Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Rowell made ready to defend Milne Bay and Gili Gili airstrip. Soon an AIF brigade arrived and Major-General Cyril Clowes took command of Milne Force, now more than six thousand strong. His headquarters was on relatively open ground in the north-west of the bay near Gili Gili. Milne Bay was a terrible place for malaria, a swampy environment below steep mountains. The Australians were equipped with shorts and often wore singlets, and with their exposed legs and arms they became victims of malaria in considerable numbers. Throughout 1942, malaria and other tropical diseases caused three times as many casualties in the New Guinea forces as the enemy did.

  On 25 August 1942, the enemy arrived at Milne Bay—four Japanese transports escorted by cruisers and destroyers. They landed the first contingent of 2400 troops at Ahoima on the north shore of Milne Bay, less than ten kilometres from Gili Gili. Twenty-seven Japanese tanks came ashore as well. Over the next few days the supply barges of the Japanese force would be strafed and sunk by Australian Kittyhawks. Unable to move by barge, the Japanese took to the muddy road towards Gili Gili, an airstrip that would increase the range of their air force.

  As they advanced, they were attacked by Australians, who sank to the ankles and sometimes to the knees in the claggy mud, and who had waited for them at an intermediate point named KB Mission. MacArthur’s headquarters was not aware of any of this and placed pressure on Blamey, who in turn signalled a complaint to Rowell about Clowes’ lack of movement. Rowell passionately defended Clowes. The Japanese could not be immediately hurled back into the sea because Clowes had to keep troops on the south shore as well, in case of a Japanese landing there.

  On the night of 28 August, the Japanese attacked the Australian lines. Behind the tanks, the infantry began to sing melodically and solemnly, and then charged. The tanks floodlit each other’s flanks to protect themselves from attacks by Australians running up with sticky bombs—anti-tank grenades packed with nitroglycerine—to attach to the sides. Damaged by damp, these either failed to explode or fell off. The tanks’ lights also enabled them to see, encircle and destroy groups of Australian soldiers. Here one knot of grappling bodies spilled into the sea, so narrow was the coastal plain. The Japanese forced the Australians back beyond the Gama River where militia units held the line.

  Clowes’ laconic press reports were not popular with GHQ, not being written in what General Vasey affectionately called ‘Americanese’. Three days after the landing, MacArthur had just about made up his mind about the quality of the Australian troops and alerted Roosevelt to his doubts.

  By now the Japanese were close to Gili Gili airstrip. Group Captain William Garing, in charge of the RAAF, was concerned for the overnight security of his aircraft and had them and all spare pilots flown out to spend the night at Port Moresby before returning to rejoin the battle the next day. The American staff had heard, wrongly, that Major-General Clowes had flown out too. Colonel Fred Chilton—the same Chilton who had led a remarkable escape from Greece, and now a member of Clowes’ staff—said in frustration, ‘How they thought they could fight the battle from Australia, I don’t know.’

  The 9th Battalion of the 7th Division fought its way into the Japanese base area at Milne Bay on the night of 6 September. That same night a small Allied merchant ship managed to sneak in from Port Moresby carrying ammunition and stores. As it unloaded alongside the wharf, a Japanese cruiser entered the bay and sank her with gunfire and heavily shelled the area around the airstrip. All the more, Clowes had no choice but to maintain an uncommitted reserve to deal with any new position the Japanese might take because ‘they completely dominated the bay’.

  Australian pilots strafed Japanese positions on the north shore as the infantry forced the Japanese back over their occupied ground towards KB Mission. There was a Japanese counter-attack and prodigious slaughter—ninety-two Japanese killed and hundreds wounded in a few minutes. Clowes received a peremptory message from MacArthur’s headquarters saying that the port would be attacked by new forces emerging from the west and north-west. So he halted his eastern offensive and all night the Australians waited for these attacks from the west and north-west to present themselves. Patrols found nothing of them. At dawn, Clowes swung his troops back from this useless exercise.

