Kokoda (57 page)

But at the instant that the metal of the gun touched the metal of his helmet, Corporal Nishimura suddenly became aware that something was amiss and jumped up, just a split second before the bullets came tearing out of the barrel. Though the helmet was blown from his head peppered with holes, his cranium was untouched— it was his right shoulder which took two bullets.

It was do or die, and the Japanese soldier and the startled Australian—who had been expecting an easy kill, but was now faced with a fight to the death—soon came to grips. The Japanese corporal was gushing blood from his wounds, but soon had the bayonet free from his belt and stabbed the Australian. Instead of sliding smoothly into his stomach, however, the point of the bayonet stopped only a little way below the surface as it had hit a rib. The Australian groaned, and kicked the smaller man in the stomach. Sensing that his only chance was to close quickly on the Australian soldier—and so deny him the chance of getting off more shots— Nishimura grabbed the larger man in a massive bear hug. In the groaning, grunting melee that soon developed, the Japanese man managed to get the bayonet of the Australian free with his good left hand and arm, and satisfactorily plunge it several times into his torso.

The Australian, his strange round eyes suddenly getting rounder and bigger, groaned and fell to the ground in the soft twilight, just a few moments before the Japanese man did the same. The rest of the battle had moved well beyond the two now, and they were alone.

They both lay there for some time, each trying to garner the strength to finish the other off. Both had lost a lot of blood, and were losing more. Every so often the Australian soldier would lift his head up to look balefully at his Japanese opponent, before he would then lay it back down, exhausted. The Japanese corporal would do much the same. On several occasions when it looked like the Australian had mustered the strength to rise, the Japanese man also would start to get up… but then sink back down in tandem with his enemy. So it went, all night long until, when the sun finally came up, Nishimura looked over to see that the Australian soldier was dead. Corporal Nishimura was alone. Seriously weakened by his fight with the Australian, he used his remaining strength to secrete himself inside a hollow log, in the hope that his own forces would get to him before the Australians did.

(The earlier experience of Jack Manol, a private of the 39th Battalion, had been entirely the reverse. Pushing through the long kunai grass to be found on the northern slopes of the Owen Stanleys, he had suddenly found himself face to face with a Japanese officer. Each was as startled and scared as the other and there was a split second before each reacted by bringing their weapons to bear. The Victorian managed it just an instant quicker, and fired, drilling the Japanese officer neatly through the heart. He fell dead at Jack’s feet. Shaking with the emotion of it, the Australian soldier nevertheless did what he had been trained to do, which was to go through the dead man’s pockets, looking for anything that might be of value to military intelligence. There was something, a waxen piece of paper which he retrieved from an inside pocket. Jack turned it over. It was a photo of the officer, clearly back at home in Japan, with his lovely wife and three beautiful, smiling, healthy young children. The perfect family snapshot. Jack wept. Yes, it was ‘him or me’, and the Japanese officer would have done exactly the same to him if he’d had a chance, but it did not make it any easier to bear.)
²³⁶

Chester Wilmot was disgusted. The report he had penned for the ABC on 7 September, had now returned from the chief censor. Everything that lauded the valour of the Australians had survived all right, but the whole section that had criticised the military administration had enormous slashes of big black pencil through it. ‘Not to be broadcast.’ Apparently the authorities had decided that it was a matter of national importance that their own ineptitude had to remain a secret. Censored. Chester Wilmot was
disgusted
.

On the alternative track to Menari, the 2/14th had come to a halt in the pitch black as it was impossible to continue. There, Captain Phil Rhoden faced his men—just 150 of whom were left of the 550 who had set out less than a month ago—and made the finest speech Stan Bisset had ever heard.

Rhoden, a former school captain of Melbourne Grammar, as well as captain of the football team and the cricket First XI, had always had a facility for inspiring oratory, but on this occasion he outdid himself, trying to point out that, though they had already accomplished great things, it would all count for nothing unless they went on with it. By the light of a small lantern, Captain Rhoden spoke to the grim-faced men huddled close, here in the back of beyond.

