Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  His mother had looked less prepared. She had always been slender, not thin, but when they had reached the camp on the day the Japanese had come, she’d looked too frail to carry her light pack. Eventually the rain had stopped and they’d lit a fire under a tarpaulin; it had smoked, but not so much that it would have been noticed in the mist. One of the boys had cooked a whole leg of pork. The campsite was comfortable. The native huts were thatched, but relatively drip-free if you chose the right spot.

  Live here for years, Harvey had said.

  It’s a jungle, Ted, Marjorie had replied. I don’t want to live here for years.

  Dickie had said he’d be quite happy living there for years, as there’d be no school work. His mother had burst into tears.

  Just a figure of speech, Harvey had said. Just a figure of speech.

  After a few days, the sun came out and everything steamed. Canvas turned black. They had been reduced to three boys, none of whom would clean, so Marjorie washed clothes in the rushing creek. The boys decided to go to the coast to hunt and fish, and Dickie wanted to go with them.

  No, you will not, said Marjorie at first. The Japs will catch you and eat you up.

  I’m not a baby.

  How old are you again? She looked him up and down as if she’d just noticed he’d grown.

  Ten.

  In truth, he looked much older. He was the very image of Jack Gasmier, come to haunt her every day, with his wide shoulders and strong arms and irrepressible optimism.

  Em I no pikinini, agreed the boys, on Dickie’s side. Em I bilong mipela.

  Dear God, he’s gone native, Marjorie told Harvey, who laughed and laughed. Stay close to the camp, she told Dickie, but he went anyway, barefoot with the fish boy to the sea. He hoped one day to see George come sailing back into the bay, to take them all away.

  At night they slept on canvas stretchers under mosquito nets, and it was comfortable enough. Marjorie tried to read to Dickie by lamplight, but he always fell asleep, the days were so long. During those early days he wandered, or as he said, scouted, and became quite good at it. He could get close enough to the Australians to tell Harvey what they were planning.

  What did they say?

  Some talked about walking or sailing around to Pondo. Some wanted to put a white flag on the beach. Most just eat and sleep.

  Ungrateful bastards, said Harvey, mixing the whisky with creek water to make it last.

  Radio’s still broken.

  Serves them right.

  Dickie’s Uncle Jimmy had initially returned to the plantation to bring what remained of Harvey’s radio back up to the camp, but the Australians had beaten him to it and he had little choice but to help them fix it. It was either that or leave it to them. If the transmitter could be fixed, he needed to be able to let Harvey and Marjorie know.

  Jimmy spent the rest of the time between Nambung and Lassul trying to get the soldiers to move on, and sharing a bush camp on Nambung with Bill Parker, who was now bedridden most of the time.

  At Lassul on St Valentine’s Day, soon after Mac Hamilton, Mick Smith and 100 men had left for the north coast, a lookout told the senior officer, Captain David Hutchinson-Smith, that a ship was off the coast. A short time later, the Japanese stormed onto the beach again, this time firing mortars and machine guns.

  The troops, or at least those who could move, scattered. Hutchinson-Smith hid in a hut. Not long after, ‘a surly, insolent Kanaka boy came through the gloom and handed me a note’.

  The note said: ‘To all sick Australian Soldiers and all other Australians who are at Mr Hervey’s [sic] bungalow tonight or early morning tomorrow are herewith commanded to be on the beach at Lassul at about 12 noon tomorrow.’

  The note had been written by Joe Roca, the man who had had an argument some years earlier with Ted Harvey and had never forgotten.

  Once the Japanese felt secure after their invasion of Rabaul, they began to round up the Australians. The day before they came to Lassul, Captain Ogawa Ayara of the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, had ordered Joe Roca to guide his soldiers to the plantation.

  Roca claimed that, initially, he refused. ‘I said, “I am a married man with many children.” He said, “I cut you, I take your wife.”’

  With another local man, Otto Zander, Roca went with the Japanese to Harvey’s plantation. Ogawa hadn’t known that Japanese sailors had raided the plantation weeks earlier, and he didn’t know that Harvey had a radio.

