When General Douglas MacArthur
pp. 40-45 · Read in the full issue
was one of PlM’s heroes
Continuing her review of PlM’s half-century of news highlights in this, PlM’s 50th anniversary year, former editor JUDY TUDOR looks at five years and eleven months of World War from 1939 to 1945 when the South-West Pacific became a vast U.S. base. It was a time when PIM, too, nearly died.
World War II began on Sep tember 3, 1939 and, after the alarms and excursions of the previous 12 months, was some thing of an anti-climax. Con trary to expectations, the world did not immediately cave in upon itself and neither Italy nor Japan rushed to join Hitler.
The German armies on the Eastern front swiftly flattened Polish resistance only to have Russia walk in and seize half Poland plus Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The German- Russian pact that had stunned the rest of the world in August 1939 seemed to be working well in Russia’s favour.
The so-called phony war in Europe lasted nine months; in the Pacific it remained only a luke warm affair for a further two years. It did bring changes but for the ordinary Pacific Islander and most of the non indigenous residents, life went on pretty much as before apart
from money-raising for patri
otic purposes, such as ‘Bombers for Britain’.
Shipping became scarce and freight rates went up but there were no restrictions on travel if you could get a berth. The Sydney-New Guinea air ser vice ran to capacity and the
long delayed Pan-Am trans
pacific service, and the
Auckland-Sydney flying-boat
service run by a new outfit called Tasman Empire Air
ways, actually were inaugura
ted during this time.
Hundreds of young men in the Islands left under their own steam to join the Army, Navy or Air Force in Australia or Britain. Papua and New Guinea each raised contingents for the Second Australian
Imperial Force, with military
numbers prefixed by PX and
NGX respectively although in
Australia they were absorbed into various Army outfits.
After June 17, 1940, when
General Petain threw in the towel for France and the country was partitioned into the German-occupied zone and the non-occupied south centred on Vichy, the French colonies in the Pacific New Caledonia, French Oceania and the French part of the New Hebrides entered a period of
great disruption.
On June 10, presumably be cause Mussolini believed Hitler about to cross the Chan nel and invade England, Italy came into the war. Nonetheless it was only shortly afterwards that a tall, austere Frenchman named Charles de Gaulle whom no one had previously heard of, arrived in London and set up the French National Council, the HQ of what came to be better known as the Free French.
On August 15, 1940 the French Resident Commiss ioner in the New Hebrides, Henri Sautot, sent a telegram to de Gaulle pledging the sup port of the French in New Hebrides, the first overseas ter ritory of France to do so. His action was received with en thusiasm by PIM, which ran off a supplement in French in sup port, and by the Australian Government, but not by the Governor of New Caledonia, who was Sautot’s superior and
a more cautious individual who felt bound to the official government of France.
It was soon obvious, how ever, that the population of New Caledonia was over whelmingly for de Gaulle and in September Governor Pellicier resigned and headed for France, leaving affairs in the hands of the pro-Vichy commander of the Noumea garrison, Colonel Denis.
Leading citizens then de manded a referendum and on Denis refusing, near revolt fol lowed, up-country Frenchmen converging on Noumea armed with whatever they could lay their hands on. Meantime, Sautot landed from Vila, placed himself at the head of a column that marched on Government House and per suaded Denis to resign. Denis and a group of officials were
despatched to Indo-China by
warship at the end of the month and Sautot took con trol.
The same sort of situation
prevailed in French Polynesia,
where conservative officials were finally replaced by de
Gaulle appointees, but rallying
to Free France did not solve all their problems and it is doubt ful if all that went on behind the scenes in the French Pacific
at that time has ever been fully documented.
It was not for nothing that Churchill claimed that the heaviest cross he had to bear during the war was the Cross of Lorraine, the double-barred
symbol that represented Free
France and de Gaulle. The fact was that the Pacific colonies endured considerable inter ference plus a procession of governors and others sent by de
Gaulle including, in August
1941, a somewhat mysterious figure who a year before had been a monk in a religious in stitution. He was Rear-
Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu,
who became military governor of New Caledonia while Sautot carried on in a civilian
capacity.
