by Bruce Gamble
The plan’s success depended entirely on Appel. Because the Japanese controlled the waters off Lassul Bay, he had to move his men overland to Pondo, twenty-five miles from Harvey’s plantation, in order for McCarthy to evacuate them by boat. Appel told McCarthy that he could have 145 men at Pondo in seven days. His most difficult task was leaving behind those who were too sick to travel. At this, John Ackeroyd stepped forward and volunteered to remain with eight men at St. Paul’s Mission, knowing that all of them would eventually become POWs. Later, Ackeroyd was decorated with a Member of the British Empire for his selfless devotion.
Meanwhile, those who could walk were in bad shape. Appel noted a long list of ailments among them, including “acute tinea, tropical ulcers, ringworm, diarrhea, dysentery, swollen glands, [and] infected sores, with over 80% developing malaria.” Despite their poor physical condition, he got them all to Pondo as promised—and in five days, not seven.
The arrival of Holland’s party on March 8 brought the total number of soldiers and civilians on the north coast to well over two hundred. McCarthy intended to move them in stages down the coast using boats, but he had only the Aussi and a few other small craft available. He therefore assigned several men to repair the steamer Malahuka, which still sat on the slipway at Pondo. Leading the effort was Lincoln J. Bell, another timber merchant. His team repaired the hole in the hull easily enough; the bigger problem was the damage to the boat’s engine, which proved difficult to fix. After five days of intensive work, the vessel was deemed ready to launch, and the process of ferrying men to Talasea began under the cover of darkness. But on three successive nights the Malahuka s engine broke down, forcing McCarthy to radio Port Moresby for assistance.
Enter the “Harris Navy,” a motley flotilla of launches and schooners gathered by Gwynne C. “Blue” Harris, a member of ANGAU on New Guinea whose nickname came from the fringe of bright red hair surrounding his otherwise bald head. Lieutenant Commander Feldt, who later described Harris as “a collection of contradictions,” instructed him to support the evacuation being organized by McCarthy.
Harris’s fastest vessel had a top speed of only eight knots. “It would have been hard,” Feldt recalled, “to find a more pathetic task force than this haphazard little group of launches.” But the boats were adequate to move the troops away from the clutches of the Japanese. McCarthy directed the men who were weak with malnutrition or illness to be ferried aboard the flotilla while the fittest troops walked. He was constantly in motion during the journey from Pondo, sometimes browbeating demoralized troops to keep them going, other times rushing off to attend to some organizational requirement: canoes for a river crossing, food at the next plantation, radio messages to Port Moresby. By mid-March he had succeeded in moving the Australians approximately two hundred miles to Iboki plantation, an achievement that could not have been accomplished without his boundless energy.
There was ample food at Iboki, and even better, a tireless widow named Gladys Baker who volunteered to treat the sick and wounded men. Bill Collins was among the worst cases, but there were plenty of others who also needed her attention. “I worked all night and day caring for them and feeding them,” she remembered. “In sixteen days I could only snatch thirteen hours sleep.” At the start of the war, Baker had abandoned her own plantation on Vitu, fifty miles north of New Britain, and moved to a camp upriver from Iboki. She was accompanied by two crewmen from the Burns-Philp vessel Lakatoi, which the captain had decided to hide along the coast at Vitu.
Upon learning of the Lakatoi, Keith McCarthy sent an armed party to commandeer it, and the timid captain readily agreed to cooperate. The decision was made to keep the Lakatoi hidden at Vitu, which would minimize the possibility of its detection by the Japanese. The logistics were therefore more complicated, but the Harris Navy helped out again, successfully ferrying all of the Australians from Iboki to Vitu on the night of March 20.
The next day, the Lakatoi sailed for Australia with a total of 214 souls aboard, of whom 162 were members of Lark Force. The remainder consisted of civilians, ANGAU representatives, and crewmen. When the vessel docked at Cairns a week later, Keith McCarthy slumped in utter exhaustion. He had plenty of company: only six men from Lark Force were still fit for duty. “All the rest were sick,” recalled Eric Feldt, “debilitated by poor and insufficient food, weakened by malaria and exposure. Most had sores, the beginnings of tropical ulcers, covered by dirty bandages. Their faces were the dirty gray of malaria victims, their clothes in rags and stinking of stale sweat.”