  When the shooting started at Lassul, Jimmy Manson took the opportunity to drag the precious radio piece by piece into the jungle.

  Captain Hutchinson-Smith went down to the beach with his 100 Australian soldiers to surrender, where he recognised Joe Roca among the Japanese.

  ‘Roca was ingratiating himself with the Japs and overbearing and insolent in his attitude to us,’ said Hutchinson-Smith. ‘He had always been surly when he held the contract for the supply of firewood to Malaguna Camp before the attack, and from his frequent visits to the camp was probably in a position to give quite a deal of information to the Japanese on local military matters.’

  Joe Roca was well known in Rabaul before the war. He’d been born in Kavieng in New Ireland, his father a Spaniard, Francisco Roca, and his mother a native of New Ireland.

  In 1942 Roca was in his mid-30s, tall and good-looking and married to Margaret Smith, the daughter of British planter Fred Smith, but because both Margaret and Joe were considered ‘mixed race’, they were treated as inferior by the Europeans.

  Roca had gone to school and could read and write, and Philip Coote had even employed him as an overseer on a Burns Philp plantation called Tokaia, on the Baining coast. There, as a sideline, Roca started a business carting firewood into Rabaul. He was confident and intelligent, just the sort of ‘kanaka’ that the Europeans would describe as ‘surly.’ He resented being treated as inferior, and with the arrival of the Japanese he saw a chance to better his position.

  Roca asked the Japanese for work, and they put him in charge of a sawmill on the Baining coast. At that time, he had a lot of mouths to feed, living with his wife, five children and his niece, Joyce Allen.

  ‘On one occasion Joe Roca said he was going to send a boy around the plantations to find out what he could about Europeans in the area,’ said Joyce after the war. ‘His wife advised him against doing more than he was forced to, but Roca believed that the Australians would never return.’

  In other words, Roca believed the rule of the white man in New Guinea was over.

  On the beach at Lassul the Japanese took the Australian soldiers’ watches and wallets and loaded the men onto a ship.

  After the area had been searched, Roca followed Captain Ogawa into Harvey’s house, where Ogawa sat at the dining table and gave Roca one of the soldiers’ watches as a reward. Roca had asked a worker where Mr Harvey was and was told Harvey, with his wife and son, had gone into the jungle two weeks earlier.

  Ogawa told Roca to write another note in English: ‘Mr Harvey — please surrender at once, if you don’t you will be killed. If you surrender your life will be guaranteed by the Japanese Imperial Army.’

  Ogawa signed the note and stamped it with Japanese characters, and gave it to Roca.

  All the while, Dickie was watching. Roca came to the edge of the jungle and shouted for one of Mr Harvey’s boys to take the note to him. No-one would be harmed for doing so.

  Dickie nodded, and one of the boys with him came out of the jungle, took the note from Roca and ran.

  When Harvey read the note, he tore it up. He now wanted to get off the island; he would get the radio working or find some other way to be rescued.

  He, Marjorie, Dickie, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were to remain hidden in the jungle for the next three months.

  CHAPTER 25

  The attitude of those with near relatives in our Garrison at Rabaul is becoming bitter and hostile at the lack of any news of their sons, brothers and husbands, and of the feeling that is being created that alth
ough something could have been done to assist them, nothing is being attempted.

  — Letter from the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, to the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, two weeks after the invasion of Rabaul

  Phyllis stood at the sink, staring into the backyard, as Joseph at the table read aloud the news reports from the Adelaide Advertiser. The words conjured a confusion of images.

  ‘“In one of the most extraordinary withdrawal actions in modern military history, the Australians suffered only one casualty: a man whose arm was broken when a three-ton truck containing 70 men overturned,”’ read Joseph.

  ‘Oh my, that was lucky. But, you know, poor chap.’