By mid-1942 Sautot and the newcomer had got across each other’s necks to the extent that d’Argenlieu ordered Sautot’s arrest, whereupon Sautot flew off to London to protest and
d’Argenlieu disappeared some
where else. Sautot surfaced later as governor of an African colony, and in February 1943 d’Argenlieu turned up with de Gaulle at Casablanca. He later became head of the Free
French Navy.
“Strange Political Events in French Colonies” was a head line in a story in PIM in June 1942, in which an effort was made, despite the Australian censor to whom everything had to be submitted before publi cation, to see some sense in the French situation.
But PIM had other more im portant things to worry about, with half our world in the front line by then and the rest disin tegrating around us.
The Pacific Campaign: In 1941 Australia had reluctantly stationed units of the army and Navy in Port Moresby and had overcome its reluctance to for tify a Mandated Territory to the extent of sending the 2/22 Bn AIF to Rabaul. Not before
time the fighting war began in the Pacific on December 7, 1941, (or on Decembers, if you lived west of the International Dateline) when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Har bour, the US Navy base at Honolulu. Women and chil dren were immediately evacuated from Papua and New Guinea and taken off Nauru and Ocean Is.
Japan followed up its success at Pearl Harbour by launching attacks on Wake, Guam, the Philippines, North Borneo,
Malaya, Singapore and
Thailand. On Dec. 10, their bombers sank the British
battleships Repulse and Prince
of Wales , leaving PlM’s Pacific and its periphery mesmerised by the swiftness of it all.
Within two months, Guam and Wake were over-run,
Hong Kong captured,
Thailand occupied. Malaya
and North Borneo followed and on February 15, 1942, Sin gapore capitulated. By the end of the month the battle for Java began and soon ended. Rem nants of the American forces held out on Bataan, in the Philippines, wih their hours numbered.
At dawn on January 23, the Japanese landed in strength on the shores of Blanche Bay, New Britain and overwhelmed a small force composed of a unit of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and the 2/22nd Bn AIF assisted by half a dozen obsolete Wirraway aircraft.
When resistence became useless, the order was given the defenders to look to them selves. Most of the military took to the New Britain bush where some were rounded up within a few days. Of those who were not, a proportion
perished through ignorance of
New Guinea conditions and lack of will to go on, but several hundred managed to exist in the jungle and were
subsequently rescued by ex
perienced Territory residents
conscripted into the Army,
including the late Keith
McCarthy, and eventually got
back to Port Moresby or Aus tralia.
Such evacuation plans as had been made for the several hundred civilians left behind in Rabaul went by the board in
the general confusion and most of these became civilian pris oners who were shipped off to Japan on a vessel called Mon tevideo Maru, and lost.
PIM persisted in trying to have this investigated but got nowhere with Canberra. The
piece of bureacratic bungling
that resulted in the tragedy could have been avoided by evacuating the men on a neu tral ship that was actually load ing copra in Rabaul within a couple of days of the invasion.
Permission to do this was asked of Canberra and either ignored or refused, and no one on the spot had the sense or the fore sight to take matters into his own hands.
The Japanese followed up their successful invasion of
Rabaul by attacking New
Guinea mainland centres, which were bombed and gener
ally evacuated by Europeans,
the indigenous population
making what they could of the situation either by going bush or making their way back to
their villages or by staying put
and letting the Japanese wash over them.
Stories of escapes from the enemy were legion and kept appearing in the pages of PIM literally for years. In the first crazy months, heroes went quite unsung except for a ran dom par or story months after the event.
Other Territorians trapped by the swiftness of the Japanese advance got away in civilian aircraft whose pilots risked their own necks, in schooners, small boats or even canoes. Others did it on foot.
One party from Wewak went up the Sepik River, over the divide into the Fly and eventu ally got to the coast of Western Papua. It took nine months, but this considerable achievement got no publicity, and was recorded in PIM only for the first time in 1955.
