Salamaua Campaign
Wau
From Port Moresby, we went by plane to Wau. We'd been transferred to the 2/7th AIF (an Australian Infantry Battalion), an established unit. We were replacing wounded to build it up to strength. Most of the people who had been in the CMF group finished up in the Carrier Platoon.
In the usual army stuff-up, 9 planes flew out of Moresby. Three dropped food, ammunition and whatever. Three planes landed in Wau and three planes landed in Bulolo, because the 2/5th was in Bulolo and the 2/7th was in Wau.
Guess what? The plane we landed on in Bulolo was supposed to go to Wau, and one of the planes that went to Wau was supposed to go to Bulolo. To get to the 2/7th, they put us in the back of trucks that had been resurrected from bits and pieces of trucks that had been blown up by our commandos to deny the Japs their use. They took us up a winding road at night with a mountain on one side and a chasm on the other side with no lights (or only intermittent use of lights), up the Bulolo River. There were no sides to the trucks. I was very smart: I sat on the back of the truck with my legs over and, if and when the truck went over the cliff, I was going to be first off.
Anyhow, we made the trip and we were taken on strength to the 2/7th. If you read The Fiery Phoenix you'll see that it was a pretty heavy sort of unit. They had had a lot of fighting and had done very well apart from Crete where they had lost 80-90% of the troops who were taken into the German prisoner of war camps. They had landed in New Guinea at Wau while the Japs were still active there.
[More information on the events on the Wau-Salamaua has brought to light in material published over the last 65 years. The most "pertinent" one (in my [Harold's] opinion) is a web site accessed via the Australian War Memorial website, http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/pushingback/wausalamaua.html. On reading the comments by various "third parties" in this article, whilst I knew we were doing it tough, I certainly didn't realize just how tough it was until I read opinions of men who had not been actually involved:
"... one of the most difficult and unpleasant areas ever to confront troops," declared the Australian official historian, David Dexter, referring to the Wau-Salamaua campaign. It was a little-known area of New Guinea over which thousands of Australians, New Guineans, Americans and Japanese fought and died. These men, Dexter explained, "found it difficult to find enough unpleasant adjectives to describe the country, which, for the most part, consisted of rugged mountains clothed with dense, almost impenetrable jungle, and in the higher areas with moss forest. Occasionally hills covered with kunai grass, such as those in the Snake Valley, stood out against the jungle background."]
One bloke I eventually met up with in Baulkham Hills Hospital, who had lost his leg, had flown in to Wau on a DC3, got off the plane, got wounded and was evacuated on the same plane. That landing was the first time they brought in 25 pound artillery by plane. They were brought off the plane in pieces, assembled in about 10 minutes to quarter of an hour and started firing from the airstrip.
In March 1943, we were trucked into Wau. The Japs weren't very close. There were still some in the hills, but they were only few and far between. They had pulled back towards Salamaua and all the little houses, all the little stops on the way, we had to fight for them all.
I arrived in Wau late at night. The next morning I was interviewed by the CO Headquarters Company, Capt. Duell. He asked a few questions, about the fact that my regimental number was NXM and not straight NX, which I explained and obviously the correct number caught up with me. The next question related to why I had reverted at my own request. I explained as best I could with the facts but, being an officer, I think he took Maj. Conkey's explanation. (I have thought over the years that Conkey had it in for me, and it could possibly have also been anti-semitism, which I did not even know about at that time. The only time this had been evident to me was on a work detail in Port Moresby when a few of the blokes I had been with for twelve months were working with a few other bods like ourselves, waiting, and one of the other group called me a "dirty Jew". We shaped up and a few wild swings were thrown, and we were pulled apart.) Capt. Duell then asked me a question that I have not thought of since, but remember now. He asked if I knew that someone (with a hint that it was one of my family) had endeavoured to have me sent to an officer training unit.
This was a complete surprise to me and I told him so. On reflection after all this time, the only one that I can think of is that Cecil Luber either did something himself, or convinced Dad to do so.
Duell then told me I was in #4 platoon, which was the Carrier Platoon. That was the end of the interview, and I knew it would be more than difficult to gain any rank, thanks, to Conkey.
In Wau, we all slept underground. By the time I got there, somebody had built underground cabins for us. There were about four people per cabin. My memory for names is terrible, fifty years later I can't remember the names. There was a bloke called Dorney, he was in our hut, our underground base, and another bloke, a little sandy-haired bloke from Queensland. Wau was an absolute heaven for us. There was fresh food. There was corn, tomatoes, all sorts of vegetables, paw-paws by the million and one cow. There is a story about the cow. The Brigadier had "liberated" the cow and he at least had fresh milk. One day the cow suddenly disappeared. There had been a shot in the night and we all had fresh meat. But no more milk - that was the Brigadier's problem. The sandy-haired bloke from Queensland had worked on the land, on a paw-paw plantation, and he knew what to do. I don't know where he scrounged them from, but he had a box full of woodshavings. He used to pick the paw-paws just ripe, a bit on the green side, put them in the wood shavings, keep them there for 3, 4 or 5 days and then we would eat them. The cooks discovered that stewed green paw-paw was a magnificent type of marrow.
