Kokoda (51 page)

By putting it all together, Osmar White was able to report to his readers at the
Sun Pictorial
: ‘Gradually the picture of what is happening sorts itself out. All through these hills are two weaving crescents of men seeking out another to kill—blind, trying to achieve invisibility, silence of movement. Sometimes forces come on one another and open fire at ten or twenty yard range or travel parallel below a knife-edge on either side of it, tossing grenades at one another. Uncanny.’
²⁰⁶

The reporters moved on and soon came upon the man they recognised from their time back at Moresby as Major Cameron, the officer who had been responsible for sending the three companies out to retake Kokoda, and who had now been sent to the rear by Potts to set up a possible next position for Brigade Headquarters.

Wilmot later described Cameron in this moment as, ‘Calm, pale with exhaustion, with a bright aware look in his eyes. Up the hillside is a long procession of carriers and stretchers. The machine guns are still going, you can see the tree-tops flutter. The major asks where we’re going. We tell him.

‘“Well you can’t go. The Japs have just done it up. They’re coming round behind our fellows, swarms of them. There’s no good you can do. You’ll only be in the way.”

‘The private puts it even better: “Better scram. Little shits are all over the place, they love mist and rain.”’
²⁰⁷

A little more uncertainly now, the two journalists
still
kept moving forward.

At Brigade Headquarters at Alola, Honner and Potts looked closely at the situation. Though they had done well to this point to hold off the Japanese on the western ridge at Isurava, and now at the Isurava Rest House—where the Australian forces were once again being pressed on all sides—it was clear that they would be unlikely to hold out for too much longer. The greatest hammering was falling on, who else, but the 39th’s B Company which was now down to just thirteen men still standing. Joe Dawson, Wally Gratz, Ray Phillips and their mates had been saved by the blokes from A Company and some more from the 2/14th, but it was obvious that if they stayed too much longer they risked destruction.

Not only that, but it was now increasingly apparent that the Japanese would not be bottled for long on the eastern ridge either, where the remnants of the 53rd, and now the 2/16th were posted. The great danger on this flank was that if the Japs pushed on and regained the track at Alola, then the 39th and 2/14th would be cut off from their supply lines and further reinforcements, and be totally isolated.

The only sane thing to do then, much as it went against the grain, was to withdraw themselves further back from Alola, to a yet to be determined point where they could make a fresh stand. At three o’clock on the afternoon of 30 August, then, the order was given to pull out. Potts sent Honner immediately back to help scout out the best holding positions.

It was in the middle of all this, that Chester Wilmot and Osmar White finally arrived to within just a few minutes of their destination, Potts’s Brigade HQ. All was movement and madness. Hurry and hassle. Men moving out. Others wandering around vaguely with vacant eyes, until others gathered them in and sent them in the rough direction of southwards to safety. Follow your nose, Digger, and do your best. The sound of gunfire rolled over them, like unending bursts of dirty thunder. Stretcher case after stretcher case of groaning and bloody men were just starting out on their agonising journey.

‘My belly felt like lead,’ White later wrote of his emotions as he looked around him. ‘I had passed being afraid that a bullet would come out of the leaves and account for me; but I was deadly weary and discouraged—appalled by the sense of being a partisan spectator to a disaster. Also, I felt lonely. Everyone else had a job to do with his hands and his fortitude—except me. My only job was to watch, and nobody cared the price of a matchbox in hell whether I watched or not.’
²⁰⁸

After having come all this way, both journalists were keen to make contact with Brigadier Potts and get his appraisal of the situation, but under the circumstances it was out of the question. Potts was too busy to deal with the press, and it was another senior officer who
ordered
them to turn around and get out. With the sound of the guns moving closer even in the short time they had been there, they did not have to be told twice.

Up at the battlefront at the Isurava Rest House, the situation was grim and getting grimmer by the minute as the Japanese now pressed on all sides.

When, like Butch Bisset, another young bloke had taken a burst of machine-gun fire in the guts it had fallen to Lieutenant Gough Garland and Private Merv Brown to look after him. One look at him and they knew he wouldn’t have long, even though he was still conscious and slowly reaching for something. What was it? It was a letter that had clearly found its way to the young bloke just before the fighting had started, and which he had not yet had a chance to open. Merv opened it for him now and began to read it to him out loud. It was from the young bloke’s mother, with news of home.

For the rest of his life Merv would wonder whether the young bloke was conscious enough to hear his words of home, or if he was already too far gone. Probably the latter, he feared, but always hoped the former. In any case, the tragic thing was that they had to leave him as they were about to be totally overrun and it was obvious the lad wasn’t going to last long. They took his dog tags, a ring from his finger to return to his family, and moved back…

At 5.00 p.m., with his rearguard in place, Colonel Key had the staff of his Battalion HQ, including Stan Bisset, assembled on the track and were mercifully ready to follow Potts’s orders to pull back when, suddenly out of nowhere, they came under a withering crossfire. The Japanese were firing at them from two directions, while on the other side, some Australian soldiers in the thick forest who weren’t aware precisely where Key’s men were situated, were firing back at the Japs. They were stuck in the middle and it was sheer
murder
.

As men all around screamed and fell to the ground, there was only one way out. That was to dive off the track on the low side and tumble down the steep incline into the thick foliage below. Still the bullets whipped around them as they went. At the bottom they gathered themselves and moved quickly through the foliage to get away. Inevitably all the groups became separated from each other. Stan Bisset found himself with Sergeant Bill Lynn, Warrant Officer Les Tipton and ten other men, of whom three were wounded. As the senior officer, Stan took charge, organising for the able-bodied men to go in shifts helping the injured, while he forged ahead with the swinging bayonet on the end of his rifle enabling them to force a slow passage.

