The plan was to move the force to Buna in four groups, with air cover provided from Milne Bay and Port Moresby. The first group consisted of four Australian infantry companies and a small party of American engineers. These men were supposed to leave Port Moresby on July 31 and cross the mountains on the Kokoda Track in what was expected to take ten days, arriving on or about August 10. Their first task on arrival was to secure the area and prepare for the following groups. The second group, approximately 250 men—including additional engineers, radar and communications specialists, port maintenance personnel, and a .50-caliber antiaircraft battery—was scheduled to arrive by two small ships on August 11.
The third group would also come by ship. It would include an Australian infantry brigade, along with the brigadier who was to take command, an RAAF radar and communications detachment, and the ground crews to support two pursuit squadrons. Americans would be among the support personnel. Two weeks later a company of engineers and additional ground support personnel, all American, were planned to arrive by sea from Townsville.26
The key to accomplishing the plan successfully was to get to Buna and prepare the airfield for fighters before the enemy realized the Allies were there. Surprise was paramount.
As everyone was preparing for the move to Buna, MacArthur ordered a reconnaissance party to determine whether a long-neglected emergency landing strip near Buna could serve as the basis for a military airfield. If not, the party was to find a location where the Allies could build one. On July 10 a Catalina flying boat took six officers from Port Moresby to the coast near Buna Village. On board were Lieutenant Colonel Bernard L. Robinson, the ranking American engineer officer at Port Moresby, as well as Lieutenant Colonel Boyd D. Wagner, a fighter group commander; Colonel Yoder, a second American pilot; and three Australians who were familiar with the Buna area. They quickly determined that the existing airstrip was useless for military purposes, but found that a grassy plain fifteen miles south, near a place called Dobodura, was an entirely different story. Here was a large, flat area with good drainage and an excellent supply of gravel, stone, and timber for construction. A large indigenous population could supply a cooperative workforce. Robinson reported that there was ample room for dispersing aircraft and building a runway seven thousand feet long and three hundred feet wide. It was an all-weather site with good direction in the prevailing winds.27
Colonel Robinson believed it possible to build “a number of runways” at the Dobodura site. Robinson did not realize how correct he was when he wrote his report, for by the time the war in New Guinea ended, the U.S. Army had constructed fifteen airfields and interconnecting runways in the Dobodura area. One remains in operation today as a regional airport.28
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Reports began arriving at MacArthur’s headquarters indicating the Japanese were up to something. Air reconnaissance flights over Rabaul reported that on July 17 twenty-four vessels, including several large warships, were anchored in the city’s harbor. Also spotted was a group of what appeared to be trawlers or fishing boats filled with troops apparently hidden in a bay along the north coast of New Britain near the village of Talasea.29
Added to this were intelligence reports of increased enemy radio traffic referencing an overland route to Port Moresby. One decrypted Japanese message indicated quite clearly that their army planned to land near Buna on July 21, with the intention of crossing the Owen Stanley Range and attacking Port Moresby.30
When General Van Volkenburgh, who was at Port Moresby, learned on the eighteenth of the reconnaissance reports concerning the ships at Rabaul, he immediately contacted his assistant commander, Lieutenant Colonel David Larr, in Townsville. The two agreed that the enemy activity could only mean a Japanese invasion along the coast of New Guinea, and the most logical place for such a landing was Buna. They had not yet learned of the decrypted radio transmissions. Colonel Larr telephoned MacArthur’s chief of staff, General Sutherland, and proposed that the departure of the first group of troops to Buna begin immediately. He was concerned that if they allowed the schedule to stand, the troops would arrive at Buna too late. Sutherland, who likely had not seen the decrypted radio signal, turned Larr down. He indicated he might be able to speed up the schedule a little, but to Larr’s request that they use flying boats to move the first group to Buna immediately, the response was no. Sutherland had to keep in mind that the occupation of Buna was the second task assigned by the chiefs of staff, so he had to wait at least until Admiral Ghormley’s invasion of Tulagi, the first task, was under way.31
As events transpired, Sutherland’s refusal to speed up the movement of Australian troops to Buna probably saved their lives. The few troops available would have been overwhelmed when the two thousand Japanese soldiers swept ashore.
