Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

  All the first day, the 39th held amidst mortar and machine-gun fire and mountain-gun shells. All day, waves of Japanese tore down narrow ridges to the west and attacked the Australian perimeter. The casualties were prodigious. All night, Japanese patrols tried to enter the Australian lines. Preliminary to these sorties would be cries from the blackness—‘You die tonight!’ The 39th were all but overrun. By the time a fresh batch of AIF troops arrived, only two hundred and fifty of their seven hundred men were left in the battle. It had been fighting with ‘fist and boot and rifle butt, the steel of crashing helmets and of struggling fingers’, as Honner described it.

  Australians who were captured, such as Arthur Davis, were tortured. Davis’s body was dumped some hours later in a clearing to draw the Australian troops into the open. Potts himself declared, ‘We had to sit in the jungle listening to the screams of comrades tortured by Japanese in an attempt to provoke an attack.’ But Potts could not attack: he believed his line at Isurava was about to collapse. Across the valley, General Horii was shocked by the level of resistance and by his own casualties. His five-day march to Port Moresby was already three days late. At sunset on 29 August he ordered an attack by fresh units which was to last all night and continue into the next day. Japanese survivors would remember 30 August as the peak of the Kokoda campaign, with murderous point-blank hand-grenade exchanges. One Japanese who was wounded that day found that there was no morphine in the Japanese field hospital in Kokoda. It was a symbol of the shortages the Japanese faced.

  Australians were amazed by the numbers of the enemy killed. Corporal ‘Teddy’ Bear, a plain die-cast operator from Moonee Ponds in Melbourne, killed fifteen Japanese, men driven forward by desperate officers, themselves responding to Horii’s orders and the growing urgency of their supply shortage. Lieutenant Butch Bisset’s platoon from the 7th Division fought off fourteen Japanese charges. The frontal assaults right up the middle to the lines on the heights of Isurava were demented. But there was frenzy and fury on all sides. Bruce Kingsbury, a twenty-four-year-old Melburnian who had survived Syria and Egypt, was killed by a sniper while rushing forward firing his Bren gun against machine-gun fire.

  Butch Bisset received stomach wounds and died at 4 a.m. in his brother Stan’s arms. ‘I held him in my arms for four hours,’ said Stan. ‘We just talked about our parents, and growing up.’ It was unlikely that most died with such blessed composure.

  In the late afternoon of 30 August it started to rain. The Australian survivors withdrew, knowing dispiritedly that capturing Kokoda itself, up ahead beyond Isurava, was impossible. Potts was reduced to ordering a hundred remaining troops of the 53rd to cover the retreat. But as an indication of what men bound by a common, unutterable and tribal experience can do, thirty men from the 39th, waiting at Eora Creek to be returned to Port Moresby, rose, all but three, and stumbled back into battle. Lieutenant Stewart Johnston, a twenty-four-year-old, led this party past 53rd survivors resting on the track and too uncertain or uninterested in going any further forward.

  On 30 August Potts had at dawn sent three companies in to attack on the right flank, sensing that the Japanese could not sustain a toll of sixteen hundred casualties as they had the day before. Meanwhile Horii found out that the Australians had vacated their old positions at Isurava and ordered his troops to charge them in their new positions dug in further back. They attacked that morning with enthusiasm and an onerous sequence of orders from above. The Australian perimeter held, but the Japanese started to sidestep it by taking the high ground to the west. Potts made his headquarters at a place named Alola, high on the track. He became aware that the enemy had virtually flanked the battalion and that the pathway to Alola was almost cut. He ordered a breakout. Colonel Key and about five of his staff, including the adjutant, were killed on the retreat.

  The Japanese eventually threatened brigade headquarters at Alola, and knowing that Alola was difficult to defend, Potts ordered his headquarters pulled back to another small clearing—as clearings were in New Guinea—named Eora. News of such withdrawals was neither understood nor much treasured as wise tactics at MacArthur’s HQ.

