On the afternoon of 14 October the 2/16th Battalion moved up the Faria River to Trevor’s Ridge to relieve the 2/27th which began the move back to Guy’s Post late in the afternoon. Although the heavy afternoon rain prevented the Japanese from observing the move, the track down Trevor’s Ridge soon became ‘a running stream of mud’.1 ‘It simply poured with rain as we waited, blue with the cold, for the Bn [battalion] to snake out into single file along an appalling track,’ Clive Edwards wrote. It was already dark when the men reached the swollen Faria River and they had to form human chains at the numerous crossing points as they made their way down the river. ‘Drowning was certain if we broke the chain,’ Edwards noted.2 ‘There’s all sorts of boulders and stones moving along the bottom and you can lose your footing very easily,’ Jack Reddin added. ‘We lost one man who lost his grip and lost his footing.’ That man was Signaller Ron Blake, his body found the next day. He had been a brigade signaller attached to the 2/27th and was the third signaller to lose his life in the previous four days.3
With the 2/27th Battalion back at Guy’s Post, attention shifted to the massive bulwark that towered above and would soon be known as Shaggy Ridge. ‘It was an incredible feature,’ Jack Reddin observed, ‘a feature that most of us had never seen anything like before in our life.’ It wasn’t a mountain but more like a long narrow mountain range with no individual peak, just ‘an outcrop of rock or a pimple as we used to call it’. The northeastern side of the ridge was open, covered in thick kunai grass with the odd narrow patch of timber bleeding out of the side of the ridge. The even steeper south-western side caught the coastal weather and was thickly covered with rainforest. ‘It is as steep as hell on both sides and is only flat for a couple of feet on top,’ Bob Clampett recalled. The only feasible way up was via the southern shoulder. As Reddin put it, ‘You just have to see it to believe it.’4
Shaggy Ridge was named after Lieutenant Bob ‘Shaggy’ Clampett, who had taken the first 2/27th units up onto the ridge on the same day as the rest of the battalion was making its way back from Trevor’s Ridge to Guy’s Post. Clampett had been given his nickname in Syria soon after he had received his field commission when, after six weeks in the field without a haircut, Clampett and four other newly commissioned officers had been invited by the battalion commander to the officers’ club. However, Clampett’s company commander, Captain Tom Gill, had one look at him and said, ‘Clampett, you cannot go with the CO with your hair as it is … you’re just like those so and so goats out there, those shaggy goats.’ The name stuck.5
As the intelligence officer, it was Jack Reddin’s job to name terrain features that were unnamed on the map. As he was discussing operations with the quartermaster, Captain Jack Lee, he mentioned ‘old Shag’s going up the ridge, what will we call it?’ ‘Just call it Shaggy Ridge,’ Lee replied. Reddin thought Clampett’s ‘unruly hair sort of matched the terrain and so I thought that was a jolly good idea so we named it Shaggy Ridge’.6 ‘I wonder if that name will ring a bell,’ Jack Bishop wrote home.7 On 14 October Bishop told Clampett, who had only just taken over A Company after Charlie Sims had been evacuated with pneumonia, to put together a composite company and go up the ridge. Clampett gathered together 9, 11 and 18 Platoons, each one from a different company. Clampett’s ‘strict instructions were to keep the Japanese occupied’ with patrols but, in contradiction, on ‘no account to cause any casualties to ourselves’. The main task was observation.8 ‘We already knew there were Japs on top, we’d seen them there when we crossed the river,’ said Reddin.9
On 16 October Clampett sent out a patrol to the top of the ridge shoulder which found a four-strand barbed-wire fence with tins hanging off it for early warning, but it was decided to go no further than this ‘ordinary agricultural fence’. Nonetheless, the Australians had been seen. ‘The Japanese were approximately 30 to 40 yards ahead but they looked down on us from a height of roughly the height of a two-storey building,’ Clampett recalled. He reported back to headquarters and said that he thought his company could capture the Japanese position atop the ridge but it was ‘again reaffirmed that under no circumstances were we allowed to attack’. Clampett therefore just maintained his position on the shoulder of the ridge, observing and patrolling, although ‘not necessarily in an orderly manner, but in a frequent manner, both day and night’.10
