‘From today, we are entering an area subject to air attack…
Those who are slow will be regarded as cowards. If sunk, remain
calm until the water touches the feet. When in the water…
platoons should gather together to sing military songs’
—Colonel Yokoyama Yosuke, to the Nankai Shitai advance landing force
Imanishi Sadaharu was among five of 60 candidates who gained an elite position in the Imperial Japanese Army. Aged 21, he was immensely proud to join the 44th Regiment—precursor of the unit that would fight Australia along the Kokoda Track—as an A-grade soldier. It was 1936, the dawn of Japan’s military empire, and Imanishi’s family doted on their clever son who marched off in his new uniform to his regimental barracks in Asakura, in Kochi City, his home town.
A short, wiry, pugnacious man, with a loud laugh that erupts at unexpected moments, Imanishi spent eight years fighting in some of the grimmest battles of the Pacific campaign. By the time he stepped ashore at Gona in 1942, he’d had long experience of combat and beach landings. Having rehearsed and perfected their speciality—the coastal invasion—at the river mouth near Kochi, his regiment was chosen to lead the invasion of Shanghai in 1937, losing 700 dead and 1600 wounded in that action. He fought for another three years in China, after which he was promoted to staff sergeant.
He did not fight at Nanking, the scene of the mass rape and slaughter of civilians by the occupying Japanese forces, the scale of which Japanese historians continue to deny. While en route there his unit was diverted to Taiwan, and he returned to Japan in February 1941. To this day the 88-year-old veteran and former provincial mayor wonders why ‘not a single bullet hit him under intense firing’.1
In 1941, he resumed his career as a schoolteacher, but declined to marry because he feared that ‘Japan was going to go to war against the United States’.2 Indeed, in July 1942, he found himself aboard a Japanese transport ship as one of the crack infantrymen of the Yokoyama Advance Force, the forward troops of the Japanese invasion of Papua.
Imanishi was one of 2000 advance troops who streamed ashore at Gona and Basabua on the Papuan coast. In addition to the standard pack, he carried a bag of rice weighing 50 pounds, 180 bullets, two grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush—an astonishing load for this diminutive man.3 ‘There was little resistance,’ he recalls. ‘Soon after we landed, Australian aircraft attacked, but we escaped into the jungle. We headed straight for Kokoda.’4
When the Yokoyama Advance Force landed at Gona, no Allied army lay in wait on the shore; no navy contested the Japanese control of Papuan waters. American ships were occupied near the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in the Pacific, where they were soon to assist the invasion of Guadalcanal.
A small formation of Allied bombers and P-400 Airacobras—not ‘100 aircraft’, as one Japanese history claims5—did attack the convoy. While dozens of shells plopped into the sea, the inexperienced Allied pilots scored a couple of direct hits. The burning transport ship Ayatozan Maru ran aground, and the black hulk was dubbed the Gona Wreck.
‘The enemy planes impudently evaded [our] fire,’ wrote one Japanese soldier, ‘and calmly soared over the Ayatozan Maru, dropping countless bombs [which] screeched as they fell…almost lifting the ship out of the sea.’Then, ‘like a typhoon came the low-flying Spitfires!’6(In fact, these were the Airacobras; Churchill’s long promised Spitfires arrived belatedly.)
Allied aircraft were no match—yet—for the Japanese Zero. The famous Mitsubishi fighter won most dogfights over Papua and New Guinea at this stage of the war. Undaunted, the Australian airmen had a go. Pilot Officer Warren Cowan, of 32 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, dared to attack enemy ships leaving Buna in an aged Hudson. Nine Zeros, one of which was piloted by the legendary Japanese ace, Saburo Sakai, shot him down over the jungle.
Darkness soon obscured the targets, Allied aircraft flew away, and the Yokoyama Advance Force continued its disembarkation through the night. The Japanese had secured the Papuan beachhead by dawn on the 22nd. It was the southernmost point of the Imperial Army’s great arc of conquest of ‘Greater East Asia’, stretching from Manchuria to New Britain, through Thailand, Burma, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, and virtually isolating Australia.
