New Britain and New Ireland
January to April 1942
Billy Cook was waiting to die. Bayoneted eleven times through his back, neck and head, the nuggetty young medical orderly saw no other way out of his agony. Then he heard the flies, droning as they descended on the corpses of his comrades scattered all around him in the coconut plantation. No, he thought. I don’t want to die this way.
Japan’s finest samurai warriors could catch a fly on the wing and smoke a cigarette standing on their head. Sharp eyes and superb balance were essential qualities for any would-be pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy.1 Those who completed the rigorous course of training were given their country’s finest weapons. The Mitsubishi Zero fighter was their sword, the mobile carrier fleet its scabbard. On the opening day of the Pacific War, this airborne elite had struck the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Now they carried the battle to the shores of New Guinea.
Like birds of prey, the Zeros swooped across Kavieng Harbour soon after dawn on 21 January 1942. New Ireland, the long, narrow island that shielded mainland New Guinea from the north, was about to suffer its first blows of the war. Three of the Zeros targeted the ketch Induna Star, which was being used by Australian commandos from the 1st Independent Company to ferry men and supplies between Kavieng and Rabaul, on nearby New Britain. When the raid began, the ketch left the government wharf and moved out into the harbour to present a more difficult target. Ray Munro hunkered down behind a Bren gun mounted atop the ketch’s cabin, but as the cannon shells lanced through the boat, he was hit and slumped to the deck. George Anderson, who had been handling the ammunition, took over firing. When his elbow was shot away, he moved the gun to his other shoulder and continued to shoot until he, too, was felled. He and Munro would both die from their wounds. They and fellow commando Lex Noonan, who was shot in both legs, were among the first casualties of the fighting that would rage across the New Guinea islands for the next three and a half years.2
From his weapon pit near Kavieng airfield, Captain Lex Fraser watched as the planes attacked in groups of nine and then worked over their targets in groups of three. They bombed and strafed the airfield and wharf area for thirty-five minutes, sending the defenders scurrying. Armed with only Vickers and Bren guns, the woefully outmanned Australian defenders claimed to have downed five aircraft; the Japanese later admitted to losing seven. Expecting a follow-up landing, the Australians began to withdraw from Kavieng. Later that day, a message was received that a Japanese naval force was approaching New Britain, destination Rabaul.3
Rabaul was the capital of the mandated Territory of New Guinea, which had been ceded to Australian control after the First World War. The decision to defend the town had been made before the outbreak of war with Japan, when the threat of further Japanese expansion was an increasing concern; the force allocated for the task was designated Lark Force. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Carr’s 2/22nd Battalion, detached from the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 8th Division, had arrived to garrison Rabaul in March and April 1941. The battalion was nicknamed ‘Little Hell,’ after the poker hand of three twos. Hell would come to Carr’s battalion soon enough.
Colonel John Scanlan took over command of Lark Force in October 1941. Scanlan had an outstanding military record from the First World War; he had landed at Gallipoli on the first day of that campaign and later, aged just 27, commanded a battalion on the Western Front. To augment the Rabaul defences, two 6-inch guns had been emplaced at the entrance to Simpson Harbour, while a pair of obsolete 3-inch guns was positioned on Frisbee Ridge to provide anti-aircraft defence. The 2/22nd was augmented by about eighty local men from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (NGVR), who had been called up for full-time duty. Lark could be considered only a token force but, as Carr observed after the war, it was enough to compel the Japanese to launch a set-piece attack and thus help to delay the feared attack on the Australian mainland.4 All expatriate women and children were evacuated from Rabaul in mid-December 1941, though some nursing sisters remained.
Squadron Leader John ‘Kanga’ Lerew’s force of ten Wirraway fighters and four Hudson bombers had flown to Rabaul in December 1941, within a week of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The limited resources allocated to Lerew reflected the burden that the RAAF carried at this stage of the war. It had to deal not only with heavy commitments in Europe but with escalating conflicts in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Lerew’s Hudson bombers were tasked with reconnaissance missions to the north, while the Wirraways were split into two flights with the unenviable role of defending Rabaul from air attack.
Kavieng had only a notional garrison, some 150 men from Major James Edmonds-Wilson’s 1st Independent Company. Their heaviest weapons were two Vickers machineguns, positioned to defend the airfield. The forces at Kavieng and Rabaul, together with even smaller detachments at Namatanai, near Kavieng, and on the islands of Manus and Bougainville, could only be termed a forward observation party, a mere skirmish line against the expected Japanese sledgehammer.
