Edward ‘Ted’ Kenna
In full view of an enemy gun emplacement, Private Kenna fired his Bren gun amid a hail of Japanese machine gun fire, calmly taking out enemy gunners one by one and saving his comrades
How this Australia native took on an enemy machine gun nest single-handed
Edward ‘Ted’ Kenna learned to shoot by hunting rabbits in Hamilton in rural Victoria, Australia, during the Great Depression. His father had worked on the railways and as Kenna later recalled, “their wages wasn’t so hot”, and so anything extra (both in terms of pelts and meat on the table for the family of nine) helped. His skills would stand him in great stead when it came to his experiences in World War II. 15 May 1945 saw him advancing on the northwestern slopes of the Wirui Mission Station overlooking the Wewak airstrip in northern New Guinea.
Kenna’s division was involved in the Aitapewewak campaign, one of the final operations of the Pacific theatre, fought from November 1944 until the end of the war. Indeed, it was on the Wewak airstrip that the Japanese General Hatazo Adachi surrendered to Australian forces on 13 September 1945.
The Japanese had occupied Aitape in northern New Guinea during their advance south in 1942. In April 1944 the US Army retook parts of the area (centred on the Wewak airstrip) to secure their flank and act as a base for the upcoming Philippines campaign. Fighting was limited despite there being 30-35,000 Japanese troops from the 18th Army in the area. Responsibility for the defence of the region was passed to the Australians and from October 1944 elements of the Sixth Battalion began arriving. They immediately took on the task of recapturing the entire region. General Adachi withdrew his forces to concentrate them in the area around the Torricelli Mountains and Wewak. Multiple Australian columns made their way through the difficult terrain in a southeasterly direction inland, taking each village and town. The important and well-defended area of Maprik was all but cleared by 22 April by the 17th Brigade, although sporadic fighting continued into May.
The coastal campaign against Wewak proceeded at the same time as the Maprik campaign. On 1 May the 19th Brigade took over the advance from the 16th that, by then, had been in a forward position for three months and had seen 15 weeks of continuous action. It was estimated that there were between 500 and 1,000 Japanese at Wewak – by far the greatest concentration of enemy forces in the area. The town fell on 11 May and the Japanese withdrew southwards over the Prince Alexander Mountains, leaving strong defensive positions behind them on each successive knoll and ridge. Each
position could fire on the previous position and needed to be taken out individually.
Soon the only area not secured by the Australians was the rugged terrain to the south overlooking the Wewak airstrip, and it was against those positions that Eighth Platoon, A Company 2/4th Infantry Battalion, 19th Infantry Brigade advanced. Heavy machine gun positions and artillery could fire down on to the airfield and surrounding area and needed to be taken out. The most dominant of these positions was the 90-metre-high (300-foot) kunai grass-covered hill of Wirui Mission Station, known as Mission Hill. To begin with, A Company had the assistance of a tank from C Squadron of the 2/4th Armoured Regiment but, as Kenna later recalled, “It cut out more or less… stranded up on the hill there, and we had to go forward on our own.”
The men had to proceed on foot through the tall kunai grass. The terrain was rugged and there was no artillery or mortar support for the infantry assault. The actions of that day saw some of the fiercest fighting in New Guinea during the war.
The eastern slopes and the top of the hill were taken by nightfall on 14 May, but the Japanese fought back from bunkers on the northwestern slopes. Kenna’s platoon was ordered forward to deal with a machine gun post so that the company could continue.
Kenna’s support section and one other section were to pin down the enemy position while the remainder of the platoon outflanked it. Kenna’s citation stated, “When the attacking sections came into view of the enemy they were immediately engaged at very close range by heavy automatic fire from a position not previously disclosed.” Both sections started taking casualties. The citation continued, “Private Kenna endeavoured to put his Bren gun into a position where he could engage the bunker but was unable to do so because of the nature of the ground. On his own initiative and without orders, Private Kenna immediately stood up and in full view of the enemy less than 50 yards [46 metres] away and engaged the bunker, firing his Bren gun from the hip.” Kenna’s version (related in 2000, aged 80) reads slightly differently, although it does give a sense of his no-nonsense approach to combat: “Anyhow this machine gun opened up… and that’s when I got up. I couldn’t see down below, I got up and opened fire, three shots and was a bit lucky there and a couple got in the road of a couple of bullets.
But then… when I was doing that, the second bunker opened up on me and that’s when I put that out of action too, with a bit of luck … I couldn’t get at it properly with the Bren so I called for a rifle, which one of the boys [Private Rau]
threw up to me from the grass, and I happened to get a hit there so I was all right.”