In mid-March 1942, General Douglas MacArthur was snatched from Bataan and landed in Melbourne where he
was appointed Supreme Com
mander of Allied Forces in the SW Pacific. At the same time, American servicemen began to flood into Australia and New Caledonia, which became vast US bases and Second AIF bat
talions returned from the Middle East and went on to Port Moresby to put backbone into the Australian effort,
already threatened by the
advance of the Japanese
through NE Papua.
The Japanese plan was to use the Solomons to launch a final attack on Australia but they
spent too long consolidating
their occupation of Rabaul and did not land at Tulagi, the old capital of the Solomons, until May 1942 and on Guadal canal not until July, where they proceeded to build the large airfield that in US Marine hands later became famous as Henderson Field. By this time the Allies were strong enough to counter-attack and Guadal canal was where the southern thrust of the Japanese fin ished.
The Gilberts were, in later stages of the war, to have their
period of bloody fighting but
Fiji, the Samoas, Cook Islands, New Hebrides and French Polynesia did not. They be came bases, back-up areas or providers of airfields on for merly isolated islands and atolls for the island hopping
strategy developed by
MacArthur.
In August 1942 the US Navy with elements of the Royal Australian Navy attacked
Japanese positions on Tulagi
and Guadalcanal and US Mar ines landed to begin the first battle of Guadalcanal around Henderson Field. In the following month, Australian troops began to push the Japanese back across the Kokoda Trail from a point just 40 miles from Port Moresby, down over the Owen Stanley
Ranges, through Kokoda
settlement and eventually into the sea at Gona.
By 1943 MacArthur and his top brass had given away the idea of rooting out every Japanese on the path back to
the Philippines and Japan.
Instead it was decided which points should be taken, leaving enemy-held areas elsewhere to wither through lack of supplies and support. This island
leaping technique took the
Allied forces from Guadal canal to Rendova and Munda and from there to Empress
Augusta Bay in Bougainville,
leaving Japanese garrisons in
the Solomons, Choiseul and Kieta to be mopped up at leisure.
In P-NG it was from Papua to Lae/Salamaua, to Arawe on the south coast of New Britain, ignoring Rabaul. Then on to Manus, Hollandia and Biak. In the same way, US Marines took Tarawa in the battle for Betio in November 1943, then leaped to Kwajalein in the Marshalls and on to Guam and the southern Marianas.
Where they faced frontal attacks, as in Betio and Saipan, the Japanese literally fought to the death or committed mass suicide. Where they were by passed they were rounded up and surrendered. No less than 127,000 left behind by the receding tide of war were taken by the Australians by the time
Japan capitulated in August
1945.
After the Americans had taken Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas in mid-1944 they were at last within bombing range of the Philippines and Japan itself. It was, in fact, on the long straight runways that took up most of northern Tinian that on August 6, 1945 a 829 aircraft named ‘Enola Gay’ took off with an atomic bomb and a few hours later dropped it on Hiroshima.
Nagasaki’s bomb was loaded on another 829 at Tinian on August 9.
Japan was already defeated
by MacArthur’s strategy before the bombs were dropped. They merely hastened the decision to capitulate on August 12, 1945, ending a world war of five years and 11 months.
PlM’s War: PIM followed the Pacific campaigns inch by inch, month by month, very much pro-MacArthur. At the same time it struggled with its
own problems, provided a
means of communication for scattered Islands residents and a mouthpiece for their griev ances.
When the Japanese over-ran the S-W Pacific in early 1942 PIM lost over half its readers
virtually overnight, and
months passed before they sur faced again at addresses all over Australia and New Zea land. It also lost most of its advertising and the revenue
that went with it. Furthermore, paper-rationing did its best in cutting the magazine down to half its normal number of pages filled with war or nostal
gic pieces from Islands people
about how things once were. It lost its male staff and someone named Judy Tudor, ex-New Guinea, arrived to take their
place in July 1942.
It battled with the censor whose minions wielded their
blue pencils like bludgeons
without much sense or knowl edge of the Islands. Looking back through the issues of those war years it is extra ordinary how many innocent happenings that took place in 1942 were kept under wraps for a year or even two.
