‘The people were in a complete panic…They believed that the Japs were going to invade any day and they were completely defenceless except for the untrained militia. We were the first battle-trained troops to be back in Australia’
—Corporal Frank McLean, MM, 2/27th Battalion, Second Australian Imperial Force
The mood at Advanced Land Headquarters (Landops) in Brisbane on the morning of 4 August 1942 did not inspire confidence. The freshly painted rooms of the newly opened Queensland University, commandeered by Landops for the duration of the war, seemed full of disconsolate Australian Women’s Army Service soldiers ‘sitting on typewriter boxes’.1 The officers tried to remain calm before the cool example of their boss, General Sir Thomas Blamey.
Blamey had a keen eye on the big picture. So it was regrettable that certain details vital to this morning’s big picture had escaped his attention. One was crucial: Blamey had forgotten or simply failed to alert Morris in Port Moresby that reinforcements and a fresh commander were being dispatched immediately.
The job was left to Major-General George Vasey, who arrived at Landops that day as Blamey’s chief of staff. Vasey, an unstuffy, popular officer, promptly wired Port Moresby with the cryptic note: ‘Syd is coming.’2 The dispatch of this intelligence was helpful. To his great relief, the embattled Morris was being replaced as leader of New Guinea Force (he became commander of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit). He welcomed the arrival of ‘Syd’. It meant things were about to change.
‘Syd’ was Lieutenant-General Sydney Rowell, the new commander of New Guinea Force. His reputation preceded him: a clever, pugnacious, somewhat prickly senior officer, with a brilliant academic record and an impressive tour of duty in the Middle East. This was his first senior command of a combat formation.
Sent to Gallipoli aged nineteen as a lieutenant with the 3rd Light Horse Regiment, Rowell’s World War I service was cut short by accident and serious illness—he was said to suffer from an ‘enlarged heart’. He recovered and in the 1930s completed with high distinction the senior army commander’s advance training course at Britain’s Imperial Defence College, one of few Australians to do so.
His peers held him in the highest esteem. Lieutenant-General Lavarack praised his strength of character, intelligence, judgment and loyalty.3 ‘Every Australian,’ wrote war correspondent John Hetherington,4 ‘who served under, or knew, Rowell in the black days of the Middle East in 1940 and 1941 is aware of his quality as a soldier and a man…I never saw him slightly rattled in the grimmest situation.’
At the outbreak of World War II, he led a brigade of the Australian 6th Division in the Middle East. A consummate strategist, he is credited with planning the evacuation of Australian troops from Greece—in which two-thirds of the force was extricated from an extremely sticky situation—and the defeat of the Vichy French in Syria. Hetherington described the withdrawal from Greece, under German attack, as ‘brilliantly executed’.5 For men of such overweening ambition as MacArthur and Blamey, Rowell’s light perhaps shone too brightly.
Blamey well knew Rowell’s Achilles heel—the pair fell out badly over the Greek disaster. Rowell was high-minded, did not respond well to criticism and suffered from an over-fastidious concern for form. He refused to play the high-stakes political game evidently relished by Blamey. Rowell was a soldier. One officer remarked that he was ‘Proud, very austere and sensitive.’6 ‘The trouble with Syd is that he expects everyone else to act like a saint,’ said another.7
When he arrived in Port Moresby on 10 August, Rowell faced the toughest challenge of his career: to take the offensive to the Japanese. His first task, as he immediately saw, was supply. Never had he studied a battle in which the outcome would be so mercilessly dependent on the quality of his supply lines.
He could not rely on native carriers alone. The Myola drop zone was vital, and mindful of this Rowell was angry to find, on 16 August, that his transport planes—some 28 of them—were parked wing-to-wing on the tarmac of the Seven-Mile drome, sitting ducks for a Japanese air raid. He promptly ordered them to be removed, camouflaged and protected.
Rowell made it his business to see the country. He visited the jumping off point of the Kokoda Track, and subjected it to a mind highly trained at seeing the natural landscape as a theatre of war. He scanned the distant mountains of the Owen Stanleys to the north. He noted the jungle canopy and the misty valleys. The sight profoundly affected him. He ‘instinctively judged the claustrophobic influence of jungle country on troops entering it for the first time’.8 There was nothing like this in Queensland.
