‘The tension, the excitement, the flow of adrenalin, all ebbed, and I was not the only man to fall deeply into a great gulf of despair and gloomy introspection’
—Major Henry ‘Blue’ Steward, of the 2/16th Battalion
His victory at Brigade Hill was General Horii’s most decisive. The Japanese soon controlled the Kokoda Track as far as Menari, with a virtual free run to Ioribaiwa, 25 miles from Port Moresby. Their ‘mastery of movement’ in the jungle was the key to Japanese success, wrote Wilmot: ‘the track is NOT of such tactical importance to the enemy as it is to us.’1
Yet Horii overreached himself. He pressed south for Port Moresby heedless of the near collapse of his supply lines. Allied strafing, the desertion of carriers, and the bombing of ships from Rabaul had wrought havoc with the fragile human chain across the mountains.
Sheer bloody-mindedness, it seems, was one factor in the strange psychological brew that drove Horii on. The losses at Isurava and Brigade Hill would be avenged. The infernal Australians enraged the Japanese commander, who sought their total destruction. ‘[Horii] wanted to be forever rid of them. Their annihilation obsessed him.’2 Nowhere down the great swathe of conquest—in China, Thailand and Singapore—had the Japanese encountered such an impudent foe. Failure was unthinkable, and not only for the sake of the Emperor. A defeated commander was obliged to expiate his unit’s disgrace with ritual suicide.
Horii pushed his men hard. They were ordered, ‘to carry as large a quantity’ of rice as possible.3 Most had nearly exhausted their fourteen-day rations, and relied on abandoned, usually spoiled, Australian supplies and native crops. Dysentery was endemic. ‘Port Moresby’—synonymous with food, shelter and victory—exerted a terrific hold on their minds. It was as if they could already smell the sea.
Menari is the prettiest of Papuan villages, standing between two mountain ranges on a relatively mild section of the track, just a few miles south of Brigade Hill. As Maroubra Force’s walking wounded arrived here, their eyes lit up. Strewn on the village square were dumps of food, tobacco, boots, chocolate and clothing. Mountains of supplies suddenly appeared when they were least needed. The troops gorged themselves on the food lying about, ‘making them all very happy…and sending them [away] more cheerfully’, observed Vernon.4
Suddenly this happy atmosphere soured. News of the disaster at Brigade Hill came in. The Japanese were bearing down in force, with Menari naked to the storm. In panic, some of the wounded took to the bush, in the hope of finding a safe route back to Port Moresby. They wandered for days, to be later retrieved ‘in a state of colourful disorientation’.5 It was a traumatic awakening for the stretcher cases, jerked onto the carriers’ shoulders, and bundled off along the track.
In the forest east of Brigade Hill, meanwhile, hundreds of Australian troops cut off during the battle moved through virgin jungle in a wide arc towards Menari. The survivors of two battalions, the 2/14th and 2/16th—a mere 307 men—were the furthest south.6 They used their bayonets as machetes, and that night stuffed luminous fungi into their belts as ‘torches’. Their normally upbeat mood deserted them.
‘After the battle of Butcher’s Hill,’ wrote Steward, ‘a deep reaction set in. The tension, the excitement, the flow of adrenalin, all ebbed, and I was not the only man to fall deeply into a great gulf of despair and gloomy introspection. I was troubled not only by the memories of that awful day, but weighed down by premonitions of coming disaster: that we would never reach Menari; the Japs would get ahead and cut us off; that tomorrow would see the end of every one of us.’7
They reached Menari, where Potts awaited them, a day before the enemy, at 11.30 a.m. on 9 September. Virtually every man had dysentery, and many wore ‘khaki kilts’—with the crotches cut out of their trousers. Their feet were monstrous curiosities: ‘Smelly, soggy socks had to be cut from pulpy blotched flesh that was starting to disintegrate.’8
Scores, perhaps hundreds, were still missing, doomed to wander the jungle for weeks until one strange day a mob of wild-eyed, bearded cavemen would fall upon the pity of an Allied camp. ‘All through the mountains were parties of stragglers making their painful, hungry way to friendly territory.’9
Ominously there was no sign of Cooper’s 2/27th Battalion—the ‘lost battalion’—which had been furthest north when Brigade Hill fell.
A farcical element—more catch-22 than Clausewitz—entered Potts’s war. Orders with no connection to reality started coming in. One wire instructed him to establish a firm base and drive the Japanese back to Kokoda. He should contemplate no further withdrawals, it insisted.
‘What firm base? I haven’t got one here. I think they’d better send one up,’ the exasperated brigadier told Major Geoffrey Lyon, who accompanied him back to Nauro. Of the 300 troops who reached Menari, none was fit enough to resist the 2500 to 3000 Japanese troops (allowing for losses due to sickness and battle casualties) then streaming down the track.
An air of surreality descended. Out of the blue Potts received a long, tedious signal requesting the prompt return of all expendable stores. Potts’s response is unrecorded; a weaker commander would have been reduced to howling at the moon at this demand. It was as though no one had yet alerted the Australian supply depot to the fact that a war was being fought on the sides of mountains, in dense jungle. ‘Expendable stores’ (of which a substantial amount had to be abandoned at Menari) could simply not be got out.
