The story below is quite long but very interesting.  It details the unusual circumstances in which a shot down American pilot was rescued by two Aboriginal men and their mission commandant in mid 1942 near Darwin.  I stumbled across the book in which this story comes from, in my local second hand book store.  I've called this short story "Unusual Rescue".

"UNUSUAL RESCUE"

"I believe one of the most incredible stories of these or any other air-raids in any other theatre of war concerns the rescue of an American fighter pilot by Jack Murray, a good friend of mine.  Murray told me the story himself.  I have checked it, and i'm convinced of its authenticity.  This was an occasion when fact was infinately stranger than fiction.

Early in 1942 Murray was superintendent of Delissaville Aboriginal settlement, across the bay from Darwin.  Part of his honourary activities when American and Australian airmen were dog-fighting with the Japanese was to attempt the rescue of airmen who bailed out or were shot down.  Delissaville was equipped with a wireless transceiver and messages giving approximate localities were flashed to him immediately an airman said he was ditching or was reported missing in his area.  Late one day he picked up a message from Air Command Headquarters in Darwin that an American flying a Kittyhawk had been shot down at a point twenty miles south-west of Delissaville, and was thought to have bailed out.  Murray set out at once to make a search by sea.   Two natives went with him, Mosic and Willy-Woodie.

A few minutes after Murray's launch was over the horizon and out of range of the crude bush methods of communication his assistant rushed out to the landing, yelling frantically, 'Jack! Jack! It's not south-west; it's north-east.   There's been a correction'.  He might have saved his breath.  Murray was well out of sound range, and with his two native helpers was off on a wild goose chase.   A second message had come in with the news that the first was wrong.  Hurried map reading had caused the error.  The assistant superintendent radioed Command Headquarters.  Another launch was sent out and the pilot, afloat in his rubber dinghy was rescued.

This was the first accident in a chain of incredible events which led to the eventual rescue of Lieutenant P. Johnson, U.S.A.A.F., then based in Darwin.  Murray took his launch around the southern tip of Indian Island in Bynoe Harbour until they were at a point about eighteen miles from Delissaville.  Standing less than a half a mile from shore they could make out the mouth of a small creek - one of hundreds of such tidal estuaries falling into the harbour.  Then Mosic, a beautifully built Wargaitj dancer, said, 'Funny thing, Jack; I dream about that creek last night.   That same one'.

'Yeah?' Murray said, 'What you dream about him?' - 'Aw, nuthin' much', Mosic said, 'I just bin deam we see that creek and we bin go up him in the boat'.  Murray's directions to the scene of a crash which didn't exist had been vague, indeed, but he reasoned that he was somewhere in vicinity of 'twenty miles south-west' and should begin looking for clues.  His intentions had been to make a landing and search the country on foot, anticipating that if the American had any chance he would have ditched over land.  But Murray had played hunches before and Mosic's dream was as good a solution as any to his problem.

'All right, Mosic', he said, 'we'll go up that creek for two miles.  Then we'll land on the right bank and do a footwalk, see if we can find this pilot feller.  Blast him for getting shot down in the mangroves; the place will be crawling with mosquitoes and leeches'.  They set course upstream.  In the narrow tree-lined creek the pop-popping of their their two-stroke motor was amplified, and became deafening, but the going was easy.  The stream allowed plenty of steerage for the small launch, although one crocodile made things momentarily uncomfortable with a violent bow-wave as it headed for the bank.  The three men were entirely accustomed to such things and did not comment.

They had gone about one mile upstream when, for no reason he has been able to explain to this day, Willy-Woodie pushed the tiller hard to starboard.   He was an expert waterman and had been Murray's helmsman for years; yet here, in a confined creek, when he should have been concentrating on steering a straight course, he deliberately hazarded the safety of the launch.  The small craft veered crazily, heading straight for mangrove roots and the rocks along the shore.  Murray turned to curse Willy-Woodie and to correct the heading, but he saw that it was too late to change course again without scraping the bottom on some rocks ahead, so he cut the motor.

