The Persimmon Tree (74 page)

‘Well, I don’t know how much you know, but stop me if you do. We landed here on the 7th of this month with very little fuss. There were just a few Japanese engineers and a labour force of about two thousand Koreans building a large airstrip at Lungga Point. They offered almost no resistance and we were most grateful for the airfield, which we named Henderson Field. Later we put down the marsden matting. Your Mr Martin Clemens had informed us in July that it was almost operational, one of the major reasons we sent the marines ashore at Guadalcanal.’

I should just mention here that while he referred to Martin Clemens, the famous coastwatcher, as one of us (meaning an Australian), Clemens was in fact a Brit, and had been a district officer who had elected to stay behind to support intelligence operations using native police to spy on the Japanese.

Colonel Greg Woon continued. ‘When the US 1st Marines arrived under the command of Major General Vandegrift and we took the airstrip, Mr Clemens came out of the jungle the following day and briefed me, giving us a comprehensive picture of the Japanese troop build-up here. It became immediately apparent to me that intelligence sent from your men out there, the coastwatchers behind enemy lines, was going to be invaluable to us. When Clemens again sent Sergeant Major Vouza, one of his native policemen, to warn us of the impending attack from the Alligator River that occurred five days ago, we realised that information from the coastwatchers was going to be an essential aspect of winning the war in these islands, in fact, in the whole of the south Pacific.’

‘Sergeant Major Vouza, sir? Lieutenant Marty Kellard, who met my plane at Luganville, mentioned him; said it was, or he was, remarkable. But then the noise from the B-17 prevented him saying anything further.’

‘Well, yes, if I had my way, he’d get the Medal of Honor. Let’s hope the Pentagon responds well to my report. Sergeant Major Vouza was on his way to bring us the message about the impending attack when he ran into a Japanese patrol. They tied him to a tree and bayoneted him, leaving him for dead. He chewed through his bindings and staggered through the jungle to alert us that the Japs were going to mount a major attack at the crossing at the Alligator River.

‘Well, we had time to position ourselves and set up our machine-gun posts and when they crossed the river we cut them to pieces with heavy machine-gun fire. God knows what might have happened if he hadn’t reached us.

‘The Japanese were led in the attack by Colonel Kyono Ichiki, a name that may not mean too much to you, but the sonofabitch goes back a long way, to the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge that started the Japanese war with China in 1937.’ He looked up. ‘You are right about their single-minded attitude, Nick. In a last desperate attempt to get to us, despite the fact that they were being cut to ribbons by our machine-guns, Kyono drew his samurai sword and, waving it above his head, led his battalion in a series of frenzied
banzai
charges against our position. When we found him he had more holes in him than Huck Finn’s eel bucket.’

The colonel spread his hands and jerked his shoulders. ‘So you see, we’ve quickly learned to take you guys seriously and that’s where you come in, Nick. I want you to monitor the radio network, bringing in all your guys on the various islands on a regular basis, in particular the coastwatcher reports from Bougainville and New Georgia. Given even half an hour’s warning of an impending Japanese air attack, we can get our fighters to take off and gain height to attack their aircraft from above and west of Henderson Field. If you could intercept and interpret Japanese unit radio traffic, that would be immeasurably valuable to us. It seems crazy that the internment camps in the US are full of young Japanese–Americans who are loyal to the Stars and Stripes, and we go to war in the Pacific with hardly any radio operators who can speak Japanese! You’ve got to wonder about the cockamamie brains that run the Pentagon.’

‘Sir, you do understand? I’m trained as a coastwatcher, who speaks and understands Japanese; I know how to use a field radio, of course, but I’m not a radio technician.’

‘Yes, understood. Corporal Belgiovani is to be your offsider. I’m told what he doesn’t know about setting up a radio transmitter and receiver isn’t worth broadcasting.’

‘Thank you, sir. I guess that means I stay here on base, no field work?’

He looked regretful. ‘Afraid we need you here, son. Later I’ll see what I can do. Get your set-up working efficiently. That’s our number one priority.’

‘Yes, thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.’

