Kokoda (39 page)

The ship ploughed through the night, heading south—south to the coast of New Guinea.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A WEARY WAY TO GO…

Kono kuso ame!

While the Japanese language has no real equivalent to the western notion of swearing, this phrase loosely translates to ‘this shitty rain!’

I remember from the time I met Ralph Honner I felt a new course of blood. I thought he was the best battalion commander I ever had the privilege to serve under. He was just a man who knew where he was going and what he was doing, and never had to put on any airs and graces…

Lieutenant Hugh Dalby, MC, 39th Battalion
¹⁵²

Heading north, north to the highlands of New Guinea, there was no doubt that the men of the 2/14th were far more prepared than the 39th who had ventured up this same track six weeks earlier. At least the 2/14th departed
knowing
that there was a serious battle ahead. More than that, some of the experience gained by the 39th had been passed on, including the fact that the Japanese snipers seemed to focus on officers. As a countermeasure, it was deemed prudent that officers should remove any identifying insignia of their rank, that they forbear to wear pistols and instead carry rifles like the ordinary soldiers, and furthermore that they no longer be addressed as ‘Captain’, ‘Lieutenant’, ‘Major’ etc, but instead be called by their nicknames.
¹⁵³

Finally, letters written, guns checked, prayers said, packs hoisted. Time to move out. With which, platoon by platoon, 554 men of the 2/14th began their trek, leaving Ilolo at 9.00 a.m. on Sunday 16 August 1942. They were under the direct command of Colonel Arthur Key, who had assumed command just after their return from the Middle East. He was a very softly spoken, very efficient officer of the old school, who worked well with Potts. Whatever the new orders about calling officers by their nicknames, with Key it would never stick. He was not a ‘one-of-the-boys’-type officer and didn’t want to be, and the men who served under him did not mind.

He was a good cove and they were happy to serve under him, none more so than Stan Bisset who was both the intelligence and quartermaster officer, and was responsible for reconnoitring ahead of the main body of men and establishing facilities at each staging post. Given that Stan was also among the physically fittest of the 2/14th, he had no trouble pushing well ahead to ensure that all was in order, that the campsites were marked out, that each staging post had plenty of salt tablets ready for when the men arrived, and so forth. This meant, of course, that in the first instance, he had no idea of just what scenes were occurring behind him with both the 2/14th, and those who set off the following day, the 2/16th…

For whatever their physical fitness and innate strength, the AIF men were doing it tough, and no mistake—in many ways even tougher than had the 39th. Without porters, the experienced army men were—to use their own expression—‘boonging’ it, carrying their own supplies. As Osmar White had feared, some were weighed down with as much as seventy pounds of extras. It was a wonder they could move at all, let alone climb and descend a jungle track that, at its highest, reached some 6000 feet.

And when the 39th had crossed the Owen Stanleys, there hadn’t been enough of them to really chew up the ground. But now, with upwards of a thousand men trudging along the same narrow wet track, the roots and undergrowth that had once held the path together had been broken apart. This meant that the wet ground in the lower sections soon became mud, mud soon became quagmire, and quagmire soon became something that their boots would sink into up to the ankles, requiring them to suck their feet out again to take the next step, before the whole process was repeated once more.

Also, their boots, which had been so well designed for the Syrian desert, lacked sufficient tread to grip the slippery slopes of the muddy track, and time and again men would use their last resources of energy to conquer a particular bluff only to slip and slide back down the slope to start again. The worst of it was when one man fell and took out the man behind him, who ‘dominoed’ into the one behind him, and so on. Those who tried to get a little off the beaten track where it was possible to escape the mud, soon found a mass of spiderwebs and enormous spiders waiting right at face height. More than one soldier would ‘lose it’, falling screaming to the ground trying to scrabble the spider from his face.

Maybe in the stress of it all, some of the soldiers cried, but no one could ever tell. The infernal, eternal, rain kept falling. It joined the sweat from their bodies to ensure that their clothing was completely soaked through all the time, making them even heavier and meaning they sweated even more.

Arnold Potts—carrying his own fully laden pack—started with the 2/16th, but quickly moved ahead, as he was keen to get to Myola before the main body of men and ensure that everything was in order with the crucial supplies. As he moved forward he saw scenes that both amazed and depressed him. Time after time, he would come to a tough part of the climb and see ashen-faced men lying down and gasping for air. Certainly they would straighten up at his sight and try to regain their feet, but there was no doubt that some were simply incapable of it.

Men had become so exhausted that not even the great Australian cure-all of a good cuppa tea did anything for them. Many would vomit it up, on the grounds that their bodies were entirely rejecting anything except lying rigid on the ground and not moving one wretched muscle.

Potts shook his head time and again, wondering in just what state the men would be when they finally got to the front. He pushed on, though at one point on the morning after he set off, he looked up after hearing the distinctive buzz of Japanese planes high overhead. The sound receded to the south in the direction of Moresby, and not long afterwards they heard the sounds of distant explosions…

Major General Morris had a serious temper going. Since suffering the recent humiliation of having his command effectively taken away and handed to General Rowell, he pretty much always had a temper going, just on principle. Then he heard them. Plane engines, and not just
any
plane engines. This was not the reassuring and rather thrilling throb of the Kittyhawks as they returned from their missions, it was the infernal high-pitched screaming of Japanese bombers and Zeros making one more raid on Seven Mile Airfield.

