‘General MacArthur considers quote extremely light casualties indicate no serious effort yet made to displace enemy unquote’
—Wire from General Blamey to General Allen, 17 October 1942
Myola, the burnt-out supply depot, offered a welcome rest to the advancing troops. From here they got ready to attack Templeton’s Crossing, where the remnant of Horii’s troops were dug in.
The crossing is a single log bridge, dumped over Eora Creek in a setting of Stygian gloom darkened by the high, closed canopy. One has the odd impression it is always raining in this damp, moss-coated world shrouded in mist and filled with the faint odour of vegetative decay.
Along the track to Templeton’s, the enemy—now being reinforced from Kokoda—manned clusters of little machine-gun pits, built during the advance and now heavily fortified with logs and camouflaged. Strung along 600 yards of track, they were mutually supporting and connected by fire trenches—letting the gunners move to various positions. The Juki muzzles protruded from firing slits of about six inches deep and eight inches wide. The conditions inside were abominably muddy, wet and cramped; the Japanese lay glued to their firing slits and nibbling on whatever food they had left in their packs.
Hurling grenades through the firing slits was the only way to destroy the occupants. Air bombardment was of little use in a micro-war fought beneath a jungle canopy, and flamethrowers were not yet available. But first the Australians had to find and stake out the Japanese positions, which involved encircling them, and attacking from the sides. The enemy sat and waited for the Australians to come.
A tiny patrol led by Corporal Terry Campbell walked straight into the machine-gun mounds without seeing them (they were so well camouflaged): ‘A woodpecker suddenly opened fire from some hidden position and…rifles exploded almost in the faces of the patrol.’1
That night, 11 October, Brigadier Eather, under extreme pressure to capture Kokoda, held an ‘Orders Group’ at Myola. Two battalions were to attack next morning and ‘clear up Templeton’s Crossing’.2 At 8.00 a.m. the men marched quietly out of Myola, and entered the great halls of vegetation with ‘no sight of the sky’: ‘Although it was early morning, it was strangely dark, like a scene from pre-man. It looked more like the last light in winter than early morning in the tropics. The troops’ movement was cat-like. Nobody spoke as they crept over the mud and the soft, springy green mould.’3
They planned to surround the enemy in a semi-circular vice using two hundred Australian troops,4 approaching from either flank. Captain Tim Clowes, brother of Brigadier Cyril Clowes (the victor of Milne Bay) led the flanking unit guided by his compass and ‘the run of the ridge’.
There were no maps—this was virgin jungle. Visibility was reduced to a few feet. Over huge fallen trees, down ravines, and up steep slopes they slowly advanced, drawing aside the undergrowth like a curtain, to avoid making a sound.
Clowes reached the agreed point, and soon heard gunfire to the rear—his cue to ‘get in it’. He led his men up the last slope and looked back near the top—his men, he wrote, were ‘all in single file and gazing up at him’.5 On their hands and knees they reached the ridgeline where, just twenty yards away, stood a Japanese camp site with a few troops smoking by their lean-tos. It seemed to be the main Japanese HQ at Templeton’s.
The shock was mutual. The Australians charged; the Japanese responded with grenades and machine-guns, both sides inflicting heavy casualties before withdrawing. The Australians hunkered down in a ravine, about seventy yards from the Japanese positions, for the night.
Meanwhile, the frontal attack on the machine-gun nests had reached a stalemate. About a hundred Australians6 attacked a ring of the mini-forts. ‘[We] became engaged in a bitter and almost eyeball-to-eyeball action,’ said one. ‘Some of the tougher men got right up to the pits [and] tried to toss grenades into them.’7
The Japanese who survived the grenades fled out the back door, and were shot down. But few Australians got within range to toss their grenades because neighbouring pits raked the approaches. Fighting in such close conditions—down a narrow path pocked with dugouts and bound by jungle—was chaotic: ‘Men are unable to hear orders, see signals or even their section leaders, so battle dies down quickly into sniping or silence.’8
For several nights the Australians ate cold rations in the rain, draped in airdrop bags to keep warm. Sentries sat stationary within forty paces of the enemy foxholes. By this time Japanese reinforcements were coming up to Eora Creek.
Repeated attacks in the next few days slowly dislodged the Japanese at Templeton’s Crossing. The gun pits were taken out one by one, and flanking patrols attacked the rear. Perhaps the most lethal was Lieutenant Kevin Power’s ambush. On the 13th, Power led 50 hand-picked men along a track due south of a large Japanese encampment. The Australians got right up to the edge of the clearing, and watched the enemy chatting and eating; then charged. It was all over in a few minutes. Sergeant Jack Elliott machine-gunned six where they sat eating rice under a green tarpaulin. Bren gunners mowed down those trying to escape. For one man dead and four wounded, the Australians killed 30 Japanese. Power won a Military Cross for bravery.
