Invasion Rabaul (6 page)

That the native facilities were miles from town but close to the dump was no accident. Australia’s white population was no different than their American counterparts when it came to racial discrimination and bigotry. Throughout the mandated territories, the Melanesians were commonly referred to as “coons” and “fuzzy-wuzzies,” while the Pidgin English word for a European man was “masta.” Some insisted that
master
was merely an honorific, but the whites generally projected an air of colonial superiority over the Melanesians and treated them like children. Virtually all of the European households employed natives for domestic chores but paid them minimal compensation.

By the late 1930s the population of
Rabaul township had grown to approximately eight hundred Europeans, a thousand Asians, and three thousand
natives. All were capably governed by Brigadier General Walter McNicoll (later knighted), a decorated combat veteran of World War I. His proudest achievement was leading the 6th Infantry Battalion ashore at Gallipoli, where he was twice wounded. As a postwar politician he steered the mandated territories through the depression with a tight but effective
fiscal policy. Under his administration, Rabaul was said to be
“euphorically comfortable in its established routine.”

Underground, however, conditions were less than ideal. In choosing to develop Rabaul inside the rim of a caldera, Albert Hahl had evidently overlooked the island’s geological history. Perhaps he was simply ignorant of the volcanic past, else he might not have built the town where it stood. The Tolai, on the other hand, were fearful of the
kaia
that supposedly dwelled within the volcanoes. White missionaries worked hard to dismiss such superstitions, but the natives’ beliefs were eventually validated.

Strange things began to happen on the afternoon of May 28, 1937. First, a strong
guria
shook Rabaul for half a minute. It caused no damage, but the water in Blanche Bay withdrew and then surged back in a minor tsunami, stranding numerous fish on Vulcan Island. The following morning, residents of Rabaul felt another intense earthquake, then another, until eventually the whole town was rattled. Between tremors the residents felt a weird sensation, as if the ground itself was vibrating under their feet. At about four o’clock, Vulcan gave another heave, and a portion of foul-smelling reef rose up around the little island. Moments later, the vent on the islet opened up with a mighty roar.

Compared with the epic event that had occurred some 1,400 years earlier, the 1937 eruption on Vulcan Island was small, disgorging perhaps half of a cubic kilometer of material. Yet the results were devastating. Several natives who had paddled to Vulcan to gather the stranded fish were vaporized, a large sailboat crossing the bay from Matupit Island disappeared, and two Tolai villages were completely buried under volcanic debris.

As the eruption continued to build, heavy ash piled up on the landscape. Brilliant flashes of lightning split the air, sparked by static electricity within the cloud, and thunder added its din to the roar of the volcano. Mud and seawater, sucked into the already saturated cloud by powerful convection, fell to the ground in torrents of dirty rain.

Rabaul’s residents, having dropped whatever they were doing to watch the spectacle, suddenly realized they were in the path of the ash fall. Thousands tried to flee by the only roads leading north out of the caldera—one over Namanula Hill, the other through Tunnel Hill—but both routes were soon jammed with refugees. Day turned to night as the thick gray cloud overtook them, the heavy flakes of ash accumulating on the heads
and shoulders of panic-stricken citizens. Lightning and thunder added to the hellish experience, which lasted throughout the day and all that night.

Sunday morning revealed that Vulcan was no longer flat, nor was it even an island any longer. Overnight, it had been transformed into a conical mountain more than seven hundred feet high. On the surrounding plateau, everything within three miles had been destroyed. The Rabaul Dairy was gone, its entire herd of milk cows killed. In the two native villages near Vulcan, an estimated five hundred islanders lay buried for eternity under thirty feet of ash and pumice. Ironically, they had gathered to conduct secret Tolai ceremonies, much to the dismay of local missionaries. Casualties were light in Rabaul proper, where a Chinese woman was killed and a crewman from the American freighter
Golden Bear was
reported missing. Presumably he fell overboard, but his body was never recovered.

By Sunday afternoon most of the displaced citizens had gathered along the eastern shore of Crater Peninsula near the village of Nordup. Brigadier General McNicoll, who had been on New Guinea when the eruption occurred, flew in and began organizing emergency relief. A small fleet of steamships and sailboats gathered to transport the refugees south to Vunapope, which was adequately equipped to provide shelter until Rabaul could be cleaned up. During the afternoon, Tavurvur suddenly erupted with a blast of steam and heavy smoke. The flaming debris was frightening in appearance, but the
eruption soon subsided, the only casualty being a man who had been seen hiking in the vicinity of the crater.

