by Bruce Gamble
Fifty years old at the time, Page had been awarded a Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order during World War I, and was a popular figure around town. His older brother was even better known. One of the first Australians to own a car, Sir Earle Page had founded the Country Party, served as deputy prime minister under two governments, and even sat as prime minister for twenty days after Joseph Lyons died in the spring of 1939. The political connections were beneficial to Harold Page, who was still the acting administrator when the 2/22nd Battalion arrived in 1941.
By then, Rabaul had returned to its former splendor as a garden town. Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea, and a dozen other varieties of flowers flourished among hedges and shrubs, and the overhanging branches of giant casuarinas and mangos shaded the main boulevards. “It was a beautiful place, so tropical,” recalled Lorna Johnson, one of six army nurses who arrived aboard the Zealandia on ANZAC Day. “The flowers were beautiful, the birds were wonderful, and after you got used to the heat it was really quite nice.”
Known then by her maiden name of Whyte, Lorna had been raised in the “back blocks” of New South Wales and was perhaps better accustomed to the heat than some of the other new arrivals. Private Albert R. “Bluey” Fry of Sydney, a drummer in the battalion band, described Rabaul as “terribly hot.” Arthur Gullidge, in a letter to his wife Mavis, declared, “I don’t think I have perspired so much in all my life.”
The temperature was only half of the equation. Much of the discomfort everyone felt was caused by the high humidity. The monsoon season began in December and lasted six months, during which the humidity hovered at 90 percent or more and the prevailing winds often brought heavy rainstorms out of the northwest. One night, after the troops set up a temporary camp at the foot of the Mother, a downpour dumped eight inches of rain in two hours. “I was sleeping in a tent then,” wrote Private Thomas E. Hartley, a machine-gunner from Airey’s Inlet, Victoria, “and my bed was floating about the tent.”
Unfortunately for the battalion, the camp was down inside the caldera, where the humidity was much higher than on the breezy plateau. The soldiers hired “wash boys” to do their laundry, but between washings the clothing remained damp, creating conditions for all sorts of fungi and bacteria to develop. Men who failed to dry their feet and change socks on a regular basis found themselves afflicted with tinea pedis, commonly known as athlete’s foot. Even with aggressive treatment, the jungle variety sometimes took a month or longer to eradicate.
Several other tropical maladies threatened the troops, and Captain Ackeroyd would have been overwhelmed with cases were it not for the personnel of the 2/10 Field Ambulance, a detachment of which arrived aboard the Zealandia. Major Edward C. “Ted” Palmer, the officer in charge of the detachment, became the senior medical officer in Lark Force by virtue of rank. He and Captain S. E. J. “Sandy” Robertson, another capable doctor, were supported by the six army nurses and twenty orderlies.
The medics treated numerous head colds and even a few cases of pneumonia during the garrison’s first six weeks at Rabaul. Passing them off as “related to the period of adjustment to the climate,” Palmer was not unduly worried. What concerned him more was malaria and its notorious cousin, dengue fever, both of which could be lethal. Neither showed an alarming level of initial incidence, but the potential for outbreaks was constantly high. Another serious threat was tropical ulcers, which could develop from almost any small cut or scratch into a festering ulcer in less than twenty-four hours. If left untreated, the patient ran the risk of serious infection or even blood poisoning. Using the ounce-of-prevention method, the medical staff made certain that hygiene and anti-malaria medication received top priority. Everyone took daily showers to ward off fungi, and each afternoon on the parade ground, the sergeants walked the ranks to ensure that “every man took his dose of liquid quinine, unceremoniously administered by spoon into an open mouth.”
Thanks to the medics, the garrison adjusted to the climate without undue hardship, but the same could not be said of the six nurses. Referred to as “sisters” in the Australian Army Nursing Service, they wore ridiculous World War I-period uniforms: long dresses of gray cotton, a red cape, a white veil, thick brown stockings, and heavy shoes. The women greatly envied the nurses at the civilian hospital, who wore sensible short-sleeved frocks, so the senior army nurse decided to make some changes. Kathleen I. A. “Kay” Parker, a former matron of nurses at Ingleburn army camp in New South Wales, was free spirited and strikingly tall. “Right,” she told the others, “this is fair enough; we’re going to leave these awful cotton stockings off.” Delighted, the nurses also decided to get rid of the red capes and shorten the sleeves on their dresses.
