‘Never in my life, in the worst part of Gallipoli, or anywhere, had I seen soldiers who looked so shocked and so tired and so utterly weary as those men.’
—Brigadier John Rogers, Australian director of military intelligence
Anxiety in Brisbane fuelled the alarm in Canberra. The War Cabinet sensed that something was rotten in Papua. Some ministers’ electorates were panicking at rumours of an imminent Japanese invasion.
The Advisory War Council, which included the Chiefs of Staff of the Australian Army, Navy and Air Force, met on the morning of 9 September. They referred unsmilingly to earlier ideas of the inviolability of the mountains. Menzies recommended that MacArthur or Blamey be sent to Port Moresby, to reassure the nation. Curtin replied that his Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, had already proposed that Blamey be sent to confer with Rowell.1
Blamey’s first visit to New Guinea on 12 September was a carefully orchestrated event. That the Japanese were a mere 30 miles away on the threshold of Ioribaiwa seemed not to trouble the Allied land commander. His discussions with Rowell that day were wide-ranging and, by all accounts, positive. Blamey agreed that the 39th should remain intact; the 53rd, however, should be merged with the 55th Battalion. On his return he would express his faith in Rowell and New Guinea Force.
There was one blot on proceedings, which said much about Blamey’s breezy disinterest in his senior officers. Honner, commander of the 39th at Isurava, was told to report to the Allied land commander. He ‘spruced himself up’ and presented himself at Blamey’s tent at the appointed time.
‘Good morning, Honner,’ said Blamey, glancing up casually, ‘you’ve just arrived from Australia, have you?’
‘No, sir,’ said Honner, ‘I’ve been in Papua for some time.’
Honner, who’d led the 39th at Isurava, never forgot the exchange, not least for what it said about Blamey’s attitude: ‘I’d been his commander of the Australian forces opposing the Japs. He didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know, he didn’t care.’2
The next day Blamey held a press conference. Were jungle-green uniforms superior to the regulation khaki? Chester Wilmot wanted to know. ‘They were not,’ Blamey gruffly replied. ‘The khaki had been designed in India as the ideal camouflage for the jungle.’ The general added that ‘this jungle’ was ‘no different from that of India’, to which Wilmot offered to provide him with ‘several thousand witnesses who thought otherwise’.3
Even as Blamey spoke, Australian troops were dyeing their khakis green or changing to green uniforms—within a week the 25th Brigade would go into battle in jungle greens.4 Those who missed out on the new jungle greens stripped and dumped their khaki uniforms in large Sawyer stoves, then retrieved any uniform about their size, now mottled with green dye. The dyed uniforms were not ideal: they proved intolerably hot because the material couldn’t breathe; the dye blocked the holes in the fabric.5 American knee-length gaiters replaced the Australian web anklets. Steel helmets and sprigged boots would complete the picture. The slouch-hatted, baggy-shorted Anzac was slowly metamorphosing into an American-style combat trooper.
General Tubby Allen later summed up Blamey’s colour blindness as ‘a simple example of apathy, ignorance, and not the keenness to find out’.6 Blamey flew back to Brisbane expressing himself pleased with the visit, and confident that the Japanese could be held and Moresby saved.
In September, Australian reinforcements poured into Alola, at the foothills of the Owen Stanleys. Four fresh battalions—three AIF units (of the 25th Brigade) and a militia battalion (the 3rd) arrived on 8 and 9 September. They found an ‘atmosphere of desperate defeatism’, and were regaled with terrible accounts of the enemy: ‘Japs attack at night.’ ‘They crawl silently up to your position and bayonet you while you sleep.’ ‘They scream in the night yelling in English to “come and help me, Jack”.’ ‘You can’t see them until a bayonet is in your guts.’ ‘The jungle is a bloody nightmare, everything that moves turns out to be Japs trying to surround you.’7
‘Never in all our war years,’ Bill Crooks, a sergeant in the 25th Brigade, recalled, ‘were we to hear such panicky versions of the usual soldiers’ rumours and enlarged half-truths…’ He later discovered ‘the stories were certainly based on facts, as we were to learn’.8
At midnight the new brigade assembled under their tent flies for a final briefing. A ‘bombshell order’ came: the troops were told not to attempt to rescue the wounded. The wounded were to be abandoned. Too many able-bodied men had been sacrificed in needless heroics rescuing the wounded—and the Japanese preyed on the Australians’ determination to save their mates. So ran the explanation for this strongly resented instruction.
