Kokoda (65 page)

But they were wrong.

Still scarified by what Blamey had said at Koitaki, the Australian commanders were determined to show that neither they nor their men were fucking rabbits and, also stung by MacArthur’s ongoing orders, they pushed forward too hurriedly. When the likes of Stan Bisset and his comrades of the 2/14th Battalion were just about to come to grips with the Japanese at Gona right before dusk on 28 November, they had neither aerial photographs of the enemy’s defences, nor even a rough plan of where their bunkers and machine guns were. Nothing at all.

It was
insanity
to hurl themselves at the well-entrenched Japs but they had been given orders and those orders had to be followed. So in the last gasp of the twilight then, the Australians of the 2/14th pushed forward on a tortuously slow approach, through two hundred yards of waist-deep swamp, to they knew not what…

Watching them move forward, a heavy concentration of Japanese soldiers from the 144th Regiment focused intently, picking their targets and scarcely believing that the Australians, whose fighting abilities they had come to respect and even fear in recent months, could present themselves thus. But there they were—proverbial sitting ducks in the swamp. The Japanese held back until the moment was perfect…

As the first clump of Australian soldiers approached the shoreline, a single shot rang out from the Japanese commander, followed a split second later by the mass of Japanese guns, coming from seemingly a dozen different directions at once. From their hidden bunkers the fierce defenders simply poured lead into the Australian soldiers, as from the high treetops, Japanese snipers methodically picked off the soldiers who hadn’t been cut down in the first fusillade. Within minutes, six Australian officers and forty soldiers were wiped out, and for the most part the survivors didn’t even know where to direct their fire back at the brutes.

Stan, in a cold rage at the sheer futility and
needlessness
of what had happened, moved as quickly as he could to organise for the wounded to be picked up, and for the whole lot of them to get out of there. Lieutenant Colonel Challen at this point was nowhere to be seen, and Stan knew it was up to him to take charge. With the help of two other surviving officers, Stan gathered the rump of the 2/14th together and—having located a signal wire in the now all-but-pitch blackness—led them back through the swamp, away from the Japanese guns. They spent the night camped on the track, listening to the Japs’ weird, unworldly screaming, occasional shots and, most tragically, the groans and sometime death throes of their own grievously wounded men. In the final count of that terrible day, the 2/14th lost a tenth of their men, and a third of their officers.

Coming at Gona from the western side, the men of the 2/27th fared almost as disastrously. Though the 2/27th at least had air support, there was no communication between the men on the ground and those in the air, and it is debatable if the air support made any difference at all. They had seven officers killed or wounded, fifteen soldiers killed and another thirty-three wounded.

Though the following day the 2/14th had a modicum of success by gaining some bitterly contested ground, the price they had paid in blood was one that could never be redeemed. And while it was one thing to follow orders, it was quite another to be part of a process where women and families in Australia were being deprived of husbands and fathers, without doing something to try to stop the madness.

Feeling a rising anger at the tragedy of it all, Stan decided that he simply had to get through to the highest reaches of their military command and
make
them understand that following their orders was killing the men, and that there was a better way… It took some time, but using the field telephone at Battalion Headquarters, Stan was at last able to get through to Brigade Headquarters, situated some three miles to the rear, and was able to speak to Brigadier Ivan Dougherty.

‘Sir, it is Captain Bisset, Adjutant, 2/14th,’ he said in quite strained tones, conscious that if he was not successful in changing the mind of the brigadier then the whole lot of them would likely be massacred. ‘Sir, I do hope that you will permit me to speak freely and frankly, because there is something that needs to be said. Sir, simply charging the Japs without adequate care and reconnaissance beforehand is not working. We are being killed and wounded in massive numbers. Sir, I respectfully submit that we need more time before going on with the attacks; we need time to work out precisely where they are before going in with our guns blazing. Otherwise… ’ Stan didn’t finish, aware that he had said what needed to be said, but half-expecting that it might be going too far to take it any further. If it at this point the brigadier had blasted that it was a damn impertinence for a lowly captain to presume to tell a brigadier his business, Stan was not sure what he would have done, but as it turned out he didn’t have to worry.