‘Just across to my left there is a ridge. It is covered with long kunai grass on my side and dense timber on the other … I have to climb it tomorrow,’ Jack Bishop wrote in a letter home.11 On the afternoon of 17 October he set off with Jack Reddin to climb Shaggy Ridge but Bishop only made it one-third of the way before he had to return to his headquarters at Guy’s Post. Reddin also got to accompany a number of war correspondents up onto the ridge. ‘So I started off at the bottom with seven or nine of these journalists and only one was with me when we reached the top.’ That was Merv Weston, a top-grade squash and tennis player with the fitness to match. ‘All the others faded on the way up,’ Reddin stated, ‘long before we reached the top.’12 On 20 October Reddin was ordered to accompany a platoon up through the scrub on the left-hand side to meet up with Clampett’s company on top of the shoulder. As the men climbed ‘the rains came down and everything got slippery’ so Reddin decided to just take two men up with him, leapfrogging their way up the steep slope. When they finally reached the top ‘there was Shaggy’s men training their guns between our eyes’. ‘I knew Shaggy Ridge well,’ Reddin observed, ‘at least how to get up there’.13
Although it was now confirmed that the Japanese were on the ridge, Brigadier Ivan Dougherty’s opinion was that ‘there was no desperate hurry to clear them out’.14 However, it was decided that the 25-pounder guns down below could have an impact so Jack Reddin got the job of taking the artillery observation officer Captain Bluey Whyte up onto the ridge. ‘He got us all to retreat just a few yards,’ Reddin said. ‘Seemed pretty scary to me at the time, while he sorted out how to get artillery onto the top.’ Whyte got under an overhanging bank near the barbed wire and when he had the range right he called for Fuse 231 on the shells, which delayed their detonation. ‘This resulted in a horrible mess, with many dead Japs and trees blown apart,’ Whyte noted. ‘There were great holes in the ground where the shells had gone in and exploded, forcing shrapnel up through the ground.’15
On 22 October a patrol moved along the ridge to an area of bamboo clumps which had been thinned out by the Japanese over the previous week. Les Thredgold and Private George Vandeleur were out front and watched about a dozen enemy soldiers digging in and cutting timber. Les crawled forward to the barbed-wire fence and watched one of the soldiers splitting bamboo with a machete and taking it up the hill where another soldier was sitting down with his rifle covering the track up. To Thredgold it looked like they were making a fire lane down the track through the bamboo. They had also laid out dried leaves and bamboo behind the barbed-wire fence to make a warning sound when trodden on. Then ‘one cheeky Jap … came down and he dug a hole behind us or just over the side of us’.16 While Vandeleur covered him, Thredgold worked his way back but when his toe caught in a vine the soldier ‘saw it move then he looked at me’. The soldier jumped into the hole he had been digging and yelled out to the men higher up the ridge. ‘Our position was blown,’ Thredgold said, so they pulled back to the rest of the platoon. As they withdrew they came across Bluey Whyte. Thredgold told Whyte ‘to get down quick smart,’ afraid the Japanese would open fire on them. But it was Whyte who would do the shooting. He found a spot where he could see the enemy position and he had the artillery open fire, which ‘blasted the place to smithereens,’ remembered Thredgold.17
On the next morning of 23 October the men of Lieutenant John Garnock’s 9 Platoon crawled out under the barbed-wire fence and found that the forward enemy post had been vacated so he had his men occupy it. Garnock counted 30 foxholes in the area, four of which had been hit by the artillery fire. A patrol then moved about 250 metres further on until the men could hear Japanese voices, at which point they returned. On 24 October a five-man patrol from 18 Platoon moved up to locate the new enemy positions. The lead scout was Private Bruce Truscott who was ‘a new chap’ who had only been with the battalion a few weeks but was keen to prove himself. He led the patrol across the same ground that Garnock’s platoon had covered on the previous day. They had only gone about 100 metres to where there was a dip that formed a saddle on top of the ridge, with a sheer cliff on the south-west side and the steep open kunai slope on the other, when the crack of a rifle shot was heard and Truscott was fatally hit. Some Japanese troops had moved in overnight and set up an ambush. Les Thredgold was back with the rest of the platoon when Private Des Blake came running back to tell them ‘they’ve got Bruce’. It would be five days before the body of the first Australian killed on Shaggy Ridge could be recovered.18
That afternoon Clampett’s company was relieved by Major Ron Johnson’s C Company. Johnson was a ‘wild looking bloke’ and an aggressive company commander who had been wounded five times. Lieutenant Peter Langsford’s 14 Platoon moved up to occupy the ridge just back from the saddle where Truscott had been shot. Bruce Deering was the forward scout when the patrol arrived and said, ‘No Nips here’ before taking off his pack and sitting down on the track. Private Roy Freedman was behind Deering, both men hidden from enemy view by the cloud that gathers on most afternoons. But suddenly the mist lifted like a curtain and fire broke out from further along the ridge, wounding Freedman in the wrist and Deering in the thigh. ‘They went bang, bang, bang and I got one,’ Deering recalled. Both wounded men were pulled back below the skyline out of the line of fire.19