Unfortunately, the wrong people observed their cavalier behavior. “We went to work down in the tents along the shore,” remembered Johnson, “and none of the boys took any notice. Well, they probably thought we looked a bit better. But one of the plantation owners was a First World War nurse, and her great friend was Matron [Hilda] Keary, the senior matron in Sydney. She wrote to Matron Keary and told her what we had done. The matron wrote back to us and said that if we didn’t sew the sleeves back on and put the stockings back on, we were going to be discharged from the army when we returned to Australia.”
The nurses also encountered difficulties with Major Palmer, who had been directed to establish a sixty-bed hospital. He tried to avoid the assignment, for he and Robertson saw themselves as battlefield surgeons. They preferred to do their doctoring in the field, where the ambulance men had earned glory during the last war, and feared that a hospital would anchor them to routine duties. To show their displeasure, they refused to let the nurses work alongside them.
Lieutenant Colonel Carr eventually had to intervene. “The colonel came to see us and was a bit horrified that we’d been treated like that,” Johnson recalled. “He insisted that Major Palmer take us into the hospital. The boys wanted us down at the hospital, the orderlies and all the sick boys wanted us down there, but the major was objecting to us because he didn’t want a hospital.” Palmer conceded under direct orders from Carr, and the tent hospital was built near the beach adjacent to the encampment.
Within a matter of weeks, however, the very existence of the hospital and Lark Force’s tent encampment were threatened by renewed volcanic activity inside the caldera. It was Tavurvur again. The ugly-looking volcano, known by locals as “Matupi,” had awoken after four years of dormancy. On June 6, several earthquakes jolted Rabaul immediately after reveille. The air inside the caldera seemed to vibrate, then suddenly the volcano burst into eruption. Soldiers gaped at the sight of hot rocks and ash jetting from the cone, and Rabaul’s civilians, expecting the worst, began an orderly progression out of town. They returned a short time later, having concluded that the volcano posed no immediate threat.
It was true: the emissions were little more than a nuisance, despite the fact that Tavurvur continued to spew thick clouds of noxious vapor with a sound like “a train going over a big overhead bridge.” Some nights it rumbled so loudly that the entire camp was awakened, often to the accompaniment of earthquakes. “To stand,” noted Private Pearson in his diary, “was to rock like a drunken man.” Everyone grew weary of the stench of sulfur and the corrosive effects of the ash fallout, which rotted the fabric of tents and uniforms and caused pitting in metal surfaces. Weapons had to be constantly stripped and cleaned, and any scratches that appeared on the garrison’s vehicles had to be painted over before corrosion would set in. The civilian vehicles in town, built of lighter gauge steel and less fastidiously cared for, developed gaping holes.
The eruption forced Lieutenant Colonel Carr to move the garrison to a more suitable location on the northwest side of Malaguna Road. Dubbed Malaguna Camp, the new facility featured wood-frame huts sheathed with compressed asbestos siding. The troops weren’t aware of the dangers posed by asbestos; what mattered was that they were no longer exposed to the volcanic fallout.
The nurses bene
fited the most. The territorial capital finally shifted over to Lae, leaving Government House vacant, and the garrison converted it into a hospital. Wearing their heavy uniforms, the nurses were grateful to work up on the hill, where the sea breezes felt heavenly compared to the stifling humidity inside the caldera.
Meanwhile, Tavurvur continued to erupt intermittently for months. As additional components of Lark Force arrived by ship, the volcano greeted them with fireworks, almost as if the kaia were providing their own special welcome.
* On July 2, 1937, only five weeks after the eruptions at Rabaul, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae and were subsequently lost.
CHAPTER THREE
HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE
“[Make] the enemy fight for this line …”
—Herbert Evatt, Australia Minister for External Affairs
To the military planners in Australia, the long string of islands comprising the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and the British-protected Solomons represented a sort of fence. Some in the War Cabinet even referred to it as the “Northern Barrier,” though the islands weren’t fortified until 1941. Lionel Wigmore, an esteemed Australian historian, more accurately described them as “a slender chain of forward observation posts.”
