Fear Drive My Feet (3 page)

There is real fascination in this early period of hopeless inferiority in numbers
and equipment.

When the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua the few New Guinea Volunteer Rifles
men retreated to hideouts in the bush or fell back on the township of Wau in the
mountainous goldfields inland. The N.G.V.R. had been civilian residents of New Guinea
– gold-miners, planters, government officials. They were joined by a single Australian
commando unit, the 5th Independent Company, and the two units were grouped under
the name Kanga Force, with its headquarters in Wau. In parties of a few men they
conducted a fantastic campaign of patrolling and harassing the enemy from behind
both Lae and Salamaua. Everywhere they were outnumbered hundreds to one, and their
communications spread out over a hundred miles of tracks.

In the Lae sector they had to face all the text-book conditions of jungle fighting
– dense growth, swamps,
malaria, steamy heat, crocodile-infested rivers, and so on.
In the Salamaua area the main problems were mountainous terrain – probably as rough
as any in the world – dense rainforests, cold and damp.

The enemy was strong enough to have taken Wau, with its important airfield, any time
he chose, but the aggressive activity of our patrols bluffed him for a whole year
and kept Wau in our hands. All this time Kanga Force was short of supplies. There
were no transport aircraft to fly in material from Port Moresby or Australia. Stores
therefore had to be carried round the south coast from Port Moresby to the mouth
of the Lakekamu River by steamer. There they were transhipped to pinnaces and moved
up the Lakekamu to Terapo, where they were transferred into whaleboats and canoes
for a two-day journey upriver to Bulldog. At Bulldog all stores were made up into
fifty-pound ‘boy-loads' and sent off to Wau on the backs of carriers, nearly seven
days' walk over mountains heart-breaking in their height and steepness. To reach
our troops in the Lae forward area another four days' carry was needed.

In sober truth this was probably one of the most extraordinary lines of communication
in military history.

Somehow Kanga Force held on, patrolling, harassing, watching enemy movements. Elsewhere
on the north side of the island, behind Finschhafen, Madang, and Wewak, the position
was even worse. There was no regular military force in the rear of the enemy. Our
only contact was from small special parties, often one white man and a few trusted
natives. They lived – often in conditions of frightful privation and danger – in
the jungles and mountains behind the enemy's coastal bases. At last, in January 1943,
the Japanese decided to make an assault on Wau. Reinforced by a fleet which had
landed troops early in the
same month, they set out from Salamaua and very nearly
achieved their objective.

Our air transport position was now good, but the 17th Australian Brigade, ready to
rush to Wau to stem the advance, was held up in Port Moresby by bad weather. When
they arrived in Wau their planes landed among Japanese fire on the aerodrome. But
they saved Wau and pushed the Japanese back to Salamaua. Within the next seven months,
combined land and sea operations with the Americans gave us back Lae and Salamaua. There
was much hard fighting still ahead in New Guinea – two more years of it – but after
Wau the issue was never really in doubt.

The whole character of the war had now changed. Superbly trained, supplied, and equipped,
our troops attacked an enemy who, though fanatical and tough, was increasingly embarrassed
by ever-weakening communications as our offensive by land, air, and sea mounted
all over the Pacific. Gone was the day of the lonely white man maintaining single-handed
contact with the enemy. By the end of 1943 we went where we pleased, and we went
in force.

This book describes some of the adventures which befell one man in the struggles
of 1942 and 1943 in the savage country of the Lae-Salamaua area.

I

I SAT DOWN
on a shaded boulder, head bent, sweat running in a chain of drops off
my nose and chin; they fell with a slight pat-pat-pat onto the sodden legs of dirty
green short trousers. The rushing water lapped my feet and filled my boots. I wriggled
my toes round inside them, luxuriating in the cool sensation. When I stamped my feet
little geysers of water shot out of the boots and up my shins; that was cool and
pleasant too.

Near at hand, the thin wail of mosquitoes. All over my back, through the sweat-soaked
shirt that clung to the skin, I felt the jabbing of their red-hot needles. It was
no use slapping – it only made you hotter, and made no difference to the mosquitoes.