  The advancing men found the bodies of natives with atrocious injuries. An Australian captain discovered the body of a native boy bound with wire, a bayonet up his anus and half his head burned off by a flamethrower. A native woman lay bound with her left breast cut off. Two Australian militia soldiers had been used for bayonet practice, one of them tied to a tree. The Australians responded to these sights with rage—a Japanese sniper’s body was later found to have five hundred bullets in it. The 18th Brigade recaptured KB Mission. One sergeant told his men to stick each Japanese corpse with a bayonet; when one soldier refused, he was told, ‘It’s all for our safety.’

  In the jungle the Australians found the burned-out Kittyhawk of Squadron Leader Peter Turnbull, who had flown dozens of air raids against Japanese positions. By now the Japanese tanks were bogged and Australian fighter aircraft had forced the Japanese to move entirely at night. Kittyhawk pilots even killed snipers waiting in trees.

  A Japanese convoy sailed into Milne Bay on the night of 6 September to evacuate the troops, and some fourteen hundred of them escaped. The Japanese bombed and sank the Anshun, an Allied supply ship, but spared the hospital ship Manunda, veteran of war in the Mediterranean and of the bombing of Darwin, after they had examined it by searchlight. Clowes had suffered 161 dead. Amongst them were an American engineer and two other American soldiers. Though it was the first Japanese amphibious landing repulsed, MacArthur churlishly wrote, ‘The enemy’s defeat at Milne Bay must not be accepted as a measure of the relative fighting capacity of the troops involved.’ But though the ground troops were so poor in his estimation, the report of his own military wisdom his press office prepared was glowing. ‘The decisive factor was the complete surprise obtained . . . by our preliminary concentration of superior forces.’

  VIA DOLOROSA

  The poorly equipped Australians retreated from Kokoda, with the Japanese both charging frontally and outflanking in the same manner as in Malaya. The confidence of the enemy, their screened closeness to the Australians, their taunts and cries and howls and sudden apparitions must have appalled the young Australians, whose desperate withdrawal nonetheless managed coherence. Don Barnes, an Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit member and first-aid man, had a small roll of plaster and a pair of nail scissors to treat the wounded who arrived in Deniki escaping from Kokoda.

  General Tubby Allen, commander of the 7th Division AIF, arrived in Port Moresby in August. The 7th Division troops were suntanned, muscular, and justified in believing themselves an elite. But journalist Osmar White, seeing the battalions of the 21st Brigade set out on 15 August under General Arnold Potts, advancing through Owers’ Corner where the track proper began, worried about their lack of jungle greens, the way their webbing would stand out in the jungle, and the impact of the malarial mosquito on their bare limbs. The altitude of the track at its highest point is 2590 metres. On the track up to Imita Ridge, Australian engineers had cut two thousand steps—the notorious Golden Stairs—on a track barely a metre wide. All this lay ahead of the 21st Brigade.

  Commander Potts was an amiable but very competent man who had worked with Rowell in Syria. Because of a wound suffered at the Battle of Mouquet Farm, near Pozières in France, he had been classified as 20 per cent disabled after World War I, but was fit enough to run his own sheep station near Kojonup, east of Bunbury. He told his men they were to cross the Owen Stanley Ranges, take over command as well of the depleted 39th and 53rd battalions at Isurava, recapture Kokoda and drive the Japanese into the sea.

  The packs of the men as they took off weighed about twenty kilograms, and held some of the Allies’ leftover supply of quinine, the sources of which in Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, had been captured by the Japanese, and which would eventually ru
n out and be replaced by the skin-yellowing anti-malarial Atabrine. As well as that the rifle and rounds brought the loads carried up to twenty-five kilograms. The Bren and Tommy guns were carried by the stronger men. Wirelesses, field telephones, three-inch mortars and medical gear were toted by support troops or native bearers. The 7th Division troops were quickly felled by the rigours of the track. Captain Phil Rhoden said, ‘You slept in the open, you slept when you fell.’ The difficulty these crack troops suffered made the performance of the militia all the more remarkable.