For their extraordinary roles in the successful evacuation, Keith McCarthy, Frank Holland, and Gladys Baker were decorated as Members of the British Empire, and Pip Appel received a Military Cross.
ANOTHER NOTEWORTHY ESCAPE FROM THE NORTH COAST TOOK CONSIDERABLY longer to accomplish. Colin McInnes and a party of soldiers from B Company, including Graham Parsons (who had been shot in the neck and still suffered bouts of hemorrhaging), moved overland from their hideout near Cape Lambert to Rangarere plantation. There, owner John McLean had hidden a thirty-two-foot motor launch named the Lottie Don in a shallow creek. Over a period of days, the boat was provisioned with food and fuel and her white hull was camouflaged with dark green paint.
The first attempt to get the Lottie Don past the reefs failed on February 15. The next night, McLean himself decided to join the escape attempt and brought along his personal servant, Bombangi, along with a soldier from C Company, Private Norman J. Burgell. A skilled boatman, Mclean urged the party, now numbering eleven, to make for New Ireland rather than risk the long journey to New Guinea. Everyone decided to accept his recommendation, and the Lottie Don carried them across St. George’s Channel in the dark without incident. Two days later, as the men worked their way south along the coast of New Ireland, they were met by coastwatchers Alan F. “Bill” Kyle and Gregory N. Benham, who had periodic radio communications with Port Moresby.
However, before a rescue could be arranged, Japanese ships arrived in the nearby harbor. Troops landed in force, sending the Australians pell-mell into the jungle. Separated into small parties, they spent weeks moving up and down the narrow island, scrounging food where they could, relying on native runners to occasionally send messages to each other, and always endeavoring to stay one step ahead of the Japanese.
All of them suffered at various times from tropical ailments. McInnes became so ill with malaria that he had to be watched constantly to prevent him from wandering mindlessly into the jungle. He recovered, but another victim of malaria, Warrant Officer Neale E. Evans of the RAAF, died on March 20. A helpful native dug most of the grave, because none of the Australians could wield a spade for more than a few minutes at a time.
At last, McInnes’ small party met a Chinese captain named Chin Pak who owned a battered, ungainly-looking boat named the Quong Wah. They negotiated with him to buy the craft, and he proved to be a wily trader. Part of the agreement included the purchase of thousands of cigarettes. The cartons were colorful and attractive, but the cigarettes turned out to be an Egyptian brand made during World War I. After twenty years in the tropics, none would light. “[On] that point at least,” recalled Douglas A. Aplin, a corporal from B Company, “the Chinaman had the last laugh.”
With the assistance of coastwatchers Kyle and Benham, the scattered parties were reunited after five miserable weeks of jungle survival.* They departed New Ireland on April 30 aboard the Quong Wah for what should have been a two-day voyage to New Guinea. However, multiple breakdowns slowed their progress, and they spent fifty-seven hours adrift before making landfall on May 5, by which time they were 120 miles off course. Motoring down to Buna, McInnes made radio contact with area headquarters on May 6. Then, after resting at Buna for several days, the entire party proceeded to Milne Bay. A small coastal vessel picked them up and delivered them to Port Moresby on May 26, ninety-nine days after they had escaped from New Britain.
Amazingly, for all the hardships they experienced, McInnes and his men did not endu
re the most difficult circumstances. That distinction went to the approximately two hundred Australians trapped near Jacquinot Bay on the south coast of New Britain, where conditions were even worse.
* Australian soldiers often misunderstood the definition of kanaka, which is not a pronoun describing nationality but simply means villager.
* Kyle and Benham did not leave New Ireland. They received RAN rank and were compelled to stay behind as coastwatchers. Later, they were betrayed by natives and executed by the Japanese.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ESCAPE: THE LAURABADA
“We could do nothing but wait.”
