Kokoda (60 page)

In came the always self-important officer in charge of the Signal Corps, carrying a message, which he handed to Major General Horii. It was an order. From Rabaul. They were to abandon their positions, and—because there is no Japanese word for ‘retreat’—
advance to the rear
. As quickly as possible, they were to get back to Buna, where they were to consolidate their position. Almost immediately this order was followed by another, which came from no less than Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo, confirming the previous one. The Emperor himself had commanded that they must turn back.

Horii absorbed it all, without displaying great emotion, as was his way, whatever he might have been feeling inside. And in fact, though it was not known to his troops, Horii had received word three weeks earlier from Imperial Headquarters, that he was
not
to attempt to take Port Moresby until such time as the situation was clearer and there was the possibility of getting reinforcements and bulk supplies to him. Instead, his instructions were to find a suitable defensive position and hold the line there. Horii had selected the ridge of Ioribaiwa, and it was for this reason that he had instructed the men—while not telling them the reason—to construct a kind of log palisade at the top of the hill, across the track, behind which defensive trenches were dug in the rich black soil.

Now, though, the order to pull back from even that position was a moment of sanity from a Japanese military leadership which in recent times had seemed more and more suicidal. The Battle of the Coral Sea had meant that the Japanese had lost control of the sea, and their failed action at Milne Bay had lost them all chance of air superiority. Both factors increased the likelihood that the Allies would mount an attack on the Buna beachhead and it was time to strengthen the defences there and abandon the assault on Moresby, which in any case was being slowly strangled by the impossibility of supplying the forward troops. Compounding it all was that the Japanese already were engaged in a deadly war of attrition at Guadalcanal, and therefore simply did not have the spare soldiers to reinforce Horii, even if they had wanted to. So there really was no choice.

Nevertheless, not all of Horii’s men viewed it that way when the Japanese commander gave the orders to prepare for withdrawal, leaving behind only a rearguard. Having come so far, many of the surviving soldiers and officers wanted to finish the job and achieve the goal of Moresby. Their proposal was to thrust forward now with total commitment, and see if they could not see their mission through,
regardless
of what the orders said. It was a measure of the extremity of the situation that they could even
think
of countermanding the orders of their commanding officer.

One of the Japanese officers also present at the time, Captain Nakahashi, later gave this account. ‘The order came like a bolt from the blue, causing feelings of anger, sorrow and frustration which could not be suppressed. The dreams of the officers and men of the South Seas Force vanished in an instant. Due to problems of transport and the situation at Guadalcanal, the main body of the Force had to withdraw at once. Accompanied by our prayers, our mountain battery fired several rounds at maximum range in the direction of Port Moresby, thereby somewhat uplifting our downcast spirits and those of our dead comrades. In the evening of the 26th September, our withdrawal began.’
²⁵¹

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE TIDE TURNS

Shindoi na!

A Japanese expression that translates to ‘I’m exhausted’

The Jap is a fanatic with subnormal, animal cunning, but our [infantry man] has been more than a match for him. The Digger asks no beg-pardons. He has adapted himself from the heavy-equipment desert war with the Germans to this individual war in the jungle and he has had to learn the hard and bloody way. He has outfought the Jap with the same spirit as he held the Hun at Tobruk, and smashed him at Alamein. The Jap can commit his harikiri for the Emperor and the Imperial Nipponese Empire, but the Digger has fought, and always will fight for his cobbers: for Bluey and Snowy, for Lofty and Stumpy.

Damien Parer, ‘A Cameraman looks at a Digger’
²⁵²

With the bitter decision taken, the Japanese return to their Gona–Sanananda–Buna beachhead and possible safety was frenetic. While the decision to retreat was almost unthinkable, the hardest of all things for their men was to abandon the seriously ill and injured to their fate. To this point General Horii had kept the injured just behind the advancing frontline with the intent that they would receive hospital care as soon as his troops captured Port Moresby. But now that the troops were heading back to the beachhead, the wounded would be a terrible hindrance to their journey back over the mountains.

So, just before the still healthy troops pulled out, many of the sick and dying were given two grenades each, with a clear instruction: the first of these grenades is to be thrown at the enemy when they are so close that you can’t miss. The second is for you, to ensure that you are not taken prisoner. The groaning men understood. This was the way it was, and it was as good a way as any to go out, with one last chance to serve the Emperor. Their healthier comrades left them, many weeping at the bitterness of what they had to do. (Although this was a slightly better fate than some of the wounded had received, with Diggers maintaining that sometimes at night they could hear the moaning of wounded men behind enemy lines just a hundred yards away, which ended when single shots rang out. Presumably, the Japanese killed their own because there simply weren’t the resources to look after or evacuate them in the mayhem of the battle.
²⁵³
)

The Japanese soldiers were bewildered. Where had this all gone so wrong? How had they, the all-conquering members of the 144th Regiment, got themselves into this position? Had they not fought well and bravely? Yes, they had. Had their tactics and strategies not been effective in shifting the dug-in Australians? Absolutely. Had they not outnumbered the Australians in just about every engagement? Yes, indeed. Somehow, though, it really had all gone wrong and there was nothing to do but try to get back to the relative safety of the beachhead and hope that a victory at Guadalcanal would yet see them reinforced and capture Port Moresby.

