Line of Fire Read online

  Marjorie heard him come out onto the verandah and light a cigarette. The radio crackle had stopped. Harvey yelled across to Marjorie, The Catholics have a schooner at Old Massawa.

  Yes, but they are German Catholics, thought Marjorie. Do you think they’ll sell it? she shouted back.

  I was think more of stealing it, and he went back into the house.

  Someone found Philip Coote walking over Tunnel Hill Road in shock. He was taken by the arm and led to a place called Refuge Gully, behind the town, where about 30 white civilians, 26 of the surviving crew of the Herstein, and about 200 Chinese and New Guineans were camped. Other civilians had decided to sail, drive or walk away down the coast.

  The Chinese shopkeepers had nowhere to go. They kept their wives and children with them, terrified after having read about the Japanese massacre of civilians in Nanking.

  Sitting quietly in a tent, Philip Coote was given sausage, bread and a mattress and, hardly able to speak, spent the night listening to people crying and praying.

  The next morning, Japanese bombers returned to plaster the aerodromes and seaward-facing guns at the entrance to Blanche Bay. There was now nothing to stop the Japanese fleet entering the harbour.

  If Philip Coote had still been at Tavui Point, standing where Diana’s swimming pool had once been, he’d have seen the invasion fleet stretching across the horizon. The fleet could also be seen from Namanula Hill.

  Down in the town, the 2/22nd Battalion’s commander Colonel John Scanlan, a decorated veteran of the Great War, ordered the troops to positions between the harbour and the Vunakanau aerodrome, although there was nothing left worth protecting. All the planes had gone. The survivors of the air raids, three Wirraways and a Hudson bomber, had arranged their own evacuation with the wounded the night before.

  Rabaul was now empty. In the early afternoon of 22 January, George Manson, Norman Fisher and most of the New Guinea militia were told to board a lorry that would take them to their new position on the other side of the harbour, at the base of Vulcan.

  On the way, Fisher asked the driver to stop. He’d spotted his assistant, Clem Knight, who had just locked up the observatory and was now leaving town. Clem had stayed to the last minute to make some final observations. There’d been eruptions of gas and dust for a fortnight (‘small volcanic tremors continue’, ‘several fumaroles have broken out’, ‘a black patch in the centre of each fumarole indicates high temperature’) but the violent eruption they’d been expecting from Tavurvur hadn’t happened and now they’d never get the chance to see it. The two volcanologists shook hands and agreed to meet up, if Fisher survived the night. The lorry rolled on.

  Norman Fisher and George Manson were told to dig in behind the beach halfway between the Catholic Church at Malaguna and the slopes of Vulcan, in front of the intersection between the old coast road and the new road called the Big Dipper, built up the steep caldera wall and across the plateau to the Vunakanau aerodrome. Capturing Vunakanau would be one of the main Japanese objectives. George with his new .303 and Norman Fisher, in charge of a mortar crew who’d never fired a live round, were to be the first line of defence.

  In the midafternoon, the militia was still digging in on the beach near the start of the Big Dipper Road when giant orange flowers blossomed above the palms on the other side of the harbour, near Tavurvur. When the sound reached George, it was as if a string of Chinese crackers had been set off and the noise built to one long roar that boomed back and forth between the caldera walls.

  Then came another roar from behind him.

  Cripes, is it the Japanese?

  No, it’s us, said Fisher. We’ve blown up the airfields.

  Well, what do we need the Japanese for then?

  A pall of smoke rose across the water, in front of the volcano, and a flock of birds sped over George’s head.

  And then the entire scene disappeared in a brilliant, heart-stopping flash. The explosive crack came as a physical thing, bending trees, hitting him like a hammer in the chest and pushing him backwards. He covered his ears, too late.

  A mushroom of dark cloud rose from the other side of the Tobai Wharf. Even Fisher in a faraway voice offered a profanity.

