Fear Drive My Feet (39 page)

The 6th Independent Company, one of our crack commando units, was to perform this
task. I was to go in with them, organize a native labour force from the local inhabitants
for carrying supplies and for aerodrome construction, and assist with reconnaissance
and native intelligence.

An American flew me up the Markham in a Piper Cub. A high wind was tearing down the
valley, and we made such slow progress that at times we seemed to be hanging motionless
above the jungle. When we reached the rendezvous beside the Leron River a crashed
DC-3, flat on the kunai, showed where the 6th Company had already landed.

The pilot found it difficult to put the light craft down in the gusty wind, and a
driving rain made visibility bad. When at last we touched down, after many attempts,
there was less than an hour to dark.

‘Good luck, buddy!' bawled the pilot, and he took off again, back to Nadzab, whisked
out of sight in a moment by the powerful wind behind him.

The 6th Company men were huddled under groundsheets and one-man tents dotted all
over the kunai. Their stores and ammunition were also scattered in heaps among the
grass. Portion of the unit had already moved forward a few miles to Sangan, on the
road to Kaiapit. I ran after them, across the flat country, and managed to collect
enough Sangan kanakas to bring to the Leron to carry the ammunition and stores forward.
We made several furtive trips by torchlight, and had all the cargo in Sangan before
dawn.

I collapsed with fever in Sangan, and remember nothing until the following night.
I had made my bed under a native house, and one of the 6th Company men shone a torch
under the mosquito-net.

‘Sorry to wake you up, mate,' he whispered, ‘but there's a Yank called Tex blown
in. Says he wants to see you. Do you know him?'

There behind him was Tex, a grin all over his red face.

‘Looks like they're going to need us,' he said. ‘Going to be a powerful lot of airstrips
needed between here and Madang. I'll find the drome sites, you work the natives.'

I shook hands with him, but it was hard to find any
thing to say. Dinkila, who had
accompanied him, told me severely to get back to bed. His expression said clearly
enough: See what a mess you get yourself in when I'm not there to look after you!

Kaiapit was taken in the next two days, after a fierce and bitter battle by the 6th
Independent Company assisted by some troops of the Papuan Infantry. For the loss
of ten men they killed about two hundred of the enemy. In the end they sent him reeling
back with a bayonet-charge when their ammunition was almost spent. Tex went into
action with them.

I lay under the house while the battle raged, too weak to move, whether forward with
our troops, or backwards to escape the Japs had they won the day. While I shivered,
the sweat ran out the end of the bed-sail, drip, drip, drip upon the ground.

It took me nearly two days more to hobble yard by yard to Kaiapit, leaning on a stick
like an old man, and sometimes holding on to Dinkila. We had to pick our way between
the Japanese dead, who still littered the ground. Bloated by the tropical sun, some
of the corpses had burst right out of their uniforms. Near Kaiapit some of them had
been hastily buried. From one of the shallow graves, at the side of the track, a
stiffened hand and forearm reached over the path.

I watched, propped with my stick against the trunk of a palm-tree, as a number of
soldiers passed. With macabre, unsmiling humour, which some say is typical of the
A.I.F., they bent down one by one and shook the hand of death. ‘Good on you, sport,'
each one said gravely to the hand as he moved on towards…perhaps just as rough a
grave of his own.

Kaiapit Mission House, on an eminence above the kunai plain, looked to me just like
Boana Mission. Tex helped me onto its wide veranda, and got some food, but any attempt
to swallow even a mouthful made me vomit.

Later in the day a doctor came, who said that I must be evacuated to Nadzab in the
morning.

‘Nadzab nothing, doc!' Tex drawled. ‘I'll have a special plane take him straight
to Port Moresby.'

I dropped off to sleep on the floor of the veranda, Dinkila squatting on his heels
nearby, watching.

Next day, with Tex's help, I walked down to the strip. On the way we passed a Japanese
soldier lying mortally wounded beside the track on a stretcher. He had been revived
by one of our medical people, and was now being badgered for information by an interpreter
and some intelligence men. As far as I could see he was saying nothing.

As I looked at his face, wasted with fever and suffering, I suddenly felt more akin
to him than to the Australians who would not let him die in peace. His eyes, wonderfully
large and soft, met mine. In that brief second I hoped he could read the message
in my face.

I realized then that I did not really hate the Japanese – that I did not hate anyone.
I realized that war accomplishes nothing but the degradation of all engaged in it.
I knew that Les Howlett's death had been in vain, that the loneliness of spirit and
suffering of body I had forced myself to endure had been to no end, and that the
selfless devotion of my native companions had been, in the final analysis, purposeless.

I said goodbye to Tex and Dinkila. The doors slammed shut between us, and the plane
took off.

We turned up the valley of the Wampit River, flying very low. At Kirkland's the kunai
was already silently covering the place. At Bob's the jungle creepers would, in
a few months, drag the houses down and smother them with their weight.

In a year there would be nothing – no mark or vestige to show where they had been.

As we flew across the land which had soaked up the sweat of two years, I could drag
one mouldy crust of comfort and of hope from the events of 1942 and 1943:

Man is very brave. His patience and endurance are truly wonderful. Perhaps he will
learn, one day, that wars and calamities of nature are not the only occasions when
such qualities are needed.

*
I am indebted to Mr Gavin Long, General Editor of the
Official War History
, for making
known to me the existence of the two extracts quoted above, and for allowing me to
see the text of a volume of the
Official War History—
David Dexter's
The New Guinea
Offensives
.

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