The brigadier was cordial in reply and said that he would take Bisset’s views into consideration when HQ formed up the battle plan for the morrow. And maybe it really did have an effect; for the following day, the 2/14th was not obliged to make a suicide assault and was able to gain a little more valuable ground, this time losing only three mortally and two injured. It wasn’t great, but compared with the carnage and slaughter they had known on previous days it was something. But nothing could change the fatal wound the battalion as a whole had suffered, and Stan knew that with so many men lost they didn’t have a lot left in them as a fighting force and might soon be finished. As it turned out, just a short time later, Stan was only a whisker away from being finished himself, when a Japanese bullet creased his right eyebrow and the blood flowed freely. It was really little more than a scratch, but had his head been an inch forward he would have been dead before he hit the ground. On such an inch did the difference of destinies of two brothers rest.

Other battalions found themselves in continued difficulties, none more so than the valiant 2/16th. At one point on 1 December, some of the 2/16th men made an extraordinary charge straight into fierce Japanese fire, with enough surviving to get to grips with some of the Japs for the first time, only to find themselves suddenly under a sustained artillery bombardment from their own guns! Everywhere was disorganisation, destruction, disaster and death. Never in the course of the whole New Guinea campaign would Rowell’s previous words to Osmar White—‘We need a victory in the Pacific and a lot of poor bastards have got to get killed to provide it’—prove more tragically prophetic.

By 3 December, the 25th Brigade, which had fought across the Kokoda Track against the retreating Japanese, and then been first into the battle for Gona, had lost two hundred men in six days, while the so-called ‘rabbits’ of the 21st Brigade had lost 340 Australian souls out of a total of 874 soldiers. What to do? How to proceed? Four months before, it had been the men of the 39th Battalion who’d been hanging on like grim death until the men of the 2/14th and 2/16th could relieve them. Now? Now it was time for the 39th to return the force-of-arms favour.

Again, this time several DC3s—also known as ‘Biscuit Bombers’— took Honner and his men across the Owen Stanley Range, and again the veterans among them looked out, remembered, and didn’t speak. In recent times their numbers had been bolstered by one hundred of the best soldiers from the disbanded 53rd Battalion, as well as three hundred or so fresh troops from Australia, but the wistful air of the men with the thousand-yard stares was all to do with the men who they’d replaced, down there in their graves. And now it was on again.

‘Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more…’

They landed at Popondetta and almost immediately set off in the pouring tropical rain, through ankle-deep mud. As Joe Dawson and his mates Ray Phillips and Wally Gratz trudged—like all the rest with their eyes on the boots of the man in front—they were slightly unnerved by the dozens upon dozens of little wooden crosses made from Kraft Cheese boxes that lined the track, crosses that became more numerous the closer they got to Gona. Many of the crosses had a helmet at their base, and marked on the crossbar was usually the name of a soldier and his army number. Bloody hell, it was a hard thing to walk like that, past the graves of the blokes who had gone before you and fallen down dead. It made a fellow wonder if there was a plot of ground up ahead with his name on it, but this far down this bloody track, there could be no turning back.

At last they came out somewhere near Gona, because the track kind of fizzled into nothing but swamp, and then they were on a clearing right on the beach, bunched up with the 2/14th. And there was a bit of a lark…

The exhausted men watched intently as two of their own planes, Beaufighters, went back and forth strafing a half-submerged Jap supply ship just off the coast, finishing it off as it were. Look, maybe it was the equivalent of putting bullets into an already half-dead dingo, but it was something to ward off the tension and some of them even raised half a cheer as bits of the ship started to fall in the sea. But then one of the Beaufighters broke off and started heading their way…
right
at them. Jesus Christ, you don’t think… ? He’s not going to… ?

He
is
! The stupid bastard must have mistaken them for Japs, because before the men could do anything the plane was swooping just fifty yards above the ground, with its machine guns raising pockmarks of sand in straight lines leading right at…
jump for your lives
!

