by Ian Townsend
As a soldier, George would be taken to a prison camp, and that would help no-one.
Some soldiers had gone to the north coast, but the men in George’s party had heard rumours that a rescue mission had been organised on the south coast. George was the only one in his group who was a New Guinea resident; the others were all regular soldiers from Victoria. He knew the jungle, and he knew they’d probably starve if left alone, so he trudged on with them, the group swelling to 28.
‘Our night meal for 28 men comprised one small tin of soup (diluted) and one biscuit per man,’ said George.
They were also at the rear of a column of hundreds of retreating Australian troops whose boots had turned the jungle path into a slippery, muddy mess. The ravines were steep and, at the bottom, fast-flowing streams swept men off their feet. Fighter planes flew up and down the gorges and tried to machine-gun any man they saw. Dark spirals of mosquitoes rose from the ground where they passed. Men ceased to talk. The only sounds were of feet squelching in mud and ragged breaths. At night, high in the Bainings, it became cold but it was still too damp to light a fire. They slept on the wet ground.
Their group began to pass dead men.
George was fit from work on the plantation and the schooner, and coped better than most.
After several days in the jungle, with the clothes beginning to rot on their backs, the group arrived at the remote Lamingi Mission. They’d managed to survive this far on tapioca, yams and taro begged from local villagers, but it wasn’t enough. When they arrived at Lamingi, they found that the hundreds of troops before them had stripped it clean.
George had a final, terrible decision to make. From Lamingi the track branched. North-west was Lassul Bay, but it was a four-day walk into the wettest part of the island. The south coast was closer.
George asked the Lamingi Mission priest, Father Alphons Mayrhofer, a bearded missionary from Salzburg, Austria, for advice. Mayrhofer had favoured the north-west coast, where there were more plantations and therefore more food, but he would have explained that many men such as Norman Fisher chose the south coast track because it was shorter and they believed a rescue mission from Port Moresby was more likely on the southern side of the island.
George and the 27 other men decided to head south for the same reasons. They wanted rescue more than anything and needed food as quickly as possible. But, in the end, because many of them were so weak, the trek took them six painful days.
On the way, the only thing that kept them going was the story that float planes had come to collect the RAAF men. Those planes had landed in Wide Bay on the south coast, at the plantation called Tol.
CHAPTER 24
To the Officers and Soldiers of this Island!
SURRENDER AT ONCE!
And we will guarantee your life, treating you as war prisoners. Those who RESIST US WILL BE KILLED ONE AND ALL. Consider seriously, you can find neither food nor way of escape in this island and you will only die of hunger unless you surrender.
— Japanese Commander-in-Chief, 23 January 1942
While George Manson was at the Lamingi Mission agonising over whether to return to Lassul, Marjorie and Ted Harvey had their first visitors since the invasion.
Around ten o’clock in the morning on the Tuesday after the invasion, two muddy soldiers appeared at the bottom steps of Harvey’s plantation house.
Harvey was having breakfast, and when he saw the men, he rushed down the front stairs, talking the whole time, bringing the men up to the verandah and offering them food.
The two men were Lieutenant Mick Smith and Corporal Mac Hamilton, and they had walked, paddled and swum 40 miles to escape Rabaul. It had taken them four days, and they weren’t alone. Behind them, up in the mountains, were hundreds of fleeing Australian soldiers waiting to come down to the coast.
It had been raining almost constantly since the invasion and Mick Smith’s trousers had been chafing his legs, so he’d taken them off and slung them over his shoulder. When he’d arrived at Harvey’s house, he was naked below the waist.
Mick apologised for his appearance as Harvey ushered the men into the gloom of the verandah.
‘It does not matter, it does not matter,’ said Harvey. ‘That’s all right. There is a war on.’
Mick Smith was inspecting his sore thighs when Mac Hamilton noticed a woman also sitting at the table.
Mick.
Yep?
Say hello to Mrs Harvey.
Marjorie made them breakfast and the two soldiers were able to give her a first-hand account of what had happened in Rabaul when the Japanese arrived. She asked about George but, no, they were sorry, they didn’t know the name.