  As his men fell back down the track to the creek at the Eora position, Potts himself felt his control over events was restricted most of the time to the limits of his vision, in this case feet rather than miles. Units that had been lost behind enemy lines retreated fighting in ways that could not be witnessed, assessed or eventually recorded.

  Horii was by now a week late in his scheduled arrival at Port Moresby. It was a week that would prevent any Japanese ambition to capture Moresby and—from there—continue to bombard the Australian mainland and Allied positions there. The boy-soldiers had lost Horii an essential ration of time.

  Many Australians wounded at Eora Creek behind Kokoda were operated on by torchlight under a canvas awning. The surgical tables were canvas stretchers soaked in disinfectant. Major Henry ‘Blue’ Steward and Captain Rupert Magarey performed amputations in this way, but when the Japanese appeared above the field ambulance, the doctors were ordered to stop operating and to pack up urgently; they were to tarry to stem blood loss in cases only where it was absolutely necessary. Steward had the terrible job of deciding who would be carried and who could walk. The walking wounded hobbled along Eora Creek and towards Templeton’s Crossing. Their bandages became blood-soaked. Three of the abdominal and thoracic wound cases of the kind called ‘sucking’ because they sucked air into the chest cavity, could not be moved. The medics could merely nurse these doomed youths, who lay whispering for their families before dying. Magarey calculated they had half an hour to live. Later a medical patrol returned and found one of these alive, who pleaded with them not to leave him. He was carried out by native bearers and lasted some days before expiring.

  One private, John Blythe, was shot in the chest, the chin, the back, the right hand and leg. He was carried away from Eora. The journey took twelve days and he was half his normal weight when they got him back to Moresby. His arm was amputated but he lived. Russ Fairbairn, shot in the stomach, was able to claw his way back to Moresby by a seemingly impossible exercise of will. Osmar White saw a man whose leg had been blown off and who had ligatured the stump, applied two shell dressings and wrapped the remainder of the leg in an old copra sack. He refused White’s offer of bearers. Many other wounded men, told frankly by Captain Magarey that there were no bearers, crawled their way up the mountain behind Eora Creek. Major Steward himself managed to gather a group of retreating men to carry some of the last stretcher cases out.

  Medical supplies were still scarce. No salt tablets had been issued and so men were exhausted from salt loss by sweating, as much as by disease and wounds. Penicillin, which would transform the medical scene, was a year in the future. There was a supply of morphine coming over the mountains from Moresby and Steward saved it for those in the most extreme pain. He made splints out of bayonet scabbards or branches from trees. Some sulfonamide (antibacterial) tablets for oral use began to arrive by porter, and sulfa powder for open wounds. Mental collapse of the kind that had occurred in trench warfare was less common. As in World War I, though, Australian doctors were accused of diagnosing men with diseases they did not have. This applied particularly to dysentery, of which Steward declared, ‘I say they have got dysentery, but if you expect me to look up every arse to make sure, you’re making a big mistake.’ The latrines were too shallow and helped spread the disease.

  Involved now in the retreat, Damien Parer knew from experience that even thousands of native bearers could not adequately supply the small Australian force. The newsmen stopped at a native compound to enlist three rejected native bearers to carry Parer’s camera equipment and so reached Uberi. Parer’s 150-pound (70-kilogram) camera load was split up between the three men. As they advanced they began to pass wounded young militiamen, the first two they met injured in the foot and the left eye.

  White certainly got a sense of the battle. Having crossed the mountains with Parer and now retrea
ting with him, he was called on by a travelling line of wounded to switch on a torch so that they could see the track. One of the men had been shot twice in the chest; while the others moved on towards an impossibly distant Moresby, this young man sat down saying, ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’ White wept as the boy fell asleep on a bank of arsenic weed. When the wounded men reached Myola, new stretchers were built and wounds were dressed, but White knew there was no chance of air evacuation because of the destruction by bombing of the transport planes in Moresby. So Captain Magarey herded the wounded on towards Efogi, with tiers of mountains between that and Owers’ Corner, where the road turned right into Moresby. Magarey found the strength of soul of those walking with leg wounds astounding.

