Sāmoa’s Aso Pogisa; massacre on Beach Road
Invincible Strangers 51 Chapter 22.1
Few people slept. Umu needed tendering for the feasting ahead. A woody fog from umu fires mixed with cooking food aromas. Mau uniforms were prepared. Political debate was always part of village life; now it was intense. Prayers were said. Instructions issued.
One estimate had it that 700 people began marching from Vaimoso that Saturday morning, 28 December 1929. Barrister Isi Kronfeld put the number higher: ‘About 6 am the members of the Mau, numbering some 1500, left Vaimoso headed by High Chief Tuimaleali’ifano and marched to the strains of a brass band to Āpia… They were quite orderly and as they marched past the scene was most impressive. They all wore the distinctive emblems of the Mau and marched four or five abreast, save for some 40 of their own police chiefs, who carried batons and marched on the flanks.’ A group of 700 were marching from Mātautia, east of Āpia. Their route would take them across the Vaisigano River and past the British Club, once SMP headquarters. Regular police, armed with a Lewis gun, still used it. The two marches were to meet at the Tivoli Wharf. It took the Vaimoso marchers about an hour to reach the intersection near the Custom House on Beach Road where Braisby was watching. The man police wanted was wearing a distinctive felt hat and playing the bass drum at the head of the Vaimoso band. Mata’utia Karauna had not paid his poll taxes. The son of a pastor, he was educated at Mālua, the LMS theological school. He became a printer before becoming a ‘first-grade’ interpreter in court. That brought him into contact with people like Braisby. He had joined the Mau, attracting Richardson’s ire who in 1928 had him banished for a year from Āpia to Papa, Savai’i, and stripped his matai title. Once banishment was over, he became the Mau’s only full time employee. Braisby reported Mata’utia’s presence to headquarters then headed out to Lady Roberts, preferring administrative duties to policing.
Midway along Beach Road, police sergeants Waterson and Fell waited outside the market hall for the Vaimoso march. The Mau marched briskly and they were soon alongside Waterson, Fell and three constables who then walked beside the band. As they moved along they came to the intersection of ‘Ifi’ifi and Beach Road where ten more constables waited, in front of the Administration Building. Eighty metres behind them was the police station where, Kronfeld said, police were carrying batons. Each white policeman had a Smith and Wesson 38 pistol. Used by police around the world, it had an accurate range of about 50 metres. Waterson claimed that they had not been able to spot Mata’utia before the tee-junction, despite Braisby picking him out easily from a distance. In previous marches the Mau had paused in the front of the administration building and saluted the Union Jack. Just east of the building, Waterson called to Fell: ‘That’s him in the felt hat.’ Fell grabbed Mata’utia by his neck and tried to drag him to the side of the road where Waterson and the constables were coming to help. Several Mau policemen struck Fell on the back, sending him to the ground. Waterson was caught around the throat. He saw Fell on the ground: ‘I saw a man striking at him when he was on the ground, with what I cannot say.’ Kronfeld said Fell was ‘knocked to the ground senseless and mauled and beaten with a cornet.’ Waterson drew his revolver but when he pulled the trigger it did not fire. He thrust the gun into the face of a captor and broke free, reaching Fell who was helped to his feet.
Downes, in charge of the back-up force, was at the junction and could see other Mau men with what he said were batons, one with a hammer and another with an axe. Stones were flying: ‘I considered that the arresting party was in danger, so I sounded a blast on my whistle. That was my arranged signal to call up the supporting party.’ On that signal 20 policemen at the station, ran to the junction, pistols drawn. They opened fire as they came into the junction. People began falling dead or wounded. Mau and the policemen clashed, hand-to-hand.
‘Armed reinforcements came to the rescue and suddenly one constable was seen to run into the head of the line and grab a native, who resisted apprehension and fled to the seaside of the column,’ Kronfeld said. ‘The constable followed. A small scuffle ensued and two shots were fired, the second bringing down the man. Immediately there was a hue and cry. Bullets began to hiss around and many natives fell. Others picked up stones and threw them at the police….’
Charles Hickey, an employee of the Public Works Department, saw Constable William Duke strike a man down: ‘As I was helping him to get up I saw blood marks on his chest. Then I noticed what I thought was a bullet wound in his right shoulder….’
Seventeen-year-old baker’s van driver Jack Brunt saw four policemen firing into the march: ‘I heard High Chief Tuimaleali’ifano calling out trying to stop the trouble.’ He was hit in his upper arm.
The white police were outnumbered. The arresting party was in the middle of the road and the backup group near the junction, all coming under attack with rocks from the Mau. Waterson, who was afraid they would not get time to reload their revolvers, ordered a retreat to the station to get rifles and bayonets. Waterson’s concern about reloading pistols, indicates as many as 155 bullets were fired at close quarters into unarmed people. Accounting for the rounds was never made; no attempt was made to find out how many died from pistol shots or where the bullets went.
Several police from the reinforcement group, including Constable William Abraham, were around 90 metres away from the junction, on the seaward side. Hearing the order, they ran across the road. Downes saw Abraham: ‘As he was coming across a Sāmoan struck him with a small hammer or an axe on the back of the next. He fell, but got up and joined me.’
