Food and the Home Front: New Guinea Villagers’ Survival During the Pacific War

Abstract

In histories of the Pacific War, and its impact on Papua and New Guinea, war histories reconstruct and analyze battles and troop movements in great details. In contrast this chapter focuses on the actions and plights of villagers, using rare documents written by senior New Guinean men during and shortly after the war.

During the Pacific War, the strategically important yet confined area, the Huon Peninsula in New Guinea, was a contested space. A former German protectorate, administered by Australia as a C Mandate of the League of Nations, it was occupied by the Japanese in early 1942 and regained by the Allies in late 1943, early 1944. Members of all three nations that had claimed formal colonial control were present throughout these eventful 2 years—occupying Japanese, Australian coastwatchers operating behind enemy lines, and German missionaries—imposing on New Guineans for assistance and cooperation.

By bringing New Guinean experiences to the fore, this chapter is narrating localized histories that are more than simply small, local micro-histories. They are a fundamental change in outlook. The influential late Tongan intellectual, historian, and theorist Epeli Hau’ofa reconceptualized the Pacific as a “sea of islands,” in which local identity is not dissolved but embedded in a shared Ocean. He argues a strategic and moral concept of Pacific-Oceanic identity and history as a process. Focusing on New Guinea villagers, this article intends to create grounded and localized histories as a first step in a bigger process of creating shared histories.

Introduction

During the Pacific War, the strategically important yet confined area, the Huon Peninsula in New Guinea, was a borderland, a contested space not firmly controlled by Australians or Japanese. The impact of war, as the following chapter shows, varied depending on the specific location. But a broad chronology divides the Pacific War in the Huon Peninsular into several distinct periods. Initially, from the outbreak of WWII in September 1939 to the beginning of the Pacific War, life in the Huon Peninsula continued without much change, apart from the internment of the majority of German traders, planters, and missionaries by Australia. From January 1942, after the invasion of the region by Japanese troops, and the retreat of Australians, that also included a hasty evacuation of nearly all Europeans, the Peninsula saw the establishment of a Japanese occupation infrastructure, with posts and patrols along the coastline and—to a more limited degree—into the hinterland. During the following one and a half years, Allied aerial attacks continued in irregular intervals, and small reconnaissance groups remained behind enemy lines. From mid-1943 the Allied counteroffensive brought aerial bombing and intense fighting back to the Huon that continued for about half a year. Even after the Peninsula was firmly back under Australian control, individual Japanese stragglers—soldiers who had not surrendered—caused smaller skirmishes. The Huon Peninsula, like the rest of New Guinea, remained under Australian military occupation until October 1945.¹

Complex relationships developed from 1942 to 1944 between New Guineans, occupying Japanese, Australian coastwatchers operating behind enemy lines, and a small number of remaining German missionaries, the latter a legacy of German colonial rule.² When in January 1942, Japanese troops occupied the Huon Peninsula, the local villagers experienced their third change of formal colonial rulers in the space of three decades. In fact, members of all three nations that had claimed formal colonial control were present throughout these eventful 2 years, imposing on New Guineans for assistance and cooperation.

The archival material available on the Huon Peninsula during the war is very extensive in Australian and American holdings and includes maps and aerial photographs, films of bombing raids, official war diaries, personal papers, and captured Japanese documents. Japanese material is thus split into public and privately held documents in Japan and in archives of ex-Allied nations. The records of interrogations of Japanese POWs fill shelves, and these files have recently been examined in several projects on war crime trials. Despite the war having been fought on their land, New Guineans are a shadowy presence on the margins of these materials: named and unnamed they smile into the cameras of the liberating Allied soldiers, are listed for bravery or treachery in the war diaries of the Australian military occupation force ANGAU, and are counted in great numbers as a voluntary and often compulsory labor force for both the Japanese and the Australians.

By focusing on the experiences of New Guinean villagers, this article aims to widen our historical understanding of the conflict by asking: what did it mean for civilians, that is, New Guinea villagers. For Papua New Guineans, Japanese, and Australians—and to a lesser degree Germans—the Pacific War is an intellectually and emotionally divisive but shared past, or what the Pacific historian Greg Dening termed “our mutual and our separate histories.”³ A solution to this in my view cannot be to have one “true” history, and one or more “wrong” histories, but to excavate and listen to the experiences and remembering of all involved. The influential late Tongan intellectual, historian, and theorist Epeli Hau’ofa, who grew up in Papua, and worked in PNG, Tonga, and Fiji, reconceptualized the Pacific as a “sea of islands,” in which local identity is not dissolved but embedded in a shared Ocean that surrounds us and is within us. The sea is a pathway, not a boundary. Quoting the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, Hau’ofa wrote: “the sea is history” (Hau’ofa 1994). The metaphor of the sea, that is open to all of us, thus reveals Pacific-Oceanic identity and history as a process. As part of this process of making a shared history, this article is focusing on New Guinea villagers and their survival.

