Kokoda (9 page)

It was the Japanese…

Bombers. Torpedo planes. Escorting fighters. Two hundred in all, coming their way from a secretly assembled pod of six aircraft carriers, some 250 miles to the north of Hawaii. Japanese intelligence had predicted that most of America’s Pacific Fleet would have returned to Pearl Harbor for weekend leave and, sure enough, there they were! Just before 8.00 a.m. the Japanese arrived above the American airfields and harbour and—on the direct orders of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo—unleashed hundreds of tons of bombs. (And this, despite the fact that at that very moment Japanese diplomats were in Washington, ostensibly to discuss peace.)

While the Japanese bombers and torpedo planes were busily sending the many occupants of the US Navy dock’s ‘Battleship Row’ to the harbour bottom, the escort fighters were not busy at all. Simply put, so complete had been the surprise of the attack that barely one American plane was able to scramble in response before it was quickly shot out of the skies. When the first wave of Japanese planes had completed their work, they were quickly replaced by a new wave which unleashed its own thunder, and so on. Less than two hours after the first bombs hit, the sky cleared of Japanese planes, though the smoke from the destruction they had wrought would still be there four days later. The pride of the American Pacific Fleet—including seven battleships, three cruisers, two destroyers and four support vessels—lay on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. No fewer than 188 planes were wiped out, two thousand American military personnel were killed, over one thousand were wounded, and many military buildings were reduced to rubble.

One small blessing for the Americans, at least, was that the US Navy’s three aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet had been out of the Harbor at the time of the attack and had therefore been spared, which would shortly prove to be of great significance.

Not for nothing would President Roosevelt quickly declare 7 December ‘as a day that will live in infamy’, in the process of declaring war on Japan. Prior to the bombing, the Americans simply had not wanted to become involved in this World War—now, there was no question. For his part, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo addressed his own people in a national radio broadcast to make them aware that the war would be long and arduous, but that it would be worth it to ‘construct a glorious tomorrow’.
¹⁸

A mighty giant, now enraged, stirred itself after two years of neutrality.

While Pearl Harbor was shaken to its core in the wake of the Japanese attack, one part of the Pacific where blind panic did
not
take hold was the Philippines where General Douglas MacArthur was in charge. In fact not only was there no panic, nothing much at all happened. Just after midday local time—some ten hours after the Pearl Harbor raid—most of the personnel on duty at Clark Field, the principal American base fifty miles north of Manila, had just finished their lunch and were lazing around on the lawn before resuming their duties, when a very funny thing happened. At least it seemed funny at the time…

A soldier burst forth from the barracks and with high hilarity yelled: ‘Hey, you guys. It’s just come over the radio, Japanese planes are bombing Clark Field! Can ya believe it?’
¹⁹

Everyone laughed and looked around at the perfectly placid scene, and marvelled at the ludicrous report. No sooner was the laughter just starting to ebb though, than air-raid sirens sounded. Moments afterwards—
run for your lives!
—an angry swarm of fifty-four Japanese bombers with their thirty-six Zero fighter escorts broke through the clouds and bore down upon the American base. There, directly below the Japanese bomb-bay doors was the collected might of a good chunk of the US Air Force—B17 Flying Fortresses, B25 Mitchell Bombers and Kittyhawk Fighters—neatly lined up on the ground and waiting to be blown out of existence, in much the same manner as the US Navy had awaited its fate at Pearl Harbor. Again, not a single plane scrambled to meet the Japanese aggressors. No anti-aircraft fire raked at their bellies. Consequently, almost all the American planes were wiped out. Somehow, even though the attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred ten hours earlier, and General MacArthur was fully aware of it, his forces remained totally unprepared to counter a likely follow-up Japanese attack.

The raid perfectly softened up the American defences so that tens of thousands of Japanese troops could storm ashore shortly thereafter to take over the Philippines. The attack on Pearl Harbor had destroyed much of America’s naval power in the Pacific, while the bombing of the Philippines destroyed much of its air power in the same theatre.

Under normal circumstances such a debacle might have seen the immediate dismissal of the unprepared commanding officer who allowed such defeat, but these were not normal times, and MacArthur was no ordinary man.

To most American military men, MacArthur was already in fact the most famous man in the army. Born in 1880, the son of a famous general who was himself a Congressional Medal of Honor winner for his exploits in the Civil War, Douglas MacArthur had graduated first in his class at West Point. His grade point average had been beaten only twice before and one of those had been the famous contemporary of his father, Robert E. Lee.

Of the many things MacArthur had pursued in his military career one of the most significant was that he had virtually pioneered army public relations when, during the Great War, he had worked as a major for the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, and was responsible for drumming up public support. He had risen from there to be the Chief of Staff of the entire United States Army. It was his skills in public relations that now came to the fore. For, despite the debacle, few details of it were yet known, and to the American public MacArthur emerged almost overnight as the key defender of all that was good and American in the south seas against everything that was evil and Japanese. And even if President Roosevelt had wanted to, how could he sack an American hero while he was under siege; for less than a fortnight after the first Japanese bombing of the Philippines, the Japanese had landed extensive forces on the north of Luzon island and were quickly moving on Manila.

One communiqué after another flowed from Luzon—many of which were personally written by General MacArthur—telling of the heroic defence led by the one and the same General MacArthur, and he soon became known in the popular press as the ‘Lion of Luzon’ on the strength of it. When America most desperately needed a military hero, MacArthur came pre-packaged and continued to provide daily material to build the legend… whatever the reality.

