by Bruce Gamble
While the gunners made their way around the caldera to Three Ways, other elements of Lark Force were also in motion. Scanlan rearranged his defenses like a nervous chess player, pulling some rifle companies away from the beaches to new positions astride key roads, ordering others to dig in at sites where the enemy might land.
As soon as the wrecked gun emplacements at Praed Point were cleared of the dead and wounded, Scanlan ordered R Company and the survivors of the Royal Australian Artillery detachment to evacuate Crater Peninsula. Captain Silverman checked himself out of the hospital and returned to Praed Point in his pajamas to help with the exodus. Most of the men walked around Simpson Harbor to Four Ways, where Scanlan had established his new headquarters near Noah’s Mission, a small native church. R Company dug in alongside the intersection, while Captain Travers and D Company awaited orders to move forward toward Kokopo or reinforce Captain Appel at Vunakanau, whichever was necessary.
A Company, having completed the rigging of Lakunai airdrome, deployed to new positions inside the caldera just north of Mount Vulcan. Major Owen had his men dig in just behind the beach, which gave them a good field of fire across the harbor. Joining Owen’s company was the local detachment of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, whose eighty-odd troops had been called to active duty two days earlier in a brief township ceremony. While some of the volunteers unrolled bales of barbed wire along the beach, others sighted in their single Vickers machine gun. Behind them, Major Matheson of the 17th Antitank Battery aligned his 2-pounder guns. Nearby, three mortar teams set up their weapons, setting the angle to drop their rounds just outside the wire. Finally, “Doc” Silverman erected a first aid station alongside the command post. Assisting him as medic was bandsman Bert Morgan, who had recently been promoted to corporal.
A few miles to the south, Captain McInnes directed B Company to dig in next to Three Ways. His orders were to prevent the Japanese from penetrating inland from Mount Vulcan while also blocking their attempts to approach up the Kokopo Ridge Road. Two Vickers machine guns were set up to flank both sides of the road, and the rifle platoons fortified their positions with coconut logs.
Finally, Scanlan ordered Captain Shier to take over the hastily formed Y Company and fortify Raluana Point, the only other defended beachhead besides Vulcan. The new company was supposed to be used only as a last resource, yet for some unfathomable reason Scanlan placed it on the exposed right flank of the Australian line. Not only was Y Company isolated from the next closest unit by seven miles of bad roads, but the phone line laid that night proved unreliable. The only positive element Shier could count on was the experience of his junior officers. Lieutenant Lennox “Len” Henry, for example, was one of the few professional soldiers in Lark Force. An excellent instructor, he had only a short time to prepare the “odds and sods” for combat.
WHILE THE VARIOUS RIFLE COMPANIES SHIFTED TO NEW POSITIONS, SCANLAN met with Squadron Leader Lerew to discuss the future of 24 Squadron. The pilot pointed out that his men had received virtually no field training; therefore, it made little sense for them to stay and “fight with the army as guerillas.” Scanlan agreed. He regarded the airmen as “more nuisance than they were worth,” and consented to an overland evacuation.
That afternoon, the personnel of 24 Squadron headed south in a convoy of eight trucks. Lerew’s plan was to put some distance between his men and Rabaul while Sergeant Frederick G. Higgs, a radioman, raced ahead to find a working set. Locating the necessary equipment at Tol, a plantation on Wide Bay, Higgs encrypted a short message to Port Moresby: “Send flying-boats. [The men] will identify themselves with torch.”
Meanwhile, the number of people in Lerew’s caravan had grown significantly. Among them were Captain Denny and about twenty soldiers from Fortress Signals, none of whom had authorization to join the evacuation. After departing Malaguna Camp on Scanlan’s orders, Denny had led his men to Bita Paka, the site of the old German wireless station, where they tried to get a field telephone in operation. The equipment broke down the next morning, so Denny took a few men to search for a replacement. During their absence, an unidentified RAAF officer passed through Bita Paka and informed the remaining soldiers that the Japanese had invaded. The information was untrue, but there was no way for the signalers to confirm it. Thus, when Denny returned empty-handed and learned of the alleged invasion, he made an arbitrary decision to join Lerew’s group. Likewise, a few artillerymen and other stragglers from Praed Point had attached themselves to the exodus, as did several civilians. By evening of January 22, the number of evacuees had grown to more than 150 men.
EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE CHECKING ON NEW DEFENSIVE POSITIONS along the Kokopo Ridge Road, Scanlan stopped at a new observation post manned by Lieutenant Dawson and several privates from the intelligence section. Located on a hilltop near Taliligap Mission, the observation post provided a sweeping view of the plateau and Simpson Harbor, though the beaches at Vulcan and Raluana Point were below the line of sight. Scanlan admired the vantage point and decided to place his own command center there.
While waiting for his staff to arrive, Scanlan made an astonishing comment. “Well, it looks as though all we can do now is withdraw and attack the enemy’s L of C,” he said to Dawson, using the abbreviation for “lines of communication.”
“That is a good idea,” Dawson replied carefully, “but what food are we going to eat?” His sarcasm was evidently lost on Scanlan, who had suddenly found merit in the intelligence section’s earlier recommendations. He had snubbed them then, and now it came back to haunt him. There was little time to make changes, but Dawson knew of one last opportunity. A mound of canned food was stored at Vunakanau, and he immediately requested permission to have it moved to Malabunga Mission, the jump-off point into the Baining Mountains. Scanlan denied the request on the grounds that every vehicle was needed for moving troops.
However, as soon as the colonel was out of earshot, Dawson instructed some of his men to take the battalion’s utility truck to Vunakanau and fill it with as much food as it could carry, then deliver it to Malabunga. Later, he learned that the rest of the stockpile at Vunakanau was deliberately ruined to prevent the Japanese from getting it. The food could have sustained the Australians in the jungle for months, and its loss would be sorely regretted.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER THE ANTIAIRCRAFT GUNS WERE DESTROYED, several more deliberately set explosions shook Rabaul. First, the hundreds of pre-wired bombs imbedded in the runways at Vunakanau and Lakunai were detonated, rendering both airdromes temporarily unusable. At approximately 1600, a much heavier blast rocked the town as Royal Australian Engineers blew up the stockpile of bombs alongside Malaguna Road. Due to haste, misjudgment, or perhaps both, inadequate warnings were issued prior to the explosion. All two thousand bombs went off in a colossal blast that wrecked buildings and smashed windows for blocks around, and the delicate valves and vacuum tubes in the radio transmitter at the AWA office were shattered. Half a mile away, the switchboard at Malaguna Camp was likewise ruined. In the blink of an eye, all radio contact with the outside world was severed. Even worse, from a human standpoint, a few Tolai natives had been caught unawares in the blast zone and were killed by the concussion. In the confused aftermath, their bodies were left lying next to the road, some with their entrails exposed.
On Namanula Hill, the medical personnel at both hospitals had been busy treating injuries caused by the carrier strikes. The army hospital in Government House had no operating room, so the civilian facility was used for surgeries. Several Norwegians from the Herstein underwent treatment for burns, and there were numerous injuries among personnel from the collapsed coastal gun emplacements. Private Wilkie D. “Bill” Collins, a twenty-three-year-old driver in the 2/10 Field Ambulance, later described the operating theater as looking like “a slaughter house,” with bloodstained dressings piled in a heap in one corner.
While the doctors and nurses treated injuries, Chaplain May moved among the wounded, offering words of comfort. Sud
denly, in the midst of all the activity, the hospitals fell quiet. The remains of two RAAF men, sergeants Charles F. Bromley and Richard Walsh, were brought in on a truck. They had been shot down two days earlier and their corpses recovered from a Wirraway that crashed in the shallows off Praed Point. “The battered bodies were almost unrecognizable as the young men we had laughed and joked with a few days ago,” remembered Alice Bowman. “One who looked no older than a schoolboy had been shot through the head. The other lay like a discarded puppet.”
With so many wounded to care for, everyone was oblivious to events outside the hospital until the bomb dump exploded at 1600. Soon after, realizing that an invasion was imminent, the staff at both hospitals decided to evacuate their patients to a safer location. Vunapope agreed to make its spacious campus available, and a convoy of assorted trucks, ambulances, and private vehicles gathered to transport some eighty patients around the caldera.