The order was ‘a sickening one,’ recalls Crooks. ‘Whatever lay ahead we were prepared to face. But the…information that [the] wounded would have to fend for themselves, received in the darkness of a tent at midnight, to men just awakened from their sleep, was shattering.’9 Of 65 Australian Victoria Crosses won in World War I, thirteen went to troops who rescued the wounded under enemy fire. ‘Now the men were told that if hit…they would have to get back as best they could.’10 It shredded the one insurance policy in the back of the soldier’s mind: that his mates would help him if he fell. Years later, Crooks remembered that night as ‘the low point of the war’.11
At 4.00 a.m. on the 9th the first units of the 25th Brigade boarded trucks bound for Owers’ Corner and the Kokoda Track. They had two types of maps: one was ‘an expanse of green colour, with blue rivers and black tracks’—even at this late stage, no contours or even heights were marked;12 the other, was simply a collection of 24 hand sketches, in which the officers were required to fill in information as they went along—a bit like a child’s dot-to-dot puzzle. This was the extent of Allied intelligence about the track.
So another long line of Australian troops marched back into the Owen Stanleys.
The Japanese officers were in a gung-ho mood on 12 September, and readied their troops for the final rush down to the Coral Sea. Not all were convinced of the success of the mission. At 8.00 a.m., Sakomoto dryly recorded the facts, as he saw them: ‘Arranged weapons, stored forage…and prepared for an attack on Moresby. Information received: Enemy strength at Moresby—20,000.’13
Three days later Horii, from his tent near Ioribaiwa, issued ‘Operations Order A-115’, his final invasion order. He observed that the Australians were ‘in a state of utter confusion, and to a great degree have lost the will to fight’.14 He set the advance on Port Moresby for 20 September. All units were to ‘replenish fighting strength’ in readiness for the thrust to the Coral Sea.
Privately Horii did not believe the attack would go ahead—at least, not until his supplies were replenished. He realised the war in Guadalcanal—the American marines had invaded—would deplete his resources; air support had been diverted to the Solomon Islands. A sense of being isolated, even abandoned, began to prey on Horii’s mind. His men had reached the most southerly point of the Japanese Empire at great cost. Were they now to be forgotten? Would their lives be given in vain? Such questions consumed this proud, supremely stubborn man.
The fresh Australian troops merged with those pulling back, and the combined unit fought—in some confusion—the last confrontation of the Australian withdrawal. The formidable Brigadier Ken Eather, commander of the 25th Brigade, relieved Porter as temporary commander of Maroubra Force (Porter would continue to pop up and then fade from view throughout the campaign).
The battle for Ioribaiwa Ridge lasted from 13 to 16 September. The Australians set ambushes and booby traps on the northern approaches. Food was used as bait. Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Cameron reportedly ordered his men to spread bully beef on the banks of a creek. When some forty hungry Japanese warily tasted it, a barrage of Australian Bren guns opened fire from the surrounding grass; twenty Japanese died and the rest fled. Infuriated by these losses, the Japanese again hurled themselves at the Australians. They charged up the ridge through a torrential thunderstorm. Many died. A whole platoon was annihilated, wrote Sakomoto.
The survivors rushed between two Australian companies, and occupied the high ground to the east, a topographical feature that Eather’s maps mysteriously failed to record.15 From here they fired at will on the Australian positions lower down the slope, and drove the defenders off the ridge.
Porter was devastating in his criticism of the Australians on the eastern flank. In an echo of the 53rd’s performance at Isurava, the fresh troops were literally caught without their weapons:
15 Sept: The ENEMY managed a ‘breakthrough’ between nearest high peak on R flank and the village…the unit as a whole had NOT dug itself in efficiently…the Commanding Officer had insisted on…deeper slits…At the time of the encounter, they were digging…but their arms and equipment were out of reach and sentries were NOT observing from concealed positions—were NOT observing at all, in fact.
The Jap stalked up to them; and, with a rush, positioned himself astride the ridge, between two coy positions…untouched. At the same time, fire was brought to bear on the diggers, who could only seek the shelter of their slits—still out of reach of their weapons.16
The Japanese sustained heavy casualties, however: Lieutenant Hayashi of Shitai HQ later spoke of the ‘tremendous litter of the dead’ at Ioribaiwa. ‘The stench…is almost unendurable.’17
On the last day of the battle for Ioribaiwa a Japanese shell landed squarely on an Australian trench. The occupants were blown apart. The victims— highly popular troops of Potts’s unit—were within a day of relief. The display of open grief at the burial—soldiers wept and two fainted—suggested a severe weakening of the surviving army’s composure.
The Australians were indeed showing signs of ‘mental, nervous and physical breakdown’, concluded the 2/14th Battalion historian.18 The toughest soldiers had reached breaking point: normally extroverted men had grown ‘withdrawn, morose and silent’.
