Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  Muriel Peterson later told Marjorie’s mother, Phyllis, that ‘Mr Harvey wouldn’t allow his wife to leave.’

  Harvey was later contacted by Rabaul on his Teleradio and told evacuation was compulsory; he must bring Marjorie and Dickie into town so they could be sent back to Australia. Harvey replied by quoting the Gospel according to Mark: ‘What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’, which showed how delusional he had become.

  At Tavui Point, only a few days after her 11th birthday, Diana Coote was playing in her beach swimming pool, the one colonised by the colourful fish. After several days of bad weather, it had stopped raining for a while and she was acting out an adventure story with her ever-present dogs.

  ‘I dropped something in the water. A knife of all things,’ said Diana. ‘I knew the knife would rust so I rushed up to the house to wash it in freshwater and there was this car painted khaki at the front door. And this young fellow, with an officer’s cap, came out and Mum came out after him and waved, “Bye, bye”.

  ‘And then she looked at me and said, “We’ve got to leave tomorrow. You can only take one suitcase and you’ve got to get stuck into the packing.”’

  It was all done before dinner.

  ‘Next morning, we drove to the wharf in town and got on the ship. That was that.’

  Three days before the Christmas of 1941, Diana Coote, with her one suitcase, said goodbye to her four dogs — Patsy, Pondo, Lassie and Stainer — and was driven into Rabaul by her father. Her mother, Rhoda, had also left behind her dog, a Pomeranian called Trilby. When they arrived in town, Rhoda found Lewis Froggatt, the government entomologist who was Diana’s godfather and a friend of Philip Coote, and asked him to take care of the dogs while they were away.

  Four weeks later, when the Japanese invaded, Lew Froggatt faced a difficult choice. He had to flee, but he couldn’t take five dogs with him. He picked up Trilby and began walking.

  ‘He carried that dog with him on his back,’ said Diana, showing me a picture of Trilby, the Pomeranian. ‘Look at that poor little soft thing.’

  Diana and Rhoda Coote boarded the Macdhui in the afternoon of 22 December. It was the second time they’d been evacuated from Rabaul; the first had been during the eruption four years earlier. All the children were excited, playing aboard the big ship. All the men were staying behind, but not by choice. They’d been ordered to carry on and had gone to work that day as usual, even though by then the Australian Government knew they were all in grave danger. Rabaul could not be held.

  In the late afternoon, the husbands and fathers, brothers and sons came down to the wharf in their white tropical suits to say goodbye.

  ‘Everyone was pretty controlled. It was very quiet, really,’ said Diana. ‘They, the fathers and mothers, got together and talked about plans for, you know, what are you going to do when you get to Sydney or go and see so-and-so, or here’s some money, you know, just general plans, to cope. Well, it was terribly sudden.’

  ‘Did your father come on board?’ I asked Diana.

  ‘Oh yes, he came on board. I’m very sad about that. I wouldn’t even kiss my father goodbye because I was too busy rushing around and I was just thinking that it was just another separation for a little while. It’s not forever.’

  The Macdhui and the Neptuna sailed from Rabaul that evening, but Muriel Peterson, Mildred Scott and scores of other women and children from outlying plantations had missed the evacuation ships. It wasn’t until a week later, after Christmas, that they were flown on chartered DC3s back to Australia.

  Apart from 17 civilian and army nurses, only two Australian civilian women then remained behind: Marjorie, and Kathleen Bignell, who owned the Rabaul Hotel and had refused to leave. Eleven-year-old Dickie was the only Australian child left behind. Scores of European and New Guinean missionaries in the region, as well as hundreds of New Guinean and Chinese families in Rabaul, had no choice at all; they had to stay, as did the hundreds of male planters, clerks and business owners, ‘hostages to fortune’ with the 1400 soldiers of the 2/22nd Battalion.

  For a week or so, nothing much happened. At Lassul, copra was cut and dried as usual and loaded onto the schooner. Dickie played on the beach when the weather was good. It seemed as if the Japanese wouldn’t be coming after all.

