Kokoda (36 page)

Back in Moresby, the reconnaissance plane reported that while there were a few Australians in possession of Kokoda, it was equally clear that the Japanese were pressing in on all sides. On the strength of this report, tentative plans to fly in men of the 49th Battalion to Kokoda were cancelled.

Once again the men of A Company felt abandoned, and more than a few felt that—in the vernacular of the times—they were ‘up shit creek in a barbed wire canoe’. Down on the Japanese lines, however, the appearance of the plane hastened their soldiers to action once more. Though that plane hadn’t landed, there was nothing to say a dozen of them might not suddenly appear and land with massive reinforcements, in which case all would be lost, and the need to dislodge the defenders became ever more urgent. After desultory pot shots during the day, in the last hour of light the Japanese began a collective cacophony of wailing, screaming and chanting, like ancient tribesmen whipping each other into a frenzy for the attack they were about to launch.

Then, at a sudden break in the chant, a thickly accented voice called out to the Australians: ‘You don’t like that, do you?’
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As a matter of fact, Tojo was pretty right about that, because none of the Australians
were
too crazy about it. But seeing as this particular Jap spoke English and therefore probably understood it, many of the Diggers took the opportunity to express their own thoughts on the matter and to tell him just where he could stick his bloody bayonet and, while he was at it, to tell the murderous bastards he was with that they were gonna get their own throats slit before long! And so it went.

Really though, what the hell? In a choice between them screaming or shooting at you, the Australians would take screaming any day. The main thing was that Captain Symington had passed the word that, once it was dark, they were going to pull out anyway and get back to Deniki. Symington’s reckoning was that while they had lost men and had not been reinforced, the likelihood was that the Japanese would have massed for a big attack that night and there was no point in getting themselves massacred. Besides that, they had no food left, bugger-all ammunition and their guns were beginning to jam for lack of oil. They had held the airfield for two days now without Moresby flying anything in to them, so what was the bloody point?

No point, cobber. Saddle up. We’re out as soon as the captain gives the word.

At seven o’clock in the evening the captain gave the word. They moved out in three groups, with Lieutenant Brewer taking the front group with most of the firepower necessary to fight their way out if they had to. The middle group would have the wounded and Battalion Headquarters, and Sergeant Jim Cowey would take a few good volunteers with him to act as the rearguard and beat the beggars back if they tried to follow too closely behind.

Down in Melbourne at that very moment General Blamey was preparing for dinner. It had been a long day and had included a meeting with the prime minister and all six state premiers. They had discussed both the war effort in Australia and how Australian troops were faring overseas. Among other things, General Blamey had reported that the fighting around Kokoda was not particularly significant, nor important.
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The Australian soldiers got off the Kokoda plateau just in time. No sooner had the first two groups moved out just after seven o’clock than the Japs attacked the plateau like a bloody bunch of banzai banshees, charging all at once from every angle and firing as they came, screaming all the while. In the middle of it, Jim Cowey was with his rearguard and by this time they had also picked up a few stragglers who had become separated from the main group and were all dead on their feet.
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With hell breaking out all around, it looked like they were dead, but ol’ Jim didn’t see it like that. Realising that in the limited light of the moon everyone was just a silhouette, and that the only way the Japs would know they were Australians would be if they started firing at them, he ordered his men to hold their fire and, get this, ‘walk out’. And he was serious! Jim said that if they just kept their heads about them and acted like they had no fear, then the figures in the near distance scurrying hither and thither around the trenches the Australians had just abandoned would think they were Japs.

The men looked at him. Jim looked back at them. He really was serious. But given that no one had a better idea and it really was apparent that if they fired one shot in the direction of the invaders then the full might of Tojo would come down upon them, they really had no choice. So when Jim suddenly stepped out into the open from behind the rubber trees where they were sheltering and sauntered down the track, they quickly followed, waiting… waiting… waiting…

Waiting for the sound of a rifle shot and then searing pain somewhere on them before they died, they walked—with even those who were wounded in the legs trying to do so without a limp— their spines tingling for the shot, the shot, the shot… which never came. In no time at all they had crossed the airfield and were safe in the jungle, while the shouts of the Japs receded in the distance. Ol’ Jim had known what he was about and when, a little while later, he told the men they would stop here for the night to try to recover, he didn’t have to say it twice. In a small clearing just off the track they sank to the mud and were asleep within minutes. Jim, though, sat up through the night, keeping guard.

Some blokes called it a ‘dingo’s breakfast’—a bit of a scratch, a bit of a stretch, a bit of a fart and a bit of a look around. And that is pretty much what all three separated groups of A Company had on the morning of 11 August as they woke from a bitter night and continued to straggle by differing routes towards Deniki. There was nothing at all to eat and a hell of a long way to go so they just got on with it.

But jeez things could be a bugger sometimes. As the second group of A Company, with its wounded, was still on the hills looking back to Kokoda, they heard, and then saw something in the sky—planes. Two of them, coming in low over the valley without attempting to land, suddenly opened their doors and out rushed plentiful quantities of the very supplies they had been begging for, for days, but which were now tumbling into the grateful hands of the Japanese.

