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From the Pimple to Scarlet Beach via Dead Man’s Gully

‘Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.’

Douglas MacArthur

Seventy days had passed since Stanley and Gordon had jumped the train from the Atherton Tablelands, where their unit remained in full training. Having embarked on their second homeland AWL before a court martial could be called, they had reached 109 days absent since the end of Liddington leave in March. That’s a touch more than the twenty-one days required for a charge of desertion. It was early July when rumours reached the boys that the battalion was about to leave Australia.

Lilly Livingston had been overjoyed to have the men back by her side, and Gordon Oxman was in no doubt that this was the only place he wished to be. He made it clear with a proposal of marriage that was accepted without hesitation. This sparked the germ of an idea in Stanley’s mind in regard to young Evelyn Lonsdale, even though he was aware that the coupling of a good Church of England girl and a wavering Catholic boy could raise a few eyebrows. (It has always intrigued me that something that is frowned on can at the same time raise eyebrows.) Should both nuptials eventuate, Stanley Livingston, Roy Lonsdale and Gordon Oxman would some day be brothers-in-law as well as brothers in arms.

An official record dated 28 January 1943 entitled ‘Disposal of Personnel Awaiting Trial For A.W.L.’ states that ‘Frequently a member who has been AWL for a substantial period requires hardening training before he is fully fit for front-line duty.’ With rumours circulating of the unit moving north at any moment, any hardening of Gordon and Stanley would have to be swift. But hardening of the men was not the only concern. ‘Where personnel are returned to New Guinea to a unit which is engaged in active operations in a forward area the unit would find it a most inappropriate time to deal with the offenders and very probably in such cases considerable delays would occur . . . Many members awarded substantial periods of detention would have to be returned to the mainland to serve those sentences.’ The question now was whether Stanley and Gordon would even make it overseas at all. At the time that the boys decided to return to active service, army officials were still debating the issue. ‘It is also suggested that it may not be desirable to return to New Guinea a soldier who by reason of the fact that he is under arrest and awaiting trial cannot be regarded as D.P.I. and is not available immediately to reinforce his unit as a fighting member.’

On 13 July at 1130 hours, Pte Gordon Oxman and Pte Stanley Livingston marched through the convict-erected sandstone walls of the Moore Park Road Holding Centre in Victoria Barracks, Sydney, and surrendered. Many before them had received severe sentences for far shorter periods of homeland AWL and the pair had no idea what they would face when they returned to camp. A court martial no doubt, but would their private act of honour result in public dishonour? Was this the end of Pte Stanley Livingston’s military service? After being held in custody, the pair were returned on 26 July at 2330 to their battalion in a tented camp in Dead Man’s Gully, north of Cairns on the coastal strip near Trinity Beach. Now in its final stages of training, the battalion had become a first-class unit adept in all areas of jungle warfare.

The following morning they were awakened by the camp loudspeakers blasting out a song, ‘Beautiful, Beautiful Queensland’. Pte Livingston wondered if this was a part of the training and suggested they would have no problems with the Japs as this tune should have the enemy retreating before the sun rose. The training had been intense, and as the battalion prepared for embarkation it was noted that the men had never been fitter, except perhaps for privates Oxman and Livingston, who had essentially spent the entire training period AWL. Four days later, Stanley and Storky were on the move, but they were not ushered into court. On 31 July 1943 the battalion, including the two privates, embarked from Cairns on SS William Ellery Channing with little fanfare and no loved ones to wave them off. The general population had no idea these troops were heading into action. The troops themselves knew this was the real thing, but they too had no idea where they were heading.

Most bets were on New Guinea. The word among the men was that General MacArthur was intent on making his triumphal return to the Philippines an American-only affair after the Japanese had taken the upper hand and plenty of American POWs earlier in the campaign, and Australians would be left with so-called ‘mopping-up’ duties closer to home. ‘Wither on the vine’ was the phrase used to illustrate MacArthur’s plan to deal with any isolated Japanese troops left behind as the enemy were forced back. This dismissive phrase underestimated the fighting spirit of the Japanese, who had no intention of withering. The Australian troops would require more than mops for the job ahead. Pte H.D. Wells felt the troops were prepared ‘like sheaves of wheat to be fed to the mill—some would be ground to flour’.