  The debris and smoke rose higher and the ground kept shaking long after the explosion had died away. George’s hearing came back, but a ringing continued. The whole caldera shuddered. The cloud fused with the gunmetal sky. A number of small fires could be seen where wharf sheds had once been, but there was little left to burn.

  It’s all right boys, said an officer, it’s only the bomb dump. Keep digging.

  But at Lassul, Ted Harvey wondered why the Rabaul wireless station suddenly went off the air. The pressure wave had popped all the radio valves within several miles of Rabaul, cutting the garrison off from the outside world.

  As evening fell, the exhausted militia and regular soldiers of the 2/22nd nearby rested in their trenches and behind felled coconut trees along the beaches near Vulcan.

  George might have expected something more substantial from the regular army: concrete bunkers, more barbed wire and sandbags, at least. The coconut log he was hiding behind seemed more like an afterthought.

  The light was fading, but there was no sunset; the sky was grey and it started to rain. Nearby, Fisher checked his field of fire again before it became too dark. He’d placed his mortar 800 yards from the likely landing point. He was short-handed; his mortar section of six had been reduced to four when one bank employee was ordered to Port Moresby and another man was discovered to be only 17. They’d practised firing the mortar (carrying a bomb to the mortar, arming it, putting it down the spout and then making what they imagined was an appropriate ‘whump’ noise), but they’d never fired a live round.

  What happens if you hit one of those trees? said George. There were several coconut palms still standing between the mortar and the beach.

  We’ll try not to find out.

  It was dark. A truck had stopped down the road and there was yelling to keep quiet. Someone switched on headlights; there was more yelling, then the lights went off.

  Quiet again. Someone started whistling, faintly, ‘Make Believe Island’.

  The rain fell steadily for a while and then stopped. George looked out into the night across the bay and saw nothing more than the occasional flash that may have been lightning.

  A breeze wafted across the coconut log.

  Listen, someone hissed.

  George listened, and could hear nothing but some splashes, perhaps fish, in the harbour.

  Then there was a sudden orange flash followed by a boom. Across the bay, a great gout of sparks shot into the clouds, and the dark shapes of men stood up around him.

  What the hell are you men doing? hissed an officer. Get down into your positions, you idiots!

  It’s the Yanks, someone said.

  It’s the volcano. Another explosion and the bay was lit by Tavurvur’s reflected fire.

  Oh my word, said Fisher from the dark. Clem will be disappointed he didn’t see this.

  George felt like cheering. He didn’t know why, but he’d always liked fireworks.

  CHAPTER 23

  A brisk divine breeze blowing

  Towards Australia at the limit of the south.

  The ultimate place to reach.

  The dawn of a new world,

  Not quickly but faintly.

  — From ‘Nankai Dayori’ ‘Tidings from the South Seas’, a song of the invading Japanese South Seas Force

  The rain pattered down; it was a miserable night, except for the glow from the volcano, which had cheered George up. Perhaps it had simply broken the tension. Or maybe it reminded him of colder, drier nights at Gordon Road, sitting by the fire. Poke the coals and the sparks would shoot up the chimney. Happier times, when the family was together.

  The tropical night around him now was warm and full of a low noise, a motor throbbing unseen, the whispers of men, and rain dripping onto tarpaulin.

  He waited.
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  Over his shoulder, behind the road junction, hidden among the coconuts, was an anti-tank gun, pointed at the dark beach. Hundreds of men were also focusing on that theoretical point in the darkness, as if the enemy would play his part in the game and appear at just that spot to be shot.

  George was fully awake. The eruption had banished sleep, and his anxiety for Marjorie, Jimmy and Dickie was put aside as he watched the flickering reflection of the volcano.

  George had the look of an officer. He was 27 years old, six feet two inches tall, wiry and confident, with an officer’s moustache. He knew very few people in the unit, although he had recognised one or two planters earlier on. He had introduced himself as the master of a schooner and probably would have asked Norman Fisher, politely, what he did.

  Geologist, said Fisher.

  I bet that’s come in handy lately.

