‘We sat down by his stretcher and cried for him. And then we buried him’
—Lubini Helia, fuzzy wuzzy angel, of Alola village in the Owen Stanley Range
Havala Laula is probably 76 years old this year (2004), but he may be older. He’s not sure.* Havala lives in the village of Kagi, in the Central Province of Papua. Sixty-two years ago, aged perhaps fourteen, he carried his first wounded Australian over the Owen Stanley Range.
Havala was one carrier in a team of eight and possibly the youngest fuzzy wuzzy angel on the Kokoda Track. Today he proudly wears the tunic of the Papuan Infantry Battalion and the badge of an Australian flag, and he’s happy to discuss his memories standing on two broad, flat, roughly calloused feet that carried Australian servicemen to safety.
‘When Australians were wounded we took them from here to Owers’ Corner,’ he said, casually waving a hand towards the mountain range, as though he does this every day. ‘We took off their bandages and rubbed their wounds with bush medicines. And then we wrapped leaves around their wounds. That made them feel better—they felt all right…When a wounded soldier died we’d bury him on his stretcher.’1 As Seventh-Day Adventists, Havala’s people gave the dead troops a Christian burial. The men were not the only ones helping, he insisted: ‘The women carried the food, too. All of the village people took part.’
His bright smiling face darkens as a memory intrudes. ‘It was a very sad time for us, when the war came to Kagi.’ The day the Japanese passed through the region, he said, ‘They destroyed the villages, ruined the gardens and killed all our livestock. But the Australian troops treated us well, they gave us food and supplies.’
Up ahead, at the village of Alola, is Lubini Helia, a farmer like Havala, whose feet are twisted so far around he walks on the outer edges. Lubini, too, was a carrier—nor does he know his age—and he speaks with similar clarity of the war. His villagers hid in hills and caves when the Japanese army arrived; they returned to find their homes destroyed, their pigs shot, and two villagers lying dead, with their throats cut.2 Lubini thinks the Japanese did these things because his village refused to cooperate as guides.
He remembers giving the wounded Australians water and food (and bush medicine): ‘We’d light their cigarettes and give them anything they wanted.’
How hard was the journey? ‘It was very, very hard. We wanted the soldiers to be alive; we didn’t want them to be dead. So even though it’s steep down and up we went as fast as we could.’
Havala and Lubini were two of about 3000 tribesmen needed to carry out the Australian wounded and feed the army. Each man carried a 40-pound load (excluding his own food) from Myola to the forward stations at Templeton’s Crossing, Eora Creek and Alola. During the supply crisis, they rushed huge quantities of ammunition, grenades, rations, blankets, medical supplies, rifle grease, tobacco, papers and wax matches up to the troops.
Having deposited their loads, they were converted into human ambulances, and shouldered the wounded back to Myola. Some carrier teams continued to Owers’ Corner; others were part of a relay. Most worked until they dropped. Vernon complained that they were overworked and overloaded—‘principally by soldiers who dumped their packs and even rifles on top of the carriers’ own burdens’—and suffered from exposure, cold and malnourishment. ‘Every evening scores of carriers came in, slung their loads down and lay exhausted on the ground…’3
The legend of the fuzzy wuzzy angels, as the tribal carriers were affectionately and deservedly known, holds that they were angelic, devoted stretcher-bearers and the saviours of the Australian wounded. Many were, but a little perspective is needed. In early 1942, Australian colonial interests employed about 10,000 labourers in Papua and 35,000 in the Mandated Territory.4 When war broke out they were harnessed as porters and then stretcher-bearers, and by September, 20,000 natives were thus employed throughout Papua and New Guinea.5 Many were recruited from the labour depots around Port Moresby, with as little knowledge of the mountains as the Australians had, notes Hank Nelson. About one in ten were Koiari people, the tribe that lived along the track and on the Sogeri plateau.
They were not all smiling natives who benignly nursed the troops without complaint (though a lot were). Many had been ‘hard used’ by the Australian Government before the war, and forced to carry huge loads to plantations and goldfields.* Some were bitter. The first teams of carriers were badly treated and ‘desertions were frequently reported’.6 Nor did they simply drift down from their villages and happily give their time—and sometimes their lives—to save the white man. Very few were volunteers (though Havala and Lubini, whose villages were sacked, probably were, as they state). The native people understandably dreaded the war.
In fact, they were indentured labourers, a form of paid slavery. On 15 June 1942, Australia’s National Security (Emergency) Control Regulations Act provided for ‘the conscription of whatever native labour might be required by the [Australian armed] Services’.7 This gave near dictatorial powers to the quasi-military regional officers of ANGAU,8 who could harness ‘any native upon such work and subject to such conditions not inconsistent with the order as he may see fit’.9 The clause was open to wide interpretation by bored white ‘old New Guinea hands’ and latent slave drivers.
