Invasion Rabaul (21 page)

Starting out again, Fisher’s party followed the river downstream, wading in the water until it became too swift and deep for safe footing. Then they scrambled up the sheer bank and clawed their way through tangled brush until someone located a footpath. Fisher used his compass to determine that it was the correct route, and on the afternoon of January 25 they staggered into Riat village. Their presence put additional strain on the resources hoarded by Carr’s group, so the newcomers were offered nothing more than some cooked taro—a first for the militiamen. Nobody made room for them in the village huts, and after a night on the bare ground, Fisher and his group were ready to move on.

The trials they endured over the next several days continually challenged their resolve. On the afternoon of January 26, while working their way down the slope of a particularly steep valley, the men could hear the roar of a flooded river far below. By the time they reached its banks, the sound of the rushing water was nearly deafening. To attempt a crossing there
would have been suicide, but half a mile upstream the men found a site that looked marginally safe.

They decided to rig a guide rope. Two men cut lengths of sturdy vine and spliced them together; then Lionel “Jack” Hawes, a twenty-year-old gunner from New South Wales, fought his way across the river and wrapped one end of the spliced line around a tree. Others did the same on the near shore, then pulled the line taut. Using the twisted vines as a handhold, the party inched across the river. There were tense moments when a few men lost their footing briefly, but everyone got across without mishap.

The reward for reaching the far side was another precipitous climb up the next mountain. That night, the men found shelter in an abandoned village, and scroungers even found a supply of taro to cook. “For the first time since Frisbee Ridge,” Bloomfield remembered, “I slept well.”

The next day brought more of the same torturous travel. Forcing their starved bodies to keep moving forward, the men stumbled along the ever-ascending track through the rotting jungle. Tormented by “mossies” (their nickname for mosquitoes), they also endured other frustrations. Normally the trail was used by barefooted natives walking in single file, but in recent days it had been soaked with rain and churned into a slick, muddy bog by dozens of boot-clad soldiers. Obviously, Fisher’s party was not the first from Lark Force to use it.

The leader of one of the fastest-moving groups was Dick Hamill, whose squad had hiked until midnight on the day of the invasion. They slept in the jungle, then started out again before dawn with the aid of a flashlight. At midday on January 25, they were the first members of Lark Force to reach Lemingi, so high in the mountains the natives called it the “mission on top.” By the end of the following day, some two hundred evaders had joined Hamill’s men at the Roman Catholic compound, including separate parties led by Colonel Scanlan and Major Palmer.

The soldiers spread out and relaxed under the benevolent care of Father Alphons Meierhofer, a slender, bearded priest from Salzburg, Austria. Despite his heritage, he was no champion of the Nazi regime; to the contrary, he was generous with his supplies, and fed the Australians biscuits and strong tea upon arrival. The evening meal featured kau-kau and taro prepared by the mission staff.

Fisher’s party did not reach Lemingi until the afternoon of January 27. Instead of spending a day or more to rest like the others, he and his men planned to get underway again the next morning. By this time, Meierhofer was anxious to see the Australians leave. Japanese floatplanes had been observing his station every day, and he was concerned about reprisals.

Meierhofer informed Fisher that his party was more than halfway to Adler Bay on the south coast. The bad news was that the terrain ahead was even more difficult. Normally it would take a day and a half for a strong native to walk to Adler Bay; but the soldiers were much weaker, and the hike would probably require several days. Fisher and his men departed on the morning of January 28, only a few hours before David Selby’s small group arrived at the mission.

Unlike Fisher, Selby was in no hurry to move on once he reached Lemingi. He had fallen several times on the jungle track and painfully wrenched his knee. Thus, he decided to convalesce for a few days while conferring with Scanlan and other officers about their options. Rumors of rescue by the RAAF still dominated everyone’s thoughts.
“We discussed plans until late in the night,” Selby remembered, “deciding that the best course was to push on with all speed for the coast where we thought there was every chance of being picked up by plane.”

