Invasion Rabaul (26 page)

The unruly
gang at Milim, mostly natives from Manus Island, immediately showed their resentment of the Australians. Purely by coincidence, Frank Holland’s messenger arrived at this precise moment and handed Ball a note. It simply stated that the party was to return to Kalai, which made the Australians suspicious. After questioning the runner, Ball decided the message was a ruse and called for the Manus gang’s leader.

The situation quickly turned ugly. The boss-boy, full of defiance, threatened to “send talk” to the Japanese. Ball silenced him with sharp words, but the native began backing slowly toward a jungle trail. Suddenly he turned and ran. Ball drew his revolver and fired, badly wounding the native. The fight went out of his “sulky cohorts,” who picked up their leader and carried him into the jungle.

The Australians moved on to the small village of Setwi on the afternoon of February 28. Another runner appeared with a message, and this
time Ball recognized the scrawl of Arthur S. “Sandy” Sinclair, one of the warrant officers back at Kalai. His note read: “Advise return immediately. New plan.”

The group conferred briefly and decided the message was too cryptic to act upon in blind faith. Dysentery and malaria were beginning to weaken some members of the party, and more information was needed before everyone would commit to going all the way back to Kalai. It made more sense for one individual to attempt a fast trip to the warrant officers’ camp and get the complete story.

The obvious choice was Bill Harry. Still in good health, he had demonstrated his cross-country abilities on numerous occasions. The total journey was estimated to be forty miles, virtually all of it over rough terrain, and no extra rations could be spared. Harry would have to scrounge for native foods along the way. Could he do it in four days? If he failed to return by then, the group would continue south. Harry did not pause to think about it. Arming himself with a handgun, he started immediately on the path to Kalai. Only a few hours of daylight remained, and he wanted to make the most of it.

Darkness was falling by the time he approached Milim, where the “dust-up” had taken place two days earlier. Concerned that the Manus natives would seek retribution against the next white man they saw, Harry approached the village cautiously. On the path he met an islander who identified himself as the
tultul
, advisor to the
luluai
, the local headman. He gave Harry the good news that Milim was back in the hands of the villagers. The Manus ringleader was still alive, but remained hidden in the jungle with his gang.

The change in fortune was a boon to Harry. He promptly arranged for several natives to paddle him across Wide Bay in an outrigger canoe, thereby reducing the length of the trip by several hours. Arriving at Kalai before dawn, he walked into Sinclair’s camp just as the constables were beginning to stir. None had expected such a fast response to the note, and they were duly impressed when Harry announced: “Good morning, I’m from Ball’s party.”

Sinclair asked where the rest of the men were.

“Still a couple of days down the coast,” answered Harry. He explained that Ball had sent him “to get the story.”

“Hell,” Sinclair grumbled, “What’s the use of that? This really puts the lid on it—we haven’t a hope of holding Holland any longer.”

“But who is Holland,” Harry asked. “What is on, and where does he fit into it?”

Sinclair outlined the rescue attempt. Frank Holland was waiting near Ril to guide them all across the island to Pondo, where an evacuation was being organized. He was also caring for two survivors of the recent massacre, Alf Robinson and Bill Collins, and was impatient to get going. More importantly, Sinclair added, the Japanese occupied Gasmata, cutting off the escape route to the south. “We will do our best to hold Holland,” he promised, “but there must be a limit.”

After a breakfast of boiled kau-kau served on a leaf, Harry got back on the path. The natives who had brought him by canoe were gone, so he took the long way around the coast, walking nonstop throughout the day. Once again he reached Milim just before dark, and again the native advisor met him. This time, he took Harry aside and begged him to finish off the wounded gang leader, claiming the Manus natives had “whiskey galore from the plantation house, and large quantities of rice and tinned meat.”

Harry wisely refused to get involved. After noting the location of the supplies, he arranged for another canoe to speed him on his way. At about 2200 on March 1, he walked into Ball’s camp, having completed the round trip in just thirty hours.

The camp was abuzz. During Harry’s absence, Peter Figgis, Hugh Mackenzie, and Ken Stone had rejoined the group. The entire party now commenced a late-night planning session. Figgis reported that there was an opportunity to evacuate even more Australians: his small party had found approximately two hundred members of Lark Force encamped in the vicinity of Jacquinot Bay. They were trapped when the Japanese landed at Gasmata on February 9, and now faced severe food shortages.