Rowell momentarily doubted the sense of sending men over the mountains. With grim prescience, he told the journalist Osmar White: ‘As far as I’m concerned I’m willing to pull back and let the enemy have the rough stuff if he wants it. I’m willing to present the Jap with the supply headache I’ve got. But there are those who think otherwise. We need a victory in the Pacific and a lot of poor bastards have got to get killed to provide it.’9
Under Rowell’s command were the newly arriving troops of the 7th Division’s 21st Brigade, veterans of the Middle East. These battle-hardened soldiers of the Second Australian Imperial Force, for whose return to Australia John Curtin had lost so much sleep, had spent the past three months training in light rainforest in Queensland and desultorily building coastal defences north of Brisbane.
Their jungle training was unimpressive. The brigade had attempted a major jungle exercise in Queensland. Not a single unit in the ‘attacking force’ had reached its objective within the two-day deadline; communications collapsed; and the evacuation of the ‘wounded’ was a catastrophic failure.
As for training manuals, ‘There was one book written about jungle fighting. In it there was a diagram of a jungle track, kind of a single wobbly line running down the page, with defensive positions marked. Well, that was a load of rubbish,’ said Major Geoffrey Lyon.10
Nor were Porter’s ‘NOTES ON JUNGLE TRAINING’ illuminating: ‘What is jungle?’ he began. ‘At the equator, the temperature is consistently high and the rainfall consistently heavy…This results in rapid, intense growth of vegetation—trees, vines, fleshy shrubs and grass. The rainfall produces voluminous rivers, creeks and swamps with the resultant prolific animal and insect life. All these go to produce jungle.’11
If not jungle-trained, the men were at least combat-ready. Unlike the militia in the mountains, they’d fought in the Middle East. Why, then, were they withheld in Queensland for months after their return? Blamey had instead dispatched another militia unit, the ‘inexperienced and poorly trained’12 14th Brigade to Port Moresby. This decision almost ‘made us weep’,13 said Rowell, who was aghast at the deployment of a unit ‘in which we had no confidence’.14
One reason cited was that MacArthur wanted the AIF to finish the construction of Australian airfields and coastal fortifications before sending them to New Guinea. In other words, the nation’s most experienced soldiers were kept in Queensland as virtual manual labour, while the Japanese advanced on threadbare militia units at Isurava. In this light, MacArthur’s boast that it was he who decided to take the fight to New Guinea sounds absurd—and the Brisbane Line suddenly acquires a palpable reality.15
In early August it was deemed expedient to send up the AIF troops. Some 3000 men of the 21st Brigade boarded the James Fenimore Cooper. and the James Wilson, on 6 and 8 August, to a huge heroes’ farewell (in striking contrast to the rather sad send-off for the militia nine months previously). A few who’d gone AWOL were rounded up and put in steel cages on the deck.16 The brigade sailed undisturbed through calm seas.
Albert Moore, of the Salvation Army, led a church service on the deck of the James Fenimore Cooper: ‘I have never heard a company of men sing as these men sang that Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘We were surrounded by the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And I am sure that never before or since have I been so moved by a gathering of people as I was this morning. It seemed that every man felt that he was on the precipice of the great unknown.’17
They marched into Port Moresby with the chutzpah of a conquering army. A cavalcade of jeeps, buggies, motorbikes, anti-aircraft guns, batteries of ‘snub-nosed’ 25-pound guns and truckloads of men bristling with rifles, Bren and Tommy guns, grenades and bayonets roared through town and rattled up the drab brown hills. ‘All day they rolled up the road from the harbour in open trucks, bound for foothill camps,’ observed White from the porch of Correspondents’ House. The troops’ bodies were ‘burnt…the colour of leather by desert winds’.18
Port Moresby had been transformed. The Seven-Mile drome was a giant military base. All day American bombers roared overhead. On the ground the air was thick with dust and the smell of diesel fuel, rifle grease, human sweat and plumes of exhaust. A vast military machine was taking shape; tent city had spilled into tent suburbs.