  Potts found Myola, meant to be the horn of plenty from earlier air drops, barely supplied. He found eighty blankets, six thousand rations—about four days’ worth—and a small amount of ammunition. The latter paucity was because of a Japanese raid on Moresby during which (through a junior officer’s failure to obey Rowell’s orders to put them under cover or camouflage and disperse them) twenty-eight transports at Seven Mile airfield had been destroyed on the ground by enemy bombers, along with bomb-laden US Flying Fortresses. The transports were destroyed by the exploding bombs of the Fortresses as much as by the attack from above.

  This meant that Rowell could not go forward and relieve the 39th at Isurava above Kokoda. Fortuitously, as Potts’ brigade neared the front, the Japanese pressure on the boy soldiers of the militia itself slackened to wait for supplies to arrive from the coast. General Horii was running into the problems Tubby Allen, General Morris and others had predicted. Horii’s supply chain was longer—from Rabaul to the north coast of New Guinea, and from there to Kokoda. His troops carried for the journey nine kilograms of rice to last fifteen days and no tinned meat. This appalling undersupply of food was probably an indication of his limits but could not have been better designed to enhance desperate attack and savagery.

  At the village of Efogi near Myola, the men of the 7th Division met the 39th Battalion’s wounded militia coming back down the track. A man who had been shot through the skull had walked 180 kilometres in sixteen days to get as far as this. The wounded seemed indifferent to the hard march still ahead and delighted at the home leave they would get at the end of their hospitalisation. One of the problems of this mountain village was the cold. The 14th Battalion were shivering in their wet clothes and short pants. The men lit fires and sang as squalls of cold rain swept over the area. Former Wallaby Stan Bisset, serving in New Guinea with his older brother Harry or ‘Butch’, entertained the troops with rugby songs as well as standards such as ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. Victorian Bisset had been a member of the Wallaby team which included the ultimately famous young physician Weary Dunlop, and which had docked at Southampton the day the war began to play no games but fill sandbags instead.

  Rowell and Tubby Allen began to organise the air drop for Potts’ men—unparachuted loads of rations, ammunition and medical supplies that were pushed out of the rear doors of Dakota transports. At last some green (though not mottled) clothes were dropped to the khakied AIF. Broadcaster Chester Wilmot was on the trail with White and Parer. The latter had reached Moresby behind White and now began crossing the mountains again to film the reinforcement and—as it would turn out—retreat. Parer filmed the air raid that damaged the entire fleet of transports allocated to the Myola air drop. The following day he, Wilmot and White were given permission to advance up the Kokoda Trail to wherever the 21st Brigade headquarters was. They were to carry five days’ rations and were not permitted to use native carriers.

  Wilmot had been in North Africa with Blamey and disliked him, and now declared, ‘It is strange that six months after the return . . . of General Blamey [to Australia] there should be no green uniforms.’

  The problems at Myola also involved the disappearance of some of the bearers, who had walked away from what they considered inadequate wages, as well as the fear of encounters with the Japanese and the crippling labour. Meanwhile, further down the track at the village of Kokoda, General Horii’s troops were now beginning to take up their positions again in great numbers. Horii’s patrols told him that only the remnants of one battalion, the 39th, were defending Isurava.

  On his way to relieve the 39th and confront Horii, Potts continued along the track towards the crossing that would later be named for Captain Sam Templeton of the 39th Battalion, ‘Uncle Sam’ to his men, soon to die on the track’. Here his men descended into the Eora Creek gorge, down which water cascaded, by an embankment where a field hospital stood. As the 7th Division troops approached Isurava they met files of wounded militiamen retreating, ‘walking skeletons . . . their eyes . . . bright with fever’. On the banks of Eora Creek scores of wounded men stood about, said White, ‘slimed from head to foot’. Captain Geoffrey Vernon, a fifty-nine-year-old doctor and a New Guinea resident, was here, unfazed, though he soon ran out of morphine. Vernon had charge of the carriers as well. A cheerful army cook with a septic leg worked dishing out stew to the men who collapsed around the cookhouse.

