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Hidden in a Coconut Grove

Rabaul, New Britain, Papua New Guinea, 1986.

By Barbara Jo Shipka

February 27^th, 2015

I went to Rabaul with a specific agenda. My father had served in the Pacific on a destroyer during WWII. And my minor in college had been history with a concentration on WWII history. Rabaul had been a major Japanese stronghold from 1942 to 1945. I wanted to see it first hand.

When I was there…forty years after the war ended…Rabaul was a sleepy village. I stayed in a lovely rustic cabin across the bay. (The view below is in the direction of Rabaul from the cabin.)

I don’t scuba dive but I did do my share of snorkeling. I visited a few of the abandoned bunkers that still remained. There wasn't much else.

“What else would you recommend?” I asked the cabin owner. He said he thought I might enjoy walking in a nearby coconut grove. He gave me no more details than that.

The grove was thick and the interior looked dark as I approached. I imagined that I would just be leisurely walking among the coconut trees.

Thus, it wasn’t until I was in the midst of the grove that I saw the wreckage of several Japanese planes. One even still had the red sun image on its wing. The grove had overtaken the bombed out airfield and had grown up around the wreckage. People used the somewhat open areas around the planes to nurture coconut tree seedlings.

That's one of the things about perspective: What's inside can be surprisingly different from what we imagine when looking at it from outside.

In 1994 a volcano near Rabaul erupted. The town was 80% destroyed by heavy ash and the people were relocated to the other side of the bay. Also, in 2015 I watched a PBS show focused on traveling in Papua New Guinea. One stop was Rabaul. At one point, the travelers passed right by what was left of the coconut grove. Nothing but stumps. The narrator talked about how the grove, just outside of Rabaul, had been the location of a Japanese airstrip during WWII.

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