HEROISM AND SACRIFICE
THE BRUTAL KOKODA CAMPAIGN BEGUN 75 YEARS AGO WAS THE CRUCIBLE IN WHICH THE AUSSIE DIGGER METAMORPHOSED FROM SLOUCH-HATTED SOLDIER IN KHAKI TO A MODERN MARVEL OF JUNGLE WARFARE, WRITES JUSTIN LEES
Midnight. Beneath the trees, the darkness is almost impenetrable. But the enemy is there … close. They could rush in a wave or as stealthy lone killers. Or they might not come at all.
A sudden scream and a Japanese soldier is into the Australian lines, lunging with a bayonet-tipped rifle at the first Digger he sees: Private “Yippee” Bowen. Yippee fends off the weapon desperately, lacerating his hand as he grabs the blade. The Jap is ready to kill. But Yippee is a big lad; and the Aussies have had enough of retreating. He wrenches the rifle away and, as his enemy turns to flee, launches it like a spear. It hits home.
It would be a stretch to say this extraordinary episode sums up Australia’s first real struggle for survival — its most important and brutal conflict — Kokoda. But it resonates. The Kokoda Campaign, which began 75 years ago this weekend, and the broader battle for Papua New Guinea in WWII, breathed new fire into the Anzac legend spawned at Gallipoli.
And it was the crucible in which the Aussie Digger metamorphosed from slouch-hatted soldier in khaki to a modern marvel of jungle warfare. That transition was marked by extraordinary bravery amid vile conditions, a brutal enemy, infighting at the top and officially endorsed ignorance at home.
“It was a terrible place,” says Alan “Kanga” Moore, a 96-year-old veteran of the famous 39th Battalion, the militia soldiers who first encountered the invaders, after they landed on the north Papuan coast and began forging south down the Kokoda Track towards Port Moresby and Australia.
“We and the Japanese were both living in disgusting conditions.”
Says former gunner Dick Payten, of Sydney: “You were either in mountains or swamps. It was tough.”
“Tough” is an understatement. The famous Kokoda Track threads 96km across the Owen Stanley Range — harsh, jagged peaks clad in dense rain-soaked tropical jungle. Today it takes the average trekker 10 days of walking. Paths are steep, slippery and a perfect ambush zone. Soldiers in coastal areas like Milne Bay or the northern beachheads of Gona and Buna, after pushing the enemy back along the trail, were fighting in one of the most malarial, mosquito-ridden areas of the world.
Which brings us to disease.
Sickness claimed more men than combat (about 625 Australians were killed along the Track alone and more than 1600 were wounded. Casualties due to sickness exceeded 4000; the total number of Aussies killed in the broader war around PNG and surrounding islands was closer to 7000).
Rampant dysentery and beri-beri chewed men up from the inside; dignity was an unaffordable commodity as soldiers created “khaki kilts” — cutting the bottom from their shorts in a bid to stop soiling themselves.
Infected cuts, scrapes and combat wounds became ulcers that stripped flesh to the bone. And all the time these men were fighting for their lives and — during the Kokoda campaign — moving on foot through those hideous mountains. The enemy was up the same creek.
The 39th Battalion, poorly trained, under-equipped militia lads only in Papua because it was Australian territory (they weren’t allowed to fight overseas like the regular army) were faced with a skilful, ruthless enemy nothing like the cartoonish
The beggars (the 53rd Battalion) weren’t there; they all shot through
creatures conjured up by Australian propaganda.
“They said their sight wasn’t good, they had glasses as thick as beer bottles and they all wore glasses, and we had really not a worry as far as their ability to shoot people,” says 39th veteran Arnold Forrester of Townsville.
“And I mean we believed it until we saw them.”
The reality was far different. The elite Nankai Shitai units spearheading the Japanese attack were veterans of combat, imbued with fanatical loyalty to their Emperor and a mission to utterly defeat their enemy.
“They were experienced troops with vastly superior weaponry, which we did not have, and that gave them a massive advantage,” says former regular Army lieutenant and West Australian politician Bill Grayden.
“They were courageous and prepared to die. But I think the Australians had more initiative.” Despite their early successes — famously getting within sight of Port Moresby, from where it was feared they could invade Australia, or at least cut it off from the rest of the world — the Japanese overextended their supply lines. That, combined with Allied air superiority, meant their men were soon starving. And, in desperation, they began eating dead Australians. As Australians began to push back along the track, they would periodically discover corpses with strips of flesh taken from calves and thighs — and those parcels of meat, wrapped in leaves, in the pockets of dead Japanese. The pattern continued throughout the PNG war. “They were a very barbaric people,” says Moore, of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, a lieutenant and later captain who came to grips with the Japanese at the latter end of the campaign. “They were cannibalistic. I saw evidence, later. We lost one of my boys in an ambush. When we went back with a fighting patrol we found every bit of edible meat had been cut off his body.”
