Kokoda (30 page)

Returning fire the best they could, it was still apparent after two hours of fighting that the surviving Australian B Company force was in danger of being surrounded. Sam Templeton knew that if that happened, then the reinforcements who were heading their way might be heading straight towards an ambush. To forestall that possibility, at just before five o’clock in the afternoon, the captain took quick leave of his men and headed back down the track to warn the newcomers. He went on his ‘Pat Malone’, which was bloody well typical of him, always heading off somewhere with no accompaniment. On this occasion he was very quickly lost to sight as a combination of the jungle and the fading light swallowed him whole. Alas, alas…

Only minutes later, in a brief lull in the battle all around, his men heard a single burst of fire coming from the direction he had headed. They waited in vain—please dear God,
no
—for him to reappear. Joe Dawson kept straining his eyes in the direction where Sam had disappeared,
willing
him to come back into view, but he never did. He never did. Four men of B Company went out after him, vainly hoping to rescue him, but although they killed two Japanese soldiers, they had to turn back in the face of the swarming enemy. Against all odds, B Company continued to hold on to the hope that Sam Templeton might still be alive, but with him or without him they were obviously surrounded.

Again, they looked to one man—Major Watson. Without ‘Uncle Sam’, the major was the senior officer, and it was he who was then and there assessing their situation and working out the angles. What was obvious was that they were going to do no more real damage to the Japanese and the best thing they could do was to live to fight another day. Fortunately, it would be dark before long, which might facilitate their escape. Moreover, they had something the Japanese didn’t—a guide who knew the area backwards at midnight, which was useful under the circumstances. Lance Corporal Sanopa, a former police constable, was one of the Papuan Infantry Battalion’s finest. A massive man by any standards—well over six feet tall and strong enough to hold and fire a rifle one-handed as if it was a pistol—Sanopa had been with Watson from the beginning of the formation of the Papuan Infantry Battalion and had stuck to him throughout while others had run or drifted away. Now Watson addressed him.

‘SANOPA MIPELA MUS LUSIM DISPELA PLES.’ ‘Sanopa, we’ve got to lose this place and get away. Which way do we go?’

‘MI SARWAY ROT LONG GO.’ ‘I know a way we can go.’ ‘BEHINIM MI.’ ‘Follow me.’ As Sanopa spoke, the leaves he had in his hair for camouflage
rustled
, heightening the impression that this man was a force of nature right at home in this part of the world. If anyone could get them out, Sanopa could.

They chose their moment of exit well. Lieutenant McClean and Corporal Pyke crawled some thirty yards towards a group of Japanese soldiers without being detected, and were able to launch a grenade attack that appeared to do serious damage, judging from the screams. It also provided exactly the kind of cover needed for all of their men to follow Sanopa into the jungle. He quickly guided them in a southerly direction away from the track and in a circuitous route towards, hopefully, Kokoda. In the confusion out on one far flank, six soldiers of Maroubra Force, under the informal command of Private Arthur Swords, were left behind.

Jesus Christ. If there was ever a feeling more lonely than finding yourself just six Australian blokes up in the New Guinea jungle surrounded by half the bloody Japanese Army, then none of them had felt it, but at least they kept their heads. For together with the darkness, a pounding rain had now reduced visibility to the point where, unless they bumped right into some Japanese soldiers, they had to have a fair chance of getting through. And while Major Watson and his men had set off in one direction behind Sanopa, Arthur Swords and his men went in the other, intent on hooking up in the dawn.

For both groups, it was pure bloody murder to be travelling in the jungle in the night. With visibility practically nil, the only way forward was for the lead man to poke and prod for obstacles and take one tentative step at a time, while each man behind held the bayonet scabbard of the man in front, so forming a kind of carefully creeping conga line. Inevitably, you sometimes had to let go in order to climb down the ravines, and then contact was kept by the fact that each man attached some of the luminous fungus that abounded on trees in those parts on to the back of their hats and helmets. You knew then that the little blob moving just ahead was your mate.