On that same afternoon, the men of the 39th, who had been among the last to safely leave the Rest House position, moved back down the track and joined the throng ‘withdrawing’ from Alola—almost as a point of honour, the word ‘retreat’ was never used in the Australian Army. Of the 464 who had gathered at Deniki just under a month before, there were now only 150 left, the rest dead, missing, wounded or evacuated sick. As the men clambered up the opposite hill they naturally enough all looked back to see what was happening behind. There, just before dusk, they saw that not only had the forward party of the Japanese taken possession of Alola, but they had already hauled a Japanese flag up from the tallest house off the main square.

It was a bitter, bitter withdrawal, perhaps most of all for the surviving men of the 2/14th. In just four days action at Isurava they had lost more men—forty-eight killed and 150 wounded, with another forty-four cut off and somewhere in the jungle—than in their entire time in the Middle East. Tragically, Colonel Key was among those who would never regain the battalion lines. In the quiet view of the 39th, many of the 2/14th were simply too courageous for their own good, as they were always wanting to stand and fight, whereas from their own experience the men knew that in this kind of environment, striking from the shadows was everything.

Despite the heavy price in blood he had extracted from the newcomers, General Horii was far from rejoicing, for his own price was heavier still. In the course of the previous five days of action at Isurava he had lost at least two thousand frontline troops to death or injury. Having previously planned on a mere ten-day march to Port Moresby, the combination of these severe casualties and the lost time was devastating. The Japanese supplies of ammunition were running low and, even more crucially, their food was running out.
How
had the Australians done this to them? His intelligence maintained that the white devils were outnumbered by at least six to one, they were completely outgunned, with no heavy artillery, and they had at their core completely exhausted men who had been in action for some weeks. Yet somehow they had refused to give in…

Out in the jungle, pushing through what the natives called the ‘BIKNAIT’, the ‘big night’ of the wee hours, even though his men begged him to slow down, bloody Bisset wouldn’t. As he explained to them, in one of the two five-minute rest periods he allowed, it was a matter of urgency that they got out of this jungle as quickly as possible, both because the longer they were in there the more they would be debilitated by hunger, dysentery, malaria and all the rest, and because he was keenly aware that their firepower would be urgently needed by the rest as the Japanese kept pushing hard upon them…

All up, Stan knew their best chance was to get ahead of the Japs in their advance along on the track and come out somewhere behind the Australian lines. There was still a rough chance that Alola was in Australian hands, and it was most urgent they get to it as soon as possible before that situation changed.

Stan missed Butch. But he kept going, steering by the sight of the mighty Southern Cross, and constantly consulting his memory of the mud-map he had previously constructed, comparing it to the terrain he was covering. Nearing dawn, Stan figured he was close to Alola and so, leaving the men behind to rest, he and Les Tipton very carefully started to climb up towards the track to see if the Australians or—as he suspected—the Japanese were in control.

The thin whisper of voices carried to them through the thin jungle air. Australian or Japanese? They crept closer, and then closer still. Bugger it. Bloody Japs. Still they crept forward, until they could see about sixty of the brutes lolling around the ammunition dump.

Stan had a very tough decision. They had four grenades between them, and if they lobbed them among the Japs they would be guaranteed to take out as many as ten at once, as well as perhaps wounding the same number. If they got lucky and the grenades set off some or all of the ammo, then it would be Christmas Day and cracker night all in one.

But, disappointing as it was, after reflecting on it for all of five minutes as they lay there, Stan was in no doubt what the correct decision was. His duty lay in successfully guiding the dozen men in his group, including the three wounded, back to Australian lines. If they threw the grenades it would be tantamount to signing the death warrant of the wounded Australians as they just wouldn’t be able to get away from the patrols the Japanese would be sure to send out after them.

‘No,’ he said slowly and reluctantly to Les. ‘We can’t do it. Let’s get back to the men.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FALLING BACK

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew,

To serve your turn, long after you are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you,

Except the will which says to them, hold on…

Rudyard Kipling, ‘
If’

When some individuals laid down their lives on the Kokoda Trail, therefore, they did not have the fame of ‘Isurava’, or ‘Brigade Hill’ or ‘Imita Ridge’ to add immediate substance to their action but, in all this, they may have died in a most furious fight at an isolated place that has no real name.

Peter Brune,
A Bastard of a Place
²⁰⁹

Back on the track, the bloody track, the survivors of the 2/14th, 2/16th and 39th, and to a far lesser extent the 53rd, were in the process of staging a series of rearguard actions, essentially leapfrogging each other in reverse. Each battalion would move back, dig into a defensive position and allow the other battalions to move safely through them to dig into their own positions a little further back again. And then they would do it again. In this manner all forward elements of the pursuing Japanese were met by Australian soldiers in entrenched positions, further slowing their thrust and, most crucially, allowing the many Australian wounded some time to move back without falling into the Japanese clutches.

And of those wounded there were regrettably many. They were walking, crawling and being carried towards the nearest medical facility at Eora Creek, ten miles back from Alola over treacherous, rugged country. From Eora, the only way back was the way they had come in, back along the track all the way to Ower’s Corner.

The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels continued to do wonderful work in saving the Diggers as they hauled them back towards safety. Many, true, had broken down under the strain, despite the tender ministrations of Doc Vernon who had himself been working on them day and night. And some had indeed deserted, sick of the neverending work and keen to get back to their villages to see their own families and protect them in this ‘TIME NOGUT’, ‘time of turmoil’.