Death stalks the unwary in Papua’s jungles

Press, 9 April 1980, Page 19

Death stalks the unwary in Papua’s jungles

By

CHRISTOPHER LEE,

NZPA-Reuter

Thirty-five years after the official killing ended, the vile weapons of the Second World War are still claiming victims. Many of them were unborn when the armies left their “rubbish” to trap the innocent . . .

On the last day of January, young Ray Pabenlik, of. Papua New Guinea’s Erhira Island, found an old hand grenade and decided to.use it to “bomb” some fish. He pulled out the pin, drew back his arm, and the grenade exploded. The blast ripped off his right arm. Shrapnel tore apart his face and jaws, and slivers of metal plunged into his chest. He lay in hospital for two days before dying. In 1973, a Port Moresby woman lit her cooking fire on the ground, hung her cooking pot just above it, then squatted close to stir ■the family meal. The explosion that killed her seconds later left a gaping hole nearly two metres deep where her cooking fire hadbeen.

In a way, these people became two of the latest casualties from the Second World War. Japanese and allied debris from the Pacific theatre of the 1939-1945 war continues to take the lives of Pacific Islanders and Melanesians 35 years after the killing officially ended. Coventry, London, Hambug Berlin, have all been cleaned up over the decades since 1945. Grad-

ing, clearing rubble, and disposal of unexploded bombs went t.i in the late 1940 s and early 19505, and by the 1960 s shining new office blocks and apartment buildings had stretched a cosmetic cover over the destruction.

But in Papua New Guinea it’s different Noone, for instance, wanted to walk the length of the infamous, 170 km Kokoda trail with a metal detector, looking for grenades, bombs, and bullets. The jungle has been allowed, in its inexorable way, to creep back and cover tens of thousands of tonnes of war ordnance.

In 1975, a villager from near Popondetta, in Papua New Guinea’s northern province, came out of the jungle and told friends he had found . a “bikpela” bomb. The Papua New Guinea explosives ordnance disposal unit which flew in immediately, cleared round the “thing,”, and discovered 18 100 kg British general purpose bombs.

"Disposal” of the cache flattened the jungle for 100 metres all around and lodged a piece of shrapnel into the chest of a unit

sergeant. He was not seriously wounded. The disposal unit of up to 20 men still works fulltime on getting rid of war debris that litters the nation. "Every month we get about 20 calls”, says the officer in charge, 21-year-old Lieutenant Leo Lamba. "They find projectiles, hand grenades, bombs, mines, incendiary bombs, gas bombs — vir-

tually everything that explodes that was used in Papua New Guinea in the Second World War. “On Missan Island, north of Bougainville, two years ago, villagers found a couple of tanks full of mortars and fragmentation bombs — a couple of thousand pounds of explosives — lying around out in the bush. “When we triggered that it blasted out about a hundred metres of scrub, and fragmentation pieces would have flown for three or four kilometres all around.”

Lieutenant Lamba says that since March, 1975, when the Papua New Guinea unit took over the bomb disposal task from Australia, his unit has cleared 244 tonnes of ex« plosives — “50,901 pieces of ordnance.”

Australian army records of what was found in the previous 30 years are now part of history and housed somewhere in Canberra,

but taking the last five year’s haul as a basis, it would indicate that about 2000 tonnes of high explosives have been found around Papua New Guinea since the end of the war in the Pacific. But much more than explosives lie hidden in the dei.se jungles of this nation. Planes, tanks, APC’s, gun emplacements, jeeps, trucks, and rolls of barbed wire lie rotting and rusting. It will be generations before they disappear. . The map positions where most of this war

machine debris lies read like a “where’s where” of the Pacific war — Kokoda, Buna, Gona, Wewak, Sanananda, Milne Bay, Rabaul.

In 44 months of warfare* in Papua New Guinea more than a million Japanese, Australian, American, and Dutch troops made a massive fortress of the country. No official, definitive,

death list has been published for either side, but Japanese and Australian w’ar historians put the total, at . about, 150,000 men. ■

The deaths were not the clean, easily-accountable demises of men shot or otherwise destroyed. Both sides of the war in Papua New Guinea had a common enemy — the jungle and its huge arsenal of killer diseases.

For every man killed by the enemy one was brought down by malaria, scrub typhus, dengue fever, and complications

from the toxic effect of tropical ulcers. Commander of the Japanese 18th army, Lieutenant Colonel Hatazo Idachi, wrote that a stag-< gering 100,000 Japanese soldiers died between Milne Bay and Aitape in the Sepik region between 1942 and 1945, about half from illness and starvation.

Japanese war graves’ organisations were permitted into Papua New Guinea by the Australian Government after 1950. According to the Australian author, John Ryan: “They found scores of thousands of skeletons bleached white in the huge, open mass graves.” Many of these were ■ taken home, but many still remain hidden where they fell, in the remains of sunken ships or in the fighters and bombers, hidden beneath 35’ years of jungle growth. The Papua New Guinea Government has the map grid references for about 700 crashed planes over the nation. According to a Port Moresby resi-

dent, Bill Chapman, a part-time collector of war memorabilia and restorer of Second World War crashed aircraft, this is by no means a definitive list.

“The positions of these 700 crashed planes were all plotted in the 20 years after the war,” he says. “Patrol officers were instructed to pinpoint any plane wreckage they came across.

“Having all these wrecks pinpointed helps the authorities to sort out the sheep from the goats when a new plane crashes. If searchers have war plane crashes marked On their maps they won’t go off looking for the wrong one.”

Mr Chapman has for the last two decades gone about searching for the

most interesting crashed planes, dragging them out of the jungle and doing his best to restore them. “In the last 20 years we’ve taken out about a 100 planes” he says. “They’ve been sent all over the place — New Zealand, Australia, Port Moresby, England. the United States.”

People like Mr .Chapman still have plenty to do. Japanese, Australian, and American academics and authors make irregular visits to the country in search of history. As Mr Chapman puts it: “we know about a lot of the stuff, but certainly there are thousands of tonnes more of war equipment lying around out there.”