Line of Fire Read online

  She felt the sting of the setting sun on her face. Her cheek was wet and she tried not to cry; she didn’t want Dickie to hear. The truck rumbled on, slowed, turned off the road onto a bumpy ungraded track, and stopped.

  Marjorie couldn’t see the ash field or the volcano’s black slope, but she could feel it and smell it. She could smell everything: Dickie’s hair, Ted’s breath.

  Soldiers jumped to the ground and she felt a hand grab her elbow, with some care, and guide her down onto the hot gravel. She had lost Dickie’s hand and felt for it again, beginning to panic, then finding it, holding tight.

  She expected him to ask her what was happening, but he didn’t and she believed then that this boy, who had only just turned eleven, knew. As if in answer, she felt him squeeze her hand.

  Even Ted made no noise, and she felt him take her hand. In single file, all holding hands, they were led off. It was so, so quiet.

  While Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were kept behind the truck, Ted Harvey, Marjorie and 11-year-old Dickie were led to the edge of a pit. Unseen in front of them was the three-man firing squad.

  Warrant Officer Taki of 1 Platoon, and members of his squad, Nakabayashi and Hirakawa, were said to be present, but it’s not clear if they were the ones who pulled the triggers. Nakabayashi survived the war and denied it.

  Nearby stood Mizusaki and Lieutenant Endo, the court’s prosecutor. Hamada Diazo from the POW compound watched.

  Dickie stood between his mother and Ted Harvey, all still holding hands.

  Fujisaki gave the order.

  Afterwards, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were led to the same pit.

  It was evening when the trucks returned to Rabaul without the prisoners.

  ‘I remember hearing some seamen say it was really a miserable scene,’ said a soldier, Yoshimura Minoru, who had heard of the execution, ‘and the parents had clasped hands with the young boy standing between them. I thought at the time it was not possible a young boy could be guilty of any crime.’

  After the war in a series of interviews, Mizusaki told war crimes investigator Captain Tindale that he had done his best for the prisoners under his care and those who were later executed.

  ‘I made inspection tours of the internment camp alone, and studied means of supplying fresh food, comforted the patients, and occasionally took them candies and cigarettes. They were very delighted,’ he said. Tindale had asked him about the deaths of Ted Harvey, Marjorie, Richard and Jimmy Manson, and Bill Parker. ‘In spite of this, it is very regrettable that such an incident as mentioned in the sworn statement had taken place, although it had been carried out upon orders. Nevertheless, since I have stated all I knew about this incident just as I had in my statement last August, my mind is now at ease.’

  CHAPTER 31

  Japan has not been beaten, and by peaceful methods she will accomplish what she could not do by making war.

  — Vice Admiral Kanazawa Masao, who in 1942 signed Marjorie and Dickie’s death warrant, speaking to reporters in Japan, September 1945

  Rabaul today is a town where the survivors of eruptions and war still cling to rafts of wood and iron on a sea of ash. Little survived the three and a half years of almost constant bombing during the war, except for the stumps of houses, the broken trees that marked where the roads had been, and a few walls of the New Guinea Club. Rabaul was rebuilt using the brutal architecture of the 1950s and ’60s, which for a few decades was softened by flowers and tall trees. It took the twin eruptions of Vulcan and Tavurvur in 1994 to drive most people away for good.

  Any building you see now in what used to be the central business district is standing only because of the stubbornness of its owner. One post-war, pre-1994 house on Mango Avenue remains in a sort of foxhole dug from the ash. The Travelodge survives, the grounds excavated to their original level so that the place looks like an inverted island in a green sea of grass and vines that have reclaimed the neighbouring blocks.

  The Rabaul Hotel is still here, reincarnated, on a lonely street corner, its neighbouring shops obliterated, their skeletons buried under a metre or two of grey ash. In front of the Rabaul Hotel is a large naval gun that I’m told still works and points towards the new centre of town, now down at Malaguna, where the prisoner of war camp once stood. In front of the hotel is a short stretch of Mango Avenue tarmac that’s been swept to its pre-1994 level and shows the white stripes of angled car spaces in front of stores that no longer exist. The well-engineered road ends 100 metres beyond the hotel, subducted under a layer of volcanic dust that no-one has bothered to excavate. A man called Gerry McGrade built that original road, bought the hotel and then, after the 1994 eruption, stuck his heels in. Most of his neighbours surrendered and left, but Gerry stayed on and now his energetic daughter, Susie, runs the Rabaul Hotel.