‘I know it’s been hard,’ he said, ‘almost harder than we can bear. But we must think of what we’ve achieved, and know that even though we’ve been heavily outnumbered we’ve taken down a lot more Japs, a
lot
more, than he has taken of us. I know that we have been devastated by the losses of so many of our close comrades, but I want each and every one of you to think what they would want of us if only they could speak to us from the grave. They would want us to finish the job they died for. They would want us to keep at the Japs, keep ourselves between them and Moresby, to help keep their loved ones and our own back in Australia safe. They would want us to never give up, while there was still breath in us and
keep going…
’

At first light on 9 September, the survivors of the 21st Brigade struggled forward, carrying their wounded trying to get back to Menari. There were no native bearers as they were never expected to stay close to the frontline. Was there no end, no relief from the unending bloody track, some chance to get off it, to rest, to recuperate to have some sweet blessed rest and maybe a cup of tea?

Yes, there was!

For just on the outskirts of Menari the following morning, there were the blessed Salvos again—having successfully moved forward from where Smoky had found them—handing out cigarettes, biscuits, chocolate and a ‘cuppa tea’.
Real
tea! Real ciggies! Genuine Arnott’s Milk Arrowroot biscuits like Mum used to serve! God bless the Salvos…

By late morning of 9 September, as the 2/14th and 2/16th began to make their way into Menari, Brigadier Potts intensified the wrestling with his constant dilemma. Stay or withdraw?

Only shortly after the bulk of the men had arrived, the Japanese were mounting an attack with great force and, though the Australian rearguard was doing well, there was no way they could hold for long. The real problem was that—weighed down by their enormous numbers of injured—the 2/27th Battalion was still out there somewhere on the alternative track, struggling forward. Ideally, Potts wanted to hold till they got there to prevent them being cut off, but within an hour or two the situation had moved well beyond urgent.

Whatever the demands of his military superiors far from the front, it was obvious to Potts that Menari was not ultimately defensible. Like Myola it stood at the bottom of a hill, making it an easy target for the attacking force. Not only that, but when the killed, missing, wounded and those looking after them were taken into the equation, Potts now had only three hundred exhausted men to try and hold an impossible position. Time and again he looked to the track where he hoped the 2/27th would emerge, and every time was frustrated to see no sign. Finally, heavily, he decided that he really did have no choice. After sending out a small patrol to try to make contact with the 2/27th and at least keep them informed, from mid-afternoon on 9 September, Potts moved his available forces back, one more time. The 2/27th would simply have to look after themselves, and get back cross-country. While it was undoubtedly the right decision—and the only sane one possible under the circumstances—Potts’s superiors, who continued to have zero understanding of what the true situation was, were dismayed.

Back at Ower’s Corner, out of the jungle they came, just over 140 strong. The 39th Battalion. Walking. Staggering. Holding each other up. But still with their heads held high. Their clothes were rags, their wounds suppurating, the results of their dysentery all too apparent down the backs of their legs. But they had made it out, and little could dampen their sense of relief and even joy. Not even the fact that the trucks which were meant to have been waiting for them at Ilolo were not there as they had been shanghaied to help with the more urgent matter of bringing fresh troops up from the dock. No matter. After everything they had been through, this was as nothing, and they simply kept going towards the plantation at Koitaki—about five miles from Ower’s Corner—where they were due to recover, wash, sleep, eat and receive medical treatment until such times as they could be thrown back into the fray. After marching five miles down the road—a real
road
!—they passed one of the fresh companies of the AIF newly arrived 25th Brigade marching the other way.

The fresh company stopped immediately on catching sight of the 39th and stared. God help us all. Just what kind of battle were they going into, when the survivors looked like
this.

