Kokoda (14 page)

But did Grahamslaw
want
to serve with such men?

Every evening at sundown now, he sat with his mate, Wardrop, on his verandah, and watched first the RAAF blokes and then the army boys trudge down the street in front of them, carrying empty sacks. An hour later they would trudge back with sacks full to bursting, courtesy of the looted stores or homes that were being hurriedly abandoned. The troops considered themselves
really
lucky if they could stagger back drunk, as the most prized loot of all was liquor and they usually ripped into it straightaway.

For more durable loot, the great advantage for the RAAF blokes was that they had a way of smuggling their ill-gotten gains out because they were there to maintain the air-link to Australia. It wasn’t just the soldiers and airmen who were doing the looting, though. No less than an RAAF padre arrived in Australia carrying, of all things, ‘12 volumes of the
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics
to the value of Pound 25’, which he had obviously stolen. When asked why, the padre acknowledged that it had been a difficult decision, but a chat with the Bishop of New Guinea had revealed that ‘His Lordship’ had ‘no objection’.
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Only through severe disciplinary action could Major General Morris restore order, and all the while the Japanese raids continued on an almost daily basis. The Diggers dug their slit trenches all the deeper and built walls of sand bags around their key armaments. Under such sustained bombardment, the centre of the town was effectively abandoned as a place to live and in typical Digger humour, it soon became known as ‘Bomb Decoy no. 1’.
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More factually, it was probably ‘no. 2’, as the bombers seemed to concentrate on Seven Mile Airfield, the town and the port in that order. As the bombers appeared, the soldiers and few remaining civilians sheltered in their slit trenches, while the anti-aircraft artillery known as ‘Ack-Ack guns’—in this case not much more than a couple of heavy old naval guns with a minor supporting choir—sent up useless volleys of fire which exploded and turned into picturesque puffs well below the altitude of the thundering behemoths.

After the bombers had mercifully left, everyone would then emerge from the trenches, do their best to clean up whatever damage had been done, and settle back to what they had been doing in the first place—sweltering. The only good thing that came out of the raids was that when the bombs hit the harbour near the foreshores, which they often did, the explosions would sometimes throw fish up on to the wharves providing some much-needed variation to the soldiers’ diet. Such fortuitous fare was highly prized.

Unable to strike a blow at the Japanese so many thousands of feet above them—and there were certainly no Australian planes doing them any damage—the men of the 39th had continued to work like navvies, doing hard labour. For there was a lot to do, from digging ever-more trenches, to clearing away rubble from the bombing, to building roads around the defensive perimeter of Moresby, to constantly unloading the ships which came from Australia… too far away. It was bloody hard yakka, and the dullness of it! The sheer brute boredom of hours hanging heavy in the tropical torpor, as they dragged their way through the day. Men joked about their lives being ruled by the four ‘M’s: ‘Mud, mosquitoes, malaria and monotony.’

As the Diggers worked, little by little they came to know something of the New Guinea natives who populated the town and its outskirts, a little of their customs and beliefs, and most crucially the curious language in which they conversed called ‘pidgin English’. This last had developed over the previous sixty years of English-speaking occupation of the island, initially as a kind of bastardised version of the King’s English with which the natives could talk to the colonists, and even more importantly over time, as a language that the disparate tribes could use to converse with each other.

The structure of the language was very simple. As an example, ‘him’ was ‘EM’; ‘he’ was ‘E’; ‘party’ was ‘SINGSING’; and the possessive sense was indicated by ‘BILONG’. Put together then with joiner words, if you wanted to say of a particular Digger that ‘he is fond of parties’, you said ‘EM I MAN BILONG SINGSING TRU… ’ In a similar vein ‘whose book is this?’ became ‘BUK BILONG HUSAIT?’ and ‘a long time ago’ was ‘LONGTAIM BIFOR’. A ‘fella’ was a ‘PELA’ and ‘one, two, three, four… ’ became ‘WANPELA, TUPELA, TRIPELA, FORPELA… ’ and so on. In the view of the usually diminutive natives, the Diggers were all ‘STRONGPELA’, strong fellas, and mostly ‘GUTPELAS’, good fellas, too.