News of the landing panicked the inexperienced Labor Government of Prime Minister John Curtin. Within a day of the Japanese landing on Australian territory, Curtin met a storm of criticism over Australia’s woeful military preparedness. Though it was unfair, given Curtin’s brief period in office, William Morris Hughes was unrepentant. As the prime minister during the Great War, who had represented the nation at Versailles, Hughes denounced the lack of resistance in withering terms. ‘We must wake up to the fact that we are fighting an enemy that is not afraid to die,’ he told Australians, ‘an enemy who is on the offensive everywhere. To reach [Gona], the Japanese had to come in a convoy, with barges and troopships. We have an airforce on duty there, day and night. The Japanese ought not to have got there. Every day they are creeping nearer and nearer. Soon they may have established sufficient bases to make a major attack on Australia itself.’7
If the wily old fox Billy Hughes was not the only one alarmed by the absence of an Allied military response, he was certainly the most devastatingly outspoken.* On 5 August, Hughes once again bludgeoned ‘our military leaders’ for ‘a lamentable lack of vision, of initiative, or coordination of control’. 8 His remarks enraged Curtin and the military establishment, and fired the public mood. The blame could not be laid at the feet of John Curtin, who inherited, and sought desperately to reverse, the state of a near defenceless nation.
Yokoyama’s troops were not the first to land on the mainland of New Guinea. The Japanese had already captured, in February, Lae and Salamaua, and penetrated the Sepik region to the west, where they clashed with Kanga Force, an Australian guerrilla unit that would survive in the jungles for months without relief.*
The native response there presaged similar terror on the coast. Drums in the Sepik villages beat out, ‘Japan ’e come. White man ’e go bush’.9 Anarchy gripped the Highlands. Masterless farm labourers went on a recidivist rampage. Some highlanders rediscovered their taste for human flesh. As recently as the 1900s, the tribes had cannibalised the bodies of defeated warriors and invaders. The grisly practice of consuming ‘living meat’—keeping prisoners alive to preserve their flesh—is well-documented: ‘The well-fleshed,’ so an older Papuan told Benson, ‘used to be tied by their hands to a tree; then, as meat was needed, slices would be cut from their legs and buttocks…So for days the poor tortured bodies would hang, mercifully fainting from time to time.’10
‘Plantation houses were looted and burned by roving bands,’ reported the war correspondent Osmar White. ‘Even the nails were wrenched from the timbers and thrust triumphantly for adornment into the ear lobes and distended septa of the raiders. Lonely prospectors, several of them Chinese, were speared or shot to death with arrows. Their heads were taken to the main houses and their entrails ceremonially eaten.’11
The spore of chaos landed on the Papuan coastline. Terror of the Japanese drove communities into the jungle. Order broke down and loyalties
—to the Australian or Japanese army—divided native communities. Tribal informers were punished, on both sides, with summary execution.
This coastal region was ‘the area of greatest violence in the history of the Australian pacification of Papua’.12 Warfare was the default method of settling disputes on the grey sands of the Huon Gulf and along the banks of the Kumusi River in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Orokaivan people needed little provocation to come to blows with outsiders in the early 1900s. Then the intruders were neither barge-loads of Japanese troops nor Australian Government-backed goldminers and mercenaries—nor indeed Anglo-Saxons bearing crosses—but Melanesian explorers landing from long canoes. Those clashes were alive in the oral history of the Orokaivan tribes in 1942, and the memory rekindled the bloody history of the coastal communities.
Who were the Japanese invaders, and what were their intentions? It is worth nailing a few myths. In July the Japanese did not intend to invade Australia. Premier Tojo Hideki, the Japanese leader, had contemplated and, on 15 March 1942, rejected a land invasion of the great southern land. But the idea was discussed, and entertained, by soldiers who dreamed of celebrating New Year in Sydney.
Asked after the war if Japan had intended to occupy Australia, Tojo replied: ‘We never had enough troops to do so…We did not have the armed strength or the supply facilities to mount such a terrific extension of our already overstrained and too thinly spread forces. We expected to occupy all New Guinea, to maintain Rabaul as a holding base, and to raid Northern Australia by air. But actual physical invasion—no, at no time.’13
The Imperial Army’s plan was to isolate and neutralise Australia as an American base for offensive action. This meant commanding the air space and waters around Australia; and the best place from which to achieve this was Port Moresby. Its capture became a vital piece in the jigsaw of the Imperial Army’s strategy.
So on 11 June, darkly brooding after the lost Battle of the Coral Sea, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo considered a different line of attack. The commander of the Japanese 17th Army in Rabaul, Lieutenant-General Hyakutake Harukichi, was ordered to examine the viability of an overland invasion of Port Moresby.
Hyakutake proceeded without bothering with a reconnaissance of this bitterly obstinate country.14 He chose Major-General Horii Tomitaro, a commander of unusual stubbornness and unflinching obedience, to lead the elite invasion force, named the Nankai Shitai, or South Seas Detachment.