It was ten o’clock on the morning of 17 August, and if any of the thirty-five Japanese bomber pilots coming out of the high clouds had had the pleasure and privilege of taking out Clark Airfield in the Philippines eight months ago, they surely would have felt a sense of déjà vu…
Unbelievably
, right down there on the tarmac, neatly lined up in two tight rows almost as if they were begging to be bombed were no fewer than twenty-seven planes. In one line were the Dakota C47 ‘biscuit bombers’, while right next to them were the famed Flying Fortresses, laden with fuel and bombs.

For the skilled Japanese pilots, it took just one quick, clean run to drop every bomb they had on, or within damaging distance of, the target, and by the time they were gone three Flying Fortresses had been entirely destroyed, as had all the Dakota C47 transports, while ten other planes of the same stripes had been so badly damaged that they were out of commission well into the immediate future.

When Osmar White and Damien Parer screamed to a halt in a commandeered jeep just ten minutes later, the whole airfield was a chaotic scene of billowing black smoke rising above reddish-yellow dust, ongoing explosions, panic, flames, and trucks and men going every which way trying to regain control of a situation which was approximating hell on earth. Somehow, General Rowell’s earlier order that all planes be placed at a considerable distance from each other simply hadn’t been followed.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour was one o’clock, on this hot August day, and the man was Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner. A softly spoken but highly accomplished AIF officer from Perth, he had worked as a schoolteacher, solicitor and barrister before distinguishing himself in the Middle East, Greece and Crete.

Straight of back, clear of eye, fit as a trout, he walked into the village of Isurava—where the 39th were then preparing to make their stand—and went straight up to a group of officers. They looked at him. He looked at them. It was a friendly appraisal from both sides, though the group was entirely ignorant of who he was or what he was about. The main thing they noted about this neat, fit-looking fellow was that he was a high-ranking officer, and thus their deference was automatic.

‘Can I help you in any way?’ Lieutenant Keith Lovett asked the newcomer pleasantly.

‘Yes, I’m Lieutenant Colonel Honner, and I’m your new commanding officer… ’
¹⁵⁴

There was a stir among the men, as to this point there had been no warning that Major Cameron was about to be relieved of his command of the 39th—not that they were particularly sad to hear it as Cameron had never quite ‘taken’ as their leader. This new chappie, though, was one of those rare birds who gave out an air of friendly knockabout competence even before he had said a word, while still having a commanding presence. All up, he made a very good impression from the first. He’d arrived with no large retinue of staff, no bugles, no hoopla, just one aide and a very engaging presence.

Colonel Honner,
Sir
, it was then. Lieutenant Lovett introduced himself more formally and asked how the colonel would like to get started.

‘Well, I’d like you to take me around and introduce me to the company commanders and we’ll settle down and start our business… ’

That business, Honner quickly made clear, was to follow his orders—orders that they halt the Japanese advance to Isurava until such times as the AIF could arrive and push the enemy back down the track all the way to Gona.

And so it began. Lovett showed Honner around, and while the battalion seemed to take a shine to him immediately, Colonel Honner’s own views about
them
were not quite as admiring. Quietly, and privately, he was appalled.
¹⁵⁵
The men he was surveying were ragtag, physically exhausted, and weakened by weeks of fighting without sufficient sleep or food, and by merely existing in appalling conditions.

By burning day and freezing night these boys—for that was pretty much what most of them seemed to be—had been lashed by rains, stunned by sun, shot at, bombed, starved and bitten by bugs unknown. They had hollow eyes, rotting boots and foul, ragged uniforms, most of which had not been washed for the full forty days since they had last seen Port Moresby. Compared with the AIF men he’d commanded in the Middle East, the men of the 39th also seemed amazingly small physically, somehow as if their stature had been diminished by living in a jungle where everything else grew with such abundance. Aces were high, dysentery low, gangrene was trumps and death had a reserved seat at the table.
¹⁵⁶

The one saving grace was that these fellows of the 39th still seemed plucky. They did not have anything of the beaten-dog look about them, even though they clearly had a right to it. The colonel still heard plenty of talk of having ‘another crack at the Japs’, and ‘giving it to those yellow bastards this time’.

In a way they were reminiscent of some of the final lines of the great Australian poem, ‘The Man From Snowy River’, concerning the mount which had done so well tearing up and down the mountains, but was now very much the worse for wear:

But his hardy mountain pony he could scarcely raise a trot,

He was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur;

But his pluck was still undaunted, and his courage fiery hot,

For never yet was mountain horse a cur.

Colonel Honner woke the next morning—on his thirty-eighth birthday, 17 August—feeling better after a good night’s sleep and welcomed by a moment of rare, benign sunshine. It looked like a good day to begin doing what had to be done: preparing to defend Isurava against the inevitable Japanese attack which would shortly be coming their way.

On that same morning, some thirty miles to the north, General Horii was setting foot on New Guinea soil for the first time, landing at Buna with the remaining two battalions of the 144th Infantry Regiment, as well as ancillary units of mountain artillery, signals, munitions and Ack-Ack guns—some three thousand fresh troops in all.

And yet, despite these fresh supplies, General Horii was not without his own problems. Though all around him at that moment he had everything a fighting man could need, from fresh ammunition and clothing to bountiful food, he too faced the problem of getting those supplies to his men at the front. When the first of his troops had embarked up the track almost a month before, they had been issued with just ten days’ rations on the reckoning that that would be more than sufficient to get them through to Moresby. But now, the extraordinary Australian resistance meant that they were way behind schedule and it was now clear that the Japanese had to either crush the Australians quickly and force their way through or… or, he wasn’t sure what. Failure to achieve the objective had never even been considered. There was nothing for it but to get his men off the ships as quickly as possible and move them up the track. As to his own means of transport, well, that was being unloaded before his eyes—a superb white stallion that he had brought all the way from Japan and which had become his signature with the troops.