In the distance, the deeper, though faint, hum of aircraft engines. Where? Madang?
Lae? ‘What's it matter, anyhow? They're too far away to do me any harm,' was my vague
thought.

Wail of mosquitoes, hum of aircraft engines, roar of swirling water, and the constant
pat-pat-pat of dripping
sweat. ‘There's the whole orchestra,' I thought. ‘There goes
the non-stop background music for God knows how many months to come. Let's see just
what sort of a mess I'm in, anyway.'

I ticked the facts off on my fingers as I called them out aloud. It isn't necessarily
the length of time you've been alone that sets you thinking out loud – if the aloneness
is sufficiently intense you start doing it in half a day. The facts came out in a
sort of verbal column, like an inventory or shopping-list:

‘I'm eighteen years old, and I've been in New Guinea a couple of months.

‘A day's walk to the east is Lae, and some thousands of Japanese troops.

‘North, a few hours ahead of me, is the Markham River, and somewhere nearby in the
jungle is Bob's, the camp from which a few hopelessly outnumbered Australian commandos
are carrying on the war against the Japs.

‘Across the Markham, just visible through the trees from where I sit, are the Saruwaged
mountains, so high that you can't see the tops for clouds; among those incredible
blue ranges, somewhere or other in an area of roughly three thousand square miles,
is another lone Australian, Jock McLeod.

‘Object of my journey: to find Jock and place myself under his orders in his dual
job of “governing” some tens of thousands of natives and watching the activities
of our Japanese enemy.'

By this time I felt a lot happier. It was reassuring to hear a voice, even one's
own. Secondly, I seemed able to marshal my facts pretty well. That indicated that
I was sane as well as alive. Napoleon himself, I thought complacently, would have
made his appreciation of the situation in much the same way.

His purpose clearly stated, obviously Napoleon's next step would have been a consideration
of resources and ways and means. Again the verbal list:

‘Resources: Reputedly a fortnight's rations, but really only enough to last a hungry
man about a week.

‘No compass.

‘No maps.

‘One old rifle with a damaged foresight.

‘A thirty-year-old revolver with ten rounds of ammunition.

‘Bottomless, unbounded ignorance of the country.

‘Only the slightest acquaintance with pidgin English, the language needed to converse
with the natives.

‘For assistance, one keen but emotionally unstable native police-boy, whose home
is hundreds of miles away and whose ignorance of this part of the country is paralleled
only by my own.'

I realized that my verbal listing had turned almost imperceptibly into a sort of
double-entry bookkeeping, and that every item so far had fallen on the debit side.

‘All right,' I thought, ‘let's fill in the credit side of the ledger.'

There was a pretty long silence.

‘Well, I'm damned if I'm going to walk all the way back to Wau just to admit I couldn't
find Jock,' I said at last, a little louder than before, and hastily ruled off the
ledger. Even at that stage it seemed as if a lot of entries in those accounts might
be written in red.

It never occurred to me that I'd been given a pretty slim chance of survival by my
superior, the district officer who had sent me on this errand. Nobody thought it
very strange then, least of all myself, to send someone into that country without
such basic necessities as food, maps, and compass. When you are eighteen the fact
that quite stupid
people can play chuck-ha'penny with your life doesn't seem too
unjust. This is partly because the thrill of the adventure is more dangerously intoxicating
than liquor, and you aren't too closely in touch with reality. You stride down the
jungle trail full of confidence, a pioneer, a new David Livingstone; you feel exactly
like your favourite hero from the
Boy's Own Paper
.

The hangover from this kind of binge is unpleasant. It arrives not when you understand
clearly the danger you have been in but when you see how useless your whole mission
was, how futile and purposeless your death would have been, and, above all, when
your sober but aching eye discerns that nobody whose business it might have been
took the least trouble to see that you got even a reasonable chance of living.

But these are afterthoughts, and no such shadows clouded my purpose that hot afternoon
in 1942 as I rested in the shade.