A few nights later, when the men were moving back along the crest at night, Sergeant Harry Hood went over the side at a point where the path along the top took a twist. Private Don Duffell heard him go over and just managed to stop himself before he followed. Fortunately Hood was able to halt his fall and get back up onto the top.20 The men then dug a path along the southwestern side of the ridge just below the crest, and weapon pits were dug into the jungle-covered slope under cover from enemy snipers. However, there were still dangers. Private Norm ‘Lofty’ Emmett was a big man with a big foxhole and when it rained heavily, it weakened the sides of his position. He was just below the ridge when his hole collapsed one night and down he came with only the many trees on that side of the ridge preventing him tumbling to the valley below.21
After Harry Hood had taken his tumble it was decided to avoid moving at night other than to change over the forward three-man Bren gun post every two hours. A string was tied to the waist of one of the forward men who could tug the string to alert the post further back and vice versa. Don Duffell was up there one night but when he pulled the string it came free so he had to make his way back to wake Private Jack Jose who was due for the next shift. Jose was a jittery little fellow and when Duffell shook him he awoke with a fright, called out ‘They’re here!’ and punched Duffell on the jaw before trying to strangle him. Duffell therefore had trouble calling out the password, which was Woolloomooloo, a word the Japanese would have trouble with. Meanwhile ‘Lofty’ Emmett woke up and towered over the two struggling men with his bayonet, calling out ‘Move aside, I’ll get the bastard!’ Then Private Herb Flanaghan said, ‘No, move away, I’ll give him a burst with the Owen.’ Just then the cloud lifted, throwing some moonlight onto the situation and probably saving Duffell’s life. The strain was too much for some. After only one night, one of the older men told Duffell, ‘Don, I know we volunteered but I couldn’t stand another night up here.’ It was arranged that he be sent down.22
After the retreat of his unit from the Finisterres, Kenji Ueda ended up in the front line on Shaggy Ridge with 5 Company, II/78th Battalion. His section was ordered to move along the ridge to a place ‘where the crest of the ridge had three small hills and … dig a defensive line’. The most forward of the three hills was the Pimple, the strongest position on Shaggy Ridge. As Ueda observed, ‘It was an odd position as the ridge was so narrow there were spots on the track along the crest where only one man could walk.’ Ueda noted that when the Australians moved along the ridge towards their position, there were no serious attacks, ‘just probing, bombing, machine gunning’.23
•
Above Shaggy Ridge a flight of Boomerang aircraft from RAAF No. 4 Squadron operated on most days, spotting and strafing Japanese positions for the Australian artillery and the American fighter-bombers. In the last week of October there were constant missions out to the Bogadjim road from the coast, along which all reinforcements and supplies for the Japanese troops in the Finisterres came. Flying behind the enemy lines Flying Officer Ron Dickson had accepted that his plane would be shot at when carrying out such missions. ‘It happened on every flight in varying degrees of severity,’ Dickson wrote. On one of his early missions he could not resist strafing the staging point for the Japanese trucks at Daumoina about 3 kilometres north of Yokopi. ‘It was just too irresistible to pass them by,’ but his flight commander Ian ‘Pip’ Olorenshaw later told him ‘You came back with so many holes in your aircraft, I don’t know how you remained airborne.’24
On 22 October Dickson was on a two-and-a-half-hour mission directing an artillery shoot in the Faria Valley and then back to the Bogadjim road where he ‘indulged in strafing anything and everything in sight along the road’.25 On this day the flight moved from Nadzab to Gusap, giving the aircraft a longer loiter time over the Shaggy Ridge area. The next day Dickson was up again doing the same work, his longest mission to date at 3 hours and 15 minutes. On 28 October he was again over Daumoina to check out the transport park but he did not strafe the area as he was diverted to look over the Ramu River area further west near Koropa: ‘I would not have been asked to go there just to view the scenery.’26 There was considerable concern that the Japanese would push down the valley.