  On New Year’s Day 1942, the commander of the 2/22nd Battalion, Colonel John Scanlan, issued an order of the day in capital letters and underlined: ‘THERE SHALL BE NO WITHDRAWAL.’

  Despite the pleas of some officers, Scanlan made no plans for a tactical withdrawal should the worst happen. There was no plan to fight a guerrilla campaign in the jungle, and no plan to hide food or ammunition in the mountains.

  The only person preparing for a siege was Ted Harvey at Lassul. He had already been stockpiling tins of food at the homestead and in the mountains behind the plantation. He’d prepared emergency backpacks and put them at the back door for a quick escape. He’d even bought laudanum, so they wouldn’t be taken alive.

  Be prepared, he’d tell Dickie. You were in the Scouts, right?

  Cubs.

  Exactly. Be prepared.

  Everyone was acting a little crazy, but Ted Harvey, as Diana’s Uncle Hugh was to observe, was surely going mad.

  CHAPTER 22

  Code received: 3P2R PMTI PMTF BEPTN TQP9

  Decoded as: Morituri-Vos-Salutamus

  Translated as: ‘We who are about to die salute you.’

  — Wire from Rabaul to RAAF Northern Area HQ Port Moresby, 21 January 1942

  George Manson left Lassul on the schooner at dawn and was swept down the coast by the north-westerly monsoon, chased by a bank of dark clouds.

  He would have noted that he’d eventually have to sail back into the teeth of the approaching storm. He may have felt uncomfortable about leaving Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy on the plantation, but he wouldn’t have been too worried. Rabaul was now a more dangerous place, with bombs falling every few days. The plantation was much safer, with many places to hide, and Harvey had the place well stocked. If escape did become necessary, George would have been determined to force them all aboard the schooner, sail west and run down the island’s remote north coast; Harvey wouldn’t be able to stop them.

  With these thoughts on that Monday 19 January 1942, George Manson sailed the Lassul plantation schooner into Simpson Harbour for the last time. Tavurvur on his starboard sent up a black cloud by way of welcome.

  Ted Harvey had heard over the Teleradio that a government-chartered Norwegian freighter, Herstein, was taking a final load of copra back to Australia and any planters with copra would be paid cash on delivery. Copra was valuable again because the advancing Japanese were cutting supply lines and all New Guinea ports were closing. George had filled the hold with copra and was now making for a big ship that was docked at the Tobai wharf at Malaguna.

  Rabaul had been bombed sporadically since the start of the month, but the high-flying bombers weren’t very accurate. The AIF’s 2/22nd Battalion and RAAF’s 24 Squadron weren’t impressed. During one raid on the Lakunai aerodrome, the Japanese missed the runway and hit a labour compound, killing 15 New Guineans.

  Elsewhere, the Japanese had already captured Manila and were besieging the Americans on the Bataan Peninsula. They had invaded Borneo, the Dutch East Indies and Burma and were advancing on Singapore.

  Although George didn’t know it, the Norwegian freighter Herstein was his family’s last chance to escape. It had just delivered 2000 bombs for 24 Squadron and was now backloading with copra, but the acting administrator, Harold Page, had for days been pleading with the Australian Government to forget the copra and order the ship to evacuate Rabaul’s remaining 300 European civilians.

  The danger was now realised. Rabaul was being attacked. If the Australian Government had issued evacuation orders for the remaining civilians, Harvey would have been convinced to leave, and instead of a hold full of copra George would have arrived in the harbour that day with Marjorie, Dickie, Jimmy, Ted Ha
rvey and Bill Parker.

  The Australian Government denied Page’s request. The order came to continue loading copra.

  So it was that George tied up next to the Herstein, was told the copra couldn’t be offloaded from the schooner and onto the ship until the next day, and went to find something to eat and a place to sleep. The town looked eerily deserted.

  That night the Japanese fleet crossed the equator for the first time. Its transport ships carried vehicles and equipment, hundreds of horses and 5000 combat troops for the invasion of Rabaul. There were nine destroyers. On four aircraft carriers were scores of bombers and Mitsubishi Zero fighters fresh from the attack on Pearl Harbor. All this firepower was guarded by submarines.

