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By Ilya Gridneff, Papua New Guinea Correspondent - AAP

RABAUL, Papua New Guinea, April 25 AAP - It has taken Ray Peters decades to finally see where his father went missing when fighting in Papua New Guinea during World War II.

Mr Peters, 72, from Geelong, and his son Allan Peters, 50, of Diggers Rest, made their pilgrimage to PNG's East New Britain province and spent Anzac Day with 50 others. The small dawn gathering is possibly the only Anzac service to have a puffing active volcano as a backdrop.

Mr Peters' father George Edward Peters, born in 1908, was a 2/22nd Battalion engineer who died in 1942 serving as one of the 1,400 Australian troops known as Lark Force who defended Australia administered New Guinea.
But the Peters family, like hundreds of others, are still unsure exactly how their loved one died. "I was five and a half when Dad was killed," Mr Peters said sipping a traditional coffee with rum at Rabaul Yacht Club's Gun Fire breakfast.

"I still remember him in full uniform, our last farewell through a cyclone fence at Queenscliffe," he said.

"We have no idea where Dad was, not even sure where he died, he's been accredited for being on the Montevideo Maru prison ship but we don't have anything confirmed," he said.

The Montevideo Maru carried 845 troops from Australia's Lark Force and 208 civilian men, taken prisoner of war after Japan invaded Rabaul in Papua New Guinea's East New Britain province in January 1942.
The unmarked Japanese ship left occupied Rabaul on June 22, 1942, but nine days later on July 1 an American submarine torpedoed it off the Philippines coast.
There were no known survivors, and to this day the sinking remains the greatest single maritime tragedy in Australian history.

"He probably died in January 1942 but we didn't learn about his death until the end of the war in 1945," Mr Peters said of his father.

He has spent the past 40 years doing his own research to try to find out what happened to his father and the other members of the Lark Force.

"There was a huge cover-up.

"Our family couldn't get any information until 1985 and the papers were stamped 'not to be released'.

"I think the Australians were embarrassed at what happened.

"The troops were using first war guns, were pretty much left to escape themselves, they were ill-prepared and I think the Australians underestimated the Japanese," he said.

Mr Peters and his son visited East New Britain's Bita Paka war cemetery where George Peters and hundreds of other Australians are buried.

Gold Coast couple Peter and Anne Norton-Knight - who recently walked the Kokoda Track - were among other Australians who also went to Bitapaka for the Anzac service.