The 39th marched on, their trip at least alleviated a little when, a short time afterwards, a bloke on a supply truck grinding up the hill took pity on them and started throwing out fresh loaves of bread at them. The soldiers fell on them like starving vultures on lost baby ducks. In thirty seconds flat, all of the bread—the first most of them had eaten in well over two months—was gone. That night for equally the first time in many, many weeks, the men could sleep through in relative warmth, uninterrupted, without fearing that the creak of every branch was the possible harbinger of their death. And also, for the first time, they now had the luxury of being able to feel and to grieve. For although among the men there was a great sense of relief that they had survived to this point, this was mixed with a heavy consciousness of just how many of their comrades and dear friends they had lost. It was by no means something constantly referred to—for if they talked of the tragic deaths of their friends, they would have talked of nothing else—it was just a look that would come into a bloke’s eyes before he suddenly looked away, and you instinctively knew that he was thinking of a bloke, and a bullet, and what had happened. With Wally and Ray beside him, Joe Dawson set to, trying to recover.

Like all of them, almost the worst of it was when he peeled his boots off for the first time in many weeks. Up in the mountains, against the Japs, you simply never took your boots off because you’d be unlikely to get them back on again. It wasn’t as if you had a change of socks anyway—although a few blokes, admittedly, had cut off the sleeves of their jumpers to fashion them into makeshift socks—and it was only sensible to sleep with your boots on at night, knowing you might see action at any instant. Not surprisingly, when Joe peeled his boots off, it seemed like nearly half his feet came with them. The only reason there were no blisters was that there was pretty much no skin left to be blistered. Instead, his feet were simply a putrescent mass of white flesh covered in outbursts of outrage that the medical orderlies called ‘boils’ for want of a better term. One bloke’s right foot was so bad he could put his entire index finger in the hole at the top of his foot, right through to his instep.

At least helping Joe recover a little was a parcel from home which got through in the mail, filled with a fruitcake, biscuits, razors, coffee and cigarettes, sent jointly by his mother and his girlfriend, Elaine.

There was, alas, no such fruitcake waiting for Smoky Howson. Only shortly after getting back with the 39th to Koitaki and, in the blessed Mess Hall for lunch, he decided he’d like another piece of cake. The bloke doling the cake out looked at him quizzically and then, with some irritation, said: ‘You’ve
had
a bloody piece haven’t you?’ Dismissed. If Smoky had a gun he would have shot the bastard in the guts, just to see him squirm, dinkum he would have.
‘You’ve had a bloody piece haven’t you?’
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After everything he’d been through! Jesus Christ Almighty.

And he
was
hungry, no joke. As soon as the medical orderlies got a good look at him he was admitted straight to hospital, and one of the first things they’d done was to weigh him, so they would know what their starting point for his recovery was. Bloody hell. In his admission papers to the army Smoky had weighed twelve stone seven pounds. Now, after just nine weeks out on the track, he was down to seven stone five pounds, nothing more than skin and bone, and clearly a very big heart.

Being in hospital was good and all, but Smoky couldn’t help but constantly think about the Japs, who he was sure must be coming closer all the time…

Up in the Owen Stanleys, there were indeed still hundreds of soldiers facing the might of the Japanese guns as they tried to hold them back. Even further away over the ranges, isolated pockets of Australian soldiers who had either been wounded or—like the 2/27th—cut off, were with great difficulty making their way overland.

One small group of these included Corporal J. A. Metson, with the bullet in his ankle, who was
still
crawling his way back. Every morning the married 27-year-old set off even before dawn, a good hour before the main party he was travelling with, and continued until well after they had stopped for the night and he had caught up with them. He refused all offers of help, including those of a few still strong soldiers who offered to piggyback him part of the way. Finally, however, his condition became so weakened, as were several others, that it was decided to leave them in a friendly native village, under the care of a medical orderly who would stay with them.

At dawn, the morning after the decision was taken, those who could go on paraded before those who were to stay, formally presented arms as a show of respect for their courage and self-sacrifice to this point, and headed off into the jungle. Only a few days later, those who were left behind, including the valiant Metson, were killed by a Japanese patrol.