Up until 1943 the Japanese had been satisfied to occupy the coastal towns in New Guinea north of the Owen Stanley Range and not move too far inland. This policy changed with the loss of the Papuan beachheads and led to the unsuccessful operation to capture Wau. Further afield the New Guinea highlands area remained under Allied control and became increasingly important as the war moved north from Papua into New Guinea. In early April 1943 New Guinea Force headquarters stated that Bena Bena in the highlands was assuming increased importance as a possible base for operations against Madang, Lae and Wewak. From Bena Bena, patrols could also harass any Japanese moves into the Ramu Valley (see Map 6).1 The highlands also served as a major source of native labour while at the same time denying the Japanese that same resource. To protect Bena Bena airfield, Major Fergus MacAdie’s 2/7th Independent Company was flown in from Wau on 27 May 1943.2 Known as Bena Force, MacAdie’s company came under the direct command of New Guinea Force.
Map 6: Huon Peninsula–Ramu Valley area, 1942–43
Lieutenant General Kenney’s 5th USAAF had used Bena Bena airstrip as early as August 1942 when a C-47 transport had landed with aircraft engineers to salvage much-needed wheel bearings from a crashed B-25 Mitchell. They also found a P-40 Kittyhawk wreck, which was stripped for parts and, with the help of a hundred local natives, brought back to the airstrip. After three days the C-47, piloted by Captain Edgar Hampton, who Kenney said could ‘land and take-off a C-47 from a good sized well’, returned and flew the engineers and the recovered parts out.3
Desperate for forward fighter bases, Major General Ennis Whitehead wanted to develop Bena Bena. After a meeting on 29 May 1943, his commander, General Kenney, wrote, ‘Whitey wants to build up Bena Bena but we have only enough troop carrier effort to do some deceptive stuff. I’m going to pretend to build an airfield there to prevent the Japs from looking at Marilinan … The Nip is worried about Bena Bena … I’m going to keep baiting him to keep him interested in that area.’ Therefore Bena Bena played the part of a dummy airbase to divert attention from the airfield complex being developed further east at Marilinan, also known as Tsili Tsili. On 8 June Kenney wrote of Bena Bena, ‘tomorrow we will start raising a lot of dust … in about a week the Nip should get worried and start attacking’.4
On 3 June the Deputy Chief of the Australian General Staff, Major General Frank Berryman, flew to Port Moresby and met with Brigadier General Paul ‘Squeeze’ Wurtsmith, the commander of the 5th USAAF fighter units. Wurtsmith wanted another infantry battalion plus a light anti-aircraft unit to protect Bena Bena. However, due to other commitments, the 5th USAAF could only maintain 1000 men at Bena Bena so Berryman got agreement from General Blamey for a second Australian independent company being sent there. On 7 June it was agreed that the 2/2nd Independent Company would be sent to reinforce the 2/7th provided that 5th USAAF could maintain it.5 ‘Real tough babies,’ Kenney said, impressed by the Australian commandos.6
In line with General Kenney’s prediction, there were twelve Japanese air attacks on the Bena Bena area from 4 to 19 June, though damage was negligible.7 The Japanese command estimated that the equivalent of three Australian battalions was operating in the New Guinea highlands and that there were seven large airfields in the region. They were concerned that a road could be built to link the area with Wau and the south coast which would ‘convert these airfields into very powerful airbases’ directly threatening the Japanese hold on New Guinea. The Japanese therefore planned to move troops into the highlands to attack Kainantu, Bena Bena and Mount Hagen from the ground. It was planned to use the main force of the 20th Division against Bena Bena and elements of the 41st Division to occupy Mount Hagen. The operation, scheduled to commence in early September 1943, required 3000 men for the attack on Bena Bena and another 1000 to hold a base at Marawasa in the Markham Valley. However, because 26,000 men would be required to carry supplies to the Marawasa base and beyond, it was doubtful that the operation could commence before a planned road across the Finisterre Range to the Ramu Valley was complete in April 1944. In preparation for the operation, Japanese forces had occupied Kaiapit and patrols had moved further up the Ramu Valley and occupied Dumpu and Wesa. However, with the increasing Allied threat to Salamaua and Lae, on 1 August 1943 General Adachi decided to postpone the Bena Bena operation.8