  Ha. Well, yes, as a matter of fact. You can’t fight a war without knowing the geology of a place. It tells you a lot about its past, what it’s capable of, what it’s future might be.

  And what’s it telling you about our future here?

  Short-term? Doesn’t look good.

  The 90 men of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles had been given a mile of beach to defend at the bottom end of the Big Dipper Road. The reason for placing the local militia at that vital junction might have been as an early warning system, to slow any attack long enough for the trained rifle companies to arrive, once the Japanese landing point was known. There weren’t the troops to cover the whole harbour, and no-one knew quite what to expect.

  The militia was part of A Company, the bulk of which was on George’s right and made up of the regular infantry of the 2/22nd, now dug in at the base of Vulcan. Battalion headquarters had by then moved back to the Vunakanau aerodrome.

  George waited.

  On the beach, a misty rain was falling again, the trees shuddered in a breeze and dripped. He could smell the sea and hear the oily metallic checking of guns, while on the other side of the harbour, Tavurvur throbbed and set the clouds alight.

  Back at Lassul, Marjorie was also unable to sleep. There was a distant rumble: engines out to sea, or the engine of the world beneath grinding away, never sleeping.

  Marjorie should have left with Dickie when she had the chance, she knew that now. Returning to Adelaide and humiliation couldn’t be worse than the cold fear she felt for their immediate future. Of course, if she’d gone, she’d be worried sick for George and Jimmy, who had come to Lassul because of her but had been offered no chance to escape. Dear God. She couldn’t face Phyllis, having done that on top of everything else.

  In the end, in the heat of the tropical night, with a light rain falling, she suddenly lacked the energy to worry about everyone. Towards dawn, she finally fell asleep.

  The invasion of Rabaul began quietly around two o’clock in the morning, when barges from the hidden warships were lowered into the water and the first of 5000 Japanese troops headed for shore. About three o’clock George saw a light float down from the clouds, a parachute flare. Soon the harbour was lit enchantingly from above and below by green and red flares, and by the orange from the volcano.

  No-one fires until the signal, came an officer’s voice.

  Is this still an exercise?

  This is not an exercise.

  A cheer went up along the beach.

  Shut up and wait for the signal.

  They waited.

  George heard a machine gun chatter at the southern end of the harbour on the other side of Vulcan, followed by the cough of a mortar, but it wasn’t clear what was happening.

  Not long after, in a pale predawn light, he saw the first barges heading towards him and he jumped at the sudden noise of machine-gun and mortar fire closer on his right, on his side of Vulcan, but he couldn’t see what was happening down there either. He wiped an oily rag over the rifle and pointed it down the beach.

  What he could see in the rifle sights were three barges, holding 60 Japanese troops each, approaching the Malaguna Church and coming into the line of fire of Fisher’s mortar. The barges were being towed to the beach by a motorboat which, before it hit the sand, turned away and let the barges continue quietly ashore under their own momentum.

  George suddenly thought of his mother and the Bible she kept at hand. ‘A sound of battle is in the land and of great destruction.’

  Fisher’s mortar coughed, the first time he’d ever fired it. It was the first shot fired by Australian militia in close combat on Australian territory. It was the signal.

  Fire!

  The machine guns tore holes in the side of the first barge as it ran up onto the black sand and men poured out.

  ‘They were all dressed in dark clothes and their faces were blackened, so you could hardly see them,’ George recounted later.

  He aimed at those dark shapes running from the barge and pulled the trigger, feeling the rifle kick, the sound merging with the crack of gunfire all around him.

  A shell from Fisher’s mortar landed in the centre barge, but Fisher didn’t see it fall. He was firing the mortar into what he hoped were the landing barges. Others, such as Private George McLennan, a carpenter with the Public Works Department, had a better view. He saw one of Fisher’s mortar bombs burst among the landing troops and ‘a large number of enemy bodies in the water and on the beach’.

  A dozen survivors from the three Japanese landing barges ran across the road, straight into the Australian anti-tank gun hidden there. The boat that had been towing the barges had retreated offshore, turned and fired at the beach with its cannons. Incredibly, none of the militia were killed. The bodies of Japanese littered the beach, but no more barges came. The towing boats moved away.

