Kokoda (11 page)

The seriousness of Australia’s situation in the face of the Japanese aggression was highlighted by a New Year’s message that Prime Minister John Curtin, a former journalist, penned for the Melbourne
Herald,
which appeared on 27 December 1941. In this enormously significant communication he made it clear that the times were so desperate that Australia no longer had any confidence that the traditional ‘motherland’, Britain, could protect them now that they were ‘inside the firing lines’.

‘Australia does not accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict… The Australian Government regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in [strategy]… Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom… We are determined Australia shall not go [under], and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its keystone, which will give our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy…

‘All Australia is the stake in this war. All Australia must stand together to hold that stake. We face a powerful, ably led and unbelievably courageous foe…’

In Ottawa, Winston Churchill was about to give his own oration to Canada’s war cabinet, when he was told of what Curtin had said. He was less than impressed. Such was Churchill’s expressive way that few were left in any doubt as to his view, least of all Britain’s own war cabinet, which promptly received a cable from their prime minister saying that he was ‘deeply shocked’, at Curtin’s ‘insulting speech’.
²⁷

Australia’s need of America for its defence, and America’s need of Australia as a launching pad from which they could retake the Southwest Pacific—most particularly the Philippines—had not escaped the Japanese. At that time in Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo—the nerve centre of the Japanese military empire—the military command were deciding how best to deny the Americans any chance of using Australia in that fashion. One possibility was to simply invade the east coast cities of Australia, which were its industrial centres, while the other was to establish key bases in New Guinea and the British Solomons to Australia’s immediate north. Airfields at such bases would give Japan control of the skies, while the Japanese Navy would patrol the waters between, and this would deny the Allies the same key strategic positions from which to launch counter-offensives on the Japanese, and also allow the Japanese to effectively cut the lifeline between Australia and America. If effective, Australia would soon become all the weaker and all the more easy to absorb into the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

On the morning that Curtin’s impassioned plea appeared, the good ship
Aquitania
docked at Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Wharf, and began taking on board Victoria’s 39th Battalion and their rough equivalent from New South Wales—the 53rd Battalion—resulting in a memorable scene.

Many of the 53rd had been taken from Sydney’s Moore Park personnel depot that morning to the ship, with barely a mention as to where they were going or what they were doing. If they were lucky they had been able to get a message to loved ones that they were about to board a ship and sail away. Others had been forced on board without any chance to tell their families they were going and were of course furious and sick with worry. From waking up secure in their own beds that morning, a lot of blokes now found themselves walking the plank… up into the belly of the beast of a ship that would shortly depart Australian shores. What was going
on
! Therein lay something of a story…

The bulk of the 53rd Battalion had come into being just two months earlier when eighteen militia battalions from around New South Wales had been told to provide men to form up the new corps, with a view to them seeing service in Darwin. Some battalion commanders took the opportunity of getting rid of some of their laziest and more troublesome men, but still that wasn’t the most pressing problem on this day. In the demands of the moment, Darwin was no longer the destination, replaced instead by New Guinea, and so extreme had been those demands that Christmas leave had been cancelled. Under those circumstances no fewer than one hundred of the original soldiers of the 53rd Battalion had gone AWL. Therefore, on the morning of embarkation, it was decided with some urgency that those places would simply have to be filled. So recruitment officers accompanied by military police had promptly gone round to military personnel offices and rounded up the hundred men needed to complete the battalion. Here are your papers, sonny Jim, all signed, sealed and delivered, now get on board. ON, I SAID!

A few of the wives, girlfriends and families of these unfortunates had now arrived and were screaming and crying as the ship pulled away from the dock. But the war waited for no one. As the
Aquitania
slowly turned right past Garden Island, steering towards Sydney Heads, some from the 53rd pushed to the stern of the ship, waving forlornly at their loved ones up the far end of the wharf straining for a last look as they were lost to sight…

On board, those who had been newly pitch-forked into the 53rd were raising a stink all right, and they were soon joined by many others in the battalion when they realised that their destination wasn’t Darwin at all, but New Guinea. The plaintive cries and cursing of the 53rd kept up through much of the night, irritating the 39th no end. The mood of many of the 53rd had not been improved either, when the previous afternoon they had arrived in their bunks far below decks to find fish swimming past their portholes in the seriously overloaded ship. Sure they all knew the tub was ‘chocka-block’ and so she would sit heavy in the water, but what kind of bloody
nightmare
was this!

The mood on the
Aquitania
, then, was a curious mixture. For some of the men—most particularly of the 39th, many of whom had just seen Sydney for the first time and had never been on a ship before—there was a sense of adventure, while others were miserable at having left loved ones behind to head off to places unknown. Some of them imagined New Guinea as an island in the Pacific, full of swaying palms and maybe one or two hula-hula girls, with waves lapping the golden beaches. A few had even gone so far as to pack swimming costumes, golf clubs and cricket bats.

They knew they would find out soon enough, as the barely twinkling lights of Australia were left behind on the western horizon and the
Aquitania
steamed through the tropical seas to the north. To their starboard and port sides the Royal Australian Navy cruisers
Australia, Perth
and
Canberra
sailed as escorts. And, as an added precaution, Lieutenant Sam Templeton with a couple of others was able to put his vast military experience to good use by getting the for’ard anti-aircraft guns on the
Aquitania
into working order, and getting some of the younger laddies roughly trained in their use. (At least those laddies who were not hurling their guts up through seasickness, which certainly described a fair few of them.)