The impact of two Australian independent companies at Bena Bena on Japanese strategy in New Guinea was astonishing, diverting Japanese attention away from the main game at Lae. After the war it was stated that ‘the 18th Army commander and his staff decided to execute the above mentioned plan at all cost although it might mean the sacrifice of Lae and Salamaua’.9
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In February 1943 Captain John Murphy, who was working with the Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU), reported that between 50 and 100 Japanese troops were moving overland from Madang to Lae, a clear indication that the Japanese were intent on exerting control over the Ramu and Markham valleys. The Japanese party, from the 21st Regiment and led by Major Takahashi, had set off from Madang on 31 December 1942 with 200 troops using pack mules to carry supplies and machine guns. However, once the party reached the Gogol River, only 14 kilometres south of Madang, it had to proceed without the mules and heavy weapons. Despite losing four men to a strafing attack by Allied aircraft while trying to bridge a river in the Markham Valley, Takahashi’s men reached Chivasing on 1 February. For the final part of the journey to Lae the Japanese party used native guides and carriers recruited from the Markham Valley, 39 of them from Chivasing and another 28 from Sangan. Takahashi considered that, apart from those around Marawasa, ‘the natives in the area were gentle’. Now averaging 20 kilometres a day, and despite a 90 per cent incidence of malaria, Takahashi’s party reached Lae on 7 February. These Japanese troops had generally got on well with the native population of the Ramu and Markham valleys and this would have major ramifications for the Australian commandos and ANGAU operatives trying to maintain native loyalty and recruit native labour in the coming months.10
At the Australian 3rd Division headquarters in Wau there were also concerns about the Japanese threat to the Bulolo Valley, so any more enemy moves along the old trade route from Madang to Lae needed to be closely monitored. It was considered that an ANGAU officer based at Chivasing, employing native intelligence sources, would give ample warning of such a move from the Markham Valley along the Wampit Valley towards Wau.11 Captain John Murphy was already engaged in convincing the villagers of the Markham and Ramu valleys that the Japanese were losing the war. Photographs of Japanese prisoners and Japanese dead, the more graphic the better, proved to be a very powerful tool to convince the native population that the Australians were still in control. Murphy also requested badges taken from Japanese troops to add to the effect.12
Also serving with ANGAU, Warrant Officer Peter Ryan used a similar approach to convince hostile natives closer to Lae that they needed to back the Allies and not the Japanese by pointing out the size of the bomb craters left by Allied bombing. Ryan explained that bombs of that power could devastate any native village that refused to cooperate with the Allied cause.13
Ryan, who had originally been serving with a searchlight company in Port Moresby, had transferred to ANGAU in the hope of seeing some front-line action. After trekking from the south coast along the Bulldog Track the 19-year-old Ryan had arrived in Wau in July 1942. Some months later he volunteered to undertake his first mission across the Markham River, to contact Jock McLeod, who had been operating in the Wain mountain district north of the Markham Valley for some time. Accompanied by two native police constables, Ryan crossed the Markham River and headed up the Erap River into the mountains to Boana, within two days walk of Japanese-held Lae. Hearing that McLeod was at Samanzing, but misled as to the shortest route to get there, Ryan headed off east via mountain tracks to Kasenobe and Bungalumba before contacting McLeod near Samanzing. McLeod told Ryan of the increased Japanese presence around Lae and shared his plan to cross the Saruwaged Range to the north coast. Using a shorter return route to Boana via Kemen, Ryan then headed back across the Markham River to report and arrange supplies for McLeod.14
Once resupplied, Ryan returned to Boana and on 22 January 1943, accompanied by his police constable, Watute, he travelled via Kemen to Gawan in the foothills west of Lae. After seeing the improvement in the tracks between some of the villages it was quite clear to Ryan that the Japanese had been in the area and were exerting considerable influence. ‘Only the fact that my constable and myself kept cocked rifles continually in hand prevented our being attacked,’ he wrote. On 24 January Ryan and Watute moved by moonlight from Gawan to the junction of the Busu and Sankwep rivers. From there Watute adopted local dress and manner and went into the nearby village of Gwabadik where he arranged for three villagers to cross the unbridged Busu River and go into Chinatown on the outskirts of Lae. They were to bring out one of the Chinese civilians who may be able to provide intelligence on Japanese operations in Lae.15
