Kokoda (42 page)

And the Japanese soldiers sang too, around their own campfires, one of their favourite songs, ‘
Nankai Dayori
’, which, translated as ‘Tidings from the South Seas’.

Sekido toppa sakigake wa

Shikoku kenji no waga shitai.

Toku hanarete, nankai no.

New Britain wa Rabaul ni.

Hinnomaru san ni hirugaeru.

First to cross the Equator,

Our unit of vigorous youth from Shikoku.

Far from home, in the South Seas,

The Rising Sun flag fluttering brightly,

Over Rabaul, New Britain.

Like a maiden’s breast,

Rising kindly over the gulf,

The fiery volcano beckons.

The pure hearts of young brave men

Think of the smoke of their homeland.

Just below the Equator

We are under the Southern Cross.

The warrior’s blood runs hot

As the Rising Sun flag advances.

Ahead the enemy pleads for his life under a white flag.

A brisk divine breeze blowing

Towards Australia at the limit of the south.

The ultimate place to reach.

The dawn of a new world,

Not quickly but faintly.
¹⁶²

The wetness was the worry. Apart from the rain and the sweat from physical exertion, Damien Parer also had the remains of a malarial fever, meaning he was completely drenched all of the time. On its own that would have still been manageable, but as always Damien’s great fear was that the film in his pack would suffer. First, last, and always, that film had to be protected because if it was ruined, he was wasting his time. In an effort to give the film some protection, Damien took off his hat and got Ossie to put it between his shirt and his backpack, as a rough kind of buffer. Maybe it would help a little.

Despite such measures, both Chester Wilmot and Ossie White insisted on taking turns to help carry Damien’s gear, including his heavy tripod, despite his vehement protestations. Not that the thickset Chester Wilmot was himself travelling much better. Way back in Melbourne University days, he had been athletic enough to be the 120-Yard High Hurdles champion, but those days were long gone.
¹⁶³
Now, taking in huge draughts of air with nearly every stride, Chester was like a Puffing Billy, perpetually straining up the steep inclines which always, almost, very nearly, defeated him, before he would… finally…
finally
… gain a summit and then charge down the other side. Then the whole thing would be repeated again. What he most resented was that every step down would inevitably soon have to be paid for with another wretched step
up
, and in his mind he was just like the Sisyphus of ancient Greek mythology, who was condemned to perpetually push a rock to a hilltop, only to see it roll back at once to the bottom. If there was one small consolation in Chester’s suffering, it was that he would hopefully lose some of the spare tyres around his middle which his beloved pregnant wife, Edith, was always gently badgering him to lose. Somehow though, he doubted they would go. Even in the siege of Tobruk, when he had been perpetually hungry for months, he had only lost one notch on his belt, and there was no sign that things were going to be better this time. With Ossie and Damien, he pressed on, with only Ossie—who had long engaged in rock climbing as a hobby—managing the slopes with anything approaching equanimity.

Finally, after a long and arduous journey, and now half a day ahead of the first of his troops, Brigadier Arnold Potts—together with an advance party that now included the Intelligence Officer of the 2/14th, Stan Bisset, whom he had picked up on the way through— hauled himself over the lip of the last hill protecting the vision of Myola below. He stood, then paused. For while there was Myola sure enough, where were the huge mounds of supplies that should have been visible from this distance? If two planeloads a day had indeed been flown in for the last week, where was the evidence of it? He scanned, and scanned again, but all he could see was the precious flat ground of Myola as promised—with the thickly wooded valley walls rising sharply on both sides—and a few Australian Army personnel mooching around, but nothing,
nothing
in the way of a depot bursting at the seams and getting ready to be unloaded to the hungry army that was just around the corner. Hoping against hope, Potts descended to the flats below, praying he was the one making a mistake, only to be told the terrible news.

Despite the promises of Morris, the supplies hadn’t been delivered. The transport planes had been bombed at Seven Mile Airfield on 17 August, and alternative arrangements had not yet been made. There had not been a single can of bully beef dropped since the successful Japanese bombing. Things were so disorganised that the ordnance officers at Myola had not even been informed that a thousand men were soon to descend upon them. In the whole place there was only enough food to keep the 2/14th and 2/16th going for five days, not the twenty-five days that Potts had requested and that Morris had promised.

To hasten fresh supplies being flown in, Potts sent messages back to Port Moresby, with a tone of demand just as strong as the stiffness of military language would allow when expressing a grievance to superior officers. There were not sufficient supplies here. They needed them urgently, Suh!

Given the situation, the only way they could manage in the short term would be to hold the 2/16th a little further down the track at the village of Efogi, while bringing the 2/14th on to Myola, and keeping them there until enough supplies arrived—for it would be nothing less than suicide to send a large number of men without sufficient food or ammunition into the teeth of the enemy.

Honner would just have to hold the Japanese a little longer, though Potts himself decided to push on, with Stan Bisset beside him, through the brutal section to Templeton’s Crossing and onwards again to Alola the following day. Not being of the MacArthur school of military leadership, Potts intended to go to the frontline of Isurava himself to confer with Honner.

In the meantime, the first of the men of the 2/14th had staggered into the Myola supply depot. After having the weight of their world on their shoulders for the last five days, the majority of them simply dropped their rucksacks as soon as they arrived, and dropped beside them a moment afterwards.

