Fear Drive My Feet

by Peter Ryan

  Between 1945 and 1950, three different publishing firms read this amateur manuscript. Two said they were keen to publish, but were eventually thwarted by post-war publishing problems, chiefly the world shortage of paper. So the manuscript was tossed into a cupboard at home and would still be there, but for an extraordinary chance.

  In 1958, in Melbourne, we had briefly as a house guest that wonderful woman Ida Leeson, Mitchell Librarian from 1932 to 1946. When the poet James McAuley was once asked to define the meaning of the noun ‘secret’, he replied that a secret was ‘something very carefully hidden so that it could be discovered by Ida Leeson’.

  Doubtless trawling our cupboards for any secret which might lie there awaiting her, she found my abandoned script and, without my knowledge, read it. She announced that she was taking it back with her to Sydney, to discuss it with Angus & Robertson. Ten days later came the exciting telegram: ‘Angus & Robertson will publish stop love Ida’.

  So I was to be an author! Just like that! A&R’s superb chief editor Beatrice Davis excised scores of absurdly superfluous commas, but made no changes of substance. Not a word has been altered since. Fear Drive My Feet appeared in hardback in November 1959, and Lance-Corporal Kari (promoted now to resplendent Sergeant-Major) came down from Port Moresby for the launching. All the reviewers were very kind, Douglas Stewart of the Bulletin devoting to the book the whole of his prestigious Red Page.

  Gwyn James, manager of Melbourne University Press, took it up for his new series of Melbourne Paperbacks in 1960, and it was twice more (in a different format) issued by MUP (1974 and 1985). Then in 1991, Penguin Books chose it for inclusion in their Australian War Classics series, with a Foreword by ‘Weary’ Dunlop. It has thus been in and out of print, but usually available ever since 1959.

  It amazes and delights me that so plain and unembroidered a tale of one man’s travels sixty years ago still finds its readers. But when asked, as sometimes happens, ‘How do I feel about it all now?’ it is hard to find an answer.

  There is certainly ‘no memory for pain’ in the ordinary sense; the torn feet, the ribs broken from falls, the intensifying bouts of depressing malaria – all that vanished years ago. But several curious things still linger with perfect clarity.

  There were for example, two separate days – only two – when I felt that I was on the very brink of madness from loneliness and strain. A stern self-lecture on the virtues of the stiff upper lip seemed to do the trick – perhaps just in time.

  There was a day on which, at the end of a week of being hunted by the Japanese (said now to be assisted by tracker dogs) I sought refuge by climbing a stupendous dry cascade of huge boulders, as it ascended ever higher up a mountainside. At about 10,000 feet I sat down to rest a while, and from a sudden recollection of a school geography lesson, realized that this chaotic wasteland of random-strewn rocks was the moraine left behind in the retreat of an ancient glacier. Altitude and exhaustion play hallucinatory tricks, but a great voice seemed to boom in my ear: ‘This is the end of the Earth! This is the end of the Earth! You’ve reached the end of the Earth!’ I remember my answer exactly. I said: ‘If ever I get out of this, I’ll never travel anywhere again.’ This was not in any sense intended as a vow, yet it was what happened. Now seventy-seven, I have never been to England, Europe or America, and have never wanted to go.

  At times, every night for weeks at a stretch, when the Japanese were close, I lay down to sleep with the lively expectation of being dead by dawn. Certainly this frightened me, but I had learned by then that tranquility can be preserved even in the midst of terror: mostly I slept as sweetly as if I had been in bed in my mother's house.

  Well…all these are idle memories of a war long won – or perhaps lost. But most of all, looking back, my main feeling is of gratitude. Dispatching an eighteen-year-old on such a job as mine was heartless and irresponsible. And yet it was the best thing that ever happened to me: I got the chance to discover what I could do, and I am grateful.

  P.R. October 2000

  ‘And in the Military Service, there is a busy kind of Time-Wasting.’

  ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM (1466–1536)

  The Education of a Christian Prince

  ‘Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, and shall drive him to his feet.’

  The Book of Job, 18.11

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS BOOK is completely factual. The events it describes happened, and the people mentioned in it lived – or still live. It treats its subject – war – on the smallest possible scale. It does not aspire to chronicle the clash of armies; it does not attempt to describe the engagements of so much as a platoon. It tells what happened to one man – what he did, and how he felt about it.

  However, it will be helpful to the reader to have some knowledge of the background against which the story takes place; to supply that necessary glimpse of the wider picture is the purpose of this short introduction.

  New Guinea represented the most southerly extent of Japan’s all-conquering Pacific offensive of 1941–2. And it was in New Guinea – at Milne Bay – that the Australians inflicted the first land defeat on Japan. The campaign in the world’s largest island therefore embraced both the nadir of our fortunes and the turning of the tide in our favour. New Guinea was also the stern schoolroom in which we learnt the tactics and techniques – for example, jungle warfare – which led us finally to victory in 1945.

