‘Dead men were…sitting in their trenches, with the bones of their fingers clutched around the triggers of their weapons…The equipment and haversacks were still on…[their] backs’
—Bill Crooks, 25th Brigade, in The Footsoldiers
Up ahead, the Australian advance troops—three battalions of the 25th Brigade and the 3rd Militia Battalion—passed through the aftermath of Potts’s withdrawal. On 4 October, Sergeant Bede Tongs’ patrol ascended Brigade Hill. Near the summit they observed the ‘very devastating sight’ of numerous Australian bodies lying about the clearing. Six stretchers lay in a line, ‘holding their skeletal remains. The soldiers in the stretchers had been either bayoneted or shot. We left the identity discs on the bodies for those people moving along behind us.’1
They passed hastily dug graveyards containing some of Potts’s men. Trench lines had been turned into a makeshift cemetery: ‘Several slit trenches…had been filled in and a cross or an upturned rifle stuck in the ground by the bayonet, marked the lonely graves…moving all to contemplative silence.’2
On the night of 7th the rump of the 25th Brigade camped on Brigade Hill. It was very dark with a wafer-thin moon. The smell of putrefaction lingered because the canopy trapped odours issuing from the jungle floor. It had been in the air ‘since we left Ioribaiwa but on this night, high on the ridge south of Efogi, it had become overpowering’.3 Dawn revealed they were camped amidst the remains of the battle of Brigade Hill. Some had not realised this was the place Potts’s battalions were forced off the track. A tangle of Australian signal gear and weaponry—already rusting in the moist alpine air—lay about, and scattered here and there were a few personal items of dead soldiers: the odd letter from a girlfriend or a wife, photos of children.
Patrols dispatched at first light established the extent of Potts’s resistance, which stretched from Brigade Hill forward to the hills above Efogi, where the 2/27th had fought: ‘Dead men were found in tree tops. Others were sitting in their trenches, with the bones of their fingers clutched around the triggers of their weapons…In no single case was one of our dead touched or his weapon removed from his hands. The equipment and haversacks were still on the dead men’s backs.’4
Groups of bodies revealed the closeness of the fighting. Several men had fallen near their commander, Captain Nye; they were cut down as they charged across the clearing in an attempt to reach Potts’s headquarters. On the banks of a creek, the bodies of 33 men of the 2/27th battalion were found. Near the southern knoll three Australian mortar crews—ten men—were left dead beside their weapons, while yards ahead lay the crouched body of Captain Langridge, who’d run into the Japanese guns. The Japanese had dug body-deep trenches right up to the edge of Potts’s HQ, where troops on both sides had fallen within feet of each other. By nightfall on the 8th, the advancing troops interred 99 corpses, the vast majority Australian. ‘The troops dug shallow graves with bayonets and tin hats,’ recalled Lieutenant Merv Roberts of the 2/33rd. ‘They wore their field dressings over their noses and mouths…that the Japs could walk past this macabre scene everyday enraged us.’5
With no time and scarce dry wood for a ceremonial cremation, the Japanese had buried most of their casualties in a mass grave beneath elaborate burial mounds, each marked by a single wooden stake adorned with Japanese characters and surrounded by a little vine fence.6 After the war the families of veterans repeatedly returned to Papua and New Guinea to find and repatriate the bones of their sons from such sites.
The corpse of General Horii’s famously apocryphal ‘white stallion’ made the last of numerous sightings, in a creek near Efogi, where a horse answering to its description had been unceremoniously dumped. That the Japanese commander’s pure white mount—elsewhere described as little more than a grey mule—got so far up the track seems unlikely. This particular candidate for the honour had received neither burial nor cremation. Nor did it appear to have been eaten.
‘Jap atrocities reported from…Ioribaiwa–Nauro,’ Allen wrote in his diary on 3 October. ‘2 Aust soldiers found—one tied to tree, other decapitated.’7 The arms of one soldier had been cut off, and multiple bayonet wounds were found in both corpses.
