‘Tennoheika Banzai!’—‘Long Live the Emperor!’
—Major-General Horii Tomitaro’s last words
Some Japanese did escape Oivi–Gorari. On 9 November Horii called a general retreat to the Kumusi River. Commanders Yazawa at Oivi and Tsukamoto at Gorari promptly withdrew with their staff and any men fit enough to walk.
Many of the wounded were left behind—with the exception of the Nankai Shitai HQ’s walking wounded, who were led out by an extraordinary young lieutenant called Takaki Yoshijo, cannon commander of the 41st Infantry Corps.
Takaki, a graduate of an elite military academy, was ordered to bury his artillery before guiding the wounded to safety, according to Captain Nakahashi’s personal memoir. But the 24-year-old artilleryman could not abandon his gun. To be told to bury it was deeply humiliating—a mark of surrender. So Takaki entreated his force commander to be permitted to take his gun out with the casualties.
His commander refused. For Takaki, there remained one course of honour left. After a last goodbye to his men—he was very popular—he buried the weapon, led the wounded to the rear, and returned to the burial spot. He then sat on the mound of soil, withdrew his pistol and shot himself in the head.
Nakahashi, who knew Takaki, wrote: ‘The news of First Lieutenant Takaki’s final gesture…did much to lift the flagging morale of the Japanese troops.’*
The Shitai survivors evacuated Gorari by night, along a north-easterly route, guided by vines lashed to trees and candles sheltered in the undergrowth. Horii himself was well back on the western bank of the Kumusi. The troops joined him there on 11 and 12 November.
The Kumusi was in full flood, 100 yards wide and six feet deep at the chosen crossing point, near the village of Binga. Horii ordered Colonel Yazawa, of the 41st Regiment, to take command of the survivors, while he departed on a large raft.
Horii’s last words to his men on the bank were, reportedly: ‘I will go first.’ Then he and his staff officers and a number of ‘distressed enlisted men’ boarded the palm log raft and drifted away from the shore. They hoped the strong current would carry them to the mouth of the river.
With the grey-haired general fading into the tropical haze, Yazawa contemplated the question of how to transport several hundred men across the river. Allied aircraft had destroyed the wire bridge. They could not swim the swollen current laden with gear and weapons. One officer suggested they build a series of small rafts out of whitewood saplings, six feet long and two inches in diameter, and drift across.
Yazawa agreed. The men loaded their gear and weapons onto the hurriedly built rafts, and pushed off into the current. They clung to the sides, and most seemed to make it across. Extra rafts were built for the wounded and sick, but many of them drowned.
The medical officer Hayashi Hiroyuki ‘began to build a raft with two others’. They had not eaten for four days, and one collapsed from weakness. On 21 November he heard a report that the Australians were five miles away. So they hastily pushed off—of his unit, there were ‘50 on five rafts’.*
Some attempts failed. At Papaki, in pouring rain, about a third of the remaining strength of the Koiwai Butai drowned when their hurriedly built rafts sank, recalled Lieutenant Watanabe Fukuichi. ‘Nearly all lost or threw away their rifles, MGs and ammunition.’1
Those who reached the far bank joined a long line of emaciated Japanese troops bumping forward, leaning on sticks, many with blood-soaked, khaki-coloured bandages around their heads or arms. Only those with external wounds—i.e. with a hope of survival—were transported in jeeps. Those with internal wounds were left behind, seen as hopeless cases. The sick were expected to walk. They pleaded ‘with anger or resentment in their eyes’2 for a transport corps to take them part of the way to Giruwa, where they hoped to be evacuated by boat.
