Escape from Salamaua

Ashley Chapman was one of the few people ever to flee in danger from an invader in Australian territory. He was an oil depot manager on the north coast of New Guinea when the Japanese military arrived. A six-week arduous cross-country trek got his party safely to Port Moresby, then Sydney. He joined the RAAF and a posting back to Papua New Guinea with Allied Intelligence followed. He now lives in retirement on the New South Wales Central Coast, where Robert Murray interviewed him in July.

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Robert Murray: You arrived in New Guinea in 1933 to work with Burns Philp?

Ashley Chapman: I was a London boy who emigrated to Sydney in 1930 and I had this wonderful experience of going to the New Guinea colony, which was then an Australian Mandated Territory. I was not quite twenty-one. It was the Depression. I was offered £18 per month and the best I could do in Sydney at that time was about £3 a week. I went away on £18 per month and expenses paid, which in those days meant I could send a pound a week home to help the family.

Burns Philp was a big Pacific trading and shipping company. They were general agents for just about everything and had massive plantation and commercial interests in New Guinea. I got the job because I had just completed an apprenticeship with a law reporting firm and was a fast shorthand writer. They didn’t have recording devices then and the only way you could get a transcript was by manual reporting. Burns Philp had applied to my business college for a male stenographer. Not many women went to the tropics in those days.

How did you find Salamaua?

Things were pretty primitive. It was a tiny settlement in the Morobe district on Huon Gulf. They didn’t employ women in the early 1930s because the living conditions were not suitable. It was a very isolated white community, with only about forty whites, mostly Australians and English in their early twenties, living on a sandy isthmus that connected a rocky island jutting into the gulf with the north coast at the foot of the mountains. The reason for the settlement was that gold had been discovered a few years earlier in the interior. Burns Philp had a store at Salamaua and were agents for the Shell Company of Australia, as they were throughout the South Pacific. It was an administration centre as well.

Salamaua was a native name for the isthmus and there was a separate native village, also known as Salamaua. An Assistant District Officer, at that time a man named Taylor, administered about half a dozen patrol officers and staff, based at Salamaua, who had been trained in tropical courses. The patrol officers gradually penetrated the interior, which was mostly unexplored, made contact with the natives and set up some kind of civilised administration.

How did the whites treat the natives?

The Australian administration followed the German administration after the First World War. Generally speaking it was a very tolerant, youthful community—much less stitched up than the Australian city population. When I got there it was obvious that there was a social class structure, with the Europeans on top. There were large populations of natives all around us. About ten whites administered an area the size of Tasmania.

The Australian attitude was much more beneficial for the natives than the Germans had been. Whites and blacks were equal under the law, and under the mandate Australia would not allow any of the expatriate people or companies to own land. They couldn’t buy land from the natives and could only be allotted certain areas for commercial purposes. Generally, the native populations were left to have their old, almost stone-age, communal life in villages, particularly in the interior.

There wasn’t much tension?

On the coast in the Morobe district there was no tension at all. The natives were very amiable and co-operative. There had been skirmishes in the 1800s with the old sailing vessels and so on, but that didn’t concern us. We lived in open houses and were perfectly safe in and around the settlement. There was still some cannibalism in the interior.

Were they happy to have the Australians there?

I’m sure they were. They relied on the Australians for a great increase in their standard of living. You couldn’t employ any native unless you had the Administration’s permission and there was an official contract. The conditions were laid down in that contract. By colonial standards, particularly the German colonial standards, it was very, I was going to say generous, but from the native’s point of view it was very unusual. We had to put their money away. They only did two years at a time under contract, and then instead of staying in your employ they had to go back to their village, to their families, and to their traditional lives with their accumulated pay. If you re-applied, you could have them under contract for another two years.

You had to provide living quarters for them, and they had to have a basic ration of rice and meat and an issue of tobacco. That system was quite unusual in colonial times. If you struck or ill-treated a native, you were subject to local law. Even bachelors had at least one personal boy, or servant, to look after their domestic needs and housework, washing and so on.