Sydney Rowell didn’t see this one coming. On the morning of 28 September, just five days after General Blamey had arrived in Port Moresby, the grim, determined look on the military leader’s face was explained shortly after they began their regular morning meeting.

With little ceremony General Blamey told Rowell that he was relieving him of his command, with the firm promise that both John Curtin and General MacArthur would be informed of his inadequacies. Blamey stated that while their current arrangement could have worked if different people had been involved, it simply couldn’t work with an officer of Rowell’s temperament.

It was to be the beginning of a long and brutal stoush between the two and, furious, Rowell boarded a plane for Australia that very night. Rowell retained a good deal of support within the Australian Government, particularly from those who also deplored General Blamey, and he was far from finished. Despite this widespread support, Rowell did not content himself with leaving the denigration of Blamey to others. He was determined to be an active participant, heading off to see MacArthur in Brisbane as soon as the following day to tear Blamey down, and then to Canberra a few days after that to make the same pitch to Prime Minister John Curtin. Though with both gentlemen Rowell had to use a little diplomatic circumspection, in private communications there was no such need and in a letter to another officer shortly after his effective dismissal Rowell wrote, ‘The fight is by no means over and perhaps I can do something to help cut out an evil cancer in the body of the public.’
²⁵⁴

In the short term, Blamey’s presence and total command of the situation in New Guinea had one crucial benefit—for the first time supplies were suddenly plentiful. It had been one thing for Rowell to plead with Land Force Headquarters for more supplies, and quite another when Blamey wanted the same. For the most senior Australian military figure of the day did not plead, he merely ordered, and it came. Ammunition, food, fresh uniforms and boots were suddenly available as never before, at least within the environs of Moresby.

The other apparent benefit was that, in these last days of September 1942, with the Japanese advance stalled at Ioribaiwa, MacArthur decided it was time to throw some Americans into the fray. The oldest battle tactic in American history was to ‘cut ’em off at the pass’ and that was precisely what MacArthur intended to do on this occasion with the men of the 126th US Infantry Regiment. From the information available on his map, it all looked pretty simple.

The plan was that while the Australians pursued the Japanese back down the main Kokoda Track whence they came, the Americans—starting from the village of Kapa Kapa, forty miles east of Port Moresby—would push north across the Owen Stanleys by a shorter route. This would bring them out at Wairopi, with luck in front of the retreating Japanese and,
bingo,
the Japs would indeed be cut off at the pass. With the Australian soldiers pushing from behind, the crack American troops could block the Japanese retreat and annihilate them. It should be a fairly clean operation.

There were high hopes among the American military leadership for their troops as they set off. On a trip to Australia at this time, a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lieutenant General Hap Arnold, privately expressed the view that ‘the Massachusetts soldier knew more about the New Guinea jungle in two days than the Australians in two years.’
²⁵⁵

Fix bayonets. Check grenades. The moment came. As one, the fresh AIF troops of Brigadier Ken Eather’s 25th Brigade who had arrived from Australia only a few days before, charged up the Ioribaiwa ridge—if hauling forty pounds of rifle and ammunition straight up a muddy mountain could be so described. The main thing was that even as the Australians ran they kept firing furious fusillades of bullets up at the Japanese defenders, conscious that the more they threw the less dangerous the defenders would be.

Curiously, and for nigh on the first time in the whole campaign, the Japanese defence was scattered at best. Instead of the withering return fire the Australians had been expecting, there was naught but sporadic pot shots, and nothing like the murderous mowing down they had been told to expect.

In fact, by the time the first of the Australian troops breached the perimeters, most of the Japanese defenders had taken off to previously prepared fall-back positions further down the track, leaving behind only a very small rearguard, while the rest were their dead, dying and wounded.

It was only after the Australians had poured past these initial defences that they realised just how desperate the Japanese situation had been. When the Australians had abandoned Myola, they had destroyed or spoiled the bulk of their food dumps before leaving to prevent the enemy from using it. Here, they looked for signs of such destroyed food, yet there were none, quite probably on the grounds that there
was
none.

And there were plenty more indications to come. As the Australians tentatively took hold of Ioribaiwa Ridge—always conscious of the possibility of a Japanese counterattack or ambush or trick, and scarcely believing that all was as it appeared—they became conscious of an all-too familiar stench, but a stronger version than they had ever encountered before. Death. Dead Japanese soldiers were lying all over the ground, some of them dead for many days, and nearly all of them with the pinched and twisted look of the half-starved.

As Australian war correspondent George H. Johnston took notes, one of the army doctors carried out makeshift autopsies on some of the corpses, and reported to the battalion command that many of them had died ‘because hunger had forced them to eat the poisonous fruits and roots of the jungle.’
²⁵⁶

There would be yet more grisly finds to come. As the Australians pushed back down the track they came across their fallen comrades from several weeks before, and some of their corpses appeared to have had flesh hacked away from their thighs and calves. The dreadful suspicion that the Japanese soldiers had been so starving for nutrition that they had eaten their enemies was compounded when the Regimental Medical Officer of the 2/25th Battalion was given a parcel of ‘meat’ which he examined, before filing a report: ‘I have examined two portions of flesh recovered by one of our patrols. One was the muscle tissue with a large piece of skin and underlying tissues attached. I consider the last as human.’
²⁵⁷