In this article I am using New Guinean documents by senior village men that are rare written expressions at the time in an otherwise largely oral culture. As Hank Nelson wrote: “As little education was available to Papua New Guineans in the pre-war period and the literate minority had few opportunities to occupy positions where they might write reports, there cannot be much surviving writing by Papua New Guineas from the war.”⁴ With the Lutheran German mission arriving in the late 1880s in the Huon, however, a number of locals went through mission school and were trained to read and write and to write short biographical accounts for religious purposes. By 1942, local men took over central mission institutions in their district and kept written accounts how the communities and villages fared. These documents reveal New Guineans as active agents and participants in creating histories.⁵

The stories narrated in the diaries and reports written by senior male villagers differ dramatically from those, for example, remembered and narrated by Allied soldiers. They also emphasize different experiences and lived realities to what historians of the war in New Guinea often regard as central events. The big battles fought between the Allies and Japanese are only witnessed from a distance. Duties New Guinean men were compelled to undertake for the Allies in many locations in New Guinea, such as carrying the wounded or loading ships and lorries, are not recounted in the New Guinean war narratives from the Huon Peninsula. Nor is forced labor for the Japanese. The narrators of these war and postwar memoirs focused on their villages, and how war impacted there.

For this purpose I have concentrated on two clusters of activities by local people that are recounted in great detail in the documents, namely, food exchange and the upkeep of schooling as the lens through which to examine survival during times of great demands by Australians and Japanese forces. Food especially, like history, is shared, gifted, carried, and grown. Exchange is at the heart of these stories of New Guinean agency during the war.

Japanese Occupation

Initially in the mandate of New Guinea, life mainly went on as “usual” apart from the internment of the majority of local German men, who were taken away and brought to the mainland of Australia, and the enlistment of young Australian men into the armed forces. It was in January 1942 that the war “arrived” in the Huon, a peninsula between the Sepik and the Markham and Ramu Valleys of New Guinea. European women and children had been evacuated already weeks earlier, but then, as the Japanese navy approached, the remaining Australian men were trying to escape along the coast to Lae and Morobe and over the Cromwell Ranges up to Madang. Japanese planes and warships attacked Australian ships and local townships. The coastal waters were no longer safe. Tamigudu man M., from a village close to the mission station Deinzerhoehe at the southern coast of the Huon Gulf, wrote in his diary for January 1942:

Many planes fly [coming from Rabaul] in the direction of Lae and Salamaua. Little later explosions can be heard and mighty columns of smoke, which rise up from both places. At the same time men from Tami [gudu] and Buenggim are out with the canoes catching tuna on the ocean. In panic they row their boats with all their might as quickly as possible to the shore, leave them rocking in the water and search for cover in the forest and behind trees.⁶

Six days later the villagers spotted the flotsam and jetsam of war. M. observed:

When on Saturday we let our gaze go over the ocean we discover drift wood. It drifts towards our beach (canoe-landing place). Amongst it are some boxes. We also see a number of 200 liter metal drums drifting on the water. We immediately go to work to get as many as possible into our ‘harbour’. We roll them ashore. After some hesitation we … open [them] to find out what is in them. Some are filled with rice, others with matches or candles.⁷

German missionary Johann Decker, who due to his advanced age and long residence in the Huon had not been interned by the Australians and was one of three German missionaries who stayed at their posts during the Japanese occupation, remarked that in his opinion the drifting supplies were from an attempted Japanese landing of food onshore that had been attacked by American planes.⁸

Attacks by Japanese and Allied planes and ships and the retreat of individual Australians lasted for weeks. One Australian plane had crashed nearby, and the villagers eventually brought the sole survivor, to the local German Lutheran missionary, Stephan Lehner, at Hopoi. Lehner was in his mid-60s and had lived and worked with coastal Jabem villagers in the Huon for four decades.⁹ In a letter written for his evacuated wife, he commented that the pilot “who escaped death as if by a miracle” arrived bruised and exhausted and was shown hospitality at the mission station.¹⁰ Likewise two Australian soldiers, former local plantation owners, spent a night at the mission station, “ate with uncommonly good appetite,” took a “splendid bath,” gave Lehner “official permission” to stay, and continued on their escape the following morning. The night before their arrival, L., a villager from Sanghu, had come to the station as a messenger, warning the mission congregation about approaching Australian soldiers.¹¹

Along the coastline of the Huon peninsula between Sattelberg and Lae, information was passed on about the movements of the retreating Australians and the advancing Japanese. It was a dangerous transition period for villagers of the Yabem and Kate districts, as fighting continued, and neither the behavior of the Australians nor the Japanese was predictable. Some villagers dug trenches for shelter, and others vacated their villages and relocated to temporary huts at their fields and gardens for a while. One of the three German missionaries to remain in the Huon, Adolf Wagner, a young 28-year-old ordained clergyman, who had escaped Australian official evacuations by hiding and going bush, saw in such protective moves a lame excuse for lazy indolence. Located at the mission station Heldsbach near Finschhafen and Sattelberg—areas of heavy fighting—he commented in his diary that the mission pupils of the Kate evangelist school had begun to work their fields, but the mission “helpers” (evangelists) had feigned illness. After bombings on 23 January, more locals absented themselves. Adolf Wagner wrote:

50 Japanese planes came, to bombard Lae, Salamaua, Madang and so on. For the natives this was something new and reason enough to go bush, and have a fine excuse for Sunday, too, when they did not come to church.¹²

The acting director of the middle school in Wasutieng, South of Finschhafen, M. G., who had taken over after the removal of the German missionary, remembers Japanese bombing of the surrounding area. He wrote:

Our earth shook and we knew not what to do. We only thought the one thought that probably we would die. Our connecting paths to each other were totally cut off. It was impossible to visit each other. The people roamed without a plan.¹³

A spirit of uncertainty and anxiety prevailed. Tamigudu man M. noted in his diary the arrival of the first Japanese soldiers at his village:

Friday afternoon we see eight Japanese soldiers coming and arriving in Tami [gudu]. On this day we see for the first time living Japanese in their uniforms. They stay overnight with us. Sunday morning they depart and go to Bukawa and Lae.¹⁴

That M. marks out the first meeting of his village with the new occupation army receives some further explanation through the middle school director’s narration of the war. The Japanese were perceived as looking frighteningly different:

In March 1942 the Japanese arrived in New Guinea. Then no single white person was to be seen. They only had some forward positions as spies hidden in the bush. Back then the people feared the Japanese a lot with their strange foreign faces.¹⁵

By April the Japanese had erected and manned a defense post at Bulo, and Missionary Lehner decided it was prudent to make contact. Food, given to the courier of their respective messages, is symbolic for the mediated encounter between Stefan Lehner and the newly arrived Japanese occupation army. At Bukawa the teenage mission pupil G. K., born 1925, who also acted as Lehner’s housekeeper since the evacuation of Lehner’s wife Sophie, recalls in his short memoir about the war, how missionary Lehner assembled the mission pupils and asked for a volunteer:

‘Who of you is prepared to bring my letter to the Japanese soldiers? And to do so now?’

We remained silent. Reason: We feared the Japanese. Never before had we seen one of their race. After ten minutes I rose and said: ‘I am going’. The missionary replied: ‘I know you. You always have served me really truly.’

We both went up to the house. We packed ripe bananas and some eggs in tins and put them in a netted bag. The preparations finished; the missionary gave me his hand with the words: “the Lord protect you; your going out and your coming in.”¹⁶

G. K. continues narrating the delivery of the letter and brokering favorable treatment for the missionary. That the Japanese accepted the missionary’s plea for the continuation of the mission and congregation is again symbolically enacted through food provided for the missionary’s messenger. G. K. recalled:

[T]he officer wrote his answer letter. He put some tins with meat and fish, as well as bread and rice into my netted bag and dismissed me. A number of soldiers accompanied me. Only when we had travelled about half of my return trip, they left me. Towards evening back at Hopoi the missionary received me with overflowing joy.

A Japanese police force also occupied Bualu and its headquarters settled in Bukawa (Cape Arkona). Soon Japanese soldiers began sporadic patrols of the mission stations and villages of the hinterland. They attempted to stay overnight at Deinzerhoehe, a mission station slightly inland, but the remaining German Lutheran missionary, Johann Decker, a curmudgeon Wuerttemberger in his mid-70s, sent them off with the excuse that his facilities were too basic. When they returned after a few weeks, however, Decker decided on cautious hospitality. In a short memoir “War in the Huon Gulf,” Decker explained his motivations: “Now I thought I cannot let them walk away again, or they would interpret that as unfriendliness.” He thus arranged all available bedding in one room and prepared dinner for the patrol. According to Decker the Japanese soldiers reciprocated his kindness:

After [dinner] we sat in darkness on my verandah and two of them begun to sing: ‘Germany, Germany, above all’. They had worked in a factory in Japan that belonged to a German and learned some German songs there; but they could not speak German. We could only communicate in English. … A lieutenant said to me, I reminded him of his grandfather, and also added that his grandfather was Christian.¹⁷

G. K. in turn recalled that in the Bukawa area the commander of the Japanese station located at the former mission station Cape Arkona spoke perfect German and conducted his correspondence with missionary Lehner in German. His officer in charge of the military police also spoke German. These Japanese officials, according to G. K., gave supplies to Lehner and Decker, sought information on the Christian communities, and “ordered their soldiers sternly not to cause problems for the Christians.”¹⁸

Pigs and Rice: Japanese Initiated Food Exchange

In the beginning of the Japanese occupation, soldiers had sufficient supplies, though they endeavored to supplement their rations with fresh vegetables and meat. Accounts by New Guineans recall a sense of propriety and orderliness in these exchanges. Missionary Decker summed up his observations: “I had the impression they courted the friendship of the Papua.” He commented on Japanese behavior toward villagers, many of whom by then were still hiding out away from their villages:

[The Japanese] would have not made the imposition on the natives to leave their villages and live in the fields and the bush. Soon after their arrival they said to the natives, come back to your villages, but they had to soon see that this was impossible because of the planes.¹⁹

Complaints about occasional lootings were taken seriously by local Japanese commanders. Ke., a teacher at Bukawa, recalled:

When some of our men were looking for their pigs and fields again, they caught some Japanese and chased them away. Furiously they threatened to kill M. and his brother T. The two reported the incident to the missionary. He went to the commander and told him of the complaints. At the same time he spoke up for them both. Major Jamagada²⁰ showed full understanding and asked the soldiers to account for their behavior. He shot both soldiers.²¹

This episode is a reminder that food was demanded and at time looted and stolen. Even exchanges and trading during the war were not a barter between equals, for who was to say “no” to men holding guns when they asked for something?

