LIFE AND DEATH ON SHAGGY RIDGE
The capture of Prothero One was only the end of one battle; another was at hand to save the wounded. At the forefront were the stretcher bearers and medical teams from the 2/5th Field Ambulance. As it would require two days to get any casualties from Prothero back to the main dressing station at Guy’s Post, an advanced dressing station was established at about the halfway point to hold those patients unable to be immediately evacuated. On 19 January an advance detachment made the eight-hour trek to Geyton’s Post to set up the dressing station on a broad ledge above the eastern bank of the Mene River. The site had a good water supply and was also under tree cover, safe from air observation. The field ambulance commander, Lieutenant Colonel Alex MacIntosh, had asked Sergeant Lloyd Tann that morning if he was feeling fit. ‘Fit as a Mallee bull, sir,’ Tann replied and he was on his way. On 20 January a surgical ward was built from half tents on a framework erected by native workers. A small medical ward was also built using a half tarpaulin and four more wards were added over the next two days.1
There were two surgeons attached to the 2/5th Field Ambulance and one of them, Captain Clarence Leggett, went to Geyton’s Post. He was accompanied by his theatre assistants Privates Norm Ely and Joe Hughes while an anaesthetic section under Lieutenant James Rutherford was also attached to the surgical team. The initial assessment was that there would only be a few casualties held at the dressing station and they would only be held overnight.2 ‘They had intended to do not much more than advanced first-aid, just patch them up enough to get back to Guy’s Post,’ Lloyd Tann said. However, most of the patients treated had severe wounds and were not able to go back to Guy’s Post; more beds would have to be built for the wounded as they arrived.3
A 24-man bearer section from the field ambulance under Lieutenant Charles Jacobs would also be attached to the 2/12th Battalion for the attack on Prothero. In open country there would be four men to a stretcher but carrying a stretcher down Shaggy Ridge could require up to sixteen men. Normal army stretchers were useless in such steep terrain so the bearers would make their own using half blankets. Colonel Bourne agreed to have 100 half blankets taken forward to Canning’s Saddle for that purpose. The bearers would cut saplings for the 4-metre long side rails, which enabled a number of bearers to grab each corner. Each bearer would carry a ball of twine and two bagging needles to attach the half blankets, which were allowed to sag so as to keep the patient in. The patients were also usually tied into the stretcher.4
At 8.30 am on 20 January the bearer party left the dressing station at Geyton’s Post and headed up the Mene River to Canning’s Saddle where the pioneers had set up a small regimental aid post. Before moving up the ridge from Canning’s Saddle, each member of the bearer section picked up a half blanket from the supply dump, but of the 100 half blankets that had been promised there were only 30 available at the dump. As the infantrymen had found, the track up the spur was very bad, being unformed and slippery, and so steep that in places the men had to pull themselves up by means of ropes tied to trees. These ropes later proved very useful when bringing stretcher cases down.
