Kokoda (22 page)

Their greatest asset in such a venture would be the fine fighting men of the 144th Regiment of the
Nankai Shitai
(the South Seas Detached Force), men who had been trained for precisely this kind of venture. If they indeed decided to execute the plan, the 144th’s Commanding Officer, Major General Tomitaro Horii, estimated that his men could be at the gates of Moresby in just over a week.

It was late May 1942, and Tom Grahamslaw was not happy. He had just received a report from a colleague that a launch with a few Japanese troops on board had arrived at the tiny coastal village of Morobe. The Japs had landed and, with the aid of interpreters, were apparently asking questions about Buna—the little native village and government post just a little further east along the coast— and about the track that led from Buna to Kokoda and then Port Moresby. Tom passed the information on to Moresby immediately, though it must be said they hadn’t seemed particularly interested. At the least, they hadn’t followed it up with a flurry of enquiries pressing him for more information and the like. His report seemed to have just disappeared into the gaping maw of New Guinea Force Headquarters and was never heard from again.

It became known as the Battle of Midway, and in some respects it was not unlike the Battle of the Coral Sea. Situated right at the north of the Hawaiian chain of islands, the tiny atoll of Midway, which had slumbered there for millennia, suddenly burst into life. Eager to establish a base where they could launch aircraft, ships and submarines at the American flotillas in the central Pacific, the Japanese military leadership had decided to seize the highly strategic islands. Launching on 3 June 1942, a flotilla of four Japanese aircraft carriers, five cruisers, twelve destroyers and 250 planes moved on Midway from the west. With that level of naval firepower, the Americans would
have
to respond, and it was hoped that in the subsequent decisive battle, the American carriers would be destroyed once and for all.

This time, however, because of the work of the Allied codebreakers, warnings had been heeded, so the Americans knew the Japanese were coming and placed their forces accordingly. No sooner had the Japanese fleet steamed over the horizon near Midway than the Americans attacked with three carriers, eight cruisers, fifteen destroyers and, most importantly, 330 planes, many of them land-based from Midway itself. When the smoke had cleared, four of the six Japanese aircraft carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor were sunk side by side with a heavy cruiser, three destroyers and approximately 150 planes, while many of Japan’s most experienced pilots and navigators had been among the 4800 men killed. Although America lost the carrier
Yorktown
, a destroyer, 150 planes and 307 men, it was a wonderful follow-up counter-offensive to the Battle of the Coral Sea and meant, in the short term, that all Japanese plans to invade New Caledonia, Samoa and Fiji were put on hold.

Instead, Japan now reluctantly came to the view that America would have to be more efficiently choked off, with far-flung bases and areas of support being taken out one by one.

On 14 June 1942, Lieutenant General Hyakutake, the commander of the 17th Army in Rabaul, was given a formal order to proceed with the plans to send troops overland to Moresby.

In the meantime, training for the 2/14th, 2/16th and 2/27th battalions went on in southwestern Queensland. More manoeuvres, more living off the land, more night marches, more tests of their endurance. In one test, one of the 2/16th’s companies managed to march 65 miles in two days, while a platoon of the 2/14th managed to march 120 miles in four days and nine hours. It was good training as far as it went, but most seemed conscious that it didn’t go far enough. After what they had been able to accomplish in the Middle East, it just didn’t make any sense to leave them here festering in inaction. Why couldn’t they be at least moved closer to where the action was most likely to occur?

And they were not the only ones who felt it, then or afterwards. To have, as the closest Australian force to the Japanese invaders, mere wet-behind-the-ears militiamen who had for the most part done only a few weeks training, and who were in no way equipped to deal with the unique conditions that New Guinea would place upon them—and all while far more experienced troops were ready, willing and able to be deployed—was regarded by many as nothing short of insane.

But MacArthur, for one, wouldn’t hear of it. After the successes of the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, he told Australia’s Advisory War Council that there was no further risk of an invasion of Australia. And what MacArthur said went. Insanity dressed up in military orders, black on white…
by the right
…
quick-march!
… had a momentum all its own, and quickly routed all quibbles on the grounds that they were in the first place unpatriotic, and in the second place insubordinate.

At much the same time, a high ranking American military officer by the name of Major General Robert C. Richardson visited Australia. He had been sent by US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, to do a report on how the relationship between American and Australian officers was working in the Southwest Pacific Command.

For a true American patriot, the report that Richardson prepared did not make for pretty reading, most particularly for the fact that in some cases Australian officers were
in charge of American soldiers
. Scandalised, the major general reported in scathing terms to Marshall that ‘the present organization was an affront to national pride and to the dignity of the American Army’.
⁸⁶
In short, while it was no more than General MacArthur’s due to be in charge of the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force, it was an
outrage
for an Australian to pull rank on an American at any level. Richardson saved his most scathing language of all for General Thomas Blamey, who still retained nominal control over the American Army in the Southwest Pacific Area. Blamey, Richardson reported to his Washington masters, was a ‘non-professional Australian drunk’.
⁸⁷
(Others within the Bataan Gang, it should be noted, demurred and maintained that Blamey was actually a professional drunk.)

Though Osmar White briefly returned to Australia in May—because in his view MacArthur’s censorship restrictions were simply making it impossible for him to function effectively as a journalist—he nevertheless returned to Moresby in early June. Something told him that this was where the next major Japanese action would take place, so it was the place he had to be. All was as before. Hot, horrible, harrowing. There was a sense of foreboding, a sense that bad things were moving towards them, though for the moment the spectre lacked specific form and structure.