Missionary Adolf Wagner recalled that on one trip between villages in the Kate region he encountered a small group of Japanese soldiers. They had requisitioned some of the young men of his school for work, and Adolf managed to negotiate their release. Made to guide the soldiers, Wagner came to a resting place where others were roasting pigs. Adolf voiced strong opposition to the taking of village pigs, but the commanding officer replied: ‘But we have shared our rice!’²²

In this small story, there are a number of cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicting ideas about relationships to villagers. Adolf Wagner sees himself as a spokesperson for defenseless villagers, a shepherd to his flock, and the keeper of order and morality. From other accounts, however, it becomes clear that some villagers saw themselves in turn as the protectors of the young inexperienced German man, removing him time and again from places of danger. The Japanese in turn sometimes utilized the missionaries, Lehner, Decker, and Wagner as brokers, but mostly dealt with locals directly. In the short reply about sharing rice lies the clue as to how some of them saw their role as an occupation force. Rice, as a Japanese colleague of mine explained to me, is not shared with subordinates but only with equals.²³

New Guineans Take Control

Australian coastwatcher Harold Freund, a Lutheran (ELSA) prewar missionary who had worked on Siassi Island and was somewhat unfamiliar with conditions and people of the mainland, commented in his autobiography that all (colonial) government structures had ceased. In addition he remarked that a high number of Lutheran missionaries and Australian lay mission workers joined the army: five, including him, enlisted as coastwatchers on day 1, 18 February 1942. Freund tried to counter stories circulating in the Australian Press and later histories that the Lutherans—Germans, Australians, and Americans alike—were disloyal to the Allies and aided the Japanese.²⁴ His actions are a reminder that loyalties during war cut across nationalities. The coastwatchers were driven by local and personalized loyalties to each other that included the “enemy alien” German missionaries. Despite an order to shot the escaped young missionary Wagner on sight, they met and shared information and resources. When raiding supplies left behind at the Finschhafen mission station supply house, “Blue” Harris, a former patrol officer, decided, so Freund recalled, “that a fair share should be left for Rev. Adolph Wagner.”²⁵ Coastwatcher Lloyd Pursehouse, also a former patrol officer, in addition was sympathetic to local New Guineans supplementing their dwindling resources by accessing provisions left behind by Australian officials before such supplies were all scooped up by occupying Japanese troops. In contrast taking food or clothing left behind by missionaries and officials was regarded by the senior men of the Lutheran villages along the coast not as rescuing resources but as sin. Even and especially in times of hardship, the Lord’s command “thou shall not steal” counted. Those villages and individuals who had raided stores, for example, in Finschhafen, received stern reprimands and demands to bring the looted items back:

With subsistence farming it was difficult for villagers to assist outsiders. Freund, for example asserted that the beginning of the Japanese occupation saw large numbers of indentured laborers ‘stranded far from home’. … ‘Village people’, Freund continued, ‘could not be expected to accommodate and feed strangers’.²⁶ While his assessments of the availability of resources was accurate, he failed to notice how the Jabem villages dealt with this problem. They made an offer to the displaced young men who moved along the coast that they could stay until the ‘difficult times’ of war were over, and allocated fields to them for planting, under the condition that they obeyed by the rules and conventions of the villages.

Planting supply fields, however, was out of the question for the guerilla force of the coastwatchers. As time went on, the Australians became desperate for any occasional food drop, requested by them via radio that Australian planes managed to deliver. Freund felt it increased their status with local villagers, who seemed also reluctant to share their food, as may be they perceived the small group of men behind enemy lines as weak and alone. Food drops were for Freund a visible link to a powerful force far away.

