‘The makeup of every beast is different—some people can laugh in hell and others can’t.’
Eddie Emmerson, 2012
There was hardly a moment’s rest before the troops embarked on their toughest challenge of the campaign so far. The Japanese had left in a hurry and were in a hurry to return. They wanted Finschhafen back. There were still five thousand of them in the vicinity and more were arriving. When the actual numbers of the Japanese became clear, the 20th Brigade were finally given some much-needed support, and the 24th Brigade were sent in to bolster them.
Their next stop would be Sio on the north of the Huon Peninsula. Between the brigades and Sio was mountainous Sattelberg, which was tightly held by the Japanese. Between themselves and Sattelberg was a steep track leading to the small village of Jivevaneng. Only twelve months before, Pte Livingston had held a front-row seat in the battle of El Alamein. Now he was engaged in a battle just as fierce, in conditions that couldn’t have been more different. The enemy was only metres away in some instances, and hidden in undergrowth. This was a test for the nerves.
By 7 October heavy rain had filled the defence areas with water—the place was a quagmire. There were frequent close-contact battles with Japanese on the muddied tracks, and heavy fighting continued over the next few days. The determined Japanese were coming out of the woodwork in small groups and attacking at close range. The torrential rain seemed to be siding with the enemy. At dawn on 8 October the troops were becoming frantic, emptying their trenches of water as they came under fire. The conditions were so bad that no vehicle could get through, leaving the troops without rations and with none on the way. All Japanese advances were repulsed on 9 October and Lt Col Simpson reported in his war diary that ‘the enemy caused us no trouble during the morning but our stomachs did’. The following day the Japanese resumed their attacks on a number of fronts. The 2/17th Battalion was split up to cover a vast area of thick jungle as shells and mortar bombs increased in intensity. Unlike the desert where frontal attacks in battalion numbers were achievable, here the companies and platoons were dispersed, their progress painfully slow, generally uphill, and dangerous.
Pte Livingston had spent time with the carrier platoons in the desert, and he knew his way around a Bren gun. He once told me about a time in New Guinea when he was manning a machine-gun post and decided to take matters into his own hands. Squatting behind a Bren in a slit trench, Stanley was perched on a high ridge with a good view over the terrain when he heard the sound of a bomber approaching. He watched as an enemy aircraft appeared directly ahead of his position. There was no way he could be spotted from the air, so it posed no threat to him. But Stanley realised he posed a threat to it, and taking the initiative he opened fire as it passed overhead and brought the plane down. Expecting congratulations all round and perhaps a promotion, Pte Livingston was instead shouted down by his commanding officer for risking giving away the company’s position to the enemy. That was the last time Stanley took any initiative, perhaps the last time in his life.
Meanwhile, B Company had been under enormous pressure holding the tiny but tactically important Jivevaneng village where the battalion would finally regroup on 11 October. At 0445 hours on 16 October, the 2/17th were attacked in force. Their positions were heavily shelled and mortared, the bombs exploding in the trees above, showering shrapnel downwards. A barrage of three-inch mortars is not for the squeamish—you can hear the sound of the mortar descending and the closer it gets to its target the louder its peculiar whistling sound becomes. Lying in a slit trench no more than 30 centimetres deep and 180 centimetres wide, it would be easy to feel you’d dug your own shallow grave.
The attacks continued throughout the day, and at 1515 a heavy bombardment was aimed at the battalion headquarters. The enemy were as close as five metres. C Company was brought in to an area of exposed land near the headquarters and they remained in their holes all day. Stanley Livingston occupied one such hole. The battalion was surrounded on three sides. Continued attempts by the Japanese to dislodge the 2/17th were repelled. Unlike the Tobruk siege, this small-scale version was accessible in and out only by foot, and in the midst of sniper fire. The men had only one choice: to fight their way out. The intention was to give the enemy no respite, and over the following days they attacked the enemy on all sides, using small patrols to locate and assault enemy positions.
In the desert, patrols were generally nocturnal; in the jungle this was impossible. Day patrols were arduous and hard on the nerves—with the ever-present danger of ambush only metres away, the troops did a lot of listening. Jungles are noisy places, and the confusion of tiny sounds can cause trigger-happiness, which on patrol could be lethal. No doubt at the front of every soldier’s mind was the knowledge that this enemy was not fond of taking prisoners; if you found yourself cornered, it was generally believed that surrender was not a choice. As a result, the Australian soldiers were given licence to respond in kind. To Peter J. Jones, ‘The claustrophobic jungle imposed a stealth and furtiveness not conducive to the spirit of chivalrous opposition that characterised the conflict in Africa. Neither did the perception that the Japanese soldier, although brave, was in no sense “honourable”. The jungle war lacked mutual respect.’
