Salamaua Campaign
In Port Moresby
We landed at Port Moresby, which was pretty tame at that stage. We used to get a few air-raids, but nothing startling. We played labourers there and loaded and unloaded trucks. We became very adept at pinching things off the back of trucks, particularly large tins of asparagus. There were very big tins of asparagus that went to the officers' mess which would 'accidentally' fall off the back of a truck and scatter all over the place. There was quite an art at scattering them - you dropped them on the corner and the case broke.
They were all wooden cases in those days, there were no cardboard cartons. We worked a day or two there and we worked in the canteen, again loading and unloading trucks. We slept at a place called Murray Barracks in Port Moresby which was a huge hut with a concrete floor. We had a couple of blankets with nothing under the blankets. We slept on cold concrete - good for the rheumatism.
For entertainment, at night, we went to the movies. A number of USA camps had their own 16mm shows and used to have a film change in the middle. The Australian entertainment unit had 35mm and no breaks in the middle. To get to the show of your choice (what was on went around by word of mouth) you went to the main road and hitched a ride. This was easy. To get home again you asked the driver if he was going the way you didn't want to go and, if he said no, then you climbed on the back of a six-wheel five-ton truck and held on. When you got to the place you wanted to get off, you banged on the top of the cabin and the driver would stop. Most of the transport was USA and nearly all the drivers were negroes.
When I was in Port Moresby, one of my jobs in the early morning was to help the Army Service Corps to load planes. (The ASC supplied food and all other day-to-day requirements, eg petrol, ammunition, food, clothing and anything else that the front line troops wanted.) We went down to the aerodrome - there were four aerodromes in Moresby - and helped load a plane. All the stuff was for dropping. What they used to do was get a wooden case of bully beef, or whatever, and put them in a hessian bag. They'd sew the bag up, put another hessian bag on it the other way and sew that up. They'd then throw these parcels out of the planes over defined dropping zones. They didn't use parachutes in those days. There was an American pilot, a co-pilot and an ANGAU - Australian/New Guinea Army Unit (who were all ex-New Guineans, mostly Australians who had worked in NG before the war) - to show them where to drop. The ASC bloke said to me, "Do you want to come up and throw out?" And I said, "Yes, sure".
