Kokoda (7 page)

So it was that on 19 October 1940, just over a year after signing up, Stan and Butch Bisset stood close together in their new uniforms on the bow of the good ship
Aquitania
. The ship, side by side with the
Queen Mary
, sailed out of Sydney Harbour amid a tumultuous farewell of tooting ferries, tugboats and pleasure craft.

Just over 170 years before, Captain James Cook had sailed to this continent to ultimately claim Australia for Britain. This then, was the sons of the soil that Cook and his followers had tilled, heading from that continent to help Britain out…

A one-time cruise ship of the Cunard line, the
Aquitania
was once the second largest ship in the world, all the more impressive for the fact that the largest, the
Titanic
, now lay on the ocean floor. Converted to a troop carrier, the
Aquitania
could transport just under eight thousand men, sweating among its oak panelling and beams and Louis XIV-style restaurant, now known rather more simply as ‘The Mess’. Below decks, first-class cabins, which used to sleep an imperial one, now slept as many as ten soldiers, with two five-tier bunks crammed into it, with just three feet between, but no one was complaining. This, many of the soldiers felt on the day, was the adventure of their lives…

One who definitely felt like that was a bloke called Alan Haddy, whom Stan and Butch met about ten days into the voyage, after they’d stopped to pick up the 2/16th Battalion in Fremantle. To keep the mass of soldiers on the ship both busy and fit, boxing competitions had been staged, and Stan had just been marginally bested by an enormous Kalgoorlie miner in the heavyweight division, when this bloke came up to congratulate Stan on having done so well against a bloke who was so much bigger than him.

‘I thought he was going to knock your block off!’ Haddy told him with an enormous grin, while proffering his hand, ‘but you nearly knocked
his
off.’

Haddy had been born and bred in Western Australia and possessed a warm and generous disposition, despite having known many hard times growing up in a succession of orphanages. A superb physical specimen, with a chin like a clenched fist, he projected strength, confidence and capability, a veritable physical force of nature. Yet, he was also the kind who, once it seemed likely that German aggression would inevitably lead to war, had taken himself off to night school to learn the German language as he thought it might come in useful.

One expression that had sort of taken off from the days of the Great War was to say of someone ‘he’s the sort of bloke you wouldn’t mind being in the trenches with’, and from the first, both Bisset boys felt instinctively that Haddy was like that.

The
Aquitania
continued to plough to the west…

Damien Parer had never been busier, nor more professionally fulfilled. Since arriving on the other side of the world with the AIF, he had been always in the thick of the action, from the 6th Division’s first intensive training activities in Palestine (whose 16th Brigade was under the command of Brigadier Arthur ‘Tubby’ Allen), to their R and R activities in Cairo, to the brief debacle in Greece where Australian forces had been routed by the oncoming Germans, to the actions in Syria, to the mighty siege of Tobruk. Along the way he had not only achieved extraordinarily graphic footage of Australian troops in action, but also photographed—and to a lesser extent got to know—some of the key figures in the war, such as General Blamey, Tubby Allen, General Morris and a man by the name of Captain Ralph Honner of the Western Australian 2/11th Battalion…

Far and away the most important relationship Damien formed though, was with the ABC Radio war correspondent Chester Wilmot, who was also covering the Australians in the Middle East and Greece. Thirty years old, and himself the son of a famous journalist, Chester was close to the cream of the ABC crop. Educated at Melbourne’s Church of England Grammar School and Melbourne University, he was worldly, articulate and forthright, as might be expected of one who had captained the university debating team— on one occasion condemning Fascism against the arguments of his opponent, one Bob Santamaria—and then taken the team on to great success on a tour encompassing universities in Britain, Europe, East Asia and North America. While in Europe he had been to an Adolf Hitler rally at Nuremberg, billeted with a family of devoted members of the Nazi Party, and been to Italy to see the land of Mussolini. On returning to Australia, convinced there was going to be a world war, he had decided to become a journalist.

