Eyewitness (21 page)

Peter Ryan

The Japanese first landed on the north coast of New Guinea near Lae and Salamaua on March 8th, 1942. Kanga Force – a handful of volunteers of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles reinforced by the 2/5
^th
Independent Company, had the job of patrolling and reconnoitring in the area, from a base inland at Wau. The Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) of the Australian Army had taken over from the civilian governments of Papua and New Guinea in early 1942 and had the job of showing the flag to civilians in those parts of the country inland from Lae that the Japanese had not occupied. All were supplied up the Bulldog Track, an even more extraordinary trek than the Kokoda Track. War correspondent Osmar White, who walked it with Damien Parer on a mission to supply the commandos of the 2/5
^th
at this time, called the country the ‘spilled loads of heaven’. North of the Markham River was the Huon Peninsula and the equally monstrous scenery of the Finisterre and Saruwaged Ranges.

Here Peter Ryan, ANGAU Warrant Officer, makes an inventory of the positives and negatives as he saw them in 1942.

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.

Then:

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 …

Now read on …

Fear Drive My Feet
was published in 1959, with a new edition in 1997.

Peter Ryan was director of Melbourne University Press from 1962 to 1988 and edited the great
Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea
(1972).

*

It was nearly twelve o’clock that night before we finished laying our plans for the next few crucial days. The Japanese seemed to be everywhere, so our only hope was to move with all possible speed. Three rivers flow into the Markham from the north side – the Leron, the Irumu and the Erap. To have followed the Leron down would have taken us within range of enemy patrols near Kaiapit, the district where Harry Lumb had been killed. The Erap would have led us down close to Lae, and, after my frequent trips on the river the previous year, the enemy would be almost certain to be watching it. Between the two lay the Irumu, flowing into the Markham not far from Chivasing, where we had begun our patrol a couple of months earlier. We decided to move as quickly as possible down this river, travelling mainly at night and avoiding, if possible, all contact with the natives.

We left Ewok at three in the morning, our immediate object being to get over the divide between the Leron and the Irumu rivers to Bogeba village. We arrived in Bogeba almost 28 hours later, having neither eaten nor slept in that time. When I came to write the official report of the patrol I found that I had no real recollection of this part of the journey, but only a succession of impressions, unrelated in time or space: impressions of villages where we sneaked around in the dark, not waking the inhabitants, of rivers which almost swept us away, of legs which stumbled on, unknowing and uncaring, all feeling gone. I am sure that half the time we walked with our eyes shut from exhaustion.

At Bogeba we rested for a day and a night and made several good meals on native foods. The kanakas seemed friendly, and said that though the Japanese had never been to the village they knew there were many of them moving about the country. They introduced us to a native of Siang village, farther down the river, who said he could guide us along the Irumu to the Markham, avoiding all the tracks. This seemed a good plan, and we moved to a hamlet a few miles downstream to wait for nightfall. We set up the radio here for what was to prove the last time, asking Port Moresby to inform our forward posts along the Markham that we could be expected either next day or the day after. After a journey such as this had been, we wanted to run no risk of being shot by our own men, which could easily have happened, particularly if we crossed at night.

Just at sunset we moved off, leaving behind everything but light packs and our arms. We followed the Irumu, walking in the water for the most part, for though very swift it was not deep. The valley was a very shallow one in the Markham plain, about a thousand yards wide, and the stream wandered haphazardly from one side to the other, in several channels. As there was a bright moon, we had no difficulty in seeing our way. The country was as flat as a table, and covered with kunai- and cane-grass. Dotted here and there were weird black sentinel-like stumps, the remains of dead palms.

We were so tense and keyed up with the strain of this final stage that the slightest movement or noise in the shadows made us start, but we felt no weariness, though we walked without rest all night.

About three o’clock in the morning, as we splashed through the muddy water, we heard a rooster crowing, and then the howl of a dog. The sounds came from the bush on the right-hand side of the river, and we knew we must have passed Teraran village. So far, everything was going smoothly, and another eight or nine miles should find us at the Markham. However, the Irumu started to subdivide into numberless tiny streams, and finally petered out altogether in a tangled swamp of cane-grass, sago-palms and cruel thorned vines. Our native from Siang announced himself baffled too. It had not been like this years before, he said nervously, and then, afraid we would vent our illconcealed wrath on his person, he took to his heels and vanished into the night.

For a while we tried to cut our way through, moving on a rough compass-bearing. It was a scene I shall never forget: a dozen or so natives and two white men hacking like fury in the moonlight at the wall of jungle ahead of them, knee-deep in the slime, swearing, grunting, whimpering occasionally as bare feet encountered the savage thorns of the sago-palms.

When dawn broke we found that our progress had been disappointingly slow. Given time, we could have cut a pathway to the Markham, but we had no food and were near exhaustion. We felt our strength would never be enough to carry us through. After consultation with Kari and Watute we retraced our steps to the main Markham road, which we had crossed a couple of hours earlier. There were a number of prints of the enemy’s well-known black rubber boots, but none seemed to be of recent origin. We followed the road, scouts well out ahead, as far as the old Wawin rest-house, and then turned south down the track up which we had come on our way out – two months ago to the day.

The track showed no footprints, and to judge by the way the grass was growing on it had not been used for some time. All the way to Chivasing we saw no people, and the hamlet halfway was deserted. We were weary, sore-footed and aching all over, but we kept kidding ourselves along with the thought of the cup of tea we would soon be drinking at Kirkland’s, and of the European foods we would eat there. ‘Not far now,’ we would murmur each time we crossed a creek.