The 21 January raid on Kavieng was not the first air attack on New Guinea. On 4 January the 24th Japanese Air Flotilla—fourteen large flying boats, nine fighter planes, and eighteen bombers—had opened the air campaign against Rabaul. The two anti-aircraft guns on Frisbee Ridge did not even have the range to reach the bombers’ altitude. The battery commander, Lieutenant David Selby, watched as they flew over Rabaul in arrowhead formation, ‘flashing silver in the bright sunlight.’ Then the earth ‘leapt and danced in a huge swirling column’ as Lakunai airfield was bombed.5 Fifteen people in the native hospital and native compound were killed in the bombing, the first fatalities on the ground in the battle for New Guinea. Just before dusk, eleven Kawanishi flying boats returned to bomb the other major airfield, at Vunakanau, but damage was minimal. Follow-up raids on 6 and 7 January caused more significant damage at Vunakanau, destroying three Wirraways and a Hudson and damaging other planes. Four Wirraways managed to take off during the 6 January raid and one, piloted by Flight Lieutenant Bruce Anderson, engaged one of the flying boats, though it escaped. After more raids on 15 and 16 January, the Mobile Carrier Fleet steamed south from Truk Island and on the 20th, the day before the Kavieng raid, launched 109 planes in its first air attacks. Lerew’s tiny force had helped draw Japan’s main carrier fleet to Rabaul at a time when it should have been used to keep the boot firmly on the throat of the United States Navy in the eastern Pacific.
Of eight Wirraways sent aloft to challenge the air armada, three were promptly shot down, two crash-landed and another crashed on take-off.6 Watching from up on Frisbee Ridge, David Bloomfield wrote in his diary, ‘It was like hawks attacking sparrows. We had never seen aircraft with such speed.’7 On the ground at Vunakanau, a frustrated Lerew notified Port Moresby that he would use his sole remaining Hudson bomber to evacuate his wounded. Then, receiving an operations order to keep the squadron at flight-ready status, Lerew responded: ‘Morituri vos salutamus.’ It was the refrain of the Roman gladiators: ‘We who are about to die salute you.’ Lerew did not die in these battles, but with most of his squadron lost, the rationale for the RAAF to remain in Rabaul had gone. Lerew’s men prepared for evacuation. Late on 21 January the last two Wirraways departed, followed the next morning by the last Hudson bomber, carrying the wounded. The secretary of the Returned Services League at Rabaul, Albert Gaskin, drafted a cable to Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, protesting about the sparseness of the radio news on the bombings. He ended: ‘Send us fighter planes if Rabaul worth holding.’8 None would be sent.
Meanwhile, the 5th Japanese Air Flotilla, comprising the carriers Zuikaku and Shôkaku, was tasked with destroying air and naval forces on the New Guinea mainland. The seventy-five available planes were split into two groups. On the morning of 21 January, they attacked installations, parked aircraft and other vehicles at Lae, Salamaua, Bulolo and Madang before returning unscathed to the carriers.
It was clear that the air raids on Rabaul were a preliminary to invasion. As early as 9 January, a Hudson piloted by Flight Lieutenant Robert Yeowart had spotted large concentrations of ships and aircraft at Truk. After the longest sea reconnaissance undertaken by a RAAF land-based aircraft up to that time, Yeowart had confirmed that the Japanese were preparing to strike south. Rabaul was the obvious target. Aware of the development of the B-17 heavy bomber by the United States, the Japanese commanders in Imperial Headquarters feared that Truk would be vulnerable to attack by aircraft stationed at Rabaul. Occupying the town would prevent this. Rabaul, with its fine land-locked harbour—the crater of a flooded volcano—would also serve as an excellent air and naval base for extending the war south to the Solomon Islands and the New Guinea mainland.9
The Imperial Japanese Army would send Major General Tomitar Horii’s South Seas Force to assist the navy’s invasion of Rabaul. The force was built around Colonel Masao Kusunose’s 144th Infantry Regiment, with extensive support from divisional units including a mountain artillery battalion and a company of engineers, some 5000 men in all. Its first action was at Guam, where Japanese troops landed before dawn on 10 December and captured the island the same day. Orders for the landing at Rabaul were issued on 4 January. Any enemy forces were to be destroyed and a base for naval air operations established. Naval support was overwhelming. It included four heavy cruisers, six submarines and a mobile fleet based on four carriers (with approximately 300 aircraft), two battleships and two more heavy cruisers. After leaving Guam on 14 January, the invasion convoy crossed the equator at dawn on 20 January. Late on the evening of the 22nd, all formations had arrived at their designated anchorages off Rabaul.10
