Line of Fire Page 19

  There’d been more than 200 Australians at Tol. One small group had surrendered on the beach with a white flag, and some had run into the bush when the Japanese came ashore firing weapons into the trees, but most had been too exhausted to move and had stayed in the plantation huts.

  That night they were fed and guarded, and the next morning, the group that had surrendered on the beach was taken away by boat. The others were marched into the bush or to the beach and executed.

  ‘We came across two chaps who had managed to crawl away and were pretty far gone,’ George wrote to Phyllis, much later. ‘We fixed them up as best we could, got them back to the party, and then sent them on, as a doctor was a few miles ahead.’

  The doctor was Ted Palmer, the Chief Medical Officer of the 2/22nd, who was camped south of the plantation. One of those found by George’s group and taken to Palmer was Lance Corporal Cliff Marshall, a lorry driver from Prahran in Victoria.

  Marshall had been in a group of ten men who’d been roped together and led into the bush. One by one, each man was taken behind trees and bayoneted.

  When Marshall’s turn came, he knew he would die. As he was being led into the bush, a Japanese soldier thrust a bayonet into his back, arm and side. Marshall fell and pretended to be dead. As he lay there he heard yells and rifle shots, but he kept perfectly still until dark, when he stood up. Around him were dead men. He checked his own wounds. The most serious was where the long, thin Japanese bayonet had entered his back under the shoulder blade to emerge from his chest below the collarbone.

  When George’s group found him, Marshall was delirious, walking along with an empty tin and a shirt full of blood. Earlier they had read a note tacked to a shed door, left by the Japanese commander and addressed to Colonel Scanlan, telling him to surrender or die.

  ‘Today we caught many prisoner, but killed only those that attacked us,’ it said.

  Scanlan was camping in the jungle behind Tol and, after seeing what the Japanese were prepared to do, and hoping his gesture might stop it happening again, he shaved, put on his dress uniform and walked back towards to Rabaul to surrender.

  After reading the note, George Manson was worried that he’d made the wrong decision. He could have no idea how Marjorie, Jimmy and Dickie were faring on the other side of the island, but it was obvious Ted Harvey had underestimated the Japanese. Before he’d left for Rabaul on the schooner, he’d helped Harvey stock the jungle camp. He knew they could hide for a long time, but there was always a chance they’d be taken by surprise. Would the Japanese treat civilians in the same way they were treating soldiers? Some of the men killed at Tol were civilians. In any case, surrendering or dying wouldn’t help his family. All he could do was carry on.

  South of Tol, the sandy beach disappeared. The mountainous jungle once more came down to the sea and, too tired to battle it again, he walked around the headland at low tide on the exposed coral, cutting his boots to pieces. At one point George slipped on the rocks and cut his leg, and the wound didn’t heal for months. By the end of the detour, the whole long conga line of tattered soldiers was limping.

  ‘We also had a lot of rivers to cross, they were mostly deep and too swift a current to swim. They were also well stocked with crocodiles and sharks. Quite a few of our chaps tried to cross, but they just disappeared.’

  More than a week and a hundred miles ahead of George, Norman Fisher and his party of nine finally saw the last of New Britain as they sailed south to the Trobriand Islands. When they arrived at the port of Samurai, on a tiny island at the tip of Australian Papua, it was in flames. The Australian Army had set it alight before they’d left, leaving behind one man, Allan Timperley, a 26-year-old former civil servant, to collect news from passing boats of the advancing Japanese and retreating Australians. Timperley had a Teleradio and arranged for a Catalina flying boat to collect Fisher’s group, and on 27 February Fisher landed at Port Moresby as it, too, was preparing for a Japanese invasion.

  ‘My first impression was that of general chaos,’ said Fisher, now an expert in Japanese invasions. He went out to the air force headquarters to tell them about the Australians on the New Britain coast, ‘but received not much encouragement’, so he went back to the army hospital to get his tropical ulcers treated, while the air-raid sirens sounded.

  Someone brought him a letter, weeks old, from his wife, Ellice, and he sent her a simple telegram to tell her he was safe: ‘Many happy returns. Love, Norm.’

