The Japanese occupation of Pallier’s Hill on the morning of 11 October had major ramifications for the 2/27th Battalion. That morning Private Frank Ranger was on his way back to the battalion with other men from 11 Platoon including Lieutenant Kel Crocker. They were escorting a 2/27th supply train heading for Guy’s Post ascending the ridge to cross the saddle and go down to the Faria River when the Japanese on Pallier’s Hill began firing on the native carriers. Fortunately none of them was hit but they dropped their loads and took to the bush. But as Private Mal Keefer came back down the track from the forward section he was shot in the groin, fracturing his pelvis. ‘Quick Charlie, Mal’s been hit,’ Sergeant ‘Lappy’ Lapthorne called out to Sergeant Charlie Lofberg who treated Keefer, but, unable to move him, covered him with bushes to try to keep him safe. The group of about a dozen men stayed under cover among the scrub throughout the day and into the night, unsure of what had happened up on the ridge until the following morning. By then the native carriers had returned and it was only then that the men sheltering in the gorge knew the Japanese had been cleared from the ridge.1
Meanwhile Jack Bishop was reinforcing the key point at the end of Trevor’s Ridge, soon to be named Johns’ Knoll. When Bob Johns’ platoon reached Trevor’s Ridge on the morning of 11 October it was immediately sent forward to take over positions on the knoll so that B Company could move further east to cut further into the enemy supply line. ‘The key position in the centre, which one of the companies had vacated, they put my platoon there,’ Johns said.2
Johns’ Knoll was the highest point on Trevor’s Ridge and ‘the peak of the knoll and much of the surrounding ground was covered in grass only,’ Johns observed, ‘with the tree line starting down the slope a bit.’ Only six men could occupy the peak of the knoll and Johns had Corporal ‘Paddy’ Carey’s section dig in there. Some foxholes and a slit trench had already been dug but Johns’ men dug them deeper. The soil on the knoll was a heavy clay consistency so weapon pits could be dug to a good depth.3
At 3.00 pm Trevor’s Ridge came under close-range mountain gun fire from further up the Faria Valley. It was a new experience for Jack Reddin as ‘you normally expect to get some sort of warning’ so you can take cover.4 For Bob Johns it was similar to being under fire from the French 75 mm guns in Syria where ‘the shell arrives at its target and explodes before the warning whine of its approach is heard’ but Johns had no casualties in his platoon. It was a wet and uncomfortable night during which movement could be heard from the low ground to the east of the knoll.5
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At first light all of Johns’ men were awake and alert. An early morning patrol had run into some Japanese troops preparing to attack, which provided some measure of warning.6 Two Japanese mountain guns opened fire at Trevor’s Ridge at 11.45 am, soon joined by heavy machine guns and mortars. Clive Edwards sheltered on the southern side of the ridge beneath the crest. ‘The game was on and Tojo opened up with 75 mm [and] about four woodpeckers [machine guns] in different positions and launched strong attacks upon our positions further up the hill and across his track,’ he wrote. ‘The worst news is that the Japs have got a woodpecker installed on Plateau Post which can make things nasty for us here.’7 Plateau Post was on the lower slopes of Shaggy Ridge above the Faria River and a machine gun there could deliver enfilade fire along Trevor’s Ridge.