Pte Livingston was without question apprehensive as he lay below the deck of SS William Ellery Channing while they approached the daunting terrain of the New Guinea coast. As he rubbed his unshaven chin, he contemplated whether he feared the bayonets of the Japanese as much as the cutthroat razor of Ernie Lonsdale. Or the judgement of a court martial. What would prison be like on a Pacific island? Or would they be sent straight back to the mainland? (Perhaps to Brisbane, where a mutiny in Grovely was brewing.) Would ignominy be involved? To distract himself, he wrote home to Evelyn, describing her eyes as ‘two spoonfuls of the blue Pacific’, a line he’d appropriated from the 1938 movie The Girl of the Golden West starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Unfortunately for Stanley, Evelyn had seen it too—through almond-brown eyes. I guess two spoonfuls of almonds doesn’t quite cut the mustard romance-wise.

After disembarking at Milne Bay on the south-east tip of New Guinea on 4 August, NX20181 Pte Stanley Livingston was held in close arrest until the eleventh, when he and Gordon, as well as other stragglers and assorted deviants who had also been along for the ride, were court-martialled in the field.

From the Australian Military Forces Form of Proceedings for General and District Courts-Martial on 11 August 1943:

NX20181 Pte Livingston, Stanley James of 2/17th Aust Inf Bn being duly sworn makes the following statement: ‘The reason I went AWL for the first time was that my Father died just before I returned from the Middle East. There were a few matters unsettled and I had to finalise them. In the meantime my young sister had a breakdown in health so I stayed on for a while longer until she became a bit better and then came back to camp. The reason I went AWL for the second period was the fact that my sister had another breakdown after I had returned to camp. My mother is not alive.’

Question by the defending officer:

Q: When did you first become aware that your sister had a breakdown?

A: When I returned to camp there was a letter awaiting me from my eldest sister, saying that my young sister had a breakdown and was asking for me.

In the case of Pte Stanley Livingston, the accused was found guilty on both counts of AWL and fined the sum of twenty pounds. On top of this he was ordered to forfeit all ordinary pay for ninety days, a fair price, he reckoned, for lifting the spirits of his little sister and spending precious time with Evelyn.

At the same hearing, Pte Gordon Grant Oxman, himself duly sworn in, made the following statement. ‘The reason I went AWL for the first period was because I was suffering from pleurisy and I reported to Dr Sheehan and he gave me a certificate that I was unfit to return to camp.’ He was then asked what treatment Dr Sheehan had given him, to which he replied, ‘He told me to stop in bed and have plenty of rest.’ For deserting a second time Gordon explained that ‘my mother was ill. She had fallen down some steps.’ It seems Gordon neglected to mention he was desperately in love with his fellow accused’s sister and refused to leave her side. Unlike Stanley, Gordon had chosen not to appeal to the hearts of his superiors, perhaps fearing a more severe punishment for such a basely human and non-military response, although he did manage to get the ‘unwell mother’ angle in there at the last minute. Gordon had all bases covered. The court found that Pte Gordon Oxman was also guilty on both counts, and he too was ordered to forfeit ninety days’ pay. But there was no twenty-pound fine. Instead Pte Oxman was sentenced to ninety days’ punishment in the field. And from one glance at the fields surrounding Milne Bay, it was clear this was not going to be a walk in the park.

