‘I pinned one Jap to the ground with my bayonet and screamed with laughter’
—Warrant Officer Jack Wilkinson, 39th Battalion
‘Kokoda lost from this morning. Blow the drome and road east of Oivi,’ urged the Australian wire to Port Moresby on 29 July. The Allied aircraft obliged, and swooped on Kokoda’s airfield.
A new commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Cameron, briefly succeeded Owen on 4 August. An aggressive, uncompromising man, Cameron had escaped the invasion of Rabaul with twelve others aboard a little boat. He looked dimly on deserters. On his way over the mountains to Deniki he encountered a few wild-eyed young privates of the 39th Battalion’s B Company who’d fled after the deaths of Owen and Templeton. Cameron was ‘very bitter towards [these] men. Says they are cowards,’ according to one soldier’s diary.1 Cameron ordered the troops who’d ‘shot through’ back to Isurava.
The colonel’s orders were to recapture the Kokoda airstrip, which had suddenly assumed the highest strategic importance at GHQ in Brisbane. General Blamey, no less, had exuberantly confided to the American air commander that he’d recapture Buna in a few weeks.2
The deflated spirits of the 39th rose before the battle. Deniki, now a bustling camp site, commanded the high ground above Kokoda. Sixty-six miles of telephone line had been laid over the Owen Stanleys. Kienzle’s carrier lines were operational. These things diminished the troops’ acute sense of isolation, of being cut off by the Japanese in front, and by the rainforest and mountains to the rear.
A greater boost to morale came with the arrival on 6 August of the full complement of the 39th Battalion. They had been rushed over the mountains when Kokoda fell with the most basic cartographical support: before he left Port Moresby each man was given a little bit of paper naming the villages he would encounter en route, and the approximate marching time between them. Such was the state of Allied map-making. A few got a swift lesson in the use of the Tommy gun—a parting shot, as it were, with a weapon many had ‘never seen in their lives’.3
The only good news in early August came from Kienzle. He single-handedly solved the most pressing logistical problem: how to airlift supplies to the troops. The carriers were simply unable to deliver the vast amounts of food and ammunition needed to sustain a combat infantry, whose numbers would soon enter the thousands.
Kienzle found the solution while flying over the Owen Stanleys in July. Then he’d noticed a crater-like depression near the Kagi Gap, at the highest point of the Owen Stanley Range. His diary tells the story:
31st July. I was determined to find an area suitable for dropping supplies somewhere on the main range…I knew of an area of ‘two dry lakes’ right on top of the main range…
2nd August. I descended east through very heavy jungle and followed a native hunting pad, using village policeman and three local Koiaris as guides, who were reluctant to show me the area. A Taboo existed on the place except for a few, who used it as a hunting ground…
3rd August. We broke camp at 0700 hrs and arrived at first dry lake at 0725 hrs. It presented a magnificent sight—a large patch of open country right on top of the main range of the Owen Stanleys. It was just the very thing I had been looking for to assist us in beating the Japs.4
Kienzle’s ‘dry lake’ is an eerie, windswept plain more than a mile long and half a mile wide. It has the desolate look of a blasted heath—more Scotland than New Guinea. A creek runs through the middle, with swamps on each side covered in sharp reeds. Kienzle observed quail and bush pigs running about. Elsewhere grassland obscured the swampy ground; the bed was too rough and sodden to be converted easily into a landing strip, and the lip of the crater was a perilous obstacle for aircraft. So it would serve as a drop zone. ‘It is an excellent area for dropping supplies,’ wrote Kienzle. ‘I erected shelters during the afternoon and stayed the night.’5
Kienzle dubbed the lakebed ‘Myola’ after the wife of Major Sydney Elliott-Smith, an ANGAU commander. Myola is also an Australian Aboriginal word meaning ‘dawn’. It swiftly became a daily drop zone for food, ammunition and medical supplies, and spared the native carriers the exhaustion of bearing all this over the mountains on their backs. By 14 August, thanks to Kienzle’s phenomenal energy, Myola was nearly operational. He knew what could and couldn’t be done in this hostile land—and made an interesting aside in his diary at this time that ‘the prospect of quietly building a road from Port Moresby to Kokoda…was an impossibility from the start’.6
Cameron had a ‘three-pronged’ plan for recapturing Kokoda. It nearly didn’t happen. His junior officers resisted; they thought it unworkable. Captains Symington and Bidstrup scorned the idea of marching back down the track, without any idea of Japanese positions or strength. Symington condemned the plan as ‘ill-conceived and highly dangerous’.7 Bidstrup believed it exposed his troops to needless crossfire. ‘All [the Japanese] had to do was to enfilade that track—and that’s it!’8
Cameron, an inveterate moustache chewer, overruled their objections, and the men moved out at 6.30 a.m. on 8 August. They soon came under intense enfilading fire—as Bidstrup had predicted—from a mountain gun on the valley’s eastern side. When a Japanese sniper picked off another highly popular officer,9 a whisper of rage—‘the skipper’s gone’—flew among the troops like ‘a flame in sun-scorched grass’.10 The Australians completely lost their reserve and trepidation and charged down the valley straight into Japanese fire. The Japanese fell back in shock. For an instant a weak point in the enemy’s famous psychological armoury was laid bare.