Major Mitsunori Ikezoe had been working with the naval reconnaissance flights since early January, identifying the Australian defensive positions. Acting on Ikezoe’s information, Horii planned a three-pronged attack on Rabaul, focusing on both airfields and the coast between Tawui Point and Praed Point, overlooking the entrance to the harbour, where the main strength of Kusunose’s regiment would land. Before daylight on 23 January, one detachment would attack Lakunai airfield from the sea, while an infantry battalion would land to the south of Vulcan, a small crater on the edge of the harbour, and advance inland to Vunakanau airfield. Though engineer units carried stocks of Akazutsu poison gas, authorisation for its use was not given.11
On Emirau Island, 120 kilometres northwest of Kavieng, Ken Chambers heard the sound of planes before dawn on 21 January. They were heading southeast, toward Kavieng and Rabaul. After daybreak, he sighted three Japanese vessels passing close to Emirau: an aircraft carrier, a destroyer and a merchant ship, also heading southeast. When another forty-six planes flew over in the same direction, Chambers sent a warning message, only to be told to wait until 0800. Unfortunately, the Japanese did not keep office hours.12
On the afternoon of 21 January, Colonel Scanlan called a command conference in Rabaul. Captain Stewart Nottage, an officer from the heavy battery at Praed Point, raised the point that defending the town would not be worth the cost in lives. With the invasion expected that night, the position was all but hopeless. Concerned by the prospect of naval gunfire, Scanlan ordered the evacuation of Malaguna Army Camp, the site of Lark Force headquarters. He told the men, ‘Most of you lads are very young and we haven’t a chance against this big stuff outside.’13
Lieutenant Ben Dawson was the intelligence officer with the 2/22nd and one of only a handful of men told that the invasion was imminent. Scanlan added that the troops would be kept ignorant of the invasion and be deployed as if on an exercise. It was a strange order by Scanlan, showing little faith in his men, and it resulted in many of them failing to take hard rations and quinine with them. Scanlan’s directions got worse. ‘Well, it looks as if all we can do now is withdraw and attack the enemy’s L of C,’ he told Dawson, who replied, ‘That is a good idea, but what are we going to eat?’ Some 2000 tons of stores, including food, had been destroyed the previous day. Three months earlier, when it had been suggested that supply caches be set up in the hinterland, Scanlan had simply channelled Winston Churchill, saying, ‘You will fight on the beaches.’ With over 1000 men now leaving Rabaul, the ramifications of Scanlan’s abysmal lack of forward planning would soon be felt.14 Billy Cook, a medical orderly with the 2/10th Field Ambulance, helped evacuate the hospital. ‘You don’t try to stop an avalanche,’ he later said. ‘We put as many patients as we could on the trucks at our disposal and moved off up to Kokopo,’ the former capital of German New Guinea, about 30 kilometres away.15
Scanlan had decided to concentrate all his troops south of Malaguna to cover the high ground leading to Vunakanau, which was defended by Captain Ernest ‘Pip’ Appel’s C Company. Major William Owen’s A Company was deployed to cover the coastline north of Vulcan crater, with the 2-pounder guns of the 17th Anti Tank Battery and the NGVR detachment covering the road up from the coast to Four Ways junction. Lieutenant Eric Almond’s R Company covered that junction, with Captain Colin McInnes’s B Company at the nearby Three Ways. Major Richard Travers’ D Company covered the road up from Taliligap Mission. By 1700, the Australian troops were in position, though some still believed it was only an exercise.16
Captain Frank Shier’s improvised Y Company was placed on the coast out at Raluana Point. The company, made up of rear-area men such as clerks and cooks, manned hastily prepared and inadequate defences. Lieutenant Selby, whose gunners had been ordered to support Shier, observed that there was no wire on the beach and only one short trench had been dug. A Vickers gun was positioned, more trenches were hacked out, and more wire was laid, but it was obvious that any resistance here would be token at best.17
On 22 January, the aircraft from the Mobile Carrier Fleet screamed over Rabaul once more. They came just after dawn, attacking Vunakanau airfield and the two 6-inch gun positions at Praed Point, which were clearly visible from the air. The guns had been emplaced one above the other to allow each a full arc of fire. When the upper gun was blown from its emplacement by the bombing, it landed on the lower position, neutralising both weapons. Eleven men were killed in the attack. With the guns silenced, engineers destroyed the magazine, water supply, stores and huts, and the battery was evacuated.18
