Defence analysis
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Ross Eastgate is a military historian, writer and journalist specialising in defence. A graduate of Duntroon and the Army Command and Staff College, he has served in the Middle East, PNG and East Timor.
ON Monday, PNG, ever the land of the unexpected, will mark two significant anniversaries.
Not just the 44th anniversary of independence, but also the 76th anniversary of the surrender of Japanese forces in Lae.
Both came at significant cost, but perhaps no more than the casualties suffered by Australia’s 2/33 Infantry Battalion.
On September 8, 1989, while serving on secondment to the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, I received a call from Chief Inspector Gary Baki, then commanding the constabulary’s mobile squads at Mcgregor Barracks, situated at the western end of Port Moresby’s Jackson International Airport.
Baki, until recently RPNGC commissioner, asked who the Australian soldiers were who had marched through Mcgregor Barracks the previous evening.
Unaware of any Australian soldiers exercising in PNG, I checked with defence staff, who suggested further investigation.
At Mcgregor Barracks I was shown the duty sergeant’s log, which recorded Australian soldiers late at night, marching through.
Further questioning revealed
they were wearing slouch hats but carrying .303 Lee Enfield rifles, which had not been in service since the mid-1960s.
The duty sergeant was adamant about what he had seen and recorded.
Returning to police headquarters, I stopped en route at the airport to buy the Brisbane Courier-mail, which typically arrived in Port Moresby the day after it was published in Australia.
Among the notices on the tributes page was a Roll of Honour entry for the 2/33 Bn, which had been raised in the UK in 1940 before serving in Egypt, Palestine and Syria before returning to Australia in January 1942.
It was then sent to PNG to reinforce battalions fighting on the Kokoda Trail and later at Milne Bay.
It returned again to Australia to be reinforced and retrained before being sent again to PNG in July 1943 to participate in operations to recapture Lae.
Late on the night of September 7, 1943, a fully laden USAAF Liberator bomber crashed on takeoff into trucks carrying men of D Coy, 2/33 Bn who were waiting to be flown to Nadzab in the Ramu Valley to advance on Lae.
The aircraft destroyed several trucks and its full bomb and fuel load exploded, creating utter devastation.
The battalion lost 60 men, with 90 severely wounded, before it had even left Moresby.
These casualties represented a third of the battalion’s fatal casualties for the entire war.
The Liberator’s crew were also killed.
Eerily the crash occurred at the same location where Mcgregor barracks was established post-war.
The remnants of 2/33rd Bn arrived in Nadzab on September 8 and subsequently participated in the advance on Lae, which fell on September 16.
After operations in the Upper Ramu and Finisterre Ranges, it returned to Australia before being sent to participate in the invasion of Balikpapan in Borneo.
It then returned to Brisbane where it was disbanded in March 1946.
Were the mysterious figures at Mcgregor Barracks on September 7, 1989, ghosts of the lost men of the 2/33Bn?
In the land of the unexpected, who will ever really know?