If, a week earlier, Ralph Honner had been staggered by the weak physical condition of the men of the 39th, then so too was Brigadier Arnold Potts when he got through to Isurava on 23 August, though perhaps more so. What most impressed Potts, though, was the 39th’s extraordinarily high level of morale and courage under the circumstances, and he was, as author Raymond Paull described it, ‘heartened afresh by the spectacle of hollow cheeks and thin lips drawn back in a cheerful grin of appreciation for what “the bloody Nips will cop now!”’
¹⁶⁴

Satisfied that Honner had the situation at Isurava under control in the short term, Potts fell back to the village of Alola, a couple of hours south, where his Brigade Headquarters had been set up by Stan Bisset—who had also set up a bivouac area for the 2/14th just forward of Alola, ready for when they arrived. (Finding a suitable bivouac area was not as easy as it sounded, as along the track it was always difficult to locate a substantially flat place large enough to accommodate several companies of soldiers. Most of the land was on either too steep an incline, or too thickly covered in vegetation. Usually the only solution was to find a spot near a summit, where the track occasionally eased into something roughly approaching flatness.)

That night Potts and Bisset discussed at length the logistics of launching their major offensive against the Japs, as they had been ordered to do. It had become apparent that it was not feasible to follow these orders until all their troops were in place and their supply situation had stabilised, but both still felt confident that they would be ready for serious action from the first days of September. One of the many tasks Potts set Bisset was to use his knowledge of the local topography and skills in intelligence to continue the construction of a ‘mud model’ of the surrounding ranges and rivers. The map had already been started by the recently relieved commander of the 39th, Major Cameron, who had now been installed in Potts’s Brigade Headquarters as a liaison officer. Potts was keen that it be finished so that as many of the shortly arriving troops as possible would not be fighting blind, but would have some idea of the lie of the land, and how best their overall objectives could be achieved.

Here, Stan Bisset was in his element, and with the aid of a lantern he had a look at how the model looked at this point. Already you could see the rough contours of the land as Cameron had set it out.

The Yodda Valley, with the Kokoda airfield squarely in the middle of it, ran from north to south. Eora Creek, which began up around Myola and gathered strength as it flowed down into the valley, ran just to the east of that airfield. On the western ridge of the valley stood Isurava, while on the other ridge perched the town of Abuari. The men of the 39th were assigned to defend Isurava, while the 53rd—still grumbling!—had taken over Abuari. While it seemed that the Japanese were concentrating most of their forces on the main track, which went through Isurava, there remained a great danger that they would push through Abuari and all the way to Alola, in which case the 39th would have its supply line cut and be isolated. As a precaution against the Japanese trying a circling movement to cut them off and isolate them on a tributary track, the 2/16th battalion, when it arrived, would be sent down the western side of the valley to bolster the 53rd. The job of the 2/14th would be to act in relief of the 39th at Isurava and, if all went well, it could stick to the plan of launching an all-out attack on the Japanese on 1 September, and begin to push them back to the sea.

Meanwhile, in his own Brigade Headquarters some three miles to the north, the Commanding Officer of the South Seas Detachment, General Tomitaro Horii, was making his own plans—and he wasn’t waiting till September to attack the Australians. Horii was a military officer who liked to remain near the frontline, where he could react quickly to the changing situation, and he was a distinctive figure to his frontline men because of it, not least because he was always recognisable riding his white horse. Many of his men had marvelled at how Horii had managed to get his horse up some parts of the track, which were practically vertical, but they marvelled more at having such a distinctive leader. Streaks of individualism and personal flair were not only not encouraged in the Japanese Army, they were practically non-existent, and yet somehow this squat little man with his trademark owl spectacles and grey hair had managed to get away with it.

For all his natural vitality, however, Horii was already exhausted. Over the previous fortnight he had been massing his troops—no fewer than five battalions, totalling six thousand frontline warriors, together with specialist units of engineers and mountain artillery on the approaches to Isurava—conscious that this was a crucial battle where the result of the whole campaign might well be told. There can be little doubt that had Horii known at that time that the only force stopping his men at Isurava was just four hundred weakened and exhausted Australians—with the main force still a long way back—he would have made his attack immediately; but so strong had been the resistance put up by the 39th so far, he, in fact, thought there were at least five times that number dug in.

Clearly he was going to need more men to force the passage through to Port Moresby. The Australians to this point had been providing far more resistance than he had ever expected, the more so because from the bodies of the dead Australian soldiers it was apparent that they were only
boys
. How was it that they were doing so much damage? There was nothing for it but to push on, harder than before, and with so much overwhelming force that the Australians would simply have to crack. Grim-faced, Horii continued his preparations for the assault he had planned, but was heartened by the information he had just received from Tokyo that the Australians would soon find themselves obliged to defend Port Moresby from
another
front in New Guinea, with any luck distracting their focus from stopping him and his men.

It remained the waiting that was the most wearing. Around the entrenched positions of the Australian soldiers at Isurava, the rainforest brooded, malevolent in its silence. Now experienced in the ways of the Japanese, the men of the 39th were aware that every dark recess could hide soldiers even then moving to slit their throats, every tree was a possible platform for a sniper, every bush possibly a carefully camouflaged killer about to take them down. It was the way of this campaign. Not being able to see the Japs anywhere meant that you inevitably saw them
everywhere
. So the Australians waited, silent as the grave, as hidden as moss on lichen. No easy targets, these blokes. If the Japs wanted to know their exact positions, it was
they
who would have to expose themselves by firing first, and thus they who would cop the first well-aimed shots.