  While Fisher was recuperating in Port Moresby, George Manson had walked almost as far as he was physically able. On 11 March, George’s party arrived at Wunung on the New Britain south coast, where there were 30 soldiers who could travel no more. Here an Irish missionary, Father Ted Harris, fed the refugees. George then pressed on for another 18 miles, over another bloody mountain, to a plantation called Drina, where he was told the Japanese were 35 miles ahead. His dream of finding a boat and sailing for mainland New Guinea faded. He was stuck.

  At Drina, George and 120 other men had to survive on taro and tapioca. Men died of malaria and blood poisoning and were buried among the zinias growing near the plantation house.

  On Easter Sunday, 5 April, more than two months after the Australians had left Rabaul, a note came to the camp at Drina: ‘Send all men that can travel over to Wunung, including all sick if you can get them over. They must be here today as tonight is the night. It is imperative that you come and you will get all details.’

  The men had convinced themselves that a navy destroyer would be sent to rescue them. George could only believe that he was going home.

  ‘You can imagine the excitement,’ George weeks later wrote to Phyllis (who tried to imagine it, but she still felt a hole in her heart). ‘It took us until 3.30 pm to get the sick ready to travel. By that time, most of the boys had hopped off leaving about 15 to carry the sick, who included two stretcher cases.’

  George was left again to bring up the rear with the still-struggling Tol survivor, Marshall.

  ‘The track was very bad with a lot of rivers to cross at the start, and this took some time, as only four can cross at one time in the canoe.’

  By the time he’d crossed the rivers it was dark, and there’s no dark as dark as the jungle on a moonless night. He felt his way up the narrow, steep mountain track, hemmed in by vines, black but for the faint white phosphorescence of fungi and fireflies.

  ‘We felt our way along, stumbling and tripping every few yards, and I can assure you it was agony.’ His wrecked boots cut like knives into his ulcers and the men were so thin they were afraid their legs might snap, but their greatest fear was of missing the boat. George imagined it leaving before he arrived and began to panic. It was close to midnight.

  ‘We came across two chaps who had left early, but found they couldn’t make it, so just lay on the track. We had to assist them along, and by this time everybody was just about done. But the thought of being rescued spurred us on, and at three minutes past midnight we walked into the rendezvous.’

  They were greeted by the sputtering torches of natives who’d come from Palmalmal to show them to the boat.

  Ship ’e stop?

  She ’e stop, masta.

  What George found at the wharf wasn’t a destroyer but a small pinnace called the Mascott, big enough for only a few men.

  ‘We just sat down and nearly howled,’ said George, but it turned out the Mascott was skippered by Allan Timperley, the man who’d helped Fisher escape from Samurai. Timperley had brought his radio transmitter to contact Port Moresby, to tell them how big a boat they’d need to bring everyone home. He also brought tinned food.

  ‘We had our first decent meal the next morning,’ George wrote home.

  For two men it was too late. On Monday night one, delirious with fever, sang, ‘Hey diddly di, they’ll soon be planting me,’ over and over again, until the singing faded. He was dead by morning. Another died quietly on the eve of rescue.

  On a calm and clear Wednesday morning, another
boat appeared, ‘and didn’t the boys cheer’.

  The Laurabada wasn’t a big boat, but it was big enough. The civilians and stretcher cases went into the four cabins and, in the late afternoon, George and the rest of the men were crammed onto the deck, all terrified that Japanese fighter planes would spot them and the dream would become a nightmare again.

  They boarded. The sky grew dark. The overloaded and listing Laurabada sailed into a gathering storm. George watched from the crowded deck, as New Britain disappeared behind the downpour.

  He had no idea what had happened to Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy, but if he could escape against all odds, perhaps they could as well.

  Back in Australia, George spent weeks in hospital with blackwater fever, a dangerous complication of malaria. When he was discharged from hospital, he joined the 11 Small Ship Company operating north of New Guinea, supplying troops along the remote coastlines of Borneo.