There was only one woman in the settlement in my early years there, a forty-year-old Queensland nurse from Charters Towers who was attached to the primitive little hospital. There was also an Australian doctor, Dr Sinclair.

Was there much mixing between white men and black women?

It was frowned on, but not forbidden. In the commercial section anyone who cohabited with a native woman was sent south. There was a racial attitude in those days. Australia was a very self-consciously white and British community. We were an extremely racist country, not in a violent sense, but in an automatic sense. We considered that any coloured person was inferior. I went to an English boarding school and we were inculcated with the idea that to be an Englishman and go abroad was to be a member of the ruling caste. Half the world was in the Commonwealth then.

We had a few eccentric characters who fraternised. It wasn’t illegal, just not accepted by the white community. One old-timer lived in a house on the beach with his great tribe of kids. I thought it was a very happy arrangement, but it wasn’t acceptable under the strict mores of the time. I think the idea was that if there was too much cohabitation with the natives, you would lose control—you would lose the measure of superiority that was needed to keep the peace. I think the top white population we had at Salamaua was sixty, in a population of hundreds of thousands of natives in the district.

Did the natives resent the superiority?

There was no overt organisation of the natives. They had no political sense. The Germans had been “flogging” colonists. Many village elders were glad the Australians had replaced the Germans because they were now much freer and better treated.

As the installation manager I was employed by Shell, but paid through Burns Philp, the agent. We had a native staff of ten, with a Malay foreman. Many other natives were employed in the settlement, but also Malays or Indonesians, as leading hands, truck drivers or tradesmen. There was a small China Town removed from the main settlement, with a dozen Chinese and their families, who were tailors, and used to make our clothes. They also traded with the natives.

Pidgin was the lingua franca?

Pidgin English is an evolved language used by all nationalities to communicate with the Melanesian people. It was pretty general throughout the New Guinea tribes. I think that applied in German times as well. It is a mixture of simple words, some German, some English words, a number of native words, which are generally the nouns or the subject words, and then you use simple connecting words. You might say, if you were going across to the beach, “Mi go long nambis long wetsan”, or you might say about an aircraft that’s coming over, “Balus i kum”. It had very definite rules and was spoken very rapidly. It took me about six months to become competent.

Salamaua doesn’t exist any more. It was obliterated by both enemy and Allied bombing in the war. I believe a company has a lodge there and that’s about all.

I think Salamaua had a total of about two and a half miles of roads, all unpaved. They connected township and harbour to the airstrip and Kila, the little residential area. I had a house there when I married in 1938. The only reason for the settlement was the safe harbour and airstrip. There was a three-weekly Burns Philp supply ship from Australia and a petroleum supply ship from Balikpapan [in what is now Indonesian Kalimantan].

The only reason for Salamaua existing was its wonderfully safe harbour. There was no communication other than by ship between New Guinea and Australia. Communication with the interior in the early 1930s was by native carrier lines or by light aircraft. They were things like Gypsy and Fox Moths and DH50s, made of fabric and wire on wooden frames. I often flew to and from the gold mining centre of Wau with Ray Parer in his RAF Fairy. Most of New Guinea is hugely mountainous, with jagged ridges rising almost straight out of the sea to form the Bismarck and Owen Stanley Ranges, with peaks up to 15,000 feet.

The capacity of aviation increased enormously during the ten years I was there. Guinea Airways brought in single and three-engine Junkers. A much longer airstrip was established at Lae, about twenty miles away on the other side of Huon Gulf. They were able to transport the components for huge gold dredges.

Did roads, the size of the towns, commercial activity change much too?

Not roads, except for minor expansion around Lae and up the Markham Valley. Salamaua roads had nowhere to go except into the mountains. There were no roads into the interior until after the war started and the Allies regained control. In the early days the equipment for building and maintaining roads was not suitable. Even narrow tracks were often washed out in the heavy rains of the wet season.