  The events described in the following chapters deal chiefly with the period of our unrelieved defeats, when the character of the war in New Guinea was most curious and interesting.

  The Japanese took Rabaul in January 1942 after heroic, but hopeless resistance, from the Australian garrison. In March they occupied the important north-coast towns of Lae and Salamaua. There was no resistance. What could a few dozen men of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles do against the Japanese who swarmed in thousands from their landing-craft? In much the same way the Japs helped themselves at their leisure to the greater part of the north coast. They made an assault on Port Moresby itself which came very near to success.

  There is real fascination in this early period of hopeless inferiority in numbers and equipment.

  When the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua the few New Guinea Volunteer Rifles men retreated to hideouts in the bush or fell back on the township of Wau in the mountainous goldfields inland. The N.G.V.R. had been civilian residents of New Guinea – gold-miners, planters, government officials. They were joined by a single Australian commando unit, the 5th Independent Company, and the two units were grouped under the name Kanga Force, with its headquarters in Wau. In parties of a few men they conducted a fantastic campaign of patrolling and harassing the enemy from behind both Lae and Salamaua. Everywhere they were outnumbered hundreds to one, and their communications spread out over a hundred miles of tracks.

  In the Lae sector they had to face all the text-book conditions of jungle fighting – dense growth, swamps, malaria, steamy heat, crocodile-infested rivers, and so on. In the Salamaua area the main problems were mountainous terrain – probably as rough as any in the world – dense rainforests, cold and damp.

  The enemy was strong enough to have taken Wau, with its important airfield, any time he chose, but the aggressive activity of our patrols bluffed him for a whole year and kept Wau in our h
ands. All this time Kanga Force was short of supplies. There were no transport aircraft to fly in material from Port Moresby or Australia. Stores therefore had to be carried round the south coast from Port Moresby to the mouth of the Lakekamu River by steamer. There they were transhipped to pinnaces and moved up the Lakekamu to Terapo, where they were transferred into whaleboats and canoes for a two-day journey upriver to Bulldog. At Bulldog all stores were made up into fifty-pound ‘boy-loads’ and sent off to Wau on the backs of carriers, nearly seven days’ walk over mountains heart-breaking in their height and steepness. To reach our troops in the Lae forward area another four days’ carry was needed.

  In sober truth this was probably one of the most extraordinary lines of communication in military history.

  Somehow Kanga Force held on, patrolling, harassing, watching enemy movements. Elsewhere on the north side of the island, behind Finschhafen, Madang, and Wewak, the position was even worse. There was no regular military force in the rear of the enemy. Our only contact was from small special parties, often one white man and a few trusted natives. They lived – often in conditions of frightful privation and danger – in the jungles and mountains behind the enemy’s coastal bases. At last, in January 1943, the Japanese decided to make an assault on Wau. Reinforced by a fleet which had landed troops early in the same month, they set out from Salamaua and very nearly achieved their objective.

  Our air transport position was now good, but the 17th Australian Brigade, ready to rush to Wau to stem the advance, was held up in Port Moresby by bad weather. When they arrived in Wau their planes landed among Japanese fire on the aerodrome. But they saved Wau and pushed the Japanese back to Salamaua. Within the next seven months, combined land and sea operations with the Americans gave us back Lae and Salamaua. There was much hard fighting still ahead in New Guinea – two more years of it – but after Wau the issue was never really in doubt.

  The whole character of the war had now changed. Superbly trained, supplied, and equipped, our troops attacked an enemy who, though fanatical and tough, was increasingly embarrassed by ever-weakening communications as our offensive by land, air, and sea mounted all over the Pacific. Gone was the day of the lonely white man maintaining single-handed contact with the enemy. By the end of 1943 we went where we pleased, and we went in force.

  This book describes some of the adventures which befell one man in the struggles of 1942 and 1943 in the savage country of the Lae-Salamaua area.

  I

  I SAT DOWN on a shaded boulder, head bent, sweat running in a chain of drops off my nose and chin; they fell with a slight pat-pat-pat onto the sodden legs of dirty green short trousers. The rushing water lapped my feet and filled my boots. I wriggled my toes round inside them, luxuriating in the cool sensation. When I stamped my feet little geysers of water shot out of the boots and up my shins; that was cool and pleasant too.

  Near at hand, the thin wail of mosquitoes. All over my back, through the sweat-soaked shirt that clung to the skin, I felt the jabbing of their red-hot needles. It was no use slapping – it only made you hotter, and made no difference to the mosquitoes.

  In the distance, the deeper, though faint, hum of aircraft engines. Where? Madang? Lae? ‘What’s it matter, anyhow? They’re too far away to do me any harm,’ was my vague thought.

