Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Like Gallipoli, Kokoda has become a national legend, the young, untrained troops who delivered us from the enemy when the British army had failed. The implication is that being Australian – the rabbit potting, surfing and general bush skills – somehow created fighting men able to defeat men of far greater experience. No one doubts the young and untrained bit, but were those young men the outstanding soldiers we like to think them?

  Was Australia even really at risk?

  The testimony of maps

  As far as Australia being at risk goes, the answer has to be an unequivocal yes, despite the opinion of the British, United States and Australian intelligence services of the time that the Japanese only wanted to capture Port Moresby to harass US supply lines. Their opinions were based on a small amount of evidence, and in the triumph of decryption of local enemy communications they may have given what they’d decoded too much weight, and taken it out of context. They also did not have access to the strategic plans of those in command in Tokyo. These are the same intelligence services that so firmly believed that Singapore would not be attacked and did not pick up on the several reports that a large Japanese air attack was heading to Pearl Harbor, where they would destroy most of the United States Pacific Fleet.

  The most reliable sources of Japanese intent in 1942 are those of the Japanese commanders themselves. In an interview on 20 February 1946, Admiral Nobutake Kondo, commander of the Naval Southern Expedition Forces, stated that his primary aim was the overthrow of the British Empire. To do this the Japanese needed to do two things. The first was to conquer India, only possible if Germany could cut off British oil supplies from Iraq and Iran. Admiral Kondo unequivocally stated that the second main Japanese target was Australia.18

  Japan lacked the United States’ natural resources. Submarines and planes had a far shorter range in 1942 that they do now. Both Japan and the United States needed a safe base for the large number of troops needed in the Pacific campaigns. Australian resources, supplies and bases were vital if Japan, rather than the United States, was to control the Pacific.19

  Not only was the Japanese invasion planned but a propaganda movie had been made showing the invasion: Japanese bombers flying over Canberra while politicians fled from Parliament House. The newsreel was even shown in Tokyo, the distributors presumably unaware that the invasion hadn’t happened on schedule. The dates had been set back, then further back, as their troops faced an unexpected quality of opposition.

  If the Japanese documents are so clear, why has the misapprehension arisen? Partly this is because Japanese army commanders on the ground whose communications had been captured by the Allied intelligence services were far less optimistic than the naval commanders and generals back in Japan. The military officials back in Japan believed their own propaganda: invincible forces that would keep going no matter what. It was a crime punishable by death to even hint that victory was not inevitable, and battles being won. The commanders on the ground in New Guinea knew how badly equipped and supplied their forces were. Japan had conquered several countries already with relatively poor supply lines, relying on food, ammunition, weapons and slave labour from the country they occupied. Here in the New Guinea jungle, the men were starving, reduced to three-quarters of a pint of rice a day, eating sticks and leaves and even resorting to cannibalism, eating the limbs of dead enemies.20

  Even when the generals back in Japan decided not to pursue the campaign to Port Moresby, much less Australia, the communications lines in New Guinea were so poor that many Japanese troops weren’t informed of it.

  Even reading the public government documents of the time can give a misleading impression. The immensity of the danger was carefully downplayed. The government wanted to keep the population alert and working for the war effort, but they didn’t want to spread panic. My uncle, Ron Edwards, for example, was serving in the AMF in Darwin during the bombings, but it wasn’t until fifty years later that my mother learnt of the true devastation from the bombings. And it was also fifty years until I was able to read the newly released papers that told the true degree of the submarine threat and damage to shipping along the east coast of Australia.

  But the most vital evidence can be obtained simply by looking at a map of the Pacific showing the Japanese advance down towards Australia: a small nation with few national resources run by a military elite heads to large, lightly populated country, with major reserves of coal and iron ore, dockyards, factories, and the skilled workers to run them. New Guinea was simply a pathway to Australia. Port Moresby alone was not worth the massive Japanese commitment in New Guinea.

  Yes, in early 1942 Australia was the target of the Japanese southern advance. But by the time the militia boys met the Japanese forces in battle, the Japanese lines were overstretched, the men weak and demoralised. The real enemy for both sides was the terrain. With better (though not good) supply lines, and eventually greater numbers, the Allies, including the Australians, were better able to survive the jungle.

  To some extent, the balance between real and perceived danger is irrelevant. The koala boys believed they were fighting to save their country from the threat of immediate invasion. Despite the government censorship, which meant that most Australians never knew the extent of Japanese air raids on Australian soil and the toll that Japanese and German submarines and ships were taking on our own shipping, Australians of the time believed it, too.

  Desperation

  Things looked bad for Australia in 1942. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had told Australian Prime Minister John Curtin that Singapore would stop the Japanese advance to Australia.21

  He lied. Churchill had already written off the defence of Singapore, knowing that it lacked tanks, artillery, adequate air defences and modern fighter planes. Churchill was really only concerned with defending British-controlled Burma and India in the Asia–Pacific region. He wanted the Australian troops serving in the Middle East to deploy to Burma.

  Curtin insisted the AIF return to defend Australia against the Japanese.22 Until they returned the militia had to fill the gap, as Japanese submarines patrolled the Australian coastline, large subs that could launch midget submarines, and spotter planes flew across coastal towns and even Sydney.