Holding onto a log with one hand, and paddling with the other, the three Gwabadik natives crossed the Busu and soon returned with Peter Ah Tun. ‘He was of medium height, with gold-brown skin, and a face that looked as much European as Chinese,’ Ryan wrote. Ah Tun had been in charge of the freezing plant in Lae pre-war, and along with a number of other Chinese mechanics and carpenters he was now being used by the Japanese to maintain services in Lae. Having only recently been released after spending three days shackled in handcuffs and leg irons in a Japanese gaol, Ah Tun had no qualms about talking to Ryan. He provided critical intelligence about the Japanese troops that had landed at Lae earlier in January. ‘They are infantry, and they boast that they have been brought here to capture Wau,’ Ryan wrote. Ah Tun was also able to pinpoint where the Japanese defences and supply dumps were in Lae and relate how conditions had steadily deteriorated for those residents who remained, with only a meagre rice ration available to them.16
Ryan played a dangerous game patrolling to the edge of Lae but the information he gained from Peter Ah Tun was vital intelligence. However, without a radio he had to write out the report and have it sent by messenger back to Bob’s camp on the other side of the Markham River (see Map 2). By then the information had been superseded by events at Wau. The Japanese soon found out Ryan was in the area, but with the Busu River proving a formidable barrier to pursuit, he was able to leave the area unmolested.17
•
The loss of the Bismarck Sea supply convoy highlighted just how isolated the Japanese garrison in Lae was. The Japanese command was forced to look inland for a solution including a way across the fearsome Saruwaged Range from the north coast to Lae. As part of those preparations, a detachment from the 30th Independent Engineer Regiment under Lieutenant Masamichi Kitamoto was given the task of crossing the range to Lae from the north. Kitamoto, who had been a long-distance runner for his country at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, had decided to ‘use those legs of yours and go out to fight’ when he volunteered to lead the detachment.18
The engineer regiment, in reality ‘a group of middle-aged men who led [an] easy life as civilians and never carried a gun in our lives’, had shipped out of Hiroshima’s port of Ujina in Japan around 23 February 1943, stopping at Palau from 13 to 15 March before disembarking at Rabaul on 24 March. On 7 April the regiment boarded three destroyers at Rabaul and was taken to Tuluvu, on the western tip of New Britain. As the men disembarked they had watched some of the survivors of the Bismarck Sea convoy also come ashore. ‘They were all worn out and their tired water soaked bodies could be seen from beneath their torn and tattered uniforms,’ Kitamoto wrote. His previously confident men ‘became clouded with uneasiness and fear and finally they all looked down at their feet, trying to avoid looking directly at the pitiful scene before them’.19
On 24 April Lieutenant Colonel Murai issued the order for Kitamoto’s detachment to carry out the reconnaissance of an overland route from Kiari to Lae (see Map 7). According to Murai, the detachment was made up of Kitamoto and 22 men plus a wireless section and a code man, around 30 men in all. However, Kitamoto is quite adamant in his post-war writings that the detachment strength was 50 men.20 Kitamoto’s engineers embarked on three landing craft at Tuluvu on the evening of 24 April and crossed the Dampier Strait to Umboi Island by night, sheltering the three boats under overhanging trees throughout the next day. They then crossed the Vitiaz Strait to the New Guinea mainland and landed at Teliata Point (see Map 7) on the northern coast of the Huon Peninsula.21
Kitamoto was fortunate to soon come across a local native named Rabo who agreed to guide the detachment across the Saruwaged Range and organise 100 native carriers, to be replaced on reaching new tribal areas. ‘We had stepped into an unknown land,’ Kitamoto thought as his detachment began the long trek south to Lae. Further help came after the first night’s stop at Ulap, where a Lutheran missionary sympathetic to the Axis cause provided much-needed tents and new ropes for the journey ahead. However, the most important gift was a map of the Saruwaged region with a red line indicating the route to Lae. ‘I became filled with confidence as if I had gained a million allies for I had prepared to cross the mountains relying only on stars and a compass,’ Kitamoto wrote. Changing porters at each village, using salt and cloth as payment, Kitamoto’s expedition moved south, steadily gaining height. The track soon disappeared and Private Yoshizo Kitaide, a master carpenter from Kainan City, showed exceptional skill as he ‘built bridges over the marshes and wove ladders from the vines for climbing the cliffs … the natives were astonished’. At night Kitaide would also build hammocks in the trees to keep the men off the damp ground. As Kitamoto observed, ‘Kitaide had no time to rest.’ At the village of Dawat, at the base of the towering Mount Bangeta, half the native carriers refused to go further, afraid of cannibals on the other side.22
