War at the End of the World

by James P. Duffy

  For the Japanese soldiers at the tip of the spear, driving a group of Australians from their position became doubly important because the retreating forces often left behind food supplies they could not take with them. Some units virtually existed on these supplies. When the Australians realized how hungry their opponents were, they started leaving behind purposely contaminated food. Eating these tainted foods, large numbers of Imperial soldiers were put out of action by disabling gastric ailments, such as amoebic dysentery and severe diarrhea. This was on top of the malaria that had begun spreading like wildfire among the undernourished troops.50

  When uncontaminated food was discovered following an Australian retreat, chaos often erupted among the normally well-disciplined soldiers as they scrambled to scoop up as much as they could carry. A Japanese war correspondent accompanying the troops described a scene in one village when a hut containing piles of untouched goods was found: “Here in the Papuan mountains the standard of living was higher than in Japan! I thought I saw something of the appalling power of Anglo-American civilization that Japan had so recklessly challenged.”51

  General Horii took personal command of the troops facing Isurava and commenced his advance during the night of August 25. The village was situated in a flat clearing with creeks running on either side. Horii’s plan was to feint a frontal attack to draw Australian fire while units circled around to attack the enemy flanks and force their way to the Australians’ rear to prevent their withdrawal. The Japanese commander was not aware that the Australians had been reinforced by powerful elements of the regular army. Both sides were now almost evenly matched in size: when the battle for Isurava began, the Japanese strength was 2,130 men, facing an Allied force of 2,292.52

  The Australians’ determined resistance forced the failure of Horii’s envelopment plan. Yet with the arrival of Japanese heavy guns, the situation was altered. By August 30 eight guns were blasting shells into the Allied lines, including several 75mm mountain artillery cannons. The Australians continued fighting, but it was a fighting withdrawal day after day. General MacArthur, who some historians have charged with being too critical of Australian troops, received daily reports of the action in the mountains of Papua. On September 10, he let his true feelings be known when he issued a communiqué describing the Australian and Papuan forces as “fighting tenaciously and gallantly under conditions of extraordinary hardship and difficulty.”53

  By September 10 the Australians had fallen back to a high point known as Ioribaiwa Ridge, some twenty-five miles from Port Moresby and within sight of the Papuan Gulf on the south side of New Guinea. Relentless attacks by Japanese patrols made inroads on the defenses and prompted the current Australian commander, Brigadier Kenneth Eather, to request permission from Port Moresby on September 15 to withdraw to the nearby Imita Ridge, the last major natural obstacle on the Kokoda Track before Port Moresby. Eather believed he could establish a truly defensible position there, shorten his supply line, and take advantage of the artillery that was slowly moving up from the capital. Major General Allen approved of Eather’s plan, but warned, “There won’t be any withdrawal from the Imita position, Ken. You’ll die there if necessary.”54

  At eleven the following morning, the Australians began their final withdrawal. The departure from Ioribaiwa left the ridge to the surprised Japanese. When it was clear their enemy had gone, Japanese troops poured onto Ioribaiwa Ridge, impatient to see what food the Australians had abandoned.55 Little that was edible had been left—the Australians and their carriers had taken nearly everything with them. The Japanese were on the brink of starvation.56

  A Japanese correspondent described the scene when the troops arrived at the Ioribaiwa Ridge: “We gazed over the Gulf of Papua from the peak of the last main ridge we had fought to ascend. ‘I can see the ocean! The sea of Port Moresby!’ Later that evening we stood on the peak and saw the lights of Port Moresby. We could just make out the searchlights shining over the airfield at Seven Mile to the north of the city.”57

  Their objective was so near, yet remained out of reach.

  Events transpired in both camps to halt the Japanese attempt to capture Port Moresby. General MacArthur, recognizing that Horii had stretched his forces to their limit, on October 3 ordered the 16th Infantry Brigade of the 6th Australian Division to Port Moresby so the 25th Brigade, which was in reserve there, could be sent to Imita Ridge and support the forces preparing an offensive against the Japanese.