Perhaps if he’d played the love-of-his-life card the plea might have garnered more sympathy. As it turns out, neither party received such severe punishments as some of those handed out during the court martials on the mainland in May and June. Perhaps the army was in need of more bodies in New Guinea and the two privates arrived just in time to bulk up the numbers? Whatever the reason, after being given his light sentence Stanley Livingston was free to face the enemy with precisely zero training in jungle warfare. After months of jungle training the unit was described as finely honed, but there were at least two unhoned units now facing an unfamiliar landscape and an unpredictable foe. The only good news for Stanley was that he was a world away from what had become an increasingly alien civilian life. He could drop the act; he was among friends now.

A year earlier, on 25 August 1942, just as Stanley was getting his first taste of battle in the Egyptian desert, the battle of Milne Bay was in progress. The Japanese, flushed with a run of successes at this stage, underestimated the strength of the Australian force defending Milne Bay—for the first time in the Pacific campaign, Allied troops effectively defeated the Japanese and drove them back. The Japanese expansion began to shrink, but it was a long chase back to Japan, and years of jungle fighting lay ahead.

The campsite at Milne Bay was now a mess of barbed wire and bomb craters left over from the previous show. Pte Peter J. Jones remembers his first night at Milne Bay under a one-man mosquito-net frame, camped close to a dry pebbly creek. Conditions were mild and balmy until midnight when monsoonal rain swept in and filled the creek bed with a metre and a half of water. Many men had bedded down in the cosy-looking creek bed the night before. They made it out but lost all their personal items. The drenching monsoonal rains would be a constant daily occurrence in the months ahead. H.D. Wells said the rain was so heavy you could almost slice a path through it with a machete.

Bill Pye was just outside Port Moresby, where the view was not much better:

We went to what they called Pom Pom Park, and it was almost the same as the tablelands, it was just land [with no buildings], and we went off scrounging around and we got galvanised iron and all sorts of things, and again, we finally got tents but it was a bloody silly bloody thing . . . we sat on our arses there, we didn’t have a role at all, and then finally we were sent back to Australia. I was in charge of the rear party, I had trucks and guns and everything else and tents, we had to have all the stuff folded up and you had to take it to ordnance and then they counted it all off and one of my sergeants came back and he says, ‘Hey, do you know what, sir? All those bloody tents that we’re folding up and all the guy ropes, you know what they’re doing with them?’ He said, ‘They count them off then they take them around the bloody back and they burn them!’ It was ridiculous because we had waited so long to get them and they were so precious and then all this bloody rigmarole of having to count them and when they got them they were destroyed.

Bill’s troops assumed this was yet another example of the army ‘buggering people about’. Bill put it more philosophically, using his best military slang: ‘Snafu—situation normal: all fucked up’.

As usual the ORs camped at Milne Bay remained in the dark about the details of their mission. By mid 1943, General Douglas MacArthur was dictating the terms to Australia’s General Blamey despite any reservations Blamey may have had. The mission was to recapture a chunk of the eastern mainland of New Guinea. Milne Bay would be the training area for Operation Postern, an amphibious landing assault on the Huon Gulf, not far from the village of Lae, an area still held by the Japanese. The 9th Division were given the task of capturing Lae. The men would soon learn that they were in training for the first amphibious assault landing by Australian troops since 25 April 1915 at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. After a full-dress rehearsal, casualties were already being reported, although no human enemy had been encountered. Tiny armies of bacteria and small infectious secret agents were already on the march. There were numerous cases of scrub typhus and furunculosis (boils). A thigmotactical response troop of anopheles mosquitos was lying in wait. The only protection against malaria was a daily issue of Atebrine tablets. It was rumoured that the pills could make a man sterile, but the troops took them anyway, and, in the words of Pte Peter J. Jones, ‘eventually got malaria almost to the man’.

