LIVING IN JUNGLE

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24152, 11 January 1944, Page 6

LIVING IN JUNGLE

AUSTRALIAN VISITS NEW GUINEA

RAINY SEASON ADDS TO TROUBLES

SYDNEY, December 31,

Seen from a landing craft on a sunny day, the rich viridian of the jungle, flecked with scarlet creeper, and backed by the rugged crests of the Rawlinson range, looks like a cross-section of the Garden of Eden, writes Geoffrey Hutton, correspondent of the “Melbourne Argus,” in a description of the New Guinea jungle. Along Finschhafen way the mountains are lower and smoother, but they break down more sharply to the sea in open pasturelands. High cliffs are overhung with trailing vines and broken by little coves of clear green water, where palm trees lean negligently over the sand. So far the travel agent. When you abandon the comparative comfort of a landing barge and try to move through this Shangri La and pitch a camp in it you find out the other side of the picture.

The pleasant green is a foetid and swampy jungle, all laced with vines and alive with nightmarish insects, some with a thousand legs, some with whiskers like a cat. some with heads in the wrong place and upholstery on their backs, but all alike in their venom and their dislike of intruders. The smooth sweeps of pasture turn into foul ground covered with 10 feet of kunai grass, which harbours the heat, and the mosquitoes, and must be slashed through with a knife. The pleasant hills turn into muscle-tearing razorbacks, and the neat little villages are deserted, tumbledown, smelly, and verminous.

In peace time it would not be that bad. There are neglected plantations rear the coast, and native gardens densely overgrown where good husbandry could make a tolerable dwell-ing-place: but the natives and the planters have been elsewhere for the last year, and for cover against strafing and bombing it is wise to live like a troglodyte in the dank caverns of the jungle. And they are never danker than in Australia’s springtime. The rainy season hit Lae just about the same time as the 9th Division. Lighting and water are laid on in the new residential area. Every night the black of the trees is lit by great flashes of sheet lightning. For half an hour the thunder will rumble, and then the rain comes. It comes In drops as big as pigeons’ eggs, hammering on waterproofs, swirling over the ground, filling creekbeds and holes, trees, pouring into groundsheets, dripping through tarpaulins and tent covers, and churning every track into a treadmill of soft mud.

Many Insects Why the insects are not all drowned is beyond my understanding. But as soon as the rain eases off grasshoppers and frogs open up their chorus, millions of fireflies begin to glint among the trees, flying foxes eerily beat their wings together, and land crabs, millipedes, and scorpions resume the hunt lor human victims. Usually it is still in the forest, but when a wind sweeps down the effect is uncanny. At Finschhafen I was camped in a forest of great trees 200 feet tall and all strung together by ropes of vine like a Tarzan stage set. In clearing out a camp area under the trees the men had to cut away many of these ropes, and left the topheavy, rotting trees like unstayed masts. As soon as the wind rose, rending crashes sounded through the forest as rickety giants collapsed. . Among forward units there is not much protection against these misdemeanours of nature. There are no tents or shelters, and every man carries his house on his back like a snail. His first problem is to keep out the wet—or enough of it to save some of his gear. He usually carries a groundsheet and a blanket. To make the best of this bad job the men have very quickly learned the lesson offered by the natives. They cut the thick, rope-like vines and split them into cords. With these they rig up a roof, using a groundsheet. The next problem is to get off the ground. I have seen men with less than a week’s experience of New Guinea who learned to swing a blanket in the jungle like a hammock or build a stretcher with nothing but saplings and vines in less than half an hour. To keep your pack from getting sodden and overgrown with fungus, it has to be raised on its own little platform.

Rear troops, who are installed in a camp for several days at a time, show more architectural skill. The jungles along the coast from Lae were dotted with lean-to shelters, thatched with kunai grass, and covered with large banana leaves, which shot the rain off like corrugated iron. One of the most successful inventions of the war is the American jungle hammock, which combines hammock, mosquito net, and waterproof covering in a single portable bedroll. When these are issued to the Australian Army, malaria will inevitably decline among forward troops, and the men will have a chance of occasionally Bleeping dry. Nights often grow fairly cold on Huon peninsula before dawn, and men either carry half a blanket (the unofficial practice is to share one between two men), or else sleep in their clothes. Many of the men worked, sweated, and slept in the same muddy jungle-green shirt and trousers for a week or a fortnight at a time. The only way they kept skin troubles to a minimum was by daily baths in any streams available. Often you had a half-hour trudge through ankle-deep mud to reach the bathroom, and the same trudge home again. Equipment quickly deteriorated. Cigarettes, unless wrapped in waterproof, disintegrated and developed mould. Envelopes stuck fast, then stuck not at all. Paper grew stained and clammy. Matches left in your pocket would be useless in half an hour. Lead pencils and even lighter flints crumbled with moisture. Needles and razor blades rusted in their packets. Soap melted, and cigarette papers gummed themselves into a chain. Boot leather rotted quickly. These things and many more are still a colossal co-ordinated nuisance. Many of the troops have made waterproof pouches out of old gas capes. To seal letters they stab one of the native rubber trees, which are profuse in these jungles, and rub the envelope on the white latex as it oozes out. I found one man using a good black ink which he had crushed out of some native berries.

I could make the picture grimmer by writing about our forward elements in action, who sleep in relays with their boots on, and Owen guns in hand, and who often have to struggle for a day on less than a tin of bully beef a man, because they have got ahead of their supplies. Conditions I have been describing are what they enjoy when they go into camp for a rest.