There was no point now deploying troops to protect the harbour entrance. By afternoon, Scanlan also knew the invasion was imminent: the anti-aircraft battery telescope up on Frisbee Ridge had spotted the convoy. Within an hour, the Australians had destroyed both anti-aircraft guns, and the fifty-three men on the Ridge had boarded two trucks and were headed for Three Ways. Demolitions had already been carried out at Lakunai airfield early on 22 January. Two thousand aerial bombs that had recently been landed were also blown up. Unfortunately, the blast also put the radio station out of action.19
Driving through Rabaul late in the afternoon of 22 January, deputy chief air raid warden Albert Gaskin found the town deserted. After spending the night at Kokopo, where many of the evacuees had gathered, Gaskin awoke at 0200 to the sound of davits being lowered in the harbour. Out to sea, small searchlights were flashing. The Japanese invasion force had arrived off Rabaul.20
The transports had been lowering landing barges since before midnight. At 0225 on 23 January, Sergeant Frank Smith heard movement and saw a light in the harbour. Ten minutes later, an Australian patrol fired a green Very light, indicating that the Japanese transports had arrived offshore. By 0330, Owen’s men could hear the landing craft approaching the shore near Vulcan. These craft held 9 Company, from Lieutenant Colonel Genjiro Kuwada’s III/144th Battalion. They had strayed to the north of Vulcan and would land opposite Owen’s company. The Australians were waiting, having cut back the undergrowth between the shoreline and the road to allow a clear field of fire. As the Japanese disembarked, two mortars fired hundreds of bombs onto them. Then, as the survivors reached the barbed wire, two Vickers guns opened up. The riflemen from Lieutenant Bill Grant’s platoon added their fire to the mix. Basil Challis later wrote, ‘Gosh, they squealed like pigs as we gave them our whole repertoire.’ As day dawned, three landing craft were seen offshore. Those Japanese who were still on their feet had re-embarked, seeking a better landing site.21
After that initial repulse, 9 Company moved southwards to avoid the strong Australian positions north of Vulcan. There were many small crevasses to cross, and when the Japanese tried to concentrate their forces, the Australians began firing machineguns and mortars, targeting the flare signals that indicated assembly positions. Some of the stymied enemy troops headed along the beach towards Vulcan, while others advanced up through the ravines from the undefended Keravia Bay on the south side of Vulcan crater.
Even though Owen’s men continued to hold the beach positions, once the Japanese began infiltrating across the slopes of Vulcan and around their right flank, the game was over. Now Vunakanau airfield was under threat. At 0730, despite having lost only one man, Owen withdrew the company to Four Ways junction. When he arrived three hours later, Major Bill Mollard told him to get his men further back to Three Ways or they would be cut off. From the lookout at Taliligap, over thirty vessels could be seen at the harbour entrance. There were destroyers already in the harbour and one ship had berthed at the undefended Government Wharf.22 Rabaul belonged to the Japanese, and their aircraft dominated the sky. The outlook for the Australians was ominous.
Further south, the Japanese 8 Company had landed according to plan. By 0400 they had driven Shier’s scratch company off Raluana Point and sent a platoon to occupy Kokopo. Shier headed for Taliligap and Three Ways junction, where David Selby’s men were ordered to dig in. The Japanese soldiers were not long behind them, and Selby watched them approach ‘like a swarm of black ants.’23 Hampered by air attacks, Selby’s men fought hard until the threat from the right flank forced them back. Also at Three Ways, McInnes’s company came under pressure and withdrew at 1000.
Amid the chaos, some kept their heads. Travers’ company, at Taliligap, did not face its first ground attacks until 1130 and, though Lieutenant Fred Lomas’s platoon moved back towards Vunakanau an hour later, Lieutenant John Donaldson’s platoon was still holding positions facing Taliligap in mid-afternoon. At 1400, some of Donaldson’s men had also advanced under covering fire to recapture two trucks along with the two Vickers machine guns they carried. Arthur Simson moved up to the trucks and engaged two groups of enemy soldiers with his Tommy gun while John Sloane provided covering fire. At 1510 Travers pulled his men out. It had been quite a fight. They had taken a heavy toll on the enemy, for which Travers would pay dearly. Later taken prisoner, he would be executed by officers from the attacking units.24