  Wail of mosquitoes, hum of aircraft engines, roar of swirling water, and the constant pat-pat-pat of dripping sweat. ‘There’s the whole orchestra,’ I thought. ‘There goes the non-stop background music for God knows how many months to come. Let’s see just what sort of a mess I’m in, anyway.’

  I ticked the facts off on my fingers as I called them out aloud. It isn’t necessarily the length of time you’ve been alone that sets you thinking out loud – if the aloneness is sufficiently intense you start doing it in half a day. The facts came out in a sort of verbal column, like an inventory or shopping-list:

  ‘I’m eighteen years old, and I’ve been in New Guinea a couple of months.

  ‘A day’s walk to the east is Lae, and some thousands of Japanese troops.

  ‘North, a few hours ahead of me, is the Markham River, and somewhere nearby in the jungle is Bob’s, the camp from which a few hopelessly outnumbered Australian commandos are carrying on the war against the Japs.

  ‘Across the Markham, just visible through the trees from where I sit, are the Saruwaged mountains, so high that you can’t see the tops for clouds; among those incredible blue ranges, somewhere or other in an area of roughly three thousand square miles, is another lone Australian, Jock McLeod.

  ‘Object of my journey: to find Jock and place myself under his orders in his dual job of “governing” some tens of thousands of natives and watching the activities of our Japanese enemy.’

  By this time I felt a lot happier. It was reassuring to hear a voice, even one’s own. Secondly, I seemed able to marshal my facts pretty well. That indicated that I was sane as well as alive. Napoleon himself, I thought complacently, would have made his appreciation of the situation in much the same way.

  His purpose clearly stated, obviously Napoleon’s next step would have been a consideration of resources and ways and means. Again the verbal list:

  ‘Resources: Reputedly a fortnight’s rations, but really only enough to last a hungry man about a week.

  ‘No compass.

  ‘No maps.

  ‘One old rifle with a damaged foresight.

  ‘A thirty-year-old revolver with ten rounds of ammunition.

  ‘Bottomless, unbounded ignorance of the country.

  ‘Only the slightest acquaintance with pidgin English, the language needed to converse with the natives.

  ‘For assistance, one keen but emotionally unstable native police-boy, whose home is hundreds of miles away and whose ignorance of this part of the country is paralleled only by my own.’

  I realized that my verbal listing had turned almost imperceptibly into a sort of double-entry bookkeeping, and that every item so far had fallen on the debit side.

  ‘All right,’ I thought, ‘let’s fill in the credit side of the ledger.’

  There was a pretty long silence.

  ‘Well, I’m damned if I’m going to walk all the way back to Wau just to admit I couldn’t find Jock,’ I said at last, a little louder than before, and hastily ruled off the ledger. Even at that stage it seemed as if a lot of entries in those accounts might be written in red.

  It never occurred to me that I’d been given a pretty slim chance of survival by my superior, the district officer who had sent me on this errand. Nobody thought it very strange then, least of all myself, to send someone into that country without such basic necessities as food, maps, and compass. When you are eighteen the fact that quite stupid people can play chuck-ha’penny with your life doesn’t seem too unjust. This is partly because the thrill of the adventure is more dangerously intoxicating than liquor, and you aren’t too closely in touch with reality. You stride down the jungle trail full of confidence, a pioneer, a new David Livingstone; you feel exactly like your favourite hero from the Boy’s Own Paper.

  The hangover from this kind of binge is unpleasant. It arrives not when you understand clearly the danger you have been in but when you see how useless your whole mission was, how futile and
purposeless your death would have been, and, above all, when your sober but aching eye discerns that nobody whose business it might have been took the least trouble to see that you got even a reasonable chance of living.

  But these are afterthoughts, and no such shadows clouded my purpose that hot afternoon in 1942 as I rested in the shade.

  Five natives squatted in another patch of shadow, a few yards downstream. They were armed with leafy twigs, which they flicked across their shoulders at the clouds of mosquitoes that hummed round their shiny brown backs. Four were carriers whom I had borrowed in Wau to carry my bedroll, my rations, and my few odds and ends of personal possessions. They wore only lap-laps – strips of ragged and faded red cloth tied in a knot about their middles. As they sat on their heels patiently suffering the mosquitoes’ assaults, they talked quietly in pidgin English and passed from hand to hand a fat twelve-inch-long cigarette which one of them had rolled out of black twist tobacco and a sheet of newspaper.

  The fifth native was Achenmeri, my so-called police-boy. In peacetime, patrol officers working in the bush had found the assistance of several well-trained members of the native constabulary invaluable; now, in time of war, they were indispensable. Yet here was I sent wandering through the jungles of the largest island on earth with one partly trained police recruit!