Target: Rabaul (48 page)

Captain Richard Ian Skinner and Leslie John Stokie, both of whom used their middle names, had many years of experience in New Britain—Skinner as a patrol officer, Stokie as a plantation manager. Their party headed for the northwestern Gazelle Peninsula, hoping to establish an observation post near a volcano named The Father.

Another former patrol officer, Capt. John J. Murphy, headed south for the enemy-occupied area near Gasmata airdrome. With him went a cadre of native helpers and two capable soldiers: Sgt. Lambert T. W. “Bert” Carlson of “M” Special Unit, and Lt. Francis A. “Frank” Barrett. The latter was a veteran of combat in North Africa, the Mediterranean (where he was captured and escaped), and on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea.

After the parties went their separate ways, the Cape Orford camp settled back to its quiet routine. The peace lasted only a short time, however, before the Allies commenced the daylight bombing campaign against Rabaul on October 12. From then on, the skies above New Britain and Saint George’s Channel became far more active—as did Figgis and all the coastwatchers.

ACCORDING TO THE latest directive from Port Moresby, Murphy’s party was to be behind Gasmata by November 1, which gave them almost four weeks to reach their destination and set up an observation post. For the first fourteen days his party traveled with Wright’s group as far as Porlo, a village south of Jacquinot Bay. Following the island’s convoluted coast, they had walked more than seventy miles, and Murphy had to cover approximately eighty more to reach the objective. All along the route, from village to village, runners obtained the cooperation of the village headmen. All they needed to do was invoke the name of Golpak, and the officials fell in line with pledges of support. A few days out of Porlo, Murphy decided to abandon the coastal foot trails and “Jap roads” in favor of traveling by night in outrigger canoes. This was faster and easier than humping heavy packs up and down the jungle trails, but unfortunately the party outdistanced their prearranged warning network.

One evening, a hundred miles from Cape Orford, Murphy’s party waited for moonrise before proceeding around an enemy camp in their canoes. At midnight, the party heard machine-gun fire nearby. A quick recon at daybreak revealed that a PT boat had shot up the enemy camp, destroying a barge and floatplane and killing five Japanese. The local natives, who had not received the “jungle telegraph”
regarding Murphy’s arrival, turned hostile and informed the Japanese. Moving quickly down the coast, the would-be coastwatchers were betrayed by another native. On October 24, a Japanese patrol surrounded the Australians’ hiding place and machine-gunned the brush, killing Barrett without a fight; Murphy and Carlson fled with only their weapons and the clothing on their backs.

Moving inland, knowing that the cordon was closing, Murphy and Carlson evaded the Japanese for nearly a week. From his stint as a patrol officer, Murphy knew Pidgin English better than any white man, and had in fact had published a comprehensive dictionary that year. But his knowledge of the singsong language was of little use now. Hunger forced him and Carlson toward the coast, where they hoped to find native gardens. They met islanders who took them to a nearby village, and this time the headman himself informed the Japanese. The next morning, November 1, Murphy and Carlson had just forded a small river when another enemy patrol surrounded them. Diving into the brush, the two Aussies escaped briefly, but as they tried to recross the river farther upstream, they were caught in the open. Enemy soldiers fired, killing Carlson and wounding Murphy in the right wrist. Knowing the jig was up, he floated downstream to the waiting Japanese.

The next day, his wound was treated in Gasmata. Then Murphy went to Rabaul by submarine on November 3. There, handed over to the 81st Naval Garrison Unit, he joined an estimated twelve civilian internees, four captured Australian airmen, and five American POWs. Murphy’s days as a coastwatcher were over. His personal struggle had just begun.

AT HIS CAPE Orford camp, Figgis enjoyed several “kills.” Although there was never any official recognition, the RAAF often acted on his reports of barges tucked away in camouflaged hideouts during the daytime. His reward was the pyre of black smoke rising from the shoreline whenever the Beaufighters torched another barge. Figgis also reported on the daily passage of a Type 0 reconnaissance seaplane (Aichi E13A “Jake”), which overflew the cape every day for months, its timing so predictable that he gave it a nickname: “Chaffcutter Charlie.” The Beaufighters eventually targeted it, too, and Figgis was delighted to watch the twin-pontoon floatplane fall in flames. Next a twin-engine bomber took up the daily reconnaissance route. Figgis called it in for several straight days, until four RAAF Kittyhawks shot it down.