Equally horrifying was the Japanese treatment of natives, civilians and — with their military culture’s disdain for any man who “allows himself” to be captured — prisoners.
The feats of the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”, tribespeople who carried wounded Aussies to safety and ferried supplies, are well known.
And, officially, the invading Japanese intended to treat locals with respect but reality was very different. Villagers in Japanese territory were pressganged into porter service alongside other labourers imported from Rabaul, Formosa and Korea, then literally worked to death; women were routinely raped and suffered sickening acts of sexual mutilation. One woman was found bound to a hut by arms and legs with 70 condoms around her.
Such acts were not reserved for natives. Two Australian missionaries — May Hayman and Mavis Parkinson — were captured on the north coast in the early days of the Japanese invasion, after being betrayed in hiding by villagers. One friendly local who spied from afar reported they were held for 24 hours in a building which was visited by a number of Japanese.
The next day they were led out and a soldier grabbed Miss Parkinson and tried to hug her. She pushed him away — at which he drew a bayonet and stabbed her in the throat.
Miss Hayman was forced to blindfold herself and was bayoneted. Then there is the torture. Captured Australian soldiers were mutilated; some were deliberately tortured so their screams — or the sight of their savaged bodies when it was done — would draw comrades into rescue missions that became ambushes.
They were also used for bayonet practice while alive.
Official acknowledgment of Japan’s wartime atrocities across the world has taken decades, a very different picture to Germany’s remorse over the Holocaust. In 1992 a Japanese bishop apologised to Miss Parkinson’s sister and promised to make sure his country knew the truth.
For transparency, it must be noted some Australian troops treated Papuans badly — as some civilians had done so before the war — mainly by pressuring them to work as labourers. Among those who did were the militia men of the 53rd Battalion. Like the 39th, before entering combat they were derided as “chockos” — chocolate soldiers who would melt in the heat of battle.
Unlike the 39th, who defied the slur to become underdog legends, the 53rd went to pieces at the famous Battle of Isurava, fleeing and forcing natives to carry their gear back as the remnants of the 39th and regular AIF units battled for survival against overwhelming odds.
“They had a very bad record in New Guinea,” says the 39th’s Arnold Forrester. “They were looking after our flank in, off the back of Isurava … but the beggars weren’t there; they all shot through.”
Historians and veterans alike are cautious to blame the men, who had themselves been forced into service — “rounded up off the streets” in Forrester’s words.
That they were even in the situation at all reflects more on our top brass. While the list of leaders at brigade level and below along the track is a rollcall of heroes, the high command was riven with infighting among old men as concerned with their positions as they were with the fate of the men in PNG.
Australia’s most senior general, Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, and the American commander of Allied Land Forces in the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, have been particularly damned by history as out of touch, ego-driven and woefully ignorant of the true conditions in Kokoda.
That ignorance stretched to the Australian public, with iron-clad censorship more suited to Nazi Germany making it impossible to reveal anything like the truth of what our soldiers were facing.
But the soldiers were driven by another more powerful force — “mateship”. “You were doing it for your mates,” confirms Dick Payten.
It is that extraordinary quality of so many Australian soldiers, the willingness to risk your own life to save your comrades, that led to so many of the most inspiring stories from PNG.
Victoria Cross recipient Private Bruce Kingsbury charged into a horde of enemy overwhelming Australian positions at Isurava, firing his Bren from the hip to kill several and put the rest to flight. He was felled by a sniper. His VC was the first earned on Australian soil.
Just days later at Milne Bay, Corporal Jack French also earned the VC, taking out three enemy machinegun pits single-handedly and dying in front of the third.
Their medals are among scores earned for outstanding acts in this hideous campaign. Many more feats of courage, endurance, mateship and sacrifice went unrecognised by medals but remembered by the men who were there.
The wounded soldier who fashioned ragged kneepads and crawled for three weeks back along the track to avoid taking up one of the precious stretchers; the Salvation Army chaplain who rustled up enough supplies to set up canteens along the track for the exhausted soldiers passing to and from the front; the natives who rescued stricken Australians and hid them from the Japanese. And still new stories emerge from the Kokoda jungle.
Seventy-five years on, archaeologists are making discoveries that could change our view of this historical milestone — unrecovered remains, “lost” battlefields.
A new project to gather the stories of local people will shine an entirely new light on the conflict, which is as crucial to the modern PNG idea of nationhood as the WW1 Anzac tale is to Australia.