New plans were drawn up that night, and Figgis outlined the details in a coded message. The next morning, Ivan Smith and James C. H. “Connel” Gill, one of Mackenzie’s sub-lieutenants, set off for the north coast to deliver the message directly to Keith McCarthy. Harry informed them of the food cache at Milim village, which indeed contained supplies that helped them in their effort to cross the island.

The rest of Ball’s party also prepared to get underway. Most would hike back to Ril and join Frank Holland, but the new plan also called for several volunteers to stay behind and attempt to coordinate a southern evacuation. Well aware that they were passing up a good opportunity to get off the island, a total of six agreed to help the stranded troops. Peter Figgis, Bill Harry, Hugh Mackenzie, Ken Stone, and two of the naval ratings divvied up the few remaining tins of food and set off for Jacquinot Bay.

Ball led the rest of his party, which included Howard Carr, “Tusker” McLeod, Steve Lamont, and eight naval ratings, back to Wide Bay. They succeeded in finding Holland at Ril plantation, where Sinclair and the other constables joined them, as did the three civilian planters who had originally found Alf Robinson in the jungle. Holland then guided the collective group to his remote camp, where Bill Collins was still recovering from the wounds he had received at Tol.

The party now numbered twenty-five Australians. However, before they could get underway from Holland’s camp, two of the naval ratings fell gravely ill with dysentery. Yeoman George P. Knight and Writer Thomas I. Douglas were too sick to travel, so Chief Lamont nobly volunteered to take care of them until they were able to move. The three navy men remained in the jungle camp while the rest of the evacuees started across the island. Thanks to Holland’s expert guidance, the group joined Keith McCarthy at Pondo on March 8.

By then, both Thomas and Knight were dead, but not because of illness. Soon after the main party left the camp, they were captured along with Lamont and taken to Rabaul. Lamont was imprisoned at the Malaguna Camp stockade, but Douglas and Knight were executed on March 5.

K
EITH
M
C
C
ARTHY SEEMED TO BE EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
. A
FTER SENDING
Holland across the island, he proceeded north to Cape Lambert and searched for scattered groups of Australian soldiers. At a plantation called Seragi, he found two noncoms, both sick with malaria, who led him around the cape to Langinoa, another plantation. There, thirty soldiers languished, slowly starving, but within yards of where they sat was a huge crop of untouched cassava. McCarthy could scarcely believe the soldiers’ ignorance. The cassava roots would yield plenty of life-giving tapioca, but the soldiers had no knowledge of their surrounding habitat.

Near midnight on February 21, Pip Appel learned that McCarthy was in the vicinity. The timing could not have been better. Appel had recently received additional messages from the Japanese stating that they would round up all Australian troops at Lassul Bay on February 22. He was on the verge of giving up, but the news of McCarthy’s arrival saved the day. Appel pulled his men back into the hills. He met face-to-face with McCarthy in the morning, and together they planned an evacuation.

The plan’s success depended entirely on Appel. Because the Japanese controlled the waters off Lassul Bay, he had to move his men
overland to Pondo, twenty-five miles from Harvey’s plantation, in order for McCarthy to evacuate them by boat. Appel told McCarthy that he could have 145 men at Pondo in seven days. His most difficult task was leaving behind those who were too sick to travel. At this, John Ackeroyd stepped forward and volunteered to remain with eight men at St. Paul’s Mission, knowing that all of them would eventually become POWs. Later, Ackeroyd was decorated with a Member of the British Empire for his selfless devotion.

Meanwhile, those who could walk were in bad shape. Appel noted a long list of
ailments among them, including “acute tinea, tropical ulcers, ringworm, diarrhea, dysentery, swollen glands, [and] infected sores, with over 80% developing malaria.” Despite their poor physical condition, he got them all to Pondo as promised—and in five days, not seven.

The arrival of Holland’s party on March 8 brought the total number of soldiers and civilians on the north coast to well over two hundred. McCarthy intended to move them in stages down the coast using boats, but he had only the
Aussi
and a few other small craft available. He therefore assigned several men to repair the steamer
Malahuka
, which still sat on the slipway at Pondo. Leading the effort was Lincoln J. Bell, another timber merchant. His team repaired the hole in the hull easily enough; the bigger problem was the damage to the boat’s engine, which proved difficult to fix. After five days of intensive work, the vessel was deemed ready to launch, and the process of ferrying men to Talasea began under the cover of darkness. But on three successive nights the
Malahuka s
engine broke down, forcing McCarthy to radio Port Moresby for assistance.