When General MacArthur learned of the transports full of Japanese soldiers, he informed General Brett. Concerned about poor morale and exhaustion among his aircrews—as well as the worn condition of their planes, especially the B-17s—Brett sent a single Hudson from Port Moresby to fly over Talasea and along the northern New Britain coast to confirm the earlier sightings of warships and transports. The Hudson’s crew found nothing.
Meanwhile, the Japanese, convinced of the existence of a route from Buna to Port Moresby, decided that the theoretical road could accommodate motor vehicles. The basis for this was an account penned by an English explorer, discovered by Japanese officers in occupied Manila, of his time spent on the northern coast of New Guinea. The explorer reported learning of a road from the coast across the mountains to Port Moresby. Though he failed to describe the road in any detail—in part because he had not seen it and was only recording something told to him—the Japanese military planners took the story as completely accurate and planned their assault based on its misinformation.32
Two Japanese reconnaissance flights from the 25th Air Flotilla, on June 27 and June 30, reported finding a “road passable by motor transport between Buna and Kokoda,” which is located a little less than halfway to Port Moresby in the upper reaches of the mountain range. The pilots claimed to spot a ten-foot-wide road that wound from Buna for about three miles, then narrowed to about three feet for another six miles. After that, jungle canopy hid the road from view. For some unaccountable reason, the pilots’ report clearly stated, “There is a road passable by motor transport between Buna and Kokoda. There is a bridge over the Kumusi River passable by motor transport to the east of Papki. This road is in flat terrain devoid of ravines.” It went on to state there were large portions of the road beyond Kokoda “that are passable by motor transport and areas where difficulties would arise.” It then summed up the final leg of the trip with the claim that the way west from Kokoda “is judged to be passable by motor transport that proceeds to Port Moresby.”33
The pilots were lucky that they did not have to travel this “road.” Commenting on these reports after the war, the U.S. Army noted, “Actually, the Buna-Moresby road was nothing but a native trail which alternately ran through jungle swamps and over precipitous mountains. Throughout the entire campaign the use of vehicular transport was out of the question.”34
Based on the faulty reconnaissance report, a Japanese convoy weighed anchor at Rabaul on July 20 and headed west toward New Guinea. On board two high-speed army transports were two thousand soldiers commanded by Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama, including engineers, infantry, and mountain artillery troops consolidated into the Yokoyama advance party. A third transport carried three hundred men from a Special Naval Landing Force, and eight hundred men of a Naval Construction Unit. These army and navy troops were an advance party whose assignment was to establish the beachhead near Buna, then proceed as quickly as possible toward Kokoda prior to the arrival of the main force. This advance party was to determine the best overland route, repair roads as needed, and stockpile ordnance along the way for use by the follow-up units.35
A B-17 reported briefly seeing the ships north of Rabaul heading west
, but lost them in bad weather. Allied aircraft searched as best they could, but were limited by a heavy mist that reduced visibility to virtually zero. The transports and their warship escorts were briefly seen about ninety miles east of Salamaua. Later that afternoon they were sighted again, this time forty miles from Buna. Several bombers attacked the ships, but with no reportable results. Visibility remained the main problem, and likely accounted for the absence of air cover for the convoy. At six p.m., the warships engaged in a brief shelling of Buna and nearby Gona.
