Kokoda (45 page)

Based at B Company Headquarters, dug in just back from the frontline behind a large log, Joe Dawson was flat out, first distributing the ammunition, and then going from platoon to platoon to ensure that there was as much order as possible in the chaos of battle.

He was just coming back from one such head-down-and-run-for-it sortie when a runner from one of the platoons caught up with him to say that a couple of Japs had just got through and were loose in his sector. In such a situation of extreme urgency, Joe had no choice but to take immediate action himself and, after picking up his gun, he grabbed another bloke and together they ran full pelt after the platoon runner back to his position to try and stem the flow. They were so hot on the runners’ heels that when a shot was suddenly fired from somewhere at close quarters and the runner went down, Joe fell on top of him. It seemed likely the runner had just slipped on the muddy track, but by the gasping, rasping sounds the bloke was now making, it was apparent he had been shot. Joe was about to tend to him when he saw a movement in a bush to his left and fired off two immediate shots, before dragging the runner back to a small depression in the landscape where they could at least get some shelter.

From there he hurled two more grenades into the area of the bush. The runner, it was now clear, was dead, with a bullet to the head. Joe felt bad for him, but that feeling was outweighed by the far more urgent feeling that he needed to complete what he had come here to do. If there were Japs who had broken through and were now inside the perimeter, then they had to be dealt with right now; but circling around to approach the bush from another direction with his gun at the ready he discovered two dead Japanese soldiers, torn apart by one of his grenades. That problem had been solved for the moment.

It momentarily seemed strange that here he was, Joe Dawson of Footscray, having just ended the life of two blokes from Japan— they were
dead
because of him—but that was just the way it was. There and then there was little time to reflect and he had to hare back to B Company Headquarters, where he was certain to be urgently needed. No sooner had he got there than a runner arrived from Colonel Honner at Battalion Headquarters with a message that each company had to hold its position whatever the cost—that if just
one
fell back all would be lost. Now exhausted, the runner who’d brought the message fell to one knee as mortar bombs landed all round and said something Joe would never forget: ‘Jeez, they’re rockin’ in, ain’t they!’

They were at that, though it seemed a strange thing to say at the time—as strange as a bloke without a leg being carried past on a stretcher. A mortar or grenade had landed near his feet, blowing one of those feet clear away and leaving the bloody stump. Joe couldn’t help but think that it really looked rather like a big red flower had suddenly sprouted from his right leg, just below his calf. Joe thought that maybe he was shell-shocked or having battle trauma or something, but that is what it fair dinkum looked like… and he never forgot it.

There were many moments on that morning when other parts of the perimeter were threatened. To stem the fury, Colonel Honner called not only every able-bodied man to duty, but pretty much the disabled as well—in fact, anyone on site who could hold a rifle and fire at the throng was required to do so. Colonel Honner also issued an order for Lieutenant Sword’s two platoons from the forward post to hot-foot it back to the plateau and take up positions. The time for keeping the Japs at arm’s length was gone and, if it was going to be hand-to-hand, the colonel wanted as many Australian hands as possible on deck.

‘There is a problem, Sir,’ one of his signallers rushed up.

‘Yes, Sergeant?’

‘The line to Lieutenant Sword is dead. The Japs must have cut the cables overnight… ’
¹⁷⁷

At the other end of the severed cable, Lieutenant Sword had just come to the same conclusion. Having heard the heavy firing coming from Isurava, he had attempted to contact Battalion HQ for instruction, with no result. And just as there are few things so black as the black of the New Guinea jungle in the night, there are surely few things so silent as a cut signal cable back to base at a time when the Japanese are swarming and you and your men are suddenly totally cut off and on your own.

What to do then? As a preliminary measure, and as a way of seeing which way the land lay, Lieutenant Sword gave the order for his men to move to their fall-back position some two hundred yards down the track towards Isurava. Bayonets fixed, eyes peeled, they moved out. Carefully. The one thing that gave them some confidence was that the previous night, when Lieutenant Simonson had headed back with the wounded, they had been relieved to hear no shots fired, hopefully indicating that the track was free. Another attempt to contact Battalion HQ from the holding position failed, and so Lieutenant Sword gave orders for Private Albert Grace to act as a runner and try to make contact.