The only possible antidote to all the gloom and doom in the air was laughter, and, as it happened, a fellow came into Osmar White’s orbit at this time, a fellow who was always a sure source of a laugh. His name was Damien Parer and he was one of the hottest documentary-makers in Australia at the time, and of his many distinctive features it was his loud hooting laugh that White would treasure longest. Of those other distinctive features, there were many and, as White later described Damien: ‘He was young, tough, keen and unshakably courageous… The more I saw of the man, the more I liked and admired him. He was long, stooped, black-headed, sallow-faced, smiling. He had great piston legs covered by a fuzz of black hair and ending in size 12 feet that looked as if they could crush the skull of a python.’
⁸⁸

Instinctively, both men liked each other from the start, and they became a common sight around the military installations of Port Moresby, Parer’s rather dark and aquiline Spanish features somehow managing to make Osmar White and his strong jaw look more than ever as if they had been carved out of granite.

With still nothing happening in the environs of Moresby that was ‘news’, White and Parer decided to use their time by making an overland journey across New Guinea to get some idea of the real country. They might even get some stories and footage of the guerillas code-named Kanga Force—a combination of AIF commandos from Major T. P. Kneen’s 2/5th Independent Company, and a detachment of New Guinea Volunteer Rifles—who were making hit and run raids on the Japanese along the north coast around Lae and Salamaua. The guerillas were known widely for their daring raids on the Japanese, and personally for their exotic uniform which included beautiful bird of paradise plumes emerging from their felt hats. A whole load of supplies were about to be delivered to the guerillas by a gruelling circuitous route, and White and Parer received permission to accompany the native supply-bearers.

While they were still organising this trip north, Damien kept shooting. On the afternoon of 17 June 1942 he had his best camera set up above Port Moresby’s Fairfax Harbour and was capturing the essential New Guinea experience for so many diggers at that time—the unloading of a ship. This was the
Macdhui,
and if Damien had a particular interest in the ship it was because he recognised it as the ship that had brought his parents and brothers and cousins to New Guinea several years before.

Down on the deck of the ship at that time, Joe Dawson was in charge of the detail hauling the cargo of tinned food and boxes of ammunition out of the hold and onto the flat boat called a ‘Lighter’ that nestled nearby, like a baby chick next to its mother hen. It was this boat that would take the cargo to shore.

There were one or two of Joe’s superior officers also there, but they had gone below to the ship’s saloon to get out of the heat and have a drink with the
Macdhui
’s captain, James Campbell. Joe kept to his post in all the stinking, dripping oppressive humidity, but then suddenly heard an air-raid siren in the distance. In an instant he saw them—an angry flock of Jap bombers, protected by Zeros, was approaching the harbour from the east. In an instant the captain of the Lighter told Joe to get his soldiers back onto the
Macdhui
, because it would be safer for them there, and in any case the bombers would in all likelihood be going for the harbour’s one massive T-wharf. If that wharf was taken out, the problems of supply for Moresby would become critical.

Only marginally relieved, Joe ordered his soldiers to get back onto the ship, which was very quickly underway as, with great skill, Captain Campbell tried to move the ship out of harm’s way. But as Damien Parer’s cameras faithfully recorded it, the bombers had no interest in the T-wharf. They had eyes for one thing: this prize fat ship lumbering around in pathetic zig-zags on the pearly waters beneath them. Of course the Ack-Ack guns did their best, as did the ‘pom-pom’ guns—so-called because of the
pom-pom-pom-pom
sound they made—but the bombers were too high to be affected.

Thus, all around the
Macdhui
, bombs began to drop, with the subsequent waves of concussion constituting an absolute physical force. Still on the deck, Joe had just turned away from the explosion of one bomb while holding onto the rail, when another bomb dropped even closer. The force of it lifted him up—he had the momentary sensation of an enormous hand grabbing him by the trousers and hauling him high, causing enormous pressure on his groin area—and then his whole body smashed into the ship’s superstructure below the bridge, before he fell to the deck again, an all but broken rag doll. When he roused himself to get up and moving again, strangely the ongoing roar of the battle sounded like it was coming to him through the bottom of a barrel packed with cottonwool. The
Macdhui
had a terrible list as it took on water amidships, but it was at least still under way. Most upsetting for Joe in that first instant was that somehow the explosion that had knocked him over had also blown his wristwatch off and into oblivion. That wristwatch was a present from his beloved Elaine and it near killed him that it was lost.

Far more tragically as Joe soon discovered, six members of the 39th, including the two officers below, really had been killed by one of the bombs which had penetrated the decks before exploding in the saloon bar. Six men dead. Good men.
Dead
. In an instant, Joe Dawson’s sense of appalling unreality was compounded when he spied, on the deck of the ship, a whole human leg, the dead owner of which could only be identified by the name written on the inside of the leg’s puttees. Horrified, but mesmerised, Joe kept looking at the leg and two or three thoughts kept reverberating through him: ‘This is really a
war
. Blokes are going to get
killed. I
might get killed.’

The
Macdhui
survived for that day, when the Japanese were chased away by predominantly American planes twenty minutes after the bombing had begun, but nothing would bring those dead men back. A dreadful pall fell over the entire 39th Battalion, as they came face to face with the dreadful realities of war for the first time.

Though Damien Parer still had his cameras with him as the ship came to the wharf and they evacuated the dead and dreadfully wounded, he turned the cameras off. Somehow, it just seemed disrespectful to the dead and frivolous to the wounded. They were dead and there were missing limbs, and he wanted to make a film about it? No thank you.

One of the soldiers who’d been with Damien up on the hill, but had sheltered in a slit trench as bombs exploded all around, couldn’t contain himself.

‘Christ, how did you stay up there? Didn’t you hear the bombs?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t hear any bombs,’ Damien replied, ‘I was filming.’
⁸⁹

And he was still filming the following day when the Japanese returned to finish the job. Again the
Macdhui
made a run for it, but this time it took three bombs through the deck and it quickly ran aground, with thirteen killed and ten wounded.