To the north, like some dark, Gothic horror, the Owen Stanleys cast a great shadow on these Lilliputian endeavours, at the head of which Allied sappers impudently persisted in trying to carve a road through the jungle from Owers’ Corner. Dozers, power shovels, graders and rollers gouged out a lane to the base of the Golden Stairs, where the first serious ascent of the Kokoda Track begins. Thousands of tons of ‘metal, crushed coral, pumice, logs and gravel were poured into the endless belly of the road’s foundations’. The results were puny: ‘it was still a river of mud in which every wheeled vehicle but the unconquerable jeep…stuck fast or skidded into the ditch’.19
Within days, the first AIF troops were preparing to march over the Owen Stanleys. The correspondent Osmar White witnessed the men preparing to depart. Hundreds rested ‘in a green meadow flanked by rubber trees’. They had their shirts off, and their backs were ‘sun-tanned, rippling with muscle’. Some sang songs, others wrote letters home. There was much rowdiness and joking—perhaps too loud for comfort; a few were quietly introspective. One group cheerfully sharpened hundreds of bayonets on a grindstone, their slouch hats ‘pulled rakishly down and their eyes bright and reflective’,20 and laughed as they honed the razor-sharp tips.
Though mostly in their twenties, they had something of the severity of old soldiers. They did not ‘cheer and catcall’—‘They knew what fighting meant and they were going to fight.’21 Their muscular frames distinguished them from the gangly militia. They were also older. The average age of one battalion was 29, with the oldest, 55, and the youngest, who lied, fifteen.22 A less obvious difference was their minds: they were conscious of their status as saviours of the nation. Rushed back from the Middle East, they were welcomed home with ticker tape parades in all the capital cities.
‘Everywhere we went,’ said Frank McLean of the 2/27th, ‘we were met by huge crowds, cooking meals for us at the station, hugging us at every opportunity. I don’t know how many hundreds of girls’ addresses were thrust into our hands. The people were in a complete panic…They believed that the Japs were going to invade any day and they were completely defenceless except for the untrained militia. We were the first battle-trained troops to be back in Australia.’23
White, the war correspondent, saw chinks in the armour, however. Their equipment weighed about sixty pounds, he quietly observed; their uniforms were khaki—not jungle green—and their webbing ‘shone white from long bleaching in the desert suns’. Their semi-nakedness displayed an ignorance of, or foolhardy indifference to, the risk of mosquito bite and malaria. ‘For the first time, the shadow of doubt crossed my mind. I dismissed it. Lesser fighters might fail, but not these—not the best assault infantry in the world!’24
The best assault infantry in the world answered to the obligatory roll call of Australian nicknames: ‘Pop’, ‘Butch’, ‘Bubba’, ‘Junior’, ‘Runt’, ‘Lefty’, ‘Nugget’, ‘Curley’, ‘Snowy’, ‘Doc’, ‘Sandy’, ‘Wog’, ‘Tarzan’, ‘Dusty’, ‘Baldy’ and so on. ‘Blue’ was usually a redhead; ‘Tiny’ tended to be a giant. They came from all backgrounds: working and middle class, educated, illiterate; ‘men of all creeds and political beliefs…blended into something of strength, unity and endurance’.25
The brigade’s three battalions were raised in Victoria (2/14th Battalion), South Australia (2/27th Battalion) and Western Australia (2/16th Battalion).* Each contained 1000 men. Mates and brothers chose the same units: in the 2/14th there were dozens of pairs of brothers, as well as three groups of three brothers. Many had transferred from militia units. The battalion had one Aboriginal soldier, Harry Saunders, who was very popular—and later killed.
Gangs joined up together. One was the Goldfields Mob of the 2/16th Battalion. They were machine-miners, boggers and truckers from the tough gold mining towns of Western Australia. Like Smoky Howson’s Zorro Gang, the Goldfields Mob decided to enlist while drinking in their local pub. Unlike the Zorro Gang, they claimed they were sober at the time. Indeed, after their final binge in the Court Pub in Boulder, Western Australia, the Mob soberly nailed various personal items to the pub walls—socks, underpants, boots—and set off for Northam training camp. They carried little. The biggest, and the lightest, suitcase was that of Frank ‘Runt’ Reed, the smallest member of the Mob. On arrival at camp, a sergeant asked Runt what his outlandish luggage contained. Lifting it with exaggerated ease, Runt declared, ‘There are exactly 53 articles in that case, sarge.’‘Fifty three?’ replied the sergeant, finding the case unusually light. ‘Yes,’ said Runt, ‘a pack of cards and a toothbrush.’26 Runt Reed died of wounds in 1943.
Sometimes a man’s physique decided his place: heavily built soldiers were encouraged to join the mortar platoons. The weediest bloke in the 2/27th Battalion’s mortar platoon was Sergeant ‘Shaggy’ Clampett, six-foot and twelve-stone, whose nickname was given to Shaggy Ridge.27
Each battalion was ‘in effect a fair sized town’, with cooks, carpenters, blacksmiths, builders, mechanics, bandsmen, drivers, fitters, tailors, postmen, telephonists, sanitation experts, drain-diggers, electricians, butchers, bakers, grocers—‘and a lot of other people besides fighting men’.28 While bandsmen were of little use in the jungles of New Guinea, mechanics and sanitation experts would prove helpful.