  ‘Listen to this. “In the beach fighting and the hand-to-hand struggles that followed in the coastal gullies, it is estimated that at least 1500 Japanese lost their lives at a cost of fewer than 20 Australians slightly wounded.”’

  ‘Does that include the chap with the broken arm?’

  ‘I suppose so. Here’s what one of our boys said: “They were squealing like pigs. Hundreds of them had been killed as they tried to get across the wire and their bodies were slumped there in all sorts of grotesque positions. It was not long before the Japs realised the value of their dead. They gathered scores of other bodies and threw them across the wire. Then they clambered over their own dead and came at us. Several were waving Japanese flags. They were shot down. Others then picked up the flags and carried them until they, too, were killed. Along the beach on a front of about 200 yards the Japanese dead were stacked six feet high.”’

  There’d been a terrible battle with Japanese bodies stacked six feet high, and one of our chaps had a broken arm. That didn’t seem too bad. And yet the Australians were in retreat. Did we win or lose? Phyllis wasn’t sure. What did that mean for Marjorie, Dickie, Jimmy and George? Where were they in all of this? She had to believe that they had escaped on the plantation schooner, but there had been no mention of civilians.

  Joseph read on: ‘“A force of 500 troops landed at Massawa and a force of 200 at . . .”’ he stopped.

  Where?

  Lassul.

  Phyllis Manson hadn’t had any word about her family since Christmas, and she wrote to the New Guinea Trade Agent, a government agency, asking about her daughter, two sons and grandson.

  ‘They were at Mr A.A. Harvey’s Plantation at Lassul,’ she wrote. ‘Trusting you may be able to help me about my family it is a great suspense when you don’t know what has become of them.’

  But the government was unable to help. Details about what had happened to the Australians in Rabaul had taken weeks to trickle through, but the newspapers were full of what seemed to be a remarkably successful military withdrawal.

  Military censors during war try to keep the public calm and optimistic, but the Australian press made defeat sound like victory when it had clearly been a disaster. In the short battle on 23 January, only 28 Australians had been killed, but hundreds more died later. Officially, 16 Japanese were killed. The families of the Australian soldiers and civilians waited for answers and clung to rumours and newspaper reports, which were much the same thing. Reports that no Australians had died but somehow 1500 Japanese had been killed were hard to believe.

  The fate of hundreds of civilians in Rabaul wasn’t mentioned at all and desperate but polite, almost apologetic letters were sent to various government departments asking for information.

  ‘As you can quite understand,’ wrote a representative of Burns Philp to the Department of External Territories, ‘we are very anxious to secure some information concerning the present whereabouts of Mr P. Coote.’

  Rhoda Coote and young Diana had rented a house in Killara, in Sydney. Nearly everything they owned was back at Rabaul; in fact, it had been blown to pieces by Japanese bombs. Other families lived with family and friends, unable to access bank accounts that were in the name of a husband missing, perhaps alive, perhaps dead. Many waited so long and were told so many lies that when official word finally came, they didn’t believe it.

  A week after seeing the Japanese storm ashore near Vulcan, George Manson was still on the run, heading for the south coast. He and his group of 28 were at the end of an ant trail of men on the same winding jungle track through the Gazelle Peninsula.

  George was among the last soldiers to leave the Lamingi Mission in the Baining Mountains and head for the coast, praying he had made the right decision, convinced most of the time he hadn’t. There was nothing to eat along that trail but leaves and grass.

  He slid down greasy paths that hugged slopes so steep they were almost cliffs. At the bottom he had to cross roaring streams by clinging to vines strung between trees. The climb up the other side was torture, and he hauled himself up with what strength he had left in his arms and legs. At night it was too damp to light fires and he slept on branches laid across the wet ground. Each day he grew weaker.

  George was at the end of the column, but Norman Fisher was at the head and moving faster. When he and his group of four had set foot on this track days earlier, it was firm and there was food to share. Clem Knight had joined Fisher and two members of Fisher’s mortar section: Keith Paul from the Bank of New South Wales, and a government patrol officer called George Greathead.