It was a mere spasm of reflex aggression. But the charge showed that the 39th could mount an offensive. The momentum soon collapsed, however. Bidstrup’s ambush near Pirivi, the second prong of three, failed. Pressed in from both sides by superior numbers, his company suffered eleven deaths for which he claimed twenty Japanese casualties. One of his platoons, driven deep into the jungle, did not emerge for days, and their captain despaired of the claustrophobic fighting conditions: ‘All of my platoons were almost within voice call. I sent two runners from one platoon to another…I’ve never heard or seen them since.’11
Captain Symington, however, actually succeeded in retaking Kokoda. His men had moved down the mountain, crept through the rubber trees and, to their amazement, walked straight into Kokoda, unopposed.
Tsukamoto had presumed Kokoda secure, and sent most of his men up the mountain ridges in an attempt to outflank the Australians. So the dozens of slouch hats that advanced across the plateau stunned the little group of Japanese who had stayed to guard the airstrip. They screamed and ran into the jungle, according to witnesses. A captured Japanese notebook and map, showing some knowledge of the Kokoda Track, were sent to Port Moresby.
Immediately the 50-year-old Sergeant-Major Jim Cowey, winner of the Military Cross in World War I, fired a flare, as ordered, to signal the recapture of Kokoda and to request supplies and reinforcements. The flare went unseen at Deniki—Cameron must have been chewing his moustache again. In fact, no one in Cameron’s HQ at Deniki saw the flare they were supposedly anxiously awaiting.
Assuming help was coming, the Australians reoccupied the battalion’s old trenches on the tip of the plateau, and awaited the return of the Japanese. As they gazed down on the Mambare River, and west to the coveted airstrip, they kept watch for signs of any movement, or any shape, in the gathering dusk.
The big, bellowing Japanese commander of the 1st Battalion, 144th Regiment, provoked strong feelings in his troops. One described Lieutenant-Colonel Tsukamoto as ‘that thundering, bawling old man’. Others admired his courage, and his capacity for sake. Tsukamoto had ‘such a dynamic way of drinking sake’, observed Imanishi, who served in his unit. ‘And he was such a daring man.’12
Tsukamoto rewarded the troops with sake if they fought well. He drank copious quantities of the stuff himself, as he staggered up the track. It didn’t always help—he later saw fit to send crates of sake to the front lines, at a time when the troops were starving. Crapulence on an empty stomach did little to assist the Japanese war effort. In the end, the men seemed either to admire or despise him.
Tsukamoto wasted little time redressing the grave error of losing Kokoda, the seriousness of which required an extreme response. He would not be forgiven if he failed. He ordered a counterattack through driving rain at 11.30 a.m. on 9 August. Their faces smeared with mud, their uniforms festooned in vegetation, his troops crept back through the jungle toward the Australian lines. They met raking fire, and withdrew. Symington’s unit was extremely well dug-in, with rows of light machine-guns trained on all approaches. On his most vulnerable wing he’d placed thirteen automatic weapons in groups of three, every twenty yards. They plugged out a wall of lead covering a 250-yard perimeter, into which the Japanese charge had little hope of success. Indeed, the Australian Bren and Tommy guns were proving their superiority over the Japanese rifle and unwieldy Juki with devastating effect.
Tsukamoto ordered a second attempt at dusk. Two hundred Japanese troops stormed the escarpment and threw themselves at the first Australian platoon. Again, they were repulsed. The Australians resisted two more attacks that night, at 10.20 p.m. and 3.00 a.m. The heavy rain and mud helped to thwart the Japanese advance.
‘We went back to Kokoda in order to recapture it,’ wrote Watanabe Toshio. ‘We fought all day and night. We had still not captured it by midday of the 10th.’13 Tsukamoto’s men seemed to grow confused; this wasn’t supposed to happen. Discipline slipped. ‘The men were not properly assembled,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Hirano, one of Tsukamoto’s platoon leaders and an unusually candid diarist. ‘Valuable time was wasted in the torrential rain and darkness. Even the section leaders could not be lined up.’14
In the heat of battle, even the usually alert Hirano ‘turned in the wrong direction…within 40 [yards] of the Australian lines, and grenades were thrown at us’. Hand-to-hand combat at night was chaotic: ‘Suddenly encountered enemy guards in the shadow of large rubber trees. Corporal Hamada killed one of them with bayonet and engaged the others, but enemy fire forced us to withdraw. The platoon was scattered. First class private Hirose was killed…the soldier I grappled with was wounded in the leg by a hand grenade thrown by Corp Hamada.’