  Out of Parer’s footage of the withdrawal came again some of the classic shots of the campaign. Having to flee the village of Eora, he left his personal gear and took only his cameras and equipment. Retreating along the trail he had to throw away the heavy leather case and spare parts of his movie camera, then the tripod, then his still camera, but he kept filming with his movie camera and carrying his rolls of film.

  To Parer’s single-minded regret, many rearguard actions and withdrawals were conducted at night when his camera was useless. Even by day he didn’t know if the dimness of the jungle tracks would enable him to film or if rain and mould would get into his cameras. He shot in faith. At Myola his film ran out. However, the last plane in before Myola itself was overrun dropped, amongst other things, about 450 metres of film for him. And so he continued on, as fevered and exhausted as the young men around him, to Ioribaiwa Ridge, where the Australians stood and retreated no further.

  Later that year, in the first week of October, Parer turned up in Townsville as what a friend, Alan Anderson, declared ‘a living wreck’. He apologised that he wasn’t able to get his gear up the stairs. In a few days’ time he went to Sydney where Ken Hall and Cinesound wanted to film him introducing his Kokoda film. The film, Kokoda Front Line!, would receive an Academy Award for the Best Documentary Film of its year. The Academy was more ready to acknowledge the Australian contribution than MacArthur was, but Parer himself wasn’t satisfied with Kokoda Front Line!. The encounters had been hard to film and before that the quick raids and getaways of Kanga Force did not allow him quite the latitude that the desert had.

  Myola was eventually overrun. More accurately, Potts told Allen in Port Moresby, he was withdrawing in good order while he could. By then the 2/14th that had left Port Moresby less than a month before with about 550 fighting men had been reduced to less than one hundred. Close behind them came the 2/16th, holding the track with only 250 men. Everyone was grey-faced. At that alpine height, Alan Avery of the 7th Division and others bayoneted all the tins of food in the hope that bacteria would affect them and the Japanese would eat (or at least be deprived of) them. Forty thousand rounds of ammunition were destroyed and Bren guns that there were no soldiers to carry were bent at the barrel. The three battalions moved into defensive positions behind Efogi around a Seventh Day Adventist mission hut perched on the spur of the ridge, and the 39th were at last due to be taken back to Moresby to the rear. There were 185 of them left and they lined up to pass over their automatic weapons, rations, signal stores and medical supplies.

  At length a strong defensive line was set up on Imita Ridge. General Horii was able to use two full regiments alternatively to attack the Australians and push them back. By 12 September it was estimated he still had five thousand fit men under his command, including artillerymen who brought with them mountain guns that could be broken down into five two-men loads. Sickness and casualties cut their number down to two guns by the time Horii reached Ioribaiwa Ridge facing the Australians on Imita.

  By now the Japanese had reached a position where they could hear the aircraft at Port Moresby and see the port’s searchlights flashing in the sky. They were a few days’ march away from the port they wanted. Their resources were at an end but they might succeed by desperate, literal hunger and raw desire. The Australians were on the last ridge, Imita, confident in the terrain but aware they could not retreat further. This was where Port Moresby would be won or lost. Fortunately, Imita Ridge was a natural rampart, and its cliffs rose steeply above the track. An entrenched Australian force could hold it, Potts was sure. The trouble was that the composite battalion made up of survivors waited for the Japanese attack in a state of suffering from sundry mosquito- and tick-borne fevers, and mentally afflicted by extreme stress and the weight of horrors undergone.