Natives who refused to work, deserted, absented themselves ‘without leave’ or worked in ‘a careless of negligent manner’ faced severe fines and imprisonment. The grinding reality of carrying broken men over the Owen Stanleys rendered these petty, officious terms absurd. They worked like Trojans. They responded to perks and incentives, and one reason they liked the Australians had nothing to do with their putative affection for their white colonial masters: it was simply that they were allowed to take any damaged goods dropped at Myola back to their villages as a kind of bonus.10
Some Australians treated them abominably. Natives were rounded up and ‘held’ for service—they were corralled into pens. Many were pushed to the limits of physical endurance. Vernon was shocked by the weight of the load on the back of a decrepit old native man, a father of eight, who tottered into his field hospital at Eora Creek and promptly collapsed. ‘The age of this old chap showed me how desperate was the call for carriers.’11
A large number were expected to work long after their contracts expired, without pay. Nor were their rations always reliable. Wilmot, a torchbearer for the fuzzy wuzzies, wrote sternly to the authorities: ‘The native ration is pay, and he regards it as his RIGHT. Any whittling down he regards as a breach of faith.’12
Both Japanese and Australians routinely plundered their gardens. ‘The native regards his garden…very jealously,’ Wilmot reported. ‘They would, I’m told, give the troops fruit, if they had it, but we will lose their faith if the troops loot.’ He cited a few 2/14th men who hacked down young pawpaw trees at Menari in an act of ‘sheer vandalism’.
The terms of native ‘contracts’ were imposed with brutal, if necessary, efficiency. The Australians hunted and summarily executed those accused of betrayal and collaboration. An Alola man was hung as a traitor in Isurava, according to Lubini. There was a cruel catch-22: the natives were executed by the Japanese if they refused to collaborate; and imprisoned or executed by the Australians if they were found collaborating.
Havala remembers the Japanese arriving at Isurava, and asking the way to Port Moresby. When the Isuravan people gave no reply, ‘the Japanese got these Isurava people and killed them’.13
The natives were mortal, not superhuman; many fled the bombs—the hellish sound of which was so alien to their world—and rejoined their villages. Others ‘chucked a sickie’, in the Australian vernacular, to avoid duty—‘a typical Fuzzy trick’,14 that no doubt resonated with their Australian bosses on a bad day.
A large minority dumped their loads and simply gave up. After the battle of Isurava, for example, the desertion rate was said to be 30 per cent; many supplies were left by the track, including 18,000 rifle rounds, on 31 August. And there was the rare case during the explosive evacuation of Eora Creek when a few terrified angels flew away, leaving their wounded beside the track. ‘The carrier position is very precarious,’ Wilmot warned at the time.15
There is another side to the truth, however, which befits the angelic legend. At their best, the fuzzy wuzzy angels were ‘magnificent’, said Magarey, who worked closely with them. They saved the lives of hundreds of Australian soldiers. This went well beyond the call of duty. ‘Every need which they can fulfil is fulfilled. [At night] they will find a level spot beside the track, and build a shelter over the patient. They will make him as comfortable as possible, get him water, and feed him if any food is available.’16
Many felt a deep personal responsibility for their patients, and close friendships developed between fuzzy wuzzies and the Australian wounded. The sight of their powerful back and leg muscles, hoisting their patients aloft, gave hope to men who had utterly abandoned hope.
‘The Fuzzy Wuzzies performed all tasks asked of them, tasks that few white men could have stood up to,’ concluded an official 21st Brigade report.17 And the tribeswomen, it is rarely observed, helped too, carrying lighter supplies and distributing food at village stations.
They shunned the standard army canvas stretchers, which rotted and tore. They made their own by doubling a blanket around two long poles and tying the edges together with native string. The poles were kept apart by spreaders lashed across them at each end. These were deeper, thus avoided spillage, and were far tougher.
Though sure-footed, the fuzzy wuzzies could not avoid jolting their heavy human cargo. Sometimes, the stretchers collapsed; or the carriers slipped. The pain was extreme and soldiers passed out. With every jolt, blood seeped from wounds and stumps. Amazingly, few of the stretcher cases died from blood loss; such was the care with which they were borne over the rivers and steep slopes.18
One soldier, Hamlyn Harris, witnessed the stretcher-bearers ‘picking their way…softly and silently…handling their stretchers with surprising deftness in rough places, to save their human burden the slightest jolt…’19 No amount of care could ease the pain of horribly wounded cases, but a surprising number survived the journey through mud and slush, over razorbacks and across rivers. The rhythm of the movement rocked some men asleep.