Meierhofer urged the Australians to take the northern trails to Open Bay. The terrain was less rugged, and the weary travelers would encounter more villages along the way.
“He gravely doubted whether any of us would be able to make the south coast without guides, food and carriers,” recalled Selby, “and warned us that even should we reach the coast, habitation was so sparse that we might all starve. For good measure, he told us that malaria, hookworm, elephantiasis and leprosy made this coast a most unattractive proposition.”

Despite the warnings, Selby believed the south coast was the logical place to go, especially considering the possibility of an airlift. Others disagreed. Roughly half of the troops who passed through Lemingi followed the missionary’s advice and walked north to Open Bay. Those who went south, including Selby, would later regret their decision to ignore the kindhearted priest.

After resting a full day at Lemingi, Selby teamed up with Scanlan (who still had Tovokina to carry his kitbag), Captain John R. Gray of the
Royal Australian Engineers, and a few other soldiers to begin the walk to Adler Bay. Within an hour of leaving, they made a near-vertical descent, sliding nearly two thousand feet down to the bank of a raging river. The mud-colored torrent was frightening to behold, and the thin cable someone had stretched across it for a handhold gave them no confidence.

Days earlier, Dick Hamill’s party had reached the same river, whereupon Perce Pearson almost lost his resolve.
“My first view of it,” he remembered, “was to see a man hanging [from] the wire by his hands, and stretched out on the top of the water like a sheet in the wind.” Pearson successfully crossed the river, but others evidently did not. “It was rumored,” he continued, “that two committed suicide here. If true, I can quite realize their feelings.”

Scanlan’s party also made it across, each man
“hanging on like grim death” and each experiencing at least one close call as the water pounded at their legs. The men rested for an hour, then started up the far side of the gorge, its slope just as steep as the one they’d descended. “Only by grasping vines and saplings and hauling ourselves up,” Selby recalled, “could we avoid slipping back faster than we climbed.”

At the top, the weary men shared a cold can of bully beef. The next day their only meal was a can of beans. After that, there was nothing to eat except moldy biscuits.

Later, Selby described the party’s collective suffering:

Each day we felt ourselves growing weaker from lack of food and the strain of climbing those towering mountains and crossing the racing rivers. Time after time we would miss our footing and fall, or a vine by which we were pulling ourselves up would give way, and we lay on the ground too weak to haul ourselves to our feet without the assistance of another member of the party. Our hands, never dry, were now cut and torn—it was painful even to close them to grip the rough vines—and our bodies were bruised and stiff from our innumerable falls. Our clothes, too, were never dry, for during the brief spells when we were not soaked to the skin by rain or river crossings we would be dripping with sweat.

The men lost count of the days as they struggled across the Bainings. At times it seemed as though the jungle had swallowed them in foul darkness; at others, they could not help admiring the spectacular views from atop tall mountains. Sometimes those same vistas depressed them, because they revealed many more ridges yet to be crossed.

The final leg of the journey was the most challenging. Having climbed to a high plateau, the men could see the ocean on the horizon. Far below, a slow-moving river appeared to lead toward the coast, but they could not find a way down.
“Wherever we tried,” Selby remembered, “we were stopped by sheer cliff faces with a drop of several hundred feet.” Finally, someone discovered the cut of a watercourse in the face of a cliff, and they began a frightening descent. No one had mountaineering experience, let alone the proper equipment, so they simply lowered themselves from one precarious handhold to the next. Selby considered it “the most terrifying part” of the entire journey.

At the bottom, the group followed a path through the jungle to a village on the shore of Eber Bay. There they found John Mollard, whose party numbered about thirty men. Their camp was well stocked, including a supply of rice obtained from a nearby plantation, and the new arrivals were thrilled to receive a hot lunch.
“It was our first real meal since leaving Rabaul,” Selby explained, “and the feeling of satisfaction and delight with which we lay back and rested afterwards is quite beyond description.”

To everyone’s surprise, Peter Fisher and his group walked into the village later that afternoon. They had left Lemingi at least twenty-four hours ahead of Scanlan and Selby, but such was the maze of trails through the mountains that Fisher’s group took a full day longer to navigate the unmapped terrain.