In a later television interview, Kenna said he couldn’t explain why he had done what he did. “The opportunity came to shoot and I shot, that’s all.” When pressed as to why he did it, he replied, “I couldn’t answer that and I never tell a lie.’ He called himself a ‘sticky-beak’ – always wanting to know what was going on – and he couldn’t see what was going on lying down, so he stood up to take a look. He also said, “It’s just one of those things that you do, I suppose. It’s hard to say. I think anyone would have done the same thing in the same position because, well it’s no good laying down there and doing nothing. You had to do something, and I don’t think the Nips [Japanese] would have brought tea or dinner for me.”
The Victoria Cross citation goes on to speak of Kenna’s “magnificent bravery in the face of concentrated fire”, that the bunker was captured without further loss and the company action was successfully concluded. Large amounts of munitions and equipment were captured and the successful taking of Wirui Mission gave the Australians complete control of the Wewak coastal plain.
Kenna’s modesty and no-nonsense approach can be seen in his words. He had enrolled in the Citizen Military Force in the 1930s and then the Australian army in 1940. He said that he wasn’t one of the brave ones who rushed off to war and only wanted to go and fight when he actually had to. He thought that the greatest battle a soldier had to perform was actually waiting to go to war. Kenna was assigned to the 23/31st Battalion and served in Victoria and Darwin, Australia.
In June 1943 he was sent to Queensland, training at the Jungle Warfare School in Canungara. Kenna recalled, “We learnt the way to treat a jungle and the way the jungle treats those that is kind to them somehow. It might only be walking from here to there, but you’ve got to move with certain care or certain respect, I’ll put it that way, and that’s how it is.” Kenna’s battalion was then disbanded and its men sent to other units. Kenna was allocated to the 2/4 Battalion, Second AIF, and in October 1944 he sailed for New Guinea.
It is odd that a crack shot with a rifle was given charge of his support section’s Bren gun – he felled successive enemies with a single shot at Wirui Station. But Kenna appreciated his Bren, even if he saw its limitations: “The Bren is more of a gun that you put on automatic and give them hell like that… the perfect shot, with a Bren, you couldn’t do it.”
Kenna’s interviews make it clear that he was a character (what the Australians would call a Larrikin: a mischievous person, uncultivated and rowdy but good hearted) who often spoke out of turn to his superiors. “A lot of times that I’ve spoken to a higher up, like say a captain or lieut [lieutenant] or something like that and told him in certain terms that what he was doing wouldn’t win the war at all, but when I look back at it now, everything I done and everything I was going to do and failed like they told me, and I went against it to my own stupid mind.”
“THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE SUCCESS OF THE COMPANY ATTACK WOULD HAVE BEEN SERIOUSLY ENDANGERED AND MANY CASUALTIES SUSTAINED BUT FOR PRIVATE KENNA’S MAGNIFICENT COURAGE AND COMPLETE DISREGARD FOR HIS OWN SAFETY”
On at least one occasion he was deprived of a promotion to lance corporal, which was probably given to him after his action at Wirui Station, but he lost it less than three weeks later.
Kenna makes some interesting observations regarding not being in the ‘big’ war or the major campaigns that usually fill history books. The campaigns around Wewak were characterised as ‘small-scale patrolling with small-scale company attacks’. The forces against which the Australians advanced were seldom more than a few hundred and in some actions only a handful. Kenna, however, maintained that “war could be a little patrol. One men, two men, three men on patrol and you get shot, well that war is the biggest war he’s ever been in – only a handful of men… and if you call them big, in my book the small little patrol could be the biggest war of the lot… It’s one life as far as they’re concerned and that’s the big war. That’s my idea of war… There’s no such thing as big war. It’s a one-man job and that’s it.”
For all that the Aitape-wewak campaign may seem like a minor one today, two Victoria Crosses were earned by members of the Australian forces during the fighting there, which puts the heroics they performed into perspective. Lieutenant Albert Chowne was awarded a posthumous VC on 25 March at Dagua during the advance on Wewak. Australians were awarded 20 Victoria Crosses during World War II, two coming in the Wewak campaign and two others (Reg Rattey and Frank Partridge) during the 1945 Bouganville campaign, also in New Guinea. The apparently disproportionate number of awards for these minor late war campaigns reveals, as Kenna contended, that war was a one-man job and that the Australians who fought in those campaigns did so as heroically as any other serviceman. Some three weeks after his actions at Wirui Station, Kenna was wounded in the mouth and evacuated to a military hospital in Australia. It was there that he met his future wife, Marjorie, who nursed him. But he also overheard the doctors talking about his serious wounds and giving him only a 40 per cent chance of survival. Kenna’s response was typical: “Pigs. I’m the other way, don’t you worry.”
After spending more than a year in hospital, he eventually pulled through and began the road to recovery. Bizarrely, he almost missed the phone call to advise him of his Victoria Cross, because he was in the shower. His immediate reply on being told he was to receive the honour was, “Oh that’s a strange thing, you know, at this time of day."
“DESPITE THE INTENSE MACHINE GUN FIRE, HE SEIZED THE RIFLE AND, WITH AMAZING COOLNESS, KILLED THE GUNNER WITH HIS FIRST ROUND”