Generally the Australians and the natives got on well, the more so when some of the more affluent of the soldiers and the non-commissioned officers would give a couple of shillings to hire a native as a servant to make their beds, shine their shoes for parades, prepare their meals and all the rest. It was through such constant contact that some of the Diggers began to understand a few of the natives’ customs and ways. While their extended families were important to them, the most identifying grouping was their ‘WONTOKS’, ‘one-talks’, as in their own tribe who spoke their own language. They had no concept of the ‘nation’ of New Guinea although they were aware of the ‘BIK WOR’, ‘big war’, going on between the ‘white man’, ‘WITMAN’, and ‘Japanese’, ‘JAPUN’.

Something that amused the Diggers greatly was the natives’ idea of the human body. According to them, the most important organ of all was the ‘LIVA’, liver, and it was from here that all thoughts, emotions and life force was generated. ‘EM I ASKIM LIVA BILONG EM’, ‘he asks liver his’, meant ‘he is searching his memory’. ‘ASKIM GUT LIVA BILONG YU’, as in ‘ask well liver of you’, meant ‘examine your conscience’. One word specific to the local tribe’s Motu language the Diggers learnt was ‘DEHORI’, which meant ‘wait awhile’, and this was the standard answer whenever anything was required of any of them.
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The Diggers repeatedly tried the imperative ‘KARAHARAGA’, meaning ‘hurry up’, but it never really seemed to help much.

For all that, the general consensus was that while the natives were clearly a very primitive people, they were generally ‘not bad Joes’, and many of the Diggers formed a rough affection for the ‘boongs’, as they were all but universally known from the start. There were more than a few strange things though…

Tits. Everywhere. Women’s breasts. Big ones. Little ones.
Really
big ones. Swaying freely, coming this way, as the native women walked down the streets. They really were everywhere, and it would take the newly arrived Australians some time to get used to seeing breasts at least every time they went into town, and often around and about their encampment. Curiously, few found it at all sexually appealing, even though back in Melbourne more than a few had parted with a day’s wages just to see naked breasts in a St Kilda strip joint.

In any case, there was little to no fraternisation between the Diggers and the native women, it having been made clear to them by old hands that, on the odd occasion it had happened in the past, the usual form was for the native bloke who had been cuckolded to simply take a knife and redeem his honour by wearing the white fella’s balls for earrings thereafter. Under those circumstances the young soldiers didn’t need to be told twice and, one way or another, it wasn’t long before they didn’t even blink an eye at a native woman’s bare breasts anyway.

That potentially delicate issue settled, the natives in turn formed their own impression of the Diggers, their machinery, their guns and their industrious activities. These soldiers in the street had doubled the white population of Port Moresby, strange aircraft were landing at the new airfield at Seven Mile and Catalina flying boats were churning up Fairfax Harbour.

From the tiny speck of urban settlement that was Port Moresby in all the vastness of New Guinea proper, the word went out. From the natives working in the town, who had some interaction with the tribes on the fringe, who talked to the tribes in the hills above the town, who themselves had been observing more and more planes overhead and white faces all around and big guns being installed on terrain overlooking the harbour… the news spread.

‘
PLUNDI WAITMAN E CUM LONG HELPIM YU E RUSIM MAN BILONG JAPON. MIK BIK WOR.’ ‘Lots of white men have come and want us to help get rid of the Japanese. There is going to be a big war.’

The situation in Singapore was grim and getting grimmer. After a long and devastating march down the Malayan Peninsula, the Allies resolutely focused their defences on the few roads; but the Japanese constantly outflanked and choked them by moving through thick jungle previously thought impenetrable. It seemed that the end was near. By late January, the Japanese had pushed all Allied defence back to the island of Singapore itself and were storming it from the direction of the Malayan jungle just a few hundred yards across the narrow causeway to the north. This meant that most of Singapore’s much-vaunted fixed defences, with guns pointing to the sea in preparation for a seaborne invasion, were worse than useless.