  They had a head start because their truck had driven them all the way to the end of the road, to the very start of the jungle track, before most of the fleeing troops had arrived. When Fisher passed through Lamingi, he even had the time and energy to take a professional interest in the seismic heart of the Baining Mountains. Father Mayrhofer showed him his own seismograph; the mission had been close to the epicentre of the huge earthquake that had struck New Britain 12 months earlier, and the volcanologist and the priest shared an interest in geology. Fisher kept notes as he walked, peppering his descriptions of escape with geological observations. He described lava bombs in the landslips exposed by the 1941 earthquake, and noted that the oldest rocks on the Gazelle Peninsula, the Baining Series (a mere 34 to 56 million years old), had been uplifted to the very top of the mountains. This was geology in action. The rocks were moving, the land rising and cracking like the top of a baking cake, and he was walking over it.

  For the soldiers following in his footsteps, such as George, the geology was what made it torture: ‘a nightmare of hills leaping up a couple of thousand feet all round; struggling along ridges, avoiding landslides and giant cracks in the ground, still the trail went on’.

  The trail through this ‘nightmare of hills’ ended for George six days after leaving Lamingi. Starving when they reached Adler Bay, the party shot a pig and George gorged himself until he was sick. Then they turned south for Wide Bay, where the flying boats had rescued the RAAF crews weeks earlier and might, please God, come back. The big plantation at Wide Bay was called Tol, a short piece of land jutting out into the bay and covered in coconut palms. Like Lassul, it had huts, a plantation house, food, possibly a boat, and maybe a Teleradio.

  All George had to do was walk down the coast, but the mountains wouldn’t leave him alone. After a relatively easy walk along the beach, a spur of the Bainings fell into the sea in front of him and forced him to climb again.

  The next morning, as he lay exhausted on the beach on the other side, a powerful earthquake woke him up. It might have been a warning. The word Tol had been repeated so many times it had become a magical word, a prayer, a piece of heaven where there was shelter, food, a boat or, better yet, gleaming seaplanes to ferry him home. In front of him for as far as he could see a ragged line of men stumbled along the beach, many shirtless, a few carrying packs and rifles, walking in a rough single file, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a hundred yards apart.

  Word was passed down the line, each man calling back to the man behind, that Tol was ahead. George could see its tall coconut palms in the distance. The pace picked up. Ahead, a small river entered the sea and George was thinking that he would have to swim again when he saw figures on the other side, and smoke.

 
Then the man in front called back, Japs ahead, mate, and George followed him into the bush.

  Norman Fisher had passed through Tol a full week before George Manson, on his way down the coast to Jaquinot Bay, but banker Keith Paul, weary beyond endurance, had left the group a day before they reached Tol. He told them he’d had enough and was going back to Rabaul to surrender. Now there were only three in the group.

  Like many, Fisher had it in mind to get a boat and sail from island to island until he had left New Britain behind. Because his small group was ahead of the main body of soldiers, they found plenty of food. Fisher, Clem Knight and George Greathead had left Rabaul with cash in their pockets, and it was enough to buy food and hire canoes, which helped them make even better time, saving energy and boots.

  They then had the good fortune to run into Leo McMahon, an engineer with the Works department in Rabaul, who had leapt ahead down the coast in a small boat. The boat was too small for the extra three men, so they found a village and commandeered a larger pinnace.

  McMahon and Fisher disagree about how one of New Guinea’s most respected paramounts, Luluai Golpak, was persuaded to hand over the boat.

  Fisher said that they ‘obtained his approval’ to take it. McMahon said, ‘We took the pinnace at the point of a revolver. It was a troublesome hour or so, but we were desperate men.’

  And lucky. Behind them, at Tol and nearby Waitavalo plantations, the Japanese were executing 160 men. One of them was their friend Keith Paul.

  George Manson had skirted the Tol plantation and, two days later, when the Japanese left, he went back to see what had happened. He found 18 bodies in the grass, ‘killed by bayonet thrusts and left by the Japs just where they fell’.