  George tried to blink away the still-flashing ghost images of gunfire and looked around him. How long had it been? Long enough for Fisher to run out of mortar bombs. It seemed for one glorious moment that everything the militia believed about themselves was actually true. They’d fought off the Japs.

  On George’s right, the regular soldiers of A Company were still being attacked, and dawn now revealed a harbour crawling with landing barges and warships. As George watched, a line of Japanese Zeros and dive bombers came roaring low over the harbour towards them.

  ‘We knew we didn’t have a chance,’ said George, so they ran.

  Fisher had run out of ammunition, so his crew, the last to leave, left the mortar in the hole and escaped just before a bomb blew the thing to pieces.

  Fisher followed George through a nearby coconut plantation to the road, where their lorries were parked facing uphill. George still had his .303 but had run out of bullets. Fisher had only a sidearm: an old, unreliable 1892 Colt revolver.

  The Japanese Zeros were strafing them as they jumped into the last of the trucks and began the slow, terrifying crawl up the Big Dipper Road.

  In the back of a truck, George heard the rolling boom of guns from a cruiser that had come into the harbour to shell the area he’d just fled. He saw the black landing barges like ants below before the truck reached the lip of the caldera and sped away inland.

  With a roar, two Zeros came up over the ridge behind them, following the road and racing low overhead. The truck stopped and everyone fell out and ran for the cover of kunai grass.

  The bright machines banked smoothly, beautifully, and came racing back. A blurred orange cannon shell buried itself into the other side of the road and threw up a wave of earth. The pair sped off, and banked again.

  Get lost, you bloody Nips, someone yelled. In reply the planes riddled the road with bullets, but, for all their gleaming technology, missed the trucks.

  And then they were gone. The men clambered back into the trucks and sped on.

  At an intersection called the Four Ways, George was separated from the militia when the trucks stopped again, men jumped out, the trucks were bombed, some were hit and others drove off, in a crazy game of musical chairs. One truck was hit by cannon fire or a bomb, the men inside killed,
others wounded. It was hard to tell in the chaos where the firing was coming from, the air or the sea, or from the Japanese troops now pouring over the caldera wall behind them.

  In the end, George left the truck and with other men took to the bush beside the road and began stumbling towards the distant Baining Mountains. He suddenly found himself in a group of eight men he didn’t know, cutting their way through grass and vines with bayonets.

  Fisher, in a lorry behind, had driven on past George’s abandoned truck to a village called Toma, where Colonel Scanlan had set up his rear operational headquarters. There Fisher heard the order to withdraw in small parties. Every man was to fend for himself, said Colonel Scanlan, before the commander himself left for the mountain jungles.

  The battle for Rabaul was over. The Australians had lost 28 men that day, but this was just the beginning.

  Miles behind Fisher, George Manson was still struggling through the roadside bush and tall grass, keeping well away from the deadly road. The group saw more trucks abandoned beside the road but didn’t dare go near them.

  Fisher, on the other hand, had jumped into another truck that took him to the end of the road at Malabunga, where he had time to make a meal of bully beef and tinned peaches before setting off on foot into the mountains.

  It was a trek Fisher had wanted to do, but under better circumstances. The path would take him through the epicentre of that enormous earthquake that had destroyed his instruments a year earlier. He wanted to see what rock formations had been exposed by the jolt, if there was any uplift and what damage had been done. Along the track, Fisher caught up with Clem Knight.

  George Manson was also keen to get into the mountains, but his party of eight was one of the last to leave the battlefield and became the last to reach the jungle track into the mountains.

  George was torn. Should he head west to Lassul? If he did, it would be to remain on the plantation, and that might put them all in danger. It was one thing to be captured as a civilian, but another as a soldier. As civilians, Harvey was convinced that they’d all be allowed to stay, unmolested. They hadn’t taken part in the war, so why should the Japanese bother them?