PIM, like its customers, finally survived, but at times it was a near thing. Of the hun dreds of matters that concerned the magazine in those years brief precis of a selected few follow: Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, Coast watchers and Others: The eventual success of the Aus tralian campaign that drove the Japanese back over the Owen Stanley Ranges in 1942-43 was contributed to in no small way by 1000 Papuans and New Guineans employed as carriers and stretcher bearers. Their efforts won them in Australia the affectionate title Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels which, in 1980, sounds patronising but at the time was sincerely meant.
The recruitment and organ isation of these men was in the hands of old Territorians, notably Herbert Kienzle of the Yodda, who was awarded the MBE for the magnificient job he did.
Equally magnificent was the
work of the Coastwatchers, Australian and British, who worked hard behind or in front of enemy lines, forever on the run, lugging their precious tele radio sets and living like bush rats. Their story has been told in the excellent book that bears their name, The Coastwatchers, written by one of the men re
sponsible for the organisation,
the late Eric Feldt.
Many Coastwatchers were decorated and none more de servedly than W. J. Read and Paul Mason, who worked in
Bougainville keeping tags on
Japanese planes and ships heading south from their base in Rabaul. By warning the US Marines on Guadalcanal, the right kind of reception com
mittee was always waiting.
Read and Mason both earned the US Distinguished Service Cross.
Most Islands territories raised units for home defence; Fiji, howeverrsent two bat talions into battle in the Solomons and Bougainville. It was in the latter that Corporal Sefanaia Sukanaivalu of the 3rd Bn. FMF was posthum ously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest British award for valour. He is buried in the Bita Paka War Cemetery on New Britain with other Fijians also killed in the Solomons and Bougainville
campaigns.
The Pacific Island Regiment with Papuan and New Guinean “other ranks” and Australian officers took part in the later New Guinea cam paigns and the mopping up of
by-passed enemy garrisons,
and the French Pacific Regi ment raised from French Oceania, New Hebrides and New Caledonia distinguished itself during the North Africa
campaign. The first casualty
list, issued in October 1942 after the battle of Bir Hakeim in Libya, showed 16 of the bat talion killed, 67 missing and 21 wounded.
Slaughter of the Innocents: In September 1945 Australian
troops reoccupied the phos
phate islands of Nauru and Ocean Is where Japanese gar risons had been by-passed.
On Nauru they found that Lieut-Col. F. R. C. Chalmers, Dr B. Quinn, W. Shugg, W. H.
S. Sayle and F. F. Hamer, all of whom had stayed behind after the general evacuation to look after the islanders, had been murdered by the Japanese after an American air-raid in 1943 and that 1200 Nauruans had been deported to Truk with two priests, Fr Kayser and Fr Elivaz. Fr Kayser died on Truk and so did over 400 Nauruans.
The story repeated itself on Ocean Is. The Europeans who stayed (C. G. F. Cartright, R.
W. Third, L. W. Cole, N. A.
Mercer, Father Pujebet and
Brother Herman) were dead, either through starvation or mysterious medical treatment by the Japanese. All the Gil bertese workers and 700 Banabans had been deported to Kusaie in the Carolines or elsewhere, with the exception of 200 Gilbertese kept as fishermen. After the capitu lation of Japan, these 200 were massacred.
The Japanese commanding
officers of Nauru and Ocean Is
were subsequently hanged for
these crimes.
After Tarawa was taken by the Americans in November 1943, it was discovered that five civilians (Rev A. L. Sadd, B. P.
Cleary, Capt. I. R. Handley, A.
M. MacArthur and R. G. Mor gan) along with 17 NZ Coast watchers, had been lined up and beheaded by the Japanese in October 1942. The Marines erected a memorial to these men with an inscription. The last sentence of it could apply equally also to those who died on Nauru and Ocean: ‘Stand ing unarmed to their posts they
matched brutality with gallan
try and met death with forti tude.’
The Civilian Front: Not everyone could be a soldier and of those who were not the most fortunate lived in Fiji, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, the Samoas, French Polynesia and Cook Islands. From 1942 they
rejoiced in a prosperity they
had not enjoyed for 20 years ‘dollar prosperity’ it was called, for obvious reasons. They could even forget the lean period between the outbreak of the war in Europe and Pearl Harbour when shipping dried up, copra piled up, unsaleable even at £4.10 a ton.