The loss of two reconnaissance planes in the area drew attention. “The Japs had become suspicious,” Figgis recalled. “One day a small ship bristling with radio masts and aerials appeared … . We immediately shut our transmitter down and watched the ship sail up and down the coast. Eventually it headed back towards Rabaul, and as we did not see it again, we resumed our normal radio reporting.”

The long period of waiting for the Allied advance to reach New Britain ended dramatically with the aerial offensive against Rabaul. From October 12 onward, Figgis observed bomber formations and their P-38 escorts as they winged up Saint
George’s Channel. Within days, he began collecting additional mouths to feed. Aiding downed airmen was one of his most important responsibilities, but he found it unexpectedly challenging.

The first two Americans, brought in on the same day, arrived from different directions. Lieutenant Migliacci and Staff Sergeant Henderson, who had survived ditching their B-25 off Cape Orford on October 18, drifted for hours before coming ashore four miles apart. Golpak arranged for their delivery to Figgis two days later. Henderson had been shot through the shoulder, and despite Johnson’s experience with bush medicine, the flier’s condition worsened. Although wary that the increase in activity would alert the Japanese, Figgis decided to stay put until Henderson recovered sufficiently to travel.

ELSEWHERE AROUND NORTHERN New Britain, the new coastwatching parties delivered by the submarine
Grouper
made an immediate impact on other downed aviators. One was Hargesheimer, still alive more than four months after bailing out over the north coast of New Britain.

Having landed in a vast eucalyptus forest on June 5, Hargy spent the first month utterly alone. A clear stream provided fresh water, so his greatest challenge was finding food. He wore a sidearm, and his chute pack contained a machete, matches, two chocolate bars, and a survival guide titled
Friendly Fruits and Vegetables
. With these and a few other items—mostly his wits and patience—Hargesheimer stayed in reasonably good health. He lasted ten days on the chocolate, but couldn’t find a way out of the dense jungle. Finally he started a fire (using every damp match in the process) and roasted some snails. Days later he stunned a fish in a streambed with a shot from his automatic. Using a green stick for a spit, he enjoyed a feast that night. While hunting edible berries one day, Hargy forgot to tend his fire and was panicked when he returned to his campsite and found the coals “as dead as a gravestone.” That was the closest he came to despair. A few moments later, when he jabbed at the embers with a stick, he saw a puff of smoke. Slowly, almost hyperventilating, he coaxed the fire back to life. “The experience,” he later wrote, “left me with a thorough understanding of why people had worshipped fire.”

On July 6 Hargesheimer came across a party of natives. One of them, a local headman, carried a generic note left behind by John Stokie, who had helped rescue three Americans during his stint on New Britain as a plantation manager. The note promised that the islanders were trustworthy, and indeed the tribe housed and fed Hargesheimer in their village for the next three months. He had practically gone native by the time an excited runner brought in a fresh note in November, asking him to accompany the bearer. It was signed by Capt. Ian Skinner, AIF. Several days later, Hargesheimer was taken to the camp run by Skinner and Stokie. After nearly five months in the jungle, he was overjoyed to join the Australians, but news that the coastwatchers had just arrived tempered his celebration. There were no plans for an evacuation. That event was still months in the future.

Hargesheimer was not the only longtime survivor on New Britain. Sergeant Manuel, one of two men who escaped from the first B-17 shot down by a night fighter, had parachuted into Saint George’s Channel on May 21—two weeks before Hargesheimer hit the silk. Legs wounded by shrapnel, Manuel spent five days alone before encountering islanders. He spent only one night in their village after they made it clear that they would inform the Japanese of his presence. Striking out on his own, Manuel had many experiences similar to Hargesheimer’s, though his prized meal was a large snake, and his isolation did not last as long as Hargesheimer’s. Taken in by a more sympathetic tribe, Manuel remained inactive for six long weeks while his wounds healed.

In the second half of August, Manuel spent a couple of months venturing out on organized reconnaissance hikes with several natives. Some of the trips brought him close to Vunakanau and Tobera airdromes, where he witnessed the start of the bombing offensive on October 12. Soon thereafter he heard from the islanders about the landing of mastas from a submarine. A few weeks later, native runners put him in contact with Roberts, who was making his way toward Kokopo.