  ‘It was a privilege to live through the eruption,’ she says, in the hotel’s bar, where a 50 calibre machine gun hangs from a chain above our heads. A bomb swings over the billiard table. ‘You’ve got the war and you’ve got the eruption. The characters that survive a crisis, I think, a little bit of DNA comes out. Survival of the fittest. You stay on, you survive, you pay your staff.’

  The Rabaul Hotel’s DNA goes all the way back to the 1920s, but then the Japanese bombed it and then the Americans. Rebuilt on a different spot after the war, it had several name changes before being destroyed by fire in the 1980s. Gerry McGrade rebuilt it in 1988 using the principles of the Chinese feng shui philosophy, which placed it at a rakish angle to the street with big glass windows meant to welcome the invisible forces of the universe.

  ‘Feng shui?’

  ‘Drives everyone crazy,’ says Susie.

  Her father’s partner in the hotel business back then was Sir Julius Chan, the former prime minister of New Guinea. The feng shui was his idea.

  ‘Sir Julius was persistent,’ said Gerry McGrade in a later email, ‘reminding me that the previous hotel had gone up in flames, and that we should not tempt fate by ignoring the powers of Chinese beliefs.’

  Six years later, in 1994, the volcanoes Tavurvur and Vulcan erupted and the office roof collapsed. The principals of feng shui were no protection against volcanic ash loading. Then again, the Rabaul Hotel survives today where everything else is gone.

  Under the machine gun in the hotel bar, I ask Susie if she’s heard the story of the Harvey family, of Marjorie and Ted, Dickie and Jimmy, and Bill Parker, all executed by the Japanese in 1942.

  ‘The Harvey family?’

  ‘One of them was an 11-year-old boy.’

  She frowns. ‘Yes, that’s right. No, I don’t think anyone knows much about the Harveys.’

  But later, when I’m back in my room with the airconditioner turned up high, I get a call from reception about a man who’s waiting for me downstairs, who knows the story of Europeans executed under the volcano during the war.

  I find the man sitting on a plastic chair next to the hotel’s feng-shui-aligned swimming pool. He’s an old man with white hair in tight curls and he says his name is Damien Kereku.

  ‘I am very old,’ he tells me as we shake hands. ‘The oldest man in the village.’

  Damien Kereku was born in 1931, making him the same age Dickie would have been if he was still alive, and I imagine them as boys, one black and one white, led by their mothers’ hands, passing each other in Rabaul’s pre-war streets.

  Damien Kereku still lives on Matupit Island, the land that rises and falls above the breathing magma chamber beneath Rabaul’s harbour. He’s one of the fathers of Papua New Guinea independence, and as a young man in the 1960s and ’70s he was a leader of the Mataungan Association when revolution was in the air and the Tolai were seeking self-government and the return of their land.

  I tell him about my search for Dickie Manson, executed during the war under the volcano.

  ‘My father’s brother, he saw what happened.’

  ‘He saw it?’ I can’t hide my shock.

  ‘He was hiding. He was so lucky.
He was hiding from the Japs. They put them in jail somewhere here in Rabaul. And [the Japanese soldiers] said, “Today we go and dig the holes.” Grave. Dig them long, they said. Then the next day they come they put the lap-lap,’ and Damien Kereku makes a gesture of being blindfolded, ‘so they won’t know where they are going. Red lap-lap.’

  It takes me a little while to understand that the execution Damien Kereku’s uncle witnessed is probably not that of the Harvey family, but of some of the many young American or Australian soldiers executed later in the war at the same spot.

  ‘Americans or Australians, they’re all white, you know, I couldn’t tell who was who,’ says Damien Kereku. ‘I never tell anybody until you came asking about the story.’

  And this is his story:

  ‘My uncle, Toman,’ he says, ‘the little brother of my father, from Kikila village on Matupit, was going to the south-eastern side of the volcano Tavurvur to dig for the eggs of megapode birds.’ The megapode is a type of bush turkey that digs deep holes into the side of the volcano. It lets the volcano’s hot ash incubate its eggs, so that the volcano is, in effect, the mother of all these birds.