The Boomerangs would always operate in pairs, with one doing the work down low and the other providing top cover against air attack. The men on the ground would nickname the pair of Boomerangs Bluey and Curley or Bib and Bub depending on what cartoon they favoured. On 29 October Dickson’s wingman was Flying Officer Norm Trumper and the mission was to try to locate the Japanese mountain gun at the head of the Faria Valley. Dickson got lucky when he spotted a Japanese officer in the open next to a patch of jungle pulling his arm across his body as if it was attached to a firing lanyard or something so he radioed Trumper, who was providing top cover, that ‘we should do our best to give this place a bit of attention’. Dickson ‘approached low and at the last moment rose up and focused on the Jap site’ with his strafing run before dipping low on departure. However, Trumper did not follow Dickson’s example and took his own line of attack to the target, carrying it out as if on the gunnery range with a shallow dive from about 30 metres and then pulling straight up after strafing the target. To Dickson this method made Trumper an ideal target for any ground fire and his misgivings about his wingman’s strafing technique were confirmed on landing back at Gusap. ‘All who saw his plane were appalled at the damage done to the aircraft by the ground fire,’ Dickson wrote. ‘It was quite remarkable that he survived this encounter.’ To Dickson, Trumper ‘was an accident waiting to happen’.27
The next day Dickson and Trumper were up again looking for the Japanese mountain-gun positions. They had two locations to investigate: near the head of the Faria River valley and around the adjacent Kankiryo Saddle. As the Boomerangs approached the area ‘the mountain ridges were engulfed in dense cloud’ so while Trumper flew top cover, Dickson looked for gaps in the cloud. Trumper then followed Dickson down through the cloud to maintain contact. After circling around the upper Faria Valley Dickson was able to mark a suspected gun position on his map before heading for Kankiryo, flying through a narrow gap between the cloud base and the tree line along the top of Kankiryo Saddle into the Mindjim River valley to the north.28
Dickson’s dilemma was how to fly safely across Kankiryo Saddle below the low cloud base while at the same time having a good look for likely gun positions. He would approach the saddle from the Mindjim Valley and after crossing the Kankiryo Saddle to the Faria Valley, ‘despite the opening available being very tight’, he would go up through the clouds, head back to the Mindjim Valley and repeat the process. With only a brief opportunity to view the small ground clearing on each pass, Dickson had to make a number of runs and soon realised that it would not be possible for Trumper to keep contact with him. Each time he would reach the Faria Valley and then break up through the clouds, Trumper would be there waiting for him but after a number of runs he broke through the clouds and Trumper was no longer up there. At first Dickson was not concerned but after a few more runs ‘it dawned on me he could have come to grief’. Dickson tried the radio with no response and then searched what ground he could see below for any sign of a crash and it soon became clear that Trumper ‘must have gone in’.29 Trumper’s Boomerang had crashed near the northern end of Shaggy Ridge on the west side of Kankiryo Saddle on a feature later known as Prothero Two. His broken Boomerang was found three months later when Australian troops occupied the feature.