  Before dawn on Tuesday 20 January 1942, the fleet entered the South Pacific under the cover of the monsoon trough that was also heading south towards Rabaul.

  A storm was coming but hadn’t yet arrived, and the morning was fair in Rabaul. After breakfast, George found that the copra still hadn’t been unloaded from the schooner. The Herstein was still loading copra from the sheds and the ship’s captain, Gottfred Gunderson, was nervous and angry. The longer he stayed in port, the greater the chance of being caught in an air raid. He’d been lucky so far, but it couldn’t last and the damned copra was taking too long.

  Gunderson and George might have both visited Philip Coote at the Burns Philp offices that morning to complain, not that Coote could do anything about it. The port manager had orders from the Australian Government to load all 6100 tons of stockpiled copra into the Herstein, and that was that. Philip Coote’s hands were tied and, as he usually did, he drove back over Tunnel Hill to Tavui to have lunch in his now quiet house.

  Captain Gunderson was still ashore when the air-raid siren sounded, and his heart sank. It was also George’s first air raid and the schooner was still tied up near the Herstein, but all he could do was find a slit trench and hope for the best. He noticed that the men who came out into the street when the siren sounded didn’t seem to be all that fussed. They were old hands at this now, sharing cigarettes and looking up into the sky. Soldiers almost sauntered to their positions.

  Previous air raids involved slow-moving bombers that had targeted the two aerodromes, and it invariably took twenty minutes from the air-raid siren for the first bombs to fall. It was almost sporting of the Japanese. Neither side suffered much damage. The Japanese bombers were too high to either hit what they were aiming for or be hit by the old anti-aircraft guns at Fisher’s observatory, and they were far too high to be reached by the RAAF’s Wirraway fighters.

  As the siren sounded, six Wirraways took off to join two already on patrol. One crashed on takeoff, the others climbed above the harbour and circled around the column of smoke over Tavurvur.

  George watched with interest from his slit trench near the shore. He would have seen the Wirraways suddenly start weaving and diving around the volcano and racing over Blanche Bay. Silver-grey shapes were streaking towards them from the east and the west. It didn’t make much sense and the grey shapes were moving faster than seemed possible.

  Is it the Japs? George asked a soldier nearby.

  Can’t be. The man checked his watch. If it is, they’re ten minutes too early.

  George counted 50 silver fighter planes in groups of three. None of the Australians in Rabaul had seen a modern fighter aircraft before and couldn’t have imagined that the Japanese ‘Oh’ they’d heard of was capable of 300 miles an hour. The Wirraway pilots never stood a chance. A puff of white smoke was followed by the boom of an explosion, and one after the other the Wirraways fell in flames.

  At Tavui, Philip Coote’s telephone rang; after answering it, he took his sandwich to the slit trench in the garden. At first he didn’t see any planes — the Zeros had approached Rabaul from the south-west and east — but he heard the noise of battle muffled behind the North Daughter volcano.

  Now, from the north, dive bombers came in a second attacking wave and he watched them approach like a swarm of flies. To his horror, several peeled off and headed towards him. It was a nightmare. Over the whining engines came a tremendous thump, and the H-shaped house erupted in a fountain of flame and splinters. The front lawn and coral driveway rose and shattered in the air. Diana’s swimming pool and its colourful fishes took a direct hit.

  It was over in minutes. Philip Coote lay in shock at the bottom of his trench, thrown about by the concussion, deafened and covered in coral and dirt. He picked himself up, couldn’t find the car amid the rubble, and began the long walk back to Rabaul.

  After the Zeros had taken out the Wirraways, the Japanese dive bombers fell onto the shipping and wharves.

  The copra shed on George’s left suddenly bloomed orange, and George’s head was squeezed and the world went quiet. Absurdly, burning shreds of copra were falling from the sky, and then slowly, from a distance, the world found its voice again and with a roar a grey shape flew low over his head at a speed he didn’t think possible.

  The Herstein’s Captain Gunderson hadn’t managed to reach his ship in time and wasn’t far from George when three bombs hit the freighter amidships, one starting a fire in the engine room that spread to the rest of the ship. The ship’s anti-aircraft guns were firing continuously until a bomb hit the bridge. The surviving crew leapt overboard.