In the fall of 1939, an officer of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) set out to link the islands with a communications and intelligence network. Over a period of months, Lieutenant Commander Eric A. Feldt traveled “by ship, motor boat, canoe, bicycle, airplane, and boot” from New Guinea all the way to the New Hebrides, single-handedly enrolling dozens of plantation owners, traders, and assorted civilians into a loosely organized group known as the “coastwatchers.” All of them would perform a crucial role the coming war, many at the cost of their lives.
Simultaneously, detachments of a small militia organization, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (NGVR), were established among the major islands. Representing the mandated territory’s only infantry force prior to 1941, the NGVR was authorized the day after Australia declared war on Germany, and many of the region’s able-bodied men were volunteers. Lieutenant Colonel John Walstab, the supervisor of police on New Britain, trained a unit of approximately eighty men who formed a rifle company, a machine gun squad, and a small headquarters unit.
The arrival of Lark Force in 1941 was a significant boost to the local military strength, and later that summer a commando unit garrisoned New Ireland. The 1st Independent Company, led by Major James Edmonds-Wilson, represented the extent of the War Cabinet’s effort to defend the other islands of the mandated territory, but even that small force was subdivided. Approximately 150 of the commandos fortified the main harbor town of Kavieng and a nearby airfield; the rest defended several remote airstrips scattered among the Solomons and New Hebrides islands.
Additional components of Lark Force were delivered by the Zealandia, which returned to Rabaul with a detachment of Royal Australian Artillery to install a pair of 6-inch coastal defense guns. A company of Royal Australian Engineers was also aboard, along with a detachment of communications specialists. Together, the three groups added two hundred officers and men to the garrison.
The engineers’ first responsibility was to construct access roads and emplacements for the coastal guns. Praed Point provided the most commanding view of St. George’s Channel and the approaches to Blanche Bay, but the steep topography of Crater Peninsula prevented the guns from being placed side by side in the conventional manner. Instead, they were stacked one above the other despite “expert and most urgent advice” to the contrary from several old soldiers. A number of veterans went out to Praed Point and criticized the engineers, but stacking the guns was the only practical solution that allowed both guns a wide firing arc. The bigger problem was the fact that there were only two vintage weapons to begin with.
Likewise, Rabaul’s air defense was limited, the only weapons being a pair of 3-inch guns manned by militiamen. Captain David M. Selby, a slender, aristocratic-looking attorney from New South Wales, led the fifty-four members of the battery ashore from the liner Neptuna on August 16. They moved into several huts at Malaguna Camp, then set up their mobile guns near the beach and commenced an almost laughable training program. Permission to fire the weapons was denied because one of the weapons had a crack in its breechblock. In order to prevent further damage, the crews had to satisfy themselves with merely tracking the weekly mail plane. They pretended to shoot it down twice every Saturday—once during its approach to Lakunai airdrome and again when the plane departed. The rest of the week, one of the young gunners (invariably the fellow with the most accumulated demerits) supplied the target by running back and forth while holding a model plane aloft on a length of bamboo. Naturally he was the butt of many jokes, and the militiamen as a group endured endless wisecracks from their AIF campmates.
The final component of Lark Force, the 17th Antitank Battery, was delivered to Rabaul by the Zealandia on September 29. Commanded by Captain Gwynne Matheson, the battery of eight 2-pounder guns was served by six officers and 104 men. Unfortunately, like the other components of Lark Force, the weapons had serious limitations. The only ammunition shipped with the guns was solid-steel shot—good for target practice but almost useless in battle—and there were only twenty rounds per gun.
With the arrival of the antitank battery, Lark Force was complete. In addition to the 2/22nd Infantry Battalion, the hodgepodge of support units brought the garrison’s total to approximately fourteen hundred men—and six nurses.
THE MILITARY WORKDAY AT RABAUL NORMALLY CONCLUDED WITH AN afternoon parade at 1600. Passes were usually available for those who wanted to leave camp, and if a bloke was lucky, he might get to accompany one of the nurses to a film at the Regent. Fraternization was frowned upon, but not everyone abided by the guidelines. “The nurses were not supposed to go out with the troops; we were only supposed to mix with the officers,” recalled Lorna Johnson. “But that never troubled Kay [Parker]. If she saw somebody that she liked, and he came up and asked her to the pictures, it didn’t matter if he was a private—she would go.”