  ‘Toman had been digging for eggs and returning by canoe. It was late in the afternoon and he was coming back along the coast, around the base of the volcano where it falls into the sea.’

  Toman started to cross Greet Harbour, which is the bay between Tavurvur and Matupit, and was passing the half-sunk wreck of a bombed warship when he saw prisoners on shore being lined up next to a hole. The Japanese stood behind them. He paddled behind a shipwreck, not wanting to be seen.

  ‘He was hiding,’ says Damien Kereku. ‘The Japanese, you know, they got a big sword. And they’re very sharp, you know. They cut their heads. They stood blind like this on the graves.’ And he gestures again with the blindfold. ‘And they line up like this. And they chop it. Down he goes. Down inside the graves. Terrible thing. And then he went home and told us what happened. To my father and only a few people. We were so afraid to tell anybody.’

  This is the place near Rabaul’s pre-war garbage dump, ‘the Malay Hole’, on the north-western side of the volcano where Marjorie and Dickie were executed. It was Toman who, after the war, led Australian investigators to the base of Tavurvur, where they found 54 bodies in a number of mass graves.

  Unfortunately, none of them was identified as Marjorie, Dickie, Ted, Jimmy or Bill Parker. Investigators estimated that as many as 100 bodies of executed prisoners were buried in this place and that some would never be found because of attempts during the war to bomb the volcano into eruption.

  On 22 March 1943, ten B-17 Flying Fortresses from the 43 Bomb Group of the 5th US Airforce flew from Port Moresby with a special mission. The last Flying Fortress to take off from the Seven Mile aerodrome that day was Monkey Bizz-Nes, captained by Carl A. Hustad, and it carried two 2000 pound bombs. When they arrived over Rabaul, Hustad’s colleagues began hammering what was left of Rabaul town with incendiary and demolition bombs, as Hustad peeled off to drop his bombs into Rabaul’s active volcano.

  ‘An occasional fire was seen emanating from the crater called Rabatana,’ explained Lieutenant James T. Murphy, of the 63 Bomb Group ‘Sea Hawkes’, who was in one of the other planes on that mission. ‘Everyone hoped that the bombs could cause the lava to flow again . . . The plan was excellent.’

  Except that if they were bombing Rabatana, it was the wrong volcano. The active volcano was Tavurvur, which was the volcano they meant. They’d mixed up the names. (Rabatana is another name for the nearby dormant volcano Rabalanakaia, and there’s no evidence Rabalanakaia was deliberately bombed.) Hustad made for Tavurvur, which was still smoking, glowing red and hard to miss, and dropped his two 2000 pound bombs. The bomber crews held their breath.

  ‘They waited around the target for over ten minutes,’ said Murphy, ‘but there was no explosion.’

  During the war, so many people had the bright idea of bombing Rabaul’s volcanoes into eruption that the Australian Government asked Norman Fisher, who after his escape was made chief geologist with the Minerals Resources Survey, to investigate. He ridiculed the idea.

  ‘Even a large bomb dropped into the lava would merely ruffle the surface and would be insufficient to cause an eruption,’ said an unnamed authority associated with the inquiry, but who was probably Fisher. ‘The largest conceivable bomb blast would have the same effect as “tickling a giant’s throat with a feather”.’

  At the end of the war, Fisher returned to Rabaul and was surprised to see that his advice had been ignored. There were large bomb craters on the inner and outer slopes of the volcano, well away from any other military target. Large bombs had fallen onto the ash field at the base of the volcano among the graves of executed prisoners, where Marjorie and her family were killed and buried.

  It was a place I had to see first-hand.

  ‘Hello, boss. My name is Tamwell. I am the keeper.’

  ‘He’s the keeper,’ explains Albert Koni, my guide. ‘You pay him five kina.’

  I hand five kina to Tamwell, who asks, ‘Going for a walk?’

  I point to the volcano.

  Tamwell is a landowner at the edge of Tavurvur’s long black skirt, and he collects a small admission fee from tourists who come to see the hot springs. Few venture beyond the springs onto the shimmering black plain below the volcano.

  The volcano has surrounded itself with a desert of what geologists call tephra, the smaller rocks of different types thrown out of the crater. This desert of tephra absorbs the heat from above and below. Today, the black plain and the slopes of the volcano are still pitted with the impacts of lava bombs thrown out during the most recent eruption, not that long ago.