One morning the ‘hardest case’ limped into Steward’s tent and said he couldn’t take any more. ‘I told him to sit down and take a rest,’ Steward recalled, ‘and assured him that if he really felt he couldn’t face it, then I would not send him back to duty with his platoon.’19 Steward gently reminded the man that he’d stuck it out during the Syrian campaign, in the same state. Reassured, the soldier went back to his platoon by a circuitous route to avoid the shame of being noticed. He ran into troops of the new militia battalion coming up the track, one of whom nervously mistook him for the enemy, and threw a grenade. The soldier died of wounds a few days later.
With the loss of Ioribaiwa, Eather urgently requested permission to fall back to Imita Ridge. He explained that he needed a ‘firm base for the start of my offensive, and it doesn’t exist [at Ioribaiwa]’.20 Eather’s request stunned New Guinea Force HQ. Imita Ridge is the last razorback in the range before Port Moresby. Hadn’t Eather just received a fresh brigade and a new militia battalion? Further reinforcements—the 16th Brigade—were on the way. Why the need for yet another withdrawal, demanded Rowell and Allen.
Eather, with Porter’s assent, pressed the demand. He needed time, he repeated, and a firm base on which to consolidate his forces.
The last retreat to Imita had a deeply unsettling effect on Rowell. ‘We are now so far back,’ he told Tubby Allen, ‘that any further withdrawal is out of the question and Eather must fight it out at all costs.’21 Allen relayed the warning to Eather, adding: ‘There won’t be any withdrawal from the Imita position, Ken. You’ll die there if necessary. You understand that?’
‘Yes,’ Eather said. ‘I understand that.’
The Japanese troops scrambled onto Ioribaiwa Ridge, elated. Three weeks after landing in Papua the Imperial Army beheld the lights of Port Moresby and the distant sparkle of the moon on the Coral Sea. The sight elicited an emotional response: officers were reduced to tears and embraced. There were the usual Banzai!’s—‘Long Live the Emperor!’
‘Gazing out from the summit [in daylight],’ wrote Captain Nakahashi, of the 55th Mountain Artillery,
…there was not even one mountain to obstruct our range of vision. A dense, overgrown…forest, rising and falling like ripples on the water, and far off one was able to see, as the sun’s rays came through a break in the clouds a glitter and a sparkle, without doubt it was the sea! Over there was Port Moresby, the object of our invasion, which had become an obsession. Officers and men alike embraced one another overcome by emotion.22
Of the Nankai Shitai’s 6000 combat troops, only 1500—at most—remained. At least half had withdrawn sick or wounded. Some were missing and more than 1000 were dead. Japanese sources place the losses far higher. During his three-week slog over the mountains, Horii lost 80 per cent of his fighting force, according to the incisive war correspondent Okada Seizo, whose hatred of the war perhaps rendered him prone to exaggeration.23 (Certainly, by the end of the Papuan campaign, total Japanese losses approached 95 per cent.)
‘The line of captured positions more than atones for their blood,’ wrote a defiant Nakahashi. ‘They will never be able to gaze on this splendid spectacle…At night we are able to see the lights of Port Moresby, and the beam of the searchlight of Seven Mile Airfield on the outskirts.’24
The sight fixated them, held their attention as though it were a place of mystical splendour, an El Dorado whose long-sought treasures were not jewels and doubloons, but plentiful supplies of food. The front-line troops clung to one idea: ‘Victory meant food.’ Private Uehara Tetsunosuke shared the general hope that if they fought for another two or three days they could fill their stomachs to their hearts’ content.
The troops’ self-confidence, for a brief while, overrode their pangs of hunger. They were within sight of their goal and for a time, their faith in victory seemed to rise in inverse proportion to the extremity of their condition. The sick and wounded were carried forward in the vain hope they would get food and medical aid at Moresby—just as the Australian patients, lying at Alola, had hoped that the recapture of Kokoda would save them.25
As always, the ordinary troops were utterly unaware of the higher designs that lay in store for them. The state of Japanese food supplies was dire. Horii had cut the daily rice ration to 150 grams per man during September, in order to stretch his dwindling reserves.26
Horii, meanwhile, knew of the imminent order to withdraw, but as yet gave no indication to his men, who worked day and night on near empty stomachs to fortify the position. This was their first real rest since Isurava; but many were impatient for the green light to advance on the shimmering stronghold in the distance.
They dug in on the summit of Ioribaiwa. Despite their hunger, their talent for field engineering had not deserted them. They built air raid trenches, camouflaged their tents and dug latrines. They erected a low fence, and excavated and timbered a connecting network of weapon pits. Fields of fire were cleared, and guns positioned all along the ridge.