The trip took twice the normal time. Trees had been dynamited across many of the roads, requiring the convoy to take a circuitous route. Adding to the difficulty, the storm that had shrouded the Japanese fleet earlier that afternoon arrived just before dark, and the journey was completed in a steady downpour. The convoy finally rolled into Vunapope late that night, and the patients were placed in a native hospital near the beach. Normally a restful site under swaying palms, the wooden building was a scene of anxious activity as the patients were moved onto rows of cots. When at last the transfer was complete, Lieutenant May and the exhausted medical personnel plodded off toward dormitories made available by the generous missionaries.
Elsewhere around the caldera, scattered elements of Lark Force waited in the darkness and heavy rain for the Japanese to come. Having arrived at Three Ways that afternoon per Scanlan’s orders, Captain Selby and the antiaircraft gunners had just begun digging in when they received orders to reinforce Y Company at Raluana Point. The gunners, like most of the clerks and cooks that made up Y Company, lacked any sort of real infantry experience, but in compliance with orders they climbed back aboard their trucks for the slow, torturous ride around the caldera. Despite the heavy rain and pitch darkness, drivers were forbidden to use their headlights, so someone had to walk alongside the front bumper and shout directions. It was almost midnight by the time they reached Raluana Point and had a mug of soup, their only hot meal of the day.
In Rabaul, there was little for the civilians to do that night except seek shelter. One adventurous group set off in a schooner for Kokopo, but the rest climbed the hill to Refuge Gully, walking on roads made slick by the rain. Their progress was slow, the night seeming all the blacker because of drifting smoke from scattered fires and the sulfurous ash that billowed from Tavurvur. The mood at the shelter was grim, and not just because of the weather. The men gathered at Refuge Gully were extremely irritated, mainly over the indifferences shown by the Commonwealth. Many complained bitterly, while others held out hope for last-minute American intervention. “When the Yanks get here …” they said, as if to reassure themselves.
Conspicuously absent from the shelter was Harold Page, the corpulent administrator. Evidently he had given up in frustration after his repeated appeals for evacuation aboard the Herstein were refused. At noon that day, he and Harry Townsend, the treasurer of the mandated territory, started out on foot toward Kokopo. They told everyone they met along the road that there was nothing left in Rabaul. Their actions disgusted some citizens, but others chose to follow their example. Page and Townsend eventually joined up with Lerew’s RAAF convoy, and others made their way south by whatever means of transportation they could find.
Ironically, in the middle of the afternoon the 330-ton steamer Matafele slipped quietly into Simpson Harbor. Upon learning of the pending invasion, the captain quickly prepared to get underway again. He had plenty of space for civilians, yet only a handful went aboard due to the fact that “consent [from Canberra] was not forthcoming.” Dozens could have safely left the island, but far too many were accustomed to adhering to the whims of distant bureaucracy. Everyone, it seemed, forgot common sense. Later that afternoon, shrouded by the torrential rains, the Matafele sailed with her cabins mostly empty. A Japanese warship lurked near the entrance to Blanche Bay, but the Matafele’s captain steered the little steamer into a squall and escaped undetected.
FOR HOURS THAT NIGHT, JOHN LEREW AND HIS MIXED CONVOY OF RAAF personnel, soldiers, and civilians struggled southward along a rough and treacherous road. One truck missed a curve in the darkness and tumbled down a steep slope. No one was seriously hurt, but the remaining vehicles slowed to a crawl. The last segment of navigable roadway was little more than an overgrown track through the jungle, and it terminated at the Warangoi River. The men disabled the trucks and proceeded on foot to the riverbank, where they could see by flashlight that the muddy water was in full flood.
The only means of crossing the river was by native canoes, which had to be guided downstream and out to sea before they could be safely beached. With only two dugouts available, the process took hours. Afterward, the rabble continued on foot through the dripping jungle and forded another river before finally reaching a large, stylish plantation called Put Put in the middle of the night.