As Colonel Carr moved his battalion headquarters further from Rabaul, he lost what control he had over his companies. Scanlan too had lost control: he now ordered Carr to pull his entire battalion back to the Keravat River. That order ended any chance of mounting a coordinated defence. Some units withdrew in reasonable order, others not, but as a whole the battalion had folded. When David Selby reached headquarters at Toma, eight kilometres southeast of Vunakanau, he asked if he could see Scanlan. The sergeant-major went to Scanlan’s tent and returned to tell Selby: ‘The colonel’s orders are that each man is to fend for himself.’25 It was an astonishing order. Just when strong leadership was most needed, Scanlan had failed abysmally. His attitude had been apparent earlier that morning, when he returned to Toma from Three Ways and told Captain Harold Nicholls to prepare to disperse the headquarters men because ‘the Jap force was too formidable to hold.’ At this stage neither C nor D Company had yet been engaged on the ground.26 As ‘Bill’ Harry, who was attached to Scanlan’s headquarters as a signaller, observed: ‘When the beach defence broke down it was one glorious shemozzle.’27
The true ramifications of Scanlan’s orders would be felt in the following days, when his lack of pre-planning for the retreat of such a large body of men into the mountains to the south became evident. Only the foresight of Major John Mollard, who had positioned a food cache further back, gave the retreating men any sort of chance. The road ran out only a kilometre or so beyond Toma. From there, it petered out into a jungle track that led to the Warangoi River. Most men went this way, moving south across the Baining Ranges towards Wide Bay. Scanlan told Bill Harry, ‘We’ve just got to get back in the bush.’ When Harry told Scanlan he wanted to stay and join up with the other signallers, Scanlan replied, ‘You please yourself,’ and left.28
There had also been a landing at Kavieng, carried out by a detachment built around the 2nd Maizuru Special Naval Landing Party (SNLP). Expecting only scant resistance, the Kavieng invasion force had left Truk on 20 January, a day before the first air attack. As at Rabaul, the transport ships approached the designated landing place on the evening of 22 January using the smoke and glow from the blazing township as a guide. At around 0200 next morning, Ken Chambers watched from Emirau Island as a fierce glow lit up the horizon from the direction of Kavieng. ‘We saw continual explosions as of bombs or [a] mine going up,’ he later recounted, ‘a terrific stab of angry red darts to each side and a huge stab into the heavens.’29
The first Japanese marines landed at 0230 and soon secured the town and airfield. A second landing on the eastern shore began at 0440. In total, between three and four thousand troops were landed, overwhelming the small party under Major Edmonds-Wilson and the few civilians who remained in Kavieng. As the lead Japanese troops reached the airfield, two officers exploded demolition charges in the runway, while Lieutenant George ‘Peter’ Dixon, aided by Stan Uhlman and Alex Davis, blew up the explosives dump. Before morning had broken, all three men had been captured. Their hands tied to short stakes and fastened behind their backs, they were marched back along the airfield. Dixon was paraded before the Japanese landing force commander and threatened with execution.30 Hopelessly outnumbered, the remaining Australian commandos fell back to a camp at Suk, about 30 kilometres southeast of Kavieng. The Japanese completed mopping-up operations on New Ireland on 24 January, capturing Namatanai and a number of neighbouring islands.
On 28 January Edmonds-Wilson, who had escaped from Kavieng, gathered his men and moved to Kaut, where they hastily repaired the Induna Star with the intention of sailing down the coast. Lex Noonan, who had been wounded in both legs during the earlier air attack, refused assistance and dragged himself aboard the vessel, one of 141 men who embarked on the night of 30 January. Reaching Kalili harbour the following morning, they learned that the fighting on New Britain was over and that the Japanese now occupied Rabaul. Edmonds-Wilson decided to sail for Port Moresby, but early on 2 February the Induna Star was sighted by a Japanese plane, which strafed and bombed it. Three men were killed and another thirty wounded, and the lifeboat was destroyed. The ketch was now taking on water, and Edmonds-Wilson considered any further resistance useless, so the men ran up a white flag. They were instructed to sail to Rabaul. En route, they were escorted by Japanese aircraft until a destroyer offloaded the men as prisoners of war and took them to the town.31
Those Australians who had fled from Rabaul, civilians and servicemen alike, had few options. Most headed south to the Warangoi River—the end of the road. When Albert Gaskin’s party arrived there at around 0700 on the morning of the invasion, they found some fifty abandoned cars and at least three army trucks. The ground was strewn with the detritus of defeat. When David Selby’s men arrived later that day, they were able to stock up on ammunition and food from the abandoned trucks.