What most commended Reginald William Winchester Wilmot to Damien though, was his shared passion for reporting from the frontlines, for getting the story absolutely right, for perpetually trying innovative ways to tell a story so it achieved maximum impact on his audience at home. Both men were highly motivated to make the Australian public aware of exactly what the Australian troops abroad were facing, and how magnificently the nation’s sons had performed under often difficult circumstances.

Wilmot had an equal regard for Damien, so much so that on occasion he would interview him for his ABC radio reports to get his expert eyewitness accounts. On one notable occasion, Damien returned the honour by putting his camera over Chester Wilmot’s shoulder for a close-up, as, using his patented two-finger ‘hunt-and-peck’ method, the ABC’s finest typed the following words:

The spirit which has made Australia is the spirit which has held Tobruk. The inspiring and binding force in Australian life isn’t tradition or nationalism or social revolution. It’s quite a simple thing. Henry Lawson called it
MATESHIP
… the spirit which makes men stick together. In Australia by sticking together, men have defied drought, bushfire and flood. In Tobruk they’ve scorned hardship, danger and death, because no digger would ever let his cobbers down. In Tobruk for the first time in this war the Germans were thrust back by a spirit that even tanks and dive-bombers could not conquer.
¹³

And indeed it was, Tobruk marking the first time also, in the whole war, that the might of German arms was significantly checked. The mateship of Damien Parer and Chester Wilmot, though, would get them through steeper and more dangerous obstacles yet.

And then, the last moderate in Japan crumbled. Having fought a losing battle for too long against a military that he now viewed as out of control, in October 1941, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye resigned. He was immediately replaced in the post by the famously brutal Army Minister, General Hideki Tojo, the same man who had been Chief Of Staff of Japan’s Kwantung Army during both the occupation of Manchuria and the Nanking Massacre, as well as the former chief of the Manchurian Secret Police.

Known to his colleagues as ‘Razor’, Tojo had long been an advocate of Japan simply taking by military force anything, and even any
country,
that it coveted in its region, and had been personally instrumental in forming up the detailed plans for the conquest of Southeast Asia.

For the militarists generally, Japan’s historical calling was ‘
Hakko Ichiu
’
,
to gather the people of Asia under one banner—it translated as ‘all the eight corners of the world under one roof’. Much of the Japanese military leadership taking over had quite openly studied the best of the Western military ways—and in fact copied the way the Germans organised their army and the British their navy—and many had taken a shine to the West’s ideas of establishing colonies. Not for them to be like India, Burma, Malaya and the East Indies and find themselves subjugated by a foreign system—they were much too proud for that. For well over a decade it had been Tojo’s view that it was for Japan to
liberate
such countries from the yoke of the West and essentially establish Asia for the Asians, under Japanese leadership, of course. And if this put them on a collision course with the West, as well as those Asian countries who didn’t see things their way, then so be it.

Now that he was not only prime minister, but also the minister for war, and a full general of the army, there was nothing and no one left to stop Tojo. The militarists in Japan had won a comprehensive victory over the moderates. Tojo was now the most powerful figure in modern Japan besides the Emperor.

Too few in New Guinea had the barest inkling that the war might reach its isolated shores and the most likely suspect to do it was the increasingly warlike Japan. The ascension of Tojo to the top political post was a clear sign of increasing militarism. So too was the fact that two months earlier the Japanese had followed up their invasion of northern Indochina with the invasion of the southern half of the country. Given Japan’s shortage of natural resources, they were obviously looking covetously at the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The question had to be raised: did Japan’s interests in Southeast Asia extend all the way to New Guinea?

From Australia’s point of view, New Guinea was something of a colonial outpost, and one of only medium value—a value determined mostly by its natural resources. Since Europeans had first settled there, a kind of white ‘squattocracy’ had developed in those scattered parts of the island where the wild environment could be tamed enough to produce some economic benefit. The Europeans had established rubber plantations, the odd mine and a few scattered copra farms, while in other parts many missions had been set up to harvest native souls for Jesus. Typically, each white household had a retinue of black domestic servants attached to it and it was they who provided hard labour.