Early in the war the Japanese were assumed to be inferior soldiers and treated with disdain. The tables soon turned when the troops were faced with the sheer brutality and skill of this enemy. By 1942, the tables had turned so far that Australians at home and on the battlefields viewed the ever-encroaching enemy as an invincible force of military supermen. The fear of these sadistic and ruthless killers who showed no mercy mixed with the nightmarish terrors of jungle warfare fuelled the myth of an unstoppable foe. Creating demons is an old human habit. Perhaps by imagining an enemy that is either less than or more than human, the act of killing becomes more palatable. In the Middle East the perception of the Germans approached respect, and the Italians were seen as something of comic relief; the Japanese, however, were perceived to be an alien species.
Clichés about enemies aren’t necessarily always accurate, as Pte Livingston discovered. He shared with me the occasion when he witnessed, at close hand, another side to this enemy. While on patrol somewhere in that jungle, Pte Livingston became isolated from his patrol group after venturing too far forward. He made his way back with painstaking stealth, hoping the enemy wouldn’t hear his thumping heart. Creeping slowly forward holding his rifle and bayonet before him, he suddenly came face to face with a young Japanese soldier, also with rifle and bayonet in hand. Both men froze, and stared at each other for some time. It was as if they could read each other’s minds. Stanley took one tentative step to his left and his opponent did exactly the same, as step by step, bayonets at each other’s chest, they semi-circled each other before silently backing off, their eyes fixed on one another the entire time. For both soldiers this action would most probably have been considered cowardly, and not within the rules of war. But each man recognised something in the other’s eyes. Possibly it was nothing more than the mutual mirroring of utter heart-stopping fear. My father spoke of this in his matter-of-fact manner, passing the incident off as a humorous anecdote, but technically the soldiers were following orders: on contact with the enemy, do not take prisoners. Neither did.
Another of Stanley’s anecdotes highlights the closeness of the fighting in the jungle. With no enemy in front of him, Stanley had dug out a shallow trench at dusk, only to wake in the morning to find himself once again face to face with the enemy. A Japanese soldier had dug his own trench overnight without either party noticing they were only metres from each other. Stanley never told me how that one ended.
Sgt Eddie Emmerson cites fear as the instigator of a horrendous experience in the jungle:
Fear is a thing that people don’t understand, fear is frightening, you can’t speak. I remember once at Sattelberg, I had some blokes around, there was a few Nips about, and . . . I went to one of the lads about two o’clock in the morning to see how he was, and he says, ‘I’m alright,’ and then a bloke walked out into a bit of a clearing, and I says, ‘Challenge him, you know, scream out to him, halt, the old story, halt or I’ll shoot’ . . . and . . . he’s just stood there, and I said well you can’t shoot him for that, you know, so I says, ‘Challenge him and give him a proper warning,’ and he screamed out to him, ‘I’m going to shoot,’ and he ran, and I says, ‘Let him have it,’ and with an Owen gun he stitched him right across the chest, so I says, ‘Bloody good shot, son, good shot!’ Went and picked him up, it was one of our own blokes. And what we think happened was he realised where he was, could not speak and in absolute fear decided to run, and once he run that was it. You cannot speak. You can’t hide it. That was bad, especially congratulating the bloke on how good he shot.
J.W. Holmes recalls that on finding a wounded Japanese face down on a track, he immediately took out a shell dressing to tend to the soldier’s wound. Holmes insists this was not a compassionate act, that the taking of prisoners was a means to extract information. As he tended the prisoner, a lance corporal stepped up and shot the prisoner through the head. ‘Leave the wounded alone,’ he said. ‘You run the risk of a Jap bursting his grenade on you both.’ From a distance it is easy to pass judgement, to recoil in horror from what seems a callous safety measure. Sgt G.H. Fearnside puts it bluntly: ‘Civilisation steps back a pace or two when one goes soldiering in the jungle.’
The twenty-third of October was the first anniversary of the battle of El Alamein, and now many of those same men were forcing another determined enemy back. The battalion had been in close contact with the enemy for most of the month and the troops were exhausted; it would take days for casualties to be evacuated. There were no reported cases of NYDN, but two men were given sedatives before returning to action. The rest were suffering from diarrhoea. Eventually the soldiers received supplies of sulphaguanidine tablets and soon after that the ‘uncontrollable prolapsing of the anus relented’.