Mac Hamilton had met Mick Smith days earlier at the Kerevat Bridge, near the agricultural experimental station, as they both fled west from Rabaul along the north coast road.
Hamilton had, against orders, packed a compass and map the day before the invasion and was guiding a group of four to the north coast to try to find a boat. Smith was with about 20 men, and he suggested they form one party. Hamilton wouldn’t have bothered, except that he was impressed by Mick Smith’s scheme to escape the island.
‘We all had our own schemes worked out, but Mick’s went as far as stealing a Jap plane.’
It was a crazy plan that could never work, but that optimism was just the thing that might eventually save them. Smith was prepared to try anything, and Hamilton recognised a kindred spirit.
Mick Smith, a plumber from Melbourne, and Mac Hamilton, a wool valuer from Geelong, each treated escape as a personal challenge and quickly became friends.
Together they found canoes and paddled along the coast, jumping ahead of the other escapees on foot. With hundreds of exhausted troops trailing along the coast behind them, they searched for a temporary base in the mountains. They commandeered a horse named Timothy, loaded it with supplies and walked to St Paul’s Roman Catholic Mission, passing villages that had already raised the Japanese flag.
By the time they reached St Paul’s, they had convinced themselves they were in enemy territory. St Paul’s looked as if it had been plucked from a German village and placed into a coconut plantation. The church was painted white, with a two-storey bell tower and stained-glass windows. It was run by Father Bruno Stapelmann, ‘a very clever German of about 40 who had not been out from the Fatherland long, and four German nuns who could not speak English,’ said Mac Hamilton.
The priest welcomed them with a hot bath, a change of clothes, a good feed and, bless him, beer.
‘Lovely man, Father Stapelmann,’ said Mick Smith, ‘but the big question: pro-Jap or not? Stapelmann was Prussian, so we had a fair chance of being on the wrong side.’
But Stapelmann proved to be surprisingly candid.
‘He told us where every planter was; even told us where their bush hideouts were,’ said Hamilton.
Father Stapelmann then told the pair another secret. Three hours walk away, down the mountain at Lassul Bay, a man named Ted Harvey had a Teleradio and stockpiles of food.
It sounded too good to be true, but the two soldiers decided to trust the priest who had given them beer and insisted they stay the night under clean sheets.
Hey Mac, you ever see that movie The Wizard of Oz? said Mick, on the brink of sleep under those sheets.
Rings a bell.
You know the part where the house gets sucked up by the cyclone? That’s us, mate. We’ve just landed in bloody Munchkin Land.
The next morning, they sent a rider on Timothy the horse back to Captain Pip Appel, who was leading the escapees coming up from the coast, with a message to continue to St Paul’s. It was safe.
Hamilton and Smith then followed a steep jungle track down to Lassul to see if Stapelmann’s story about Harvey’s radio and food supplies was true.
Marjorie had made the two soldiers breakfast and sent Dickie, who’d come up onto the verandah to stare, back down to the beach to keep a lookout.
Ted Harvey was rambling, talking about w
hat he’d done to prepare for the invasion. He’d dyed his grey hair black, he told them, because ‘the natives would be more likely to attack an old grey man’.
It seemed a strange thing to say, but Harvey was thinking of Hugh Scott, a man about the same age as himself, greying, who lived nearby and who had told him the natives were dancing with axes and spears every night outside his house. Harvey had dyed his hair black hoping the natives wouldn’t think him old and weak.
Mac Hamilton tried to speak to Marjorie, but Harvey kept talking: Enough to feed the 5000, well, perhaps a few hundred for a few months, hidden around about. He told them about his Teleradio, packed into three large metal boxes, ready to move.
Harvey then lowered his voice and asked Hamilton and Smith if they could help him get Marjorie and Dickie away to Australia. Five miles down the coast, at the Massawa plantation, the Catholic Mission had a schooner ready to go with a native crew, fuel and food.
Mick Smith tried not to choke. So why don’t you take it?