When I was escaping from the Japanese I went up the Bitoi Valley to Wau, following the native tracks, some of them on the side of mountains just wide enough to take one person at a time. You often had your arms stretched out against the side of the mountain so you didn’t fall into the deep valley below. Wau was directly only fifty miles inlandbut the going was so awful that it took three and half days for me to climb the ridges to the gap through the range into the Wau Valley.

What do you remember about the early stages of the war? Was it expected?

No, it was not expected. Our stevedore and customs man Laurie Williams picked up the incredible news on his ham radio that on December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft had attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and had also attacked Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Indo-China and Burma. I vividly remember a small gathering at the wharf saying, “Singapore will stop them, we will be all right.” And the Australian Prime Minister declaring war in company with the USA and Britain. Then a couple of days later the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse, sent from England to reinforce Singapore, unbelievably were sunk by Japanese dive bombers off the coast of Indo-China. There was also the swift advance down the Malay Peninsula.

We were still not overly concerned, but the Administration called a meeting and said the vessel Neptuna was expected soon and we should allow any women and oldies the opportunity to leave, just in case there were no more ships. Most of the wives decided to go and when I saw Sadie off I wondered if I would see her again.

Business activity continued at Salamaua, aircraft came and went, but there was no further shipping. We got used to RAAF Hudsons and Wirraways on our strip, often refuelling. A machine-gun detachment of Australian soldiers was billeted at the edge of the drome. Nearly all our young men joined the local militia, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (NGVR). There was continuous wireless news from the OTC (Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission) about the Japanese forces spreading around the Pacific but things continued to function fairly normally until our settlement was raided on January 9, 1942.

I have never forgotten that date. I was in the Shell compound with some of the labour boys and the foreman, a Malay. He said, “Here they come, the balus are coming.” I could see the Rising Sun emblem under the wings and thought, “This is the end, for sure.” We were surrounded by great stacks of drums of high octane aviation fuel. One incendiary bullet and we would have evaporated in the explosion. I can still see one of the pilots flying low over our heads. I am sure he was grinning. You could hear him clear his guns but he flew right over our installation and joined his mates attacking the airstrip. My native boys scattered in panic but I realised I was in the safest place; they wanted to preserve the fuel stock. After half an hour of shelling and strafing—everywhere except the Shell Co—all was calm as they flew off north to do over Lae.

Half a dozen houses in the residential area and the bakery had been damaged and my house was unlivable. Kevin Parer, the Wewak Airways pilot, was killed. He had just been landing his Dragon Rapide, which was damaged. Two other aircraft employees were injured. Huge bomb-holes made the single runway unusable. All the refuelling tanks and facilities were gone, the airline hangars and repair shops and many staff houses were destroyed. Some fourteen civil aircraft were destroyed and the RAAF Hudson damaged. The Guinea Airways premises burnt for days. The staff and residents had saved their lives by dashing into the jungle when the strafing started.

It was obvious that our civilian lives in Salamaua were over. All NGVR volunteers were inducted for full-time duty and fit men under forty were conscripted. Remaining women, unfit men and those over forty were to be evacuated by sea. A bigger fishing boat would tow the Burns Philp stevedoring pinnace round the coast to Kokoda, where they would be picked up and transported to Port Moresby and then Australia. Some twenty-five people, including Sister Stock, who had remained in the hospital to the end, went out this way. Native gangs filled the holes in the strip and two RAAF crews and aircraft were stationed there.

I was the last civilian to leave Salamaua, on January 25, 1942, the day after the RAAF pulled out and I was no longer required. I had stayed to assist with refuelling and because I could identify where we had hidden dumps of aviation fuel in the jungle.

Wireless reports were saying the Japanese were everywhere—they had taken Rabaul and were spreading out over New Britain and New Ireland and were expected to land on the north coast of New Guinea. I got up to the coast watcher’s camp on a hill overlooking the coast—a day’s march—just before they landed. I was on my own because my carriers had deserted. I stayed a few days and then with two others went on the track up to Wau and eventually got over the pass at approaching 10,000 feet. I got malaria about that time.