On 3 November all resources were thrown at the enemy to remove the last pockets of resistance. The attack began at 1330 and the fighting went on all afternoon from a range of only 20 metres. Cpl Mayne Ready remembers the day well. ‘The most vivid memory I have of Jivevaneng was the final C Company attack. The memory of men moving silently forward to face, suddenly, a terrific barrage of fire from the enemy at close range; of men going down and not getting up . . . I remember men diving forward a yard at a time, the continuous chatter of machine guns and ceaseless bursting of grenades and darkness suddenly falling, and rain.’
It rained without let-up the night of 3 November and filled any hole up to a metre—not too handy if your slit trench is only 45 centimetres deep. By the morning of the fifth the enemy position in front of C Company was quiet. Jivevaneng had been held. The next day was a day of rest. The troops washed clothes that had not been removed for weeks. Stanley had missed the siege at Tobruk but survived this one. Thirty-five men from the 2/17th did not.
The battalion history records that during the journey from Scarlet Beach to Jivevaneng the troops endured the worst operational conditions in the history of the battalion’. Although lives lost in New Guinea were half those of El Alamein, one soldier reported that the fighting was ‘harder and more nerve racking than any ten days at Tobruk or El Alamein’. Not everyone agreed. Eddie Emmerson described the desert as ‘a terrible place . . . it’s like an ocean. It’s just the same as being dumped out in the middle of the Atlantic. ’Cause there’s no landmarks . . . and you’d get out in the night, you didn’t know where you were, and if you went the wrong way, bad luck.’ All Eddie had was the stars to guide him. ‘I knew enough to make sure that I knew where they were, as you went, because otherwise there’s nothing. It’s just a black void . . . and moonlight—what’s there to show up in the desert? Just more sand.’ At least in the jungle, there was somewhere to hide.
Of course, this aspect of the jungle was a double-edged sword, and to others the jungle was pure hell; it conspired to unnerve a soldier, the assault as much mental as physical. With no horizon to scan, the element of surprise meant troops were constantly on edge. Stanley’s war record contains a confusion of hand-scribbled instances of evacuation during his time in New Guinea—most were for infections, some had no explanation. While I cannot pinpoint a three-week absence, it seems highly likely that given the conditions of this jungle campaign, it was here that Pte Livingston’s stoush with shell-happiness occurred. Although in the desert the shelling was relentless, a soldier was always aware that he was flanked by kilometres of supporting forces, whereas the jungle made for isolated, claustrophobic battle conditions. At times a man was a pack of just one, inching forward, always listening. The uncertainty was nerve-racking in itself. The possibility always existed that the enemy were not only nearby but on all sides. ‘Some desert veterans suddenly found campaigning intolerable, and gave the reason as being “the hunting, hiding, listening part” of jungle warfare.’
At night, a soldier’s ears were all he could rely on; the jungle provided an orchestra of minuscule sounds, any one of which might be the enemy. Tales of kamikaze pilots had the men on edge, and many grew to fear the sound of any passing aircraft, another potentially deadly noise to add to the jungle’s arsenal. Pte Peter J. Jones describes the jungle as a cocktail of real and imagined dangers, and claims that the ‘myriad tiny movements of the jungle’s non-human citizenry’ sent many on sentry duty trigger-happy. The Japanese had a habit of launching solo assaults under the cover of darkness. H.D. Wells recalls receiving orders to fire at anything that moved after dark. He offers a concise explanation of the soldier’s predicament: ‘One never spends seconds on thinking before the art of self preservation takes over.’
Jones describes the cumulative effect of torrential shelling: ‘some of the men showed strain . . . in their empty-eyed vacancy and unnatural quiet’. Those taken from the action Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous were treated in field hospitals, with no escape from the landscape that was at the root of their problem.
Eddie Emmerson always knew when a mate was in internal strife: ‘Once you seen him catching flies you knew he was bomb-happy.’ When Sgt G.H. Fearnside was evacuated with malaria he encountered an acquaintance sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed. ‘His right hand was held out in front of him as he sat there patiently, like a fisherman on a river’s bank, which indeed he believed himself to be.’ Fearnside adds that every one of the doctors in that particular facility ended up in a straitjacket and was shipped home.
In the early 1940s any kind of non-physical therapy was viewed with suspicion. In the early days of the war, medical officers were encouraged to ‘detect and bash back the neurotic’. As the war progressed, opinion gradually shifted, and the work of psychiatric advisers began to be heeded. Yet there remained a fear that ‘over-enthusiastic psychiatrists might start a landslide which might sweep away a goodly proportion of the essential manpower through a broadened channel leading to the way out’.
Call it battle fatigue, shell shock or post-traumatic stress, the condition was a manifestation of a kind of internal AWL. The flesh may have been willing but the spirit had deserted it.