The brigade had a smattering of the sons of World War I veterans. One was Corporal John Burns, a baker from Adelaide, whose father won the Military Medal in the Great War. Burns would soon match his father’s achievement in the most harrowing circumstances imaginable.
After a few days of hasty jungle exercises, the brigade assembled at Itiki on 15 August. Before them stood the amiable, crew-cutted Brigadier Arnold Potts, their new commander, a solidly built World War I veteran a few weeks shy of his 46th birthday.
Potts delivered their battle orders: some 1500 Japanese troops had landed at Gona. The enemy had captured Kokoda. They were to cross the Owen Stanley Range, relieve the 39th at Isurava, recapture Kokoda and drive the enemy into the sea. Potts chose less vivid language, but the message was clear. In short, the men concluded, ‘we were to wipe them out’.29
Even at this late stage, the Allied generals dismissed the notion of an overland invasion of Port Moresby. It seemed at best a profound error of judgment; at worst, a mad fantasy. They held this belief until well into August. Neither MacArthur nor Blamey ‘could credit the Japanese with planning to attack Port Moresby by way of the tortuous Kokoda Track’.30 Willoughby repeatedly scorned the idea of a land invasion; he held this view until as late as 18 August, a week before the decisive battle of Isurava.
No one seemed aware of their illogical position. If the mountains were supposedly unassailable, why were the Australians being sent to fight a war across them? If the mountains would so assuredly block the Japanese invasion from the north, why would an Australian offensive from the south so readily succeed? Only Rowell saw the yawning contradiction at the heart of Allied thinking. Japan had conquered most of Asia, yet GHQ seemed always to underestimate the Japanese soldier.
The men were not entirely ignorant of the terrain: maps, crude as they were, did show elevations, walking times and distances between villages.31 And they had the 39th Battalion’s sketches. But there were no contour maps of New Guinea, only ‘pitiful quarter-inch-to-the-mile sheets’.32
The intelligence was pretty woeful. The departing 2/14th listed its knowledge about the Kokoda Track as: a little ANGAU information, one air photo, and an inaccurate track report.33 In sum, the Australian army had ‘virtually no military knowledge of the region and no appreciation of the tactical and logistical problems it would pose in a war’.34
The Australian ignorance of the Kokoda Track is baffling. There was a great deal of information about the track, had Allied Intelligence bothered to find it. It was not a ‘little known jungle path’, as it is so often described. Since 1904, when the Kokoda station was established, it had been a well-trodden trade and communication line over the mountains.35
At the outbreak of war, the Koiari people at Kokoda, Isurava, Efogi, Menari, Nauro and Ioribaiwa farmed the land along its winding route. Today, the villagers subsist much as they did in 1942, on the produce of their market gardens, growing bananas, yams, pawpaws and taro.
The track had been well known for decades. In the 1890s Australian gold prospectors took the Kokoda trail to the Yodda goldfield on the upper Mambare. ‘It was the main path to the goldfields and the gazetted mail route,’ said John Rennie, a former policeman in New Guinea.* An Australian government surveyor mapped the track in 1899—and was attacked by Orokaiva tribes north of Isurava. Gold was not the only lure: rubber, coffee and Seventh-Day Adventism—which established a mission at Bisiatabu in 1908—all brought white men over the track before the war. The first white woman to walk it was probably Miss Philippa Bridges, in 1923. She described it as a ‘splendid experience’, records Hank Nelson.36
Tom Grahamslaw, an ANGAU captain, had sent hundreds of his men over the mountains in April 1942. Civilians escaped south using the Kokoda route. And the Papuan Infantry Brigade walked it many times before the Japanese landed—first setting off under Lieutenant Harold Jesser in February 1942.
Several of these people could have disabused the Allied commanders of their wilder notions about the Owen Stanleys—had they been consulted.37 As Hank Nelson explains: ‘The track, then, so often described as a native pad and said to have been used infrequently by the occasional missionary…was well known in Port Moresby.’38 As early as 1917, Richard Humphries, a patrolman, described the Kokoda crossing as the ‘most important’ in all of Papua.