News reached Stefan Lehner, who in the Jabem area was quite a distance away from the coastwatchers in the Kate region further North in the Huon peninsula, about Australians behind enemy lines, and their lack of supplies. Lehner wrote:

The Australians are said to be still in the inland. It must be appalling, however, in regard to food, as no new supplies are to be expected, and the foodstuffs which the natives are able to deliver, are not sufficient. For no native works for general consumption. He plants only so much as is required for himself and his family. What then? Die or surrender! The Japanese are said to have caught a few Australians in Lae this week. They do not chase them. They let them carry on, doubtless because they are waiting for them to surrender…²⁷

There were spaces of overlapping rule and demands on villages by both Japanese and Australians for support. Other regions experienced a power vacuum between retreating Australians and Japanese occupiers. The missionaries’ accounts and those of the senior community leaders are full of comments on individuals and groups who used this situation to initiate a new order, or to take over supplies left behind by the retreating colonials. Middle school director M. G. laconically commented: “Some who lost sight of themselves had difficulties to endure.”²⁸ Along the coast up from Lae, according to several accounts by local leading men, Lutheran church elders and teachers took control of the villages and the district. Middle school director M. G. set out the spirit that was affirmed and that through the work of villages helping each other out over great distances became a structure:

The people from Lae to Jabem were in some sense one single congregation. They worked together well in the midst of difficult times. In November (1942) Missionary Lehner and the overseer from Lae and Bukawa appeared in Jabem. All us Jabem speaking people, we congregated at Wasutieng and tied the tie of unity more firmly. Then, on the 21 November we went to Heldsbach. There we celebrated with the Kate a big Sunday with the theme standing true together. … It was the doing of the Lord that the congregations stood together like this.²⁹

Hopoi became a center where information was received and shared out, community leaders from near and far came to seek advice, and selected men went out to inspect schools and visited villages. Villagers took over responsibilities that had been the white missionaries’ preserve before the outbreak of war. Village schools, middle schools, and evangelist schools were supported by villagers and kept going throughout the war. Extra fields were planted. When fighting and air raids necessitated leaving villages and sheltering in the forest or near their fields, new provisional schools were erected on a regular basis. M. G. commented that, for example, “the Lae people had to move more than other people but they never forgot to take their school with them.” From the very start of the war, local institutions that had been closed by the retreating Australians were reopened. M. G. recalls:

The middle school at Wasutieng, whose missionary had been taken away on 16 February 1942 was closed down by the whites on 3 March and the pupils chased away. Later the Jabem took on and looked after the school, and called the pupils back together, so that we could take up our work again on 1 April 1942.³⁰

The church calendars were a central tool in organizing the district, as they carried dates and locations for meetings and celebrations, baptisms, catechist exams, and the like for the year. Thus one of the first things commissioned by the Jabem district in December 1942 was for two experienced former employees of the mission printing press, T. and N., to print calendars for 1943.³¹

Chicken for Books: New Guinean Initiated Trade

The Japanese, according to J. N., a pupil at the middle school at Wasutieng, confiscated mission property, including all chickens, when they occupied Wasutieng and the neighboring village of Logaweng in April 1943. An initial agreement negotiated by M. G., director of the middle school, for access to schoolbooks stored at the printing press at Logaweng was soon withdrawn. Armed sentries patrolled the press and its store. J. N. recalled how their two teachers discussed with the pupils how further books could be gained. Enquiries revealed that supply ships had ceased to arrive and that the Japanese were in desperate need of food:

[W]e decided to offer them field crops to gain books. Thus we plucked up courage and together with our teachers called on the Japanese and made our offer. They agreed and said if you want books in the future you will have to pay with crops and chicken. Thus on a daily basis we carried sacks full of crops to Logaweng to the Japanese.³²

M. G. sacrificed all his chickens to get more books. The rescued books were stored at M. G.’s house, and a written note was procured from a Japanese officer prohibiting soldiers to enter the hut. After removing all bound copies from Logaweng, the pupils gathered books printed but not yet bound, and the two printing experts N. and T. were called upon to teach the pupils how to bind books. Lacking binding material, the Wasutieng group used stripes of their clothing and sowed books for their own use and that of other schools in the Huon. As the bound books had to be cut, more food transactions were required. The Japanese brought the cutting machine to Wasutieng and asked for a certain amount of Taro for each use. J. N. recalled that the bookbinding became an enterprise used by the occupation army:

Our reputation spread to Finschhafen, so that Japanese soldiers came from even there and asked us if we could bind something for them. We said we would and they unlocked the door at Logaweng for us. We used this opportunity to rescue some more books for us.³³

In anticipation of an offensive by the Allies, the Japanese reinforced troops at Logaweng and brought cannons up to Logaweng and Wasutieng. At this point missionary Adolf Wagner decided it was time to relocate the school from what would most likely turn into a battlefield. He wrote to missionary Lehner and the Bukawa elders that the middle school was in grave danger. According to J. N. on hearing this, the Hopoi came without delay, evacuated teachers, pupils and books, and erected a new middle school amidst the Bukawa congregations. This also necessitated planting new fields to feed the pupils. During the ensuing battles, the buildings at Logaweng and Wasutieng were heavily damaged. J. N.’s recollection finishes with an appeal to his New Guinean readers:

Dear friends, let us praise God that he protected our Wasutieng middle school during difficult times and that not one of us died.