  The commander in chief then decided that American troops, with little jungle training and no combat experience, should be sent across the mountains using a different route to cover the right flank of the Australians, and possibly even cut General Horii off from his supply line. MacArthur selected the 126th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Division for this task. On October 2, before they left, MacArthur visited them and, according to General Kenney, found the men eager to join the Aussies in fighting the Japanese.58

  Nine hundred Americans participated in a forty-two-day trek across the mountains without ever seeing one Japanese soldier. To their amazement, they stumbled on a party of thirty-five Australian soldiers who had been isolated by the speedy Japanese advance against Isurava. Their shredded uniforms and gaunt appearance made them appear ghostlike.59

  Meanwhile, attacks and counterattacks by the Japanese on Ioribaiwa and the Australians on Imita failed to dislodge either army. General Horii established his headquarters in a valley behind Ioribaiwa Ridge and issued an order proclaiming that the final advance on Port Moresby would begin on September 20. He had to know this was untrue because his intelligence officer had reported that nearly twenty thousand Allied troops were in the capital. Besides, his starving men were in no shape for a large-scale attack. He must have issued this order as a way to lift his soldiers’ morale with the hope that they would soon be in a town full of food. His own supplies from the coast were now nonexistent. Men and matériel were being diverted to Guadalcanal, where the U.S. Marines were making great headway.60

  On September 24 Horii received a telegram from General Hitoshi Imamura at Rabaul with orders to “stop attacking Port Moresby and wait for further instructions at present position.” A second telegram later that evening instructed him to “withdraw from present position to some point in the Owen Stanley Range, which you may consider best for strategic purposes.”61

  Horii contemplated disobeying these orders but soon realized that doing so would only increase the suffering of his men, with little chance of success. On September 28 the Japanese began their own fighting withdrawal that would eventually bring them back to where they had begun: the opposite coast.

  As the Australians advanced, they came across the bodies of two soldiers from the 21st Brigade who had been captured by the Japanese. One was beheaded, while the other had received several bayonet stabs while tied to a tree. Members of a local tribe, the Orokaivas, told the Aussies the enemy had destroyed much of the tribe’s food supplies, bayoneted and shot several of their men, and raped their women, even abducting some.62

  The Japanese soldiers who survived the withdrawal to arrive at Buna were small in number. Some reports put the figure as low as 500, others at a perhaps more realistic 1,500. Estimates place the number of Imperial troops who had perished in the fight for the Kokoda Track at as high as 6,500. Allied losses were slightly over 600.

  General Tomitaro Horii, commander of all Imperial troops on the Kokoda Track, was not among the survivors. Attempting to cross a rapidly flowing river to escape the Australians, the general, along with several of his staff, drowned when their raft capsized.

  A Japanese correspondent who watched the returning survivors described their condition: “Their uniforms were soiled with blood and mud and sweat, and torn to pieces. There were infantrymen without rifles, men walking on bare feet, men wearing blankets or straw rice bags instead of uniforms, men reduced to skin and bones plodding along with the help of a stick, men grasping and crawling on the
ground.”63

  CHAPTER 8

  First Defeat at Milne Bay

  While the fighting along the Kokoda Track was under way, General MacArthur turned his attention to what he believed was another route the enemy was considering in its attempt to secure Port Moresby. He told his staff he was concerned that a Japanese force of at least division size, supported by land- and carrier-based aircraft, would try to reach the capital by coming around the eastern end of the island.1

  Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison described New Guinea as “shaped like a prehistoric monster, half bird and half reptile.”2 A long tail splits in two parts that project into the Coral Sea, and between them lies Milne Bay, named for a nineteenth-century British admiral. More than twenty-two miles long and averaging over ten miles wide, the bay is dominated by the heavily wooded Stirling Mountain Range, which reaches almost to the water’s edge on all three sides. A narrow strip of mangrove swamp stretching back from the water is covered with wildly growing brush, except for occasional patches of coconut trees planted in orderly rows by Australian plantation owners. Never more than a few hundred yards from the water’s edge, a twelve-foot-wide trail circles the closed end of the bay beginning at an old outpost known as K.B. Mission and ending on the opposite shore at the village of Gili Gili, ten miles away.3