The sight of bayoneted, bound Australian corpses revolted the troops then moving up the track, but did not surprise or shock them. The atrocities at Milne Bay and Rabaul were well known. If the Japanese supposed such brutality would frighten or demoralise the enemy, they gravely misread the Australian psyche. The scene of Australian bodies trussed and mutilated merely confirmed the 16th Brigade’s opinion of the Japanese. A general hardening resulted; and there would be very few prisoners taken.
Nor were the natives spared. The condition of carriers press-ganged into Japanese service at Rabaul defied belief. Vernon examined a Rabaul man found crawling along beside the track. He’d escaped when the Japanese sounded the retreat and, on hearing Australian voices, dragged himself out of hiding, ‘cowed and broken-spirited, the tears welling in his eyes’. Vernon found the man’s feet riddled with gangrene, and ‘every toe worn to the bone and crawling with maggots’. ‘Two bayonet wounds scored his back, the mementoes of two falls with his load.’8 In a shaking voice the man described how the Japanese kept the carriers moving at bayonet point, working them till they dropped. His was not an isolated case. Ahead were found the bayoneted bodies of several Rabaul natives. They served Kienzle’s ‘propaganda’ purposes, and inspired greater loyalty in the Australian-controlled carriers, many of whom, though scared and exhausted, counted themselves lucky.
As the maelstrom swept back the way it came, and the Australians reclaimed previously Japanese-controlled territory, the mountain tribes emerged from the jungle to find their villages destroyed, their gardens plundered and members of their families dead or impressed as carriers.
An Australian situation report on 9 October didn’t mention battle. It concerned itself entirely with atrocities alleged by an Orokaiva native who had escaped the Japanese: ‘Word of rape of women passed quickly all villages…Eleven BIAGI natives were bayoneted to death at DENIKI. RABAUL natives dying of starvation from IOROBAIWA [sic] back. Japs also starving to death…gardens in KOKODA district have been destroyed and thinks Japs will NOT stop at KOKODA due to food shortage and sickness.’9
Deeper in the mountains dozens of straggling Japanese troops were found wandering around, or prone on the jungle floor. A medical study of enemy corpses concluded: ‘Jap dead very wasted. Evidence of starvation.’10
The state of the Nankai Shitai was indeed worse than a beggar’s, in Sakomoto’s phrase. On the north coast, mosquitoes were feasting on Horii’s supply lines. Of the 282 patients in one field hospital, ‘the larger percentage has malaria, others have fever or acute inflammation of the large intestine…beri beri, chest disorders and skin diseases’.11
The Japanese were abysmally equipped to deal with malaria. While each man supposedly had ten tablets of quinine, this didn’t last long. Malaria wasn’t considered a serious disease; nor fully understood. Some Japanese doctors thought malaria contagious through contact with the natives, who were ‘separated at the billeting area’ to prevent contamination.
Others realised the foe was a tiny parasite borne by the mosquito—but had little means of controlling it: ‘There are too many mosquitoes breeding in the streams,’ pleaded the Yazawa medical report, ‘and we have no defensive equipment against them.’12
Those too sick to fight came in at the rate of three to eight per day during October. The coastal hospitals had medical supplies for a month—yet about a third of the troops were unfit for combat by 19 October.13 It didn’t help that wells and streams flowed together with lavatory effluent and contaminated the water supply. Some troops sat ‘hip-deep’ in contaminated water after heavy rains.
Elsewhere the famous Japanese spirit was weakening. A trickle began to desert, or abandon their positions. The rumour spread that a company commander, First Lieutenant Ino, had left his Buna post without permission and returned to Rabaul. Another Lieutenant, Nagano, had relieved himself of his duties. A disgusted Sakomoto wrote that such men were ‘unworthy of the Army’. It was unheard of that Japanese officers would simply walk away from battle.