Shortly after Albie left, Private Jimmy Woods—who had been burning up with fever for the past twenty-four hours—was also given permission to head back to the camp to get some medical attention. No sooner had he rounded the corner though than a massive spate of gunfire broke out.

Hoping against hope, Sword’s men were at least relieved to see Jimmy tearing back around the same corner, eyes rolling and tongue spitting with fury: ‘The bastards are just down the track and had a go at me.’ It wasn’t that he was scared, he was
offended
by their pure bastardry. On his back, his rucksack had been shot all to pieces, perhaps saving his life. As to Albie Grace, he was, alas, never seen again, at least not by Australian eyes.

Signals cut. Japs in control of the track. There was only one thing for Sword’s men to do, and they all knew it. They would have to head out cross-country, up above the track into thick and densely wooded jungle, to try to cut their way through in a circuitous fashion back to camp. It was a last resort to beat all last resorts, as trying to push through the jungle without a track was pure murder, but on the grounds that it was probably less murderous than staying where they were and starving, or heading straight into massed Japanese guns around the corner, Lieutenant Sword gave the order.

Unbeknown to Sword’s men, another patrol, under the command of Lieutenant Bill Pentland—which had gone out to try and stop the Japanese outflanking Isurava by going along another track to its west—was also cut off. These two patrols, separately, now started thrashing their way through the jungle. Given that Isurava was all but surrounded, both groups set off towards Alola. They had little to no food, but more water than they thought they could bear as it continued to tumble from the heavens. They each pressed on through the day and into the night, as to their east the battle rolled on, with Colonel Honner now deprived of some of his fittest men.

And that, in General Rowell’s view, was a typical bit of bullshit from General MacArthur. On the morning of 27 August, Lieutenant General Rowell the Commanding Officer of all Australian forces in New Guinea, received a direct order from MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area: ‘The landing force [at Milne Bay] must be attacked with the greatest vigour and destroyed as soon as possible.’ (Oh, really? As opposed, perhaps, to simply hauling up the white flag and throwing down their weapons? Or maybe even catching a flight to Australia when things got really grim, as some had so recently done up in the Philippines?) Rowell decided to turn the order into more acceptable Australianese before passing it down the line to his friend Clowes (for whom in a cricket game played by the 1st XI of Duntroon Royal Military College in 1914, they had once combined to make
b. Clowes c. Rowell
that institution’s most famous hat-trick): ‘Confident you have situation well in hand and will administer stern punishment.’

For all that, Rowell’s close colleague, General Tubby Allen, the Commanding Officer of the 7th Division, sent a message quite different in tone to Brigadier Arnold Potts in Alola. In response to Brigadier Potts’s request the previous day that the 2/27th Battalion be dispatched forthwith to Myola to act as his reserve as the fighting intensified at Isurava, General Allen’s cable advised: ‘Enemy force landed at Milne Bay, 26th. Inadvisable send 2/27th Battalion until situation clarifies.’ With the Japanese landing at Milne Bay, it meant that Port Moresby had an invasion force coming at it from two directions and would have to protect itself first. The upshot was that the men on site at Isurava, and those racing to get to them, were on their own.

Half a league, half a league, half a league onwards… Their’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die
.
Into the valley of Death, rode the six hundred…

Many times, as the brave Japanese soldiers launched their full-frontal attacks on the Australian positions, they would shout ‘
Banzai
!’ and as a matter of principle they usually seemed to make an infernal racket when they were about to make a big front-on charge.

And the Australians? On one notable occasion the many cries of ‘
Banzai
!’ were met with an Australian soldier doing a very impressive Tarzan impersonation à la the Hollywood actor Johnny Weissmuller, but generally their own war cries were a little more prosaic and regional in nature, most particularly given that the men of both the 39th and 2/14th were drawn from Australia’s southeastern state.