The early arrivals had been able to find boat rides down the coast. Just after dusk on the day of the invasion, a group of fortress signallers, RAAF personnel and civilians, some 100 in all, were flown out on two RAAF Short Sunderland flying boats from Sum Sum Plantation to Samarai Island.32 The following night, more people were evacuated by flying boat, this time from Tol Plantation on Wide Bay, further down the coast. Gaskin was one of about sixty evacuees taken off that night on one of the Sunderlands. When their plane landed at Samarai Island, the right-hand float was damaged. To keep it from flooding, four people had to sit on the opposite wing.33
Most evacuees had to trek through the mountains to Adler Bay, just south of Sum Sum Plantation. The main body of men arrived on 28 and 29 January before moving further south to Wide Bay. As he made his way south through the coastal ranges on 3 February, David Bloomfield saw five Japanese landing craft moving south along the coast from Rabaul. Next day, his party reached the Bulus River, on the other side of which lay Tol Plantation. Les Fawcett shot a pig to provide some much needed food while Bloomfield and a civilian named Hutchinson crossed the river to scout the plantation. Here they discovered that Japanese troops had already landed and that their patrols were also scouting the area. The two Australians dodged one patrol and fled to the coast before recrossing the Bulus to rejoin the main party.34
After the invasion of Rabaul, 200 to 300 evacuees from the town had gathered around Tol Plantation.35 A Japanese float plane had flown over on 1 February, and two days later a Japanese force landed. After firing mortars and machine guns at the shoreline, the five landing craft beached and were met by twenty-two men, under Lieutenants Bill Grant and Harry Erwin, who waited on the shore under white flags. Believing there was nothing to be gained by staying on the run, Grant and Erwin had decided to surrender.36 Other troops fled. Some were later captured further south, at Kalai Mission, from where they were brought back to Tol. Here 123 men were put under guard for the night in three native huts ringed by fires that burned all night. At daybreak, the men were brought outside and their identity details taken.37
They were then marched to Tol Plantation house, where the Japanese officer asked for those who had surrendered on the beach to step forward. When some forty men did so, one of those who had held a white flag was told to pick out those who had been with him. The twenty-two men he identified were marched back whence they had come. The 101 who remained had their possessions taken and their hands bound with white fishing line, and were marched off in small groups.38
Wilkie ‘Bill’ Collins was given food and cigarettes during the recording process on that morning of 4 February. He was then marched off into the tall grass with nine other men, all of whom had their hands tied. They were told to stand as a Japanese officer drew his sword and ordered his men to fix bayonets. One soldier selected a prisoner and marched him off out of sight. The other men heard screaming. The soldier returned alone, wiping blood from his bayonet. More men were taken away to their deaths. The others cursed the murderers: ‘You yellow bastards, you’ll pay for this when our chaps catch you.’ One man asked to be shot. Another tried to run; the officer slashed him with his sword and shot him. Collins was last in line. The officer told the Australian to walk ahead of him, then shot him in the shoulder. He slumped to the ground and the officer fired twice more. One shot smashed through his left wrist and right hand, breaking his bindings. The other went through Collins’ back. He lay doggo until the officer left, then hid in the bush. After five days, he came across two other survivors in an abandoned house. When some civilians arrived, Collins went with them to get help.39
Alf Robinson, a NGVR rifleman, also survived. As the Japanese led his group through the plantation, the track came to an S-bend. The group had not been roped together, and Robinson, a jungle-savvy 38-year-old, saw his chance. ‘Turning the first bend of the S, I nipped out of the line and ducked down behind a bush on the other side of the S,’ he later recalled. The man next in line whispered ‘lower, Sport,’ and Robinson’s escape went unnoticed. His quick thinking saved his life: as he moved away through the plantation, he heard a series of rifle shots. Robinson hid out for three days before meeting a group of civilians, who untied his hands. The bonds were so tight they had almost severed his thumbs.40
Billy Cook was also rounded up when the Japanese landed at Tol. Told that they had left, he and seven of his fellow ambulance men were cooking and playing cards when one of the cooks ran past, crying, ‘The bastards are here!’ Cook dived for the scrub, ‘panic lending me speed and strength.’ Sheltering behind a log, he watched as enemy troops surrounded his mates. As they raised their hands high, his own resolve drained away, ‘running out of me like water from a sponge.’ He stepped back onto the track, hands in the air. A Japanese officer came along with a book and had the men write their names in it before cutting the identity discs from their necks. ‘What’s up?’ Cook asked his friend Raffles. ‘Don’t know, pal,’ Raffles answered with a shake of the head. ‘But I’ve got a fair idea.’41