  A survey party, headed by an American engineering officer, traveled to Milne Bay in a Catalina flying boat on June 8, 1942, to determine the suitability of the site for construction of an airfield large enough to accommodate both pursuit aircraft and heavy bombers. MacArthur had in mind using such an air base to attack the enemy at both Buna and Rabaul. What the survey party discovered was a coconut plantation and factory complex used by Lever Brothers before the war. The grounds were large enough to accommodate at least three airfields, in addition to the small field already located there. A number of buildings connected by a small network of roads could be made useful by Allied forces, as well as several small jetties reaching into the bay that had been used by cargo vessels over the years.

  A few months later, following the arrival of Allied troops and war correspondents, an Australian newspaper described Milne Bay as a virtual tropical paradise. “The water is deep and clear of reef. There are coconut plantations along the bay.”4 Not mentioned was that this soggy paradise received two hundred inches of rain each year, and the malaria rate among the Allied troops stationed there would soon reach four hundred per thousand per year.5

  One Australian soldier, Leading Aircraftman Harold Pyke, would describe Milne Bay differently: “Even without the war, Milne Bay would have been a hell hole—it was a terrible place. The sun hardly ever shined and it rained all the time. It was stinking hot and bog holes everywhere and it was very marshy, boggy country. Even without the Japanese, it would have been hard to live there. It was a disease-ridden place—it was terrible.”6

  On June 22, MacArthur’s headquarters issued orders for the occupation of Gili Gili, and three days later two cargo ships, escorted by a pair of small Australian warships, entered the bay. On board the Dutch-owned Karsik were two companies and a machine-gun platoon from 55th Infantry Battalion of the Australian 14th Infantry Brigade. There was also an antiaircraft battery with eight Bofors 40mm guns, and a platoon from the U.S. Coast Artillery Battalion with eight .5-inch machine guns and two 3.7-inch antiaircraft guns. Aboard the second Dutch ship, Bontekoe, was a company from the 46th Engineers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The latter arrived with air base construction equipment. The engineers immediately began construction of the new base, while the combat units set up defense perimeters in case of enemy attack.

  Early in July the 7th Australian Infantry Brigade, considered one of the best trained of the militia units, arrived in several waves. The units were the 9th, 25th and 61st Infantry Battalions from Queensland. Forty-three-year-old Brigadier John Field, recently returned from the fighting in North Africa and the Middle East, commanded these troops. Until the arrival of a second brigade, Field was the only man at Milne Bay with combat experience in this war. He was quickly assigned as commanding officer of a new entity, Milne Force, which included not only his 7th Brigade but all naval, land, and air forces in or arriving at the Milne Bay area. Considered a reliable and able soldier by his contemporaries, Field had been commissioned as an officer in the militia in 1923; he held a degree in mechanical engineering and was a member of the engineering faculty at the University of Tasmania. His engineering knowledge and experience were just what Milne Bay needed.7

  By the end of July, as construction moved along rapidly, elements of the 75 and 76 Squadrons of the RAAF landed at the nearly completed No. 1 Airstrip. They were flying American-made P-40 fighters.8 Built by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation of Buffalo, New York, the P-40 was known to American pilots as the Warhawk and to the Australians as the Kittyhawk. It was the main fighter–ground attack aircraft used by the RAAF during the war. Australian pilots generally liked piloting the P-40. One Australian double ace, Nicky Barr, said of the single-engine, single-seat craft, “It was quite capable of getting you out of trouble more often than not. It was a real warhorse.”9

  While American engineers concentrated on building the three airstrips MacArthur wanted, as well as new wharves, Australian sappers and infantrymen went to work hacking out minimally passable roads, strengthening or replacing many of the seventeen lightly built bridges in the area, constructing living quarters, and, under Field’s expert guidance, building well-camouflaged dispersal areas for a minimum of thirty-two fighters. The camouflage worked so well that when Japanese reconnaissance aircraft flew over the area, they failed to see many of the Allied aircraft parked on the ground.

