Aboard the World Discoverer in the South Pacific-Jack Morris, a World War II U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, had arrived at the Papua New Guinea port town of Rabaul several days before most of the cruise passengers on this 14-day voyage through the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
Morris, a 71-year-old design educator from Newport Beach, Calif., was on a mission. As a young F4U Corsair fighter pilot flying cover for B-25s on a bombing raid in 1944 out of Guadalcanal`s Henderson Field, he was shot down by the Japanese south of Rabaul on the island of New Britain during his fourth combat mission. After a loud explosion, smoke filled the cockpit. Morris bailed out and landed in a tree. He cut himself free, secured his jungle survival kit and inflatable life raft, and hiked about 15 miles to a river flowing into St. George`s Strait. Two days later he was rescued by a Navy patrol plane, but injuries he sustained ended his flying days.
Now, 48 years later, Morris was determined to find the remains of his plane. He thought he knew where he crashed in the New Guinea jungle.
While trying to arrange for a car and guide, Morris was referred to a plantation manager who knew about some of the WW II planes found. He asked Morris if he recalled the plane`s serial number. Morris did.
”We`ve got it at the Kokopo Museum (a little place) outside Rabaul. The plane was found by an Australian geologist in 1986. The wreckage was hauled out by helicopter in 1990,” the plantation manager told Morris.
”That was an emotional moment when I heard that,” Morris said. ”I couldn`t believe it.”
When Morris joined passengers aboard the ship, he not only had seen and videotaped the remains of his plane, with a palm tree growing through it, but had several other souvenirs beside his tape: a part of a gun camera and a piece of cockpit switch panel from the plane given to him by the museum. Nearly 48 years after he was shot down, he was able to reconstruct a harrowing part of his life.
”I was excited when I heard this trip was going to Rabaul,” Morris recalled. ”I thought there might be a possibility of finding my plane. It was remote, but it was something I wanted to try to do.”
Morris was just one of 10 or so veterans of the Pacific war aboard the World Discoverer, a Society Expeditions ship, which carried a Stanford Alumni Association group as well as other passengers. The vets included former Navy and Marine officers, U.S. Army Air Corps pilots and a Seabee, returning out of curiosity to see the island battlefields of their youth. World War II sites in the Solomons and the Melanesian culture were parts of this exotic voyage in the South Pacific, beset by rough seas and intermittent rain for the first five days.
During the course of the trip, the veterans recalled their own experiences of the world`s biggest war as they sat and talked. One evening after dinner, they shared their recollections with passengers.
The war, of course, was a compelling theme of this trip. The 50th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalcanal will be marked in August. Also compelling were the islands themselves, still immersed with their old rituals and traditions-islands and peoples that probably were best known through the pages of National Geographic.
To put World War II in the Pacific in perspective, David Kennedy, chairman of Stanford University`s history department, was on board. Bob Tonkinson, an Australian cultural anthropologist, helped the 110 passengers understand the Melanesians, the people who inhabit these islands. This was a trip of peace with remembrances of war.
Traditional sightseeing
While Morris pursued his plane-search mission in Rabaul, the other passengers boarded Toyota and Mazda mini-vans festooned with flowers and palm fronds for a more traditional sightseeing mission around Rabaul. The caravan moved past cinderblock buildings with corrugated iron roofs, soft drink bottling plants, a local brewery and the city`s main market en route to a Japanese World War II memorial on a hill overlooking the city. Farther along at scenic Namamila Lookout some local mothers and children let visitors photograph them.
Near Rabaul`s airport, our caravan bounced along a dirt road through coconut groves to a clearing with the ruins of several Japanese war planes-one a twin-engine bomber, the other a Zero fighter, their interiors a tangle. On the aluminum underside of a wing, a fading insignia remained-a Rising Sun.
At the Rabaul War Museum, housed in a bunker connected to a network of tunnels lacing the area, we saw Japanese relics of war-a map room, radio equipment, parts of planes, utensils; outside stood restored Japanese anti-aircraft guns and a small tank. Rabaul was a major Japanese stronghold and was heavily bombed by the U.S.
The tour also stopped at a hot springs in an active volcano area and at Rabaul`s city market loaded with stalks of green bananas, peanuts, papaya, taro, watermelon, pineapple, tobacco and betel nut. The latter is a fruit from the betel palm chewed by locals together with lime and leaves from the betel pepper, staining their gums red.
Also for sale were local handicrafts-story boards, shell necklaces and bilums, handy mesh bags. We wandered into the Fish Market, which proved to be a grocery store/deli that sold hot dogs, sausage and sheep tongue sandwiches. Many passengers bought their first souvenirs-masks, necklaces and bilums- but none were as meaningful as the ones that Jack Morris carried back to the ship.
Rough seas forced the World Discoverer to slightly alter its itinerary hours after the ship departed Rabaul. Instead of first calling at Gizo, administrative capital of the western Solomons, the ship received permission to land passengers the following morning at Mono in the Treasury Group.
Islanders dance, sing
In a gentle rain at Mono, friendly islanders danced and sang, much to the delight of the children who giggled at their elders` cheerleader-like gyrations. Some of the ship`s passengers sat on benches beneath a thatch shelter to watch the dancers, who wore dried palm fronds over their red skirts, flower wreaths around their heads and white T-shirts advertising Solomon Airways and Guadalcanal. Passengers also mingled with the islanders, many of whom were huddling under black and rainbow-colored umbrellas with their children.
Some islanders listened to the music and watched the activities from their thatched houses in the closeby tidy village.
According to a village spokesman, garbed in a blue polo shirt and blue shorts, the island saw no fighting during the war, even though the Japanese were there. But the people did rescue and hide three American airmen for seven months before a Navy amphibious patrol plane could pick them up sometime in 1943.
