Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  Taking both of Roca’s statements together, as well as the statements of other witnesses, a picture emerges of how Ted Harvey, Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were captured by the Japanese.

  Despite their threat of ‘surrender or die’, the Japanese never conducted a serious search of the jungle behind Harvey’s plantation until Japanese pilots started complaining that someone in the area was trying to signal to the enemy.

  As they flew out on night raids, pilots reported fires being lit in a line showing which direction they took. During the day, they’d seen lines of stones on the beach, obviously put there by spies.

  In April 1942, the Kempeitai had sent patrols along the Baining coast to try to catch the two people they suspected of doing it: Ted Harvey and a man named John Stokie.

  Stokie was the manager of Lilinikaia plantation, about five miles west of Lassul, and he was also a private in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. He’d come to Rabaul when the militia had been activated two days before the invasion, but just before the Japanese attacked he collapsed with malarial fever and was taken to the aid station. When dawn broke, at the height of the battle, Stokie staggered aboard a lorry of fleeing troops and when that got bogged he decided (still half-delirious) that instead of trying to escape from New Britain, he’d simply walk 40 miles home to his plantation. Stokie, like most planters, believed that the war wouldn’t last long, so it seemed reasonable to just wait until the Americans arrived. He made it back to the plantation and, while he waited, planted 5000 cocoa trees.

  ‘Then the Nips came after me,’ he said, ‘and I thought it time to move.’

  The Japanese in Rabaul became convinced that Stokie was spying for the Australians or Americans, or both, and Joe Roca was sent to find him several times, but Stokie was fearless and resourceful and had an uncanny ability to dodge capture at the last minute, and to live in country that had killed many men before him.

  ‘I once lived for six weeks on pumpkin alone,’ said Stokie, ‘and pumpkin is a vegetable I have loathed all my life.’

  After three months, he decided to try to get off the island. He knew that Ted Harvey, his neighbour, had a Teleradio and so at the end of April he went to find Harvey, hoping to send out a message.

  He arrived unannounced one day at Harvey’s jungle camp.

  ‘He looked as if he had seen a ghost when I walked in,’ said Stokie.

  It might well have been Dickie who first saw the stocky white man appearing next to the campfire, conjured by some trick out of the smoke. Dickie had never met Stokie before but was impressed when he laughed as Ted Harvey, literally, fell off his chair.

  After the men had pumped each other’s hands, Harvey turned to scream at the boys for not keeping a lookout, but Stokie told him not to be too harsh: one of Harvey’s boys had led him there and, if not for him, he’d have never found the camp.

  Dickie thought Stokie knew very well where Harvey’s camp was. Most planters along the coast knew everything there was to know about each other.

  His mother had come up then from the creek and on seeing the man dropped an armful of wet clothes, which made Stokie laugh again, but it wasn’t funny. She seemed permanently on the verge of tears to Dickie; everybody seemed a little crazy.

  You’ll never guess who just dropped by, said Harvey, as if Stokie wasn’t standing right in front of her in his grubby khakis and a stained broad-brimmed khaki hat.

  Well, I do hope you’ve come with some good news, said Marjorie when she’d composed herself.

  Well, the thing is . . . you have a radio, right?

  Dickie saw his mother blink back the tears, pick up the clothes and turn back to the creek. Harvey took Stokie by the elbow and made him sit.

  She’s not feeling well. The place is a bit of a mess. Harvey waved a hand at the jungle around them, as if invoking walls and curtains.

  It’s a bloody mansion, Ted. You’ve done wonders. You should see my place.

  While the men talked, Marjorie returned and draped the wet clothes over a line strung between trees, and then boiled some sea water to clean Dickie’s two gaping leg ulcers. He’d grown so used to them that he hardly noticed, except at night, when he lay down on the canvas stretcher.

  This place is going to eat us alive, Marjorie whispered, perhaps to herself.

  Dickie wasn’t as troubled by ‘this place’ as his mother. He ate well enough, although it was a narrow diet of tinned meat, fresh fish sometimes, pigeon and occasionally a goat or pig. There was sweet potato, bananas and papaws, of course. (His grandmother would have wept for the lack of lamb and potatoes.)