  The outlook was grim. Far more colliers and other ships had been sunk by the Japanese than the Australian government admitted to the general population. Where possible everything had to be sent by land. There was no modern network of highways: to get from Sydney to Brisbane in 1942 you travelled along narrow gravel roads, and waited for a ferry to cross rivers. The sea surrounding us was no longer ours. Even in a land of abundant food and firewood, there were massive shortages because of the lack of efficient ways to transport them, especially with so many men in the armed forces. Children collected spare saucepans or any spare metal for the war effort. The Prime Minister exhorted school children to grow their own vegetables, even giving helpful hints about growing tomatoes, a crop that could survive heat and lack of watering. Women volunteered their spare hours to make camouflage nets.

  And then the bombs began to drop. On 19 February 1942, fifty-four land-based bombers and approximately 188 attack aircraft were launched from four Japanese aircraft carriers in the Timor Sea heading for Darwin. The first attack began just before 10 a.m. and lasted forty minutes. Bombs fell across the town and harbour; dive-bombers attacked ships, the aerodromes and the hospital. The second attack began an hour later. For twenty-five minutes the Royal Australian Air Force base at Parap was bombed.

  The two attacks killed at least 243 people and between three and four hundred were wounded, although the government insisted that only seventeen had been killed to try to stem the panic.23 About half of Darwin’s population fled south towards the Adelaide River and the train station, desperate to go further south to safety. Many servicemen deserted, too, racing south in what would be later known as ‘The Adelaide River Stakes’. The empty houses and buildings were looted by some who remained.

  The government pl
anned mass evacuations of civilians from northern Australia down to Charters Towers inland of Townsville if the Japanese landed, accompanied by a ‘scorched earth’ policy – everything that might be useful to the Japanese was to be destroyed as people left. Townsville was only to be defended by its local brigade, but Brisbane was to be defended against all attacks.

  The bombings continued, Darwin being hit sixty-four times.24 On 3 March, two weeks after the first attack on Darwin, seventy people were killed and twenty-four aircraft destroyed at Broome in Western Australia, with Wyndham bombed too. On 20 March, the bombers returned to Broome and Derby. Horn Island in the Torres Strait was first bombed on 14 March 1942, with more raids after that.

  In May, midget submarines launched from a larger ‘mother’ submarine outside the Heads attacked Sydney Harbour. Japanese spotter planes had been seen over Sydney and along the east coast, launched from the Japanese submarines that patrolled the coast and targeted Australian shipping vessels. Townsville, the site of Australia’s most important air base, was bombed three times in late July 1942. On 30 July a single bomb was dropped near a house in Cairns.

  There had been thirty-three bomb attacks altogether, killing about nine hundred people. Australia lost seventy-seven desperately needed aircraft and ships, too.25

  Australia expects invasion

  Australia – and Australians – were seriously preparing for invasion, even while the government tried to downplay the actual attacks.

  Road signs had been taken down. From 1940 to 1942, petrol, sugar, butter and meat were rationed.26 Buildings were sandbagged and air-raid shelters dug, not just on the coast of Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory but in Sydney and along the New South Wales south coast too. Maps and signposts vanished. Many beaches were fenced off with barbed wire and roads leading inland from the coast were defended with mines, with army and unofficial and semi-official and volunteer observers day and night, watching for invasion.

  We wouldn’t give in. Children were to be evacuated from areas in imminent danger of enemy occupation to Alice Springs, where vast amounts of food were transported and stored. The rest of the population was expected to become resistance fighters. Local unofficial ‘people’s army’ militias were formed, with old weapons usually used for rabbit shooting. Pamphlets and books explained how to make homemade bombs. Even Mum could make a stand, with a bayonet made from a broom and a carving knife.

  Girl Guides and Brownies as young as seven studied semaphore, so that messages could be passed on if the phone lines were down or radio stations taken, and practised hiding behind hedges to eavesdrop on the enemy.27

  Land prices plummeted in Sydney, especially for harbourfront properties. Many fled to the Blue Mountains, and children were sent to stay with relatives inland. The Australian public of the time were in no doubt that an invasion was imminent.

  ‘Oh, how ridiculous,’ said my mother, Val French, reading a revised history claiming that Australia had been in no immediate danger. She had sheltered her younger brother under the stairs as the midget submarine shelled near their home in Sydney. ‘We all drilled for invasion. Every schoolchild had to wear a box on a cord around our necks, holding everything we needed for an air raid. We weren’t allowed to take that blooming cord off. All windows had to be taped in case of bombing. The school I went to was closed, because it was too near the harbour, and vulnerable to bombing from submarines or planes launched from the bigger subs. We had air-raid practice at school, at the hospital and when the sirens went the public had to find shelter, too. We knew the invasion was near.’

  The Japanese advance

  In March 1942, Japanese forces landed at Lae and Salamaua. In July 1942 more troops landed at Buna and Gona on the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea, only three hundred kilometres as the crow flies from Port Moresby on the southeast coast, the last port before the Australian mainland. In between Port Moresby and Buna and Gona was the Owen Stanley Range, steep, wet jungle mountains, with only a few foot tracks across them, far too steep for vehicles. The Kokoda Track was one of these.