Two weeks later, the people of Rabaul returned to an eerie ghost town. The once-lovely streets lay in ruins. Trees had snapped under the weight of several inches of wet ash, cars lay buried as though by a gray blizzard, and outbuildings and sheds had collapsed. A thick sludge of pumice choked most of the harbor’s surface. Ships were aground, scattered at odd angles on the beaches. Some roads had been buried by rockslides, while others were sliced by huge ravines. Most of the substantial buildings in town had suffered only minor damage thanks to their steeply pitched roofs; nevertheless the task of cleaning up was a long and frustrating affair.

Long before the job was finished, Rabaul was deemed unsuitable for continued service as the territorial capital. Three towns on New Guinea were considered as alternates. Salamaua prospered as the air-freight center for the goldfields, and Lae, twenty miles to the north, had a good
airdrome.
^*
The third choice was Wau, the administrative center for the goldfields high in the Bulolo Valley. The administration could not reach an agreement, however, and discussions dragged on until 1939, when the decision to shift the capital to Lae was finalized. Before Brigadier General McNicoll could complete the move, however, he fell seriously ill with malaria. Major Harold H. Page, the deputy administrator, assumed McNicoll’s duties and remained happily in Rabaul.

Fifty years old at the time, Page had been awarded a Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order during World War I, and was a popular figure around town. His older brother was even better known. One of the first Australians to own a car, Sir Earle Page had founded the Country Party, served as deputy prime minister under two governments, and even sat as prime minister for twenty days after Joseph Lyons died in the spring of 1939. The political connections were beneficial to Harold Page, who was still the acting administrator when the 2/22nd Battalion arrived in 1941.

By then, Rabaul had returned to its former splendor as a garden town. Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea, and a dozen other varieties of flowers flourished among hedges and shrubs, and the overhanging branches of giant casuarinas and mangos shaded the main boulevards. “It was a beautiful place, so tropical,” recalled Lorna Johnson, one of six
army nurses who arrived aboard the
Zealandia
on ANZAC Day. “The flowers were beautiful, the birds were wonderful, and after you got used to the heat it was really quite nice.”

Known then by her maiden name of Whyte, Lorna had been raised in the “back blocks” of New South Wales and was perhaps better accustomed to the heat than some of the other new arrivals. Private Albert R. “Bluey” Fry of Sydney, a drummer in the battalion band, described Rabaul as “terribly hot.” Arthur Gullidge, in a letter to his wife Mavis, declared, “I don’t think I have perspired so much in all my life.”

The temperature was only half of the equation. Much of the discomfort everyone felt was caused by the high humidity. The monsoon season began in December and lasted six months, during which the humidity hovered at 90 percent or more and the prevailing winds often brought heavy rainstorms out of the northwest. One night, after the troops set up a temporary camp at the foot of the Mother, a downpour dumped eight inches
of rain in two hours. “I was sleeping in a tent then,” wrote Private Thomas E. Hartley, a machine-gunner from Airey’s Inlet, Victoria, “and my bed was floating about the tent.”

Unfortunately for the battalion, the camp was down inside the caldera, where the humidity was much higher than on the breezy plateau. The soldiers hired “wash boys” to do their laundry, but between washings the clothing remained damp, creating conditions for all sorts of fungi and bacteria to develop. Men who failed to dry their feet and change socks on a regular basis found themselves afflicted with
tinea pedis
, commonly known as athlete’s foot. Even with aggressive treatment, the jungle variety sometimes took a month or longer to eradicate.

Several other tropical maladies threatened the troops, and Captain Ackeroyd would have been overwhelmed with cases were it not for the personnel of the 2/10 Field Ambulance, a detachment of which arrived aboard the
Zealandia
. Major Edward C. “Ted” Palmer, the officer in charge of the detachment, became the senior medical officer in Lark Force by virtue of rank. He and Captain S. E. J. “Sandy” Robertson, another capable doctor, were supported by the six army nurses and twenty orderlies.