—Gunner David Bloomfield, antiaircraft battery
In early March, a few days after volunteering to stay behind on the south coast of New Britain, Peter Figgis and the five men with him walked into a village at the tip of Cape Orford. There they found Ben Dawson and seven soldiers from Lark Force, most of whom looked sick and dejected. Their party had left Kalai in a commandeered motor launch on February 10, and moved down the coast as far as Pul Pul. However, within two weeks everyone except Dawson was infected with malaria, and one man died. After resting for several days, the men had worked their way south to Marau plantation, from which they set out again in the launch on February 26. Strong winds blew them onto a reef near the village of Baien, wrecking the boat, and that was where Figgis found them—out of hope and planning to surrender. However, when Figgis informed Dawson of the evacuation being organized on the north coast, Dawson thought his group would be able to walk to Pondo. With directions for finding the stash of food at Milim, he and his ailing men set off across the island on yet another arduous journey.
Figgis’ party continued south for another thirty-five miles to Waterfall Bay. They took shelter in an abandoned sawmill, near which a large garden of sweet potatoes was ready to harvest. Other foods included pawpaws ripening on numerous trees. Four men rested there while Figgis and Mackenzie walked farther south to look for the main body of troops on the far side of Jacquinot Bay. A few days later they located Bill Owen and numerous Lark Force soldiers living in squalid conditions.
As the ranking officer on the south coast, Owen had performed admirably in moving the troops southward after the departure of Scanlan and Mollard. It was to Owen’s credit that so many had traveled so far, but after they reached Jacquinot Bay the situation turned nightmarish. The incidence of malnutrition and disease increased dramatically, and although Ted Palmer helped the soldiers as best he could with his limited medical supplies, some individuals had died.
Palmer was grateful for the aid of Father Ted Harris, the local priest at Malmal Mission. Tall and slender, Harris possessed “a wonderfully eloquent gift of expression, a delightful Irish brogue, and a frank and infectious smile.” In short, he was a parody of the typical Irish priest. Working out of his church—naturally called St. Patrick’s—he cheered the sick men and provided native foods. It was a losing battle, however, as both he and Palmer constantly fought another enemy that affected the troops. “Morale gradually deteriorated,” recalled Palmer, “the jungle itself seeming to depress the men quite apart from the massacres and the deaths from malaria.”
The men lived at two plantations: Wunung, about a mile from Harris’s mission, and Drina, twenty miles farther down the coast. Palmer used Wunung as an aid station, checking the condition of each man that arrived. He sent those deemed “fit” to Drina, while the sick remained at Wunung for treatment in his makeshift hospital.
At Drina, Bill Owen strived to keep the healthy ones busy. He organized the men into three platoons, each with a rotating schedule: one day of camp duties, a day of rest, and then a day of gardening. They planted the flat terrain of an unused airstrip with sweet potatoes, which would eventually improve their food supply, but in the meantime men began dying at an alarming rate.
Palmer was forced to divide his time between both plantations. “With one exception,” he wrote later, “every man of more than 150 was infected.” He had a limited amount of quinine, so he administered small doses only to the worst cases, giving each man 50 grams daily for a maximum of four days. Soon he had to stop using even that insufficient amount. “I decided to use the minimum of quinine and only when I thought the patient would die without it. This should have produced black water fever but I do not think any occurred.” Suffering his own malaria attacks, Palmer watched helplessly as the men endured the debilitating infection with virtually no relief.
One vivid portrayal of malaria’s mind-bending effects appears in a book written after the war by David Selby. Appropriately titled Hell and High Fever, it describes a feverish episode that occurred on the porch of the Drina plantation house:
From where I lay on the floor I could see, further down the veranda, the legs of a table which, together with an upturned box, comprised the Adjutant’s office. Those table legs acquired a peculiar significance with the approach of delirium. As the fever rose, they would grow and grow until, colossal giants, they floated towards me. I struggled in my mind to keep them back but nothing would hold them. One was kneeling on my chest, crushing my lungs and, as I panted for breath, it seemed that no breath would come.