  He’d spent his 11th birthday at the camp and his mother had baked a cake, and wept for the lack of presents until Jimmy walked into camp with a bag of things he’d found on the plantations, including a sticky mass of boiled lollies and a watch with a leather cover that had been hidden behind a stump under the house by one of the sick soldiers.

  Dickie’s Uncle Jimmy and Bill Parker had their camp at Nambung, where they’d set up the Teleradio, and sometimes in the evenings they’d all visit to listen to voices from far away. The news was terrible, and it was after his mother had come down one evening and sat listening to the BBC that she went back to talk to Ted about giving themselves up. Hugh Scott had been allowed to stay on his plantation, she said, and they would surely be allowed to stay, too.

  Ted Harvey and Marjorie, and even Hugh Scott, had seen no evidence that the Japanese would harm them. They hadn’t then heard of the massacre at Tol. In fact, Hugh Scott had seen prisoners being well treated: the Australian soldiers who’d surrendered along the beaches had been given food and cigarettes, and a Japanese doctor had walked among the sick.

  And Bill Parker needed a doctor, said Marjorie. He hardly spoke a word any more. He looked done in, and must have been poor company for Jimmy, who was the only one now who made the trips down to the coast to ‘keep an eye out’ and collect information, and to check on the plantation buildings, empty since the soldiers had left. Jimmy spent most nights trying to fix the radio and still couldn’t get a message out, something that Harvey was now explaining to Stokie.

  Damn it, said Stokie. Damned shame.

  Harvey didn’t mention that he had already written a letter to the Japanese offering to surrender. It would never have crossed Stokie’s mind to surrender, but then, thought Harvey, Stokie didn’t have a wife and child on the island.

  When Stokie had appeared, Harvey had sent one of the boys to shoot some ducks and they had these for dinner with bread and tinned butter. The men sat up all night talking, and, just before dawn, as Harvey started to nod off in his chair, Stokie wished him luck and slipped away.

  That was the day the Japanese came.

  Down the coast at Vunairima, the chief of the Kempeitai, Inasawa, and his second-in-command, Hashimoto, had gathered 18 police officers and sent for Roca to guide them to Ted Harvey. They didn’t know exactly where he was, but Roca was sure he was in the hills behind the plantation house.

  They didn’t have enough boats, and so Roca commandeered a boat owned by Karl Hoerler, another planter who happened to be passing.

  ‘Roca told me that the Japs were going to use my pinnace to get Mr and Mrs Harvey, Mr Parker and two others,’ said Hoerler.

  With them was another guide, Nelson Babao. The party left early on 1 May and landed at Hugh Scott’s place.

  ‘He made a rough sketch to the whereabouts, according to [the] boy’s information,’ said Roca. ‘Mr Scott was not fit to go when he was asked. So he stopped at home.’

  Scott believed Marjorie and Dickie were in greater danger from Harvey than from the Japanese. Harvey’s letter to him, in which he’d threatened to kill them all, proved it. But what the Japanese found in the camp was to change all that.

  From Scott’s house, Roca led the party to the adjoining Neu Kauern plantation and collected a number of workers to help with the search. Then they swung further inland.

  ‘A Baining boy spotted them and l
ed us there,’ said Roca.

  Harvey was sleeping after his long night with Stokie, and it was Dickie who saw the Japanese first, although by then it was too late. They came quietly from the jungle, from all sides of the camp, pointing their long rifles.

  Mum! yelled Dickie, but his voice sounded tiny, as if he was dreaming and could hardly speak. Run!

  But Marjorie walked slowly from the hut and spun in slow motion as the soldiers converged. One of them said something in Japanese and gestured for her and Dickie to put their hands up, which seemed ridiculous to Dickie, as if they were playing a game.

  Har-bay? one asked, and she pointed to the hut where Harvey was sleeping, a small betrayal, but she didn’t want to see Ted stumbling out and doing something stupid. Two soldiers went into the hut, and emerged with Harvey staggering between them.

  The Japanese then went from hut to hut and threw everything out the open doors, including mattresses, while two soldiers collected anything of value and brought it to the central table. The Bowie knife was thrown into a pile, and one of the soldiers made a noise of surprise and laughed. Dickie’s face burned.