Early on the morning of July 21, army troops landed at a place called Basabua, a short distance from Buna Village, while the naval troops arrived at Gona. By the time Allied bombers found the invading forces, most of the landing parties were already ashore. Troops wasted little time in unloading supplies and weapons, including an antiaircraft gun, and hiding them in the nearby jungle, out of sight of enemy pilots. Over the next few days B-17s, B-26s, and P-39s attacked the landing zones, but with limited results. One transport and one destroyer suffered damage, but all the ships were able to withdraw in relative safety. On July 26, more troops went ashore from a destroyer, followed three days later by troops from two transports, a light cruiser, and a destroyer. On July 30, Allied bombers sank an empty transport, and the next day turned back a second convoy.36
Colonel Yokoyama sent a reconnaissance party up the first “road” he saw, and the die was cast. In a bit of irony, the first opposition the Japanese encountered was not from Australian troops but rather native New Guinean soldiers of the Papuan Infantry Battalion. The PIB ambushed the reconnaissance party, but was soon driven back by overwhelming firepower. By the end of August, 13,500 Japanese troops had landed in the Buna/Gona area.37
The Japanese were on their way to Port Moresby—or so they thought.
CHAPTER 7
Death Along the Kokoda Track
Kokoda lies about fifty miles from Buna, and slightly more than one hundred miles northeast of Port Moresby. The village is situated in the Yodda Valley in the northern foothills of the Owen Stanley Range, about twelve hundred feet above sea level. In 1942, it was home to a small native population, a rubber plantation, and a government post, but its greatest value was the small airfield nearby. This was the only such field in the Papuan portion of New Guinea between Port Moresby and the northeastern coast. According to Australian military historian Peter Williams, the Kokoda airfield was central New Guinea’s “most important feature. Whichever army held the [air]strip could fly in reinforcements and supplies while denying the same to the enemy. In the long run the army that held the Kokoda strip was best placed to win the mountain campaign.” To Allied leaders, it quickly became obvious that the Japanese intended to use that airstrip to supply the troops they planned to send across the mountains.1
The official Australian history of the war describes the link that connects Port Moresby, through Kokoda, to the Buna-Gona northeastern coast as “a primitive foot track” used primarily by “barefoot natives, or occasionally a missionary, a patrolling officer of the [Papuan] Administration, or some other wandering European.”2
The history then takes three densely packed pages to describe the full length of the narrow, mud-filled trail as it winds through jungles and across rushing streams and rivers, up the sides of mountains to heights of seven thousand feet and down again in almost vertical descents. The trail clings to the sides of crevices, moves along the edges of narrow precipices that fall away hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet to crashing rivers below. So narrow is it in many places that two men cannot pass each other without one stepping off the path into the jungle to allow the other to go by.
The U.S. Army’s official history claims that “the Japanese could scarcely have chosen a more dismal place in which to conduct a campaign. It often rains as high as 150, 200 and even 300 inches per year, and during the rainy season, daily falls of eight or ten inches are not uncommon. The terrain, as varied as it is difficult, is a military nightmare. Towering saw-toothed mountains, densely covered by mountain forest and rain forest, alternate with flat malarial, coastal areas made up of matted jungle, reeking swamp, and broad patches of knife-edged kunai grass four to seven feet high. The heat and humidity in the coastal areas are well-nigh unbearable, and in the mountains there is biting cold at altitudes over 5,000 feet.” Along the banks of the numerous streams and turbulent rivers that drain down from the mountains, “the fringes of the forest become interwoven from ground to treetop level with vines and creepers to form an almost solid mat of vegetation which has to be cut by the machete or the bolo before progress is possible. The vegetation in the mountains is almost luxuriant; leeches abound everywhere; and the trees are often so overgrown with creepers and moss that the sunlight can scarcely filter through to the muddy tracks below.”3
The hot and humid zones below the mountains were home to a wide variety of animals: crocodiles, snakes, lizards, anteaters, tree kangaroos, wallabies, butterflies with twelve-inch wingspans, and more than six hundred species of birds, including the five-foot-tall cassowary, known to kill a man with a single swipe of one of its daggerlike clawed feet.
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Well-practiced Japanese troops and laborers began building headquarters facilities on July 22 at the Buna-Gona landing sites, installing antiaircraft guns and constructing fortified bunkers, as well as improving and expanding the airfield that American officers had found unsuitable for military use. A wharf was run out into the water to speed the offloading of supplies and reinforcements, all while Allied aircraft relentlessly bombed both beachheads.