To reach Dawat, Kitamoto’s detachment had followed an east–west ridge line for some 15 kilometres from Gilan, gaining no distance to the south. As Kitamoto wrote, ‘In New Guinea, the only way to climb the mountains was to follow the ridges’, even if you went the wrong way. Battling rain, cold and sharp inclines, the detachment, now down to 50 native carriers, struggled up the Saruwaged Range. ‘It was just like climbing a slide from the bottom to the top … We continued our climb looking for a piece of flat ground but the incline kept going up and up into the skies.’ As the men climbed higher, ‘It was so cold that it seemed that our hands which grasped the rocks to pull us up would become frozen … A single hemp rope was the only lifeline for 100 men.’ The summit of Mount Bangeta ‘was a world of snowy white’, incompatible with the tropical world below. For Kitamoto, reaching the summit ‘was the same feeling of victory when one cuts the tape in a race’. With his men gathered around the Japanese flag crying tears of joy, Kitamoto experienced ‘the most dramatic and impressive sight that I have ever experienced in my life’. From the summit he could look down into the Markham Valley and the Markham River beyond, flowing to the sea at Lae. Kitamoto’s wireless operator Tsutsui sent out a message that his men had reached the summit and the ‘Successful achievement of mission is near.’23
As the detachment approached the first village on the southern side of the range, the 50 carriers were loath to continue, afraid of cannibals. ‘Trembling with fear we entered the village of Tukaget,’ Kitamoto wrote, but ‘It appeared that they did not have the strength of eating people, let alone killing them.’ From Tukaget the detachment trekked through Kasenobe and ‘spent hours making detours of ravines and valleys that obstructed our course’. Using the same route from Kasenobe as Peter Ryan had taken three months previously, the detachment crossed two steep ridges and was reported as reaching Bungalumba on 10 May. Kitamoto’s men ‘were completely worn out and about half of them came down with fever’.24
Kitamoto then turned west for Bawan, where two Australian soldiers with about 30 accompanying natives had been reported.25 He selected at least ten of his best men and they moved fast, reaching Bawan at dawn on 15 May. However, the two Australians had seen him coming. ‘After engaging in gun battle, they escaped into the hills,’ Kitamoto noted of the incident. ‘It was very regretful that we could not catch them.’26
Having split his detachment, it is probable that the remainder of Kitamoto’s men followed him from Bungalumba to Lae via Boana once they had recovered their health, although some may have taken the shorter route through Gawan, crossing the Busu River at the Kunda (cane) bridge (if it had already been built) or else at the river mouth. Kitamoto took his fit group of men on to Boana and then back to Lae via Yalu and the Markham Valley road.27 On 18 May, three weeks after landing on the north coast, he marched into Lae with nineteen of his men, their ‘torn and soiled uniforms all pointed to the difficulties experienced in crossing the mountains’ and he was able to tell General Nakano that a route across the Saruwaged Range, although difficult, was feasible. At this stage Kitamoto’s path across the Saruwaged Range was looked upon as a possible route to bring units from the 20th and 41st Divisions, currently at Madang and Wewak, across from the north coast to Lae.28
Nakano had also sent out a reconnaissance party from Lae on 13 April to investigate the easiest routes to Gawan and Kalsia from Lae. Both villages were in the foothills of the Saruwaged Range north of Lae. The party returned to Lae on 24 April and confirmed a route through to Bungalumba via Gawan.29 Another party, the Arai Tai, made up of ten engineers and fifteen infantrymen, left Lae on 18 April to check tracks in the Boana area.30
Three days after he had reached Lae, Kitamoto was sheltering from Allied bombing when a bomb hit a nearby shelter killing a number of fellow officers. ‘It was horrible to look at and the severity and merciless nature of war struck me strongly,’ he wrote. ‘If I stay in this place any longer, I may have to die an unnecessary death.’31 He would have other work to do soon enough.