By 10 February 1942 still no serious support had arrived from Britain despite Singapore’s pleas. Instead, Winston Churchill sent a stirring cable to his commanding officer, General Archibald Wavell, a man whom he had, just seven months before, removed from command in North Africa when it became apparent that Wavell couldn’t match it with General Rommel. In the kind of language that gave the word ‘Churchillian’ its punch, the British Prime Minister essayed to give mettle to his men from afar, asserting that Wavell and his officers should abandon any ‘thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs. The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.’

It was one thing to be magnificent enough to send such a cable, and quite another of course for the recipients to be magnificent enough to live up to its dictates. Because, on balance, the besieged officers and their troops decided they’d rather live. And on 15 February 1942, they made that decision. General Arthur E. Percival, the famously buck-toothed commanding officer of the Allied forces defending Singapore, walked purposefully, if sorrowfully, out from the Allied lines. One of his aides carried a Union Jack, while another carried a white flag, generating the famous picture symbolising the death of the British Empire in the Far East. It was over.

The ‘impregnable bastion’ of Singapore—or ‘
Syonan-to
’, or Light of the South, as it was promptly renamed by the victors—had fallen to the marauding Imperial Japanese Army, despite the attackers being outnumbered two to one and almost out of ammunition. Never more would the European have the right to a superior swagger in those parts.

Almost eighteen hundred Australians were killed, while the remaining fifteen thousand were captured and sent to either the infamous Changi prison camp or worse, to labour on the Thai–Burma railway. All up, thirty thousand Japanese soldiers had routed a hundred thousand armed defenders, at a loss of only 3500 of their own. Prime Minister Curtin issued a statement from Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital where he was being treated for a bad attack of gastritis. While he described the fall of Singapore as ‘Australia’s Dunkirk’
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and the future as ‘the Battle for Australia’, the clear difference was that while the glory of Dunkirk was more than 300 000 Allied soldiers escaping to fight another day, for the most part the captured Australian soldiers were out of commission for the rest of the war, if not all eternity.

Not least of this disaster was that most of those Australian officers experienced in jungle warfare were either dead or locked away as prisoners of war unable to impart their crucial experience. The same did not apply to the Japanese, whose victorious officers were quickly assigned new horizons to conquer.

With the fall of Singapore, the strategic importance of Australia in Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere came into sharper focus. The key point of resistance for Japanese hegemony in the Pacific was the great South Land and Curtin himself warned his fellow citizens that the ‘Battle for Australia’ was just beginning. But, in the absence of so much of her military manpower, who would defend Australia against an enemy which in the previous nine weeks had notched up comprehensive victories against the best the British, Americans and Dutch could throw at them? Certainly not Britain.

In a strongly worded cable, Winston Churchill made it clear to John Curtin that whatever meagre resources the mother country could garner in that part of the world would be devoted to defending India, Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’. Australia would have to sort itself out. No matter that Australia had lost sixty thousand men in World War I in the service of Britain, and that at the outbreak of this war Australia had promptly sent two full divisions of men to fight beside Britain in the Middle East to defend British interests. Now, it seemed to Curtin, when Australia was in need, Britain simply wasn’t there.

Curtin replied with an equally direct cable, which was typical of the tightening tension between the two wartime leaders. The previous month Curtin had cabled to his wife Elsie in Perth that the ‘War goes very badly and I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily. He has been in Africa and India and they count before Australia and New Zealand. The truth is that Britain never thought Japan would fight and made no preparations to meet that eventuality. But enough, I love you, and that is all there is to say… ’
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Churchill was less than impressed with such cable sparring and, as only he could, took umbrage at Curtin’s colossal presumption in demanding that Britain support Australia, just as Australia had previously supported the mother country. While in cables to Curtin the British Prime Minister did not mince words assuring him that Australia was in minimal danger, in private he was scathing, claiming that the Australians were ‘jumpy about invasion’ because they came from ‘bad stock’.
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