Colonel Woon looked directly at me. ‘Yes, Nick, I think you will.’ He nodded slowly. ‘I think you will, son.’ If this bloke had a quick temper then he was bloody good at hiding it; he’d managed to assuage my disappointment and give me confidence at the same time. He glanced at his watch. ‘Can I buy you a beer, Nick? Bud is all we’ve got at the moment but it will be cold. When we arrived we inherited a newly built iceworks from the Japs, an excellent unit that is now under new management!’ He suddenly slapped the top of his head. ‘Jesus Christ, son, I guess you haven’t eaten in a while?’

What could I say? I wasn’t going to start my career with the Americans by dobbing in Sergeant Joe Polanski. And so I grinned. ‘I’m an Australian, sir. The beer always has priority.’

He laughed. ‘Well said, but we’ll get you something to eat anyway. You look hot in that uniform, would you mind if I suggested you use our jungle fatigues? I’ll get someone to sew your naval rank onto your shoulder tabs.’

‘I’d be enormously grateful for the fatigues, sir. Don’t worry about the rank insignia.’

‘No, son, anyone who’s made a naval lieutenant at your tender age is worthy of recognition.’

‘Well, yes, maybe, but in my case it’s not strictly true, sir.’ I proceeded to tell him about my dubious promotion from snotty to lieutenant, the sole reason being not to diminish my position with his mob.

‘It will be a pleasure to watch the marines salute you, Nick. Anyhow, I have a hunch you’re going to more than earn your rank.’

The officers’ mess was an identical set-up to the sergeants’, although I wondered if Colonel Woon knew the sergeants and not the officers had the fancy chef from the Waldorf Astoria. He ordered two Budweiser and when they came he opened them both and handed one to me. ‘Butterflies, eh? I find that interesting. Tell me about it,’ he said, taking a slug directly from his can.

I had begun to relax a little in his company, so I grinned. ‘Are you sure you want to hear, sir? In my experience it’s a subject few people outside of small children find enchanting.’

‘My father was an entomologist, a professor at Yale,’ he replied. ‘Before I could recite “Little Bo-peep” I knew the Latin names of at least two hundred insects. In me you have a kindred soul, Nick. But first let’s order something to eat; you must be starving.’

I guess at eighteen there’s always a hole to be found that remains unfilled. I ordered a hamburger that turned out to be the usual shit on a shingle, chopped beef on a bun, and served with mashed potatoes. I proceeded to tell the colonel about my boyhood hunting butterflies in the jungles of New Britain and New Guinea.

‘Some childhood — from the streets of Tokyo to the depths of the jungle, Japanese to pidgin English! Not too hard to see why you want to get back into the field,’ he said, when I eventually, and not too tediously I hoped, came to the end. ‘Do a good job for us here and I’ll see what I can do.’ Then he asked, ‘With all that time spent in the jungle, do you suffer from malaria, Nick?’

‘Everyone does, sir, it’s only a matter of time. The dreaded
anopheles
mosquito leaves no vein untouched. However, I’m fortunate; some people fare better than others. When I go down with a bout it’s not too bad and only lasts two or three days, then I’m right as rain again.’

‘Yah, the first casualties are beginning to come in. Nasty business,
culicidae
,’ he said, perhaps showing off a bit with the Latin name for the mosquito family.

‘I guess the enemy has the same problem,’ I ventured.

‘Quinine, disgusting taste, lingers for hours,’ he spat.

The existing radio set-up was a tribute to Corporal Belgiovani, and inside a week we had the coastwatchers on Bougainville, New Ireland and the Solomon Islands coordinated and making regular incoming calls and, in turn, receiving our messages. The reception was in morse code, or by voice spoken in English or pidgin English. The brilliant, over-chatty Belgiovani soon had us receiving Japanese field unit transmissions, many of them uncoded. Most of the traffic wasn’t very helpful, but every now and again there was a real gem. When I got something good I reckon I made Colonel Woon’s day; he would take it to the general wearing a smile on his face like a Cheshire cat.