The Australian withdrawal to Imita Ridge provoked panic in Port Moresby. Comparisons with Singapore plagued the town, and many ‘timid souls’ contemplated evacuation. Some Australian and American servicemen planned to escape along the coast to Daru, the closest town to the Australian mainland. The journey would have killed them: Daru lies beyond the vast swamp of the Fly River Delta.
Stronger constitutions were ready to fight for Moresby. They need not have bothered: senior commanders rightly believed that the Japanese were an almost spent force. Australian reinforcements were pouring into Port Moresby, and heavy artillery was being winched up the Golden Stairs to Imita’s summit.
Mobilising his counteroffensive was Rowell’s top priority; the furthest thing from his mind was capitulation. He had growing concerns for his career, too—and desperately needed good news. ‘Our heads will be in the basket over this, Tubby,’ he told the commander of the 7th Division, when he learned of the pull-back to Imita.27
Eather hunkered down on the last razorback, a mere 25 miles from Port Moresby. By 16 September his fresh brigade had fully relieved Potts’s battalions. His officers were told they must defeat the enemy here, or die.
Brigadier Eather was a tough, composed man of immense fortitude. He was also a curiously lateral thinker, exemplified by an odd exchange at the height of the emergency. Vernon happened to be passing through Imita ‘on the way home’. He was summoned to the brigadier’s shelter, a mere strip of canvas ‘stretched over a boulder in a sea of mud’.28 Eather asked the elderly medic, ‘How do you think we ought to reward the carriers after the war?’ Vernon was taken aback. ‘The end of the war,’ he thought, ‘seemed so remote that all I could think of saying…was, “Give them all the food and smokes they could wish for…”’29
Potts returned to Port Moresby to an atmosphere of simulated cordiality. Some plainly treated him as an ignominious failure, and his men were to share this odium. Potts wouldn’t hear a word said against them in his round of top-level debriefings, from which he emerged as the convenient scapegoat for a layer of incompetents, seat-warmers, and seasoned backstabbers. It suited few people actually to defend Potts, or to inquire too deeply into the true circumstances of his withdrawal. The brigadier was, in some circles, deemed untouchable.
He needed calming down when he arrived at Port Moresby on 11 September. Generals Rowell and Tubby Allen withheld judgment—the brigadier had had ‘a very gruelling time’. They desired to hear him out ‘before condemning’.30
Others rushed in to judge him. Over lunch MacArthur’s engineer-in-chief, Major-General Pat Casey, hectored Potts about the withdrawal. Rowell leapt to Potts’s defence: ‘I thought it injudicious of [Casey] to be needling Potts and…I asked Casey whose bright idea it was to blow up the mountain. He said “it was mine”.’31
The next day Potts was summoned for a debriefing at 7th Division HQ, in Bisiatabu.32 It was a searching interview. Rowell and Allen grilled him about tactics, supplies, and relative army strengths. Potts unburdened himself of his grievances: the lack of a reserve force, the supply failure at Myola; the absence of Vickers machine-guns; the air force’s refusal or inability to evacuate the wounded; the 53rd Battalion’s weakness. Any criticism of the rest of the troops ‘stung him fiercely’.33
‘I don’t know the bastard who sent the 53rd up the track,’ Potts reportedly said.34 Rowell, who did know the bastard, chose to ignore this implied criticism. Potts continued, ‘There’s no better way of killing men in large numbers than sending raw and undisciplined troops to fight a jungle war against troops of seven years’ experience.’35 He dismissed any suggestion that the armies were numerically matched (MacArthur still thought the Australians outnumbered the Japanese). ‘My own estimate is that we had about five-to-one against us, and the number killed is four-to-one in our favour.’36
The two generals were sympathetic. They admired Potts’s tenacity under the most trying conditions. Rowell recommended that he be returned to his brigade. The Japanese army’s greater numbers, better camouflage and higher standard of jungle training were the causes of the Australian withdrawal, not Potts, he noted (tactfully avoiding the supply disaster, for which he accepted technical responsibility).37 Tubby Allen later observed that Potts had ‘saved Port Moresby from invasion by forces superior in number and had prevented the catastrophe nearly brought about by the neglect of New Guinea by the authorities…’38
Sir Keith Murdoch in his influential newspaper column echoed these sentiments. The media baron refused ‘utterly to accept any easy explanation of the Kokoda disaster. [No] slur shall be cast upon the men who fought there or upon their battalion officers. Of course some failed; but they were NOT the cause of the great failure.’39
Nobody in MacArthur’s office shared these generous verdicts.