Not so the residents of Papua and New Guinea and the Solomons most of whom who were over military age found themselves evacuees in Aus tralia fighting for their future existence.
Civil administration in the Solomons did not officially cease; administration donned military gear and seemed to carry on, even if it was from a fox-hole or in exile. In Papua and New Guinea however it ended on February 12, 1942, when the military took over
and anyone over 45 was sum marily evacuated to Australia with a couple of days’ notice.
Evacuees formed the Pacific Territories Association, with HQ in Sydney, in 1942 to fight for their rights, particularly in relation to compensation for
war damage. Generally, New
Guinea property owners had no worries as their property had been knocked flat and
totally destroyed by enemy or
Allied action. Residents of Papua were differently situated as most of the damage to their property was caused by the Allies taking it over or by Aus tralian soldiers looting it. This was classed as ‘consequential damage’, according to the rele vant Act and until the PTA wore the authorities down after 2Vi years, it was not eligible for compensation.
In P-NG, as part of the mili tary set-up, the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) was set up in 1942 to administer areas cleared of the enemy and in 1943, as an offshoot of it, the Production Control Board, headed by Brigadier D. M. Cleland, came into existence to work plan
tations after fighting passed
on.
By early 1942 most of the world’s main sources of copra and rubber Philippines, East Indies, Malaya and to a lesser extent, Mandated Territory of New Guinea, were in Japanese hands and every ounce of what could be produced in the rest of the Pacific was in demand
and prices rose accordingly.
Evacuee planters in Australia could only bite their nails in frustration although a few of them were allowed to return to join the Production Control Board and others were released from the Army for the same purpose.
To make matters worse, evacuees in Australia were learning for the first time that
far from being respectable
Empire Builders and bearers of white men’s burdens, they were
exploiters of deepest dye, living
by the sweat of indentured labourers who were little better than slaves.
Australia had a Labor Government and for most of the period had, as External Territories Minister, Mr Eddie
Ward, MHR, who took the I view that in future natives were 1 to be protected from many ■ abuses that he said they had I been subjected to in the past.
I Capitalism and free enterprise,
I if not exactly out, was to be I severely stamped on. Every I theorist and academic rose in i his support and ordinary Aus- I tralians who had never thought I about New Guinea pre-war
f and only recently had learned
about Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels,
came to regard anyone ex-P-NG as a moral leper.
Britain too acquired a social ist government immediately after the war and the lot of the Solomon Islands civilian was i even tougher than those from P-NG. There was no war dam age compensation to sweeten
things up and private
enterprise was on the outer, to the extent that the big firms that had operated there before the war never did return. Government instrumentalities called Wholesale Societies were set up in both BSIP and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to take their place.
Bits and Pieces: The death occurred in Samarai, Papua on February 27, 1940 of Sir Hubert Murray, Lieutenant- Governor of Papua since 1908.
He was 78 and had been in fail ing health for some time before he died, as he had wished, with his boots on. His body was flown back to Port Moresby where a State funeral was held.
A successor to Sir Hubert was appointed in November 1940. He was Mr Leonard
Murray, Sir Hubert’s nephew
and right-hand man. He was to be called Administrator, like the rest of Canberra’s men in top territories’ jobs. (You couldn’t have them getting ideas above their station.) Mr
Murray was unceremoniously
evacuated along with the rest of the civil administration in 1942 and did not get his job back in 1945 - another matter for grievance for old Papua hands.
And talking of Adminis trators: After the retirement of Administrator Hart of Western Samoa in 1935, Mr A. C. Turn bull was appointed Acting Ad ministrator. He continued in that capacity for eight years
being confirmed in the job only
in April 1943. Even in the realm of New Zealand bu reaucracy this must be con
sidered quite an apprentice
ship. PIM had a dig at NZ from time to time but neither Wellington nor Mr Turnbull ever uttered a word on the sub
ject.