  In August more Japanese reinforcements landed at Milne Bay on the southeastern tip. Australia had only two militia brigades stationed in Port Moresby, to defend both the port and prevent the Japanese from continuing their sweep down into Australia.

  Australian General Blamey and American General MacArthur assumed (incorrectly at the time) there was no immediate intention of invading Australia. Military intelligence led the commanders to once again leave a vital area (temporarily) poorly defended. The young Australian militia boys and a few trained servicemen were on their own.

  Could a young, untrained and poorly armed militia – conscripts mostly, not volunteers – stop experienced jungle fighters in the hell that would become the New Guinea battlefields?

  A complex victory

  The Japanese were certainly stopped. How much of that was due to the militia boys will remain a matter of debate, depending on which sources the history is taken from. A large part of the Allied victory was due to the Japanese lack of supply lines and reinforcements. The militia’s main achievement was probably in slowing down the advance till reinforcements arrived, and the Japanese strategy was revised as they realised that the expected swift victory over the United States was not going to happen.

  Even though US and British intelligence reports suggesting that Japan did not intend to invade Australia were initially incorrect, they ended up being right. In an emergency session, the Japanese authorities in Tokyo decided that they could not support fronts in both New Guinea and at Guadalcanal. They had seriously underestimated the United States’ ability to mobilise after Japan had destroyed most of their navy in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  The Japanese forces in New Guinea would get no more reinforcements. General Horii, the commander on the ground in New Guinea, was ordered to withdraw his troops along the Kokoda Track until the issue at Guadalcanal was decided, even though the Japanese were close enough to see the lights of Port Moresby. The invasion of Australia was off the agenda.

  The achievements of Australia’s 39th Battalion, in particular, given the terrain, the overwhelming odds and their lack of formal training, were extraordinary, but they had at least some supplies and reinforcements. By the time they began their retreat the Japanese had none.

  In terms of the whole PNG campaign, the Allies committed about 30,000 men, although at any one stage fewer than 3500 were probably fighting and the Australians were at many stages outnumbered. By comparison, a total of 13,500 Japanese were ultimately landed in Papua for the duration of the campaign, of whom only 5000 made it back to Buna on the north coast. The Japanese troops had a saying: ‘Java is heaven, Burma is hell, but you never come back alive from New Guinea.’28

  Invincible koalas?

  The legend of the invincible ‘koala boys’ implies that you could take good, tough Aussies and expect them to become instant soldiers. But this wasn’t what happened.

  In March 2007 General Peter Cosgrove, former chief of the Australian Defence Forces, addressed a Sydney fundraising dinner for the Kokoda Track Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation seeking to repay the help given to Australian soldiers by Papua New Guineans in World War 2. He stated that despite the work of revisionist historians, the nation knew that Kokoda was the stuff of survival. Those young men, he said, untrained, should have fragmented in their first few days of action. He spoke of the innate guts of the young soldiers, and the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner in particular, who took untrained, untested men and led them not to victory but to ‘stubborn and ceaseless resistance, tenaciously holding on to successive crags and ridges until finally reinforced’.29

  But there are also accounts of confusion and cowardice among other units, as well as extraordinary heroism and achievement. There were major discipline problems where men spread out in panic instead of staying with their unit. In some cases, poor leadership led to continued resentment. The koalas arguably had excellent m
ilitary potential, but you need superb leadership to turn raw recruits into effective soldiers. The leadership was often far from superb.

  * * *

  The Kokoda Track

  Most Australians have only heard of the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, but there were many tracks used and fought over in 1942.

  It was goldminers in the 1890s who originally walked the Kokoda Track as they travelled north from Port Moresby to the goldfields of Yodda and Kokoda. Then it became the mail route over the Owen Stanley Range, starting from McDonald’s Corner, up to the Myola Swamp and on to Kokoda.

  After walking the track for an hour or so the soldiers were faced with the Golden Stairs, two thousand timber steps cut by engineers into the mountainside. From the Uberi section of track they rise four hundred metres in two kilometres before dropping five hundred metres, then climbing another seven hundred metres in the last two and a half kilometres.

  Men slid and fell, breaking ankles, knees, collarbones; they reached the top of one mountain to see another, and then another or, even worse, a bank of cloud and fog that could hide anything - including Japanese planes. Climbing down the slopes was even more dangerous than climbing up.

  Even today, with no enemy shooting at you, dropping bombs or grenades, climbing down a muddy slope is hard and dangerous for anyone who isn’t fit and experienced. There is a skill to walking down muddy slopes: depending on terrain, you splay your feet and body from side to side, a bit like penguins on the ice, or go sideways, changing sides to use different sets of muscles. You learn the art of the ‘controlled slide’. You can use sticks to help keep your balance, but if you fall the stick can be lethal, poking out your eye or piercing your body. Presumably the men worked this out, eventually. Injuries in mud - especially mud mixed with faeces and blood - are soon infected. All who used the tracks - Japanese, Papuan and Australian - would be bruised, battered and exhausted at the end of each day.