At 2.30 pm a call came down the ridge for all 24 stretcher bearers to immediately head up to the top and it was clear from the sound of the explosions that there would be casualties up there. Once they were up Lieutenant Jacobs formed the men into three squads of eight and three stretchers were constructed. The mountain gun ‘was firing point blank into the huge tree trunks around us and shrapnel was flying everywhere,’ Terry Wade wrote. Lance Corporal Ernie Waugh, in charge of one of the squads, constructed a stretcher for Bluey Berwick while in the open under mountain-gun fire. It took 15 minutes as other men were being killed and wounded around him while he worked, and Waugh had to attend to one of the other wounded men at the same time. Despite the danger, the first three casualties were on their way down the ridge by 3.30 pm. Colonel Bourne was on the first stretcher taken down and Bluey Berwick the second.5 It took 19 hours to evacuate Bourne and he was lucky that his wound was manageable for the time it took to get him down the hill.6
‘We got rid of any surplus gear & equipment we had, for we expected a long hard carry down to the saddle,’ Terry Wade wrote. It was extremely difficult getting the stretchers down the slope, although they were pleased to escape the bursting shells and sniper fire that ‘whistled all around’. But just after passing the enemy outpost position, ‘we met a train of natives and they relieved us of the stretchers’.7 Three native carrier squads were formed, each of sixteen men, and they carried the wounded down to Canning’s Saddle. It was not so much a carry as a passing operation as each stretcher was passed from hand to hand down the slope. On reaching Canning’s Saddle the carriers kept going all the way to the dressing station at Geyton’s, enabling the three badly wounded men to undergo surgery that night. ‘The native carriers never stopped,’ Lloyd Tann observed. He watched them cross a fallen tree about 6 metres above a creek when one of them started to slip. ‘The boss boy jumped onto the log and grabbed the stretcher to save it from falling while the bearer regained his balance.’8
Colonel MacIntosh went to Geyton’s to assist with the operation on Bourne.9 Bourne had severe injuries to his abdomen and Lloyd Tann worked by torchlight to build a backrest as Bourne had to sit up due to the nature of the wound. A lump of shrapnel passed through Bluey Berwick’s legs and both his knees had been shattered. ‘If you can imagine,’ Tann said, ‘like if someone hits you with an axe’.10 Suspended in his Thomas splint, Berwick was moaning with pain and one night said he could feel crawling in his legs from the maggots. Clarence Leggett came over and said to keep him doped with morphine as the maggots only fed on dead or decaying tissue and would clean the wound better than he could, as long as Berwick could endure it. As the war correspondent John Scarlett wrote, ‘for this freckled, red-haired lad the war has ended, although he was only 16 when it began’.11
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By the time the bearer section had returned to Prothero the mountain gun had been captured but there were at least another fifteen stretcher casualties and many walking wounded to be treated. No more native carriers were available and insufficient light remained for any more casualties to be carried down to Canning’s Saddle that day. The 2/12th Battalion stretcher bearers had also been busy gathering all the wounded at the aid post atop the ridge, and one of those bearers, Private ‘Tex’ Parnell, had been badly wounded himself. Parnell had the bone in his upper arm completely shattered, the arm just hanging by particles of skin and flesh. ‘I was horrified when I saw his arm,’ Max Thow said. ‘From his shoulder to his elbow … I could see daylight straight through.’ ‘Hey, Doc, look what I have done to my arm! Can you do anything for it?’ Parnell asked the dumbfounded medical officer, Captain Jim McDonald. ‘I’m afraid it’s got to come off, Tex,’ McDonald told him and Parnell just said, ‘Righto, Doc, whip it off!’ Parnell held the arm with his hand ‘while the doctor cut the remaining flesh and skin away’. He then spent a night of suffering in the cold and wet on the mountain before being carried back to Geyton’s Post the next day. He would die on the way out.12