Trumper had been shot down by ground fire from Kankiryo. As Lieutenant Kumao Ishikawa later wrote, ‘We could only watch in silent frustration the enemy spotter planes that would come flying up as if weaving at extreme low altitude in the valley from Irie Village to our position.’ But Ishikawa knew that if his men fired, they would give away the location of ‘our secret position’. The frustration only grew at ‘the enemy pilots whose faces could be glanced at between trees’ and Ishikawa finally received permission from his battalion commander, Captain Shoichi Kagawa, to try to shoot an aircraft down. Ishikawa had ten men aim at a Boomerang flying over his position but thought ‘the first salvo was fired slightly below him and before he passed over us three or four more salvos were fired’. But on this first occasion there was no result. That came in the following days when an explosion was heard and one of his men ‘came rushing in short breaths, tears on his face’. ‘Commander, we did it!’ he excitedly told Ishikawa; the men had finally brought the Boomerang down in flames. ‘The pilot had been burned in the lower torso, asked for water then passed away,’ Ishikawa wrote. Several days later, Ishikawa received a message of praise, a bottle of sake and twenty packs of cigarettes from General Nakai, ‘which pleased us all’.30
•
With his battalion about to be relieved from Shaggy Ridge, Jack Bishop cobbled together a plan that would hopefully see the Pimple captured before his men left the ridge. Just after dusk on 3 November he sent D Company out in heavy rain to try to find a way up the open north-eastern side of the ridge to attack the Pimple the next day. ‘We didn’t like the job much but off we went,’ Clive Edwards wrote. The men would cross the area that was under enemy observation in darkness. ‘It was a slow and queer march in pitch darkness on only a narrow track,’ Edwards noted. Having already been on an earlier patrol where the men ‘finished up by hanging tooth and nail to sheer slopes where a slip would have landed us in the Faria far below’, Edwards was well aware of the challenge.31
The men were overloaded for such a climb. ‘We carried our tents and everything because we expected to remain on Shaggy Ridge,’ Edwards wrote. ‘I had to carry Tiny Bastick’s rifle because he was lugging six mortar bombs, and the extra weight didn’t improve things any.’ It took five hours to reach a point from where they could make the final push up onto the ridge. ‘It was a ticklish position for we are parked on a slope of about 50 degrees and dare not show our noses over the ridge,’ Edwards realised. Les Thredgold had his men stick their bayonets into the ground and tie themselves to them as they lay down on the side of the ridge for the night. Lieutenant Gordon Macdonald then took a patrol higher up and ‘reported that any attack was impracticable’.32
Meanwhile the men on top kept the attention of the defenders on the Pimple. At 9.25 am the guns down in the valley opened fire and at 10.00 am Peter Langsford took a ten-man patrol out along the top of the ridge to see if the artillery had forced the Japanese off the Pimple. The patrol advanced until the men were under the cover of the rock face below the Pimple but noise could be heard above and there were two bursts of machine-gun fire, which made it clear that the Japanese were still there. The patrol split in two and Corporal Tom Excell took four men around to the right side of the rock face while the other five men went left where the shale thrown up by the recent shelling soon halted progress.33
On the right side Excell’s group moved through the shattered timber below the Pimple and then came across a clear patch with two tents and a machine gun set up slightly above and to the left. Excell and Private Willie Smith moved behind the enemy position at a higher point of the ridge and threw five grenades and fired a burst from an Owen gun. A series of machine-gun and rifle shots followed. The other men from Excell’s party were fired on so slid down into dead ground before hearing a dull thud like a man falling. Excell and Smith did not return and after half an hour the other men withdrew. Their bodies would remain unrecovered for two months.34
‘One day they got serious,’ said Kenji Ueda, ‘They were equipped with automatic sub machineguns and came at us suddenly … they fired shots like rain drops.’ Ueda’s five-man section kept their heads down but some men from another section ‘were very brave, they stood up and shot at the enemy, but they were all soon cut down’. Ueda’s men then ‘started shooting our rifles into the sky, and we soon learned that the Australians would never charge us as long as we fired our rifles’. Ueda thought that if it seemed his section was holding the position in any strength the Australians would not attack them. He would not have known there were only two Australians on the ridge but ‘as long as we seemed to be holding our position in strength, they would not come close’.35
•