Sanopa led his group down towards Oivi Creek, and when they got there a good hour was spent wading waist-deep through its freezing waters before Sanopa somehow instinctively knew the best point to get out. For Swords’s group the night was equally filled with silent terror in the darkness as they tried to make their escape, but the upshot was that both groups successfully evaded the Japanese clutches and had the deep satisfaction of hearing at the precious dawn a massive Japanese attack being launched on what was now an abandoned position. With any luck the bastards’d end up shooting each other.

Shortly afterwards, Sanopa had his men on a track which led to Deniki, where the major dump of the 39th’s forward supplies were situated. Arthur Swords’s group, meanwhile, found its way back to the track leading to Kokoda and eventually arrived there late on the afternoon of 27 July, only to find that it had been abandoned by Colonel Owen and the rest of their comrades…

This was a decision that hadn’t come easily to Colonel Owen. But having received the devastating news the previous day that Oivi was surrounded and Templeton likely killed, Owen had reluctantly decided that with a battalion of Japs in full flood and rolling their way, discretion was the better part of valour and it would be more prudent to pull back with his remaining fifty men to the far more defensible position of Deniki. So, after torching all the supplies at Kokoda that they couldn’t carry, they’d done exactly that.

Which was fine for them. But when Arthur Swords’s men got to Kokoda late that afternoon they were too exhausted to take another step, Japanese or no Japanese. So, rustling through the still glowing coals of what had been burnt, they managed to find some tinned stuff that looked a lot like dinner—and that was already cooked at that!—before turning in for the night.

And this was luxury on a massive scale, at least, the very best luxury that Brisbane could offer in 1942. At much the same time as the troops were fighting at Oivi, Douglas MacArthur was savouring the pleasures of Brisbane’s finest establishment, Lennon’s Hotel, where he had settled in with his family and entourage. The hotel’s penthouse suite on the fourth floor was not quite as fine as the purpose-built penthouse the general had only four months previously been occupying in Manila’s best hotel, but it wasn’t bad all the same. It was in fact four adjoining suites. MacArthur and his wife took one, his son and nanny took another, his doctor went into the third, while the fourth served as an office and library. The hotel also kindly constructed a theatrette where the general and his family could watch the westerns that he so adored. In the hotel’s driveway, two chauffeur-driven limousines were always on call, one for Jean MacArthur, the other for the general to take him daily to the AMP Insurance Building on the corner of Queen and Edward streets, just five blocks away, where the new GHQ had been set up. The numberplate on MacArthur’s black Cadillac read ‘USA–1’ with the four stars of his generalship embossed above, while Jean had ‘USA–2’—the first personalised plates in Australia. (War was hell.)

General Blamey, meantime, had taken over a section of the new Queensland University campus in the leafy Brisbane suburb of St Lucia for his Allied Land Forces Headquarters. He had meetings with MacArthur or one of several of the Bataan Gang, on average, four times a week and was in phone contact at least daily. The conversations were far more a case of the Americans telling the Australian what was going to happen, rather than sounding him out as to what
should
happen, but they were at least always able to achieve something that could safely be called ‘consensus’.

In the case of the Japanese landings at Buna and subsequent incursions inland, while they had been viewed with great interest and discussed at great length, still neither Blamey nor MacArthur was particularly alarmed. After all, the Japanese had already made two landings on the north coast of New Guinea that year—at Lae and Salamaua—and had been content to effectively ‘sit on their blot’ from that point, making no serious drive to the south. MacArthur’s view was that there was every indication that they would do the same at Buna. Blamey concurred, so they saw no reason to send fresh reinforcements to New Guinea. Historians have since speculated on another possible reason. While MacArthur wanted to keep the top-notch 7th Division troops fresh for the main game—island-hopping their way back to the Philippines, starting with Rabaul—Blamey’s desire was probably for them to be on hand in Australia, against a possible Japanese invasion of the Australian mainland.