The forces that bombed Benson’s Gona Mission were Horii’s advance troops, led by Colonel Yokoyama Yosuke, who personally instructed his men three days before their departure, to ‘occupy a strategic line south of Kokoda…Push on day and night to the line of the said mountain range…Have the infantry battalion reconnoitre the route to Moresby…as quickly as possible…’15
Imanishi was listening. Within moments of running up the Gona beach, the sergeant remembers carrying his bicycle along the muddy track toward Kokoda. The Japanese clocks left no room for error.
Yokoyama’s troops were an amalgam of elites. The core infantry were drawn from the Tsukamoto Battalion, part of the 144th Infantry Regiment, raised in Shikoku. In addition there were mountain and anti-aircraft artillery units, Yokoyama’s own 15th Independent Engineers Regiment (engineers in the Japanese army doubled as combat infantry), and a company of shock troops, the Sasebo 5 Special Naval Landing Party. In total there were nearly 2000 men most of whom, like Imanishi, were veterans of the invasions of Shanghai and Rabaul. In addition, there were 100 Formosan (Taiwanese) troops, 52 horses, and some 400 Rabaul natives, press-ganged into service as carriers.
They sailed from Rabaul on 19 July over rough seas that made preinvasion deck exercises difficult. As the convoy entered coastal waters, Yokoyama addressed his men with a cheerless premonition of doom: ‘From today, we are entering an area subject to air attack. Hereafter…any attack will be the real thing. Those who are slow will be regarded as cowards. If sunk, remain calm until the water touches the feet…Those who hurriedly jump will drown. When in the water…platoons should gather together to sing military songs. All must be calm, even when awaiting rescue, for perhaps two days and nights.’16 Singing in a catastrophe was a common Japanese trait: civilians would sing encouraging songs to each other during the Tokyo fire bombing; the crews of bombed ships—for example, the Zuikaku at Leyte—stood to attention and bellowed traditional naval songs as their boats sank.17 It seemed the karaoke spirit came alive in the most inauspicious circumstances.
The troops were spared that ordeal on this occasion and Yokoyama’s force landed safely off Basabua on that cloudy afternoon, 21 July. The convoy comprised two cruisers, two destroyers, and two transport ships (the Ryoyo Maru and Ayatozan Maru). They were fully disembarked by 6.00 a.m. on 22 July. The infantry were dispatched inland the moment they set foot on Gona’s dark sands. Tsukamoto Hatsuo, a grouchy middle-aged Lieutenant-Colonel with a great fondness for sake, led the advance toward Kokoda. Back on the beaches, anti-aircraft guns were installed at intervals along the coast; the unit HQs were built, and a system of fortified bunkers was begun. The engineers worked round the clock, readying the beachhead for the arrival of the full invasion unit, the 10,000-strong Nankai Shitai, which was to leave Rabaul in mid-August.
Speed was the catchcry, drummed into the men at every moment. Colonel Yokoyama had told his officers: ‘Have the infantry…reconnoitre the route to Moresby in the occupied forward zone as quickly as possible. Reports of its value must be made, as well as reports on how quickly construction of roads for packhorses, light and heavy traffic…can be carried out. Report also on whether or not the main force of the detachment could capture Moresby by overland route. Guard particularly against “defeat by detail” by the enemy.’18
The advance troops were phenomenally energetic. While Tsukamoto’s 900 infantrymen swept inland towards Kokoda,19 the transport battalions mowed down the jungle with crushing thoroughness. Consider the astonishing progress of the Sakigawa Transport Unit: by 24 July, two days after landing, these indefatigable troops had cleared six miles of rough track between Buna and Soputa. They worked by the light of the moon, through pouring rain, laying palm logs over mud. A Japanese soldier said of his unit’s superhuman effort: ‘Our duty to reach the front line would not let us rest for one moment.’ That day, ‘black clouds, hiding the moon’,20 deposited torrential rain on the road-builders, but the Japanese engineers continued working through the night. The next day they reached their destination, a mile south of Soputa, where they built a heavily camouflaged vehicle base, and trucked in a radio station from Buna.
Mud and rain stalled the motorised units, whose vehicles got hopelessly bogged in the log road. ‘All personnel covered with mud and sweat and needing sleep, bravely carried on,’ wrote one soldier. ‘Since the night before landing we have not slept. The difficulties of the roads and their repair are beyond description. All officers and men realised their duty and proudly carried on.’21
As the terrain worsened, the vehicles were discarded, and the men were turned into packhorses. The troops, like Imanishi, shouldered heavy bags of rice, in addition to their usual kit, over miles of difficult country.22 ‘I am completely exhausted,’ wrote Private Watanabe Toshio, of the Tsukamoto Battalion, ‘because I walked 40 ri [about five miles] with 1 TO 9 SHO [7.54 gallons] of rice and miso on my back.’23