Blamey seemed coolly unperturbed by the crisis in the mountains. He barged around Landops in ebullient mood. He had repeatedly expressed confidence in Rowell—on his visit there on 12 September, in a national broadcast on the 15th, and again on the 17th, when he told the Advisory War Council that the Japanese ‘would not be able to take Port Moresby from the land’.40
Yet Blamey was privately vexed. On the 16th he got alarming news of the retreat to Imita Ridge. Rowell, guessing how this would be received, explained that Potts’s replacement, Brigadier Ken Eather, needed time to consolidate his force at Imita Ridge. Rowell added emphatically: ‘I had NO repeat NO alternative but to confirm [the decision to withdraw].’41
Despite this disastrous news, Blamey remained sanguine. On the 17th he deluged the War Council with details of progress: for the first time, the Australians outnumbered the enemy; the 25th Brigade was deployed; the 16th Brigade was on its way, as well as two squadrons of light tanks, three field regiments, a mountain battery and one horse transport unit. The supply advantage had shifted overwhelmingly to the Allies. No more nonsense about unassailable mountains: here were raw military facts that should have persuaded everyone of Allied supremacy.
The War Council was not persuaded. Their ignorance of the campaign was profound. Forde, the Minister for the Army, believed the Japanese could still capture Port Moresby. Billy Hughes demanded to know why the Japanese did not appear to have the same supply problems. Others wondered why the Allies had failed to take the fight to the Japanese.
With silken emphasis, Blamey gently explained that when he’d returned to Australia in March the only troops at the nation’s disposal were untrained militia. It was a deftly delivered self-acquittal, tinged with the subtlest suggestion that the home forces, and by definition the Government, were to blame for a crisis not of his making.42
MacArthur’s GHQ had become a lightning rod for ill tidings. News of the withdrawal to Imita shocked his staff. General Kenney warned on his return from a visit to Port Moresby that the town would be lost, and that Rowell’s attitude was ‘defeatist’. MacArthur was apoplectic—and, as usual, sought someone to blame.
The supreme commander told a disturbed Curtin by secraphone that he’d lost confidence in the Australian command and the Australian troops. They lacked efficiency. The fresh troops were ‘only two days out from Port Moresby…the Japanese have the same troubles as our troops, but they are not withdrawing’.43 He decided American troops could do a better job, and ordered their dispatch to New Guinea by air or by sea.
MacArthur invoked the spectre of Singapore. If the Japanese advance continued, the Allied defensive ‘would duplicate the situation of Malaya’.44 Or the Philippines? MacArthur confronted the memory and, with his unerring nose for a scapegoat, quickly found another. He recommended that Blamey, as Commander-in-Chief of Allied Land Forces, be sent to Port Moresby to ‘energise the situation’.
The survivors of the 21st Brigade reached Koitaki in the last week of September. Those who saw the line of men enter camp never forgot the sight. Brigadier John Rogers, Blamey’s director of military intelligence, observed: ‘Never in my life, in the worst part of Gallipoli, or anywhere, had I seen soldiers who looked so shocked and so tired and so utterly weary as those men.’45
Potts’s men were somehow set apart from their fellow troops. Their condition was shocking; many looked stupefied, with the ‘bulkhead stare’ of stunned infantry. They were dimly conscious of failure. They’d neither recaptured Kokoda, nor held the track between Isurava and Ioribaiwa. Most humiliatingly, the Japanese had driven them into the jungle at Brigade Hill.
Yet they’d successfully delayed a far bigger army, fatally thwarted its advance and inflicted far more casualties, perhaps three times as many. They’d fought a brilliant withdrawal between Eora Creek and Efogi, and rallied towards the end with a series of attacking patrols that punctured Japanese morale. Horii had planned to capture Port Moresby by the first week of September. It was now the 19th; and the Japanese had lost most of their men—either killed, wounded or sick. His army, now abysmally resourced, tottered at the end of a 150-mile supply line.
On 3 October the health of the Australian survivors was examined, to assess when they would be fit for combat again. Of 295 survivors of the 2/14th and 2/16th battalions, 189 would be ‘fit in one week’, the medical report said. These men were diagnosed with ‘Avitaminosis…including oedema of the legs, neuritis and loss of sensation…feelings of lassitude and breathlessness…cases of glossitis and dyspepsia…a number of cases complaining of arthritic pains in the knees…dyspepsia is very widespread…’ Sixty-two men were classed as ‘permanently unfit for operations over mountain country’. Of these, 22 were over 35 years old. ‘A number of cases had already “cracked up” when sent out on patrol…’ the report concluded.46