Either way, the upshot was the same. While Stan and Butch Bisset and their comrades continued their training up on the coast and hinterland just north of Brisbane, the Japanese were set to develop their strength at the Buna–Gona beachhead, where they would continue to pour men, mules, machinery and munitions. They did not do this entirely without resistance as Allied planes continued to bomb them sporadically, just as Japanese planes returned serve on Seven Mile Airfield—with both sides achieving mixed success. But in this particular battle theatre both sides were conscious that the day would neither be won in the air, nor on the sea, but instead by soldiers in the muck…

And there they were. When Doc Vernon walked over the ridge and into the picturesque village of Deniki at eight o’clock on the morning of 28 July, it was to a scene that caused him some concern. Exhausted men lay everywhere; some of them had simply sunk into the sucking mud and not moved since, while others were badly wounded and awaiting attention.

Doc didn’t waste time and said immediately to the paramedic Jack Wilkinson: ‘Jack, I heard there was some action up here and thought you may need some assistance. Where do I start?’
¹¹⁶

God bless you, Doc, and you can start just about anywhere. Though as deaf as ever, Doc was still able to pick up most of the conversation after he had personally received all the ‘hail-fellow-well-mets’ from an exhausted group of soldiers who really were very glad to see him—despite the fact that many there were hoping against hope that the mysterious figure emerging out of the mist would prove to be the still missing ‘Uncle Sam’ Templeton.

Doc Vernon picked up the thread of what happened, as he tended wounds and handed out the few painkillers he had. Private Arthur Swords, who had just returned from Kokoda with five others, reported in that the government station had not only
not
been stormed by the Japanese, it was entirely empty just three hours ago when they had left it. Colonel Owen, while staggered to hear it, was eager to capitalise on the unexpected opportunity and now that his force had built up a little from his position of forty-eight hours before, he decided to re-occupy.

He didn’t expect that the seventy-seven men he could now muster would be able to hold off the Japanese if they struck in force, but, with luck, if they could control the Kokoda airfield, Moresby might be able to at last fly in the companies of reinforcements they needed. Quickly he gave his orders. They would move out in ten minutes, with each man taking as much ammunition and food as he could carry. And Doc Vernon, he could set up a medical post for the wounded evacuees who might well soon be coming back once they got to grips with the Japs.

Doc Vernon did what he always did on such occasions. He nodded his head as if he understood the orders entirely and would carry them out to the letter, but in fact made his own plans. He could always claim afterwards—as he often did—that he must have misheard the orders. What he did know was that if there was going to be fighting on a massive scale, he knew where he should be. And after all, what good were all the army regulations in a situation like this? So what if he was deaf? He knew for a fact that there was barely one man in the whole 39th Battalion, or the rest of Maroubra Force, he had seen who would have had
any
chance of passing an army medical physical; and yet there they were heading off to fight for their lives! In war, you adapted. Trailing the bulk of the men, at the safe distance of a couple of hours behind, Doc Vernon moved forward one more time.

To the east of them at this time, Father James Benson and Sister May and Sister Mavis had continued to push on through the jungle, together with other assorted refugees, and had found the mission they were looking for, enabling them to rest up for a few days safe, they thought, from the Japanese. That illusion would be shattered soon enough. Not long after a native appeared telling them that the Japanese were on the approach, a group of Australian soldiers hurriedly arrived. They included the three former members of the succeeded in getting the message out from their wireless station at Ambasi that the Japanese had landed. Also there were five Americans who had been shot down while on a bombing raid over Gona and were now trying to get back to Moresby. Father Benson and the two Sisters, with the few native staff from the mission who were still with them, decided to travel on with the soldiers in the slim hope that together they might be able to get through. One of the Americans was on crutches from a bad leg injury and both Sisters were poorly, so the going was slow.

As they travelled, the villagers they came across everywhere looked at them completely stunned. In their whole lives they had never seen white fellas and natives walking together like this. Blacks and whites simply did not travel together, and white fellas
never
travelled these tracks. The natives instinctively knew that there must 39th Battalion, Sergeants Holyoke, Hanna and Palmer who had be a big disruption in the land, and the stories told them by the black fellas confirmed it.