  George’s schooner, unseen on the other side of the big ship, was pushed under like a bath toy when the blazing Herstein broke her moorings and drifted away. With the copra sheds and the shipping ablaze, the Japanese warplanes left in search of other targets. Fortunately, they hadn’t spotted the huge pile of bombs recently unloaded from the Herstein and left lying in the open beside the road, not far from George’s trench.

  The destroyed wharves and sheds were crackling. The bombing had stopped, but the anti-aircraft guns were booming and someone opened up with a .303. The enemy planes eventually ran out of targets and decided to put on a show, chasing each other like kittens through the columns of smoke around the caldera’s edge.

  George emerged from his trench and looked around. On the slopes of the Mother volcano a spiral of smoke rose from a crashed Japanese bomber. The Japanese had tried not to hit the town, perhaps because they’d soon be using it, but the Rabaul Hotel was in ruins.

  Ted will be devastated, thought George. Then he realised the schooner was missing. Ted will be furious. And then it hit him that he was stranded in Rabaul.

  Shaking, he made his way to the wireless station. Harvey took it surprisingly well.

  Was the New Guinea Club hit?

  I don’t think so.

  Thank God for small mercies.

  George would have spoken to Marjorie to assure her he was all right, before walking down to the New Guinea Club, where he found civilians steadying their nerves. He would be told excitedly that so many enemy planes could only have come from an aircraft carrier, and that the Japanese must be close. Many of the men in the bar were members of the local militia, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, and among them was Norman Fisher. It was at this point George agreed that, seeing he was stuck in Rabaul, he might as well join up.

  For Norman Fisher, the sudden escalation in the war couldn’t have come at a worse time. His assistant, Clem Knight, had been collecting observations, and the signs from Tavurvur looked ominous. The temperature inside the crater had shot up alarmingly and the ground was tilting.

  Still, Fisher had no choice. The militia had been activated and he had to follow orders, and that night he joined bank clerks, a dentist, schoolteacher, entomologist, customs officer and bookkeepers guarding Lakunai aerodrome, which at least gave him a good view of Tavurvur. From the back of a lorry that night, he could see an incandescent glow from the crater that was already in the early stages of eruption. He felt the ground tremble as the magma below moved and the pressure started to rise.

  The next day, Wednesday 21 January, George Manson enlisted in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. He was asked if he could fire a gun and was handed a .303 rifle and
100 rounds of ammunition, and then driven out to join Fisher at the airport.

  A newly bulldozed military track took him past the last houses and through a village, scattering chickens and attracting children who threw sticks. The airfield appeared on his right, empty but for two wrecked planes. The black volcano was quietly smoking nearby. This was what he’d signed up to defend.

  Back at Lassul, Ted Harvey had changed his mind. He had been listening to the Teleradio all morning and was in danger of running out of petrol to keep the batteries charged. The Japanese fleet had been spotted off New Ireland.

  Marjorie couldn’t bear it and you can imagine her leaving the room, leaving the house, to find a quiet spot in the garden where there was no sound of war. When George radioed he had made it sound as if the air raid had been a bit of a lark, but that was George, pretending to be indestructible. The world seemed to be falling apart again, as it had when she’d lost the baby and again when Jack had gone to jail. Just when she’d thought she’d finally fallen on her feet, war had intervened. It was as if God had sent the Japanese to punish her for her sins.

  Her sins. But Dickie’s very existence disproved that, didn’t it? He was a blessing.

  Please God, she thought, don’t take this all away from me now. She walked around the gardens blindly. There was no one around. Dickie and Jimmy were . . . she wasn’t sure where. They were usually tinkering with something, partly to steer clear of Harvey, she suspected.

  After the air raid and the loss of the schooner, it seemed to have dawned on Harvey that he’d lost their only means of escape. While the option of sailing away existed, he had the luxury of rejecting it. Now the loss of the schooner brought home how dangerous things had actually become, and leaving suddenly seemed like a good idea after all.