Kokoda (71 page)

The troops stared back, stunned, scarcely believing their ears.

‘You have been defeated,’ he went on, ‘I have been defeated, Australia has been defeated.’

This, to the very men who had just handed to the previously all-conquering Japanese army their first defeat!

It was an insult that those troops would never forget. When I raised the subject with the great Stan Bissett some sixty years later,
still
he turned white with rage.

The next denial, effectively, came with the disbandment of the 39th Battalion in July of 1943. By any measure, their achievements over the previous twelve months had been staggering, and under different circumstances they might have had the reasonable expectation of returning to Australia, lauded as heroes forevermore. But that is not the way it turned out.

With the politics of the time, it simply did not suit to have the Australian public realise that in the face of a grave threat, the only troops that the government had to put on the front line in the first instance, were so-called ‘chocolate soldiers’. And nor did it fit to have a mere militia outfit perform at least as well as the Australian Imperial Force battalions.

So that was the end of the 39th and any true appreciation of their achievements.

And yet, even those mighty battalions of the AIF who had stormed to the 39th’s aid at Isurava and then fought the Japanese all the way back down the Track were not particularly honoured for their achievements either. For one thing, when you had their commander in Thomas Blamey saying they had been ‘defeated’, it was unlikely the public would easily be able to arrive at a different conclusion on their own. Certainly, the emphasis in everything said from headquarters concentrated on the counter attack. For much of the Australian public at the time, Kokoda was just one more campaign of many, in an obscure part of the world that was immensely difficult for journalists to reach, let alone cover and get their stories out – and there was certainly no official effort to change that.

It simply didn’t suit to make much of what they had done, particularly at a time when the most powerful force abroad in the land were American forces, led by one General Douglas MacArthur, who was eager that most of the glory for Allied victories against the Japanese in New Guinea go the Americans generally, and himself specifically.

And even allowing for the famous notion that ‘history is written by the victors’, the official history was not particularly kind to the Kokoda veterans. There were some especially glaring omissions in its account of the fighting on the Kokoda Track and beyond.

Dudley McCarthy’s
South-West Pacific Area First Year: Kokoda to Wau,
was published in 1959, and though it helped to shed some light on what had been achieved, it was nowhere near enough to bring the story of what had happened at Kokoda to wider public attention.

When I asked my historical and intellectual mentor on this book, Neil McDonald, how that could be, he was passionate in his answers. Neil’s strong view is that if you were the Official Historian in the 1940s or 50s when the histories were being written you could hardly state that the man who was by then Chief Justice of Victoria, Sir Edmund Herring – formerly General Ned Herring – had needlessly sacrificed his troops in the attacks on Gona, Buna and Sananda by launching ill-considered frontal attacks without adequate reconnaissance and sufficient artillery support, or that the man ultimately responsible for this tactical and strategic idiocy was Australia’s first Field Marshall, Sir Thomas Blamey.

Soon Blamey was dead, but men who owed their careers to him were still in positions of power and influence. Neil points out that Dudley McCarthy was himself, by his own admission, a ‘Blamey man’ whose career had been helped by the late Field Marshall. McCarthy took the word of other Blamey men at the Koitaki Parade that Sir Thomas was misunderstood and intended no disparagement of the 21st Brigade.

To be fair,
Kokoda to Wau
is still a very good book, and McCarthy did expose Blamey’s lies about Rowell’s conduct of operations. (He also discovered why Rowell detested Blamey. ‘Because he was debauched and I would not join him in his debaucheries,’ Rowell told McCarthy.) But still the legend was denied.

Despite those steps forward however, and the fact that McCarthy’s understanding of the terrain is on every page, it was never going to be the book that would alert the public at large to what had happened – even if subsequent writers like myself owe it a great debt. Of course there were also several official battalion histories that covered the campaign but, again, they were limited publications that did not enter the mainstream consciousness.

