AMERICANS IN PAPUA

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 26 June 1943, Page 3

AMERICANS IN PAPUA

IN SLUDGE AND BATTLE GRIME A FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH WAR AUSTRALIAN CORRESPONDENT THINKS BACK Watching sleek Americans on leave in all the variety of their extensive issue of uniforms, I have been thinking back on them as they were in the sludge and battle-grime of Papua—hot, tattered and heavy-laden, squelching through swamps, burning with fever, making a harsh first acquaintance with* war, writes Geoffrey Tebbutt, Melbourne “Herald” War Correspondent. It was the general opinion of A.I.F. troops who fought in the Middle East before going to New Guinea that the tropical campaign was far more severe. If some of our own battle-hardened soldiers wondered what had hit them when they plunged into jungle fighting, it is easy to understand the reactions of the Americans, going into action for the first time, when they swarmed out of their transport aeroplanes behind the Buna front.

They had not imagined anything like this. It was, beyond all its inevitable roughness and toughness, an' unnatural kind of war, against an enemy largely unseen; against a wildly lush background; it was being fought to repossess a malarial strip of coastline in a creepy land that nobody ought to covet and which only the crazed Japanese would write off a garrison to defend.

There was no shining goal ahead, no immediate reward of achievement which the common soldier could appreciate along with the higher strategists—just another swamp, another tattered coconut plantation, another beach, another cluster of battered pillboxes filled with stinking corpses. The country, although the maps said it was Australian soil, was alien to our own men, far more so to the Americans. They came, many of them, from Wisconsin and the north-western States of Washington and Oregon. In December and January they were homesick for snow as they burrowed into* the black oozing earth of North Papua, drenched by night broiled by day. • There were some Red Indians among them. One, Private Matthew Black Dog, showed me a tree with the bodies of three Japanese snipers still hanging in it He had just helped to kill the last of the three. The Red Indians were found useful on anti-sniping jobs. Ancestral hunting instinct found its re-expression with a tommy-gun in the dark forests of Sanananda. Black Dog had been a truck driver on construction jobs in the States. He lived on an Indian reservation. He said he had never seen country like this. It was their own battle they were fighting, as well as Australia’s, but that must have been hard for them to realise, dumped here in the green desolation, minds and muscles strained to outlast the concealed enemy and the viciousness of the land. These same stresses were imposed on the Australians. They had more war experience to pull them through and, I think, an additional insulating layer of hard-bittenness.

The American soldier is more frankly sentimental than our own. He is more anxious to tell you his home town and his street number, and even if he is a colonel no longer young he may on the shortest acquaintance produce photographs of wife and children. Perhaps we do not often enoqgh remember how far he is from home —as far from home as Australians were in the Middle East.

In addition to being more sentimental, he is more curious and speculative and less satisfied with things as they are, more anxious to know how things work, to find out whether they would work better in a different way, more enthusiastic about applying charts and card-indexes and business-office systems to the administrative branch of

We incline to pride ourselves upon how much we can do with so little, upon toughness for its own sake. The American ambition seems to run to bigness of achievement, to elaboration, to improvement not out of sheer necessity, but for satisfaction of the urge to produce something better, and especially to produce it where it did not exist before.

A composite American-Australian mind and outlook and capacity would be a very formidable quality, and not only for fighting wars. The Americans would not deny the endurance and resource of the Australians with whom they fought on the Buna beachhead; I hope we have no Blimps in authority who would refuse to see the virtues of American ingenuity in the maintenance of armies in the field and in ministering to their well-being and minor comforts. While the Australian staff toiled beneath hurricane lamps, the American staff a few miles away at a native plantation had got an electrical plant going. Wherever it was a question of extending the paper war, American typewriters and office supplies would appear, while the corresponding Australian branch would be labouring with pen and ink in some rickety hut. Somebody in Ordnance could no doubt explain all this away. I record merely that it was so. Americans working on the roads, hacking jeep-tracks through the kunai grass, wore gloves as they sunk their picks, a refinement that amused our hornier hands.

The, American field hospitals and dressing-stations somehow achieved a less haphazard and more encouraging appearance than ours; an American dental unit set itself up in a tent a few hundred years behind the Sanananda front line, chromium-fitted chair and all; the American engineers installed pumping machinery and arranged bulk supplies of chlorinated water, while our troops were still baling individually with water-bottles from the murky creeks. There were no plumbers to send for, but the American cookhouses turned on ample hot water for the troops to wash their mess-kits in while our people were dipping theirs in tepid tins of greasiness. These are not great issues. They do not relate directly to fighting quality. But they are significant. They are the things a layman notices when he is in circulation between American and Australian forces, looking for the merits in different systems, trying to define psychologies and temperaments. The Americans do not for long bind themselves to standards in equipment. In camouflage uniforms—a leopardspotted zip-fastening snap-button jungle outfit was the latest I saw in New Guinea—in packs, emergency rations, and the oddments of personal kit, they are repeatedly trying out something new. The experiments are not always exclusively official. The intelligence officer of one of their bomber squadrons in Papua had a caravan fitted as a mobile office and sleeping quarters. The American Army must be much more costly per man than is ours, the higher pay aside. One hears the criticism that their equipment is too elaborate for the conditions of Pacific war, in which soldiers so often have become packhorses again. The criticism may be just, but perhaps when Americans and Australians have fought side by side long enough for ideas to percolate through the proper channels, some kind of compromise may be struck for the welfare and efficiency of both forces. What some soldierly traditionalists regard as our Allies’ frills must very largely be the martial expression of the American national gift for streamlining and the exploitation of gadgets. It is more conspicuous here because

of our immediate horse-and-buggy background. The Americans in the Pacific theatre have learned much already the hard way. The process of readjustment is slow and difficult, as the conversion of Australian civilians to more frugal living shows. If the Americans to our troops occasionally seem a trifle extravagant—if they show an effete preference for keeping flies outside their garrison kitchens rather than in, if they are not ready to appreciate the merits of al-fresco sanitation— it is only a form of the great national discontent and restlessness. It was, after all, discontent that made America.