The Australian administrative authorities essayed to continue to ‘civilise’ as many of the natives as it could and as part of that aim they published a newspaper called the
Papuan Villager
, which gave the latest news. In that October of 1941 the
Villager
broadcast what was happening in the European theatre of war between the Allies and the Germans, and also informed them of what to expect should the Japanese arrive on New Guinea shores. One article was as clear a manifestation as any of the view which had suddenly crystallised among Australians in that part of the world, that the true value of controlling New Guinea was not just supply of rubber and gold and copra, but the fact that New Guinea would be the ideal launching pad to invade Australia.

‘The Japanese are not white men,’ this article went. ‘Their skins have a rather yellow colour, sometimes pale brown. They are often small men, but well-made and strong… The Japanese are a very warlike people. They are brave men, but they make a lot of trouble… So far the Japanese have not entered our war. They have done a lot of talking, but they have not begun to fight. We do not want them to fight; but if they do we shall be ready for them.’
¹⁴

An example of the Japanese ‘them’ at this very moment were the men of the 144th Regiment. In much the same manner as some Australian battalions had been formed by taking bits and pieces from other units, so too was the 144th brought together in November 1941 from units of the 55th Division from No. 11 Army Depot at Zentsuji, Japan. Most of the men were drawn from the city of Kochi on the island of Shikoku. At their head was Major General Tomitaro Horii, who received his promotion from the 11th Brigade after brilliantly brutal service in China. The men of the 144th were for the most part hardened veterans who had already seen a lot of action and victory. In this moment, they were being formed up for duty somewhere in the South Seas. Just where and when they would see action, they neither asked, nor were told.

Just where and when the young Aussie Diggers would likely see action, they most definitely
did
ask, but still were not told. All that the young men of the newly formed 39th Battalion knew—as they gathered at Camp Darley about forty miles west of Melbourne, near the tiny town of Bacchus Marsh—was that their battalion had just been created by order of the Military Board in early October 1941, with a possible view to serving overseas.

There was nothing specifically stirring there at the moment, but the noises coming from the increasingly aggressive Japanese meant that the Australian military authorities had decided that it was a good idea to gather up some of the militia—they were all that was left at home after Australia’s fighting finest had been sent to the Middle East and Singapore—and train ’em up the best they could, and quickly haul them up north, just in case.

And this was ‘them’! Victoria’s 3rd and 4th Infantry Division, as well as the 2nd Cavalry Division, had kicked in the few men they felt they could spare, and they were thrown in with several hundred raw recruits who didn’t necessarily know the butt end of a rifle from the pointy bit. Finally, to complete the mix, the authorities also added a few old stagers regarded as not good enough for the AIF, but who Australia was now getting desperate enough to allow back under arms. This was the new 39th Battalion.

And one old stager, now standing at the front of the battalion in the Camp Darley parade ground on this dusty morning in mid-October 1942, was the Battalion’s Commanding Officer, the vastly experienced Colonel Hugh Marcell Conran who had been a lieutenant with the 1st AIF in the 23rd Battalion. He was not a bad sort of fella to be leading a newly formed outfit like this. For while he was very much old school and had all the fortitude and command of one who had successfully hauled himself up in life by his own bootstraps—and believed that others could do the same—he was also a family man with a strong streak of compassion and a high sense of duty to Australia. And not without reason…

After the last war he had settled on land in the Red Cliffs district which the government had opened up for soldiers like him who had served their country well. He had raised his family and prospered but now that Australia was in trouble, and needed him once more, like many of his ilk he made it his business to jump straight back into the fray and give service. Many of his erstwhile military mates from the last war had felt the same, for flanking him as he spoke were many of the older officers who had served with Colonel Conran, friends and former associates who would be useful teaching both the new soldiers and some of their younger officers everything they knew about establishing a good battalion. And in his book, by the book, that started with them learning that they were there to serve Australia in whatever capacity was demanded of them.