It didn’t happen immediately, but after a few days I began to translate the meaning of unspoken Japanese. Allow me to explain. The Japanese language is built on extreme politeness: what is said is seldom what is meant; it is the unspoken meaning that often counts the most, the underlying interpretation being overlaid with a pattern of words that appear harmless. It is how the words are put together that counts. Now, suppose you’ve spent your entire lifetime (as has every Japanese person) speaking this silent language. You develop your own pattern of pauses, inflections, glottal sounds or whatever, but the unspoken language is still perfectly understood by everyone. The patterns are known. Emotion, excitement, panic, anxiety, important information, even the deliberate attempt to be obscure, lies in the silent gaps, the unspoken syntax, if that isn’t an oxymoron. I understood this aspect of the Japanese language and so I believed I came to read, in a sense, what was really going on in the Japanese radio operator’s mind. I began to be able to pick a deliberate piece of false information or obscuration that was meant to lead us away from what was
really
happening. I even believed that we could put together the bits of ‘unstatement’, if that’s a word, so that we could become aware of the true situation.

For instance, the knowledge that the Japanese were running hopelessly short of supplies was reported through listening to ‘silent’ language long before it became known by our high command. With our aircraft controlling the beaches during daylight hours, the Japanese could only bring their supply ships in to unload at night and they simply couldn’t resupply their troops at a rate that was fast enough.

But, of course, this is not the kind of thing that causes you to rush into the colonel’s office yelling ‘From the land of the silent language, Eureka!’ So I would add it as a paragraph, an addendum at the end of a report. Naturally, at first nobody took any notice of what must have seemed to be pure speculation on my part. Even I was somewhat hesitant when writing such information, a little negative voice in me would be saying,
What if this is all bullshit?
But when, more often than not, we, the deadly combination of Corporal Belgiovani and over-promoted Duncan, began to be proved right, they started to take the extra paragraphs very seriously and these addenda became known as ‘Nick’s Knacks’, often becoming the subject of some rather serious meetings between Intelligence and the top brass.

Even after the excitement of the first week of establishment, I began to think about some way to get into the field. I literally longed for the jungle, to be alone or with a small tightly knit group of natives whom I trusted, and operating behind enemy lines.

I was surrounded by several thousand marines, some of whom were beginning to carry battle scars, unshaven faces and a certain look I hadn’t seen in the faces of young blokes before now. More often, they wore the plum-bruised and hollow-eyed look of malaria recovery, or exhibited the sniff and over-bright eyes that warned malaria or dengue fever was about to strike them down. I wanted some of their action — not as a sitting duck in a dugout, but on my own terms in the jungle.

But secretly I wondered — that is, when I had the chance to question myself, lying on a stretcher at night in my tent — whether being a coastwatcher was really what I wanted. The reports over the radio coming in from behind enemy lines clearly showed that these were mature men, steady, enduring and diligent, who knew who they were, and while observing the enemy’s movements, would go to extraordinary lengths not to confront him. It was not the excited chase of a boy after a butterfly, but a nerve-racking vigil by patient men, spent in a wet jungle that you could watch rotting while you boiled a billy. They worked in an environment where everything happens slowly, methodically; great sentinel trees are slowly strangled by vines restricting their supply of rising sap, finally choking them to death. Jungles are much more about slow death than urgent life. It takes patience and extreme caution to reach the canopy.

When Commander Eric Feldt set up the coastwatchers network he adopted the cartoon of Ferdinand the Bull, the mild-mannered young bull who hated violence and would sit under a tree while all the other bulls fought each other for, well, you know what bulls fight for. Then when they’d battled themselves to a standstill and collapsed in a heap, Ferdinand would get up, stretch, yawn and saunter over to Daisy, the object of every bull’s desire, accepting the prize with a sense of dignity and entitlement, brains triumphing over brawn. What this patently meant was that coastwatchers don’t get involved at the sharp end. They had inverted the traditional soldiers’ motto to read ‘Ours is not to do or die, but to reason why’. I didn’t want to be like Clemens and Kennedy (the coastwatcher on New Georgia) and the others, valiant and praiseworthy as they undoubtedly were. In my mind the jungle was the ideal place to
fight
the enemy — I didn’t see it as simply somewhere to hide, as did these older, wiser coastwatchers.