Operation Postern began on 2 September 1943, when the 20th Brigade of the 9th Division embarked in convoy for Lae. The convoy of US naval ships left Milne Bay and headed north-west, hugging the coast of New Guinea. Leading the way were two APDs (armoured personnel destroyers), one carrying Pte Stanley Livingston, Pte Gordon Oxman and the rest of the 2/17th, with Roy Lonsdale and the 2/13th Battalion alongside in the other. From their most recent intensive training, the men knew they would be amphibiously landing somewhere, and once at sea they were informed that they were to come ashore on two beaches, codenamed Red and Yellow. The beachfronts were around eight kilometres apart and 25 to 30 kilometres east of Lae. They were to expect a Japanese welcome on Red Beach—in strength. There were no roads between the landing beaches and Lae, just the jungle and five rivers. Their first objective was to capture the beach and penetrate inland.

When night fell the engines were silent. On ‘battle eve’, H.D. Wells sensed a stillness in the men, who talked in low voices. The troops did not sleep well, not unusual given the circumstances. Prior to battle, soldiers often could not hold back the need to urinate—a practice also common in my own profession. First-night jitters can be messy: the performer on one side of the curtain outnumbered by a hostile audience on the other. The final call is made, and the players, bladders and bowels safely evacuated, go out to their potential deaths.

When the warning alarm sounded just before dawn, most were already awake. Allied bombers swept the area as five destroyers, part of the fleet of one hundred vessels, sped forward, turned parallel to the shore, and began their bombardment of the area surrounding Red Beach, clearing a path for the infantrymen. H.D. Wells recalls seeing his fellow troops clambering down scramble nets draped down the side of a destroyer, men being tossed against the sides like prawns being shaken from nets. The men carried tinned rations to last two days, mess gear, a towel, anti-mosquito cream, toilet tools, spare boots, two pairs of socks, a singlet, a shirt, one pair of underpants, a pair of trousers, a mosquito net, groundsheet, blanket, steel helmet, knife, rifles, wound dressings, ammunition, a water bottle and a grenade—all up around 30 kilograms, about half of what they’d carried into El Alamein. Slipping from the net would ensure a swift journey to the sea floor.

LCPs (landing craft personnel carriers) tethered to the ship lurched below. As dawn broke, the men squatted in the barges as they headed to shore. In one barge a 2/13th private, J.W. Holmes, crouched while his sergeant, ‘Bill the Goose’, ‘ordered us to fix bayonets and partially squeeze the split-pins of our grenades’. I imagine J.W. also partially squeezed the last of the urine from his bladder, and to use one of Stanley Livingston’s favourite sayings, in doing so he would not have been Robinson Crusoe. Near the shore the barges cut the engines and then slid towards land, where ramps were dropped and the men tumbled out and raced across eighteen metres of wide black sandy beach and into the thick tangle of jungle. This was to be no rerun of Gallipoli—no shots were fired.

The first wave, including Stanley and Gordon and the recently promoted Lance Corporal Roy Lonsdale, had arrived at their objective relatively unscathed. Others were not so lucky. Within half an hour nine Japanese ‘Betty Bombers’ (Mitsubishi G4M1s) and Zero fighters flew low over the heads of Stanley, Gordon, Roy and J.W. Holmes, machine guns firing at an unknown target. Veterans of the Middle East didn’t fail to notice that a red disc on their underbellies had replaced the black cross of the German bombers. Not far from the boys, H.D. Wells looked up through the trees as the bombers dived towards Red Beach. He watched as they swooped towards the beach, where the men of the 2/24th were exposed. ‘Like large silver birds they sped onward, dropping their eggs of death.’ The American destroyers ensured their visit was short—the planes were scattered, but not before a large number of men from the 2/24th had been killed.

By last light on 4 September, with 7800 troops landed, the advance towards Lae began. While enemy resistance was light, the jungle tested the men. Although the khaki uniforms of the desert were now replaced by jungle green, no-one would have noticed as the men became caked with mud from day one. Within days large numbers of men from local villages arrived in the area to offer support. They were organised into carrying parties. Their knowledge of the jungle was invaluable when it came to obstacles like the Buso River, 50 metres wide and travelling at a rate of twelve knots. Determined enemy fire from the far bank didn’t help matters. By forming a chain holding each other’s rifles, the men made the crossing.