  Of 546 men of the 2/14th Battalion who had come over the ridge four weeks earlier, there were only three officers and eighty-five other ranks left. But to answer the Japanese mountain guns the Australians had themselves moved two large guns to the top of the ridge. And by 21 September, there were newly arrived Australians on Imita Ridge. What the Australians did not know was that Horii had already received orders from his superiors to withdraw to Gona and Buna, where he could be reinforced, supplied, and given the means to make his positions secure. The fact that the Japanese had been able to get two regiments in front of Imita Ridge was chiefly because of the supply problems of the Australians. If the Japanese happened to reach the outskirts of Port Moresby they would face the 26th Brigade of veteran Australians, the 16th Brigade which was on its way, two squadrons of light tanks, three field regiments of artillery and a mountain battery. As well as that, the first brigade of American-trained troops was about to arrive. The force the Japanese were facing would redouble within a few days. The army available to defend Port Moresby was almost twice that commanded by General Morshead when he held Tobruk for eight months against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

  The Japanese retreat began, and the Australians were now the pursuers. They made contact with the Japanese at Templeton’s Crossing. There were two days of Japanese defence before a flanking unit of Australians found the Japanese arms pits and muddy trenches empty. Along Eora Creek there were further rearguard actions by the Japanese, while from out of the jungle there still emerged stark-eyed Australians who had stayed at large all that time the Japanese owned the track.

  What of the bearers, the ‘fuzzy-wuzzy angels’ so endearing, via Parer’s newsreel and press photographs, to Australians? There seemed to be elements of coercion and elements of choice to their work, and there is little awareness that the Japanese also used native bearers, recruited from the north sectors of New Guinea. One of our fuzzy-wuzzy angels was Havala Laula, who lived in the village of Kagi along the Kokoda Trail in the high central province of Papua. Aged about fourteen, he carried his first wounded Australian back over the mountains as part of a team of eight. When wounded soldiers died, they would lower them to the ground and bury them on their stretchers. The bearers he worked with were reverent Seventh Day Adventists, and they gave each who died an appropriate burial. Nor were they beyond using bush remedies on the wounded, wrapping leaves around some wounds. ‘That made them feel better,’ Havala remembers.

  When the Japanese reached his village on their advance towards Moresby, they destroyed it, ruining the gardens and killing the livestock. Since the Australian troops formerly there had treated the people well, the loyalty of these colonised people went not to the self-proclaimed liberators, but to the representatives of Australian control. One must remember too that the conditions on the track left little room for men to think of ethnic or political difference. All were brothers in misery, fear and inhuman endeavour.

  YOUNG BLOOD, OLD POLITICS

  No sooner had the Japanese stalled on Imita Ridge than Curtin was called by a feverishly discontented MacArthur urging that Blamey be sent to New Guinea to ‘energise the situation’. He wanted Rowell more motivated or sacked. Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, Chief of Staff of the US Army Air Corps, had visited Australia and reached the conclusion that the Japanese were better fighting men than the Germans, that they could take New Guinea at will, and that the newly arrived, fatherly-looking American Lieutenant General R
obert L. Eichelberger ‘will put some pep into the Aussies’. As yet no American infantryman had fired a shot in New Guinea but Arnold believed that ‘the Massachusetts soldiers know more about the New Guinea jungle in two days than the Australians in two years’. Eichelberger, a man of less egregious narcissism than MacArthur, was wise enough to sense a certain resistance to the Americans in the Australian staff officers too: ‘The Australians didn’t think they needed much help from anyone. Many of the commanders I met had already been in combat in North Africa and, though they were usually too polite to say so, considered the Americans to be, at best, inexperienced theorists.’

  All this discontent also showed that MacArthur, ravenous for victory, believed the Australians had stalled rather than that they were about to rebound. There was a chance Washington would sack him if he continued to promise much and deliver nothing (except perhaps Milne Bay). He was determined at the same time that his operations would be controlled by task-force commanders rather than by Blamey as Commander, Allied Land Forces. MacArthur said that Blamey couldn’t cover the two jobs, and asked General George C. Marshall, Chief of the General Staff in Washington to send General Walter Krueger from America ‘to give the US Army the next ranking officer below General Blamey’. Soon after Krueger’s arrival, MacArthur formed Alamo Force to conduct the operations of Krueger’s 6th US Army. His problem was that there were not enough troops to form an army in Australia, an army normally being made up of a number of corps and a corps of a number of divisions. But bringing in Krueger was a ploy to prevent Blamey from commanding American troops.