And in that instant, as the noise died, they heard a faint, hoarse voice raised in anguish.  'Help!' it said. 'Help!'  Mosic's hair stood on end.  'Debil-debil there', he said, his eyes wide.  'Yeah, debil-debil', Willy-Woodie agreed, for this was completely inhabited country.  'No', Murray said.  'That's a white man; that's the bloke we've come to find.  We've got him without having to walk far'.  They stepped ashore and began wading through knee-deep mangrove slime.  Crocodile tracks were everywhere.  Then they heard the call again, closer.  'Help! Help!'.  'All right', Jack shouted, 'we've got you, mate; who are you, and. . . where are you?'.  'Keep coming. . . .for God's sake.   I'm here. . . .up this tree.  Can't you see me. . . .I'm an American airman'.   His voice was weak.

They found him sitting in the fork of a mangrove, about eight feet from the ground.  He was bootless and hatless, bearded, scarred, and bitten by every known pest.  He was near collapse.  Murray and Mosic had to lift him out of the tree, for he was incapable of much movement.  His speech became incoherent as he dared to believe that he had escaped from the death he had seen sliming beneath him.  When they carrried him to the launch he cried; and when they laid him on his back in the stern he rolled over and kissed the gunwale.

Murray gave him rum, and waited for him to recover.   The black men seemed embarrassed by this show of masculine white-feller weakness, of an emotion that was too intense for expression except in tears.  They boiled the billy and gave him a drink of tea. In ten minutes the American grinned, began brushing dried mud from his flying suit, and spoke.  'Name of Johnston', he said.  'USAAF pursuit group.  I was shot down here five days ago.  This is the sixth day.   I parachuted, lost my boots when the 'chute opened.  Maps in my boots, couldn't find them'.

'No idea where I was, or track to nearest emergency food dump.  I wandered around in the mangroves, barefoot, through the mud.  It was horrible! No idea this creek was here; I had walked from the other direction and didn't get this far.  But that explains the crocodiles.  They were grunting everywhere.   At night I had to climb trees to get away from them, and had to stay awake so I didn't fall.  This morning I was too weak; I couldn't get myself out of that fork in the tree.  Had nothing to eat'.

Jack looked at Mosic and Willy-Woodie and wondered if they had understood.  He knew the natives had an abiding fear of madmen, and it was obvious that Johnston was mad.   The awful experience of having been shot down early that morning, and then to have found himself lost in a mangrove swamp, had been too much for his brain.  Now he imagined he had been there for five days and nights.  'But they only sent me out this morning', Murray said.  'They said you were shot down a few minutes earlier.  I came at once'.  'Those office-wallahs back at base always take days to get around to doing anything', Johnston complained.  'Leave a man for dead, doesn't it worry the chair-borne division'.  'You sure it wasn't this morning you were shot down?', Murray suggested.  'Hell, man!  Don't you believe me?  Here, look at the handle of this pistol.  See that - five long notches.  I kept a track of the days to see how long I could last.  I'd had it, and I was going to give myself one at sundown today.  I couldn't take another night of that horror in there, listening to the scratching and sliming at the foot of the tree.  What time is it now?'

Murray didn't have a watch.  To him the months and years were perhaps vaguely important, but weeks and days and hours were of no consequence.  'About five o'clock, I'd say'.  'Five o'clock.  Another two hours, if you hadn't turned up.   God, I'm thankful I had enough strength left to make you hear me from the boat'.   Murray looked up and met Johnston's eyes.  'We didn't hear you, mate' Jack said.  'Couldn't hear a thing beside that two-stroke motor'.  'That's silly!' Johnston said.  'Why, I heard you when were going out to sea and I began shouting then, although I doubted you could hear me there; then you turned into what I realized was a creek, and your engine noise was getting louder all the time, and I thought you must of heard me.  I fired a couple of bullets to make sure.  Then, when you were opposite me, you cut the motor - and I knew you had heard and that I was saved'.