We camped up there for a while. A couple of the others went down with the natives into Wau and sent a utility up. What a bumpy ride! The Japanese bombed Wau several times when I was there, trying to knock out the airstrip, but I was so sick in the hospital there that I didn’t even go into the trenches. Our party gradually increased in size, mostly Australian civilians who had been caught behind the lines and were not eligible for NGVR call-up.

Wau was a miners’ town. You went from Salamaua to Wau in an aircraft, unloaded there and the stuff was taken up to Edie Creek and supplies were carried or flown to the various mines. They had a network of small aircraft.

After about a week I got better, as you always did. Being a resident of New Guinea, I had the malarial bug in my bloodstream. I didn’t think I was going to make it, so I just stayed in bed. They didn’t bomb the hospital. About mid-February we got into a party and decided to walk to Port Moresby. Many years earlier a sort of track had been surveyed from Wau over the Bismarck Range to the headwaters of the Lakekamu River, from where you could get a canoe down to the swamplands of the Gulf of Papua. Optimistically we thought we could make our way along the beaches there, and eventually end up at Port Moresby, but we had very little food.

You were climbing up an almost vertical track through the roots of the trees. The person in front of you had their boots level with your face. For sleeping, we put stakes in the ground and covered them with branches to raise us off the ground, because there were all sorts of crawly things around in the night, thousands of cockroaches walking over you. I have never been nervous, but …

We walked for about a week, climbing, and going into the big forests at the top of the pass, which was about 12,000 feet. It was cold and dank, raining and silent, and there were horrible things like leeches, enormous spiders and everything disgusting you could imagine. At one stage I began falling, standing up again and doing a few more steps, then falling over again from complete exhaustion, until I was covered in mud. Clive Cook, a big six-footer, helped me up.

I started to feel better when we got out of that very high country with its rain and drizzle, and started to go down the other side, though it was very steep. We found a grove of wild sugar cane and broke off two or three stems. To this day I don’t know what kept me going. It was over, down, up, over and down and up and over again until we got to a place called Bulldog, a native village where the Australian administration had established a camp and there was an army outpost. They fed us and we rested there for two or three days. Heavy Japanese bombers flew over on their way to Port Moresby. I was thinking, “They can’t see us here so we’re right.”

Bulldog was towards the head of the Lakekamu River, across the border in Papua, and the Administra-tion organised a village upstream to provide canoes for us to go down to the coast. The Lakekamu River flowed all the way down into the Gulf of Papua side. After about two days of canoeing we rested for two nights in the swamp land at the bottom of the mountains. I can still feel the mosquito bites. We stayed on the river bank in native huts open to everything and there were clouds of mosquitoes in the evening. We didn’t get any rest until day. After two nights of that we resumed paddling until we reached the mouth of the river. Leaving the canoes, we walked a few miles along the beach to Kerema, a village of handsome Papuans.

They were holding a ceremonial funeral when we arrived. The villagers were on the shore in a big circle, wailing and crying as they prepared the body for burial. We camped there for one night and then walked along the coast for about three days until a major river stopped us. We persuaded the village there to let us take one of their sea-going lakatois.

That’s a type of canoe?

It was a traditional Papuan trading canoe, forty feet long, with double hulls joined together with a flat deck, with a huge rattan sail. There were about twenty of us. I had to sleep with a native but at some time he moved away; apparently my smell was offensive, but I thought his was too.

Bombers from the north were constantly raiding Port Moresby. They weren’t really concerned with us, but one morning they strafed us, though there were no casualties. The Australian air gunners in Port Moresby kept the bombers so high that they didn’t do an enormous amount of damage, and Port Moresby survived until the Kokoda Track and later Milne Bay actions, which stopped the Japanese advance towards the capital.

Yule Island, about halfway between Kerema and Port Moresby, had the remnants of a Catholic mission and we were able to get food. The only education most natives got then was by missionaries. There were some European missionaries in Papua and New Guinea and the Administration was a bit worried about their allegiance. The mission was deserted except for two nuns and two or three brothers, Australians and natives.

