Embarrassing the Japs

War Came To Guadalcanal

The Part Played by District Officer Clemens in Embarrassing the Japs

{Major Clemens appears in the group on the front cover this issue )

7 1 HE following is an extract from a hook hy Harold Cooper, of the Fiji Information Office, which is to be published shortly by the British Ministry of Information. The book will tell of the British and Colonial share in the war in the South Pacific.

Mr. Cooper is at present in the United States on a lecture tour. The tour has been arranged by the Minis try of Information and is designed to acquaint the people of America with the part played in the war by natives and Europeans of the British Pacific Territories.

ON May 2, 1942, there were five heavy bombing raids on Tulagi and that night watchers on Malaita could see a bright red glow in the sky. It was assumed that the little AIF detachment was burning its stores and withdrawing according to plan. Next day the Bishop of Melanesia arrived at Auki by schooner, with the news that the Australians had got safely away in the “Balus,” a vessel of fifty tons.

On May 3 and 4, the Japanese made their first landings on Tulagi and the neighbouring islands. This meant that Kennedy had been by-passed and that Clemens, on Guadalcanal, was now the District Officer in closest proximity to the enemy.

Clemens was at his headquarters at Aola, Guadalcanal, when the Japs went ashore at Tulagi. With him he had eigh teen native policemen, twelve serviceable rifles and 300 rounds of ammunition. By swearing in clerks, native dressers from the hospital, gardeners and other volun teers as members of the Defence Force, he contrived to build up a local army of nearly 60 men, which carried out extensive patrols during the period of the Jap occupation; and, in early August, joined up with General Vandergrift’s Marines.

From an outpost evacuated by the AIF, Clemens’s men collected six extra rifles and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, while a number of useful weapons were later cap tured from the Japanese.

CLEMENS stayed at Aola long enough to play host to two American "air men shot down in the Battle of the Coral Sea. They drifted ashore on Guadalcanal in a rubber dinghy and, after being cared for by natives for several nights while they recovered their strength, were brought to his headquarters.

They were cursing their luck because they had missed the steak dinner which the captain of their carrier had promised them after the battle. Clemens gave them one at Aola, instead, and next day sent them by cutter to San Cristoval, where Forster took them over and eventually got them safely to the New Hebrides.

About the middle of May, native canoe

patrols which had been keeping watch at Tulagi and Florida reported that the Japanese were preparing to land on Guadalcanal.

Clemens then proceeded, quite literally, to take the Government station to pieces and remove as much of it as was portable to the village of Vungana, in the foot hills behind Aola. The natives gave their services free for this laborious migration.

Valuable records and heavy office equip ment Clemens concealed in a tunnel which was dug in the hillside near Aola. (All were afterwards recovered.) Sixteen men sweated over the task of transferring to this tunnel the District Treasury safe, which contained £BOO in silver.

Vungana, in Clemens’s own words, was “a miniature Edinburgh Castle, which could have been stoutly defended with a few rifles.” From this fastness he could see everything happening on the beach below, as well as all vessels entering or leaving Tulagi Harbour.

This was a great improvement on the lookout arrangements at Aola, where a native sat perched on the top of a banyan tree with instructions to blow a conch shell when he sighted an aircraft and wave a red flag to indicate the approach of a surface vessel.

ALTHOUGH, from now on, his pre occupations were largely of a military nature. Clemens did not neglect his routine duties as a District Officer. He established two sub-stations, with Clerk Daniel Pule and Police Sergeant Andrew Langabea (both now transformed into soldiers) in charge of them. The drugs from Aola Hospital he split into three parts and distributed to three improvised bush dispensaries which were regularly visited by Native Medical Practitioners.

He held court at Vungana and even trans ferred the District prison there, housing the convicts in ordinary leaf huts.

The main problem was food. Realising that his tinned stores would soon be ex hausted, Clemens had planted gardens of fast-growing yams and tapioca on the plateau below the foothills, taking the incidental precaution of siting them in such a manner as to obliterate the tracks leading to Vungana. His men went to the gardens daily to dig food, until one morn ing they found the Japanese there before them.

There followed a precarious interlude during which, as though by mutual agree ment, the Japanese and Clemens’s men dug in the gardens on alternative days. rE patrols Clemens sent out lacked nothing in effrontery. On one oc casion a Japanese political officer visited a village on Guadalcanal, assembled the inhabitants and told them he had reason to believe that .a white man was hiding in the bush nearby and had with him a number of native policemen mis guided enough to be still loyal to the British.

He offered a liberal reward for the cap ture of any of these fugitives and went away greatly pleased after receiving, from the villagers, assurances of their eager desire to co-operate in the manhunt. His satisfaction might have been less marked had he known that in the front row of the audience, gravely listening to his dis course, were three of the policemen he was seeking.