Grinning, the Japanese officer ripped the Red Cross brassard from each man’s sleeve. Then the murdering began. The officer stood there, ‘hands on his hips, arrogant as the devil,’ as the first man was taken away. Face white, jaw quivering, the victim managed a bold farewell: ‘See you in hell, fellers.’ Two other men prayed. So, in his own way, did Raffles, who muttered, ‘Oh, Christ. Oh, Christ.’ ‘Next!’ the officer said. Two more men went forward, heads held high, disguising their terror with a final, ‘Cheerio, fellers.’ Another ‘Next!’ sounded. Raffles and two others stood up. ‘So long, boy,’ Raffles said to Cook. ‘I’ll see you at the bottom of the hill.’ Then he winked, turned, and spat in the officer’s face. The officer cursed, wiped his face and followed the three men into the plantation. Three shots rang out.42
Richard and Cecil Buck were brothers, born barely a year apart, who had grown up together in the Sydney suburbs. They had joined the Army together, been given consecutive service numbers, and served together in the 2/10th Field Ambulance. They were still together now, part of the group of men with Billy Cook. On this day, they died together.43
Cook and two Victorians from the 2/22nd Battalion were cut loose from the five remaining men. ‘Well, Cookie, now we will know what the next world is like,’ one said. ‘God, what a way to die!’ The other man just prayed. As they walked down a slope towards the sea, three enemy soldiers converged on them from behind. The first searing stab of the bayonet sent Cook to the ground, still bound to the other two. Four more times he felt the bayonet plunge into his back and heard the snarling grunt of the Japanese. Cook wanted to scream, but one of the other men had fallen across his neck, pressing Cook’s mouth into the dirt. He waited for death yet hoped to survive, holding his breath lest the soldiers see his chest moving. Then the dying man on top of him let out a groan and one of the guards returned to finish him off. Cook kept holding his breath, but he couldn’t help it—as the other man’s body rolled down across his back, it pressed the air from his lungs with a faint whistling sound. Cook felt the savage blade again and again and again, four times through his exposed neck and twice through his ear and out his mouth. He had now been stabbed eleven times. ‘All the pain there has ever been in the world hit me,’ he later recalled. Satisfied with their handiwork, the murderers covered the bodies with leaves and left.44
Darkness came. When Billy Cook opened his eyes, he could not believe he was still alive. Surely death was close; he was resigned to it, even wanted it. Then some feeling returned to his limbs, and as the flies gathered, he decided he would not die—not there, anyway. Somehow, he managed to rise, untie himself from the other two bodies and stumble towards the shoreline, some 40 metres away. After falling twice, he got a leg between his bound thumbs and, despite the pain in his neck, chewed through the binding. Finally reaching the water, Cook waded in to bathe his wounds, though the salt water burned. With night approaching, he staggered along the coast, walking and falling and getting up again, always in a blur of agony. Stinging sandflies made sleep impossible. ‘The pain stayed with me all the time.’45
When daylight came, Cook found a path. Stumbling along it, he came to a camp that had been set up by a party under Colonel Scanlan, and collapsed. Bill Waugh saw Cook arrive. He ‘was in a frightful mess, rotten with wounds.’ After letting him rest and dressing his wounds, the Australians sent Cook on his way with a native guide. But the guide soon vanished, leaving Cook to wander the jungle tracks alone. Eventually, he came across three more Aussies, who took him with them into the mountains. After seven days of trekking with little food, they ended up back where they started. Cook took the other three men through the massacre site at Tol Plantation, clutching a razor blade and ready to take his own life if the Japanese should appear. Leaving the others he decided to head down the coast. Climbing cliffs and swimming across river mouths, he finally met up with Major Ted Palmer, the medical officer from his unit. After inspecting his wounds, Palmer said, ‘Cook, you’re a tough old bastard.’ The devoted Palmer cared for Cook and later helped to bring him out of New Britain alive.46
On 5 February, David Bloomfield’s group had moved further up the Bulus River away from Tol, but the next day three of them returned to their former position to search for food. There they found Max ‘Smacker’ Hazelgrove propped up against a tree trunk. He had been roped to six other men and marched through the plantation by twenty armed enemy soldiers. Ordered to stop and turn their backs to the Japanese, the Australians hurriedly farewelled each other. Then the guards opened fire. Hazelgrove collapsed to the ground and passed out as the Japanese began covering the bodies with palm fronds. When he woke, he managed to untie his bonds, tearing the skin off his thumbs in the process. Rather than hazarding the jungle, he decided to wait for help. Back at the camp, the men examined Hazelgrove and found four bullet wounds and another larger wound. Taking him back through Tol Plantation, en route to Kalai, the group found Cliff Marshall, another survivor of the massacre, who had been bayoneted three times and left for dead. Two other men, Hugh ‘Nipper’ Webster and Norm Walkley, also survived, though Walkley would die of his wounds within a month.
There were at least four separate massacres at Tol and the nearby Waitavalo Plantation on 4 February, with between 123 and 150 men murdered. When Australian troops reoccupied Tol in 1945, 158 bodies were recovered. Troops from Colonel Kuwada’s III/144th Battalion had carried out these atrocities.47 Post war in China, where such atrocities had taken place on a genocidal scale, the murderers were called the Riben Guizi, the Japanese devils.