On the Kokoda Track, a rising number of Japanese yielded to their illnesses, and abandoned the fight. The advancing Australians soon encountered more Japanese stragglers stumbling around the forest. ‘Many of the Japs,’ wrote journalist George Johnston, ‘had been eating grass, wood, weeds, roots and poisonous fruits.’14 Native accounts told of the Japanese ‘grubbing in the mud’ for a few grains of rice.
Among the few prisoners taken during the counteroffensive was Okino Jiro, of a horse transport unit within the Kusunose Butai, captured between Menari and Efogi. Okino’s job had been to take horseloads of wire-cutters, rope and ammunition from Buna to Kokoda. When the animals died, he was himself harnessed as a draught horse and loaded up with grenades weighing 82 pounds. He’d collapsed from exhaustion and disease. The advance troops found him on 2 October sleeping in a native hut, and bound him to a tree, to await the main army.
The Australians looked on this sick, exhausted man, borne aloft through their lines, with loathing and disgust. A half-starved sight, riddled with jungle sores, weakened by dysentery and malaria, Okino lay shaking on his stretcher and gazing indiscernibly at his captors. Two weeks later, he tried to wrestle with his prison guard, but he could not recall the incident when interrogated the next day. It showed nonetheless that he’d regained his physical strength, and the Australians do not seem to have harmed him.15
Born in Shikoku, Okino had worked for an Osaka artificial silk manufacturer—so he told his Allied interrogators. He was unusually outspoken, accusing Horii of ‘unreasonableness’ in forcing the march on Port Moresby, which they were expected to capture, he said, within three days of leaving Kokoda. Coming from an ordinary private, this was extraordinary criticism of a top-ranking officer. It spoke less of general insurrection than personal bitterness: Okino had been refused leave at Rabaul, and complained that his superiors had put the welfare of the horses ahead of the men.
Another prisoner, drawn along by a rifle pull-through, smiled and bowed to the Australians as they passed. The sight, south of Efogi, of a shallowly buried fellow Japanese soldier, highly amused him: one of the corpse’s rigid arms broke the soil, and a blackened finger pointed to the sky, as if showing the way.
Groups of Japanese soldiers were captured sitting in a daze by the track, too weak to continue. They had dropped to the ground to await capture or, preferably, death. One man who called himself Katsukara Kanemidzu, a first class seaman of the Yasuda Special Landing Party, had disembarked with a party of twenty on the beaches near Gona. Sent over the mountains to deliver supplies to Horii’s army, they’d got lost.
Katsukara had ‘no idea where [the rest of his patrol] went’, noted his interrogators. ‘For over a month the party wandered from place to place hoping to come across Jap troops. Biscuits…had long since been exhausted and the men were reduced to eating edible roots.’ On 9 October, they ‘threw away their rifles being too weak to carry them further’. On 17 October Katsukara, ‘exhausted…and powerless to resist’, was marched blindfolded for two hours into a prison camp.16
Not all the sick and hungry were abandoned. Some Japanese units tried bravely to carry out the dying, and impressed the natives to shoulder the weakest men, which caused severe delays.
The tail end units blew up cliff sides or log bridges to delay the Australians, ‘but the pursuit grew hotter every day until the enemy were close upon our heels’, wrote Okada. American aircraft meanwhile strafed and bombed the thin line of retreating men, ‘the ratatat of the machine guns, the sound of cannon fire that streamed forth from tails of B-17s—these were nightmares threatening us in our miserable retreat’.17
Horii could not rely on airdrops, and the country was denuded of ‘Churchill supplies’, which had been either spoiled or eaten. Patrols were sent deep into the country in search of native fruit and vegetables. Fields more than six miles away from the track were dug up ‘inch by inch’, wrote Okada.
The South Seas Detachment had simply ‘failed to…employ adequate numbers of men as beasts of burden’.18 Nor could they call on the navy for supply drops, as it was increasingly difficult to get ships to the coast as the air war intensified.
A surprising number of Japanese endured these torments—their indomitable spirit would prevail, they told themselves. Such thoughts drove men like machine-gunner Sakomoto, who soon turned to face his pursuers, vowing, incredibly, to fight on.