While all this work was under way, Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama, commander of the advance party, sent Lieutenant Colonel Hatsuo Tsukamoto, a martinet and heavy sake drinker widely disliked by his men, inland in search of the road to Kokoda. Tsukamoto’s party comprised an infantry battalion, a signal unit, and a company from the 15th Independent Engineers. In all, about nine hundred men loaded into trucks and followed tracks that led them inland. After a few miles, the troops abandoned the trucks when the road narrowed to a footpath. By nightfall, they had reached the native village at Soputa, seven miles from the coast. Other than a few skirmishes with Papuan Infantry Battalion troops, the march had been uneventful but exhausting: some of the soldiers must have had premonitions of what faced them in the coming weeks as they slipped and fell into the thick, stinking mud that served as their “road.” The Transport Battalion followed Tsukamoto’s men and quickly cleared a track to Soputa for vehicles.4
The following day the troops made it to Awala, about twenty-five miles inland, where they again encountered PIB troops and some Australian militiamen. The outnumbered defenders had to fall back after inflicting as much damage to the invaders as they could. Colonel Tsukamoto pressed on toward Kokoda, following his instructions “to push on night and day to the line of the mountain range.”5
The Papuan Infantry Battalion was one of two military units composed of local Papuan natives. The other was the Royal Papuan Constabulary, an armed police force that worked in conjunction with the PIB, with some members actually moving back and forth between the two units. About eight hundred men from both forces fought against the Japanese during the war. All privates and most noncommissioned officers were Papuan, while the officers and some NCOs were Australian, except for the PIB’s commanding officer, Major William Watson, a New Zealander. A well-known rugby player, Watson had toured the United States and Canada in the pre–World War I years. During that war, he fought at Gallipoli and on the western front. When World War II broke out, he rejoined the Australian forces. Because he had lived for several years in New Guinea, working as a plantation manager, gold prospector, and trader, he was familiar with the local dialects. This led to his posting to the PIB.
The previous month, even before the enemy invasion of Buna and Gona, General MacArthur had informed General Blamey that there was “evidence that the Japanese are displaying interest in the development of a route from Buna on the
north coast of southern New Guinea through Kokoda to Port Moresby. From studies made at this headquarters it appears that minor forces may attempt to utilize this route”6 MacArthur then added, “Whatever the Japanese plan may be, it is of vital importance that the route from Kokoda westward be controlled by Allied forces, particularly the Kokoda area.”7
Blamey passed this on to Major General Basil Morris, commander of the New Guinea Force at Port Moresby. The fifty-three-year-old Morris, a decorated artillery officer in the First World War, had served in the Middle East since December 1939, before his appointment to head the Military District in New Guinea. When the civilian government at Port Moresby was withdrawn after the first Japanese bombings, Morris became head of the Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit, the military government of New Guinea.
General Morris already had three hundred men of the PIB and about 130 men of Company B of the 39th Australian Infantry Battalion in the Kokoda area. The company commander was Captain Samuel V. Templeton, a man in his mid-forties who had served in the Royal Navy during the Great War. These were the first elements that Morris had charged with the responsibility to defend Kokoda if the Japanese approached. It had taken Templeton’s infantry troops eight difficult days of marching to reach Kokoda from Port Moresby, a distance of just over one hundred miles.8
When MacArthur learned such a small force had been sent to defend Kokoda, he discussed his concerns with Blamey, who instructed Morris to send additional troops to protect what they knew was going to be a vital link in the coming battle for the Kokoda Track. Morris quickly ordered the rest of the 39th Battalion to Kokoda. With only one small transport plane available that was able to land at the Kokoda airstrip, he had the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William T. Owen, flown in ahead of the rest of his troops on July 24. As a major back in January, Owen had led his company in defending the beach near Mount Vulcan during the invasion of Rabaul. By July 26, the plane had made two more flights, but was able to bring in only thirty soldiers. The rest had to make the arduous trek on foot.
War at the End of the World Page 14