One driver recalled, ‘Many times I saw soldiers who had collapsed, exhausted on the way, all but dead by the roadside. I wanted to give them a lift but there was nothing I could do…we were fully loaded with wounded soldiers.’3
Imanishi was among the survivors. He wrapped his pistol, shoes, clothes and sword in his tent, placed the bundle on a raft and floated with it down the river. It seems he lost his bundle because he came ashore with only his underwear. In this state, he walked to Giruwa and there salvaged a uniform from a corpse.4
Horii’s party floated about a mile and a half downstream where the raft caught a large tree and ‘smashed into the river bank’.5 His party went ashore. After a long walk down the East bank, they found a little canoe, in which Horii, his staff officer, Tanaka, and his orderly, Private Fukuoka Shigeji, paddled to the mouth of the Kumusi.6
The sequence of events then gets sketchy, and acquires a note of farce. Horii and his comrades ‘stupidly put to sea’ in the canoe, notes one account.7 It seems he intended to paddle along the coast to Giruwa and take command there; perhaps in his mind’s eye he saw himself pulling ashore to the astonished applause of his troops.
Nature intervened. A tropical thunderstorm with gale force winds struck the coast that afternoon, and ‘in a flash the canoe was six miles from the shore and capsized…Staff officer Tanaka could not swim,’ writes Captain Nakahashi. ‘His head showed above the water once or twice, he then went down and was not seen again.’
Horii and Fukuoka swam for the shore. They made slow progress and, after about three miles, Horii said to his orderly: ‘I am exhausted and can swim no further, please report to the unit that Horii died here.’* Horii then raised his hands ‘as far as he could above the sea, and called to Fukuoka in a loud voice, ‘Tennoheika Banzai!’—‘Long Live the Emperor!’8 And then he sank.
Horii’s bizarre end was hushed up, but rumours soon spread among the incredulous troops; ‘heard that the Detachment commander and Staff had been drowned in Kumusi River’, wrote an unknown diarist at Giruwa on 27 November 1942. ‘Because of the possible effect on the army this is to be kept a strict secret.’
The Australians reached the Kumusi River at Wairopi, some miles upstream of Horii’s crossing point, on the 13th. The empty pylons rose where the wire bridge once stood, and wrecked and half-sunk rubber dinghies and outriggers lined the shores. All along the banks were the carcasses of some five hundred horses.
From a small island they rescued about three hundred terrified Rabaul natives who’d been sheltering there. Many were emaciated and sick, ‘others were bloated almost to bursting point from eating abandoned Jap rice supplies’, observed Kienzle on 14 November. We can assume they made a swift recovery, because Kienzle had a lot of work in store for them: ‘I now had about 1500 natives with the newly acquired Rabaul labour,’ he noted.
To Vasey’s surprise the Japanese had failed to fortify the eastern bank, and several strong Australian swimmers crossed the river. Vasey himself attempted to wade in at a shallower point, thought the better of it, and took a stroll up the bank with Norris, where they found a little beach on which four dead Japanese had been washed up. One may have been the unit paymaster, as Vasey returned ‘with over 500 yen’.9
Heavily loaded men didn’t stand a chance of swimming, and the division’s chief engineer stood on the western bank calculating how to construct a bridge. Days earlier this resourceful man—Lieutenant-Colonel Warren McDonald—had presciently requested airdrops of steel rope and tools. They were flown in on the 14th, and the field engineers set to work, building a bridge of connected logs wedged between forked trunks rammed into the riverbed; two flying foxes were constructed overhead.
These flying foxes enabled 230 men per hour to cross. They queued up in high spirits, and a sort of carnival atmosphere prevailed, ‘reminiscent of an old English fair or Irish market day’, observed the 16th Brigade diarist. ‘Battalions of heavily laden troops in their mud-stained jungle green shirts and slacks, carrier lines with the natives gaily caparisoned in bright coloured lap laps, bedecked with flowers and sprigs of shrubs stuck jauntily in metal bracelets, all mingled as they waited their turn to cross.’10
Vasey did not relish river crossings, of which there are many in the Owen Stanleys, usually over single logs. He confided to his wife, ‘I’m not too hot at that sort of thing.’ Sensing their commander’s awkwardness, the men took a close interest in his progress, as Norris observed:‘It was a grand sight to see (and hear!) George’s gaunt, lanky frame swaying and swearing across the narrow bridge. As his legs sank into the stream…George risked letting go with one hand to wave his red cap—this was nearly fatal…’11