While the majority of the men in both the 39th and the 53rd were under twenty years old, there was also a good representation of soldiers in their twenties, thirties, forties and even fifties—a real collection of the young and the restless, the old and the bold. One more senior fellow with barely a tooth in his head helped to pass the time by playing ‘music’ on a homemade instrument consisting of a broomstick stuck through a kerosene tin, with strings attached.
²⁸
Somehow or other, just with that, he managed to play recognisable tunes, and one or two of the young fellas of the 39th even sang along. As a general rule, the men of the 53rd Battalion did not join in.

As the voyage continued, the one hundred new recruits to the 53rd were given instruction each day before lunch out on the open deck on how to handle, fire and conduct maintenance on a .303 rifle.

It was not only, thus, mad dogs and Englishmen who were out in the midday sun… as the
Aquitania
continued north.

It was so cold that they reckoned the local wolves were nailing the sheep for their
wool.
The 2/14th Battalion were camped in an olive grove where they had been sent in the north of Syria to protect the border with Turkey from a possible thrust by Germans. As they shivered around their fires, the burning beach sands of Australia at this time seemed far, far away. In the midst of them all, one presence in particular stood out—Lieutenant Butch Bisset.

Butch had a very distinctive laugh, which often rang through the ranks, and his presence alone could brighten the mood of a large group of men. This lightness of being was curiously combined in Butch with a hardness of purpose that made him a rough diamond and a very fine soldier in one, the man the others instinctively looked to when the bullets began to fly… It was his extraordinary gregariousness, the way he knew everyone and everyone knew him; the way he kept an instinctive watch out for those on the edges of the group and was constantly encouraging them onwards. The way, all on his own, he was a binding force on the battalion.

While Stan Bisset at this point had risen higher in the hierarchy— right up to becoming the intelligence officer for the battalion—Butch’s leadership was on a far more spiritual level and was every bit as valuable. Stan could not have been prouder of Butch, and in his many letters to their parents back in Victoria was constantly telling them what a fine soldier Butch had proved to be. All up they were a tough mob, and proud of it, and proud of often being known as ‘Jacka’s Mob’…

Albert Jacka had been a hardy Victorian who had served with such distinction in the 14th of World War I that the whole good name of the battalion had become associated with him. After joining up in the first few days of the war, Jacka had been one of the first Diggers to hit the beach at Gallipoli. Just a month later, when the Diggers had unsuccessfully stormed some Turks who were dug in, Jacka had volunteered for the dangerous mission of crawling around behind them. When he got there he had dived in headfirst and succeeded in shooting five Turkish soldiers dead and bayoneting two more. It was the stuff of legend that when his commanding lieutenant had finally peered over the edge of the strangely silent trench the next morning, Jacka was laconically drawing on a cigarette and said: ‘Well, I managed to get the beggars, Sir.’ It was the first of many extraordinarily courageous episodes for this fine Australian soldier, and he would effectively go on to win the Victoria Cross three times over. When he died in 1932 of medical problems derived from his war-wounds, his eight pallbearers were themselves each individual winners of the Victoria Cross—the only men good enough to take such a champion to his grave. Yep, they were Jacka’s Mob all right, and in their Middle East campaign to date, the 2/14th had already acquitted themselves well.

After landing at Suez, they had briefly headed to Egypt to go up against Germans, who unfortunately wouldn’t front for the fight. Then they had been thrown up against the traitorous Vichy French in Syria, where the 2/14th had quickly proved themselves to be disciplined, well trained, cohesive, courageous even against an ardent foe. After six weeks of vicious fighting the Vichy French had hauled up
un drapeau blanc
, read white flag.

Now that the men had fought so ferociously through such a campaign, the bonds between them were forged of blood, sweat and tears; of total dependence each on the other; of a common consciousness that only they knew what they had been through. They had lost many men, good men, great men, killed in battle and terribly wounded, and with each succeeding casualty every survivor had become increasingly conscious that their time too, might come…

Legends had been made both in their battalion and in their sister battalions of the 2/16th and 2/27th. Some soldiers had performed actions of such conspicuous courage that other soldiers would tell the stories again and again, and point them out to other soldiers.

‘You see that bloke over there? That’s Corporal Alan Haddy, from Western Australia. An amazing bloke. A couple of months ago we were going after the Vichy French, down in Syria, and you’ve never seen anything like it. The Froggies were dug in on one side of the Litani River, high up on the banks, and the only way we could get men across was via these canvas boats, which were literally being blown out of the water. Haddy
volunteered
to swim across the river, under fire, with a rope around his waist, and set up a kind of flying-fox to pull the boats across, meaning our blokes would be free to fire back at the turncoat Froggies instead of having to paddle.

‘So, anyway, Haddy was swimming and they were firing at him, and he’d dive as deep as he could, and then come up in a different spot from the one they were expecting to get a big gulp of air, and they’d start shooting again, and he’d go under. And somehow,
somehow
—even though they dropped a mortar within three yards of him—he got to the other side. He was pretty badly wounded in the chest, with blood pissing everywhere, and was a dreadful mess, but he still tied off the ropes and the operation was a success. If he hadn’t done it, the 2/16th would not have been able to get through, simple as that.’

Stan Bisset himself had gained a fair measure of notoriety for courageously leading a charge against a concrete blockhouse, where a machine gun was sending out lead as thick as lice on a mangy dog. Despite the withering fire, which had pinned down the entire Australian advance in this sector, by the time Bisset and the boys had finished the machine gun was silenced and the survivors of the defending platoon that had been manning the blockhouse were last seen running for their lives to the north.

All up, they were among Australia’s finest fighting men, and as successful action succeeded successful action, their confidence continued to grow and they believed that they could face just about any enemy, any situation, and have at least a bloody good crack at besting them…