Kokoda (47 page)

A small parenthesis here. There were other surprising bursts of humanity from the Japanese enemy, even amid all the carnage. One that had come to Osmar White’s attention, which had occurred early in the campaign, was when a Digger with a broken ankle was being carried on a stretcher through a large patch of kunai grass at the bottom of a gorge, and a Japanese plane had suddenly appeared from nowhere. The two natives, fearing the murderous machine-gun fire that was surely to come, fled for their lives, leaving the Digger powerless to do anything but lie on the stretcher looking straight up at the man who was about to kill him.

‘But,’ as White would write, ‘the Jap… merely leaned out of his seat, waved and left.’
¹⁸⁷

Close parenthesis.

The sickly sweet smell of human flesh burning is unmistakable. This far into the Kokoda campaign the Australian soldiers knew that the smell came from the Japanese practice of burning their dead so that the ashes could be transported home. The difference on this afternoon was that the Australians had three-inch mortars that had been brought forward by the 2/14th. Up on the perimeter held by B Company, the men could clearly see smoke rising further up the hill, and the smell of the human flesh told them it was a funeral pyre. It was too good an opportunity to miss. This was no time to respect the Japanese dead, this was time to add to their number.
¹⁸⁸

B Company commander, Lieutenant French, had much experience with mortars and he knew exactly what he was doing as he gave the men operating them precise ranges and angles. And… FIRE! Screams coming from the direction of the smoke told them they had been precisely on target, so they quickly lobbed three more mortars at exactly the same range, just for good measure. Now build a
bigger
fire, you bastards.

Alas, at much the same time, on the opposite ridge, it was the Australians of the 53rd Battalion who were being killed by the rampant Japanese. Those killed included the 53rd’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel K. H. Ward. Now leaderless, and with neither morale nor even the bare basics of esprit de corps, much of the 53rd did not resist for long when the Japanese launched their main thrust along the parallel ridge line to Isurava. First one man shot through like a Bondi tram and then a couple of others quickly followed suit, running from their dangerous possies down to the comparative safety below the ridge, and it didn’t take long before they were joined by a lot more.

The situation was now critical, as the Japanese pushed to within two miles of Alola, and then mysteriously stopped. Although Alola was practically defenceless, as the 2/16th had not yet arrived, the Japanese—not knowing this—dug in at Abuari, and only then began sending out patrols to reconnoitre the country ahead. Complete disaster for the Australians had been narrowly averted by this failure of Japanese strategy.

In all the world, there was surely no stiffness like it. It was the stiffness of one who had gone to sleep wet in a foxhole, partially submerged in mud and filth and water, and then at dawn begun to move his limbs for the first time in many hours. And while breakfast was only sometimes an option, the least the defenders of Isurava could do was ensure that they weren’t personally providing breakfast for the many leeches that had settled on them overnight. A key part of the first minutes of the early morning was to put a lit cigarette onto the leeches until they dropped off. Such was life in the trenches.

And such was death…

At the first rays of the sun on 28 August, every Japanese mountain gun, every mortar and every heavy machine gun began to again pour withering fire upon the valiant defenders of Isurava, achieving several direct hits. One second a man was a living, breathing Digger— a body who Australia ‘
bore, shaped, made aware. Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam
’—and the next, after the whistle of the approaching missile achieved a crescendo never heard before… the man was blown apart. The survivors kept firing, perhaps glancing at the torn remains of the body of their mate just three yards away, but firing as if their own life depended on it, because it
did.
There was rarely time for grief, or even shock—that would come later. It was not that another’s life was cheap, it was that your own life was precious, and all realised instinctively that in the thick of battle feelings of grief and shock were luxuries you just couldn’t afford if you were to survive.

Never in the battle of Isurava so far had the firing on the Australians been so intense as on this morning, as Horii went all out for the knockout blow. And never, once the firing ceased, were the waves of Japanese soldiers coming at them so thickly bunched and committed. A seeming unending tide of them emerged from the jungle…

From Divisional HQ in Port Moresby, General Tubby Allen sent a message to Brigadier Potts in the middle of that morning of 28 August, even as carnage and catastrophe were being just kept at bay around the entire perimeter of Isurava: ‘28 Aug, Allen to Potts. Reports indicate that your patrols are static. Would not fluid fighting patrols with an ambush as a rallying point be better and could not small fighting patrols lure enemy into such ambush?
¹⁸⁹

Now why didn’t they think of that!

With respect to Tubby, it seemed extraordinary to Potts that Divisional HQ could be so presumptuous as to think that, from a distance so far away, they could
still
have a better strategic understanding of what was required than the leadership on the spot.

For the defenders of Isurava, however, all such wrangling between their senior officers was neither here nor there as they continued to keep up a steady stream of fire to beat the beggars back. In the Australian trenches, it was simply load and re-fire, load and re-fire, load and re-fire, as the Bren and Tommy guns kept chattering. The key was to ensure that while one gun was in the reloading process, the other guns around it would cover for it and that no matter what,
no matter what
, the oncoming Japanese soldiers would be met by an unending storm of bullets.

The imperative was for the man alongside to grab the gun from a dead man’s hands, pick it up and fire it himself. Any Japanese soldier that made it through to the Australian lines was dealt with by bayonet, rifle-butt or whatever came to hand, even if it was only your fists themselves.

With any less ferocity, the Australians would have been overrun in minutes and, as the morning of the 28th whistled on, the piles of Japanese soldiers became progressively thicker on the jungle perimeter. Was there no end to them? How long could the Japs keep this up?

The answer: a long time. In this full cry of battle, the Japanese were in a kind of frenzy unknown to their western counterparts. This was what years of training, of praying, of being inculcated with the belief that their highest calling was to die in the service of the Emperor had prepared them for.