M. V. Bulolo, the nearest the Burns Philp Line ever got to having a luxury liner, entered the New Guinea service in early 1939 and at the outbreak of war was immediately taken over by the British Admiralty.
She was in the thick of things in Europe, at the North African
landings off Normandy on
D-Day, finally becoming
Mountbatten’s HQ ship. She had a charmed life and, refur bished, returned to Sydney- New Guinea service after the war. Not so other BP vessels.
Neptuna, full of ammunition, was bombed and blew up at
Darwin during the Japanese
raid in 1942. One of BP’s best
known skippers, Captain W.
Mitchie, died in her. M. V.
Macdhui was bombed and sunk in Port Moresby harbour in June 1942 when 10 of her crew were killed.
On July 12, 1940, Pan-
American Airways inaugura
ted its flying-boat service San Francisco Los Angeles Honolulu Canton Is.
Noumea Auckland. It was suspended for the duration im mediately after Pearl Har bour.
On January 1, 1941, 496 sur vivors from vessels sunk by German raiders operating in the Pacific were landed in Aus tralia. Fifteen ships had been sunk by the raiders in the pre
vious six months, five of them, caught off Nauru in December 1940 waiting to load phos phate. The 496 survivors had been accommodated on the raiders for varying periods and had finally been dumped on isolated Emirau Is., 80 miles N.W. of Kavieng, in December 1940. The cutter belonging to a
Carpenter plantation on
Emirau was used to take the news to Kavieng and the Aus tralian Navy undertook the survivors’ rescue.
In August 1942 PIM, Lieut- Col. E. T. W. Love, com mander of the Maori Battalion in the Middle East was reported killed in action. He was the husband of Mrs Takau Rio Love, the Makea Nui Ariki
of Rarotonga.
A year after the event it was learned in February 1943 that half a dozen Europeans had been killed on the Sepik River early in 1942. ADO George Ellis had been in charge of Angoram station but was in poor health. When ADO James Taylor was sent to relieve him he refused to hand over and be came violent, calling out his
native police. During shooting
Taylor was wounded and Ellis later committed suicide where upon the police went on the rampage and, coming upon a group of European miners, shot three of them plus a patrol officer and a Chinese car penter. The incident had nothing to do with the war
although it happened during
the evacuation of N.W. New Guinea when many men were
gathering on the Sepik.
An Indian language news
paper, Fiji Samachar published
in Suva, was suppressed by the
governor under defence regu lations in 1943. It was said to
be systematically publishing
matter calculated to foment opposition to the successful prosecution of the war. This came at a time when there was serious trouble from parts of the Indian community in Fiji, particularly in the sugar indus try. As part of a campaign for higher prices for cane some Indian farmers refused to plant a new crop or to cut the mature one. Crushing had also been held up through a strike at the mills. The price of cane was fixed in London and had nothing to do with the Fiji Government, and the Indian troublemakers got little sym
pathy from Fiji’s tough war
time governor. Sir Phillip Mitchell.
The death occurred in Apia on February 21, 1944, of Mr O.
F. Nelson, for 15 years the leader of the Mau organisation that fought the New Zealand government. Mauism died out with the war.
In April 1945 Qantas
acquired the Sydney-New
Guinea service which had been run by Carpenters until sus pended in 1942. An air service with mail and passengers was recommenced with DC3 planes and an overnight stop at Townsville.
Deep mystery surrounds the selection of a new capital for the British Solomons, said PIM in May 1945. It is said to be Harira or Honiara on the Guadalcanal coast opposite the old capital of Tulagi. No infor mation was available from the BSI office in Sydney although PIM couldn’t see what security was involved, with war so far removed from the Solomons.
In September 1945 news of New Guinea’s 300-odd missing civilians was still awaited.
Nothing had been heard of them since the Japanese occu pation of Rabaul 3Vi years be fore although their wives and dependents believed them to be in POW camps in Japan. In October it was revealed that they had been shipped away from Rabaul on the Mon tevideo Maru at the end of June 1942 and that that ship had been torpedoed, with total loss of life, by an American sub marine near the Philippines.