Kokoda (66 page)

For such an important job, there had been none better than Stan’s old mate, Alan Haddy of the 2/16th, the big smiling Western Australian who had so distinguished himself in the war to date. Haddy had taken twenty of his best blokes and set up in a small village two miles to the west of Gona that had instantly become known to the troops as ‘Haddy’s Village’. In truth, Haddy was now only a pale shadow of the man he had been, racked by malaria, lack of food, lack of sleep and sheer exhaustion at having fought so hard for so long, but his mighty spirit remained intact and everyone felt better for the fact that Alan was on the job. They knew if the Japs did land west of Gona, Haddy had ’em covered, and would give ’em hell the way he always had—usually first up with the two-inch mortar that he operated personally, before then using his Bren, then his rifle, then his bayonet, then his fists as they got progressively closer. That was just Haddy.

And sure enough, sure enough… The night after the 39th’s first disastrous assault on Gona, a storm that would wake the dead had blown up out of the Solomon Sea. Whatever gods New Guinea had were clearly all angry at once as the lightning cracked just a split second before the thunder crashed and the rain lashed down as the wind blew the palm trees almost horizontal to the ground. And in the middle of it all each flash of lightning around Haddy’s village suddenly revealed dozens,
hundreds,
of scurrying Japs, all converging on Haddy and his men. Suddenly there is a flash and an explosion and one of Haddy’s men is killed outright, while four others are severely wounded, of whom Haddy is one. But it was going to take more than a grenade to take out the likes of him and, though bleeding profusely, Haddy soon organised his men to drop through the floors of the flimsy huts, get into their entrenched positions beneath and return fire, even as he sent one of his men immediately back to warn the troops behind that the Japs had landed and were coming their way.

Propping himself on the edge of his trench, Haddy was soon timing his every shot to the flashes of lightning, which in every split second revealed more and more targets coming for them. In the intensity of the Japanese return fire it was extraordinary that any of the Australians survived. When it was clearly hopeless, and there was just no way to hold back the Jap tide for much longer, Haddy ordered his few able-bodied men to gather the wounded and get back to safety, while he mounted a rearguard. And that was Haddy, too. On the track, in dangerous country, he had always insisted on taking the most dangerous position of forward scout, the one who always copped it first, and now that they were in trouble, he was insisting he’d be the last man out, while they got to safety.
²⁹²

What goes through a man’s mind when he does this? What does he think as he sends others to safety, surely knowing that he is signing his own death warrant by doing so? What was Haddy thinking? The soldiers making their retreat to safety didn’t know, but they would never forget the vision offered by their last backward glance. There was Alan Haddy, a proud mother’s son from Western Australia, now a skull’s head by the lightning’s glow, loading his Bren, gathering his grenades close and getting ready to take as many of the bastards with him as he could. And then, as they limped away, he was lost to them.

It was a measure of the respect that the Australian troops had for Haddy that as soon as the word got through that he had been left behind and was in trouble, two groups immediately went to the rescue, one of which included the 39th’s Lieutenant ‘Kanga’ Moore and ten of his men from 18 Platoon. Both groups soon encountered swarms of Japanese, and neither was able to get through, but at the very least Haddy’s mission was accomplished. No one knew if the Western Australian warrior was alive or dead, but the fact that he and his men had put up such a fight meant that Brigadier Dougherty had time to move more men of the 2/14th west of Gona Creek to prevent the Japanese reinforcements from getting across that creek to relieve the Australian siege.

The following morning, Ralph Honner could barely believe it. He had been ordered to mount
another
attack just like the disastrous one the day before, to send men over the same killing field that was now soaked with the blood of five aborted attacks that had got precisely nowhere. It was almost more than Honner could stand. It was one thing for him to follow orders, but how could he order men to their certain deaths?
Could
he do that?

