which was heard for three hundred miles and also killed its quota, and Vesuvius, “where untold numbers perished.”

  He’s afraid Rabaul may not go that way. “More like Port Royal. Bottom dropped out of the harbor and the whole town fell a hundred feet into the bay, wiping out everybody. Of course,” he adds, “they were mostly pirates.”

  Mrs. Macdonald says she’s seen her catastrophe-starved husband slowed down only twice. He has only one eye and heckled the Army for twenty months before they accepted him. Then in the jungles of Dutch New Guinea he went exploring and ran out of food, so he popped out his glass eye to amuse the natives into feeding him. “It interested them,” he says, “and they followed me back to camp.” It developed that they were avid head hunters and wanted to know what they could trade for the “skull belong look-look he come out.”

  The second stopper came when Macdonald had been predicting something unusual, “maybe a real whopper guria.” He was delighted with the prospects when at seven one morning it arrived and knocked things silly. For three days he made no more predictions. Then Matupi belched a particularly odorous cloud of gas and he ran up to me crying, “Smell that! An explosion here might be worse even than Krakatoa!”

  Another kind of violence menaces Rabaul: the ferment in Asia. But to hear the white citizens talk, you’d never know they are aware of it. They seem to have forgotten that only a few years ago the Japs kicked all the whites out of Rabaul. Citizens yearn for “the good old days when a German trader had the right to knock a native down in order to establish discipline.” Even yet there is resentment over Chinese who dare to attend the movies. (“They wouldn’t have done so before the war, by God!”) And there are many who say, “The only hope for this country is to give the white man a free hand.”

  There are some, however, who know what the score in the world is. Mostly they are government men who say privately, “Wouldn’t surprise me if the U.N. took this place away from Australia. We’re only piddling around with government.” I was much impressed with the government men, although one planter said proudly, “Don’t underestimate our government blokes. They’re well up to the world standard in stupidity.” They wasted a much-needed ship to send a cargo of coconuts to feed natives on Bougainville, one of the biggest producers in the South Pacific! They set up an expensive committee to see if cattle could be raised in an area th
at pre-war grazed 20,000!

  Fred Archer knows history and is aware that Rabaul, strategic key to strategic New Guinea, may become a Japanese possession or a Chinese stronghold or an Indonesian center. Like most white men he hopes that Australia will be able to hold it. Sometimes he doubts it. “Not enough settlers. Not enough money to invest.”

  John Stokie has a more dramatic solution. “Australia can’t hold this place. And she won’t give it to America. Our only chance is to import two million Japs. Make them turn Christian. Make them practice democracy. Give them such a stake in the country they’ll have to remain true. Then trust in God.”

  The land about Rabaul is worth saving. New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville, and Manus are rich in resources. At the sprawling native boong (market) in Rabaul produce of all kinds can be found. Corn yields three big crops a year. String beans bear all the time. Pineapples, sweet potatoes, paw paws, cucumbers and peanuts grow abundantly. At elevations of more than 2,500 feet even potatoes and tomatoes can be grown at any season, if fresh seed is introduced yearly. Otherwise the rate of reproduction is so rapid that strains deteriorate.

  One of the most popular items at the boong is betel nut, which grows on the fragile areca palm. The nut, about the size of a lemon, is covered in a thick, rubbery skin. The core is a fibrous, heavily veined, gelatinous mass. When chewed by itself, a betel nut tastes like much-diluted alum. It is mildly toxic and astringent. The juice is colorless and narcotic. It has no effect on teeth.

  Alone, the betel nut is pretty drab stuff. But natives burn coral to get lime, a pinch of which makes the betel juice slightly effervescent and quite pleasing to the gums, which it ultimately eats away. However, the combination is still colorless.