Allowing only a brief rest, Lerew split his group into two parties. He put Flight Lieutenant Brookes in charge of the civilians, Lark Force personnel, and married men, totaling about fifty individuals. Some were beyond middle age and struggled to keep up, so Brookes commandeered two small boats to take them the rest of the way to Tol plantation. He was appalled by the behavior he witnessed that night. “The action of certain civilians, including some senior civil servants, was disgraceful,” he later reported. “Numerous cases occurred where [men] were deliberately dumped and left behind in order that a particular person could make his escape either a little more certain or faster.”
Among those left behind were Harold Page and Harry Townsend, who decided to walk back to Rabaul with two other administration officials. Upon reaching the abandoned convoy at the Warangoi River on January 25, they made camp and waited for the Japanese to come and get them.
Meanwhile, Lerew and his party of RAAF personnel continued their journey on foot, covering another fifteen miles to Sum Sum plantation, just north of Adler Bay. They stopped to rest, and were driven under cover a few times when enemy scout planes flew over. Late that afternoon, the sound of aircraft engines sent the men scurrying under the trees once more, but someone recognized the distinctive note of Bristol Pegasus engines. The word spread quickly: there was an Empire flying boat nearby.
Actually, two of the huge four-engine seaplanes, formerly used by QANTAS for international passenger service, were searching for Lerew and his men. The radio message sent by Sergeant Higgs had been received at Port Moresby the previous day, and with no other information to go by, RAAF 20 Squadron sent aloft two Empires on a rescue attempt. However, upon learning of the imminent invasion of Rabaul, the crews elected to stop for the night at Samarai on the tip of the Papuan Peninsula. They took off again the next day, flew northward up the coast of New Britain, and were able to spot the flashlights being waved by the men at Sum Sum, just as Higgs’ message had indicated.
Two of Lerew’s men volunteered to take a boat to Tol and inform Brookes of the successful pickup, which left ninety-eight others to be ferried out to the Empires in small boats. The overloaded seaplanes failed to get airborne on their first attempts, and had to dump fuel before they were able to stagger aloft. They flew back to Samarai, where a flare path had been laid to guide them in for a hazardous night water landing. The evacuees received clean clothing and spent the night in a company store, then were airlifted the next day to Port Moresby.
Subsequently, a single Empire returned to New Britain on January 24 to pick up Brookes’ party at Wide Bay. The first forty-nine men were ferried out in a dangerously overloaded boat while Captain Denny waited on the beach with a handful of his men. The nervous loadmaster refused to delay the takeoff, however, and Denny’s
small group was left behind. Gamely, they commandeered a boat and set off for the Trobriand Islands on January 27. From there, after several adventurous voyages in small boats, they reached Queensland on March 9.
Considering the lack of planning and the many variables involved, the successful evacuation of 24 Squadron was practically a miracle. Unfortunately, as word of the airlift trickled back to Rabaul by “jungle telegraph,” hundreds of men in Lark Force were led to believe that the RAAF would return to Wide Bay and evacuate them, too. The rumors proved not only false, but resulted in an exceptionally cruel twist of fate.
CHAPTER SIX
VIGOROUS YOUTH FROM SHIKOKU
“The Japs simply walked ashore, and it was all over in one day.”
—Lieutenant Peter Figgis, NGA
Headquarters Staff
From the bridge of his flagship Okinoshima, a 390-foot mine-laying cruiser, Rear Admiral Kiyohide Shima caught a brief glimpse of New Britain’s volcanic mountains in the distance. The weather had been steadily deteriorating as the fleet approached the island on the afternoon of January 22, and soon a line of squalls obscured his view. The reduced visibility caused anxious moments. “As we gradually drew closer to the coastline,” Shima wrote in his diary, “we were very much worried about being taken unawares by the enemy; and indeed, it was truly by the aid of the gods that we were not troubled by them.”
The Japanese admiral had no real cause for concern. Although his ships were being observed through long-range telescopes, the Australians could do nothing to stop him. There were no aircraft or coastal guns left to oppose the invasion fleet, and it continued unmolested down St. George’s Channel, zigzagging to kill time. By nightfall, the assembled ships were only three miles from Blanche Bay. Ahead of schedule, they held their position and waited for the signal from Major General Horii to commence landing operations.