Back at Kokoda, Lieutenant Colonel Tsukamoto was mightily relieved, and not just for the manna which was suddenly so propitiously tumbling from the heavens. Given that, after everything, Buna had proved to be an unsuitable place for an airfield and the strategic value of Kokoda had thus increased hugely, in this man’s army the loss of Kokoda would have left Lieutenant Colonel Tsukamoto with only one option: to commit harakiri. That would have involved him taking his bayonet, or an equally sharp knife, and plunging it into the left-hand side of his stomach before pulling it across to the right and then dragging it upwards. If he was still strong enough, he would then have to stab himself again just beneath the sternum, and drag it down to the first lateral cut, before slitting his own throat. All of it, as the samurai creed demanded, without uttering a cry…

But now that Kokoda was back in Japanese hands the need for such an extreme form of self-criticism had been averted.
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Yes, the Australian’s counterattack had cost the Japanese two days on their schedule of advance, but that could be made up. And now, with their loss of the airstrip, the Australians’ line of supply once again stretched all the way over the range to Port Moresby. The Japanese officers judged that if that tiny force of Australians was the best they could muster for such an important objective as the Kokoda airfield, then clearly their overall forces could not be too strong. In short, Tsukamoto was able to report to his superior back in Rabaul, General Horii, that there was no further impediment to sending the remaining forces of the South Seas Force down the track.

Not that he underestimated the fighting capacity of the individual Australian soldiers. Now that the Japanese were in possession of the terrain they had fought so hard for, he still found it hard to believe that such a small number of soldiers had been able to mount such a strong resistance. He was not alone. That night, in his small diary, a Lieutenant Onogawa of the 144th Regiment noted: ‘Though the Australians are our enemies, they must be admired.’
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Halt.

The night after leaving Kokoda, and after a full day’s trek and one battle with pursuing Japanese, Jim Cowey’s rearguard group joined up with Captain Symington’s group in the tiny village of Naro, to the west of the main track between Deniki and Kokoda. Captain Symington did not want to take the wounded men they were carrying to Deniki immediately, as it was likely that the Japanese would shortly attack there as well and he also wanted to give his men some respite.

Wonder of all wonders, though the Naro villagers had all disappeared with the sound of the gunfire nearby, they weren’t far away, and when some of the braver souls decided the Australians weren’t dangerous, and returned with no ill effect, it wasn’t long before they all returned. That night, the exhausted Australian soldiers dined on vegetables from the village gardens and slept in huts—it was far and away the most comfortable night they had had in the past three weeks. The following morning a villager was sent to Deniki to pass the message to the rest of A Company that they were safe in Naro, but that they would need help to move the wounded any further.

It was far and away the most uncomfortable night he had spent for many a long time. Back in Port Moresby, Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell—Thomas Blamey’s former chief of staff—had just arrived to take command of all forces in New Guinea. And just what had he let himself in for? Tossing and turning all night long in the wretched heat, he kept thinking back to early February, when he had personally signalled Major General Morris with a distinct warning:

‘Japanese in all operations have shown inclination to land some distance from ultimate objective rather than make a direct assault. This probably because of need to gain airbases as well as desire to catch defences facing wrong way. You will probably have already considered possibility of landing New Guinea mainland and advance across mountains but think it advisable to warn you of this enemy course…’
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And so it had proved, and yet as far as he could see, Morris had done just about
nothing
to prevent exactly that taking place! What kind of mess had he inherited here?

With Rowell came General Tubby Allen, the commander of the 7th Division, whose men would shortly be arriving. It all meant that General Morris was now free to take over ANGAU, thus removing him from the frontline of military operations and leaving him in a far more administrative position.

On 13 August, these three military leaders, Rowell, Allen and Morris, had a meeting with Brigadier Arnold Potts to work out the next step. And that step was clear. It would be the job of the 21st Brigade—composed of the 2/14th, 2/16th and 2/27th battalions— to recapture the Kokoda airfield, which could then be used as a supply base and from which they would push the Japs all the way to the sea. The 53rd Battalion were already heading on their way up the track to try to help out, though they remained such a ragtag bunch, with so little training, that—apart from a few genuinely good men and officers—there seemed little hope they would be able to make much difference. General Allen was forced to allow Potts only two of his three 21st Brigade battalions: the 2/14th and 2/16th. He required the 2/27th to stay in Port Moresby as the divisional reserve, pending events on the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay.

There was, from that point, a great deal of discussion about the logistics of the operation, though the level of ignorance that still flourished about the Kokoda Track at this highest level of military command in New Guinea was staggering. Even after six weeks of having Australian soldiers in the field, seeing for themselves the lie of the land, General Tubby Allen continued to push the view that just one well-equipped and courageous platoon with enough grenades could hold the Kokoda Gap. And nor was his view singular. General MacArthur’s chief of staff, for example, General Richard Sutherland, had sent word that the track to Kokoda passed through such a deep ravine that in one spot it might be ‘blocked by demolition’. Genius!
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Still, Potts thought to himself, if it were as simple as that, why hadn’t it happened? He knew Australia had competent commanders in the field and courageous men. It seemed to him that if it had been possible to hold the Japanese at a point like that, Moresby would have already heard about it from the men in situ. He also didn’t put a lot of store by Tubby Allen’s view that the ‘the Owen Stanleys are impassable’. It certainly hadn’t seemed impassable to the Japanese, who had already made massive inroads into the range, and though he knew from his own venture up there that it was singularly difficult terrain, he set no confidence in the view that geography alone would beat the invaders. The whole track record of the Japs in the war to date had proven that they didn’t regard anything as a physical obstacle and had been able to use that kind of thinking to their advantage.

For now, though, there was nothing for it but to get down to tintacks. By far the greatest problem with ensuring that his men would be an effective fighting force by the time they got to the Japanese was rectifying the supply problem. Sending close to one thousand men to the front meant that the demands on supply would be enormous, which was where Basil Morris came in. In his new role as the head of the ANGAU it would be his job and overall responsibility to ensure that, as the men of the 2/14th and 2/16th made their way forward, at least two planeloads of supplies would be dropped at Myola every day.