Forced to Live Like Wild Beasts

While J. N. focused on the rescue of the school and its equipment, he did not even in passing mention the challenges such an evacuation entailed at that time. From September 1943 until February 1944, the Huon Peninsular was under constant attacks by the Allies. As part of Operation Cartwheel to push out the Japanese from the Ramu and Markham valleys, the Huon peninsula, and the Sepik, before liberating New Britain, the Huon became the site of the first amphibious assault by Australian forces since the Gallipoli landing in WWI and the first airborne operation of the war in the Pacific.³⁴

The Tamigudu communities at the coast were forced to flee their village. M. detailed their actions. Alerted by a letter from the Jabem at Bukawa, and warned by leaflets dropped by Allied planes, huts and fields were relocated inland, hidden in the forest. For a while the villagers commuted between their forest accommodations and their village, especially for church services. One night the Tamigudu woman S., who experienced a long and difficult birth, was carried back to her village, where she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But when one morning a group attending church was shot at by machine guns from planes flying over the village, the emergency huts as well as suitable mountain caves became permanent places for shelter.

Japanese troops already on retreat made their way along the coast, and Tamigudu villagers decided to slaughter all their big pigs and take the smaller ones with them into the forest. They did this, M. remarked, “as they did not trust the Japanese. Day and night Japanese soldiers in great numbers move through our village in the direction of Lae.”³⁵ In the midst of bombing raids, a dying man, Z., was carried back to the village to die. Shortly after eight American planes attack the village, according to M., and dropped one big bomb in the middle of the village. A crater remained, filled with water:

M.’s diary details that the dying continued: a little girl died of fright; Ma.’s daughter S. died in Busengseng, and was buried at the local graveyard. The Lord “called the souls” of health assistant G E, and of Mg… Five weeks after Easter, M. dogs were beaten to death, but nobody knew by whom.³⁶

Three Japanese motorboats moored at the mouth of the river Bulesom. After darkness the Japanese attempted to flee to Lae but were spotted by the Allies, chased, and bombed. The crew crashed the boats into the shoreline and escaped inland, with dire consequences for the sheltering villagers, as M. noted:

Despite of the pitch-black night they stumbled around in the forest and some of them found the huts and caves occupied by us Tami. Our people were afraid of the Japanese, and retreated to more remote fields and field huts. They leave their emergency shelters to the Japanese who now occupy the huts and caves instead of them.³⁷

Five American planes returned to bomb the deserted motorboats, hitting the village in the process, as they let the bombs glide to earth “in cloths like the umbrellas of the white people.”³⁸

The bombings affected people along extensive areas of the coastline of the Huon and the neighboring regions. The Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin provided a benign version of events at the Dap village on Wogeo Island, further up the coast:

Despite a little harmless bombing – by which side is unknown – and a short Japanese occupation, these [the effects of the conflict] proved to be mainly indirect. The worst disaster occurred when a detonating device, probably a mine, drifted to a beach near Dap. A crowd of children dragged it ashore and, ignorant of the danger, began throwing stones. In the subsequent explosion several were blown to pieces and two or three injured.³⁹

With the bombing raids intensifying in size and numbers, the congregation managed to convince old missionary Decker to finally abandon his station that lay exposed and had been attacked several times. The villagers of Tamigudu, under the leadership of M., who was a trained carpenter, evacuated missionary Decker, and within 8 days took down the guesthouse at the mission station, transported it to the safety of the forest, and erected it there. While they were busy building a new emergency schoolhouse in the forest, Japanese soldiers plundered the village and took planks from houses into the forest nearby to erect some shelters for themselves. Three days later the Japanese discovered the village fields close to the coast. M. wrote: “Japanese soldiers vandalize our yam, taro and banana gardens.” The villagers resolved this, according to M, by supplying the hungry Japanese “with papaya, taro and bananas.”⁴⁰

Checking on the abandoned mission station after the relocation of Decker and the mission pupils, a small group of villagers found it looted—clothes, household items, and 30 bottles of wine for the Eucharist were missing—and they followed the traces of the invaders to the village Ulugedu. There they complained to the commanding officer, whom M. named as Sakai. The Japanese officer assembled the soldiers and retrieved 15 empty and 15 full bottles. The latter the Tamigudu men took back to missionary Decker.

That the New Guinean men dared to make a complaint is surprising. It either points to the value they placed on defending church property or the trust they placed in the correctness of Japanese army leaders. With retreating units passing through, and soldiers starved out of supplies, however, relations with the occupation force were becoming unpredictable.

These experiences were shared by villagers all along the coastline. Three years after the end of the war, an American mission paper published an appeal by a New Guinean Christian to cease wars. The message was directed at friends in “Australia, America, Sydney, Port Moresby and Japan, namely kings, governments, civil servants and lords.” He wrote about the war, taking up the language of the prophet Jeremiah at the destruction of Jerusalem: “Our legs trembled and our knees wobbled like water.” He summarized the conditions villagers found themselves in during the final period of fighting between the Allies and the Japanese:

Your bombs and missiles and men overwhelmed us. Our villages, fields and part of our people were smashed and annihilated. We were forced to live like wild beasts, like wild pigs, rats, birds and cassowaries. We ate their food, vines and leaves. We begged the hills to open so that we could hide there, but in vain. Many of us died. … Our fields were plundered, and our food eaten.⁴¹

“When the Whites Came, They Destroyed the Whole Work”

