May 10, 1945 - We are lying off Saidor, mandated territory of British New Guinea. This is a better looking place than the more northern parts of New Guinea. 10:00 - A pilot came aboard to show the beach. He says there is only one airstrip and 250 white men here. One aussie plane flies in here once a day and an American plane one a week and ships hardly ever stop here. There are still Japs a little ways back in the hills. As we were going in to the beach we saw a school of big fish jumping off the reefs just off the land. We beached at 2/3 speed and nearly got a dry ramp. There are about 2 or 3 hundred native men on the beach to load us. We are going to carry the tank deck full of fuel oil and kerosene in drums to Finchshafen. We will also carry about 12 vehicles on the top deck. They are fixing to abandon this place. The natives are dark fellows with dull kinky hair standing straight up on their heads. Their hair is black except where part of them have it bleached about white. They say these are the unmarried ones. They all wear a piece of cloth wrapped around them like a dress. They take this off and wrap up in it when they sleep of a night. They wear a vreech cloth under their wrap. Some of them have holes in their ear lobes and the holes have been widened until they are about the size of a quarter or bigger and nearly all of them have bands around their arms cutting them about half in two it seems. Most of their have piece of bright colored rag bands around their head and have stuck some leaves, flowers or some other bright colored object in them. All of their mouths were orange in color from chewing beetlenut, which is a native nut that makes them high like whiskey or dope. For all of this though they seemed pretty friendly and they sure did work hard. They are to work from about 1600 this afternoon until about 1100 tomorrow if they can be persuaded to do so. For their chow tonight they had rice cooked in banana leaves and a can of Australian meat rations. They all cut themselves opening their can of meat they mixed with the rice. To eat this some of them had spoons while others eat with their fingers. They all took about a heaping tablespoonsul at a bite. To control the natives the Australians had made some of them police. These wore long sabers on a belt and wore a purple and red wrap around. To make these police the Aussies take a native who has killed another native or two and send him to school instead of to jail. The natives are all afraid of these guys and so they can keep them in hand ok. There are some Japs back in the hills a few miles and the natives are mostly the ones to fight them. One Australian officer was saying one of the natives has nearly a hundred Japs to his credit and another had killed 40. There is a lot of malaria around here and we have to wear our shirts topside. This afternoon a bunch of our boys went off the ship and picked 5 pecks buckets of limes. They grow wild around here and grow about the size of lemons. They make a pretty good drink. A lot of boys went back into the jungle a little ways and came back with loads of bananas which they stored in the refrigrator to ripen as they were still green.