  At Isurava on the day before the 2/14th Battalion of the 7th Division arrived, a young sergeant, Bill Guest, a member of the 39th Battalion since the age of seventeen, found out by telephone that the 14th were arriving the next day and were at Templeton’s Crossing. Guest, who like everyone of the 39th had been expecting to be overrun, whose clothes were foul and rotting and whose boots were held on by vines, was immensely fortified by the news. Guest saw his first 14th Battalion man as he went down to fill water bottles below the Isurava escarpment. He was astonished to see this creature, this forward scout from a different, more robust and less deprived world.

  Horii became aware on Friday, 28 August, that the 39th had been reinforced, and the news dispirited him. By then the 39th Battalion had been holding Isurava for ten days under persistent Japanese attacks. The 53rd Militia Battalion’s disgruntled and demoralised troops, who were untrained and had been used until now mainly as labour along the track, had arrived at Isurava a few days before Potts’ men but had not caused the same degree of elation as the coming of the AIF men did.

  When the first AIF platoons moved up to Isurava that evening, they presented themselves in the dugouts as if they belonged there. ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ one of the 39th men asked of these unlikely figures. This was the first time the twin armies met together at war. ‘I could have cried when I saw them, they looked terrible,’ wrote Phil Rhoden of his first meeting with the 39th. ‘The divisions faded at once . . . We were Australians fighting for Australia. The mood was electric.’

  Isurava was an excellent defensive position, Potts thought, a high spur that forced those who would outflank the Australians to climb mountainsides to east and west and at massive effort. Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, another Western Australian and veteran of the Middle East and Greece, and who had been commanding the 39th, said that they were in a situation to allow ‘the jungle itself to do the killing’. Here about six thousand Japanese troops confronted some eighteen hundred Australians, of whom six hundred were the militia of the 39th and the 53rd and twelve hundred were newly arrived and morale-enhancing AIF. There were more on their way too. But during the Isurava fight, from 28 to 30 August, there were perhaps three or four Japanese to every Australian.

  Having now seen the condition of the 39th, Potts decided to let the battalion rest a while and to send in a fresh AIF battalion, the 14th, and to commit the militia’s 53rd along a fork in the track towards Abuari, the village high up on the eastern ridge. If he did not secure this height and the Japanese did, he could be fired on from above. The 53rd had had a week’s rest since crossing the Owen Stanleys. It was impossible to send in men—even the other AIF units—who had just survived the track, since a period of recuperation was essential.

  Horii, still on his white horse, surveyed the battlefield and distributed sketches of the Australian position to his men. The next morning a detachment of the 53rd Battalion set off in the direction of Abuari on the eastern flank as they’d been ordered to. A forward patrol led by Lieutenant Alan Isaachsen, a South Australian bank employee, reached the villa
ge of Kaile; though attacked by two Japanese platoons by night, he held his position. Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Ward, the 53rd’s brave but inexperienced commander, could not get through to Isaachsen’s men because a Japanese soldier had captured the Australian signalmen and smashed their radio set with his sword. Ward was ordered to recapture the lost ground at first light.

  A mountain gun dragged this far by Horii’s gunners fired into Isurava village as the Japanese infantry advanced through high grass. Two militia platoons a few hundred metres forward of Isurava were cut off. The Japanese jumped into their foxholes, and the horrifying intimacy of hand-to-hand combat began. The Japanese captured further high ground to the east and were deploying men along the ridges. It was, for four days, an inhuman affair, with the Australians positionally sound but undermanned. The attempt to advance on the right again was catastrophic for the 53rd; Ward and his entire headquarters staff were wiped out in an ambush. Potts ordered the 53rd back to Port Moresby and brought up the newly arrived 16th Battalion to recapture the eastern flank. The fittest of the 53rd were assigned to labour details at Myola and the rest ended up back in Moresby, through no fault of their own—‘untrained, deeply stigmatised young men’, as one historian puts it.