Oh no, said Harvey. He could be fined for taking natives out of the Territory without a permit.
The two soldiers exchanged a glance. Harvey’s reasoning didn’t match his dire circumstances.
Mick Smith told Harvey not to worry about the native labour laws; he was prepared to take responsibility. Harvey said they should all go immediately and commandeer the schooner, and sail it back to Australia.
But what about all the other Australian soldiers behind us? asked Smith.
Harvey leant close and said, Keep it quiet.
It was getting late.
‘We didn’t like the idea of camping with such a madman,’ Hamilton said later, so they asked Harvey to set up the Teleradio and said they’d come back the next day with a soldier from Signals, who might be able to get a message to Australia.
They then trudged back up the mountain to St Paul’s.
When they stumbled back into the mission, they found nearly 300 men had arrived and Father Stapelmann and the nuns were trying to feed them all. Most of the troops still had some rations, and the mission had found sweet potato and had handed out one egg for every four men.
Mick Smith and Mac Hamilton reported what they’d seen and heard to Captain Appel.
‘Mick and I did the dirty on Harvey by telling of the schooner at Massawa and the Teleradio,’ Hamilton later admitted.
To Appel, it seemed like a miracle. Here was food as well as a chance to get a message out for help, and he imagined the schooner might be big enough for 100 men.
The next morning, Wednesday 28 January, Appel sent soldiers down to Massawa to see if they could find the mission schooner. He sent Smith, Hamilton and a man from Signals back down to Lassul to get the radio working and to ask Harvey to move the food stores further into the Baining Mountains. He was worried the Japanese would get there first.
When Hamilton and Smith arrived at Lassul, they found Harvey charging the batteries, and while the Signals man worked on the radio, Smith inspected the food stores.
Then everything happened in a rush. The natives that Hugh Scott had been so worried about approached Harvey’s house carrying spears, bows and arrows, axes and knives. Harvey came out and asked them what the hell they were doing, deserting their plantations.
‘He abused and cowered them so much that they couldn’t tell him why they had left their plantations and were going bush,’ said Hamilton, who decided to take advantage of the cowed workers to help him move Harvey’s food stockpile and the Teleradio into the jungle.
At rifle point, Hamilton made the armed men sit. It was at that tense moment that ten-year-old Dickie came running up the track from the beach.
‘Go for your lives!’ yelled Dickie. The Japanese were coming. ‘They’re on the beach and they’re on the way up.’
Mac Hamilton grabbed his pack and ran up the front steps of the house, where Ted Harvey, Marjorie and Dickie were at the back door snatching up their getaway packs before running down the back steps and vanishing into the jungle. That was the last Hamilton saw of them.
The three soldiers followed the fleeing natives into the bush, eventually grabbing some and forcing them at gunpoint to carry their packs. As they ran, they saw their own heavy boots leaving a trail from the house, so they took them off and ran barefoot, following their reluctant carriers into the mountains.
When they stopped for a breather and looked back down into the bay, they saw two Japanese destroyers and half a dozen other vessels. Mac Hamilton checked his pockets and found his compass.
Right, where do we go now? he asked.
We take you to Master Mission, said one of the plantation workers.
Mission?
No, Mission. Mission. Master Mission.
‘We thought it would take us to some inland mission, so let them lead on,’ Hamilton recalled later, but when the natives showed them the track, it seemed to take them back down to Lassul Bay, back towards the Japanese, and Hamilton was suspicious. He knew there was no mission in that direction.
What the carriers were actually saying was that they would take the Australian soldiers to Master Manson. Hamilton and Smith’s guides were trying to take them to Jimmy Manson, who had set up his own bush camp on Nambung plantation next door to Lassul. There, Jimmy would give them food and shelter, and they could wait for the Japanese to go, but the soldiers didn’t understand what the carriers were saying. During the first night, the carriers ran away while the soldiers slept. Hamilton, Smith and the man from Signals ended up spending six wet and hungry nights in the jungle.
Mac, you’ve got something in your eye.