The bearers worked until dusk helping Jim McDonald and his staff make the casualties comfortable for the night, using their own blankets to keep them warm. They spent the night in the open under steady rain with little to eat and only the rainwater to drink.13 A wounded Ted Crawford had ‘very grim memories of us all lying in mud and rain’. It was the ‘longest bloody night of my life, memories of men much worse than I was suffering without complaint and of profound gratitude to Bn MO & s/bearers who battled their guts out to try and help and comfort us,’ he later wrote. Private Vic Ellem ‘carried seven bullets in him’ but when informed by McDonald that his balls were still OK he yelled out ‘Hooray!’14 McDonald ‘did a fine job with the wounded in very difficult circumstances,’ Colin Fraser said.15
The next morning ‘the drenched wounded were lying on the side of the mountain,’ Bill Etchells observed.16 ‘Most of them were in a very bad state of shock,’ Terry Wade said, ‘accentuated by the terrifically cold night.’ One of the wounded with two bullets in the stomach had died during the night and ‘a grave was dug on the spot for him,’ Wade added. There was ‘also a chap with head, neck and chest wounds [who] would not last much longer according to the Doc’. He was one of the wounded men brought in during the night but he ‘battled on and the grave did not claim another victim that day’.17 George Schollick, himself wounded, later wrote, ‘I think I grew up that night and the next day when I saw the courage of those severely wounded men making their way down that tortuous track to the dressing station.’18
The bearer section got to work in the morning and constructed sixteen stretchers that day, using Japanese signal wire when they ran out of twine. They were also able to get five squads of infantry bearers and two squads from the pioneers to join their three squads to help get all the stretcher cases down the ridge. Jacobs had his three squads carry part of the way down the track, where one infantry and the two pioneer squads took over and carried down to Canning’s Saddle. The other four infantry squads carried their wounded all the way down. At 2.00 pm a party of native carriers came up to Prothero and was able to carry out twelve more stretcher cases. All the walking wounded had left earlier with the infantry bearers.19
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At Geyton’s Post the field ambulance crew knew that about 40 casualties were expected on 22 January and two extra medical orderlies were sent up from Guy’s Post to help the two already there. Twelve stretcher cases and 30 walking wounded arrived that day. ‘As patients came in,’ Lloyd Tann said, ‘we’d go out into the jungle at night with a machete and a torch, cutting saplings to make more beds and extend the wards.’20 On 23 January another thirteen casualties came in, most also suffering from exposure when admitted, due to the blanket and shelter shortage up on Prothero.21
The operating theatre was constructed of six half tents slung over the branch of a tree with an army stretcher sitting on four forked sticks as the operating table. Light came from a Tilly lamp and a torch. All surgical instruments had to be immersed in boiling water and then kept in sterilised jars. With so many casualties the work was constant, with ‘one patient lifted off and the next lifted on’. At times Clarence Leggett would be standing in the one place for hours while operating and would ‘gradually sink … down in the mud almost to his knees’. In order to move, ‘he’d have to get the other boys to drag his feet out of the mud’. Leggett worked till five each morning and then rested for two hours. ‘Call me at seven,’ he told Lloyd Tann before grabbing those two hours of sleep. He would do dressings first thing in the morning and mark those for evacuation by the native carriers before working on fresh casualties until five the following morning.22
Tann had also done a mountain of work. From when he got up on the Friday morning he didn’t lie down until the following Wednesday night. He had ‘not a wink of sleep in that six days’, covering both day and night shifts. Colonel MacIntosh, who came up from Guy’s Post on the Wednesday with a relief team, looked at Tann and said, ‘How much sleep have you had since you’ve been up here?’ Tann told him he had not had any so MacIntosh ordered him straight to bed.23
Of the 58 casualties that the dressing post treated, 41 operations were carried out, with four casualties having two operations each. There were 21 re-dressings that could be carried out without an operation, all of whom were mountain-gun casualties. In addition 47 men moved through with serious illness.24 ‘We never lost a patient at Geyton’s,’ Tann said. ‘Everyone who reached us alive left us alive.’25 On 27 January the last of the casualties treated at Geyton’s, including Colonel Bourne, reached Guy’s Post.