At night, the fuzzy wuzzies slept four to each side of the stretcher, in a protective ring, and assisted the patient’s every call and need: ‘The natives practically never left the patient until they had brought him to his destination,’ said Magarey.20
The fuzzy wuzzy angels were hailed as heroes; many were decorated or rewarded with gifts. The legend adorns Australian schoolchildren’s textbooks, and some Australians continue to honour them on Kokoda Day,* as they did in 1942. A well-known wartime poem reads:
…For they haven’t any halos,
Only holes slashed in their ears,
And their faces worked by tattoos,
With scratch pins in their hair.
Bringing back the badly wounded
Using leaves to keep the rain off
And as gentle as a nurse.
Slow and careful in bad places
On the awful mountain track
The look upon their faces
Would make you think that Christ was black.21
The stretcher-bearers felt a deep sense of personal loss if their patient died, such was the bond formed during the ordeal over the mountains.
‘We were very, very sad when we saw the wounded Australian soldiers,’ said Havala. ‘When a patient died, we were tearful,’ he said.
‘We sat down by his stretcher and cried for him. And then we buried him,’ Lubini remembers, of one Australian soldier.
The Japanese treated the native people variably: sometimes well, at other times with brutal impatience. Rabaul carriers said they were compelled at bayonet point to join the Japanese convoy to Papua. Certainly many were starved and beaten along the Kokoda Track.
The Japanese sought to confute this impression. ‘Rabaul natives entertained no animosity against Japanese troops,’ Superior Private Iwasa Koji told Allied Intelligence officers. ‘They were well treated and were always paid in Military Notes for anything they supplied. Severe penalties were imposed for striking a native or for robbery…while rape was punishable by death. The Gendarmerie was very strict about correct treatment of natives.’22 Surviving veterans are adamant they did not harm the Papuans.
Some coastal villages did cooperate with the Japanese, and initially relations were good. There were great carrots on offer to those who collaborated. The Japanese portrayed themselves as long lost relatives, returning to liberate the tribes from the white imperialist. They promised equal rights, and a smorgasbord of impossible rewards after the war: cars, planes, investment, and so on.
A ‘warm spiritual reception’ for the Papuans was vital, noted a Japanese military guide,The Handling of Natives: ‘There must be no racial discrimination. Suitable awards and punishments must be made…If it is at all avoidable they must not be beaten…’23 Troops were told not to respond to native complaints with, ‘You are only a dirty native’: ‘Do not treat them as pigs for they resent it,’ the handbook warned. Uneaten rice should be given to native carriers, but ‘do not be too generous…as it spoils them’.24
Japanese troops were never to forget that carriers were ‘also human and that there is a limit to their endurance’.
In reality, the Japanese were rather less caring. Desertion was severely punished, and collaboration an immediate death sentence. Native rations were gradually cut to about a third of the troops’ ration, and were barely enough to sustain sedentary human life. Many exhausted Rabaul carriers were later found starving on the side of the track, with bayonet wounds.
‘This…propaganda had very gratifying effect at first but generally had to be supported by threats of decapitation after a month or so,’25 observed Keiko Tamura.
As well as carrying supplies and wounded, their work involved cutting sago, and building bunkers, roads and airstrips, according to Hiromitsu Iwamoto, who later interviewed many tribal elders of the Sepik and Madang regions.26
The Japanese did not recruit Papuan carriers in an organised manner; individual officers tended to press-gang native labour when and where it suited them (they usually dubbed the tribal chiefs ‘Boss Boy’). In this the Australians, as the colonial power, had the advantage of local familiarity. Some villagers took the view, ‘better the devil we know’, after exposure to the firmer Japanese methods; Kienzle’s rigorous propaganda helped persuade them.
Any goodwill the Japanese enjoyed with the villages utterly collapsed later in the war, when the starving invader plundered their plantations on a scale that dwarfed the worst excesses of the Australians. They would sweep through villages like ‘a typhoon’, stripping out the slightest morsels of food.27
Horii’s carrier desertion rate soared as he advanced over the Owen Stanleys, putting immense strain on his supply lines. The Japanese commander would rely mostly on his loyal Formosan conscripts, Korean labourers and his own troops as both porters and stretcher-bearers. So few carriers were available, the bearers had to work in teams of four to a stretcher, with no relief. It was a gruelling regimen, hardened by the fact that they were not as sure-footed as the Papuans. The Japanese wounded had to be ‘firmly tied to the stretchers with vines to prevent them rolling off…’28