The period of retreat by one army and the arrival of another was a dangerous period for the villagers and replicated some of their experiences at the beginning of the war. G. K. recalls the time from March 1943 when the Hopoi pupils and missionary Lehner were hiding out in the forest. They were able to continue their schooling but had to be careful not to light fires at night, lest they attracted air raids. As they were unable to bake bread, all, including the missionary mainly subsisted on a diet of Taro, interspersed with occasional sweet potatoes that Hube men from the mountains managed to bring them. When news of the Allied landing at Lae reached the Bukawa, missionary Lehner asked G. K. to—once more—bring a letter to the new occupation army. G. K. went along the beach, where he met Australian soldiers whom he presented with the letter and led to the forest hide out. The following day, on 7 October, the soldiers returned, and, as G. K. recalled, somewhat abruptly announced to Lehner “you come to Australia.” The students and elders together with the whole community, G. K. continued, accompanied the missionary to the coast and said their farewells. G. K. was aggrieved that the pupils and villagers were unable to further assist or protect Lehner: “In our presence the missionary was treated correctly by the soldiers. But if they continued to do so we do not know.”⁴²

The Allies reached Tamigudu and missionary Decker about 2 weeks later. M. narrates that peace came slowly, with the Japanese retreating from their village, Allied soldiers arriving 2 days later, and occasional skirmishes and fighting erupting that could be heard from afar. Not long after that a jeep loaded with telephone cables rolled along the local road. M noted that “the old men and women could not stop being amazed, because never had a lorry come so far as to us during peacetime.” Many ships passed by, and one had soldiers disembark. W. A. Money,⁴³ according to M., a plantation owner from Umboi on the island of Siassi-Rooke updated the villagers on the state of the war.

By the time the first labor recruiting occurred, the villagers were still in their forest hideouts. On 2 October 1943, Sergeant Iwago,⁴⁴ from the Royal Papuan Constabulary, approached the villagers asking them for several young men and was allowed to take eight with him. The men assisted Allied soldiers clearing the bush at Bukwang and Butaweng, the place of the former mission sawmill, before being taken further up the coast to Sattelberg and Wareo. From M.’s account it becomes clear that the villagers were keeping an eye out on the whereabouts of their young men. A further six young men, M. wrote, were taken by military police to unload ships in Sambojang and Kaming. While the first encounters with advancing Papua New Guinean, Australian, and other Allied soldiers are recalled as mostly informal, soon colonial rule and formality were reinstated. M. recalled:

A government official comes and has us all line up in rows. He takes many of our young boys to Lae for cleanup work. ANGAU⁴⁵ stays for two days at Tami[gudu], and then goes to Ulugedu.

The same government official also visited the forest shelters in order to speak to missionary Decker. Accompanied by a group of police soldiers, M. recalled, he announced that Decker would have to come with them. M. continues:

My father and I are the only ones who are there with the missionary in his hut. He hands us the keys to his boxes and places the whole work into our hands. We accompany him to Ulugedu together with the government official.⁴⁶

One local, K. G. managed to accompany Decker on the motorboat to Lae. Decker was taken to the mainland of Australia, never to return.⁴⁷

Adolf Wagner, who had received news about the removal of the missionaries, attempted to avoid meeting up with Allied troops⁴⁸ and was shot by Japanese soldiers in December 1943. In 1947, a local evangelist B. showed Adolf’s brother Emil⁴⁹ and his wife Linda the place Adolf died. Linda recalled that walking along B. pointed out a number of places and events that happened during this last phase of the war. At one place a Japanese soldier driving cattle along a narrow path lost direction and fell down a steep embankment, Linda wrote. At another place B. pointed out that “there a Japanese lay with fever and died. Now he rests under a pile of stones, over which we had to walk.”⁵⁰

The war, that is most fighting and bombing, ended in late 1943, early 1944, but Papua and New Guinea remained under military administration until October 1945. In the collection of the Australian War Memorial are a great number of photographs taken by official photographers of the Australian military administration ANGAU, with captions written that show that their use was not only to document events but to publicize them to a wider Australian public. The overarching narrative is one of liberation and joy, and of order and resource stability returning. An image of a group of 30 smiling children in front of a local hut at an unspecified coastal village in the Huon, taken in February 1944, has the following caption:

New Guinea. 15 February 1944. A group of local native children in their rebuilt village. As troops pushed back the Japanese along the coast of the Huon Peninsula, natives straggled back to their villages which had been wrecked by retreating Japanese. Natives fled to the hills when the Japanese first entered the area. Some who could not escape were forced to work in Japanese carrier lines but seized every opportunity to make a break for the hills. As the Japanese retreated, native gardens were systematically wrecked and the natives were on the point of starvation when troops advanced. Brought back to their villages and fed on Army rations by Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) officers, the natives soon began to pick up in health. In return for food and medical attention and regular pay, all the able bodied natives of this village are working in carrier lines taking supplies to Australians further north.⁵¹

