There Will Be Roads In New Guinea

A Silver Lining to the War-cloud

EVEN war-clouds have a silver lining.

Evacuees from Papua may be heartened by the thought that roads are appearing in their previously notoriously un-roaded country as a direct result of the military operations in that area.

The four month’s struggle over the Owen Stanley Range has largely been one of supply—the tremendous supply problems, which proved the Japs’ undoing in their unsuccessful drive across the track to Port Moresby, automatically be came the Australians’ problem when they took the offensive and drove the Jap back to his Buna-Gona, beach head.

With the capture of Kokoda airfield— and possibly through the use of other airfields in the flatter country towards the coast—the communication problem has been solved to a certain extent; but the delivery of food and equipment to forward areas have caused many head aches to Allied commanders. Hence, roads have appeared in many localities where, five years ago, even a mule-track 'was never dreamed of.

Food cannot be cooked in the front lines without the fires presenting a first class target to the enemy. It is reported that some Army cooks heated up stew and bully-beef hashes in a kerosene tin and sent them in by carriers—a jaunt of perhaps an hour and a half. Use was made also of rubber-tyred, rickshaw-like hand-carts that the Japanese con veniently left behind during their “Back to Buna Week.”

THOSE people who knew this Owen Stanley country, stuck successfully to their theory that the Japs could not get an army—or, at least an army in fighting trim—across the Owen Stanley track to take Port Moresby in the rear, even when it appeared for a few mad weeks that the Japs were doing just that.

Many now ask how the Australians, in what is known as the “Wet Season,” have managed to reverse the process.

The answer is, firstly, undoubted Allied air superiority; secondly, native help. Our planes have been able to support actively our forward troops in combat, supply reinforcements, and at the same time prevent the Jap from blasting our bases as we blasted his from September on wards. The natives whom the Japs brought from Rabaul to transport goods and equipment, were continually sub jected to Allied straffing from the air, whenever they moved along the track.

They had no love of the Jap, in the first place, and they must have found his methods of compulsion a little dif ferent to the kid-glove tactics of the benevolent Administration to which they have been used for 25 years. Conse quently, they deserted whenever possible, either to the bush, or to the Allies.

The undoubted loyalty of the natives serving the Australians has been, on the other hand, a decisive factor in the Allied success. These natives, taking over where the plane left off, have supplied the only possible means of communi cation in areas where aerial transport can never be.

A kanaka’s idea of what constitutes a “road” is not ours. Usually it is a narrow native pad that links village to village simply by following the contours of the country. Inland natives, bred to the mountains, are not mountain-conscious, as we are, and can tackle blithely this heart-breaking terrain of serrated peaks, deep ravines and impossible tracks that attack the heights without thought of gradient—straight upwards through the

mud —and reach the top only to plunge over into the next valley and begin the process all over again.

EUROPEANS even unencumbered Europeans—drag themselves over this type of country without en thusiasm, and usually at the price of complete exhaustion. To live there and get about by the only possible means— that is, by foot — was considered a job in itself, prior to the war. One of the Territorian’s most sacred beliefs was that it was impossible for a European to do hard physical labour there without land ing very soon in the local mat-mat.

Yet Australians have not only lived there, and dragged themselves about the country, but have fought and beaten an enemy, trained since youth to harder liv ing conditions than ours.

REAL roads, as we understand the term, were few in the Mandated Territory at the outbreak of the Pacific war.

In Papua, except for the odd twenty miles out of Port Moresby, they were non-existent.

But, judging from the latest infor mation from that area, a different state of affairs will exist by the time this war is over. Engineering units, under the command of officers who were construc tional engineers in civil life, are building bridges across streams that hitherto were negotiated by canoe or on foot; and, with the help of bulldozers and other road-making machinery, are constructing roads that fully live up to that name— the kind of road that was hitherto un known in that part of the world—roads which, when military needs are served, will become “developmental” roads.

The two extremes of transportation— boys, which means long, laden lines of carriers, plodding up the precipitous slopes, and planes, used as aerial taxis and freighters—have thrown roads out of focus in the minds of Territories’ people. It was generally realised that there would be no real progress until roads came, but they were as pots of gold at the rainbow’s end, and no Administration could be cajoled into any definite action in the matter. For years the Morobe miners agitated for a road linking Wau and Salamaua and, although the route was eventually surveyed (at a cost of something like £20,000!) the matter rested there until the war came, again relieving the Administration of the necessity of going ahead with the ex pensive project.

Time and progress were largely static in our pre-war Pacific Territories —but the spur of war has worked many re volutionary changes, changes which, con verted to peacetime use should be of inestimable value to those Territories.

Friends of Captain Andy Thompson, one of the best-known skippers in the Cook Group, will be interested to learn that his son, Tony, has for some time been a member of the personnel of HMS “Achilles,” of “Graf Spee” fame. Tony went to Tahiti for his education and, later, resided in New Zealand, where he was joined by a younger brother.

The Makea-ariki-nui of Rarotonga (Mrs. Takau Love) was expected in New Zealand when the last mail left. Makea Takau is the widow of Lieutenant- Colonel Tiwi Love, who was killed in Libya while in command of the Maori Battalion. The Mokoroa, her eldest daughter, is at school at Hukurere, Napier, where her mother was educated.