  Marjorie’s purse was upended brutally and out fell a revolver. Everyone stopped and stared at it. Dickie was shocked; he’d never seen it. One of the Japanese soldiers started shouting in his mother’s face and slapped her hard with an open hand.

  Dickie launched himself at the man, punching him as hard as he could on the side of the head, and the soldier staggered back holding his cheek. He turned to Dickie with shock on his face. Another soldier stepped in and hit Dickie once in the mouth and kicked him in the shins with his heavy boot. Dickie dropped, clutching his leg.

  Marjorie sobbed, No! and reached for him. The soldier held her back and continued to yell in what seemed to be broken English, but Marjorie wasn’t listening. Dickie sat up and one of the soldiers grabbed him by the arm and helped him stand.

  At that point, Joe Roca stepped into the circle and spoke to the senior officer, Inasawa, and then turned to Marjorie.

  You come with me, Mrs Harvey.

  Ted? cried Marjorie, but Ted was forced to stay behind while she and Dickie were led away by two soldiers.

  They arrived at Nambung and sat on the verandah. Dickie was still shaking. His mother put her arm around his shoulder. In the late afternoon, the Japanese came down the path with Harvey carrying the Teleradio’s mantel, followed by Jimmy Manson with the wireless set, and Bill Parker staggering with both batteries.

  The Japanese had calmed down but looked, if anything, sad. Neither Marjorie nor Ted, and probably not even Joe Roca, realised it at the time, but the discovery of the radio and the hidden revolver was a death sentence.

  CHAPTER 28

  Passing round Tavui Point, the north-eastern tip of the Gazelle Peninsula, we came reasonably close inshore and saw clearly the wreckage of the home of Mr Philip Coote, Manager of Burns Philp & Co. in Rabaul, which had received the attention of twenty dive-bombers on the day before the Japanese landing. It had been a beautiful spot but was now desolate.

  — Captain David Hutchinson-Smith, in his unpublished memoir, ‘Guests of the Samurai’

  Marjorie and her family stayed in the Nambung plantation house for several hours before being forced to walk, with Dickie limping, to the beach at neighbouring Neinduk plantation, where they spent their first miserable night in captivity.

  The next day, they all climbed into the three boats and, with the Teleradio and boxes of evidence between them, motored down the coast to Roca’s sawmill, where they arrived late in the morning. Before sending them across the bay to the Kempeitai station at Vunairima, Roca took the prisoners and their police guards to his home for lunch.

  The Roca house was already crowded. Not only were Joe, his wife, Margaret, and five children living there, but they’d also taken in two teenage girls, Dora Hanson and Roca’s niece, Joyce Allen.

  When Marjorie walked into the house she was astonished to see three Australian soldiers in the living room. They’d been there for several weeks, after being captured on the Baining coast, so sick that the Kempeitai had left them with the Rocas to recover or die.

  ‘One disentery,’ wrote Roca in his careful handwriting, ‘one swoalin testicles, one blackwater fever and a little short sighted. they had 3 weeks I think with us and we became to call each other by the forenames.’

  The three Australian soldiers were even more horrified to see Marjorie and Dickie come through the front door. When they learnt what had happened, they began abusing Harvey for not sending his wife and boy back to Australia when he had had the chance.

  ‘If you can do your best to help her,’ Margaret Roca whispered to her husband as she fetched what food she could find.

  Roca then asked the Kempeitai where Mrs Harvey was to be taken.

  ‘All go to Rabaul today,’ the officer said. ‘We don’t spend the night in Vunairima.’

  Roca quietly asked Marjorie if she’d be happy to go with Dickie to Vunapope to stay with the Catholic nuns, but Harvey overheard this and began shouting that there was no way on God’s earth that Marjorie would be separated from him.

  According to Roca, the Kempeitai officer tried to calm Harvey down by producing his original letter, the one in which Harvey threatened to kill himself and his wife, and putting it under his nose.

  While Harvey read his own words, the officer turned to Marjorie to assure her that she and her son would be sent to Vunapope the next day. (It was, after all, where all the captured women — the nurses, nuns, and Kathleen Bignell from the Rabaul Hotel — were being held.)