•
Meanwhile the Australians continued their own patrols of the Huon Peninsula. After his successful patrol to Lae in January, Peter Ryan was back for more, this time accompanied by Captain Les Howlett, eight native police constables and five native carriers. Their patrol crossed the Markham River on rafts near Chivasing on 25 April 1943 tasked with obtaining further intelligence on Japanese operations around Lae and the Huon Peninsula or, to put it more simply, ‘keep an eye on the Japs’ and ‘keep in touch with the native situation’. The patrol would be the first Australian presence in the Lae region since Ryan had gone to Lae in January but, due to rumours of Japanese patrols along the Erap River, he had crossed the Markham further west than on his previous trip. ‘Each time I crossed the Markham on my way to the mountains,’ Ryan wrote, ‘I felt I had passed through a door into another life.’32
After crossing the flat country of the Markham Valley the patrol moved into the cover of the foothills and made its way east towards Lae. After being told that a fifteen-man Japanese patrol had been at Boana on 17 April, Ryan and Howlett decided to take an alternative route to Bawan. There were signs the track had seen recent heavy use, and Singin, the head man from a village near Boana, also told Ryan and Howlett that a Japanese party, Kitamoto’s engineers, had recently crossed the Saruwaged Range from the north coast to Bungalumba and then gone on to Lae.33 Such information went both ways as Ryan’s presence in the area had also been reported by other natives to the Japanese.34
Ryan headed off to Boana where he found indications that the Japanese had indeed recently been there. He then sent his most trusted native policeman, Watute, and one of his carriers, Pato, who understood the local dialect, to investigate. They heard of a food cache left by the Japanese at Samanzing and surmised it may be there ‘for Japanese troops being evacuated from Lae’. Once Ryan and Howlett reached Bawan on 8 May, Ryan was laid up for four days with malaria. On 12 May Ryan heard that Japanese troops were at Kasenobe and was concerned that they were headed to Bawan so it was decided to look for a new camp.35
As Ryan and Howlett scouted for a new location near Orin on 15 May, they were fired on by a patrol of seventeen Japanese troops from the track far below. Kitamoto’s patrol had found Ryan and Howlett. ‘The machine guns opened fire,’ Kitamoto wrote. ‘The noise was amplified to three times the sound heard in open country as the cracks of the guns vibrated among the cliffs.’36 ‘Buzzing bullets seemed to fill the air round us, clipping through the grass and ricocheting,’ Ryan wrote. Unable to give chase, Kitamoto’s detachment proceeded through to Bawan and Boana. ‘After perhaps ten minutes the leader put his pistol back in its holster,’ Ryan observed, ‘and we heard him shouting to the natives to pick up their loads.’37
‘The enemy showed his back once and disappeared into the jungle,’ a frustrated Kitamoto wrote. ‘It was impossible to locate them in the maze of vegetation … That night we spent at the enemy camp and next morning burned it to the ground.’ Aware of the danger they were now in, Ryan and Howlett moved higher up into the Saruwaged Range.38 After the author showed Kitamoto’s account of the incident to Ryan in 2006, Ryan referred to Kitamoto as ‘a foeman, a chap that didn’t kill me, but he tried’.39
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Even before the loss of the Bismarck Sea convoy, the Japanese had decided to try to open an overland supply route from Madang to Lae via the Ramu and Markham valleys. A road would be constructed from Madang to Bogadjim and up to Kankiryo in the Finisterre Mountains to join with a supply track into the Ramu Valley. On 9 February 1943 a detachment from the 20th Division under the infantry group commander, Major General Shinichi Yanagawa, left Wewak by landing craft for Madang to commence the work. The Yanagawa Detachment was made up of two infantry battalions and most of the 20th Engineering Regiment.40 The importance of the project was stressed during a visit to Madang by the Japanese emperor’s aide-de-camp on 27 March. ‘His majesty’s enquiries and anxieties were conveyed,’ one officer wrote.41
By mid-April the detachment had been reinforced with two further regiments of engineers and three road construction units. The course of the road was also changed to continue through the mountains via Yaula and Yokopi towards Kaiapit as this route was considered ‘less vulnerable to air attacks’ than the shorter route via Kesawai into the Ramu Valley. Battling steep grades, cliff faces, waterfalls, ravines and dense jungle as well as malnutrition and malaria, Yanagawa’s men pushed the road forward. Due to the terrain challenges and supply difficulties, ‘troops were compelled to attack the virgin forest with shovels, picks and explosives’. Horses and trucks were sent to help but both soon became useless, the former from lack of suitable fodder and the latter from constant breakdowns under such harsh conditions.42
Soon after he had returned from his Saruwaged crossing, Masamichi Kitamoto was given a new task. He was ordered to lead a force up the Markham Valley from Lae to report on the progress of the Yanagawa Detachment as well as investigating Australian activities at Kaiapit and further west (see Map 8). Kitamoto put together a detachment comprising 19 infantrymen under Sergeant Sogabe, ten of his own engineers, a five-man communications squad and a doctor. The native guide Rabo, Kitamoto’s constant companion since they had met in Kiari, would again travel with the detachment.43
Kitamoto’s group left Lae by night on 26 May, travelling on trucks as far west as possible before daylight so as not to alert any Lae natives who may report the departure to the Australians. When the patrol arrived at Boana the next evening, Kitamoto came down with a bad case of malaria and, when his men left for Kaiapit on 31 May, Kitamoto was carried.44 His detachment was travelling through the foothills north of the Markham Valley and would approach Kaiapit out of the hills to the north. As he approached Kaiapit, his native guide Rabo went out and discovered that there were supposedly six Australians at Ofofragen, a small village 2 kilometres north-west of Kaiapit.45 Kitamoto’s unit had come across Warrant Officer Harry Lumb who, accompanied by five native policemen, was recruiting native carriers around Sangan and Kaiapit to work on the Kaiapit airstrip. It was later thought that the Ofofragen village leader had betrayed Lumb to Kitamoto’s party.