One of the soldiers there at Isurava, Toshiya Akizawa, later told Australian film-maker Patrick Lindsay:

‘You need a special kind of courage. When you draw your sword and point it forward like that, this is a display of your own courage as well as a signal to the men. It doesn’t just mean right we are going to attack now. In a sense it is a signal but also is deeply linked to your personality and courage. It is like in music when the conductor raises the baton to the orchestra. Instead of raising the baton though, you draw your sword and say “Charge!”. You give the order. Obviously you are not trying to cut the opponent. It is in order to get everybody out and into the attack.

‘I remember that all my junior officers, my NCOs and most of my men lost their lives. All we could do was leave the place we were in and attack up the hill. And we were being told from behind. Attack! Attack! So there was no courage. Just without thinking, we attacked and attacked and attacked… ’
¹⁹⁰

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

GUMPTION, GUTS AND GLORY

I remember that an Australian soldier, wearing just a pair of shorts and stripped to the waist, came around and towards us, throwing hand grenades at us. And I remember thinking at the time that this was something that would have been very hard for a Japanese soldier to do… I suppose the Australians had a different motivation for fighting but this soldier, this warrior, was far braver than any in Japan I think and when I think about it now it still affects me…

Private Shigenori Doi, 144th Regiment
¹⁹¹

Much was lacking in New Guinea, but the greatest shortage of all was information about the enemy… General Headquarters believed we were up against a handful of Japanese… In reality we faced a well-trained force of greatly superior strength; yet as late as 7 September MacArthur was insisting to the Prime Minister [Curtin] that we were stronger than the enemy…

General Sir Sydney F. Rowell
¹⁹²

Finally, Damien Parer, Chester Wilmot and Osmar White hauled themselves to the top of a particularly brutal hill overlooking the Eora Creek encampment, just ten miles from Isurava, and saw a scene that would never leave them. There below, on a small plateau about fifty yards wide by a hundred yards long, was a large dam of mud, on which floated six haphazard huts, all of which looked like they might sink beneath the muck at any moment. Around the huts were hundreds of mud-men emerging from the shins up: Australian soldiers covered from head to toe in the slush that they had been living, sleeping and, in many cases, dying in, in this God-forsaken settlement. On the edge of the settlement were hundreds of panting porters, lying like exhausted and beaten greyhounds after a long race, who with their last ounces of energy were picking at little balls of muddy rice that they were holding in equally muddy banana leaves.

Despite the obvious fatigue of the soldiers, as White soon discovered, there was frenetic activity going on inside the huts, where army surgeons and medical orderlies were working in atrocious conditions trying to save lives that were hanging by a thread.

Their operating tables were stretchers. Their instruments were being sterilised in a biscuit tin suspended by a piece of wire above a small fire.
¹⁹³
In all, it provided exactly the kind of graphic war footage that Parer sought most and he decided to stay at Eora for the moment, slow down the shutter speed to compensate for the dim light, and capture it all while he could. After a brief rest, Wilmot and White moved forward towards Isurava, which they were told was the frontline.

In the principal Japanese field hospital back at Kokoda, which held many of the wounded and seriously sick Japanese soldiers from the actions at Oivi, Wairopi, Gorari, Kokoda and Isurava, things were even more grim. Takida Kenji, a Japanese officer, who saw it, later described it in this manner:

‘On the other side [of the river], a one-metre high wooden sign read in black ink, “Field Hospital Entrance”. Lined up on the nearby embankment were countless white sapling grave markers. I passed through and discovered a field hospital in the midst of the jungle. Inside, numerous small wards were lined up like pig-sties. Each was constructed from thick poles with low ceilings. The blackened rotten banana leaves that formed the roof were constantly dripping. The injured and sick were packed in like sardines.

‘On the floor were spread green leaves or thin saplings. There were no blankets. The patients lay strewn in their blood-stained, blackened uniforms. Large drops of water fell on their pale faces from the leaves of the surrounding trees. However, they didn’t even have the energy to avoid them. They were also tormented from the pain of their injuries, or distressed by high fever. Were they praying for life? Or just waiting for death? Some several hundred of these inmates were probably embraced by unbearable torment. The hospital, where not a word was uttered, had sunk to the pit of a deathly silence.’
¹⁹⁴

At high noon on 28 August, the last of the 2/14th Battalion—A Company and Headquarters Company—arrived at Isurava, and with them came Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Key, their commanding officer. Now that the 2/14th was fully in place, they had planned to withdraw the entire 39th Battalion to safety, but Colonel Honner demurred to Key.

Honner pointed out how precarious the situation was; how there was no sign of Japanese withdrawal, and insisted that the 39th not leave Isurava, but instead stand and fight with their brothers of the AIF. It was a time when everyone who could still wield a gun would be needed to stem the attack of the large force of Japanese.
¹⁹⁵
Lieutenant Colonel Key gratefully accepted and together they persuaded Potts back at Alola that this was the only wise decision possible.

It was surely not too difficult a conclusion to come to. For though in one sense the battle was now evenly poised, with the undefeated troops of General Tomitaro Horii’s South Seas Force going up against the equally undefeated 2/14th, that did not tell the whole story. Despite the arrival of the 2/14th, the Australians were still vastly outnumbered. In their own battalion they had some 546 active soldiers capable of wielding a weapon, while against them were no fewer than six Japanese regiments, each boasting some eight hundred highly trained soldiers. Potts, Honner and Key were not aware that there were six regiments against them, but they did know that there were so many soldiers that the Japanese could send waves of a hundred men at a time seemingly without fear of running out of men.