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As the wounded men from the first day and night of battle were brought down from the ridge, another grim task remained on Prothero: to bury the dead. This would include the Japanese dead in the mountain-gun bunker. Colin Stirling had inspected the bunker after it was captured, and thought ‘it was like a charnel house with legs and bodies everywhere’.26 Bill ‘Tojo’ Etchells and Private Dennis Morris got the job of getting the dead bodies out of the bunker. Worried that there may be live grenades beneath the bodies if they lifted them, the two men dragged them out using lawyer vines. The final body was a tallish man lying across the gun, and after they dragged him out, as Morris untied the vine, he turned to Etchells and said, ‘Tojo, he’s still warm.’ Next thing Etchells saw was one of the onlookers come over with a .45 pistol and put a bullet through the soldier’s head.27 Stirling was alongside one of the signallers watching the bodies being dragged when the signaller said, ‘That bloke’s still alive, can I shoot him?’ ‘Go for it,’ was Stirling’s reply and the signaller shot him.28 Major Cameron came racing over and asked Etchells, ‘What did you do that for?’ ‘I didn’t bloody well do it,’ Etchells replied. ‘He would have been good to interrogate,’ Cameron added. Etchells opened up the bloody shirt of the dead soldier, pulled out his wallet and saw a photo of ‘a bloke with his wife and two kids’. ‘It’s the only time I ever felt sorry for a bloody Jap I think,’ Etchells said.29
That was one version of events. Terry Wade had gone forward early that morning with two teams of stretcher bearers to bring back two casualties from Thomas’s company, and on the way up he had passed the smashed bunker. ‘Dead Japs lay everywhere, piled on top of each other,’ he wrote. Then he saw that the last body hauled out was alive and, knowing that five pounds was being offered for a prisoner, they intended capturing him ‘until the Jap started biting and kicking’. Then one of the men ‘stepped back a pace’ and shot the prisoner dead. ‘They threw the Jap into the big hole with his mates, before he had finished kicking,’ Wade added.30
Bluey Whyte had a similar account and was also aware that the brigade commander wanted a prisoner. The dragged-out soldier had been shot through the neck but was still alive, however, ‘when he opened his eyes he saw a gaggle of wild looking men’. One of those men prodded him to lie down at which point he took off his leather belt and began to lash out with it. According to Brodie Greenup, the prisoner was on a stretcher and while Captain McDonald was checking him ‘he tried to hit him with a bit of wood he grabbed from a tree’.31 Norm Sherwin and Lieutenant Hughie Giezendanner were involved. ‘He’s got a belt in his hand and he’s snarling like a dog,’ Max Thow said. ‘Hughie’s got his pistol out and he’s calling on him to surrender.’32 Giezendanner asked Sherwin, ‘What will I do … this bloke won’t be taken prisoner.’ Sherwin’s idea was that he was not a prisoner, he was an active soldier, so he said, ‘Shoot him.’ When someone else asked, ‘Will I give him a burst?’ Giezendanner replied, ‘No, it’s my job to execute him.’33 The prisoner kept coming and when he was only a few metres away Giezendanner fired two shots from his revolver but missed, perhaps deliberately.34 ‘Shoot the bastard,’ someone else said and an Owen gun burst killed him. ‘Who’d want to carry this bastard back?’ another added.35 ‘How’d you come to miss him?’ Giezendanner was later asked. ‘I tried to shoot between the eyes,’ was his reply.36
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It was late in the afternoon of 21 January when Colin Halmarick reached Canning’s Saddle. He had walked all day ‘over a hellish track’ from Guy’s Post to get there. On the way he had photographed the preparations being made at the Geyton’s Post advanced dressing station and at the 2/2nd Pioneers aid post at Canning’s Saddle. The 2/12th Battalion was further ahead, forming up for the attack, but ‘The country in which they were moving was very thick jungle and the opportunities for photographs were nil.’ Halmarick was advised against going forward on his own so it was not until the next morning that he was taken up to Prothero where he took photos of the mountain gun. ‘I had to work with time exposures and extremely low exposures,’ he wrote. ‘The jungle was very thick and picture taking was just about out of the question.’ Having shot six film packs despite the conditions and with only one pack remaining, Halmarick returned to Canning’s Saddle. It is a tribute to his photographic skill that he managed to get anything on film at all. ‘By going like hell’ Halmarick made it back to Guy’s Post the next day. Another photographer, Frank Bagnall took Halmarick’s and Stuckey’s photos back to Port Moresby on the day after that, leaving Halmarick ‘in need of a few days rest’.37
Halmarick had been hampered in his work by not having his Graphic camera available after it had been lent to Lieutenant Bill Sanders. It had been returned to Halmarick at Guy’s Post on 19 January, the day before he left for the front line but he found ‘the camera was covered with fungus, rusty and badly bent’, making it unsuitable for use. Nonetheless, with his spare Graflex camera he had managed to take over 160 photographs of the Prothero operation.38