Map 8: Kitamoto patrol to Kaiapit (26 May–13 June 1943)
According to Kitamoto, his men moved to the village on the night of 6 June and were in position before dawn. Two squads of Sogabe’s infantrymen covered any escape to the rear or flanks while Kitamoto led his engineers in from the front. ‘Stifling the noise of our footsteps we gradually closed the net,’ he wrote. Early on the morning of 7 June his engineers opened fire but Lumb and his native police fought back. ‘The bullets of automatic rifles came flying from the hut,’ Kitamoto wrote, ‘we concentrated our fire on the hut. The outcome was obvious.’ The six men were killed.46 An alternative account by one of the native policemen, Arwesor, says the attack took place at about 1600 in the afternoon while he was away from the village. When he returned an hour later the Japanese had arrived and were accompanied by an interpreter, a Chinese man from Lae. Arwesor was captured and bound but later escaped, reaching safety at Marilinan on 12 June.47
Documents found on Lumb identified him and his mission, which was to recruit native carriers and obtain information on the enemy as he moved west along the Markham and Ramu valleys. One of the letters dated 12 October 1942 stated that ‘I do not trust Chivashings.’ ‘Even the information they give about the Japanese Army is half trustworthy and half doubtful,’ Lumb had written.48 He had been proved correct at the cost of his life.
On 13 June the Japanese patrol returned to Lae with one of the officers wearing Lumb’s clothing and spectacles while Kitamoto rode the captured donkey like ‘Don Quixote leading the soldiers through enemy territory’. Other soldiers carried Lumb’s Owen sub-machine gun and the rifles taken from the native police.49 Kitamoto later returned to Boana with a platoon of Taiwanese infantry known as the Takasago Volunteers and trained the local natives in ancillary tasks. By August the military police unit at Ngasawapum and Kitamoto’s unit at Boana had together trained some 100 native soldiers.50
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Meanwhile, on 25 May Peter Ryan had returned to Boana for supplies, contending with leeches, landslides, biting cold and violent headaches brought on by the altitude. When Watute rejoined him he told Ryan that they had been betrayed and a Japanese patrol was now searching for them. Ryan headed back north into the mountain range, crossing a landslide via a vine ladder which was then cut away to make it very difficult for anyone to follow. Like Kitamoto two months before him, Ryan and Howlett were now faced with crossing the Saruwaged Range but this time from the southern side. They would also cross further to the west of Kitamoto’s route. When the party reached Amyen, at the base of the range, Pato was able to advise the best way to make the crossing and he assembled fifteen carriers to assist.51
On 5 June the party left Amyen and commenced to climb along a narrowing ridge up into the Saruwaged Range. ‘Remote, cold, incredibly high and distant seeming, they frightened us,’ Ryan wrote of the daunting mountains. The cliffs were sheer, ‘just like that bloody wardrobe door,’ Ryan later told me. The party faced ‘bare rock-faces, smooth and polished by the water’. Knowing what lay ahead, the guides cut vines for the climb as they went along the track, wrapping them around their bodies to carry them. They were ‘tremendous, looking like a bloody Michelin man,’ Ryan said. The guides would somehow traverse the cliffs and then secure the vines to enable the loads to be carried forward. ‘Hardly daring to breath, we crept over,’ Ryan wrote.52
The rain and freezing cold on the first night led to five carriers dropping out which resulted in one-third of the stores having to be abandoned. On 6 June the party set off at dawn knowing that it would be their longest day. ‘No more depressing sight can be imagined than this moss forest in the half light.’ They crossed the crest of the range and began an at times vertical descent before reaching Gombawato on the northern side after thirteen hours of punishing toil (see Map 7). Corporal Kari had been invaluable, relieving carriers of their loads at crucial moments to allow them to recover and continue. ‘His enormous strength of both physique and character were an inspiration to all of us,’ Ryan wrote. Still carrying the vital radio, Ryan and Howlett now received a message to withdraw from the Huon Peninsula and head either to Bena Bena or back across the Markham to Wampit. They decided on the latter course. The next day they were advised to move rapidly as the Japanese had moved deep into the Markham Valley and Harry Lumb had been betrayed and killed.53
Negotiating a series of rough and steep tracks, Ryan and Howlett’s party moved west along the northern side of the Saruwaged Range. The natives on this side of the range were not helpful and it was difficult to obtain carriers. Nonetheless on 12 June the party trekked for over nineteen hours straight before reaching Worin village. Here they were fortunate to meet a friendly village chief who fed the party well and offered to guide them back across the Saruwaged Range via an easier route than had been planned. At Sindamon, after they had asked to sleep in one of the huts, the villagers ‘politely removed a decomposed corpse, and motioned us to enter’. After recrossing the range by a much easier route, Ryan’s party reached Ewok on 17 June only to discover that Japanese patrols had already been there twice. On 20 June, carrying only their packs and weapons, the men set out to follow the Irumu River down to the Markham Valley, but after getting lost in ‘tangled belts of pit pit and sago swamp’ they headed back onto the main track and made their way to Chivasing.54