Salvation came from heaven, or at least the heavens, for this attack was going to be supported by an aerial bombardment. It fell to Joe Dawson and a couple of other soldiers to guide the bombers. Standard practice in such cases was for the troops on the ground to construct a massive white T, with the top of the T pointing to the target site. Strangely, Joe didn’t have any starched white sheets on him, but he managed to gather in the towels of all the blokes and quickly construct a ‘T’hat-a-way T for the Wirraway bombers, while keeping his head down.

But then came the supposed salvation. Whether they didn’t see the T or were just bad shots would never be known, but the bombs when they came simply went everywhere, including
behind
the gathered 39th. No one was hurt, but it gave Honner precisely the excuse he was looking for. He was quickly on the field telephone to Brigadier Dougherty to inform him that he wanted to cancel the attack. When Dougherty agreed, Colonel Honner used the opportunity to
implore
the brigadier to let him put into action the plan he had formulated to get to the Japanese via the finger of jungle leading to their heart. Choosing his words carefully, but acutely conscious that the lives of many men depended on him mounting a convincing argument, Honner respectfully pointed out the folly of heading out once again over terrain that was already soaked with Australian blood when there was a good alternative at hand.

Dougherty, who had fought with Honner in Greece and Crete— and knew him to be absolutely top drawer—listened, and roughly acceded, although without wanting to abandon the attack on the left flank altogether. Perhaps the fact that Honner was free of the Koitaki slur meant that Dougherty was more free to follow Honner’s advice and not simply command. Extraordinarily, in all of the Gona campaign to this point, this would be the first time that a commander in the field would be executing a plan entirely of his own creation, instead of following the dictates of someone operating solely from maps and situated well removed from the action.

Honner spent the time before the attack began scanning the ground with his binoculars, making notes and plans, and working out precise tactics for his men. One thing among many that he soon worked out was that if his men could get through, the Japanese defences really would be split for the first time, with the Jap defenders to the west entirely cut off from those on the eastern side.

They found Haddy. Dead, beneath the house, surrounded by a ring of equally dead Japs. If he had to go, that was precisely the way he would have wanted to go, defending his mates and giving the Japs hot curry right to the end.

All was now in place for the 39th’s attack on Gona. Colonel Honner’s plan was for A Company to lead the attack, followed hard by D Company and then… C Company. Ah yes, C Company. Though Brigadier Dougherty had insisted that C Company mount their attack across the kunai killing fields, for the first time in his military career, Ralph Honner disobeyed a direct order. Quietly, he told the C Company commander, Captain Seward, to make a feint only— send in some limited fire, but risk no lives at all—and get ready to back up A Company and D Company in the eastern sector, through the finger of jungle, when the moment came.

And still Honner had yet one more ace to play. His close examination of the Japanese military method had revealed that while the Japs were being bombarded, they didn’t bother firing but simply kept their heads down till it passed and then proceeded to let forth their withering fire.

What if his men, then, advanced right to the Japanese throats while the bombardment was on? What if the 39th took the risk of being blown apart by their own bombs, on the reckoning that, however dangerous, it was a whole lot less dangerous than going straight into the teeth of a Jap who was aiming directly at you? The more Honner thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Refining it a little more, he arranged with artillery to fuse their shells so that they would explode a couple of feet into the soft soil. That way if they got into the roof of the bunker they would damage the structure, and if they landed beside they’d still stun the defenders. Either way the Japs would be heavily distracted.
²⁹³

By split-second timing, the 39th would be able to begin its move on the Japs two minutes before the bombardment finished, giving them one minute to get among the bunkers, and one minute to do damage while the bombs were still dropping and all was confused.

It was a plan of extraordinary daring, the more so because there was a very real chance that an enormous bomb would drop right on his own men and take out twenty at once; but the point was that it was so daring that the Japanese surely wouldn’t anticipate it.

The key was to get the timing precisely right, and not to tell the men that the barrage would continue for two minutes after they launched their attack. To do so would have troubled them unnecessarily, and simply lifted their anxiety. All they needed to know was that when the time came, they were to attack with everything they had.