The reputation of the super soldier was slowly fading into myth. The Australians used Japanese tactics, attacking at night, and up close. Sergeant Bede Tongs, for example, crawled through the jungle to within ten paces of a Japanese machine-gun. The gunners looked idly away. Tongs held his grenade close to the ground, to muffle the sound of pulling the pin, waited longer than was safe, and threw it. ‘The two Japs…were blown clean out and sprawled one on each other.’9 He hurled another, and shouted to his platoon, ‘Get stuck into the bastards’, at which the Australians started ‘yelling and whooping’ and charged the gun, firing from the hip.
The Japanese tried to confuse the Australians with the old ruse of shouting orders in English, ‘Up this way, Jack’, ‘Hey, Bob, over here, I’m wounded’, and ‘Cease Fire!’ Power responded by yelling in Arabic, bits of which the troops had picked up in the Middle East, e.g. ‘Imshi Allah’—‘get out’ or ‘go!’ Soon the forest was a-chatter with Japanese, pigeon-Arabic and broken English.
The Australians reached the banks of Templeton’s Crossing on or about 15 October, and camped amidst the bodies of the Australians killed there during Potts’s withdrawal. ‘The rain poured down in a great deluge and the roar of the creek continued through a bitterly cold night,’ remembered Bill Crooks. Most lay awake, he said, ‘silently contemplating’ the bodies of the men strewn about the area.10
Lloyd’s 16th Brigade fully relieved Eather’s on the 19th, and took over the fighting. Eather had lost a third of his men in a month: 55 dead, 133 wounded and 769 sick. Three died on the day of their relief, in a bad accident: a mortar shell blew up inside the barrel, killing the crew. The shell had been primed for explosion on impact after free falling from a biscuit bomber. One young corporal cried out from the debris—‘there is a letter in my pocket, see that my mother gets it’—and passed away.*
After two days of near constant, close combat, the 2/2nd Battalion drove the enemy out of Templeton’s Crossing. The action won three Military Crosses and four Military Medals, and produced some evocative prose:‘As we dug in for the night,’ wrote the unit’s historian, ‘a desolate scene was presented: our own and enemy dead lying in grotesque positions, bullet-scarred trees with the peeled bark showing ghost-like, our own lads digging silently. And with the coming of darkness came the rain, persistent and cold, and in this atmosphere we settled in our weapon pits for the night. At night we could hear the Jap chattering and moving about.’11
Of the 58 Japanese corpses found amid the wreckage, one lay on a little Rising Sun; their determined protection of the Standard had cost the enemy many lives.12 One sight brought tears to the eyes of some troops: the starved body of a little boy from Rabaul, lying dead on a native bench.
As they searched the camp, a burial party found a grisly discovery: the flesh of Australian soldiers still cooking over the smoking embers of a campfire. More carved corpses lay on the track nearby.
In an official report, the unit’s padre wrote: ‘I saw an Australian soldier stripped of all clothing with the flesh of his left thigh cut away and a long cut down his calf. There was a razor blade lying on the soldier’s body. Another body was also cut about the thigh.’ As a lieutenant who accompanied him confirmed:‘Without any doubt this man’s body had been mutilated by the Japanese. It can be verified that fresh meat was being cooked in pots.’13
Three other bodies were found similarly mutilated, reported Lance-Corporal Allan and Private Connor. Connor’s close examination of the enemy camp at Templeton’s Crossing found ‘small pieces of flesh’ on the leaves of nearby trees; while ‘dixies 10 to 15 yards away had both flesh and cooked meat in them’.14
The memory of the loss of the Philippines tormented MacArthur. The supreme commander had famously promised to return. Only the recapture of the Bataan peninsula would exorcise the demon of that particularly harrowing defeat. For MacArthur, this was curiously personal, and the armies under his command seemed, at times, the mere playthings of the man’s immense ego, like the little coloured pins on a military operations board. MacArthur’s deepest fear was that his enemies in Washington might find a pretext to remove him before he had a chance to strike back at the Japanese.
So the delay at Templeton’s Crossing put MacArthur in febrile mood. His nose for someone to blame alighted once more on Blamey and the Australian officers. He demanded to know why there was a delay in forcing the Japs back over the mountains.
Blamey did not rush to defend his officers against this stream of American bile. No wonder Allen, Rowell and the brigadiers felt as though they were fighting two wars.* In a classic display of gutless political cunning, Blamey decided instead to pass MacArthur’s attack down the Australian lines of command. General Tubby Allen was the obvious target; Blamey saw to it that the buck stopped with Tubby.