Potts mucked in with the men on the journey back, and had some tragicomic encounters. On the trail to Nauro, he came across one Private Clarrie Maskiel, who was barely conscious, face down in the mud, with a shattered arm tied to his bayonet scabbard. After a dose of whisky, Maskiel stirred but wouldn’t rise. Potts thought provocation the best medicine: ‘If you weren’t so yellow you’d do something to help yourself. You’re yellow, Maskiel. And you’re holding up your mates!’ the brigadier yelled. Maskiel, so the anecdote goes, struggled to his feet, swung a weak punch at Potts, and walked. He reached Nauro as Patient No. 40.
Potts encountered Maskiel again—slumped by the track just before Ioribaiwa. Impressed, Potts ordered a stretcher for the wounded man. Maskiel was carried back to Uberi, where he attempted a second swing at the brigadier, lost his footing and collapsed.10
GHQ’s extreme displeasure caught up with Potts at Nauro. The brigadier was told to report immediately to Generals Rowell and Allen in Port Moresby. You are being relieved, not replaced, Rowell insisted. Though sympathetic, the generals reckoned the severe strain was beginning to affect Potts’s judgment. The poor man needed a rest.
The trigger was a blunt summary of the disaster at Brigade Hill by the liaison officer, Major Geoffrey Lyon. It stated, ‘we have not sufficient troops to prevent outflanking…troops from Port Moresby would have to fight into us’.11 The message was the last straw for Port Moresby, not least because it had Potts’s imprimatur.
Potts’s temporary successor was the extraordinary Brigadier Selwyn Porter, who arrived at Nauro at noon on 10 September. Potts briefed him. The men were ‘unfit for further operations’, he said, and could endure no more.12 Porter made his own mind up. He examined the exhausted line of sick, half-dressed men, stumbling along in a bleary-eyed daze. Many could barely walk. ‘They hardly knew they were marching,’ recalled Steward. ‘Some had peculiar dreams or hallucinations. Others actually dropped into a doze, shuffling along in the line…’13
The absence of potassium weakened the muscles and ‘played a part in the mental confusion many of us experienced’, the doctor advised. Medically speaking, he told Porter, the men ‘had almost had it’. Porter decided instead that they were merely in a state of ‘general demoralisation’, a verdict deeply resented.14 Whatever their condition, Porter realised he lacked the resources to defend Nauro—and continued the retreat (this could no longer be called a fighting withdrawal). On the 11th he organised his meagre force into a composite battalion of the 2/14th and 2/16th, and fell back to the Maguli Range.
As they neared Ioribaiwa, their spirits revived. The proximity of relief raised the battered Australian morale, and the few who were able to fight, did so. They turned and inflicted a series of deadly ambushes and assaults on their assailants. Potts’s ‘fighting withdrawal’ flickered to life. The healthier troops picked off enemy scouts, and blunted the enemy advance, the evidence of which can be seen in the myriad dugouts between Ioribaiwa and Nauro. Occasionally, Japanese dressed in Australian uniforms tried to infiltrate the lines. A few sword-carrying suicide squads marched brazenly into Australian fire. The ambushes caught the exhausted Japanese off-guard.
In one example, Corporal Brian ‘Bluey’ Malone left tins of rations lying around as bait. When hungry Japanese approached, he opened fire.15 British officers sent to learn ‘jungle tactics’ later asked Bluey, ‘And tell me, corporal, how close do you let them get?’ ‘About six feet, sir. Any closer and the bastards’ll fall on top of you.’16 Corporal Bluey Malone was killed at Wewak.
Up ahead, rounding a bend in the trail at Uberi, the walking wounded beheld a strange vision in a jungle clearing, of smiling faces and roasting scones beneath a fluttering red shield. It was a canteen offering tea and cakes and cigarettes, emblazoned with the words ‘Salvation Army’.
If this was a godsend, one man, Major Chaplain Albert Moore, was His most indefatigable messenger. When he got to Papua, neither the Red Cross nor the YMCA—which otherwise did a brilliant job—was able to get him a glass of water. Moore thought, ‘I could see a grand opportunity here’ for the Salvos.17 He set up several canteens along the track, news of which passed from man to man, as Moore’s diary describes: ‘Monday Sept 7th, 1942: Rose early and got coffee etc ready, and from 8.30am a steady stream of wounded and sick came along, and were they delighted to see the… Salvos on the job. Men arrive here in a state of utter exhaustion and move on revived.’18 That day the Salvos’ hut at Uberi served 39 stretcher cases.
Throughout September, Chaplain Moore achieved prodigious logistical feats. He mysteriously rustled up biscuits, tea and coffee from the ends of the supply lines, distributed thousands of sheets of writing paper, and baked hundreds of scones, with varying success. He served 4200 gallons of coffee during the whole campaign; his one-day record, 106 gallons.19 He slept with a phone by his ear, in case of emergency, and his staff were on call 24 hours a day.
Moore closely observed the state of the troops as they came in. ‘One fellow,’ he wrote, ‘weary, sick, all spirit sapped from his broken body, took the cup I offered him, sat on the track with his back against the embankment. His head drooped and…the tears coursed down his cheeks.’20
Of the hundreds of stretcher cases who passed through his care, one soldier suffering from deep chest wounds stuck in Moore’s mind: ‘I could seem to hear the pulsating of his lungs through the wounds. The Natives who carried him camped alongside the wounded man…In the morning I gave him a little nourishment, and as the Natives lifted him to their shoulders I put my hand on his and uttered a prayer…He said to me, “You are worried about me Padre, don’t worry, I will be OK.”’21
‘Never in my life’, Moore later wrote, ‘have I felt so compensated for service rendered.’22