On 16 September, the ‘silent’ 7th Division were the first troops into Lae, approaching from the opposite angle to the 9th. When the 9th arrived not long after, the 7th were happy to gloat that they had won the race to Lae against the ‘glamour’ 9th. What they didn’t find in Lae was any sign of Japanese resistance—the town was there for the taking. The expected battle did not eventuate, but the Japanese were not far away. With the Allies advancing, the Japanese had decided resistance was futile and withdrawn towards the town of Finschhafen. There had been eleven thousand Japanese troops in the Lae-Salamaua area at the time: they lost over two thousand men during the march on Lae, while the 9th Division lost seventy-seven. A dozen of these were from the 2/17th battalion. For most 2/17th soldiers it was a battle against the elements, and dumping their mosquito nets and groundsheets on landing to ease their burden hadn’t made the going any easier. On 20 September, troops were able to rest while their officers decided how they would approach the tightly held area surrounding Finschhafen.

The capture of Finschhafen required another amphibious landing, and the 20th Brigade, comprising the 2/17th, 2/13th and the 2/15th, were selected for the job. General MacArthur was adamant that just one brigade would do the trick, but General Blamey was not so sure. Japanese numbers were unknown, but with the enemy on the run, confidence was at an all-time high among the Allies—so high that this time they were to land in complete darkness. Intelligence reports suggested that they should expect a welcoming party of just three hundred and fifty enemy around the Finschhafen area; as it turned out, the actual enemy numbers in the area were approximately five thousand. The 20th Brigade were to land at Scarlet Beach on 22 September, only six days after the capture of Lae, and advance to Finschhafen. There was no time for rehearsal.

Scarlet Beach was a small indentation between two well-defined headlands approximately 600 metres long and ten metres wide at the far northern mouth of the Song River. The convoy left Lae at 1930 hours on 21 September. Gordon, Stanley and Roy were side by side again throughout the still, quiet night as the convoy was shadowed by enemy aircraft. Once again, Roy Lonsdale and the 2/13th Battalion and Gordon and Stanley in the 2/17th would head to the beach first. The objective for the 2/17th was to capture the northern headland; the 2/13th were to capture the southern headland.

Reveille was at 0245. Unlike the situation at Lae, the troops could not see any sign of the coastline in the darkness. They could barely see the destroyer alongside their own, and worse, they couldn’t see if there was an army waiting for them onshore. The Americans were eager to land before first light and get their ships out of there. The men were served breakfast, or ‘the Last Supper’ as some called it. After breakfast, bladders were evacuated and made safe for landing. After a burst of speed the orders went up: ‘Lower barges, get ready to land, away the landing force.’ Scramble nets were hung over the destroyers’ sides, and the men made their way down to where the landing craft waited. Weighed down with their packs, the ‘prawns’ gripped the net. It was 0440 hours when the sixteen cramped, flat-bottomed barges that made up the first wave headed for shore. Stanley, Gordon and Roy stared ahead, but it was too dark to see the shoreline.

With visibility so low, one of the barges veered left, causing a domino effect. At the same moment, 4500 metres from shore, five American destroyers began bombarding Scarlet Beach, firing over the top of the landing barges into the jungle, immediately drawing return fire directly from the beach. Fear gripped the men in the barges. Scarlet Beach was occupied, and the occupants weren’t happy to see them. H.D. Wells counted at least eight machine guns firing directly at the landing barges. The confusion and the darkness meant most landed far to the left of their intended positions, and the order of landing was jumbled. Some barges were grounded on coral beneath the cliffs, impeding the function of the ramps. Once on the beach, the troops answered the fire. Many now held thoughts of Gallipoli and feared the consequences of a botched landing under enemy fire.