A marked ‘Rowell man’, Tubby Allen consulted his old friend about Blamey’s intentions. Still brooding in his Victorian garden, Rowell replied on a singularly lukewarm note: ‘I can’t believe the Jap will clear out of Buna unless forced out,’ he said. ‘You will have a bag full of problems now.’15
The confused chain of command added to Allen’s frustrations. To whom should he report: Herring, the New Guinea Force commander, or Blamey, the Commander-in-Chief, Allied Land Forces? Both generals were then based in Port Moresby. Allen sent messages to Herring but received answers from Blamey.16
‘Who was actually commanding in New Guinea at that time?’ David Horner caustically inquired. Herring insisted he was in charge, ‘but MacArthur believed Blamey was in charge’.17 This was not simply a question of form—it had tragicomic manifestations. On 9 November the most senior inquired of the second most senior medical officer in the Australian Army, ‘Who do you belong to, by the way? The C-in-C or GOC New Guinea Force?’18
Allen did his best with scarce resources and a terrible supply line. His HQ, in ‘normal’ conditions a little transportable village of typists, signals equipment, supply officers, map-readers, cooks and filers, was reduced in the Owen Stanleys to a few tough soldiers running the show out of their backpacks. They fought a rearguard action against severe supply delays and chronic carrier shortages. The least Allen might have expected was Brisbane’s encouragement and a swift response to his supply demands. He got neither. Instead MacArthur, acting through Blamey, seemed determined from the start to undermine the man they’d chosen to lead the Allied land offensive.
When Allen reached Myola on 17 October, he received a message from Blamey. It said:‘General MacArthur considers quote extremely light casualties indicate no serious effort yet made to displace enemy unquote.’ Allen must capture Kokoda airfield ‘at earliest’.19
Allen did not share MacArthur’s opinion that effort could be measured by the sum of Australian corpses. He replied at once: the 25th Brigade had been ‘attacking all day’. The unit’s casualties numbered 50 killed, with 133 wounded. The sick numbered more than 700. ‘…but I respectfully submit,’ Allen icily added, ‘that the success of this campaign cannot be judged by casualties alone’.20 On their relief three days later the 25th Brigade’s casualties were 68 killed, 135 wounded and 771 seriously ill.
The dispute blew up into another battle of wills, in which Blamey played the role of MacArthur’s amanuensis. Blamey’s parroted cables conjure an impression of the sender as a rather large, khaki-clad ventriloquist’s doll, relaying MacArthur’s every word with unconsidered approbation. On the 21st, echoing MacArthur, he insisted: ‘Progress on the trail is NOT repeat NOT satisfactory. The tactical handling of our troops in my opinion is faulty. With forces superior to the enemy we are bringing to bear in actual combat only a small fraction of available strength…’
On the same day came another message from MacArthur–Blamey: ‘During last five days you have made practically no advance against a weaker enemy’. MacArthur–Blamey demanded that Allen act ‘with greater boldness and employ wide encircling movement to destroy enemy’. Time was critical: ‘Capture Kokoda aerodrome.’
Allen instinctively sided with his troops. He drafted an enraged response, accusing MacArthur–Blamey of ‘myopic ignorance’: ‘If you think you can do any better come up here and bloody well try.’21 Colonel Charles Spry, his senior staff officer, persuaded him not to send it. Instead, Allen wrote that he was ‘singularly hurt’ to receive General MacArthur’s wire, and blamed the country and shortage of carriers for the delay: ‘This country does not lend itself to quick or wide encircling movements,’ he explained, adding, ‘It was never my wish to site a brigade defensively in rear but the supply situation owing carrier shortage has enforced it.’22
MacArthur demanded that Allen hurl his entire force at the enemy. Allen knew what was possible, given the terrain and the available supplies. ‘I was determined not to murder my men by letting [MacArthur–Blamey] put me in a panic,’ he later wrote. Both commanders seemed to think the terrain was ‘only undulating and I could have swept around the flanks with a brigade’.23
No doubt the Australians outnumbered the Japanese, and were in better shape. But Allen’s depleted carrier lines and supply shortages held him back. How could they advance without proper supplies of food and ammunition? However, the delay was getting dangerous: Japanese reinforcements were continuing to move up to Eora Creek from Kokoda.
In fact, a most stubborn obstacle now confronted Allen: a series of entrenched Japanese guns on the high ground overlooking Eora Creek, site of the former Australian field hospital (near the place from which they’d attacked during their advance). It was the perfect position for a small force to put up a strong defence. Allen had to capture it before he could sweep forward to Alola–Isurava and down to recapture Kokoda.