There was a rumble in the jungle. Aeroplanes overhead. American aeroplanes. This time they were not dropping death and destruction on the Japanese, but propaganda pamphlets. It was an initiative from Brigadier Dougherty, and the hope was that the pamphlets might weaken their resolve. Each photo showed dozens of Japanese soldiers being guarded by a single Australian soldier holding a rifle, with the subtitle in Japanese characters saying: ‘This is to inform the Emperor’s soldiers that thousands of their comrades have already laid down their arms, so you too should surrender.’
²⁹⁴
The soldiers of the 39th wistfully watched the pamphlets flutter down, and the worse they had dysentery the more wistful they were. All that paper,
wasted
—though it was a fair bet that all the Japs suffering from dysentry, which was surely most of them, would put the paper to good use.
²⁹⁵

Not surprisingly for the men of the 39th, the pamphlets did not make the Japanese do what five straight months of starvation, bullets, bombs, death and disease had not been able to accomplish— that is, make them throw down their weapons and come out with their hands up—and the attack by the 39th had to go ahead.

And the time came soon enough. It was 12.42 p.m. on 8 December 1942, and the bombardment just ahead made the ground shake like it had thunder in its belly. At Honner’s signal the men of the 39th did what they did best, which was to get to grips with the Japs. And how sweet it was. Four months before, it was the 39th who had dug themselves in, waiting for the Japs. But now, now it was their turn…

With the roar of the exploding bombs obviating any need for a cautiously quiet advance, they just up and ran straight at where they knew the Japanese bunkers to be, where Lieutenant Colonel Honner’s reconnaissance had told them they would be found. Cannon volleyed and thundered—to the left of them, to the right of them, and cannon right out in front.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death,

Rode the six hundred…

What ensued was happy carnage. Happier still, not one bomb killed any man of the 39th.

The Japanese had no idea that the Australians were on them, and many died where they sat, their heads between their hands, waiting for the barrage to stop. By the time they knew that the game had changed, an Australian grenade had either hurtled surprisingly through the gun slot of their bunker—
‘mail call, special delivery!’
— or the muzzle of an Australian Bren gun was spitting death at each and every one of them. Some Japanese soldiers did manage to rally a little, but they, too, were wiped out in the course of the day and into the night, as the men of the 39th moved ruthlessly from post to post, secure in the knowledge that they now had the yellow bastards isolated from their reinforcements.

Not that the Japs didn’t have some fight left in them. In the last post to fall, the gallant Lieutenant Bob Sword—he who had gone so far beyond the call of duty at Isurava, and who Colonel Honner had saluted with such respect—was mortally wounded by what was close to the last shot fired in the clean-out.

All around Gona Mission now on this morning of 9 December, the detritus of a long battle was apparent. Walking around among it all, Joe Dawson came across the bodies of two Australians with their heads within a foot of Japanese pillboxes. Just one more yard and they would have made it, killing the Japs instead of being killed by them. And, obviously, they weren’t the only ones. Joe was a bit worried at the time, as he was yet to catch up with Wally and Ray, and had some fear they might have been killed or injured. Never mind, he was sure they would show up soon.

In the meantime, many dead and rotting bodies of the recently killed Japanese soldiers lay nameless in the tropical torpor. In these conditions a dead body could start to be on the nose in a matter of an hour, but that wasn’t where most of the unbearable stench was coming from. Nor did it arise from the fact that the Japs in their trenches for days on end had to do their ablutions a step away from where they subsequently died. The real putrescence came from the Japs who had been killed
weeks
before, and who had just been piled up, sometimes almost as part of a barricade, before being blown apart in this new battle. Their remains now lay all over the place. Not for nothing were some of the dead Japs wearing gas masks. It wasn’t because they feared a gas attack, it was because they too, couldn’t stand the smell.