I remember sitting at this great long table, with piles of roughly cut bread. We were absolutely starving. A brother said, “Just wait a minute, the natives are preparing some food.” When he left the room, someone reached down to a piece of bread and suddenly all the bread disappeared. We just stuffed ourselves. Then we had an absolute feast. It was only composed of a stew, this coarse bread, and manioc [cassava] and taro, the native sweet potato. I have never had such a feast in my life. It was the first full belly I had had for weeks.

We were on Yule Island for about a week. It was a restful holiday except for the nights when the bombers came over and we were constantly getting out of bed. It was a pleasant little island with handsome natives who took us fishing. They got word to Port Moresby, and the army there sent one of their coastal boats. By that time there were about thirty fellows on the island waiting for rescue.

The final voyage was an anti-climax. We had a pleasant trip for about ten hours and it was still light when we arrived. Port Moresby was a typical garrison town. I gave an Australian soldier my .22 rifle and he gave me a two-ounce tin of Champion tobacco. It shows the value of things. I had carried the rifle the whole way.

How long did the whole trip take?

We arrived in Port Moresby on March 12, 1942, so it was six weeks since leaving Salamaua.

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After a break back in Australia, Chapman joined the RAAF and, with his knowledge of Pidgin, was posted back to PNG, mainly Bougainville, with a propaganda unit attached to the Allied Intelligence Bureau.

Tell us about your work with the propaganda unit.

Among my duties, I wrote propaganda leaflets and interviewed in Pidgin. We had very little knowledge of the Japanese, and Australians able to speak Japanese were few, so we had to rely on either Nisei—American-born Japanese—or the Japanese having learned Pidgin.

Did you talk to any of the Japanese prisoners?

Some of the Japanese could understand Pidgin because they had been so long holed up on the island, some for three or four years by the end of the war. They used the natives too but not as successfully. On Bougainville, the natives would look after our fellows when they were in the bush.

Occasionally a starving Japanese would come in towards the end of the war. We’d sunk all their coastal shipping, so they were virtually living off the land. There was a lot of starvation. One Japanese orderly room sergeant was co-operative and very useful. He was educated enough not to have absorbed the propaganda which said that you were expected to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than become a prisoner. There were two huge military police in the interviewing cage with me, and another two standing behind him. I thought, you know, they are just the same as we are. He gave us all the details of his work, as far as he could cope with Pidgin.

Were they generally co-operative when you spoke with them, or were they resentful?

Some were co-operative, some weren’t. An ordinary infantry man was nothing like the Australian infantry man. He didn’t know what was going on, he just did as he was told. Some officers had to be guarded in cages to stop them from committing suicide

What sort of information did you get from the prisoners?

First of all you’d try and get numbers. What kind of unit was it, was it an infantry battalion, artillery, or was it services, that sort of thing. Then you would get where they were situated, how many there were, the state of their morale and readiness. We knew that they didn’t have much food towards the end of the war and if food was short they weren’t going to be much of a menace. In the last year or so of the war most of the Japanese were bottled up in the south of Bougainville and the Allied forces spread out over the northern part. The Japanese lost more and more ground. They weren’t getting supplies by air and we blocked their small supply ships—we sank most of them.

We had a Japanese-American who could speak Japanese. We had a loudspeaker section in our unit which used to go right up to the Japanese lines. We put loudspeakers in the trees, calling to the Japanese. However, we were unpopular with the infantry because the loudspeakers drew fire.

I wrote pamphlets for dropping by air after the atom bomb raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We painted in Japanese characters, on the underwings of the three bombers allotted to us, “The Emperor says the war is over—surrender your arms”, or something like that. We dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets in Pidgin and Japanese over southern Bougainville. These advised the natives that the war was over, and also other people in the bush, the coast watchers and intelligence people who were behind the lines. Cinesound filmed the operation, which was shown in Australian theatres. We didn’t have a single casualty on Bougainville after that declaration, although it was a few days before they started to come in and surrender.

There is a lot of moralising these days about the atomic bomb, but there was joy and relief from everybody in the South-West Pacific when the Emperor accepted unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945.