Enter the “Harris Navy,” a motley flotilla of launches and schooners gathered by Gwynne C. “Blue” Harris, a member of ANGAU on New Guinea whose nickname came from the fringe of bright red hair surrounding
his otherwise bald head. Lieutenant Commander Feldt, who later described Harris as
“a collection of contradictions,” instructed him to support the evacuation being organized by McCarthy.

Harris’s fastest vessel had a top speed of only eight knots.
“It would have been hard,” Feldt recalled, “to find a more pathetic task force than this haphazard little group of launches.” But the boats were adequate to move the troops away from the clutches of the Japanese. McCarthy directed the men who were weak with malnutrition or illness to be ferried aboard the flotilla while the fittest troops walked. He was constantly in motion during the journey from Pondo, sometimes browbeating demoralized troops to keep them going, other times rushing off to attend to some organizational requirement: canoes for a river crossing, food at the next plantation, radio messages to Port Moresby. By mid-March he had succeeded in moving the Australians approximately two hundred miles to Iboki plantation, an achievement that could not have been accomplished without his boundless energy.

There was ample food at Iboki, and even better, a tireless widow named Gladys Baker who volunteered to treat the sick and wounded men. Bill Collins was among the worst cases, but there were plenty of others who also needed her attention.
“I worked all night and day caring for them and feeding them,” she remembered. “In sixteen days I could only snatch thirteen hours sleep.” At the start of the war, Baker had abandoned her own plantation on Vitu, fifty miles north of New Britain, and moved to a camp upriver from Iboki. She was accompanied by two crewmen from the Burns-Philp vessel
Lakatoi
, which the captain had decided to hide along the coast at Vitu.

Upon learning of the
Lakatoi
, Keith McCarthy sent an armed party to commandeer it, and the timid captain readily agreed to cooperate. The decision was made to keep the
Lakatoi
hidden at Vitu, which would minimize the possibility of its detection by the Japanese. The logistics were therefore more complicated, but the Harris Navy helped out again, successfully ferrying all of the Australians from Iboki to Vitu on the night of March 20.

The next day, the
Lakatoi
sailed for Australia with a total of 214 souls aboard, of whom 162 were members of Lark Force. The remainder consisted of civilians, ANGAU representatives, and crewmen. When the vessel
docked at Cairns a week later, Keith McCarthy slumped in utter exhaustion. He had plenty of company: only six men from Lark Force were still fit for duty.
“All the rest were sick,” recalled Eric Feldt, “debilitated by poor and insufficient food, weakened by malaria and exposure. Most had sores, the beginnings of tropical ulcers, covered by dirty bandages. Their faces were the dirty gray of malaria victims, their clothes in rags and stinking of stale sweat.”

For their extraordinary roles in the successful evacuation, Keith McCarthy, Frank Holland, and Gladys Baker were decorated as Members of the British Empire, and Pip Appel received a Military Cross.

A
NOTHER NOTEWORTHY ESCAPE FROM THE NORTH COAST TOOK CONSIDERABLY
longer to accomplish. Colin McInnes and a
party of soldiers from B Company, including Graham Parsons (who had been shot in the neck and still suffered bouts of hemorrhaging), moved overland from their hideout near Cape Lambert to Rangarere plantation. There, owner John McLean had hidden a thirty-two-foot motor launch named the
Lottie Don
in a shallow creek. Over a period of days, the boat was provisioned with food and fuel and her white hull was camouflaged with dark green paint.

The first attempt to get the
Lottie Don
past the reefs failed on February 15. The next night, McLean himself decided to join the escape attempt and brought along his personal servant, Bombangi, along with a soldier from C Company, Private Norman J. Burgell. A skilled boatman, Mclean urged the party, now numbering eleven, to make for New Ireland rather than risk the long journey to New Guinea. Everyone decided to accept his recommendation, and the
Lottie Don
carried them across St. George’s Channel in the dark without incident. Two days later, as the men worked their way south along the coast of New Ireland, they were met by coastwatchers Alan F. “Bill” Kyle and Gregory N. Benham, who had periodic radio communications with Port Moresby.