At about 1450 on 21 June Ryan’s party warily approached Chivasing. An accompanying native guide, Arong, was then sent ahead to check all was clear while Ryan and Howlett remained at a coconut grove on the edge of the village. Local natives told Arong that no Japanese were present in the area and that rafts and canoes were available for the trip down the Markham River to Kirkland’s camp, an Australian commando outpost. Arong returned to Ryan to confirm the absence of enemy troops and, with most of the native police left in the coconut grove, he led Howlett and Ryan into Chivasing where an obvious air of unease permeated the demeanour of the inhabitants. Suddenly rifle shots and machine-gun fire opened up from a row of houses and the two Australians dashed through the village, making for the creek. Another volley of fire broke out and Les Howlett cried out and fell face down, fatally hit in the head and chest.55
The quicker Ryan had jumped into the creek before the second volley of fire but had then lost his Owen gun and shirt climbing out through the thick undergrowth on the other side. Fear drove his feet as he scrambled away with small-arms fire lancing through the undergrowth around him. He then hid in the mud of a pig wallow as his pursuers continued the search. After about half an hour he heard the villagers calling out that the Japanese soldiers had gone but, having being deceived once, Ryan stayed hidden. Then as night fell he made his way southwest towards the Markham River, spending the night in a mud pool to escape the mosquitos. Next day he reached the Markham at a point opposite the Watut River and swam across from island to island. He then forced two local villagers to take him downriver by canoe to Kirkland’s camp and safety. On arrival he was ‘too spent, emotionally, to feel or think or care’.56 ‘I lost everything at Chivasing,’ Ryan later said, ‘My trousers, I looked like Malcolm Fraser!’57
The Japanese intelligence report on the incident stated that two Australians and fifteen native troops were ambushed by a military police unit at Chivasing with one Australian soldier and one or two native soldiers killed. The Japanese patrol consisted of ten men led by Lieutenant Tomita, who was the commander of the Lae Military Police and had left Lae on 10 June to reconnoitre the Markham Valley.58
•
Further west the Japanese were also contesting the presence of the Australians in the Ramu Valley. Much of the increased activity was related to the military road which was being constructed from Bogadjim on the north coast up the valley of the Mindjim River to Yaula and Yokopi with the intention of crossing the Finisterre Range into the Ramu Valley.59 The stretch from Erima to Yaula was 29 kilometres long and required 45 bridges to be built. After that it was still another 25 kilometres to Yokopi.60 On 6 June the astute General Kenney wrote, ‘I don’t think he [the Japanese] will ever finish it. If he does, air attack will keep him from using it.’61
Keen to know more about the road, a native police constable, Corporal Merire, who had good knowledge of the Madang area, was sent out to do a reconnaissance of the road with another native policeman, Constable Kominiwan. The two men left the Bena Bena area on 18 June and after wading across the Ramu River reached Kesawai village. They then headed north across the Finisterre Range to the headwaters of the Mindjim River. From here the two men heard the sound of dynamite explosions and discarded their rifles as they approached the Japanese controlled area. Entering a valley carrying baskets of food, the two disguised constables ‘saw hundreds of houses and tents, and what appeared to be thousands of enemy troops’, as Merire later recalled. The head man at the village next to the Japanese camp kept the men safe and they were able to observe the Japanese at work building a road 5 metres wide. The Japanese were using three groups for the work: one to clear a wide path through the undergrowth, a second to cut down any trees in their path and a third using dynamite to clear any rock obstacles. All the work was being done by manual labour using picks, mattocks, shovels, crowbars and hoes to clear the blasted rock. Only Japanese workers, most of them front-line troops, were used and they worked from dawn to dusk and into the night if the moon was out. After the two native policemen had moved nearer to the coast, some hostile locals betrayed them but both managed to escape capture and were able to return with their valuable information about the Japanese road.62
Good use was made of this intelligence. On 18 July an F-5 Lightning photo-reconnaissance aircraft took excellent photos of the road from Bogadjim to Yaula. ‘The size and scope of this construction project amazed all of us … the target appears lucrative,’ General Whitehead wrote in a report to General Kenney. On 20 July three medium-bomber squadrons, taking part in the deepest penetration by attack bombers into enemy territory to date, attacked supply dumps and three bridges on the Madang to Bogadjim section of the road. The next day the medium-bomber squadrons were back in a major air attack on the road itself.63 ‘At noon their airplanes strafed and bombed us with terrific firepower,’ one Japanese officer wrote. The raid killed 114 Japanese officers and men.64
On 1 August New Guinea Force headquarters estimated that the road could reach the Ramu Valley within six to eight weeks and there was concern at the threat that posed. In response the 2/2nd Independent Company had flown to Bena Bena to join the 2/7th. On 8 August a patrol under Lieutenant Bill Hawker reached Wesa, about 3 kilometres south of the Ramu River, from where it was planned to carry out a reconnaissance patrol across the valley to investigate the road. Lieutenant Pat Dunshea went with Hawker on the patrol. Dunshea, who had been decorated for his long-range patrol work during the Wau campaign, had recently been appointed as the 2/7th Independent Company’s intelligence officer.