On Johns’ Knoll the mountain-gun fire came from the west, the mortar fire from the east and the fire of two Juki machine guns from the north. As Johns later noted, because the artillery was firing from the west and the Japanese infantry was gathering to the east to attack the knoll, any shells that went over Johns’ Knoll, and that was most of them, ‘went in amongst the Japanese. So they probably got more casualties out of their artillery than we did.’8 Despite that, one weapon pit down the slope from Johns took a direct hit from the barrage and one of his men was killed. Then the support fire stopped and the attack came in from the east. ‘There appeared to be thousands of them,’ Johns wrote, ‘They had little cover and we shot them down in droves.’9
Paddy Carey’s section did most of the damage and forced the attackers to withdraw. The attacks continued throughout the day and during one of them the Bren gunner down the slope to the left of Johns suddenly stood up and cried out ‘I’m hit!’ Johns watched as he ‘promptly was hit again and dropped’. Johns’ batman, Ron Barnes, leapt from his own pit and, braving the enemy fire, ran down to retrieve the Bren gun, then returned for the spare ammunition. He later went out to get two cans of water for the parched men and one of the cans was leaking from bullet holes when he returned.10
Map 6: Johns’ Knoll, 12 October 1943 (Keith Mitchell)
Armed with his Owen gun, Carey remained on the peak of the knoll all day, right on the edge where it dropped off. He was in prime position to knock over any enemy attackers tackling what was a pretty severe slope. As Bob Johns observed, ‘roll a grenade down there and the numbers they had, it had to explode amongst Japanese’.11 Private Ray Fisher, who was next to Carey at the top of the knoll, watched the Japanese skilfully fire their knee mortars to explode the rounds in the air over the Australian positions. Fisher had laid out his equipment in front of him on the parapet of the trench and this had stopped one round coming in, but another exploded in the air above, catching him unawares. He was hit by the blast which riddled his clothing and smashed his rifle but only left him shaken and able to remain on duty ferrying vital ammunition forward.12
At midday Jack Bishop ordered 17 Platoon to move up to reinforce Johns by occupying the weapon pits vacated by casualties. ‘Bob Johns’ platoon got a bit of a hiding,’ Private Keith Addison said, ‘there were five or six empty holes’. Addison and Private Reg Hillier occupied back-to-back positions at the front of the knoll, each protecting the other with the body of the former occupant between them. Addison tried to use the dead man’s Bren gun but it had been hit in the breech and did not work. Both men kept their heads down as a Juki machine gun cut a gutter across the top of the knoll with a tightly grouped stream of bullets.13
Addison could look down and see the Japanese slowly climbing up the slope on all fours carrying their rifles. They were trying to sneak up on the knoll but he could spot them with their long rifles with attached bayonets moving through the scrub. Addison would crouch down out of sight only 5 to 6 metres away before rising up on his knees to fire short bursts from his Owen gun at them. The gun was particularly effective at such short range and he preferred it to the Bren as you could fire it from the shoulder. As the attackers were knocked over backwards to roll back down the hill, Addison would quickly duck back down into his weapon pit.14
Holding back the constant attacks soon left the men on Johns’ Knoll short of ammunition. ‘They’re running short of ammo on the right!’ Reg Hillier called out. So when it went a bit quiet for a while the men would go around to any vacant weapon pits to recover any unused ammunition.15 After the failure of the supply train to get through on the previous day, ammunition reserves were gone and the other companies on Trevor’s Ridge had to give up all but a basic supply of ammunition to feed the demand. At 1.05 pm this ammunition was sent up to Johns’ Knoll.
At 1.20 pm the mortar sergeant Sergeant George Eddy was also sent forward. He could see that the attackers were not far from Johns’ Knoll and that he would have to shorten the mortar range to something that was ‘not practicable, not taught, you couldn’t do it’.16 Although the enemy was too close to fire a 3-inch mortar, the mortar round could still be used in a grenade-type role after initiating the primary charge by banging the base of the round on the ground. Then when dropped over the edge of the ridge onto enemy troops some 6 metres away, the secondary charge would be initiated and the round would explode.17 The soldiers who were throwing the rounds ‘of course took a chance and so far as I know they did not have any duds and the Japanese got their full benefit of the round,’ Lieutenant Bob Clampett said. The twelve mortar rounds were very effective.18
At 1.35 pm Johns reported that his losses were heavy and that the Japanese were within 10 metres of the knoll. Half an hour later, Johns said that the situation was now critical and that he was considering withdrawal. Jack Bishop now realised that defending Johns’ Knoll was not enough, he had to take the initiative. He ordered Lieutenant Bob Paine’s 14 Platoon to attack on the right flank to cut the Japanese supply line and ‘cause as much havoc as possible’ and then ordered Lieutenant Rex Trenerry’s 16 Platoon to do the same on the left flank. Paine’s platoon moved out with Corporal Ron Box’s section in the lead. The men killed one enemy soldier before the section came under sniper fire as it moved further around the knoll. Having cleared two ridges, Paine pulled his platoon back only to be immediately sent out again by Bishop. He told Paine that the platoon was to stay out all night if necessary. ‘The boys took a very dim view of this,’ one of Paine’s men noted, a view not improved when it started raining as the men moved out along the side of the razorback. The Japanese opened up with light machine-gun fire and rolled grenades down onto them, wounding Ron Box and two others.19