  Phyllis and Joseph still had not heard from Marjorie or Jimmy. George might have hoped for a chance to sail the small ship he commanded down to New Guinea and make a dash for the Baining coast to find them, but ferocious take-no-prisoner battles were raging in the Bismarck Sea and on its surrounding islands. Everything on that sea was bombed by one side or the other until the end of the war.

  Phyllis prayed, and checked the mailbox. Joseph read the papers. The news was all terrible, everywhere. Phyllis’s growing sense of loss seemed small in a world full of atrocities, where entire families in France and London and Russia had been exterminated by bombs and the Nazis. But this was her family and this was Australia. Darwin had been bombed, but Australia’s battlefields were overseas. Australian women and children just didn’t get caught between armies. Why had everyone forgotten that Rabaul had been part of Australia? No-one she knew quite understood how half her family could vanish in the war if they weren’t fighting. Why was there nothing in the papers explaining that?

  Joseph didn’t know either. He tried to comfort her, keeping his own sense of loss and helplessness to himself. On 8 May 1943, at the age of 82, Joseph Manson, with the newspaper beside him, had a heart attack in his chair and died, with his youngest son, Graham, holding his hand.

  CHAPTER 26

  For the coming generation these machines have wrought each function to the civilised world and progress of the scientific world during the War. On my retiring of the public post may I offer them to the person in the future.

  — A notice outside a cave at Rabaul, written by Dr Takashi Kizawa, Director of the Seismological Observatory of the Japanese Navy, 30 October 1945

  Dr Takashi Kizawa from the Japanese Central Meteorological Observatory flew over Rabaul in early May 1942 and saw Tavurvur below still smoking. When the plane dropped quickly onto the Lukunai aerodrome near the base of the volcano, the smell of sulphur was strong. Kizawa was in his element.

  The young volcanologist, seconded by the Japanese military, was Japan’s answer to Dr Norman Fisher. The Japanese had wasted no time setting up a naval base and airfields, but they needed to know if a volcanic eruption would spoil their plans to turn it into Japan’s main base in the South Pacific. Japan was an archipelago of volcanic islands itself, and they knew the risks well.

  One of the first things Kizawa did was to search for the records of the Rabaul Volcano Observatory. They weren’t in the buildings on the ridge, nor were the observatory’s instruments. Kizawa had also been hoping to find Dr Fisher himself. He’d read Fisher’s papers back in Japan, and wanted to speak to the man who wrote them, but Fisher wasn’t among the hundreds of men packed into the POW camp at Malaguna, on the outskirts of town.

  Fisher was already in Port Moresby, his instruments had been thrown off the cliff, and most of the precious data had been removed or burned.

  Kizawa was disappointed. He was interested only in volcanology; the war was a dangerous nuisance, but he was under pressure to write a report for the military on Rabaul’s volcanoes and when they might erupt again. He needed as much data as he could find as quickly as possible.

  He spent the first few weeks searching, and in a storeroom finally found pages of what seemed to be seismic measurements written by Norman Fisher or, more likely, Clem Knight before he escaped. The humidity had made the pages damp and sticky and they were black with mould, but he found a last entry recorded the day before the Japanese invasion. On the last page was written, in what Kizawa considered a sort of scientific poetry, the words: ‘Correspondency between Tavurvur and Vulcan — majestic relationship of volcanic tremors.’

  Kizawa became fascinated by this entry and the link between Tavurvur on one side of the harbour and Vulcan on the other. He ignored the Australian’s observatory on the ridge overlooking the town and instead chose a hill ‘covered by turf and flowers’ next to a ravine of hot springs, and decided to build a seismograph room ‘at the destroyed concrete block’.

  He couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate place for his ‘K Corps Vulcanological Research Institute’ at Sulphur Creek. He’d built it on the remains of Diana Coote’s childhood home, Haus Rakaia, the ‘house of the volcano’.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Baining boy spoted [sic] them and led us there I was behind but I could see a soldier slap Mrs. Harvey on the face, the boy of about 12 years old started to hit the soldier when his mother was struck the poor boy was hit and kicked by another soldier.

