Tebbutt’s first job was as a messenger on the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1922, and afterward he worked on provincial newspapers in country Queensland and New South Wales in order to save his fare to London. He worked for the agency Associated Press and covered the 1930 Australian cricket tour, writing With the 1930 Australians. He was later a feature writer with the Brisbane Courier Mail, and assistant editor of the Melbourne Herald’s London Bureau where he covered the 1938 tour. After the war he worked for AAP and Reuters in New York, and returned to the Herald in 1949 as leader writer, features editor and Australian correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He was remembered by young tyros at the paper as a white-haired gent walking from mahogany row with his hands clasped behind his back in the manner of Prince Phillip. A colleague said that he was easily the best-dressed journo in Australia and never failed to wear a purple cornflower in his buttonhole. Tebbutt died in the mid-1980s.
*
There were two days to wait for a Lodestar to Tarakan. The Dutch, from the concealment of Samarinda II, had been harassing the Japanese who had landed unopposed in Sarawak, attacking Miri and Kuching after the long flight in their Martins. Sometimes a hint of cover could be provided by having the fighters go ahead and refuel at an advanced field; sometimes the bombers had to go unescorted. They could go only in twos or threes or fours without, even at this early stage, dipping into their slender reserves.
The younger pilots were restive. Inactivity in the rotting air of the jungle was getting on their nerves. The morose major had to hold them back – there was a limit to what they could do to the Japanese on the northern side of the island, and that at heavy risk. He wanted to have something left when the Japanese came down from the Philippines to attack Tarakan, and round the corner to snatch at the oil of Balik Papan. He had not much to play with, there at Samarinda II – perhaps a dozen bombers and three or four fighters, and no major repairs could be done on the spot. (We took bullet-holed petrol tanks all the way back to Java for repairs.) He could not save Sarawak for the White Rajah in Sydney, nor North Borneo for the British. The best he could hope for was to jump on the Japanese with all his little strength when they stuck their necks out farther.
Chess and talk and the crushing of cockroaches filled in the time. There was a visit to a French missionary immured in the jungle and selling vegetables to the garrison to make up the funds which no longer came from home. There was a little Bols in the mess, whither came buckets of a tepid, revolting dish that had a rice basis and presumably was a bad cross between Dutch and Dyak cuisine. There was an egg thrown during dinner by a wild lieutenant at a solemn captain, provoking resentment less because of the indignity in the presence of guests than because of the scarcity of eggs. There were pilots sitting on bombs and lamenting, as I had heard them lament in France, the lack of numbers. ‘If only we could meet them on equal terms …’ There was the rigid standing to attention when Batavia radio sent the British, American, Chinese and Dutch national anthems out to the exiles. Not the Russian anthem, though the Russians alone were moving in the right direction then – Holland was not in diplomatic relations with the Soviet. Empires crumbled, but there was still protocol.
Then it was our turn for a moonlight take-off. A three o’clock call, a groping for shoes among the corpses of cockroaches, a cup of sickly coffee proffered in the operations room where the chalked scoreboard showed six Japanese ships sunk and three fighters shot down for the loss of two bombers and a fighter and three bombers damaged. Out to the strip by rough and slippery paths to the Lodestar warming up. The pulse beats slow when the belly is empty in the misty Borneo jungle at four in the morning. The Lodestar charged down the runway. The guiding lights closed their ranks as she picked up speed. She bounced over the ridge. At 4.10 she was up in the clear moonlight, a white ground-sheet covering the jungle.
The drill was to reach Tarakan Island with just enough light for landing, and for the ferry machine to be out again within a few minutes. It was no place for an unarmed transport to dawdle about. The Japanese already had been pecking at Tarakan. Bomb-craters pocked the only airfield. The burnt-out skeleton of a Brewster Buffalo fighter lay on the strip. The few other machines there were wrecks. Salvaged parts from them were put aboard the Lodestar, so desperately had the Dutch to improvise. There was a jeep to bounce us into the trim equatorial town, cool in the dawn hour.