Arriving with Fisher, David Bloomfield learned that most of the gunners from the antiaircraft battery had gathered up the coast on Adler Bay. He and several friends continued walking and reached the abandoned plantation just as darkness fell. The additional effort was worthwhile. Compared with the conditions they’d endured on the trail, the situation at Adler Bay seemed idyllic. Approximately two hundred soldiers lounged among the huts of a large coastal village. A general store contained sacks of rice and flour, chickens and goats wandered about the plantation, and bananas and pawpaws grew in abundance. Bloomfield
and the other newcomers enjoyed a large helping of stew, then fell asleep in a native hut.

Early the next morning, February 1, Bloomfield ambled to the beach to bathe in the ocean and wash what little was left of his tattered clothing. His shirt was rotting apart, his socks were in shreds, and his khaki shorts were ripped. “My underpants,” he wrote later, “were the only garment intact.” Bloomfield enjoyed a brief swim, but it ended abruptly when he spotted a white cloth tied to a length of bamboo. Returning to his hut, he asked what the
flag was about. The answer caught him completely off-guard: everyone at Adler Bay had decided to surrender.

Bloomfield announced defiantly that he was not giving up, and pleaded with his friends to join him. None could be persuaded. Subsequently, Bloomfield learned that Scanlan, Mollard, and the large party down at Eber Bay were preparing to continue south to Wide Bay. He decided to follow them, and departed Adler Bay that afternoon with several civilians, including the Norwegian skipper of the
Herstein
, Captain Gotfred Gunderson.

Before leaving their campsite at Eber Bay, Scanlan and the others debated whether to order the troops at Adler Bay to join them. Nobody had a specific plan, and they knew that their rescue was far from guaranteed. As Selby later explained,
“It seemed unfair to order the men to leave their food supplies, and their prospects of being repatriated after the war, for the uncertainties and privations which were all we could offer them if they came with us.”

Walking southward along the coast, the Australians found the going somewhat easier than in the mountains, though not by much. Coral outcroppings tore at the soles of their boots, and every few miles the men were forced to climb one of the many ridges that ran at right angles to the shoreline. At the completion of one such climb on February 2, Bloomfield’s group enjoyed a broad view of the sea. In the distance they could see a line of Japanese barges heading south. Someone speculated that they were en route to Gasmata, an old RAAF grass strip farther down the coast.

The next morning, catching up with a small group of soldiers near Wide Bay, Bloomfield learned that Scanlan’s group was only a few hours ahead. To know the officers were breaking the trail made him even more eager to reach Tol plantation.

Up ahead, David Selby elected to follow a narrow track that meandered toward the shoreline. Just north of Wide Bay, he stepped into the open, hoping to get a glimpse of Tol.

That seemingly random decision probably saved his life:

The plantation was plainly visible—a palm-covered tongue of land jutting out into the bay—but what I saw made me call to Fisher. A mile or so offshore were five barges towed by a steam pinnace. Through my binoculars I saw at the stern of each a Japanese flag, and they were crammed with troops. This was a cruel disappointment. For days Tol had been our goal, Tol was the word most often on our lips and at Tol we had anticipated the end of our wanderings [and] good food while we awaited the Catalinas which must surely be sent to our rescue. By a few short miles the enemy had beaten us to it.

The barges that Bloomfield had seen a day earlier were not headed for Gasmata, but for Tol. By a stroke of luck, Selby was in the right place at the right time to see the barges enter Wide Bay; otherwise he and the men behind him would have walked into a trap. He rushed ahead to warn Scanlan and Mollard, catching them just before they crossed a narrow river on the eastern border of the plantation.

The officers held back, but for almost two hundred others, the warning came too late.

CHAPTER NINE

TOL

“Those who resist us will be killed one and all.”

—Major General Tomitaro Horii, South Seas Detachment

I
n the days that followed the invasion, Major General Horii became increasingly frustrated. Like all officers in the Imperial Japanese Army, he was accustomed to instant obedience, yet hundreds of Australians had ignored his order to surrender. And they showed every sign of continuing to evade, despite the explicit warnings contained in his airdropped leaflets. Even more infuriating, thousands of his troops were incapacitated by an outbreak of malaria while chasing the Australians.