The medics treated numerous head colds and even a few cases of pneumonia during the garrison’s first six weeks at
Rabaul. Passing them off as “related to the period of adjustment to the climate,” Palmer was not unduly worried. What concerned him more was malaria and its notorious cousin, dengue fever, both of which could be lethal. Neither showed an alarming level of initial incidence, but the potential for outbreaks was constantly high. Another serious threat was tropical ulcers, which could develop from almost any small cut or scratch into a festering ulcer in less than twenty-four hours. If left untreated, the patient ran the risk of serious infection or even blood poisoning. Using the ounce-of-prevention method, the medical staff made certain that hygiene and anti-malaria medication received top priority. Everyone took daily showers to ward off fungi, and each afternoon on the parade ground, the sergeants walked the ranks to ensure that
“every man took his dose of liquid quinine, unceremoniously administered by spoon into an open mouth.”

Thanks to the medics, the garrison adjusted to the climate without undue hardship, but the same could not be said of the six nurses. Referred to as “sisters” in the Australian Army Nursing Service, they wore ridiculous World War I-period uniforms: long dresses of gray cotton, a red cape,
a white veil, thick brown stockings, and heavy shoes. The women greatly envied the nurses at the civilian hospital, who wore sensible short-sleeved frocks, so the senior army nurse decided to make some changes. Kathleen I. A. “Kay” Parker, a former matron of nurses at Ingleburn army camp in New South Wales, was free spirited and strikingly tall. “Right,” she told the others, “this is fair enough; we’re going to leave these awful cotton stockings off.” Delighted, the nurses also decided to get rid of the red capes and shorten the sleeves on their dresses.

Unfortunately, the wrong people observed their cavalier behavior. “We went to work down in the tents along the shore,” remembered Johnson, “and none of the boys took any notice. Well, they probably thought we looked a bit better. But one of the plantation owners was a First World War nurse, and her great friend was Matron [Hilda] Keary, the senior matron in Sydney. She wrote to Matron Keary and told her what we had done. The matron wrote back to us and said that if we didn’t sew the sleeves back on and put the stockings back on, we were going to be discharged from the army when we returned to Australia.”

The nurses also encountered difficulties with Major Palmer, who had been directed to establish a sixty-bed hospital. He tried to avoid the assignment, for he and Robertson saw themselves as battlefield surgeons. They preferred to do their doctoring in the field, where the ambulance men had earned glory during the last war, and feared that a hospital would anchor them to routine duties. To show their displeasure, they refused to let the nurses work alongside them.

Lieutenant Colonel Carr eventually had to intervene. “The colonel came to see us and was a bit horrified that we’d been treated like that,” Johnson recalled. “He insisted that Major Palmer take us into the hospital. The boys wanted us down at the hospital, the orderlies and all the sick boys wanted us down there, but the major was objecting to us because he didn’t want a hospital.” Palmer conceded under direct orders from Carr, and the tent hospital was built near the beach adjacent to the encampment.

Within a matter of weeks, however, the very existence of the hospital and Lark Force’s tent encampment were threatened by renewed volcanic activity inside the caldera. It was Tavurvur again. The ugly-looking volcano, known by locals as “Matupi,” had awoken after four years of dormancy. On June 6, several earthquakes jolted Rabaul immediately after
reveille. The air inside the caldera seemed to vibrate, then suddenly the volcano burst into eruption. Soldiers gaped at the sight of hot rocks and ash jetting from the cone, and Rabaul’s civilians, expecting the worst, began an orderly progression out of town. They returned a short time later, having concluded that the volcano posed no immediate threat.

It was true: the emissions were little more than a nuisance, despite the fact that Tavurvur continued to spew thick clouds of noxious vapor with a sound like
“a train going over a big overhead bridge.” Some nights it rumbled so loudly that the entire camp was awakened, often to the accompaniment of earthquakes. “To stand,” noted Private Pearson in his diary,
“was to rock like a drunken man.” Everyone grew weary of the stench of sulfur and the corrosive effects of the ash fallout, which rotted the fabric of tents and uniforms and caused pitting in metal surfaces. Weapons had to be constantly stripped and cleaned, and any scratches that appeared on the garrison’s vehicles had to be painted over before corrosion would set in. The civilian vehicles in town, built of lighter gauge steel and less fastidiously cared for, developed gaping holes.