It is astonishing, then, that such bizarre notions of the Kokoda Track should have gripped the imagination of GHQ in Brisbane. The Americans in particular seemed to be in the thrall of images more appropriate to a cartoon strip, or a boy’s own adventure story. Was the track roadworthy, they wondered? Was ‘the Gap’ defendable with a handful of men, like the Greeks at Thermopylae? The Gap had insinuated itself into the commanders’ minds in the form of a narrow mountain pass flanked by steep cliffs, in which a few men could hold thousands of rampaging warriors. In fact The Gap is a seven-mile-wide, U-shaped valley suspended in the mountains, and paradoxically one of the few places where more open battles were possible.
The high-water mark of Allied blockheadedness came when Major-General Pat Casey, the American engineer-in-chief, suggested that the mountain pass could be blown up. In fact, on 13 August, New Guinea Force was ordered to select ‘points where the pass may be readily blocked by demolition…’39 A wall of rocks would presumably hold back the Japanese invader, to which Rowell caustically replied: ‘It is respectfully suggested that such explosives as can be got forward would be better employed in facilitating our advance than for preparing to delay the enemy!!!’40 The three exclamation marks are revealing of Rowell’s temperament. In his memoirs, he noted: ‘I sent [the order] back asking whether it was this week’s funny story.’41
GHQ showed extraordinary little interest in the terrain that so richly fed their imaginations. The exception was General Vasey who had, in fact, flown over the Owen Stanleys in July, and flew into Kokoda on the 18th—three days before the Japanese landed at Gona. Oddly, he did not inform Blamey of his useful insights until 7 September, with a devastatingly casual aside: ‘apparently, our ideas of topography in the area of the Gap were all wrong’.42
The day before their departure, the troops lavished special care on their equipment and weapons. Machine-gunners and mortar platoons doubly checked their equipment. The rifle companies dismantled and cleaned their rifles, and sharpened their bayonets. The troops cut mosquito nets to half-size; studded or placed leather straps on the soles of boots for extra grip; and dyed their khaki uniforms green using extract from local plants. It washed out. Four hundred and fifteen pairs of American gaiters were issued.
They packed their haversacks as lightly as possible; they even cut their towels and toothbrushes in half. The standard pack contained: two shirts, a pair of shorts, underpants, a pullover, equipment pouches, six days’ rations of bully beef and biscuits, one dehydrated emergency ration and one chocolate emergency ration, a dixie and mug, anti-malarial cream (i.e. insect repellant), seven days of quinine tablets, water purifying tablets, toilet gear (including half a toothbrush), a ground sheet, long khaki drill trousers, half a blanket, half a towel and half a mosquito net. It weighed about 40 to 45 pounds.
Each soldier carried a rifle with bayonet and 50 rounds of .303 ammunition (unless he was a machine-gunner or mortar-bomber), and three hand grenades.43 The total weight of pack, rifle and ammunition exceeded 55 pounds. Bill Russell of the 2/14th Battalion remarked, ‘Never before had white men, or native carriers for that matter, attempted to carry such loads over those towering ranges, in the humidity of the tropics.’44
The Bren and Tommy guns, with 100 rounds and twelve magazines per gun respectively, plus two grenade discharger cups, were to be shared among the stronger men. The best medium machine-guns—the Vickers—were too difficult to carry and left behind. Three 108 wireless sets, five field telephones, a quantity of three-inch mortars and a set of medical gear were borne by the signals and support troops, and native carriers.
Crucially, 40,000 fresh rations, four two-inch mortars, four miles of field cable, three magazines per light machine-gun, blankets, picks, shovels, and other vital supplies were to be dropped by plane at Myola, while the troops crossed the mountains. Rowell assured Brigadier Potts the biscuit bombers would deliver the supplies to the lakebed in time. There was little room for error in this immense exercise. Everything needed to feed and fuel a combat unit of 1200 troops would be dropped from the air or carried on the backs of the men.
The brigade held a church service on the eve of their departure. Some 500 men assembled in the camp clearing at Itiki in the Owen Stanley foothills. Chaplains C. W. Daly and Fred Burt45 bestowed the blessings of Christ on soldiers about to fight the apostles of a living god.
That night, a message confirmed that a further 1800 Japanese combat troops had landed at Gona. Brigadier Potts shrugged: ‘It appears to be just a question of killing more Japs.’ As long as his supplies arrived at Myola, and his reserve force, the 2/27th Battalion, went up on time, his men would defeat the enemy. And so they set off.