  Meanwhile in Rabaul, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake of the 17th Army was busy working on a plan to flank Port Moresby from the southeast. He selected the tiny island of Samarai, just a few miles into the sea from the opening of Milne Bay, as the ideal location for a seaplane base. The island, less than one square mile in size, had once been a busy trading post and stopover for ships sailing between Australia and East Asia. What the Japanese general did not know was that in January 1942, the Australian government, fearing the Japanese would use the island as a base to invade Australia, ordered its population evacuated and destroyed all its buildings and wharves. This made the island virtually uninhabitable without major construction projects, which the U.S. Navy Seabees would undertake in July 1943.10

  Reconnaissance flights over Samarai revealed that the island could offer support only for floatplanes, and that it was not large enough for an airfield. What was needed if General Hyakutake was going to be able to provide air cover for an invasion of Port Moresby was a location for land-based aircraft, both fighters and bombers. Still smarting from the losses at Midway, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Eighth Fleet decided to proceed with an amphibious assault inside Milne Bay. Special Naval Landing Force troops were to be deployed because the army, now bogged down on the Kokoda Track and Guadalcanal, could not participate.

  Increased Japanese reconnaissance flights over Milne Bay revealed that there were about thirty enemy fighters stationed at the completed airstrip, and that work was under way on two additional landing fields. There was little time to waste. Without troops of his own available, Hyakutake asked Vice Admiral Mikawa to proceed quickly with plans to capture Milne Bay. Japanese photo interpreters scanning pre-invasion photographs of Milne Bay underestimated the number of Allied troops protecting the airfields. This was in part due to the camouflage efforts of Brigadier Field. Intelligence officers of the 17th Army staff concluded that because the base was so new it did not yet have a large garrison for defense.11

  While the Japanese planned their attack, the Allied forces in Milne Bay increased in numbers and strength. A second Australian infantry brigade had arrived by August 21, the 4,500 members of the 18th Infantry Brigade, under the command of forty-nine-year-old Brigadier George Wootten. This brigade and its commander had fought with great distin
ction against the Italians in Libya and against the Germans at Tobruk. MacArthur once said of Wootten that he was “the best soldier in the Australian army who had it in him to reach the highest position.”12

  Soon after, the arrival of several American and Australian antiaircraft batteries increased the overall strength of the Allied land forces at Milne Bay to nearly eight thousand Australians and almost fourteen hundred Americans, as well as another six hundred members of the RAAF. A new overall commander soon arrived in the person of Australian Major General Cyril Clowes, a fifty-year-old veteran of the fight against the Germans in the Middle East and a graduate of the Australian Royal Military College, Duntroon. All three senior officers at Milne Bay had distinguished themselves in the First World War.

  General Clowes, an experienced combat officer, conducted a quick survey of the men and territory under his command and immediately set about preparing a defense should the Japanese decide to assault Milne Bay. He assigned the inexperienced militia troops of the 7th Brigade the first line of defense. Units guarded key locations against either seaborne or airborne attack. The veteran 18th Brigade was held in reserve so that it could respond quickly wherever the enemy landed.13

  Clowes sent several patrols into the mountains to guard the overland trails from the north coast along Goodenough Bay, and to guard along the south coast. He had no idea yet whether the enemy was coming, and if so, from which direction.

  Airstrip No. 1, located at the center of the Lever Brothers plantation, was as fully operational as was possible to construct it in the rain-drenched mud. By the time Clowes arrived, the two squadrons of Kittyhawks and a few Hudson bombers were using it. Meanwhile, the Americans of the 46th Engineers were busy laying out No. 2 Strip, about four miles farther inland. The 43rd Engineers worked on No. 3 Strip that was northeast and close to the shore. Yet No. 1 Strip was a mess. Constant rain turned the terrain into fast-flowing rivulets of muddy water that washed across or seeped up through the open mesh of the steel mats the engineers had laid out on what passed for a runway. Planes regularly slid off the mats. Damaged beyond repair, some of them suffered the indignity of being cannibalized for spare parts. With no time or extra labor for rebuilding the field, each day bulldozers scraped the mats, dumping the mud on either side of the airstrip.14