The morning after the loss of Excell and Smith, the Australian artillery and mortars opened up on the Pimple, trying in vain to drive the Japanese off. Clive Edwards thought that ‘they must be jolly well dug in and won’t worry about the muck’. Rex Trenerry took his platoon along the side of the ridge and then up through a thickly timbered patch of jungle but although he could see the Japanese, the jungle petered out into open kunai and the lead section came under fire.36 Trenerry reported back that the rest of the way to the top was impossible. Meanwhile Guy Fawcett was spending a long time on the walkie-talkie with Jack Bishop ‘trying to convince him of this fact but it sounds as though he’s taking some convincing’. As Edwards noted of Bishop, ‘it’s alright for him to say the country is passable’.37 In the end Bishop saw reality and called off the attack. ‘We couldn’t go further,’ Private Alan Bullock stated, as it was ‘too steep above’.38
Meanwhile Kenji Ueda’s section had pulled back and established another position where the ridge was wider and Ueda’s section held the left flank, on the open side of the ridge ‘some distance down off the ridge proper’. While the men were still digging in about 10.00 am, ‘about 30 Australian soldiers emerged from the jungle below us,’ Ueda said. ‘Each time they showed themselves, we shot at them, but we never got any of them.’ It would have been Trenerry’s men that Ueda’s section fired on. The next day Ueda’s men were out of their dugouts and cleaning their weapons when they were fired on ‘from a hill behind us’. Ueda stated, ‘It was my fault that two of my men were killed right then and another later.’ After driving the Australians off, Ueda decided to move back closer to the rest of the platoon.39
On the afternoon of 7 November, a patrol along the top of the ridge by Lieutenant Colin Fisher led him to conclude that the Pimple was ‘unassailable’ because only two or three men could approach it at a time and they would come under intense fire. The main enemy position was well dug into the rock and had proved immune to shelling. Private Horrie Beames was shot in the back and killed while two other men were wounded as the patrol withdrew.40 ‘This time we were well prepared and had more men than them, so we easily defeated them,’ Ueda wrote, ‘We knew we had killed at least one Australian soldier.’41
That night the Japanese positions came under mortar fire ‘and all we could do was to hide in the bottom of our holes and wait for it to end,’ Ueda wrote, but in the face of ‘almost overwhelming strength, none of our men ran. They were brave men.’ Ueda noted that there were three artillery pieces and a Juki machine gun available, ‘but we had to save them for a critical situation as, as soon as we used them, the enemy would spot their position and destroy them’. The Japanese also had their 50 mm light mortars but the rounds for them had ‘super quick fuses and it was very dangerous to use them in the jungle as it would explode even if the grenade hit a small branch just over your head’. Ueda also thought that the Japanese hand grenades were ‘almost too dangerous for us to use in the jungle’.42
•
On 9 November the 2/33rd Battalion took over operations up on Shaggy Ridge. Coming down off the ridge was a challenge and Don Duffell slid down on his back using his heels as brakes. During the descent the grenade discharger cup tore away from his webbing and was lost and Duffell was later fined two pounds for loss of equipment. As a ‘six bob a day tourist’, that meant four days’ pay.43 Although the artillery and air strikes against the Pimple continued, the 2/33rd didn’t make any attacks. On 19 November an artillery round dropped short, startling Private Frank Heinze who jumped into the air and then slipped off the ridge, tumbling down the kunai-covered east side for some 20 metres before he was able to pull up. ‘Am I alright, Doc?’ he asked the medical officer John Follent, ‘I thought I had broken my bloody neck.’ Follent assured him he was fine but knew Heinze was right; Heinze would die during the difficult stretcher carry down off the ridge.44
With his battalion out of the front line for a break, Jack Bishop had time to sit on a ridge in the foothills and pen another letter as he took in the panorama: ‘On my left is a narrow valley, and beyond it once again these everlasting hills. The valley loses itself in infinity in both directions, and along its floor winds a great river … it is the Ramu.’45 They were interesting days for the 2/27th commander. In late November Bishop took a phone call at his forward headquarters from Brigadier Dougherty who informed him that General Vasey wished to say goodbye. When Bishop asked where Vasey was headed, Dougherty replied, ‘He isn’t going anywhere, but you are.’ Bishop’s time as a battalion commander had come to an end. ‘I was to return to the gilded staff,’ Bishop wrote. His value as a staff officer now saw him promoted to full colonel and appointed as a general staff officer to the 6th Division, the formation that he had first served with in the Middle East. On 12 December, while sitting on an aircraft on the way back to Australia, Bishop wrote what would be his final letter from New Guinea. ‘Life and events are moving far too quickly for me. I said farewell to the grandest lot of lads with whom I have ever been associated,’ but ‘at least I shall not have to climb Shaggy Ridge again.’46
Lieutenant Colonel Keith Picken, who had administered command of the 2/7th Battalion during the latter part of the Salamaua campaign, took over from Bishop, arriving on 5 December. For the 2/27th it was a quiet time with the 2/16th Battalion having now taken over on Shaggy Ridge and its approaches. Vasey wrote to Morshead on the same day and, in regard to Bishop, told him ‘I am sorry that the change had to be made.’47