Earlier writers who
did
want to research Kokoda and tell the story were denied access to the official records until the Official Historian completed his volume. And even when Raymond Paull’s first popular history of the campaign was released shortly before McCarthy’s official history, the title chosen,
Retreat from Kokoda,
could only have been more downbeat had it been called
Defeat at Kokoda.

Still, in terms of information on the battle, it was big step forward.

Paull had been a junior officer who had served with Potts in Darwin after he had been removed from command of the 21st Brigade. There he had heard Potts’ very impressive lectures on Kokoda. Paull, a journalist in civilian life, realised that there was a great book in the Kokoda story. He interviewed Potts at his farm in Konjonup in Western Australia and was given access to Potts’ diaries and correspondence. Sydney Rowell and Tubby Allen gave Paull ‘their reminiscences and access to personal documents’, while Chester Wilmot got his family to unearth the original drafts of his dispatches. Paull also interviewed a number of senior and junior officers as well as soldiers from the key battalions that had been on the track. Included was the first accurate account of Blamey’s conduct at Koitaki. And as the foremost of the modern Kokoda authors, Peter Brune, has observed, it was a brave book to have been written just sixteen years after the events it was describing.

When
Retreat from Kokoda
appeared, Osmar White, the one remaining of the three correspondents who had covered the retreat, wrote a ringing endorsement in which he insisted Paull’s book told the story as he, Damien Parer and Chester Wilmot would have wanted. But there was a serious backlash. John Hetherington, another former war correspondent – himself the author of a biography published four years earlier,
Blamey
published a review attacking Paull’s depiction of Blamey. Then, as Neil McDonald has detailed for me, Sir Edmund Herring organised a letter to the
Age
signed by himself and other Australian luminaries of World War II who had been broadly in the Blamey camp – even if not fighting beside him during the events in question – deploring the way Paull had seen fit ‘to assail the honour, capacity and reputation of the late Field Marshall Sir Thomas Blamey in a most bitter and partisan fashion’. The men said they had written the letter, ‘so that some measure of justice may be done to the memory and motives of the Field Marshall’.

And yet they advanced no evidence, only the preposterous claim that after Chester Wilmot had been disaccredited Blamey had found him a position with the BBC. (As is a matter of historical record, Blamey had of course done the exact opposite.)

While Paull’s book was nevertheless a great step forward in offering due acknowledgement to those who fought there, the fact remained that Hetherington’s review and the Herring letter were a strong warning to all who might presume to follow: far more important than elucidating the truth of what happened, was protecting the reputation of some of the leadership involved. This factor even ensured that some modest battalion histories were, effectively, censored. Though it is staggering to contemplate from this point in our history, the truth is that when the authors of the volume on the 2/27 Battalion wanted to include a description of what had happened at Koitaki, they were told by Official Historian Gavin Long that if they did they would lose their War Memorial grant. (Peter Brune confirms this story in his book,
Those Ragged Bloody Heroes
.)

The decades passed. The defenders of the likes of Blamey and MacArthur fell away, the issues became a whole lot less sensitive to deal with. It was time for a fresh look.

Step forward, Peter Brune. For it was not really until 1991, when he released his classic
Those Ragged Bloody Heroes
– which gave a complete account of Kokoda campaign – that the public at large began to be aware of the stunning details of the campaign.

Following Brune’s wonderful book, the true breakthrough, of course, came on Anzac Day 1992, when the Australian public, watching the evening news, was greeted with the exceedingly curious image of our newly installed Prime Minister, Paul Keating, on his knees, kissing the ground at Kokoda and soon after making his famous speech.

As I write, in 2010, in my view that speech neatly encapsulates a poignant truth, widely, if not universally, acknowledged. At the time that Paul Keating said those words, however, they were practically revolutionary. ‘For Australians, the battles in Papua New Guinea were the most important ever fought…’ Hang on, sport, what about Gallipoli, the story all of us were born and raised on?

For that, of course, was the other factor that to this point had acted as a severe brake on the Kokoda campaign by the Australian forces receiving the reverence that was its due. Simply put, the Australian Military Legend Lodge was full, with practically every room filled with Gallipoli battles, Gallipoli soldiers, and even Gallipoli donkeys.