Hirano fell back, stunned by the resistance: ‘Every day I am losing my men. I could not repress tears of bitterness. Rested, waiting for tomorrow and struggled against cold and hunger.’15
Daylight discouraged combat. The troops withdrew into their trenches like small nocturnal creatures. Furious at their failure to dislodge the enemy, the Japanese waited until dusk for another try. This time they would unleash their speciality, honed in China: a night attack in force. ‘No enemy can withstand…this stirring and dauntless charge,’ Hirano wrote.
At sunset a low chant, a primitive dirge, rose from the jungle below the escarpment. It paused. Then a Japanese voice shouted out, ‘That should frighten you!’ The Australians swore back. Smoke candles burst on the edge of the jungle, and through the cloud the Japanese came. The screams of Tsukamoto’s warriors split the night. ‘Our grenade discharger began to roar…we advanced to within 70 [yards] of the Australians…we fired a smoke candle with excellent results.’16
But Hirano’s dauntless charge came unstuck. As he jumped over a tree, he recounted: ‘I caught my foot in something and fell flat.’ He resumed the attack on his hands and knees. But this time Tsukamoto’s forces prevailed. After resisting one last burst of Australian fire, they streamed across the plateau—and found it deserted. Symington, short of ammunition and food and easily outnumbered, had withdrawn along the western edge to Deniki.
The Australian veterans similarly recall direct personal experiences: the sudden proximity of the enemy, moments of searing pain or numbing fear; often they knew nothing of things happening yards away in the rain, smoke and darkness. ‘Everything happened so quickly,’ is a soldier’s constant refrain. ‘The order came to fix bayonets,’ said Smoky Howson, ‘and it was then, for the first time, that I became really frightened.’
Some of the wounded, shunning help, wandered off into the darkness: Lieutenant Hercules Crawford, ‘limping along the track with head swathed in blood-stained bandages’, refused carriers and forced his escorts at gunpoint back to their units. He hobbled off into the jungle and was never seen again.17
Private Vic Smythe, though shot through the upper arm, managed to keep firing his Bren for 24 hours. Another private, Trothe, hit in the face by a bullet and minus two fingers, held his position and continued firing for eight hours during the night.18
The extreme strain of battle, the loss of friends, the unyielding nature of the Japanese soldier—all contributed to a murderous hatred of the enemy felt among the Australians. At Pirivi village, Wilkinson recalled: ‘[I] pinned one Jap to the ground with my bayonet and screamed with laughter…one of my police boys went back to nature and used his rifle as a club.’ Later, he reverted to his old, caring self—putting hot stones around a dying mate to warm him. ‘Sucking wound of back,’ Wilkinson wrote on 8–9 August. ‘Holding rosary and crucifix all the time. No rations at all.’
The loss of Kokoda was a strategic disaster for the Allies, redeemed by the extraordinary verve of a few Australian militia troops. A mere 80 men had recaptured and held Kokoda for two-and-a-half days against successive waves of 400 Japanese. During this time, they received no fresh supplies or reinforcements. About twenty Australians died; enemy casualties were far higher.
The battles for Kokoda were small, scarifying flash points; the full invasion of Papua had not yet begun. Their significance was perhaps psychological: not since the start of the Pacific War had the aggressor encountered such fierce resistance. Lieutenant Onogawa, commander of a detached unit of Tsukamoto’s battalion, was magnanimous: ‘Although the Australians are our enemies, their bravery must be admired,’ he wrote on 11 August.19 Indeed, Kokoda immortalised the name of the 39th Battalion—the first to fight the Japanese on Australian territory.
Wilkinson reached Deniki ‘totally buggered’ and found Cameron ‘chewing his whiskers’.20 The survivors of the 39th withdrew to Isurava, a village on a precipice with a panoramic view of Kokoda and the Mambare River flood plain. Here they dug new trenches—with bayonets and their steel helmets (there were no shovels)—in anticipation of a fresh onslaught. Meanwhile, making his way over the mountains came their new commander, a man of singular coolness and immense courage, the rapidly promoted Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner.
And so they waited in their trenches, high in the mountains at Isurava, for a leader and reinforcements. It was the lull before the storm. Scorned by their own country, poorly trained and supplied, these men formed Australia’s front-line defence against the perceived threat of a Japanese invasion. There was no immediate hope of relief and, at that time, they didn’t envisage the possibility of retreat.
In Kokoda, meanwhile, the Japanese fortified their positions—and no doubt themselves, with a swig of Tsukamoto’s sake—and awaited the arrival of the rest of the Nankai Shitai, the South Seas invasion force of the Imperial Army.