Raun Raun Photography

This gun, recovered from old WW2 American and Japanese bases and rebuilt by BRA engineers brought the Bougainville Conflict to a whole new level. It was known by many names but some calling these guns "no mile" because of the distance the bullet travelled. Main targets for these guns were the patrol boats.... Seen here are some young freedom fighters from Koromira way..

Photos borrowed.

Shot down. Alone. 31 days eating snails to survive. Then the villagers found him—and risked everything to keep him alive.

June 5, 1943. First Lieutenant Fred Hargesheimer was flying his 49th photo reconnaissance mission over Japanese-occupied New Britain, Papua New Guinea, mapping enemy territory from 20,000 feet. A Japanese Zero appeared from nowhere. Bullets tore into his left engine.

Fred dove sharply to escape. The canopy jammed. Standing to force it open, he was violently sucked out—tumbling through the sky at terminal velocity.
In a moment that defies explanation, the Japanese pilot held his fire. Fred's parachute deployed safely, drifting him down into the endless green hell of the jungle below.

He landed halfway up a mile-high mountain range—75 miles of jungle and 200 miles of ocean from his base. Armed only with a survival kit, Fred started walking toward the coast.
The jungle had other plans.

Venomous snakes. Charging wild boars. Crocodiles that made his raft a deathtrap. Endless monsoon rains. By day 10, exhausted and starving, Fred was eating snails to stay alive. He huddled in a makeshift shelter, murmuring Psalm 23 for comfort: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."

Thirty-one days. Alone. Waiting to die.

Then voices.

Local hunters had been searching since they saw his plane go down. They found him skeletal, fever-ridden, barely conscious. They carried him to their hidden village of Nantabu and gave him a Pidgin name: "Mastah Preddi."

For seven months, these villagers risked everything. When Japanese patrols came through, they hid Fred, brushing away his boot prints in the dirt.

"Seeing those prints would've meant torture for the whole village till they handed me over," Fred later reflected, still in awe of their courage.

One raid forced him up a eucalyptus tree overnight—mosquito-bitten, shivering with malaria. The village nursed him back from death's door twice.
In early 1944, Australian coastwatchers made contact. On February 5, the submarine USS Gato surfaced offshore and plucked Fred from the beach. After 8 months in hell, he was going home.
Fred returned to the States. Got married. Started a family. Built a successful career.

But he couldn't stop thinking about Nantabu.
"War tales to my kids always felt unfinished," he told a journalist. "Those villagers' sacrifices haunted me. How could I ever repay people who risked their lives to save mine?"

In 1960, Fred returned to Papua New Guinea. The entire village lined the shore—they remembered. They cheered. Luluai Lauo, the village chief who'd first vouched for him, piloted the welcoming canoe.

Fred asked what they needed most.
"A school," they said.

Fred came home and spent three years raising $15,000—"most of it $5 and $10 gifts." In 1963, he returned with his teenage son Richard to oversee construction.

The Airmen's Memorial School opened in 1964 with 40 students.

But Fred wasn't done. From 1970 to 1974, he and his wife Dorothy moved to Nantabu to teach the children themselves. Fred built a library. A medical clinic. An experimental oil palm plot that grew into a job-creating plantation that transformed the local economy.

He visited dozens more time over 40 years. In 2000, the tribe proclaimed him "Suara Auru"—Chief Warrior.

In 2006, at age 90, Fred made his final visit. They carried him in a chair to see the wreckage of his P-38, recently discovered in the jungle—rusted metal from another lifetime.

One of those student from 1964, Garua Peni, earned her master's degree from the University of Sydney. When asked about Fred, she couldn't hold back tears: "He is the one who made all this happen for me, for all of us."

Fred Hargesheimer died in 2010 at age 94. His schools, libraries, and clinic remain. The plantation still provides jobs. Hundreds of educated Nakanai carry his legacy forward.

"The school shows how one act ripples to transform countless lives," Garua said.
Fred survived a war. But what he did next won something far greater: he proved that gratitude isn't just a feeling—it's a life's work.
What an amazing story...

"The Lonely Highway"

Always fresh in lae 🇬🇦