Several further images, all with the word “bartering” in the caption, show army barges at various locations along the coast of the Huon between Lae and Sattelberg, loaded with fruits and other field produce for the use of ANGAU.⁵² One caption explains that:

Tamigudu area, New Guinea. 1944-05-12. Tamigudu natives carrying fruit and vegetables from native gardens to the beach. Most of the work is done by native women who carry produce in a ‘billum’ (string bag) slung from the head. A weekly barge has been chartered from Lae by the Australian Army Service Corps to transport the fruit to the detail issue depot who despatch the fruit to the 2/7th General Hospital and provide any surplus to units in the Lae area. A bartering arrangement has been made by Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit with the Luluai (village head), to exchange army rations for fruit and vegetables.⁵³

The histories narrated by the captions paint a picture in black and white, making a distinction between Japanese destruction and Australian rebuilding, that erases for one the impact Allied bombing had in the region. They also give no second thought to the impact on the local economy and food production that ensued when “all the able bodied natives of this village are working in carrier lines” and fields were to carry additional crops for the use of the Australian army. Who was to carry out the work in the gardens and fields? And what changes to crops had to be made with all the young men gone from the village—some crops like the more nutritional Taro necessitates hard work, while the less nutritional sweet potato can be planted and harvested with less effort. The New Guinean war memoirs are silent on these matters. They do, however, narrate the effect the Australian military occupation had on some villages as a whole that had to make way for army units and relocate—and some of the effects recruiting had on the region’s education efforts.

New Guineans from the Huon peninsula had to wait until 1947 for the return of missionaries and European teachers. Until then, as M. G. set out in his memoir that doubles as a community and education history, New Guineans carried the work alone in trying circumstances first under military and from October 1945 under civilian administration that drew, however, initially on mainly the same army personnel.

The running of schools suffered from a lack of teaching material, lack of students, and lack of teachers. The young men were recruited for labor by the Australian military administration, ANGAU (Australian New Guinea Administration Unit). At Hopoi the seminar that had been relocated in the face of bombardments and battles from Wasutieng had to close in September 1943 and was only able to reopen at the end of 1946. M. G. recalled that “all students had been taken away by the white people” on 10 September 1943 and only trickled back in small numbers. Labor recruiting left villages depleted of young men.

In addition, the armed forces occupied strategic places at the coast, necessitating whole villages to relocate. The people of Tamigudu, for example, were removed from their village to make way for two Australian army units in late October 1943. In contrast to stories of liberation and rebuilding of New Guinean infrastructure by ANGAU, M. G. wrote that by October 1945 the Jabem people like the Lae people had suffered greatly:

Their whole land and beautiful coastline now belonged to the white people, and they themselves were pushed into the mountains, and built a village there called Talabe.

G. M. continues this story of loss with an aside to community resilience: “In Talabe they rebuilt their school…”⁵⁴ In 1947 the middle school formerly at Wasutieng was finally reopened, too, at Kahnsaung near Lae. M. G. remarked:

These were difficult times for us, because we had no school missionary to help us. We natives had to run these important schools all by ourselves. But God’s blessing was with us.⁵⁵

Conclusion

In histories of the Pacific War, and its impact on Papua and New Guinea, war historians reconstruct and analyze battles and troop movements in great details.⁵⁶ In most published accounts, Papuans and New Guineans are marginal, even when they worked for the war effort, and the fates of local civilians are even more neglected. This is partly because of a lack of interest, partly because of a lack of sources. In the lead up to the 75-year commemorations, a number of oral history projects have started up, localizing an analysis of the war and detailing participation by Papuans and New Guineans. Such localized histories are more than simply small, local micro-histories. They are a fundamental change in outlook.

The war in the Huon Peninsula challenged colonial structures to their core. New Guineans developed their own chronology: up to WWII German taim (German time), followed by taim belong faet (fighting time), and postwar by taim bilong Australia na kipa (Australian and Kiap time). By extending German time right up to the outbreak of WWII, New Guineans were not engaging in historical forgetting but cultural-historical positioning.⁵⁷ Though Australia took colonial control in 1914, regular Australian patrolling of the Huon Peninsula only really started in the mid-1930s, and until the outbreak of war, the German mission structures remained central to colonial rule. The accounts I have used in this chapter are by New Guinean men from the Huon Peninsula, who place themselves firmly on the side of the mission and Christianity. The mission’s social structures strengthened, they argue, the connectedness of villages along the coastline of the Huon peninsula and into the hinterland and stabilized village communities during what they referred to as “difficult times.”⁵⁸

These accounts also enable an investigation into local impacts of the Pacific War, without which, I argue, histories of the war stay one-sided and bereft. A history of the Japanese army in New Guinea would not be complete without the villagers who planted the taro they ate. What a return of the Australians entailed would be diminished, if we would not, like the village elders, follow the young men recruited for labor along the coast. And how could we, I argue, write about any bomber command without following the bombs down onto the ground, where, as M. recalled, they left a crater behind in the middle of the village, slowly filling with water. It is thus to “grounded” histories of the Pacific War that this chapter seeks to contribute.