Invasion Rabaul (30 page)

Of the few who were healthy enough to return to active duty, most eagerly accepted combat assignments. Bill Owen was promoted to lieutenant colonel and fought in the brutal campaign to hold the Papuan Peninsula against the Japanese. In late July 1942, just three months after escaping from New Britain, he was killed during a firefight on the Kokoda Track. “Jungle Ted” Palmer, something of a legend for his battlefield medicine, was likewise promoted to lieutenant colonel. He commanded a field ambulance unit for the rest of the war and was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Dave Laws joined ANGAU and was attached to the Allied Intelligence Bureau as a commando. During service in New Guinea, he was killed in action on May 5, 1943. Bill Harry was more fortunate: he served with the ANGAU intelligence section at Port Moresby and later worked with American forces in the Admiralty Islands. Peter Figgis was promoted to major and became a commando, after which he joined the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB). In March of 1943, a year after escaping from New Britain, he returned to the island aboard an American submarine and spent the next twelve months in various jungle camps as a coastwatcher.

Three other members of Lark Force also returned to New Britain during the war. Arch Taylor, now a sergeant, was back in action against the Japanese with the 1st New Guinea Infantry Battalion. So was Sergeant Bruce L. Perkins, who had come off the south coast with Taylor in the
Laurabada
. The two men helped to flush Japanese troops from Tol plantation in 1945. In a remarkable
reunion, they met up with one of the survivors of the 1942 massacre, “Nipper” Webster, now serving with a transportation unit. Together they posed for a photograph, but none felt like smiling for the camera. Instead, their faces relected the horrors of what had happened to so many of their mates.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

INSIDE THE FORTRESS

“I am a prisoner-of-war in New Britain
…”

—Sergeant W. Arthur Gullidge, 2/22nd Battalion

R
abaul had never been so busy, or its streets so crowded. By mid-afternoon on the day of the invasion, troops of the South Seas Detachment offloaded from various transports jammed against the wharves and jetties in Simpson Harbor. The streets of Rabaul were chaotic, as described by historian Peter Stone:
“Japanese soldiers fanned out to inspect their prize. Battalions branded their names on the doors of buildings as they forced them open and claimed what was inside. Tinned food was not touched for fear of being poisoned but it was later issued to prisoners … Cars, trucks, machinery and other useful equipment were stockpiled, while houses and buildings were ransacked. Furniture was thrown into the streets for fear of booby-traps, and valuable books and records were burnt. Natives found looting were shot on sight.”

Order was soon established by the 81st Naval Garrison Unit, but there was still plenty of plunder for the conquerors to indulge in. Rabaul’s department stores were filled with dry goods, the cold storage warehouse held plenty of meat, and the pubs in Chinatown yielded all sorts of alcoholic beverages. Once the pickings were gone, however, the Japanese were left to cope with severe overcrowding, which only worsened as additional personnel came ashore.

Support units of the South Seas Detachment included the 1st Field Hospital, the 55th Division’s Medical Corps, the 55th’s Veterinary Depot
(to care for approximately forty-five hundred army horses), a water supply and purification unit, and the 47th Field Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion. Conditions ashore became so crowded that many personnel were forced to live aboard the transports.
“I was left to work on board the ship,” noted Private Akiyoshi Hisaeda, a member of the field hospital. He remained aboard the
Venice Maru
for an entire week before making his first visit to Rabaul.

At the time of the invasion, Rabaul consisted of approximately 330 structures of all types, including warehouses and commercial buildings. The Japanese would eventually triple that figure, constructing more than six hundred wooden structures for an aggregate floor space of 2.8 million square feet. The demand for lumber was so great that both the army and navy put local sawmills back into operation and constructed new mills. Ultimately, twenty-nine
sawmills were in operation on the Gazelle Peninsula under Japanese supervision, with a combined monthly output of more than seven hundred thousand board feet of lumber.