It was doomed, and everyone there – at least every white man and the handful of women who had remained as volunteer nurses – knew it. The only question was the length of the stay of execution. No shortrange air protection. Only a battalion of infantry, mostly native, with a few armoured cars, a little artillery, some light anti-aircraft guns, and orders to fight until, the inevitable end approaching, the demolition scheme for the oil wells could be applied. Tarakan was an incitement to oil-hungry conquest, a glittering prize. The Japanese had shown their minds plainly enough.
Their attacking aircraft in the preliminary raids had laid off the oilfields which cluster about the town. They wanted their winnings intact. There was fabulous wealth in this lonely, exposed island with the forest of derricks, looking across the Celebes Sea to the falling Philippines and its own imminent fate. There were oil slicks in every ditch and puddle. For 40 years Tarakan had been yielding up its treasure. Now, seven years beyond the normal expectation of an oilfield’s life, it showed no signs of petering out.
Consider the ripples that had spread from this rain-washed, palmfringed pimple on the earth’s surface: consider what its scientists, its engineers, its coolies, had provided: what it had meant to many people, most of whom had never heard of it. Eighty thousand tons of oil a month was the capacity of the three Tarakan fields. It had built, in its time, ornate office-blocks; it had bought racehorses, yachts, mansions, mistresses; it had fattened tycoons in London, Amsterdam, New York; it had meant power for voyages and sea-fights. It had lit Nippon’s eyes with ambition, this shuttered, anxious little town under martial law, its anchorage empty of tankers now that the scorched earth policy was not a phrase in the newspapers from far away, but something that must sorrowfully be applied here and soon. Tarakan had spelt guilders, dollars, pounds, for decades. Only a sacrificial, suicidal handful of men would briefly stave off the absorption of its ruins into the Coprosperity Sphere of Greater East Asia. To walk in Tarakan was like inspecting a grave while the funeral procession approached.
The quiet, elderly commandant, Colonel Simon de Waal, gave his consent to inspection of the defences. It did not take long. It seemed that everything possibly had been done with the material that lay to hand, and that was not much. Little brown men in domed steel helmets manned the machine-gun posts and trenches that covered the approach to the oil jetty. They sprang to it happily when the cameraman wanted his shots; they would soon be springing to the real thing. In the low, leafy hills there were observation posts, winding revetted trenches and hideouts, the whole scheme designed to cover the approach to the oilfields. Repairs after the bombing were going forward at the airfield. A new runway was being made for the bombers the Japanese would not wait for. There were convicts among the toiling coolies. The convicts had bolted to the jungle after one Japanese attack, but presented themselves for work again next day. In town, a few Chinese shops remained shyly open. But life had come to a standstill. Even the film club with the wide terrace (one of those spacious cool retreats that Hollanders build throughout the Indies as surely as colonising Britons lay down cricket fields) was hushed.
A few jars of caviar, spindly Russian typography on their labels, stood in the shelves of the European provision shop as a reminder of what the old life had been. Hollanders had said to hell with anaemic sahibs’ rules of drink and diet east of Suez. Now the expansive days were going, gone. A whispering tenseness had succeeded. It was 1200 miles to Java, only a few hundred to the nearest points of the rushing Japanese conquest. The bone was pointed at Tarakan.
*
Dr Hendrik Colijn, manager of the Batavia Petroleum Company�
��s Tarakan fields, sat on the veranda of his white bungalow and spoke in cold, heavy tones of the plan to destroy the work of years. He was a tall, thin, sad, precise man. His father, the former Premier of Holland, was in a German concentration camp. He himself was about to be confronted with the blackmail of war. If Holland could not keep the oil of Tarakan, the Japanese should not have it. He spoke of the exceptional purity – the low ‘pour-point’ – of the Tarakan crude oil. It could be pumped from the fields into ships’ bunkers for immediate use; it could be used in the tropics or at the North Pole. There were ten distinct layers of oil on the island, all within 1500 feet of the surface.
If the defence failed, could the fields be put out of action for a long time?