  It’s midmorning and the road back to Rabaul is already swimming in the heat. There’s no shade. Everything here is dead.

  Albert and I walk to the hot springs, through an opening in a fence of bleached sticks stuck into the ground like bones before the gate that leads to Hades, the god of death who is also guardian of the earth’s mineral wealth. Water boils to the surface and steams all the way to the sea, leaving a rusty residue on a beach of black sand. The water is acidic and as it’s been moving through the rocks it’s dissolved iron, aluminium, manganese, zinc, copper and minute traces of gold. This is a mine in the making.

  We circle the springs and walk up a ridge to see the volcano standing before us on the far side of the plain of dark tephra, scarred by gullies and those lava bomb craters.

  After half an hour of walking, Albert stops and then walks around in circles. He looks away to the caldera rim and then back over his shoulder, to the volcano looming above him. He spreads his arms wide. ‘Here.’

  This is the execution site, the area Albert knows as the Malay Hole, the rubbish dump of old Rabaul. Beneath our feet, somewhere, are the remains of Ted Harvey, Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy Manson, and Bill Parker. There’s nothing to mark the site. Albert, who’s lived near here all his life, knows nothing of Marjorie’s story and repeats the names after I say them, remembering them for the tourists who sometimes come, a memorial of sorts.

  I try to imagine Dickie and Marjorie standing here, as they faced the firing squad, feeling the volcano’s hot breath on the backs of their necks. I close my eyes, listening, but there’s nothing to hear.

  After a moment, we trudge off, up the volcano’s slope. The crater rim is only 250 metres above us and I can see the crumbling summit clearly, steaming a little but not much.

  As we climb, the lava bombs are larger: hard, black, brittle, glassy lumps of basalt the size of cars. I climb around them and feel heat through my shoes, which are falling apart. The glue that holds them together is melting, and the smell of sulphur here is strong.

  Albert stops suddenly. ‘It’s not safe to go further up.’

  Relieved, I turn and look down the crumbling slope, back the way we’ve come. South, on the far side of Greet Harbour, is Matupit Island, where Albert my guide and Damien Kereku have lived all thei
r lives. Their village is hidden by tall coconut palms. Near Matupit is a grey-green finger of palms hiding the buried wartime aerodrome. To the north, the hills turn from dead grey to green and rise to Rabalanakaia and the Mother volcanoes. The Mother stretches an arm to touch the shoulder of the South Daughter volcano. Tavurvur beneath my feet completes the circle.

  Tavurvur is the youngest, a stratovolcano, built by successive eruptions often involving explosive showers of lava. If it decides to erupt now, a giant gas-filled bubble of lava will rise from the crater behind me and pop to shower me with clots of incandescent rock. I’d vanish, too, into the landscape.

  Everything I see is dominated by volcanoes, and man’s best attempts to change this landscape have hardly scratched the surface. Between war and eruptions, the evidence for what happened here has all but disappeared. It’s almost as if the town and most of its people never existed.

  Most of the Australian civilians and soldiers who were here at the beginning of 1942 were dead by the end of the war. Ted Harvey and Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy Manson, and Bill Parker, who have no known grave and no memorial and are barely remembered, are just a few among the many.

  The political forces that led them to this place have passed, but the geological forces are still at work beneath my feet, inexorably recycling the earth’s thin crust. The geology that shaped Marjorie and Dickie’s destiny remains indifferent to them. They lie somewhere beneath the baking plain that shudders and ripples below me in the heat. Nothing alive is moving down there, and up here on the slope of the volcano there’s no breeze and nothing to hear. The ash, like snow in a forest, soaks up all sound.

  ‘Let’s go back.’

  POSTSCRIPT

  Philip Coote didn’t survive the war. In June 1942, five weeks after Marjorie and her family were executed, he was marched with most of the captured Australian soldiers and civilians to the wharf and herded aboard the Montevideo Maru. The ship was to take them to a labour camp on Hainan Island, off China, but eight days after it left Rabaul it was torpedoed by the American submarine USS Sturgeon, which had no idea of its cargo. The best estimate is that 845 Australian soldiers and 208 civilians drowned, including Philip Coote and his brother-in-law, Marjorie’s neighbour, Hugh Scott.