Two things struck me on this first remote island visit: Jazzy T-shirts-not only Solomon Airways and Guadalcanal, but Papua New Guinea and crossed tennis racket designs-had found their way here. The other was the wonderment of being on an island I`d never heard of, trying to absorb a culture about which I knew next to nothing. The people seemed genuinely warm. But it was difficult in a few hours to know what our being here meant to them and to know what their lives are really like. We must have been just as enigmatic to them. After the Mono encounter, the Zodiacs carried us little more than a mile across the bay to uninhabited Stirling Island, a U.S. supply base during the war. According to guides from Mono who were on hand to show us around, Stirling was occupied by Americans and New Zealanders.
As we followed our guides, we saw remains of a halftrack vehicle, rusting equipment, a destroyed B-24, the body of a dump truck, parts of cranes, a 3-inch naval gun, a U.S. carrier-based dive bomber, its wings resting on 50-gallon drums.
”This was a headquarters,” said our guide, pointing to decaying buildings that housed men and supplies. He said that when the war ended, Americans destroyed what planes and equipment remained and bulldozed them into a huge grave on this coral island. Over the decades, salvage workers carted off material worth selling, probably for scrap.
On this wet, overcast day, passengers squished their way along a spongy trail flanked by ferns, clearings with flowering trees and decaying branches and tall trees to a network of airplane taxiways carved out of a jungle. We continued on to an overlook above the pounding surf and finally strolled down a 3,000-foot coral runway.
That evening at the nightly briefing before dinner, John Alltucker, a civil engineer from Veneta, Ore., Stanford University graduate and a Seabee during the war, told how he had worked on many of these Pacific islands.
”Our special construction battalion (long for Seabee) was responsible for getting heavy equipment ashore, like the shovel we saw near the airstrip on Stirling,” recalled Alltucker. ”I was on Stirling twice, once to determine how the airstrip was to be built, later when it was about two-thirds completed. I spent the entire war going back and forth from Tulaghi, Guadalcanal and Green Island before we went to New Guinea.
”I don`t ever remember anybody in particular shooting at me. I lived a charmed life. I was always on a different island when my outfit got into trouble. I spent my war working 24 hours a day, 12 on, 12 off, seven days a week. I think what described the Seabees better than anything I can remember was in one of a couple of citations our outfit received: `Being where you didn`t want to be, doing what you didn`t want to do, but knowing that it had to be done. And doing it better than they had a right to expect.` ”
The following morning, after some passengers had endured their own kind of war, another bout of seasickness, the World Discoverer anchored off Gizo, a day late. Zodiacs carried us to a wharf, where people of all ages awaited our arrival. At the entrance to the Gizo Hotel, opposite the main wharf, islanders displayed their crafts. And young girls, dressed in sarongs and flowers, were waiting to dance for us.
The ship`s itinerary also called for a stop at Kennedy Island, also known as Plum Pudding Island, about 4 1/2 miles southeast of Gizo. Only a few veterans opted for the tour to Kennedy, a palm-dotted dot in the sea 200-300 yards in diameter where Lt. John F. Kennedy and his crew made it ashore after PT 109 was struck and sunk by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri in 1943.
Movie-set capital
As an administrative capital, Gizo looked like a set for a South Pacific movie with its mottled wood and corrugated steel buildings. Rain left the partly paved main street dotted with copper-colored mud puddles. Passengers strolled along the main drag called Middenway Road, looking at stores and reading signs. A newspaper clipping about Typhoon Ivy, the storm giving us problems, was posted on one sheltered storefront. A poster explaining the merits of tourism decorated another. Souvenir shoppers found Dive Gizo, a combination store with island-made handcrafts and a dive center operated by Danny and Kerrie Kennedy, an Australian and an American from Florida who met while backpacking, married, had a baby and settled in Gizo.
The hub of Gizo, of course, is the Gizo Hotel. A sign at the hotel`s bar sets out the rules and sums things up: ”Dress requirements: 5:30 p.m. onwards, clean clothes only. Be polite and respect one another.”
Most of the stores along Middenway-Solomon Islands Consumers Supermarket, Gizo Gift Shop, V.S. Store, Chang Wen Ming, Wing Sun Co. Ltd.-were closed, except for the Chinese-owned stores. It was Sunday, and at least five church services, among them Methodist, Roman Catholic and Anglican, were in progress. Voices singing ”Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” wafted from one church as a rooster crowed in the distance.
After two hours, the Zodiac flotilla shuttled back to the ship. Shortly after lunch aboard, the ship anchored off Lubaria, a war-time PT boat base off Rendova in the New Georgia Group.
To lure the few tourists who cruise this way, the people of Lubaria created a little business on this low-profile, palm-shaded island. The sign that greets visitors reads: ”John F. Kennedy`s Base During World War II and Tourist Resort.”
After inspecting crafts demonstrations near the beach, the group moved toward several thatched huts where inlaid spoons, masks and bowls were for sale.
The Kennedy Memorial Hall and Museum, adjacent to the crafts, consists of a thatched hut. Inside were arrayed five rusty machine guns, five equally rusty helmets, local sea shells, a collection of old Coke bottles, a couple of mess trays, a collection of canteens and canteen cups, hand grenades, ammunition, an anchor chain, a rusty rifle and a photograph of JFK.
After a few minutes of browsing, passengers were summoned to the beach to watch a simple cultural play about visiting cruise ship passengers, a story acted out by two ”warriors” and narrated by the island`s chief.
As with the previous island visits, the people return to their activites as the Zodiacs zip back to the ship.
Next week: Tulaghi, Rennell and Santa Ana.
