Chapter 7: Darwin Days

Brian Rofe, who featured in an amazing escape from Timor in the early days of the war, was posted to Darwin just before the war in the Pacific ended. Brian escorted two widowed nursing sisters over to Timor to see if they could find the graves of their husbands. They were fighter boys and had been shot down over there. So he returned to the island of Timor where he had performed magnificently in eluding Japanese forces before being picked up by an American submarine with the party he had led for six weeks (see Joyce, Metarch Papers No 5, October 1993 for details of the Rofe story—Ed).

In the year the war ended Darwin started to become more civilised. But there was a problem of arranging the surrender of the Japanese forces in the islands of what was then the Dutch East Indies, later to become Indonesia. The Army and the Navy were fully committed and there was a Japanese division on Flores Island.

It was decided that the Air Force could handle this one. Stu Campbell who was in charge of the Catalina group in Darwin at the time phoned me down at Area HQ and said 'I've talked to your CO (Charles Charlesworth) and I want you to go on this surrender mission to Flores with three of my blokes'.

Allan Cornish (left), Jim Williams, John S. Maher and George Smallman at Milne Bay, Papua, April 1943.

So the four of us took off from Darwin in a Catalina at midnight together with an AIF sergeant who spoke a bit of Japanese. We landed at Koepang at first light about three or four days after the war had ended. We sent a signal to Mayomere in the Flores, well north of Timor, that we were coming and would need safe conduct.

We picked up a Japanese lieutenant in Timor who spoke some English. We landed in Mayomere about 4pm. A Japanese LST (landing ship) approached the Catalina. We were concerned that it might collide with our Catalina and sink it so we kept taxiing around. We indicated that we wanted nothing bigger than a canoe and that we wanted a Japanese major as hostage.

Bureau of Meteorology