‘Not only for a long time,’ said Dr Colijn, ‘but for as long as we wish. We are so prepared that we have not stopped production. We can destroy the fields at a few hours’ notice.’
It was not a hastily made plan, he emphasised. Civil and military engineers had been working on it before Holland declared war on Japan. They had no doubt.
*
The bucketing rain of the day cleared. The evening was calm with a malicious moon, and the garrison stood by for the parachute raid that might have been attempted to seize the oilfields. The staff-captain came home to rest briefly in his bungalow by the barracks. He was nervously, spasmodically gay, but anxious as the telephone buzzed in the comfortable lounge-library. He was a cosmopolitan. There were more books in English, French and German than in Dutch. His review of the situation was stark enough, unless there should be time for the hewing of more airstrips out of the jungle in Borneo and aeroplanes to use them to give close cover. But the messages coming over his telephone did not suggest time for Tarakan. He spoke of his French wife who had escaped from the Germans in Holland and reached East Africa via Switzerland, and who would now be coming to Java. He produced wine.
‘You won’t be able to get any more here,’ I demurred.
‘Drink it, my friend. The Japanese will take it from me.’
Towards midnight, the moon was blotted out. The rain came sluicing. Whenever I wakened, it was pounding, hissing. I thought of that low-lying airfield, with its best runway bombed out of service. It was still raining when we were called in the dark and the jeep heaved and splashed its way out to the airfield. The rain had eased. The faint light showed the airfield surface a series of lakes and morasses. The Lodestar should have been in from Samarinda II, but it was nearly an hour before she made the prescribed approach from seaward and the pilots began to take stock. Once, twice, thrice, studiously, they circled the airfield, deep in mud and water. They were game and good. A miscalculation would have marooned them and their waiting passengers. Any trip now might be the last to Tarakan. They slipped in over the hill and set her down. She threw up a waterspout, lurched and slowed in mud that almost submerged the wheels, and then, leaving a slipstream of ripples and a deep-rutted track, slithered to the tarmac. The freight was hustled out. We piled in. The tall, friendly corporal of the airfield guard said goodbye as though he knew no envy of anyone going back to Java, as though he did not know he would never be leaving Tarakan. They understood, on that island, the meaning of face.
We pulled the safety-belts tight and hung on, thankful for the proven airmanship of the landing. The Lodestar rocked and vibrated as first one wheel and then another struck a soft patch. Mud spattered up. At first we could see the threshing wheels. Then mud and water obscured the windows. She bounced, plunged, bounced again, and then was up in a climbing turn. When the windows cleared, Tarakan was a sad speck.
Samarinda II again, Balik Papan, Banjermasin, and back in the late afternoon to Bandoeng, weaving through the cloud-filled mountain passes. That was on January 7th. On Saturday afternoon, January 10th, the Japanese invasion fleet approached.
Patrol in the Saruwageds
Peter Ryan
The Japanese first landed on the north coast of New Guinea near Lae and Salamaua on March 8th, 1942. Kanga Force – a handful of volunteers of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles reinforced by the 2/5th Independent Company, had the job of patrolling and reconnoitring in the area, from a base inland at Wau. The Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) of the Australian Army had taken over from the civilian governments of Papua and New Guinea in early 1942 and had the job of showing the flag to civilians in those parts of the country inland from Lae that the Japanese had not occupied. All were supplied up the Bulldog Track, an even more extraordinary trek than the Kokoda Track. War correspondent Osmar White, who walked it with Damien Parer on a mission to supply the commandos of the 2/5th at this time, called the country the ‘spilled loads of heaven’. North of the Markham River was the Huon Peninsula and the equally monstrous scenery of the Finisterre and Saruwaged Ranges.
Here Peter Ryan, ANGAU Warrant Officer, makes an inventory of the positives and negatives as he saw them in 1942.
I’m eighteen years old, and I’ve been in New Guinea a couple of months.
A day’s walk to the east is Lae, and some thousands of Japanese troops.
North, a few hours ahead of me, is the Markham River, and somewhere nearby in the jungle is Bob’s, the camp from which a few hopelessly outnumbered Australian commandos are carrying on the war against the Japs.