On the left flank Trenerry’s platoon reached the main track about 150 metres to the rear of the Japanese attackers at 4.00 pm. Six or seven groups of Japanese soldiers were spotted preparing to attack Johns’ Knoll, and after Trenerry’s men threw grenades among them they ‘dispersed very quickly and ran into our own fire’. Trenerry then took five men down the track towards Johns’ Knoll while another five men cleared the track the other way. Firing his Bren gun from the hip, Dave Blacker killed five while Private Frank May took care of another four as they advanced towards Johns’ Knoll. Up ahead the track veered around a big tree on a rise, which Private Wally Agett moved around with May close behind. As Agett cleared the tree an enemy light machine gun opened up from a dip on the other side of the rise, killing Agett who had just returned from leave to see his newborn baby in South Australia. May was also killed. May was Rocky Chellew’s best mate but Rocky could do nothing for him as the enemy fire pinned the men down. He screamed back for the Bren gun to be brought up but everyone was staying under cover.20
Earlier Johns had told Bishop that he could hold if the ammunition was kept up and half an hour later added that the shortage may mean ‘we couldn’t possibly hold on much longer’. Fortunately Johns’ casualties were still low and most of the enemy machine-gun fire was going over the top of the knoll. Low on small-arms ammunition, Johns’ men used a 2-inch mortar and rifle grenades to ease the pressure as the attacks kept coming.21 As Jack Reddin later recalled, ‘very rarely is a battle waged on such a small section of our perimeter and the rest of us were all busily gathering ammunition from the rest of the companies and carting it up to keep Bob and the rest of his men well equipped’.22
The men on the knoll now realised that other Australians were counterattacking the Japanese but were not sure who they were.23 Keith Addison could hear Paine’s men moving out to the right and provided some covering fire for them down the valley.24 About 7.00 pm Paine went forward, called out to Johns and headed his way. ‘As we moved along the razorback everyone was very cold … and as it had been raining everyone was wet through and shivering,’ one of Paine’s men noted. During the sweep, Paine’s platoon had killed nineteen enemy troops and no doubt contributed to the Japanese calling off the assault. The track was patrolled until 6.30 pm, when Trenerry met up with Paine before both platoons moved back to Trevor’s Ridge. Trenerry’s platoon had also killed 24 enemy troops and wounded many others, both platoons considerably easing the pressure on Johns’ Knoll.25
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Jack Bishop was also concerned about what Captain Seymour Toms’ B Company was doing out to the east of Johns’ Knoll as the phone line had been cut and Bishop did not want to leave the company ‘out in the blue’. Two men were sent out to contact Toms and tell him to counterattack towards Johns’ Knoll with two platoons while leaving one on the high feature he now occupied. Private Jack McManus and Lance Corporal Bert Scott went out on the left flank but had a tough climb up through the scrub and hadn’t reached B Company before dark. They took shelter in the bush and heard enemy troops moving past during the night before finding the signal wire the next morning and following it to the summit of the ridge only to find that B Company had gone.26
The day of the Johns’ Knoll attack had begun quietly for B Company. ‘It was a glorious morning but things were quiet,’ Lieutenant Tom Cook wrote. Then the phone line went dead and firing broke out down at Trevor’s Ridge which continued all morning. Seymour Toms sent two sections out under Lieutenant Don McRae to find the line break, only to discover that the ridge to the west was now occupied by the enemy. McRae patched into the signal line and called back to Toms who sent Cook’s platoon down to help. The Japanese on the ridge had seen McRae’s men so turned their Juki machine gun around to face them. Cook sent sections left and right and it was Corporal ‘Lum’ Yandell’s section on the right that got around to knock out the woodpecker. At least twenty enemy troops were killed on that first knoll. ‘The gun was well dug in and there was a pile of dead round the gun,’ Cook said. Down on Trevor’s Ridge at 6.00 pm, Jack Bishop saw that ‘Fire from the woodpeckers abruptly ceased.’27
Cook and McRae’s men continued another 100 metres along the ridge until held up by three light machine guns in thick scrub. ‘These opened up with some of the heaviest fire we’ve ever encountered,’ Cook commented. Two men were killed and four wounded. ‘We didn’t know they were there, walked straight into it, killed in action like that,’ Private Harry Ashton said.28 It was now getting dark so a perimeter defence was established around the wounded men. Yandell and two other men then made their way through enemy lines to battalion headquarters at Trevor’s Ridge to get help. They arrived at 7.45 pm and two hours later they returned with an aid man who had morphine for the wounded. At 5.30 am the next morning the rest of B Company joined them and the company headed back to the battalion.29