Another time, an islander returned from patrol with an unusually detailed descrip tion of the equipment brought ashore by a new Japanese landing party. Asked how he came to be in a position to make so accurate a report, the native replied: “I wanted to know exactly what they’d got, so I helped them unload it from the boats.”

The political officer who offered the reward for Clemens’s capture was among

the first arrivals on Guadalcanal after the Japanese had formally “occupied” the island. His duty was to pacify the local inhabitants and obtain their assistance in establishing a new Administration.

He set confidently about his % task by sending a circular letter to leading natives, inviting their co-operation. The letter, a copy of which was duly passed along to Clemens, declared that the British and American navies were at the bottom of the sea, that British rule in the Solomons was at an end, that in future only Japa nese law would be recognised and that all Europeans of enemy nationality still in the islands would shortly be rounded up for internment.

The letter drew no response, for those to whom it was addressed had good reason to know that the boasts it contained were, to say the least, grossly exaggerated. They knew that British administration had been embarrassed, but not interrupted, by the arrival of the Japanese, and that the Union Jack, if it had been hauled down at Aola, was still flying at Vungana.

WHEN the Marines landed, Clemens decided that it was his duty to make contact with American Head quarters as quickly as possible. To do this he and a small party of natives made a thirty mile trek in as many hours, passing through the Japanese lines en route. The journey was almost, but not quite, with out incident.

There was one minor misadventure which, but for the nearsightedness of an anonymous enemy pilot, might have had serious complications. As they crossed the grass plain near the coast an aircraft circled over them and, thinking it was American, they waved a greeting, only to discern a moment afterwards that it bore Rising Sun markings. But to their relief all the plane did was to return the

greeting and drop a canister containing ammunition and food. This gift from heaven they gratefully accepted and later handed over to the Marines.

When Clemens reached the American lines he responded to the challenge of a somewhat bewildered sentry by introduc ing himself as the District Officer of the island, adding that he had come to see if there was any way in which he could be of service to the Marine Commander.

His appearance scarcely accorded with the description he gave of his standing in the community. He was bearded, bare foot and clad only in a grimy shirt and a ragged pair of shorts. But the sentry took him at his word and let him in.

General Vandergrift was delighted to see him. He and the new arrival had plenty to talk about. rE islanders continued to distinguish themselves as one-man patrols.

There was the creditable adventure of Corporal Jaku, who was sent into the bush to endeavour to locate a gun known as “Piccolo Pete,” which was inter mittently shelling Henderson Field.

Jaku found the gun, but decided that he could not deal with the crew single handed. He did what he thought was the next best thing by following a tele phone wire to an ammunition hut and killing the three Japanese who were in side it. He then made a two-day trek to the nearest American outpost to report the position of the gun.

The Americans gave him a smoke-pot, which he was told to ignite alongside the gun at noon on a certain day, so that the troublesome Pete could be dealt with by dive bombers.

Jaku returned to the site of the gun, only to discover that it had been moved — doubtless to preserve the crew fTom the fate of their comrades in the ammunition hut.

Jaku, ashamed at the thought of hav ing to report the failure of his mission, lay in wait in the bush until a Japanese patrol went by. He followed it to a fair sized camp. Promptly at noon on the appointed day Jaku lit the smoke-pot a few yards from the Jap tents and walked back to his base happy in the know ledge that he had at least provided the dive bombers with a worth-while target.

Nor were the civilian islanders lack ing in initiative.

Consider the unhappy experience of the two surviving members of a Japanese plane which crashed on Guadalcanal in the closing days of 1942. They met a party of natives and asked to be guided to the nearest Jap post. Although there was a bivouac area only two miles dis tant, the natives blandly walked the Japanese forty miles in the opposite direction and delivered them, too weary to be indignant, into the hands of the Marines.

CLEMENS’S men had adventures at sea, as well as by land, although they could not compare in scope with the amphibious operations which Kennedy undertook in the Western Solomons.

There was, for instance, the narrow escape of the schooner “Kokorana,” which one night was lying in a bay on the north coast of Guadalcanal —most of' which was then No Man’s Land—when machine-guns brought up by a Jap patrol opened fire on her from the beach at point-blank range. The bo’sun hastily turned his ship about and took her out to sea, leaving the dinghy floating in the bay.

On shore, three men from the “Koko rana” had been stranded and two of them, both Europeans, were casualties after the first burst of enemy fire. The third —a Solomon islander—dragged them to a hid ing place in the mangroves, out of sight

of the Jap gunners, then swam out into the bay and brought in the dinghy. Under sporadic fire from the enemy ambush he hauled the wounded men into the dinghy and rowed them round the point to safety.