The hot Markham sun blazed down on us and the sweat squirted from our bodies. The dust from the dry track rose slowly round our feet, sticking to our wet skins. We did not care. The end was in sight.

By about three o’clock we had reached the large coconut-grove at the edge of the village, and looked up longingly at the cool green nuts. A crowd of Chivasing natives, with the tultul and doctor-boy, appeared suddenly at the other end of the grove and advanced to meet us. Some of them climbed the palms to get green coconuts for us to drink. We sat in the shade and let the cool fluid trickle down our dustfilled throats.

‘Are there any Japanese about?’ we asked at length, our inevitable question, which we hoped would be for the last time. There was a silence. The steaming quietness of the Markham afternoon descended.

‘Are there any Japanese about?’ we repeated sharply.

‘No-got, master! Me-fella no lookim some-fella Japan!’ The answer came readily enough this time.

‘Better make sure,’ Les said. ‘We’ll send Arong into the village to have a look round.’

We called to Arong, who had had a drink, to move into the village. He was wearing no uniform, and there was nothing to mark him out from the Chivasing kanakas, so he would be safe enough even if there were Japanese there. While he was away we tried to make conversation with the natives. They seemed strangely uneasy, but they said they had expected us and had the canoes all ready to take us down to Kirkland’s. We wondered whether we imagined the tension in the atmosphere – whether the long strain now ending had made us oversuspicious. We were cheered when Arong came back a few minutes later with a smile on his face, to say that he had taken a look round the village and that all was as it should be. Then, Arong leading the way, and Les behind him, a few paces ahead of me, we walked into the village. Most of our boys stayed in the grove, still drinking coconut milk.

As we neared the clear space at the centre of the village there was a sudden burst of machine-gun fire and a volley of rifle-shots from one of the houses. Bullets kicked up the dirt all round us. We both made a dash for the creek that runs through the village, and as I jumped down into it there was another burst of fire from the house. Les gave a cry, fell, and lay still. Japanese – there seemed to be dozens of them – then jumped down from the houses and rushed over towards me. I lost my footing and fell into the water, got my clothes and Owen gun tangled in a submerged branch, and finally struggled across the creek and into the bush minus Owen gun and most of my shirt. Bullets were clipping the leaves all round me. I did not go far, but buried myself deep in the mud of a place where the pigs used to wallow, with only my nose showing, and stayed put.

For a few minutes all was quiet, but soon I heard the Japanese calling out to each other, and their feet sucking and squelching in the mud as they searched. I could not see, so I did not know exactly how close they were, but I could feel in my ears the pressure of their feet as they squeezed through the mud. It occurred to me that this was probably an occasion on which one might pray, and indeed was about to start a prayer. Then something stopped me. I said to myself so fiercely that I seemed to be shouting under the mud, ‘To hell with God! If I get out of this bloody mess, I’ll do it by myself!’ It was no doubt a childish sort of pride, but I experienced a rather weary exhilaration that, terrified and abject, lying literally like a pig in the mud, I had not sufficiently abandoned personal integrity to pray for my skin to a God I didn’t really believe in.

I lay there motionless, buried alive in mud and pig-filth, feeling, or imagining, creatures of unspeakable loathsomeness crawling over me in the slime. The voices became fainter and the squelching footsteps died away. I eased my face out, blinked the mud away from my eyes, and carefully pulled some leaves over my head in case the searchers returned.

For half an hour or so there was no sound. Then several natives walked round the outskirts of the village calling out to me. I heard their voices clearly, just a few yards away through the bushes:

‘Master, you come! Japan all ’e go finish!’

I did not move. They continued to call out encouragingly for a quarter of an hour. Then one of them said, apparently to someone near by, ‘’Em ’e no hearim talk belong me-fella. I think ’em ’e go finish long bush.’

The Japanese started talking to each other again after that, having given up hope of capturing me, it seemed, now that the trick had failed. I stayed in the same place until it was nearly dark. The mosquitoes were swarming on my head so thickly, and buzzing so loudly, that I thought they would give away my position. Then I crept out of the mud, wiped the mud off pistol and compass, and began to break bush, moving on a line south and west, which, as I remembered the map, should at last bring me to the bank of the Markham, some distance upstream from Chivasing, more or less opposite the mouth of the Watut River.

In a couple of years packed with bad journeys, that night’s travel is the worst I can remember. Near the village it was essential to move with absolute quietness, no easy matter when the rows of hooked thorns on the vines caught at me continually and one hand was always occupied holding the compass. It was no use trying to free myself from the vines – as fast as one row of barbs was detached another took hold. It was easier, if more painful, to let them tear straight through the flesh. After the bush came the pit-pit – cane-grass eight or nine feet high, growing so thickly as to make a solid wall. It was impossible to part it and walk through it, and I was forced to push it over by leaning on it, and crawl over the top on all fours. It had leaves like razor-blades, which hurt terribly on bare legs; mine were soon dripping with blood from the cuts. Worse, the flattened grass left a trail a blind man could have followed. Though I had my compass handy the grass blocked all view of any object to sight on, and there were no stars, for it was a cloudy night. The two luminous points on the instrument danced and swung before my eyes. Sometimes I had to pause, close my eyes and force my nerves to calmness before I could see properly. Every time I tried to march by sense alone, I found myself going wrong.