Initially, however, the Japanese had to use whatever materials were available, and even tore down old copra sheds to obtain wood. As a consequence, most of the new structures were crudely built. It pained longtime resident Gordon Thomas to see the Japanese turn his once-lovely town into an unsightly mess.
“On every vacant piece of land within the township portable huts were erected,” he remembered, “and into the sides of the hills, surrounding the town, air-raid shelters were dug; and these later were enlarged to cave-like dimensions.”

Taken prisoner at Refuge Gully, Thomas was among the many Australians forced to work for the Japanese. The captors refused to recognize the 1929 Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, better known as the Geneva Convention, and sidestepped the article prohibiting the use of prisoners as slaves by “paying” the POWs a few yen each month. Not that the captives received any money—the Japanese simply alleged the payments with falsified documents.

At Rabaul, most of the Australian POWs and civilian internees served as stevedores.
“The days … were filled with working on the wharves, unloading some of the many transports that had arrived with the invasion convoy,” wrote Thomas. “Each day our numbers grew as more and more civilians and soldiers were brought in from outlying areas, until the
accommodation in Chinatown was inadequate, and both civilians and military prisoners were moved to the camp previously occupied by the AIF on the Malaguna Road.”

The Japanese no doubt appreciated the irony of imprisoning the Australians in the same barracks with the asbestos siding they had occupied before the invasion. Instead of gathering on the parade ground for marching drills or other familiar activities, the prisoners hurried outside twice each day, spurred by the raucous shouts of Japanese guards, and lined up for roll call.

Hardly a day passed without the Kempeitai (the military police and counterespionage branch of the Imperial Army) or naval guards bringing in more prisoners. Most were captured at one of the outposts that cordoned off the Gazelle Peninsula, but large groups were occasionally brought in by ship. On February 3, for example, a destroyer arrived with approximately 130 captured commandos of the 1st Independent Company.

Their adventure had begun eleven days earlier on New Ireland, when the Maizuru 2nd Special Naval Landing Force went ashore at Kavieng. The defenders were quickly overrun, and Major James Edmonds-Wilson withdrew with his company down the southern coast of New Ireland. At a village called Kaut, where the
Induna Star
had been hidden, the Australians began working on the ketch’s damaged hull. Ready to sail in a week, she carried the survivors down the coast to Kalili Harbor on the night of January 30. There, a local planter informed Edmonds-Wilson about the fall of Rabaul, so he decided to sail straight for the Woodlark Islands, 350 miles due south.

The perfect opportunity to sneak down St. George’s Channel past the Japanese came two nights later, when a storm lashed the archipelago. By daybreak on February 2, the
Induna Star
was already more than seventy miles south of Rabaul, seemingly in safe waters, but a Japanese patrol plane came along and attacked with bombs and machine guns. One bomb struck amidships, killing three men and destroying the only lifeboat. More enemy aircraft began to circle overhead, and the
Star
, her hull leaking badly, turned toward New Britain. All available hands were needed to man the pumps just to keep her afloat. Later that morning, a Japanese destroyer took her in tow. The commandos were transferred over to the warship which delivered them to Rabaul.

Another large group of 160 ragged-looking prisoners, all captured on the north coast of New Britain, arrived at Rabaul aboard the
Duranbah
on February 16. Among them was Captain Hutchinson-Smith, who would later write a marvelously detailed account of his
experiences as a POW. Although never published, it stands alone as the only comprehensive narrative among the many prisoners from Lark Force. The manuscript contains a wealth of detail, such as the fact that the volcano Tavurvur welcomed the prisoners’ return to Rabaul “by roaring and emitting large columns of smoke.”

Ferried from the
Duranbah
in Daihatsu landing craft, the POWs were met by a committee of Japanese officers wearing “magnificent swords, white gloves and acres of service decorations.” The eight Australian officers were then taken by truck to the former residence of William Phillpott, manager of the Burns, Philp & Company store, who was now among the civilian internees. They were ordered to sit outside on the lawn, but after an hour or so they were led across the street to Harold Page’s bungalow. Here they were ordered to write down their name, rank, and serial number, after which a guard called for the senior officer. Hutchinson-Smith stepped forward and was immediately escorted into the house for interrogation.