Iron fingers were grasping my throat, choking me, and red-hot bands were pressing in my temples, splitting my skull. I felt my struggles against this intangible menace growing weaker, and at last a black abyss opened up behind me and I slipped headlong down through waves of undulating darkness. Then a gigantic face floated down on me, and I tortured my brain to think where I had seen that face before as names drifted through my brain but seemed to elude my grasp … and a voice a thousand miles away would offer me a drink. I tried to answer but my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth and only horrible sounds issued forth.
Then the mists cleared and I felt that by an enormous effort of will I could force the table legs back to their place as they dwindled to their correct size. I realized that it was not months, or years since I had last seen them, but perhaps minutes, and that I was still lying on the veranda floor at Drina.
The attacks of chills and fever would periodically wane, and the infected men could accomplish some limited work. However, by the end of March at least a third of the men had positive symptoms at any given time, including daily rigors and a temperature above 102 degrees. Virtually everyone was anemic, and many soldiers suffered edema of the feet and ankles. Some of the sickest men appeared almost skeletal, with shreds of filthy uniforms hanging from their bony frames. Dysentery was another endemic problem, mainly because of poor sanitation. Although latrines were dug, the afflicted individuals were often too weak to reach them before diarrhea struck.
Overwhelmed by the number of sick and dying men, Palmer was forced to make difficult choices. “There were some deaths,” he admitted, “owing to the difficulty of deciding which men were in immediate danger.” Remarkably, the four men in Palmer’s care who had been so terribly wounded by the Japanese—Bill Cook, “Smacker” Hazelgrove, Cliff Marshall, and “Nipper” Webster—all pulled through.
Not only did the soldiers at Wunung and Drina battle malaria and dysentery, they also suffered from an acute shortage of food. Their diet was limited almost exclusively to taro and rice, and the sick men did not receive enough nutrition to recover. Many of those who died actually succumbed to a combination of disease and malnourishment.
The garden in front of the Drina plantation house was used as a cemetery, but eventually all the space was taken up. A new burial plot was started adjacent to a pig sty behind the house. There was good reason for choosing both locations: the ground was relatively soft to begin with, and elsewhere it took hours to dig even a shallow grave. With so much death and misery at Drina, the men came to despise “every stone and tree on that plantation.”
FOR ALL THEIR DREADFULNESS, DRINA AND WUNUNG REPRESENTED SAFE havens for the Australians who managed to stumble in from the jungle. Some arrived with harrowing tales of their journeys down the coast.
David Bloomfield, slowed by ma
laria as he traveled with a party of soldiers and civilians, did not reach Jacquinot Bay until March 29, fully seven weeks after the massacre at Tol. Suffering from exhaustion and malnourishment, he was one of the lucky ones. Several of his friends had collapsed along the trail, then gradually faded away until they slipped into a coma. It was terribly depressing to watch them draw their final breath in a dark and foul-smelling hut in some lonely, abandoned village.
Perhaps the most compelling adventure was the one endured by three young friends. On February 19, gunners Archibald N. “Arch” Taylor and James W. R. “Bob” Hannah of the 17th Antitank Battery, along with Jack Hart of the antiaircraft unit, attempted a shortcut across a rugged section of the southern coast. They made good progress until they came to a cliff overlooking jagged coral rocks near the shore. While Taylor went to search for a vine to use as a rope, Hart decided to climb down on his own. After a few minutes Taylor returned and warned Hart to be careful, but an instant later the rock Hart was holding onto suddenly broke. As his friends watched in horror, he detached from the cliff face and “turned over about three times” before hitting the rocks below.
By some miracle, Hart was not killed. It took Taylor about fifteen minutes to descend the cliff and run to his friend, by which time Hart was alert. Blood ran from a deep gash in his face, and despite his agony he managed to say, “Arch, my leg is broken.” A moment later Hannah appeared, having nearly fallen himself as he climbed down the cliff. He helped Taylor fashion a crude splint from driftwood and strips of cloth, which they used to stabilize the broken leg.