After being relieved on 6 November, the battalion moved five kilometres down the Sattelberg track where they were ambushed by malaria and dengue fever, with evacuations daily. Eddie Emmerson was philosophical about it. ‘Of a morning you could decide what you got. See, the anopheles mosquito bites with its bum up in the air, and the dengue one is grey stripes and normal-looking so you could hold your arm and say, what’ll I have? I’ve had ’em all.’
Gordon Oxman had been trundled from field hospital to field hospital since the end of September, and with no improvement in his condition, on 25 November he was discharged to Sydney. The jungle had won. Pte Oxman was back home by the twenty-ninth and was reported AWL for the entire day. No doubt his asthma hadn’t stopped him making a detour from the hospital to Tramway Street. He was fined two pounds and one day’s pay.
Meanwhile, the battalion stayed in reserve until well into December. While they were out of the main action, the jungle kept fighting back. On 9 December, Stanley was evacuated suffering tinea from the waist to the feet. Somewhere between the feet and the belt was the groin, an area fellow tinea sufferer Peter Jones describes as ‘a region poorly designed for discomfort’. The battalion moved on 24 December, marching through stifling hot head-high kunai grass to the tiny village of Hubika. The stench of decomposing bodies surrounding the area made for an uncomfortable Christmas, Stanley’s fourth with the battalion. There would be no feast this year: the portions were so minimal that someone called for a microscope. More troubling to Stanley would have been the absence of even a single bottle of beer.
A series of long marches up the coast of the Huon Peninsula followed in January 1944. There was very little enemy contact but the going was tough over ragged coral ridges and deep gullies, rough enough for Stanley to be evacuated again on 7 January with general dermatomyositis, which manifests as scaly eruptions and muscle weakness, leaving him out of the march until 16 January. Stanley was probably lying on a bunk in an ill-equipped CCS (casualty clearing station) tent on 11 January while the men of C Company were marched down from the high ridges to clean and wash on the beach. Around 6 p.m., as the men relaxed in the water in the cool of the evening, their clothes drying on the sand, two aircraft passed overhead, then turned and strafed the beach. Sand and water flew as the men took cover as best they could, their best probably being no better than Pte Livingston attempting to hide under a blanket on an airstrip in Egypt. The planes came in for a second time low over the sand. From this angle the men on the ground saw that they were US fighters. You can’t really blame the Americans: soldiers on both sides of the war looked the same naked. The pilots realised their error, waggled their wings in apology and sped off. Fortunately they hadn’t managed to hit any of the one hundred sitting ducks on the beach.
Stanley returned to the battalion just in time to secure its next objective, Sio Mission, captured with a minimum of fuss. So ended the 9th Division’s New Guinea campaign. January had been bruising on the battalion even though it saw little action. The 2/17th suffered 298 casualties—291 due to illness, scrub typhus, malaria, dengue fever and tinea of the groin. Eighty-six per cent of the 9th Division troops were evacuated at some stage during their time in New Guinea. Malaria accounted for almost half. Roy Lonsdale, already wounded in action for the second time, also added malaria to his list of wartime maladies.
February was described as almost a pleasant month in New Guinea, with the battalion resting on the Masaweng River. With little training to keep the men occupied, it didn’t take long for the river to be denuded of fish, as the preferred fishing method involved the use of grenades. On 26 February the battalion was moved to the Song River. It was to be their last stop before embarkation to Australia on 2 March 1944. After six months in the jungle, Peter J. Jones was struck by the realisation that he had been in ‘one of the most abundant and beautiful places on earth: florally, arboreally, faunally, and aviarily’. There had been little time to appreciate the view.
The battalion embarked with sixty-three fewer men than when it arrived. The troops were showing the strain, appearing lean-faced and thin-framed when Klipfontein steamed in to Brisbane in early March. Jones described his own appearance as being similar to the ‘skeletonic portrait of Joshua Smith’ by William Dobell—the painting had won the Archibald Prize amid much controversy in January, and there had been animated debate among the troops on the nature of art as black and white newspaper images of the painting were handed around. Jones also noticed that after months in the jungle many of the men had developed a stoop. ‘Perhaps the undergrowth, sometimes only centimetres overhead, encouraged stooping; or could it be that the darkened jungle, with its mysterious menace, induced the kind of watchfulness that is accompanied by hunched shoulders and furtive glances? Or was I merely going “troppo”?’
On the day before Stanley disembarked in Brisbane, Pte Gordon Grant Oxman was discharged from the army after being classified as medically unfit for further military service. His discharge, on 8 March 1944, was honourable. For Gordon the show was over. Pte Stanley Livingston, however, still had a few more scenes to steal.