Sometimes, in the heat of battle, when Australian soldiers burst from their trenches to go at the Japanese with their bayonets, in the midst of the chattering machine guns, the grenades, the screams and imprecations, you could hear it yelled, right in the middle of the battle thunder: ‘Up there, Cazaly!’

You knew then that the Victorians were on the job. It was not a password, not a battle cry per se. Rather, it was an intuitively understood shout from one Aussie Rules steeped Aussie to another, which not only had echoes of home and what they were fighting for in the first place, but also served as an inspiration perhaps that this was a time to give it your all, to not hold back, to empty yourself of all you had in the quest for victory. The way the great Roy Cazaly, a VFL footballer from Melbourne in the 1920s had… The Victorians, a tribe all their own within the Australian mosaic, were just like that.

‘
Banzai
!’ was not the only thing the Japanese called out, however. The Japanese practice that the Australians had first noticed at Oivi when they called out to Corporal White was now even more common. For some reason, the Emperor’s men at both Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Track now delighted in calling out things in English to their enemies. Some of it was a kind of half-baked attempt to demand surrender, as in: ‘Australia man you go, Japan man he come. Withdraw Aussie withdraw. Japan man here. Drop arms surrender… ’ or ‘Don’t fire. Troops coming in’, and ‘We are the Japanese. Order the whole army to stop firing.’

Some of it was amusing, as in when they called out ‘Good morning, Aussie,’ even though it was the middle of the night, and ‘Japanese soldier, he come. Australian soldier, he run like hell.’
¹⁷⁸
And some of it was downright bizarre, as in when they had been known to call out: ‘Is that you, Mum?’—perhaps one of the few sentences from rudimentary English lessons from many years before that had stuck. With a chortle, some of the men told the story of how at Kokoda a couple of weeks back a stunningly accented Japanese voice had called in the dusk: ‘Are you there, Larry Downes?’

‘My oath, I am,’ Larry had replied, before sending several magazines worth of Tommygun lead right in the voice’s direction. Larry was there, and on the job.

Of a more serious nature was when Japanese soldiers used stolen uniforms from dead Australian soldiers to get close to the Australian lines. Equally alarming was when in the middle of the night the dim silhouette of a figure moved towards you on the frontline and you had a split second to choose between firing at the figure or—risking your own life—waiting a moment to be absolutely sure whether it was enemy or friend. The Australians soon got around that.

‘Woolloomooloo!’ one of the platoons shouted as their own password, citing the place whence the
Aquitania
had set off to bring them to New Guinea. If the figure called back ‘Woolloomooloo!’ it was fine. But anything that sounded like ‘Woorroomooroo’, or more likely no response at all, risked being met with a hail of lead. Other platoons favoured ‘Elizabeth!’, the reckoning being that the Japanese tongue had even more trouble with the ‘z’ and ‘th’ sound than it did with ‘l’s. Yet another password was ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen!’.

Throughout 27 August the battle continued at Isurava, flaring into full-blooded attacks, fading momentarily as each side regrouped and recovered their dead, and then flaring again. Sometimes, though, as the Diggers learned, the Japs weren’t dead at all. There would be one charge seemingly beaten off—with many dead bodies lying prone before your guns—and then when the next charge came in, a lot of the bodies would miraculously rise and charge forward again. They had been simply ‘lying doggo’, to use the Diggers’ term, until the right moment came.
¹⁷⁹
The Japs would also send out what the Diggers called ‘crawlers’, soldiers slithering forward on their bellies, undetected, to a position close enough to the Australians where—when the next wave of their comrades ran forward—they would suddenly jump up and throw grenades at the Australians’ entrenched positions. Happily, while an Australian soldier could generally throw grenades about fifty yards, the Japanese were flat out throwing theirs twenty-five yards, limiting the effectiveness of the tactic. Partly, this was because the Japanese grenades were heavier and harder to throw, and partly because the poor bastards had never had a chance to play cricket and didn’t know what it was to grow up hurling balls in from the outfield.