Across the Markham, just visible through the trees from where I sit, are the Saruwaged mountains, so high that you can’t see the tops for clouds; among those incredible blue ranges, somewhere or other in an area of roughly three thousand square miles, is another lone Australian, Jock McLeod.
Object of my journey: to find Jock and place myself under his orders in his dual job of ‘governing’ some tens of thousands of natives and watching the activities of our Japanese enemy.
Then:
Resources: Reputedly a fortnight’s rations, but really only enough to last a hungry man about a week.
No compass.
No maps.
One old rifle with a damaged foresight.
A thirty-year-old revolver with ten rounds of ammunition.
Bottomless, unbounded ignorance of the country …
Now read on …
Fear Drive My Feet was published in 1959, with a new edition in 1997.
Peter Ryan was director of Melbourne University Press from 1962 to 1988 and edited the great Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea (1972).
*
It was nearly twelve o’clock that night before we finished laying our plans for the next few crucial days. The Japanese seemed to be everywhere, so our only hope was to move with all possible speed. Three rivers flow into the Markham from the north side – the Leron, the Irumu and the Erap. To have followed the Leron down would have taken us within range of enemy patrols near Kaiapit, the district where Harry Lumb had been killed. The Erap would have led us down close to Lae, and, after my frequent trips on the river the previous year, the enemy would be almost certain to be watching it. Between the two lay the Irumu, flowing into the Markham not far from Chivasing, where we had begun our patrol a couple of months earlier. We decided to move as quickly as possible down this river, travelling mainly at night and avoiding, if possible, all contact with the natives.
We left Ewok at three in the morning, our immediate object being to get over the divide between the Leron and the Irumu rivers to Bogeba village. We arrived in Bogeba almost 28 hours later, having neither eaten nor slept in that time. When I came to write the official report of the patrol I found that I had no real recollection of this part of the journey, but only a succession of impressions, unrelated in time or space: impressions of villages where we sneaked around in the dark, not waking the inhabitants, of rivers which almost swept us away, of legs which stumbled on, unknowing and uncaring, all feeling gone. I am sure that half the time we walked with our eyes shut from exhaustion.
At Bogeba we rested for a day and a night and made several good meals on native foods. The kanakas seemed friendly, and said that though the Japanese had never been to the village they knew there
were many of them moving about the country. They introduced us to a native of Siang village, farther down the river, who said he could guide us along the Irumu to the Markham, avoiding all the tracks. This seemed a good plan, and we moved to a hamlet a few miles downstream to wait for nightfall. We set up the radio here for what was to prove the last time, asking Port Moresby to inform our forward posts along the Markham that we could be expected either next day or the day after. After a journey such as this had been, we wanted to run no risk of being shot by our own men, which could easily have happened, particularly if we crossed at night.
Just at sunset we moved off, leaving behind everything but light packs and our arms. We followed the Irumu, walking in the water for the most part, for though very swift it was not deep. The valley was a very shallow one in the Markham plain, about a thousand yards wide, and the stream wandered haphazardly from one side to the other, in several channels. As there was a bright moon, we had no difficulty in seeing our way. The country was as flat as a table, and covered with kunai- and cane-grass. Dotted here and there were weird black sentinel-like stumps, the remains of dead palms.
We were so tense and keyed up with the strain of this final stage that the slightest movement or noise in the shadows made us start, but we felt no weariness, though we walked without rest all night.
About three o’clock in the morning, as we splashed through the muddy water, we heard a rooster crowing, and then the howl of a dog. The sounds came from the bush on the right-hand side of the river, and we knew we must have passed Teraran village. So far, everything was going smoothly, and another eight or nine miles should find us at the Markham. However, the Irumu started to subdivide into numberless tiny streams, and finally petered out altogether in a tangled swamp of cane-grass, sago-palms and cruel thorned vines. Our native from Siang announced himself baffled too. It had not been like this years before, he said nervously, and then, afraid we would vent our illconcealed wrath on his person, he took to his heels and vanished into the night.
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