  — Joe Roca’s hand-written statement, Rabaul, 1945

  At the end of April 1942, Diana Coote’s uncle Hugh Scott wrote an urgent note to Joe Roca, who was then working closely with the Japanese police, the Kempeitai.

  ‘Joe,’ wrote Scott, ‘can’t you do anything to help Mrs Harvey and child? Mr Harvey is surely getting mad I am enclosing his letter to me. Please take it to the police.’

  Ted Harvey, Marjorie, Dickie, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker had been hiding in the jungle behind Lassul for three months. In his letter to Scott, Harvey asked if the Japanese would let him and his family go back to the plantation house to live in peace. He offered to surrender and work with the Japanese Government, as long as he was allowed to keep his wireless set and was not separated from Marjorie. Harvey had asked that Scott contact the Japanese police, and that the police should reply through Scott.

  ‘Failing satisfaction,’ wrote Harvey, he would go further into the bush to wait for the end of the war. If they became weak, Harvey said, he had enough laudanum to kill them all.

  ‘Mr Harvey is surely getting mad,’ Scott wrote, telling Roca that, should Harvey’s offer be accepted, Marjorie and Dickie should be separated from the madman and perhaps sent to Kokopo to live with the Catholic nuns at the Vunapope Mission.

  ‘Harvey is wrong to take to the bush like that,’ wrote Scott, but explained that Ted Harvey had been angry with all the soldiers who’d descended on Lassul plantation to eat all his food and sleep in his house.

  After reading Harvey’s and Scott’s letters, Roca decided to pay a personal visit to Hugh Scott at his Asilingi plantation in the Bainings.

  At the time, Joe Roca was living on a plantation behind the Vunairima Mission, about halfway between Lassul and Rabaul. The road from Rabaul ended at Vunairima, and from there Lassul could be reached only by boat. In March, the Japanese had placed a small garrison and a Kempeitai station at Vunairima to patrol and police the north Baining coast. Roca by then was on good terms with the Kempeitai, and they trusted him, giving him a cloth pass to wear which gave him the freedom of the island.

  Roca had been given the important job of getting a sawmill working, to supply the growing town with lumber. Rabaul was rapidly changing from an Australian town of a few thousand people into a Japanese city of 100,000, and civilians and military were flooding in to build a base from which to rule the South Pacific.

  Roca had also been helping the Kempeitai by scrounging supplies and vehicles from the plantations, and he displayed a particular gift for capturing Australians. His standing had grown and the capture of Ted Harvey would be another feather in his
cap.

  Roca took a boat around to Asilingi that night to speak directly to Scott.

  ‘I arrived in the morning,’ said Roca. ‘We talked it over then I agreed to bring the matter to the police.’

  A few months after the Japanese surrendered at Rabaul, at the end of 1945, Joe Roca made two statements detailing how Ted Harvey was captured. One statement is written in smudged pencil on pages torn from a ruled notebook, in the careful handwriting but poor grammar of the primary-school–educated Roca.

  I thought to see Mr. Scott first so I went in a pinnace to see him. I had no permission to leave the mill but risked it I arrived in the morning. We talked it over then I agreed to bring the matter to the Police . . . we arrived at Mr. Scott’s place and he made a rough sketch to the whereabouts according to boy’s information. Mr. Scott was not fit to go when asked. so he stoped at home we went from Asilingi and a lot of boys went also to search.

  The other is a carefully worded statement on official paper, typed by an Australian Army officer and signed by Roca after interrogation. In this Roca admits he visited Scott, but says it was earlier and only to buy ‘some native lava-lava material, stating that I was taking over the MANDRESS sawmill and required it for the natives’. The army statement makes no mention of Hugh Scott’s role in the capture.

  I led the party. We went to NEWCOWAN plantation and then to NAMBUNG plantation. From these we went into the bush where I heard that the HARVEYS were hiding.

  According to that statement typed by Lieutenant H. Gridley, Roca alone was responsible for finding the Harveys, to ‘get square’ over an argument they had had years earlier. These were important legal points in cases being built against Roca for war crimes, treason and aiding the enemy; cases that might be weakened if Scott’s role in Harvey’s capture was raised.