Really? I can’t feel anything.
They stopped. In the low jungle light, Mick peered closely at Mac’s face and saw an inch-long leech attached to Mac’s eyeball.
Hang on, said Mick. His matches wouldn’t light, so he carefully grabbed the thing between his fingernails and tugged it off. Didn’t that hurt?
No. Can’t see much though.
They kept moving, and by sheer luck stumbled across the Nambung plantation house. They’d been walking in circles and were almost back to where they’d started a week earlier.
Jimmy Manson, who since the invasion had taken it on himself to look after the abandoned plantation, wasn’t there, but a small group of soldiers led by Captain David Hutchinson-Smith were camped in the house. In fact, more than 400 Australian soldiers were now camped along 30 miles of coast east and west of Lassul. Most were sick with malaria and skin infections, and all were hungry.
‘They had, as the natives would say, “gone bush nothing” into those untenable Baining Mountains and had never really recovered,’ said Mac Hamilton, who himself limped into Hutchinson-Smith’s camp with an infected leg.
Hamilton and Smith later walked the short distance to Asilingi plantation, where Hugh Scott, Diana Coote’s uncle, had put a white flag on the beach. Scott was 56 and not well. He had been feeding the escaping Australians but then urging them to move on. He, like Harvey, was hoping the Japanese would let him stay on his plantation, and by harbouring soldiers he was putting that plan and his own life at grave risk.
Eventually, Hamilton and Smith moved back to Lassul, where they found 200 troops who’d been at St Paul’s. They’d taken over all the buildings, including the chicken run, and had found the hidden food.
Ted Harvey, Marjorie and Dickie hadn’t returned. In fact, Harvey had watched the Japanese leave and the Australians arrive, and he was furious. While the Australians stayed, his family was in danger. The troops had eaten his food and taken over the house. Fortunately, he had his well-supplied jungle camp, but still, he felt betrayed.
Only Jimmy Manson had gone back to the Lassul house. When the Japanese sailors had come ashore the week before, they’d smashed the Teleradio, but left it behind, not realising its significance. Jimmy had gone back to help repair it, and managed to get the receiver going, but still couldn’t send a message.
By then the soldiers had divided themselves into two groups:
one, including Smith and Hamilton, decided to keep moving west to escape, and the other decided to surrender. It was only a matter of time before the Japanese came back to round them up. So, one morning, those who decided to escape shook hands with those who decided to stay. Hamilton, Smith and most of the escapees eventually returned to Australia. Most of those who stayed died.
From the jungle, Dickie watched as 100 men left the plantation, leaving the sick and tired behind. It was too dangerous to stay with the soldiers, who Ted said were damned fools for putting every damned white man on the island at risk. It put planters under an obligation to help them, and jeopardised their plans to stay on. It seemed to Dickie that being a civilian in a war was more dangerous than being a soldier.
He dashed back through the jungle, running from tree to tree, a Captain Blood on the deck of his pirate ship.
When his mother had escaped into the jungle that day, Dickie had known perfectly well what to do. He wasn’t scared; he’d been waiting for the Japs to come, as Ted said they most certainly would. Harvey had become paranoid and planned the escape with a precision bordering on the obsessive. Dickie was impressed.
He’d been a Cub Scout back in Adelaide, but camping in the dry Australian bush was nothing compared to a real jungle and real soldiers with real guns. Their packs were light, with only the precious things. A toy tin train Jack had given him in Brisbane (long ago, it seemed, when he was very young). A book he hadn’t read, from his grandmother. His Scout mess tin with its knife and fork. A pillow. A pair of shoes. Foot powder (something Ted insisted on). His favourite possession was a Bowie knife in its case, a Christmas present from Ted.
Most of their gear was already in the jungle camp, several miles inland, in one of the gorges that cut into the mountains. He’d been there many times; there were caves and boulders and fallen trees for hiding. There were clean, clear and cool swimming holes in the creeks and, if you didn’t mind the leeches, plenty of places for Scouting and ambushes. Be prepared, as Harvey would say. Be prepared.