I do not exaggerate.

At the time that Paul Keating kissed the ground of Kokoda, the truth is that if you had assembled all of the nation’s knowledge of our military history in one pile, then few could doubt that a full 90 per cent of it would start at dawn of 25 April 1915, and go till dusk of that same day. The story of the Gallipoli landing, with a few honourable mentions for what happened afterwards had so consumed the nation for so many decades – telling the same story, year after year after year, to our children and our children’s children, just as we heard it from our parents and our parents’ parents – it really did mean that there was little room for the nation to be collectively aware of
anything
much else that happened!

Personally, while I was vaguely interested as a young boy to know that my father had fought at the battle of El Alamein and in battles in New Guinea, and that my mother had served in Bougainville, Lae and Darwin, I was under no illusions. Yes, yes, yes, that was all well and good, but it was hardly Gallipoli.

And yet, after Brune’s book, and Prime Minister Keating kissed the ground, things really did start to slowly change. Brune’s book was soon followed in 1994 by Neil McDonald’s
War Cameraman – The Story of Damien Parer.
This included the first account of the reporting of the Kokoda campaign not just by Parer but his friends and colleagues, Chester Wilmot and Osmar White. A few more Australians began to pay attention, to understand the story, to begin to appreciate what had happened there. Veterans of the Kokoda campaigns who had lived in obscurity for decades, at least insofar as their wartime exploits were concerned, suddenly found their recollections were of a little interest again and they were occasionally sought after to recount them. It was just a small flicker of interest at first, a small candle in a dark valley – ‘send a light, Dig, send a light!’ – but it really would begin to grow.

In my own review of Peter Brune’s second book,
A Bastard of a Place,
in 2004, I particularly praised his line where he noted the arbitrary nature of where history’s accolades fall. The man who gave his life in the defence of Kokoda or Gallipoli, for example, is not inherently better or more worthy of our reverence than many a man who lies forgotten in a ditch by some long forgotten battlefield in faraway foreign climes. Against that, there really was something about the Kokoda story that captured the Australian imagination. and the more we found out about it, the more we wanted to know.

Here were ordinary Australian soldiers – very good men, fighting in a very good cause – who, despite being badly outnumbered and poorly equipped, succeeded in defeating a barbaric enemy.

The story offers mateship, sacrifice, a last minute rescue and, after a brilliantly executed fighting withdrawal, final victory. There are extraordinary heroes – men like the commander of the 39th Battalion, Ralph Honner, who takes over when all seems lost at Isurava, who alters the dispositions then proceeds to cut the Japanese attackers to pieces; Staff Sergeant Jim Cowey waiting for his men in the darkness outside the Kokoda plantation and coolly picking off one Japanese gunner after another as they vainly tried to man a machine gun; Brigadier Arnold Potts switching from the offensive to a fighting withdrawal then making the enemy pay in blood for every foot of their advance.

There are many ordinary Australian soldiers, just like Joe Dawson, who were with the action from first to last who, while they may not have returned with a swag of medals, never wavered in their duty from first to last. Personally, while despairing at the death of his brother, I also loved the story of Stan Bisset – among other things, now the nation’s oldest living Wallaby – who, after being ambushed, managed to lead his patrol on a five-day trek through the jungle, to get his men safely back to their own lines. I found great inspiration in the story of Corporal Metson who, despite being grievously wounded, refused the offer of a stretcher back to safety, on the grounds that there were other blokes who needed it more than him, and so
crawled
for the next three weeks back down the Kokoda Track.

There is Damien Parer who, wretchedly sick with dysentery, throws away all his equipment except for his bulky Newman Sinclair movie camera, and – no greater love for his craft, hath any many but this – shoved a tube up his anus that drained into a bottle in his sock so he could continue filming the withdrawal, come what may. We have Chester Wilmot who was prepared to risk his career, after first risking his life, to get the truth about the battles to the Australian public and to prevent the Commander-in-Chief from sacking General Rowell just as the tide was beginning to turn