They headed along an alleyway between two shops that took them out onto the Āpia village malae. The police station on the western side overlooked it. The police claimed the Mau continued to pursue them, throwing stones. Constable Edmund Cahill looked back and saw Abraham behind a post in the alleyway: ‘As I looked at him I saw him crumple up. His back was towards me but I was under the impression that he was firing a revolver.’ The police made no effort to help him. Hickey saw a youth go to Abraham and told the others around him that he would finish him off: ‘The Sāmoan kneeled beside the constable. I saw him hit the constable’s head … I do not know whether the constable was alive or dead… The blood spurted from his head like the splash of water when a stone hits it.’ Peter Fabricius, 13, saw Abraham go past the kitchen window chased by a hail of stones. He could not see Abrahams but he heard a person nearby refer to ‘the poor white man’. He was dead. Among the Mau, there were four dead or mortally wounded lying on Beach Road: Ainoa, Vele, Leota and Faumuina of Sāfotu (a different man to the Mau leader). The police feared they were under attack as they ran back toward the police station on ‘Ifi’ifi Road (which had been left unstaffed). In Āpia village, a woman, Popo, said there were many men crossing the malae, but they were not chasing policemen: ‘They were running very fast, I think they were frightened.’
At the station, Waterson went upstairs to a balcony looking toward the junction, and set up a Lewis gun. A light machine gun, it had an effective fire range of around 800 metres. The magazines held up to 47 rounds of .303 bullets. He was a Lewis gun expert, using it during the Great War. He was looking down to the junction, with the sea beyond. Beside him on the balcony were three men carrying Lee Enfield rifles, the same rifles used by New Zealand forces in the Great War; corporals Cahill and McMillan and Constable W.J. Sparks. It had been McMillan who had fired his rifle at Tupua Tamasese a year earlier. The four men were just under 80 metres, in clear sight, of the intersection, within the range of their rifles.
‘I saw the smoke out of the mouth of the gun,’ local woman Susana said, ‘and the European policeman had his hands on the gun; he was sitting on a chair.’
Waterson said he knew where the rounds were going: ‘It was twenty or thirty yards in front of the natives. I did not see one man fall in consequence of any burst I fired from the Lewis gun.’
Bullets went over heads, he said. People on Lady Roberts saw rounds splash into the harbour. Waterson aimed further to the west, over the Market Hall and fired another burst, over the heads, he said, of Mau throwing stones at the police station. Avea saw Waterson turn the Lewis gun toward the Āpia malae. The sun had not risen yet but the four men were confident enough to open fire.
On the western side of the junction was the two-storey Hellesoe Sasse Store. Louisa Sasse with her seven-year-old daughter Agnes, niece Karen Hellesoe and nephew Christian Hellesoe stood on the upstairs balcony, looking down ‘Ifi’ifi Road toward the police station. No one moved. A woman, Avea, who had been alongside the Court House agreed there was nobody in the street. There were people in the junction itself, among them, tall, dressed in a white jacket and lavalava and holding a rolled umbrella was Tupua Tamasese. At the first round of shooting, he had been further back in the march. Amidst the gunfire, he pressed forward, calling out ‘filemu, filemu’ (peace, peace).
Tupua Tamasese was easy to see, with his arms high, calling out, in Sāmoan and English, ‘Filemu Sāmoa, peace Sāmoa’. He called ‘uma, uma… onosa’i, onosa’i’ – finish, finish, be patient. Another said he called out; ‘They are few, we are many, they are guests in our country…’ Waterson, Cahill, McMillan and Sparks could see him across the sights of their weapons. They were not under direct threat: they were the only people with firearms. One of them pulled a trigger. Su’a remembered: ‘He called out – to the west and to the east – “keep the peace” … He was walking; he was calling out and raised his hands, saying “stop – keep the peace…” One shot was fired before the machine-gun fired; that was the shot which hit Tamasese.’ That single shot hit Tupua Tamasese’s thigh. Just ten or so metres away, on the balcony, four people were terribly close.
‘Tamasese fell in such a way that as he lay on his back he could see my mother on the balcony,’ Agnes described it. He lifted his hand slightly and waved. ‘I remember tears were streaming down her face. She was yelling at the nurse to take me inside. Once I got there I ran out of another door to keep watching.
‘Karen and Christian ran to the back of the house, to the kitchen, to see where the shots were coming from. They could see muzzle flashes through the trellis on the police station balcony.’
At the intersection Su’a, Faualo and Tufuga were near.
‘I tried to lift up Tamasese’s head, and as I was doing that I was hit in both legs,’ Tufuga said.
Su’a used his body to shelter the chief, and was hit. Faualo was hit. Two others, Migao and Tu’ia, ran toward the men around Tupua Tamasese. Avea saw the men hit with what she said was machine-gun fire. They were killed. Simeaneua saw six people fall as Waterson fired down ‘Ifi’ifi: ‘Tamasese was lying on the inland side of the lamp post. One man was lying close to the post. The other was close to the government building corner… Another was on the seaward side of the post close to it. Another one was lying just on the eastern side of Hellesoe’s corner.’
Kronfeld wrote that when Tupua Tamasese was hit: ‘several natives rushed to his help, and one, a youth, jumped in front of his chief, dropping dead, his body being hit with several shots. Two other men received fatal wounds.’ He wrote of Lewis gun bursts overhead.
None of those hit by rifle and machine gun fire had been advancing on the police station. It had been 10 minutes of premeditated murder. The sun was not up.
American Marist priest Joseph Deihl, who had followed the march in his green Model A Ford, moved closer to the intersection as Waterson fired the machine gun. He made it to the alleyway beside the Hellesoe Sasse Store where Agnes saw him jump out and, with his arms raised, he ran toward the police station.
‘Stop it, stop it, they’re human beings!’ Agnes said he called out.
‘He kept yelling and waving until they stopped,’ Agnes said. The four watching on believed he stopped the shooting. Kronfeld described Tuimaleali’ifano and Faumuina at the scene exhorting the men to quieten.
‘The killed and wounded were hurriedly rushed back to Vaimoso in motor cars and within 40 minutes of the first incident the Mau were seen quietly marching back to Vaimoso.’
Armed police followed, carrying the Lewis gun.
©Michael J Field