World War II Remembered

Guinea Pigs in New Guinea

143 This is the short history of the Special Company, General Service , Separate, at Gamadodo Mission on the shores of Milne Bay, Papua, New Guinea, U.S. Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), in the early summer of 1943. I was a second lieutenant with the so-called Airborne Engineer group, whose specialty was building airports on terrain that was accessible only by air—but that’s another story. Having arrived in Brisbane, Australia, shortly before this story starts, the GIs in the Replacement Depot at the Ascot-Doomben racetrack just outside of town were on edge as to what was to come next. Since it was certainly to be in New Guinea, the prospects were probably going to be interesting. And interesting it proved to be. A group of us, officers and men, were selected out, declared to be engineers in a general service company, and set to work loading ourselves and equipment onto a small old P & O freighter. My job developed into being Motor Officer, observing the dockers as they loaded a dump truck or two and various earth-moving equipment aboard the Guinea Pigs in New Guinea • John Weeks U.S. Army 144 World War II Remembered ship. When everything was properly loaded and ready, we were mustered on board and assigned living spaces, then settled in as we steamed north out of Brisbane harbor. During the voyage we occupied ourselves in getting acquainted and planning our mission. This was revealed to the officers first and later, only in part, to the enlisted men: we would carry out an experiment to test the efficacy of a new type of malaria drug under field conditions . The GIs were to be divided into three platoons. One was to receive the standard Atabrine preventive (effective, but it colored the complexion a distasteful yellow); the next platoon was to receive the new stuff, effects unknown; and the third platoon, the control, was to get a placebo (“to calm you”), guaranteed to have no medicinal effect whatsoever. Officers were all in the Atabrine group and so were not part of the experiment. So to the armed forces, the enlisted man was a useful guinea pig as well as a soldier. We would be encamped on the southwest side of the bay opposite the docks and main settlement, several hundred yards from a native settlement known to be fully infected with our target disease, malaria, endemic in that time and place. The presence of malaria was said to be proved when an “80% palpable spleen” was found on periodic physical examination of each of us. A Torpedo across the Bow Once we absorbed this information, we started to approach the bay. We had been accompanied by a little sub-chaser for the latter part of the voyage , and we were at morning “stand to” in formation on deck with life jackets on (part of every morning and evening routine at sea when the sun can silhouette the target for an enemy submarine) when we found that we really were under attack. A torpedo crossed our bow: so close was it that the first sergeant, on the forepeak of our ship, said later, “If I’d had a broom, I could have swept it away!” (When this is pronounced by a man with a harelip, as indeed he had, the effect is unforgettable.) The sub-chaser immediately went into action and, after some extended maneuvering and an explosion or two, passed us, displaying a broom at the masthead—the traditional “mission accomplished” signal . We all cheered, having come to realize what a close call we had just experienced. Guinea Pigs in New Guinea: John Weeks 145 Anticlimactically, we docked and unloaded and, there being an extensive road network around the bay, trundled our equipment and selves to our new station. It was a coconut plantation, still owned by Palmolive-Peet; we were warned that the Army was accountable for any damage or despoliation. The area was named Gamadodo Mission, I believe by a pioneer group of religious recruiters many years before, although we saw no evidence of that sort of activity while we were there. We settled ourselves into as much of a military space organization as we could, considering the abundant (and immovable) palm trees. Our attendant medicos set up a small clinic down by the beach. We found, soon after we set up, that the beach was a well-used route to...