Veterans from both sides have been coming back to Papua New Guinea for a number of years and I have always offered help to locate and take back to their former battlefields and one case that stands out the most or the one I will always remember is of a Japanese sergeant and I would like to share with you briefly what happened.

Several years ago, I was contacted by a Japanese veteran who fought here in New Guinea at Cape Gloucester on New Britain. He was a Sergeant or the Japanese equivalent of that rank and if my memory services me correctly, he was in charge of a AA battery somewhere on the heights overlooking the beaches of Cape Gloucester. This chap kept a diary of his stay in the area and what was interesting to note was that he had befriended a local from the village that he was closest to and recorded the locals name.

The local's name was Jonas and after correspondence with the veteran, I made a dummy run to see if I could track this local down at his village in the Cape Gloucester area. I arrived and started asking the council members of the village and they straight away told me Jonas had died some 5-6 years pervious but his son was still alive. I met with the son and told him of this Japanese sergeant and with out a moments hesitation he produced his name and even took me to the gun emplacements that made up the sergeant's "bunker".

After a short climb of 15 minutes or more we came out on a magnificent view overlooking the surrounding area of Cape Gloucester and shore enough there were the gun pits and remains of rusting guns and other memorabilia. The son whose name was John told me his father had a Japanese friend who he used to through a baseball to too while away the hours when they had nothing to do. He also told me that one day the veteran would return to see him again. I took a lot of notes and on my return to Lae contacted the Japanese veteran who then wished to bring his family out to see where he fought and to meet the son and family of his former war time friend.

Anyway cutting a long story short the veteran did come out about 6 months later with his family and spent 4-5 days wandering the points of interest at Cape Gloucester. Sadly, however I received word only some 3 months ago that the veteran had died the previous year and could I pass on his regards to the village and especially the son of his friend.

I am doing more work with veterans now and I hope some of you will get in touch after reading this, there is still so much left to see that left over from the war and if you know the area and I should, having grown up here all my life.

For those of you interested in diving PNG or for those of you that just want to walk around the old battle fields such as Saddleburg, Mt. Tambu, Cape Gloucester and Shaggy Ridge to name but a few. Do some research on what you want to see and do. Research the wrecks you want to dive and you need to be fairly skilled in deep diving although a lot of wrecks are shallow but these are breaking up rather badly now and its only the deeper ones that stand up to the riggers of time.

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