'We didn't hear you and we didn't heard the bullets', Murray said.  'We were sitting right on top of the engine, and anyway, a revolver bullet in the mangroves wouldn't make much more than a pop'.  'But you cut the engine when you were exactly opposite me, in all this terrifying wilderness.  Then there was no doubt.  Why, if you hadn't heard, did you cut the engine just there?  'Ask Willy-Woodie that one', Jack said.  Willy-Woodie, still ashamed of himself, hung his head.  He could not explain why he had pushed the tiller over, a thing he would never do even on the open sea unless ordered to do so by the boss.  Here they had been in a narrow creek, and such an action could only strand them on the mangrove roots.

They returned to Delissaville late that night.  Jack was completely mystified when he was told that the original message was incorrect, that another airman had been picked up, and that they had been on an unneccessary hunt for which Air Command Headquarters expressed its regret.  'Who is this bloke?', Jack's assistant wanted to know.   'Johnston's the name; Kittyhawk pilot', said Johnston.  They wirelessed through to base.  'Johnston.  Johnston!', the operations officer said.   'He's dead.  We abandoned him five days ago.  Yeah, we made a search from the western base.  No go.  Poor devil probably eaten by a crocodile.   What's that?  You say he's turned up there?  Good boy Johnston; he must've walked a long, long way.  Here, let me talk to that guy!'.

Willy-Woodie still lives in Darwin, but to this day has no explanation.  'I just bin do him', he told me, and even though his action saved Johnston's life I got the impression that he was still inclined to be shamefaced about it.  Mosic was a wise old man of his tribe, and an inter-tribally famous dancer, when he died a few years later.   I asked him about his dream, but he had no explanation.  'No', he told me, 'I had never been past that creek before; I don't know why I dreamt about him, but I did; I saw him all right'.

Jack Murray, my old mate, is still in Darwin too.  He is even more dumbfounded than me about the incredible series of events.  He thinks the natives perhaps have some psychic power more highly developed than anything understood by the white men.   In the years he operated from Delissaville he was given only one incorrect wireless message, and that was it.  In all the trips he did by sea with Mosic and Willy-Woodie, Mosic only once about a dream, and Willy-Woodie's subsequent behaviour at the tiller was exemplary.

Lockwood, Douglas "Fair Dinkum", Rigby Ltd London (1960).   Pages 47-52

"A REAL AUSSIE"

This story was told to me many years ago by an old digger.  He wasn't Aboriginal digger, nor was he physically there when the event occurred, it may or may not be true but it sure is funny though! 

It revolves around an Irish immigrant soldier in the Australian Army in World War One.   His Infantry unit was billeted in a small French town before going back into the trenches.  One afternoon a company of British soldiers come into the town and after a little while a small arguement breaks out among the diggers and the tommies.  One of the Tommies notices that one of the more rowdy Aussie diggers is really Irish, he asks the Irish fella "what is a Mick like you fighting for those colonials?  Your not an Awwstralian!". 

The Irish fella pipes back "why mate, I'm as Australian as the next digger. . . just ask my mates", with this he looks over his shoulder and glances at the two fellows behind him.  "You see. . .young Harry Smith here - his family has been in Australia for how long now?  Private Smith replies "well, atleast since the Gold Rush in Ballarat".  The Irish digger nods agreeingly and indicates to his other cobber to give an answer.  This other young digger informs the small gathering "my great-great grandfather came out with the First Fleet marines".  The Irish digger seems very satisfied that he has backed up his claim to being a 'true-blue' digger.

All seemed all fine and dandy for the next few seconds until an 'dark and obviously Aboriginal' soldier casually came out the hotel door and lit his cigarette.  The English soldiers saw this fella and they immediately all started laughing and the Irish digger turned around to see what they were laughing at.  The rest of the crowd howls out in laughter, the Irish digger yells out to his cobbers 'I told you bastards to have Charlie hidden until after these bastards had gone!', to which Charlie (the Koori digger) replies "I know mate, I was just bein' a smartass!".

WEIPA MISSION

During World War Two at the Weipa Mission in Far North Queensland, an Australian Beaufort bomber aircraft was dragged 8 miles along a beach by approximately 130 men, women and children.  The aircraft had made a forced landing on the beach and had suffered some damage but was recoverable. The local Aboriginal population were asked if they could help.  It took seven days to pull the plane eight miles to the place where it could be dismantled and shipped away.

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