Five natives squatted in another patch of shadow, a few yards downstream. They were
armed with leafy twigs, which they flicked across their shoulders at the clouds of
mosquitoes that hummed round their shiny brown backs. Four were carriers whom I had
borrowed in Wau to carry my bedroll, my rations, and my few odds and ends of personal
possessions. They wore only lap-laps – strips of ragged and faded red cloth tied
in a knot about their middles. As they sat on their heels patiently suffering the
mosquitoes' assaults, they talked quietly in pidgin English and passed from hand
to hand a fat twelve-inch-long cigarette which one of them had rolled out of black
twist tobacco and a sheet of newspaper.

The fifth native was Achenmeri, my so-called police-boy. In peacetime, patrol officers
working in the bush had found the assistance of several well-trained members of
the
native constabulary invaluable; now, in time of war, they were indispensable. Yet
here was I sent wandering through the jungles of the largest island on earth with
one partly trained police recruit!

I studied him carefully as he sat there smoking. His dark-brown face was thin and
parrot-like, almost as if his head had been squashed flat between two boards. His
body was as skinny as a skeleton. No matter how much he ate, he looked half-starved.
His upper arms were adorned by keloid scars in the shape of grotesque formalized
faces with gaping mouths. They were the result of wounds inflicted as part of a ritual
that was a common practice in the Sepik River country, where his home village was.
The fact that he had become a constable of police tickled Achenmeri's vanity enormously.
He was particularly proud of his uniform – khaki shorts, shining brass-buckled belt,
and khaki peaked cap with a gleaming badge. The cap, which perched precariously on
top of his woolly hair, he was in the habit of removing, to turn self-consciously
round and round in his hands, lost in silent admiration of a piece of property so
magnificent and carrying with it such prestige. As his fingers were never too clean,
the new cap was little more than a greasy rag before we had been on the track many
days. The rifle, too, added to his already vast conceit. All day long he fondled and
patted it, and he spent every spare second rubbing off imaginary specks of rust.
I discovered that he had never fired a shot out of it, and was really rather scared
by the weapon. He knew which end the bullet might be expected to emerge from – wasn't
there a hole there for the purpose? – but little else. His anxiety to display his
devotion to duty was pathetic. My slightest order was the signal for shuffling and
stamping, for saluting and slapping of the rifle-butt, and his dark eyes would roll
wildly as he hissed, ‘Yessir!
Yessir!Yessir!' He might have been a good musical-comedy
figure, but was hardly a source of comfort and inspiration to a young greenhorn on
his first patrol into territory that was wild and largely unexplored as well as being
controlled in all its approaches by the Japanese.

A faint breeze just stirred the green foliage that grew like a wall on either side
of the river. From the sun I guessed that it was about three o'clock. The meagre information
I had been given suggested that we should reach Bob's camp shortly before dark on
this the third day. It was time we moved on.

‘Achenmeri!' I called.

Instantly there was a scuttering of pebbles and a fumbling as he sprang to attention
and saluted.

‘Yessir!'

‘Talkim four-fella you-me walkabout now.'

The other four grinned to each other at my halting order in pidgin English. Natives,
and white men who had mastered the language, spoke so rapidly that the words seemed
to pour forth in an almost incomprehensible torrent. I was trying desperately to
acquire fluency, and listened keenly to every word the boys said, though understanding
but a small part of it. One of the few useful tips I had been given by the district
officer was that pidgin was a real language with rules and grammar of its own, and
must be learnt as such. He was one of the best pidgin speakers in the Territory himself,
and emphasized that it was not merely a matter of bastardizing English by throwing
in a few ‘fellas' and ‘belongs'. He pointed out that many Europeans who had lived
for years in New Guinea had never realized this fact, and their ability to converse
with natives easily and accurately was limited accordingly.

The carriers were standing up now, stretching their back muscles before lifting their
loads. The proprietor of
the long cigarette put the six-inch remnant behind his ear,
and in a few moments we set off single file along the narrow muddy track, my iron
patrol-box swinging from side to side, lashed to a pole which two boys carried on
their shoulders between them.