Rabaul offered several attractions besides the theater. Troops who had never traveled far from home marveled at the shops in Chinatown, exotic beyond anything they had ever seen. In the center of the neighborhood was the “Bung,” a colorful, noisy market crowded with dark-skinned “marys” in Mother Hubbard blouses and bare-chested Tolai men wearing colorful sarongs around their hips. Rows of stalls were piled high with pineapples, coconuts, shellfish, betel nut, papaya, sugar cane, or fresh fish. Dogs scurried underfoot, and it was not unusual to see a domesticated fowl perched atop a mound of vegetables. Visiting the market for the first time, Private Pearson was enthralled by an old native woman who watched her stall while “sitting placidly by, smoking a filthy old pipe with the stem broken off near the bowl.” Pearson also admired the strength of the native women. They worked harder than the men, and he observed one Tolai woman who walked eleven miles while carrying a load of heavy wares “plus a picaninny on her hip.”
Sometimes the natives’ appearance and customs shocked the Australian soldiers. A great many of the adult Tolai had open sores on their legs and feet, and more than a few suffered from grotesque ailments such as elephantiasis or gout. Men and women alike chewed betel nut, the intoxicating juice of which stained their lips and teeth a hideous red. Wherever they congregated, the dirt around them was splotched with red spittle.
SOLDIERS WHO LACKED EITHER THE FUNDS OR THE INCLINATION TO VISIT Rabaul made their own entertainment in Malaguna Camp. The canteen offered Castlemaine Beer and Fosters Export Ale for a shilling a bottle (about fifteen cents in 1941), and if the beer wasn’t always cold, the men drank it anyway while playing two-up, their favorite coin game. Aussie soldiers had few equals when it came to gambling. They were known to wager on just about anything, from dice to cards to “which of two flies will rise first from the bar.”
Even when they weren’t gambling, the soldiers tried t
o outdo each other at every opportunity. Participation in sports was compulsory, with the battalion’s various companies and Lark Force support units rotating between cricket, tennis, baseball, golf, and swimming. Saturday afternoons were set aside for boxing tournaments in camp or swim meets at Rabaul’s modern concrete pool. The competition was fierce yet good natured, which added to the foundation of camaraderie that no amount of formal training could instill. One could not help but admire the soldiers’ enthusiasm. “They were all outstanding young men, lots of them country boys, just bush boys,” remembered Lorna Johnson. “All had a good sense of humor; all loved their glass of beer; all loved their fun. They would take on anything and anybody. They were a great band of boys.”
She was correct in the sense that there were plenty of youngsters in the garrison—Private Andrew B. Bishop, a native of England, was only seventeen—but Johnson was looking through a prism of several decades in remembering them all as boys. Considering that the average life expectancy in 1941 was only about sixty-five years, numerous members of the garrison were actually past middle age. Older troops included Privates Thomas R. Connop and Wilfred J. Baker, both forty-one; Sydney McGregor, Lawrence Quinn, and Harry Bernstein, forty; and a host of others in their late thirties. Many in the ranks were significantly older than their officers. Private William Holmes, a thirty-nine-year-old native of Ireland, was batman for Lieutenant Alec R. Tolmer, twenty-seven, who led the 2/22nd’s Pioneer Platoon. Other junior officers were even younger. Hatsell G. “Glenn” Garrard, a lieutenant in the Headquarters Company, was twenty-three but looked more like an adolescent cadet; Lieutenant Benjamin G. Dawson, one of the intelligence officers in the 2/22nd, was only twenty when he joined the battalion.
With such a wide span of ages and backgrounds represented among the members of Lark Force, there was no shortage of colorful characters. One of the most noteworthy was Private Norman D. Webster, thirty, an infantryman who had performed as a rough rider in traveling expeditions such as “Wild Australia” and “Thorpe McConville’s Buckjump Show.” Ever the entertainer, he was fond of storytelling and had a penchant for outlandish expressions. Another performer, although not a true professional, was Private A. Colin Dowse, a twenty-year-old farm boy from Victoria who “could thump out a honky-tonk tune while he bounced about on the piano stool.”