In the meantime, the Japanese did not content themselves merely with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the conquest of the Philippines. With savage speed, Japanese forces were soon laying siege to Siam (now Thailand), Malaya, Hong Kong, Wake Island, the Dutch East Indies, Burma and British Borneo, where they were able to tap into the rich oil supplies. All of it was nominally to make sure everyone was ready to have ‘co-prosperity’ thrust upon them—not that they had a chance.

The formal Japanese declaration of war on the Allies, when it came, was at least very lyrical. The Japanese Emperor, the direct descendant of the Sun God, merely released to the ethereal ether: ‘We by the grace of Heaven, Emperor of Japan, seated on the throne of a line unbroken for ages eternal, enjoin upon ye, Our loyal and brave subjects: We hereby declare war on the United States of America and the British Empire. The men and officers of Our Army and Navy shall do their utmost in prosecuting the war…’
²⁰

And so they did.

In Australia, news of the Japanese aggression in the Pacific hit like a thunderclap on an afternoon already precipitously poised with that possibility. This was not military action in some far-flung field of Europe or the Middle East well removed from their own neighbourhood—this was a brutal and hardened foe, savaging all before it and heading their way. Really. Just half an hour
before
bombing Pearl Harbor, another Japanese force had landed in northern Malaya and was fighting its way down the Malayan Peninsula towards Britain’s enormous naval base at Singapore, a site which Australians had long considered their principal source of security in the region.

Many years before, it was a couple of lines from an old English music hall song that had inspired the term jingoism:

We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

And got the money too…
²¹

Now, Australia’s situation was the exact reverse of jingoism: no ships, no men, no money. For even while Japan was rampaging over their northern neighbours, most of Australia’s warships remained in the service of the British Navy in the northern hemisphere, while the might of Australian military manhood which could have provided some protection, were away in the Middle East fighting the Germans. Another division was closer to home, but it was tied up defending the Malayan Peninsula and already it was falling back before the Japanese onslaught as the invaders moved inexorably towards Singapore. At the outbreak of the distant war, there had been no hesitation in sending two divisions to the service of Mother England, yet now that decision looked foolhardy at best, suicidal at worst.

There was further irony in Australia being at war with a Japan that claimed it had taken up arms for the right to give the British Commonwealth and the United States competition in colonisation. For one of Australia’s problems in preparing for war was that it still had only a tiny manufacturing base—mainly because Great Britain had encouraged its colony to provide simple raw materials and not trouble itself building factories that would provide international competition for Britain.

At least, for his part, the new Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, reacted swiftly. He had been woken with the news of the Pearl Harbor attack at 5.30 a.m. on 8 December 1941 in his Melbourne hotel room and responded with a simple: ‘Well, it has come… ’ before gathering himself, and moving quickly from there. He sent his beloved wife, Elsie, back to Perth so that she was safe and so he could give his every waking hour to the task without any domestic distractions. And then he got to it.

First, without waiting for Britain’s lead as Menzies had done in 1939, the prime minister immediately declared war on Japan, and used strong rhetoric to underline the Australian view that this was not a mere expansion of the current war, but an entirely new war altogether. No matter that in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, both Germany and Italy had observed the terms of their Tripartite Treaty with Japan by declaring war on the United States, and America had returned serve.

In Curtin’s view it was crucial that the Allies
not
view the possible invasion of Australia as a subordinate problem down in the bottom right-hand corner of the grander tableau, but that they view it as a key issue in its own right, requiring significant—and not subordinate—Allied resources.

In terms of trying to strengthen Australia’s defences in the immediate future, the Australian War Cabinet quickly gave the nod to arm another hundred thousand Australian men and to send more troops to Darwin and Timor. The 2/21st Battalion was immediately sent to Ambon, on the eastern end of Indonesia, in part protecting the western flank of the 2/22nd Battalion, which had been in place in Rabaul since Anzac Day, 1941.

The government hastened plans to send a couple more militia battalions to Port Moresby, where the sum total of Australia’s armed personnel was just 1250 poorly trained militia soldiers consisting for the most part of Queensland’s 49th Battalion and three hundred natives from the Papuan Infantry Battalion—the PIB being a body of indigenous people under the leadership of Australian officers.

Beyond that, the Australian military and political leadership realised that defences in New Guinea were somewhere between ‘thin’ and ‘non-existent’. On the entire island there were no more than seven thousand Europeans, of whom just one thousand had been formed into another loosely structured local military organisation, called the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. Despite these admirable efforts to bolster defences, the fact remained that half of the nominally Australian territory had never even seen a white man. How did one defend a place like that?

That was what the Australian militia would have to find out…

As opposed to the fighting men of the AIF, the militia were soldiers who had been conscripted as the home defence force—a kind of mostly younger version of Britain’s ‘Dad’s Army’—and before the war all these recruits had proceeded on the understanding that they would never be obliged to leave Australian shores. Because New Guinea was technically a territory of Australia at that time, though, a law change in August of 1940 meant that the militia could be sent there and still nominally be at ‘home’.

It was a technicality that did not necessarily sit well with all of the men of the militia themselves, but on the other hand, who cared what they thought? On the ladder of public esteem for men in uniform, the militia was at the bottom. Derided as ‘Chocos’ or ‘chocolate soldiers’, because they would surely melt when the heat was on, the view of many—most particularly the AIF soldiers—was that the militia was naught but a shelter for those weak-kneed individuals too piss-weak to expose themselves to a real fight. Sure, before the war it had been an honourable pursuit to be in the militia,
à la
Stan and Butch Bisset, but now the war had begun, real men had long ago left the militia to join the real army. The leftovers in the militia, were considered as just one notch better than those worse-than-useless ‘conscientious objectors’. So the militia would go where they were bloody well
sent
, and there was nothing more to say about it.