It was only the darkness protecting them now. Many men who had fallen into deeper water had to be dragged out, submerged under heavy packs. With the first wave in disarray the second wave were left vulnerable to attack. Machine-gun fire poured into the landing craft. Once ashore, the men struggled to climb the ten-metre sloping bank. The incline was not expected; it hadn’t shown up on photographs. The Americans fired into the treetops near the shore to clear any snipers, the shells passing just above the Australian troops’ heads. Those who made it into the jungle had to deal with the darkness as each man held on to the muzzle of the rifle of the man behind so as not to become lost. The Japanese holed up in the jungle intended to inflict as much damage as possible with machine-gun fire onto the landing parties before retreating to more strongly held territories. Troops on the beach lay flat on their faces in the sand. Some would never get up. Despite the confusion, by 6.30 a.m. the Japanese were gone. Twenty Australians were killed on Scarlet Beach. Stanley and Gordon survived intact, but Lance Corporal Roy Lonsdale lay flat on his face. He tried to get up, but he had been shot in the leg. Roy had been wounded in the opening act, again.

Sgt Jack Littlewood, also in C Company and a good friend of Stanley Livingston’s, remembers the landing:

Bang! We landed on the rocky point, ramps went down, the port side onto rocks and the starboard into the water. There was a Jap bunker in front of us firing away . . . number 1 Section went on to the rocks, No 2 into the water . . . On landing we went in two hundred yards or so to wait for orders to move which came the next day. The Yanks came and put up their camp. They asked us to breakfast the next morning and put us first in line. What a breakfast of flapjacks and bacon! Bad luck orders came through, we had to move before lunch.

Unlike on the homeland, in the fields of battle the Yanks were a welcome sight, far better equipped than the Australians and more than willing to share. Eddie Emmerson recalls:

The Yanks were good blokes. I remember once in Finschhafen, I got into a depression and there was a group of Yanks there and they had better food than us, and so we could always get a feed, so I was having a feed . . . and a bit of stuff [fire] started coming over the top . . . Any rate, the Yanks were feeding us up well on creamed ham, instead of rotten old bully beef, and suddenly it started to get a bit warmer and then it got red hot and I always remember this one Yank, and he says, ‘Well Aussie, it’s time I went and got my gun.’

Bill Pye was getting on well with the Yanks in Port Moresby:

You could trade with them, some of our cooks were making sly grog and they were selling this to the Americans and we were getting confectionary and cigarettes back, so we were grateful to the Americans for the pictures and their canteen and so on, we were envious of them. And we thought they were a slovenly lot, you know—even though we were up in the tropics, you wore your uniform the way you were supposed to wear it, whereas the Americans, they just put it on to cover up their nakedness, they didn’t give a stuff, they were a very sloppy crowd.

On 23 September the advance down the coast to Finschhafen continued. By the twenty-fourth the task was proving arduous, the men stumbling and sliding down hillsides as they moved across the precipitous terrain towards Finschhafen. Across the Bumi River they faced the enemy, whose heavily protected pillboxes looked formidable. And so did the river. The crossing was not made without casualties. On 29 September they faced the wettest day since landing. The harsh conditions were taking their toll on Pte Gordon Oxman, and the next day he was evacuated with severe asthma. Gordon’s claim at his court martial that he had been suffering from pleurisy was no lie, and the conditions in New Guinea no doubt inflamed the inflammation.

With Roy wounded and Gordon evacuated, Pte Livingston was left heading for Finschhafen without the support of his two best friends, although he still had ‘the Count’ to count on. Despite fierce Japanese resistance, the 2/17th entered Finschhafen on 2 October. Once again, the Japanese made a hasty retreat, leaving maps and equipment. Many of the Australian troops felt jubilant, convinced that the work of the 20th Brigade in New Guinea was all but over. They had captured Finschhafen eleven days after landing awkwardly in the dark on Scarlet Beach. But the Japanese had retreated to regroup again, heading in the direction of Sattelberg, a mountain peak dominating the coastal strip. There were reports from the local population that this position was receiving strong enemy reinforcements. The show wasn’t over yet.