Joe jumped one way, Wally and Ray the other, as everyone in the two battalions did the same. Amazingly no one was killed and, when they’d all picked themselves up, only five soldiers and two native carriers were wounded, none too seriously.

‘Typical air force—couldn’t hit a barn door!’ someone yelled out.

Welcome to Gona.

They settled in, a bit back from where the main action was, and awaited orders. Not surprisingly, this wait was something close to hell on earth. It wasn’t just the heat, nor the humidity, nor the rain, nor the stench of death somewhere near. It was the fucking flies. Flies like they’d never seen before. Green flies, a bit bigger than a normal housefly, but with a sting on them that could kill a brown dog and stay itchy for
days
. Each sting left a mark on your skin, and it really looked, and felt, as if they had taken a chunk out of your flesh. And what the flies left, the mozzies and ticks were free to have a go at.

The 39th were soon issued with two bottles of liquid each, which the boffins said would help. The bottle the troops called ‘Mary’ was meant to keep the mozzies off, while the bottle they called ‘Betty’ was supposed to keep the flies at bay. As bloody
if
… What was dropping like flies was not the flies, but the men of the 39th, with everything from dysentery and malaria to the dreaded killer, scrub typhus.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Sweating
. Waiting for the order to action, Joe, Wally and Ray stuck together, as much as possible, talking. They took their turns at various duties, but really they just wanted to get into it, one way or another.

At the 39th’s command, Colonel Ralph Honner did what he had done at Isurava—that is, surveyed the lie of the land minutely to see if it would yield anything to aid their cause. This time, though, his aim was to see how best to attack. What was immediately obvious was that attacking the Gona mission by way of the swamp was close to mass suicide, and so too was heading across the cut kunai grass where his men would be totally exposed to the massed Jap firepower. There seemed to be only one way and, in many ways, it was surprising that it hadn’t already been tried.

Just to the east of the track, leading from the south into what had been the Gona compound, a thin finger of jungly scrub reached into the heart of the Japanese defences. It seemed to Honner that the only way to get at the Japanese was to take advantage of the cover offered by the scrub, and the firmer footing it was situated on. Why had this route been overlooked? Quite possibly, Honner thought, because for the previous few days the area had been occupied by an Australian force under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alan Cameron—the same man he had relieved from commanding the 39th at Isurava—and he had misreported the situation. The way Cameron had reported it to Brigade Headquarters, his men were so close to the enemy that they were having grenade-throwing jousts with them. And yet when Colonel Honner put his own A Company in there to relieve Cameron’s group, A Company’s Captain Gilmore soon requested permission to move his men to a much more forward position where they could be in basic contact with the enemey. ‘Grenade-throwing jousts’, indeed!
²⁹⁰

It was one thing to know what was the right thing to do, and quite another to be allowed to do it. Unbelievably, on 6 December, Honner was ordered to send in a dawn attack over the killing field of the sixty yards of cut kunai grass. It was to be supported by a three-inch mortar barrage and a smoke barrage, but it was still against every military instinct the Western Australian possessed. But an order was an order, and it was done.

The assault was led by Captain Max Bidstrup and his D Company and, while the smoke barrage was indeed laid down, the problem was that they couldn’t see the Japs, while it was clear that the Japs could see them only too well.
²⁹¹
The whole thing was a tragic fiasco, and resulted in twelve good men dying and forty-six being wounded for the net gain of nothing but a few dozen yards of kunai grass. The Australians were simply cut to pieces by the totally committed Japanese soldiers, who were fighting for their lives to the point of losing their lives if necessary, so long as they killed more of the enemy.

Still there was to be no respite. For the assembled Australian forces, their one standout fear at this point—amid so many fears— was that the Japanese would get reinforcements to their now besieged men at Gona. One of the obvious ways for them to do that was to land on the coast just to the west of Gona and move these reinforcements to the rear of the Australian forces who were now massing on the western side of Gona Creek. To prevent this, it had been necessary to place a defensive force beyond the western perimeter of the Australian forces which could strike at any such Japanese landing and, in so doing, give warning to the rest of the massed Australians that the Japs were on their way.