Expecting a Japanese attack against Trevor’s Ridge, the 13 Platoon sergeant Cyril Johns had repositioned his men closer to the crest that day. ‘We dug in, and I’m under a tree and I’m right up on the brow of the hill on the lee side,’ Private ‘Scotty’ Innes recalled. After the Japanese realised their attack on Johns’ Knoll had failed, the mountain guns opened up against Trevor’s Ridge at 6.00 pm. ‘Right on bloody six o’clock,’ Innes noted, ‘they must have lowered the sights or raised the muzzle of the gun or something’. A shell hit the top of the tree Innes was under. ‘I heard the boom of the gun before the bloody shell hit and I dropped.’ Corporal Max Ellis ‘was pretty bad hit’ with most of his thigh taken off and an arm wound. Private Jackie Spencer and Cyril Johns were also wounded. It was only when Innes went to help Cyril Johns that he realised how badly he had been wounded himself; his pants had been split from the crutch right down his left leg. A shell fragment ‘took the kneecap and just sliced it right off. I don’t know where me bloody boots went to.’ Innes put on a shell dressing and then, using his rifle as a crutch, ‘walked on that bloody leg for about a hundred yards’ to the aid post. There were at least a dozen men already there and when he was asked what happened he said, ‘Oh, bloody sniper got me … It was a seventy-five millimetre.’30
The attacks on Johns’ Knoll had been going on all day with no respite and about three times it looked as if the position would be lost. But as Merv Weston wrote of Bob Johns, ‘In the scorching steamy heat of that kunai-crested knoll he held on.’31
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At 5.00 pm Bishop had sent a message back that he needed some native carriers sent forward with ammunition, no matter how late. So when Kel Crocker arrived at Guy’s Post with the supply train at 5.30 pm he was told to press on to the battalion that night. It was pitch black and a hell of a job, having to move up the river in the dark and then crawl to the ridge in the mud, but Croker and his carriers kept going.32 Up at Trevor’s Ridge Clive Edwards observed that ‘our ammo is dangerously low though a train is due in tonight—will it get here?’33 There were 32 river crossings for the carrier line on the way up to the front as they followed the rising Faria River and the men had to fasten themselves together to stop being washed away into the dark.34 The supply train arrived at 1.30 am the next day. ‘About 300 of them deserved a medal,’ Jack Reddin reflected. ‘If you ever want to do a scary thing you’ll travel that jungle in the middle of the night and across those rivers and yet that patrol of carriers reached our unit with vital ammunition and supplies which were there for us at first light if there had been another attack … That was a mammoth task.’35
Still full of adrenaline from the battle, the men up on Johns’ Knoll stayed awake all night listening to the Japanese carrying out their wounded and burying their dead. Keith Addison remembered the sound of a dove cooing and took it as a sign that the enemy had gone. At 5.30 am the men from B Company came in between Reg Hillier and Addison on the north-east end of the knoll. Addison watched as they ‘came up the long spur at dawn’ but he was also wary. ‘The Nips used to sometimes latch onto the end of a patrol and follow them in,’ he wrote. So after the last man arrived Addison had the forward scout ensure they were all B Company men.36
In the morning a patrol went down to check the Japanese lines. At 9.40 am a badly wounded enemy soldier was brought in on a stretcher but died two hours later; another soldier was captured while trying to bury one of his mates. He had a broken leg and had been unable to flee. Addison saw the two prisoners come in and put a shell dressing on the leg of one, using a knife to cut his trousers. He then gave him water from an empty tin, not from his water bottle.37 The prisoner who survived was Private Tsutomu Eigashira from 9 Company of the III/78th Battalion. The rest of his unit had only left a few minutes before he was captured.38 About 150 Japanese were buried after the battle but this included 22 graves that the Japanese had dug and which may have contained multiple burials. ‘We killed more of the enemy there than we killed anywhere else in any of our campaigns,’ Johns said. ‘We certainly had our revenge for those of our battalion that were killed at places like Gona.’ The 2/27th had seven men killed and 28 wounded in the battle.39
The Japanese could ill afford the losses they had suffered. The day before the battle some of the 78th Regiment units had been sent to the north coast, further weakening the already understrength regiment. Four infantry companies, a machine-gun company and two mountain guns were used in the operation against Johns’ Knoll and many valuable men, weapons and ammunition had been lost.40
Jack Reddin later noted that the battle had been won by very good tactics from Jack Bishop and ‘great courage by Bobby Johns’ platoon’. Johns was the youngest officer in the unit but had acted like the oldest.41 The young platoon commander felt elated after the battle, conscious of the fact that his platoon had withstood many attacks and ‘had had some sort of victory, pyrrhic though it seemed at the time’. The platoon was given the honour of leading the way down the Faria River back to Guy’s Post after the 2/27th was relieved two days later. ‘The Japs didn’t attack again,’ Johns commented, ‘We’d held … We’d outfought them there.’ Back at Guy’s Post, Johns went down with scrub typhus and ‘that was the end of the campaign for me’.42