  This news would have been an enormous relief to Marjorie. She would have been worried about the men, especially Jimmy, but Dickie would at least be safe. Their interminable life in the jungle was over.

  After lunch, the Japanese escorted their prisoners back down to the beach. Karl Hoerler had been waiting for Roca to return his boat and agreed to take them all across the bay to the Kempeitai headquarters at Vunairima.

  Hoerler must have walked with them up to the police station, because he said later that the Japanese wouldn’t let the white people inside the building, telling them they’d be spending the night after all and would have to sleep on the verandah.

  It was on that verandah, as the white people tried to make themselves comfortable, that Roca saw Marjorie, Dickie and Ted Harvey for the last time. After handing them over and walking away, he noticed a large number of black workers lined up along the road. A convoy of trucks arrived.

  ‘I watched them boarding a long line of trucks with armed soldiers all going Rabaul way,’ said Roca. ‘I asked people, “Where are they going?” It was said that many ships come in and no boys to work them.

  ‘Later, I heard from many runaways they saw trucks and all people in it were hoisted up the ship and in to the rooms as they came on the wharf.’

  It was 2 May 1942, and all this activity was because the Japanese in Rabaul were preparing for the twin invasions of Port Moresby in Papua and Tulagi at the southern end of the Solomon Islands. To win the war quickly, the Japanese needed to cut the lines of communication between Australia and the US and extend their control all the way to Fiji. The Japanese called it MO Operation, but it became better known as the Battle of the Coral Sea, and it would again change the fate of Marjorie and Dickie, Ted Harvey, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker.

  The next day, as Dickie and his family were driven over Tunnel Hill and down into Rabaul, they would have seen Tavurvur sending a light cloud of ash over a harbour bristling with warships, and wharves bustling with activity. Guns, trucks and men were being loaded onto transport ships for Japan’s next move in a giant game of leapfrog across the Pacific. Escorting them would be three aircraft carriers, nine cruisers, and thirteen destroyers.

  The scene might have reminded Marjorie of the harbour in Kobe before the war, and perhaps she wondered if some of the battleships she’d seen then were among those in front of her.

  The utility truck stopped under the fam
iliar trees of Malaguna Road, outside what used to be the army barracks.

  The tailgate clanged down and they were helped out. Standing there, they would have been shocked to see hundreds of Australian soldiers behind the barbed wire staring back at them. The guards quickly took them to a hot and airless storeroom just inside the outer entrance of the prison camp. The door closed. The small group was alone at last. They sat on the floor, sweltering, waiting for the unknown.

  In those first few days of Marjorie and Dickie’s capture, the attitude of the Japanese soldiers in Rabaul was to change dramatically. Marjorie had expected that she and Dickie would be taken to the mission at Vunapope as she’d been promised, but it never happened. None of the guards spoke English. There was no-one to ask.

  Back at Vunairima, Joe Roca also noticed a change when, a few days after the Harveys left, he took the three Australian soldiers from his house across the bay to the Kempeitai station.

  The three teenage girls in the house, Dora Hanson, Joyce Allen and Roca’s daughter Cecilia, had grown fond of the Australians soldiers and insisted on going with Roca to the police station to say goodbye.

  ‘When we arrived there,’ said Roca, ‘I found the whole of Vunairima changed.’ The Kempeitai station was shut, a guardhouse had been placed on the road and the unfamiliar soldiers manning it looked nervous.

  ‘I am not sure what is on,’ Roca told the girls and the Australians as they approached. Suddenly, ten soldiers at the guardhouse noticed the Australians, grabbed their rifles and surrounded them.

  The Australian soldiers were roughly taken away amid the cries of the girls, who were forced to sit with Roca in the midday sun. The new guards had no idea why three Australian soldiers had approached the post with these natives. They didn’t recognise the Kempeitai pass Roca wore, and when Roca tried to explain, they pointed rifles at him.

  Finally, in the afternoon, a truck arrived and a Japanese officer dressed in dazzling white climbed out. Speaking some English, he asked Roca for his explanation, looked at his pass and said he could go.