He soon discovered that he had much to learn about Japanese customs:

Behind the table sat a wizened worm of a man, in the full uniform of a Lieutenant, and at his left was another Nip who proved to be an interpreter.

The interpreter opened the proceedings by losing his temper when, through ignorance, I failed to bow, and he experienced much difficulty in explaining my lapse in the etiquette department. A deft cuff or two clarified his meaning unmistakably, but my execution of this formal Japanese greeting was, I am afraid, perfunctory and gauche. The stooge then said, “Senior Officah? So you are Scanlan?” I hurriedly explained that I was not the Officer Commanding, New Guinea Area, but merely the senior officer of my group. The interpreter was very, very disappointed.

During the course of the interrogation, the interpreter asked Hutchinson-Smith point blank if he wanted to die. He ordered the Australian to kneel on the floor. Hutchinson-Smith shivered when the blade of a sword was laid across his neck, but it was merely a warning to not stray “from the narrow path of veracity.” Afterward he was allowed to sit in a chair while the Japanese questioned him about his background, military career, religion, and family.

Suddenly the questioning became more direct. The Japanese wanted to know why he didn’t commit suicide from shame; they asked about “women for the use of the officers and soldiers” and wondered why the Australians didn’t have them; and they especially wanted to know where Scanlan was. Hutchinson-Smith didn’t have the answers they were looking for, but he found the questions “easy to stall.”

A few minutes later, in a different room, he was interrogated by a Japanese captain named Harada, who said he had taught English literature at a university in Tokyo. Hutchinson-Smith stated that he was “shockingly tired and weak from hunger,” so Harada obliged him. A bottle of iced beer was brought in along with a plateful of delicious food: a meatball covered with onion sauce and “the biggest pile of white rice” he had ever seen.

When the interrogations ended, the Australian officers were driven to their former AIF camp. The barracks and storerooms previously used by B Company and the antiaircraft unit were now fenced with barbed wire, forming a separate compound. The newcomers were searched, then ordered to report to the officers’ hut. They were introduced to Major Edmonds-Wilson, the ranking Australian, who briefed them on the current situation.

For starters, the officers held no status among the Japanese because they “had not done the decent thing and committed suicide.” Instead, the prison staff recognized Mac McLellan, the forty-one-year-old warrant officer, as the senior Australian. During roll call, he always tried to frustrate the guards by making it nearly impossible for them to get an accurate count of prisoners. At any given time there were men in the hospital, or sick in their huts, or helping in the cookhouse. Even the
benjos
were always busy, thanks to a high rate of dysentery and other intestinal ailments. The Japanese never seemed to allow for such absences when taking roll call, and McLellan, much to the delight of his fellow prisoners, invariably got them to start over again when the numbers didn’t add up.

The newcomers were dismayed by the small helping of rice they received that first evening. It wasn’t the clean, white variety Hutchinson-Smith had eaten earlier that day, but “Kanaka issue plus weevils, stones and rat-droppings.” Accompanying the meager portion was a cup of watery soup, and a number of prisoners became sick after eating it.

The new prisoners were also briefed regarding the camp
personnel. The commandant, a heavyset former banker nicknamed “Tubby,” boasted of beheading an American officer on Guam with one stroke of his sword. Although only a lieutenant, he wielded absolute authority.

Another key figure was the chief interpreter, known only as Matsui, who claimed he had worked in a Tokyo shirt factory before the war. His speech had an impressive range of inflection, often zooming down to a deep pitch and then rising back up as he struggled with the English language. His gravelly voice sounded somewhat like an airplane, and he was therefore nicknamed “The Dive Bomber.”

A second interpreter, Kawaguchi, spoke with a distinctly American accent. The quartermaster, “a tiny, delicate-looking army lieutenant with hands like a young girl,” wore boots that were several sizes too large. He liked to stand on the back of a truck and read propaganda bulletins to the prisoners. “He was very bitter towards Britain and America and was loud in his praise of Hitler and the Nazis,” recalled Hutchinson-Smith, who referred to him as “Puss in Boots.”