On 10 February, Colonel Scanlan, in full military dress and carrying a white flag, left Tol for Rabaul to surrender to the Japanese. In doing so, he chose to abandon those of his men who desperately needed a strong leader to try to get them home. Major Mollard and three others went with Scanlan. On 12 February, a Japanese destroyer came to Tol. A house that may have held two of the massacre survivors was set alight. It seems likely that Scanlan’s party was taken into custody at this time.48
From Tol, Bloomfield’s group headed down the coast to Palmalmal Plantation, where Father Ted Harris, a Sacred Heart missionary, gave them food and refuge. Gasmata had been occupied, so there was no point going further, though some men were sent partway down the coast to ease overcrowding. On the morning of 9 April, Lieutenant Ivan Champion, a former patrol officer who was now an officer in the Naval Volunteer Reserve, piloted the small ketch Laurabada into Jacquinot Bay and hid it in some mangroves near Palmalmal. Billy Cook, who was sheltering some 25 kilometres down the coast, later wrote of the ship: ‘Realising it meant our freedom, it looked like the Queen Mary.’ That afternoon, as storm clouds gathered, Father Harris bade the men from Palmalmal farewell. He would not join them; his work was at the mission. Among the civilians embarking were two women, Mrs Janke and Mrs Watterman, the latter with her four children. The 157 people taken aboard from the Jacquinot Bay area included twenty civilians. Les Fawcett wrote: ‘We laid like sardines in a tin, wet, dirty, sick, but happy.’ Under cover of the storm, the Laurabada made it to Port Moresby three days later, on 12 April. Most of the passengers were immediately transshipped to Australia on the MV Macdhui. The bathrooms on that vessel got a solid workout. When it came Billy Cook’s turn to bathe, he was constantly interrupted by senior officers wanting to see his wounds. ‘Each and every one from the highest to the lieutenants wished me luck and promised to get square for me,’ he later wrote. Cook’s story would help to fire the resolve of the Australian forces in New Guinea.
Back at Palmalmal, Father Harris, who had done so much to help the evacuees but refused to save himself, was murdered by the Japanese: bayoneted, shot and thrown to the sharks.49
Smaller groups also made it out of New Britain from the south coast. Captain Nicholls’ and Captain William Botham’s parties had pushed on from Palmalmal to reach Father William Culhane at Awul Mission. On the night of 16 February, eleven men left on the pinnace Maria. Though it had a freeboard of only 15 centimetres, it reached the Trobriand Islands three days later. Nicholls wrote, ‘I feel safe at last and thank my God.’ Culhane was not so safe. The Irish priest was found in possession of a radio and murdered by the Japanese.50
On the north coast, Captain Appel—showing leadership qualities so sadly lacking in others—took firm charge of 245 men who had reached Kamanakan Mission and split them into four groups. One of these men was Captain Allan Cameron, who had been Appel’s 2IC at Vunakanau. Liaising among the four groups as they retreated westward, Cameron sent a message to Port Moresby in mid-February describing the engagement at Rabaul and seeking direction. Having been given permission to escape if he considered guerrilla warfare impossible, Cameron and eleven other men sailed from Pondo on the seven-metre pinnace Dalcie on 19 February. Sergeant John ‘Keith’ McCarthy, the Talasea District Officer, was not impressed. Their departure left him with only one vessel to carry the main body of evacuees down the coast. On 22 February, McCarthy met Appel and began guiding more troops west until, by 2 March, 150 to 200 men were gathered at Open Bay.51 On 15 March, 214 people, including 162 soldiers who had escaped from Rabaul, were ferried from Walindi around the Talasea Peninsula to Iboki and on to the Vitu Islands. From there the group was embarked on the MV Lakatoi and taken to Cairns. They arrived on 18 March, an amazing feat of seamanship. Another twenty-six men were taken off New Britain on two smaller boats.52 Meanwhile, Cameron’s party reached Lae, then arrived at Salamaua on the night of 2 March. For the escapees, the ordeal was over. For most of those left behind, the outcome would be cruel.
Most of those captured at Rabaul and Kavieng who had escaped being murdered at Tol and elsewhere would be shipped out of Rabaul. The officers were separated from the men, and on 22 June 1942, 845 soldiers and 208 civilians boarded the Montevideo Maru, which was to take them to Hainan Island, off the coast of China. As the ship steamed north through the tropical heat, the already foul conditions in the crowded holds steadily deteriorated. After nine days at sea, the ship was struck by a torpedo from the American submarine USS Sturgeon. All 1053 prisoners on board went to their deaths in the dark waters off the coast of Luzon in the Philippines. Though no one knew it then and few know of it today, it was Australia’s darkest day of the war.