● She fed him from her body for 10 days. The children swept his footprints. He built them schools, clinics, and a lifetime of gratitude
NEW BRITAIN, 1943– At 27, Fred Hargesheimer fell from the sky.
His reconnaissance plane was burning over Japanese-controlled jungle. For 31 days he moved alone through the rainforest of New Britain — starving, delirious, drinking from streams, eating roots at night to avoid patrols. By day 32 he was barely alive. When voices came through the trees, he was sure it was the Japanese. It was death.
It was salvation.
A group of Nakanai tribesmen found him and carried him to their coastal village. The Japanese offered rewards for Allied airmen and executed anyone who helped them. The villagers hid Fred anyway.
He was too weak to swallow solid food. Then Ida, a nursing mother, walked into his hut with a cup of her own breast milk and fed him for 10 days — while also nursing her baby. She kept him alive.
Whenever Japanese patrols neared, someone blew a conch shell. Fred had seconds to run. If his boots hit the sand, village children followed behind with tiny palm-frond brooms, sweeping away his footprints before soldiers arrived. If discovered, the whole village would be massacred. Nobody betrayed him.
The children couldn’t say “Freddie.” They called him “Mastah Preddi.” Master Freddie. He lived with them 7 months until Australian commandos extracted him in 1944. Some mothers even tried to give him their children to take to America.
Fred survived the war, married in Minnesota, raised a family. But one question haunted him: “How could I ever repay them?”
In 1960 he returned. The village lined the beach singing “God Save the Queen.” He found Ida. He met the son she’d nursed alongside him. A missionary said they needed a school. So a middle-aged salesman went door-to-door in Minnesota, raising coins in church halls.
By 1963 Fred helped build their first permanent school. Then a library. A clinic. He and his wife Dorothy moved there for 4 years to teach at the foot of a volcano, 12,000 miles from home.
In 2000 the Nakanai made him chief: “Suara Auru.” Chief Warrior. In 2006, at 90, villagers carried him on their shoulders through the jungle to see his plane’s broken wing one last time.
Fred died in 2010 at 94. The schools and clinic still stand.
When asked why he spent 70 years repaying strangers, he always answered the same way:
“These people were responsible for saving my life. How could I ever repay it?”
He spent the rest of his life trying.
Source: Rewritten report from: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DfrrGq34u/?mibextid=wwXIfr