Manuel continued to go out on recons with the islanders, “his boys,” as he called them. On November 6, he came across the first American he had seen in nearly six months. Owen Giertsen, a P-38 pilot who had ditched his shot-up fighter in Wide Bay four days earlier, wore nothing but shoes, socks, and a pair of white skivvies. They set off together, moving slowly, and in three days walked into Roberts’ camp.

The jungle network also helped locate Carl Planck, who had ditched his P-38 on November 2 after colliding with an A6M Zero. Islanders took him into their village, where Ed Czarnecki, shot down on October 23, joined him. Islanders then brought the two fighter pilots into Roberts’ camp on November 16. “We were four mighty happy Americans in that Aussie camp,” Manuel later explained. “I had my boys build a large hut for us. They made four beds out of the burlap sacks in which the supplies were dropped to us. Now all we had to do was wait a few days until a submarine popped up to take us home. That’s what we thought, anyway.”

But of course Roberts and his coastwatching team had just arrived. The Americans would have to wait almost three months for the opportunity to evacuate. During that time, due to the size of the party and their proximity to Kokopo and Vunakanau, the coastwatchers and Americans had to pack up and move the camp three times. It was a time of frustration, particularly after Roberts’ health began to deteriorate, but the combined group succeeded in staying a few steps ahead of the Japanese.

THE SITUATION WAS not much different for Figgis, once the bombing campaign got underway. By the end of October the Japanese were pressuring the local natives. Golpak was forced into hiding and Japanese patrols moved near the cape almost continuously. No one betrayed the camp, but the islanders, no longer willing to endure the strain of Japanese interrogation, retreated into the bush.

Additional bad news arrived on October 31, when the natives traveling with Murphy’s party returned to Cape Orford and told Figgis what had happened. Convinced that the Japanese would soon move against him, Figgis decided the camp was no longer tenable. His job had not changed, however. Within weeks, the invasion of New Britain would commence with landings at Arawe and Cape Gloucester. Figgis needed to find a good position from which to support those landings. Headquarters at Port Moresby agreed that the camp should be moved well inland. Even if he could no longer observe the sea lanes, Figgis could provide advance warnings of enemy air attacks. On November 21, with Henderson feeling well enough to travel, Figgis and his party vacated the camp.

AS LUCK WOULD have it, Krantz, Case, and Miller washed up near Cape Orford that day. The natives who informed them that a masta was nearby sheltered the Americans in their houses overnight. It was a beautiful village, with the houses up on stilts, as tranquil as a painting. The fliers were impressed when villagers showed then the wreckage of a Betty bomber—and boasted that they had killed two of the crew.

Daybreak brought a scare. Hearing a commotion in the village, Krantz looked seaward and saw four barges, “full up to the gunnels with Japs,” approaching the nearby beach. The three fliers quickly left. “I thought we were being turned in,” said Krantz. “I saw the women all running with their kids, leaving the village, and I really thought we had been betrayed. The
luluai
was with us and we took off with him. We left in a hurry.”

After receiving the all clear, the Americans ascended the steep, rocky slopes up to the coastwatchers’ camp. They found four well-made native-style huts, with a bright red cloth still covering the table in the main house. A handful of trustworthy “boys,” left behind to guard the site, explained in Pidgin English that the Australians had “gone long bush.” Still, the fliers were delighted to find a cornucopia of goods. They ate bully beef and hardtack “with great relish,” then explored the storehouse, finding stocks of atabrine, quinine, sulfa power, hand grenades, and large quantities of 9mm ammunition. There were still two cases of canned corned beef, some emergency rations, tea, rice, and a variety of dehydrated foods. The fliers stayed for a week, eating well. On November 30, heeding reports from the islanders that the situation was getting dangerous, Krantz and his crew moved into the jungle.

The Americans had no idea where Figgis and his party were, but at daylight the next morning, Krantz saw a sight that stirred his soul:

I’m never going to forget it as long as I live. I was out on a rise and heard the roar of engines. All of a sudden a B-25 came right over, and its turret was swinging. I followed the sound of the engines and looked toward the horizon, and they were making a drop. I could see the parachutes coming
out of the bomb bay. It was quite a ways off from where I was standing, but when the B-25 banked away, I saw the chutes open. I was so damn proud to be an American that day, thinking, here I am in this dire circumstance, and this B-25 is my country. It was just remarkable.