Apart from Hawker and Dunshea, Merire also took part in this patrol as well as Kalamsei, a native police constable from the Ramu Valley. Lieutenant Ted Byrne later said that Kalamsei ‘was the best shot I ever saw. Brilliant young man.’ Pat Dunshea added that Kalamsei ‘knew everybody and knew where the trails were’.65 The patrol left Wesa on 9 August with Merire and Kalamsei scouting out in front. The two native police constables would play a key role as some of the villages in the area around Bogadjim were in the pay of the Japanese. When Merire ran into some hostile locals who thought he was unarmed, he brought out a revolver from beneath his lap-lap and killed them.66 Pat Dunshea later said that he ‘didn’t do much myself, but verified what Kalamsei and Merire had said’.67 Merire, the ‘warrior’, was later awarded the British Empire Medal for his service. Kalamsei, who Lieutenant Colonel Fergus MacAdie referred to as ‘the most willing and most courageous member of the RPC [Royal Papuan Constabulary] that I have ever encountered’, was awarded the same medal but did not survive to receive it, killed by friendly artillery fire on 21 December 1943 in the Ramu Valley. On 29 August 1944 the medal was presented to Kalamsei’s wife, Kumisi, before some 500 proud locals at Atsunas village in the upper Markham Valley.68
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Even at Wesa, on the south side of the Ramu, the Australians never felt safe among the locals due to the earlier Japanese influence. Ted Byrne was told ‘it’s a different warfare down there. At Wesa they have always hated us, they are antagonistic.’69 On the night of 11–12 August a Japanese patrol cut the Australian phone lines and tried to get into the commando camp at Wesa. Ken Monk let them get to within a metre of his post before opening fire, wounding a Japanese officer in the upper leg. The officer dragged himself into the scrub where he was later found dead by Captain David Dexter, his demise ‘indicated by automatic pistol in hand and beautiful hole between the eyes’. After further patrolling found no more signs of the Japanese, most of the commandos returned to Wesa camp.70
Next morning at 1115 the call ‘come and get it’ came from the cookhouse at the commando camp. But as the men headed over to get their lunch a Japanese patrol opened fire on the camp, catching most of the Australians without their weapons. Tom Foster managed to grab his Owen gun from the hut, jumped into a nearby slit trench and opened up on the enemy troops, who were no more than 20 metres away. The Japanese moved away but then came back, attacking Foster and Tom Giles in the slit trench. Throwing seventeen grenades and firing eleven magazines from their Owen guns, the two men held their ground. Other commandos had by then grabbed their weapons and helped repel three further Japanese attacks. Captain Dexter fired his Owen gun from the hip, bowling over about half of the twelve enemy soldiers he could see gathered and putting the rest to flight. Then another attack came, led by an officer waving his sword. Dexter fired off three magazines and threw some grenades and by 1150 the Japanese had had enough and withdrew, dragging their dead and wounded with them.71
The Australians also had their casualties. Lieutenants Bill Hawker and Andrew Beveridge along with three other men who were at the nearby observation post heard the firing and headed for the camp. They soon came across Japanese troops and, after Hawker’s weapon misfired, he was shot in the back, although not seriously wounded. Merire ‘just about did for himself helping to carry me out’, Hawker later wrote. Another commando, John Maley, who had been cut off from the camp, was killed during this action.72
Whatever clashes took place on the ground, the prerequisite for any Allied operation against Lae would be control of the air over New Guinea.
