‘My father always said that many men knew they were likely to be killed in these attacks, but accepted their fate and charged towards the enemy, because for months they had been incensed by Blamey’s Koitaki address…’
—Dr Richard Honner
Only a concentrated force of heavy artillery, air bombardment and infantry would destroy the bunker fields, thought Brigadier Ivan Dougherty, as he walked toward Gona. The divided Allied army disturbed the new commander. ‘At that stage our forces were split into three pieces—Gona area, the Sanananda Road, and Buna. At no place did our strength appear to be sufficient to defeat the enemy.’1
Dougherty wanted to throw a full brigade of fresh troops into Gona, and General Vasey agreed. But who were these ‘fresh troops’? They were the 21st Brigade, the ‘ragged bloody heroes’ of the Kokoda Track. These men, recovering in Port Moresby, were flown back over the mountains and sent into battle under Dougherty, their new commander.
They were chosen because Blamey had little faith in the American troops who were floundering at Buna. At least the Australians would fight, Blamey thought. After seeming to compare them to running rabbits at Koitaki, he now sang their praises. This was as much political one-upmanship and a dig at MacArthur, as it was new-found admiration for the men.
Blamey’s renewed faith in the digger did little to reconcile him to the troops, however. Nothing eased the bitterness sown by Blamey’s Koitaki address. The festering memory drew barbs of hatred from among the troops. Did their commanders think them cowards? Had their mates given their lives to be posthumously mocked? Such thoughts profoundly influenced their contemplation of—and performance in—the battles ahead.
Indeed, as they flew into Popondetta, the 21st Brigade felt they had a bitter score to settle—with their commanders and the enemy. Their hatred of the Japanese knew no bounds. Their humiliation at Efogi rankled, and Blamey’s ‘rabbit’ speech rubbed salt into the wound.
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner dubbed their determination to avenge the past ‘the Koitaki factor’. Honner’s son Richard wrote:
My father always said that many men knew they were likely to be killed in these attacks, but accepted their fate and charged towards the enemy, because for months they had been incensed by Blamey’s Koitaki address…
It certainly appears to me that Blamey’s insensitive speech that day was a significant factor in the death of good men. In Ralph’s later years, the needless deaths at Gona were one of the recurring themes that he would describe as one of his worst memories from the Second World War.2
Dougherty, too, would attribute their extraordinary courage and murderous fighting to a desire to redeem their unit’s reputation from the charge of cowardice. A major of the 2/27th told David Horner: ‘I claim to this day that some [soldiers] whom we lost at Gona were killed because of the effect of Blamey’s…criticism.’3
Perhaps this was Blamey’s dark Machiavellian design: to fire the troops’ willingness to fight by impugning their courage. It seems unlikely—the stuff of a conspiracy theorist’s dream—yet if so, Blamey judged the psychology of the young Australian soldier with chilling accuracy.
In this febrile state of mind the 21st Brigade re-entered the war. Their new leader, Dougherty, was a ‘quiet and experienced soldier’4 with ‘an almost grandmotherly patience’.5 Born in 1907, in Leadville, New South Wales, some two hundred miles north-west of Sydney, the boy was raised by his mother; his parents split soon after he was born. ‘They lived in a slab hut with an earthen floor, and he began his education at a small one-teacher bush school.’6
As commander of a battalion in Africa, Dougherty led the attack on Tobruk in January 1941, for which he won a Distinguished Service Order. His unit participated in the doomed Greek campaign, before prevailing—briefly—at Heraklion in the defence of Crete, in May 1941. He was flown to New Guinea in October 1942, to command the re-generated 21st Brigade.
‘When morale was low,’ David Horner said of him, ‘he talked personally with his troops. He was fiercely loyal toward them yet a strict disciplinarian.’7 Dougherty would win a bar to his DSO for his leadership at Gona.
This battle would test Dougherty to the limit. He started well: his belief in concentrating the force echoed the views of several of senior officers—notably Frank Sublet, the rumbustious commander of the 2/16th Battalion, who was later fiercely critical of the open attacks on enemy machine-guns. Vasey himself later likened the tactical errors of the battle of the beaches to those of the Somme.
On 28 November, Dougherty put his ideas into practice. Heavy aerial bombardment preceded a fresh Australian attack. Twelve fighters each dropped a 300-pound bomb on Gona; Flying Fortresses released eight 500-pound bombs. For two days the Australians pressed toward the Japanese bunkers. Two battalions8 approached from the east, two more from the south and west.9 For two days they attacked—moving to the edge of the bunker fields, then charging through smokescreens.
Poor patrolling, nightmarish terrain and stalwart defence thwarted these efforts. From the east, the 2/14th Battalion waded through waist-deep swamp. Heavy Japanese firing, just before dark, pinned them down. In the confusion, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Challen, the battalion’s new commander, ordered his men to disperse into the brackish water as bullets whizzed overhead and pelted the sludge. Up ahead, intense machine-gun fire cut down his forward patrols, killing or wounding sixteen men. Darkness shut down the attempted advance, and by 2.00 a.m. 32 men were dead or missing in the swamp. Soldiers from an unseen Japanese bunker near Small Creek, 500 yards east of Gona Mission, had ambushed his men. In this unmapped region, reconnaissance was flawed, and not every bunker could be accounted for.
Colonel Cooper’s 2/27th Battalion was ordered to run the gauntlet of a ‘funnel’ of firm ground leading directly into the enemy’s machine-gun nests in the heart of Gona village. The charge was fatally delayed by a navigation error, and Japanese machine-guns pinned Cooper’s men where the jungle met the sand. Some men broke from the forest and raced up the beach, straight into Japanese guns. A few reached the village, but were forced back; 55 men died in this attempt that gained no ground and scarcely dented the resistance.
The suicidal charges were ordered not by Vasey, but handed down from the top—from MacArthur and Blamey—who were answerable for failure with their jobs. Cooper tried to resist what he saw as mindless carnage. But his repeated requests to harass and starve the enemy rather than waste Australian lives were dismissed. One terse reply ran: ‘Canberra must have news of a clean-up and have it quick or we will both go by the boot.’10 This has been attributed to Vasey, though it sounds uncharacteristically self-serving. It seems more likely to have originated at GHQ in Brisbane. Either way, rarely has a commander’s sense of self-preservation so cravenly trampled on the lives of his men.
The Koitaki factor ignited a suicidal courage in the Australians during the attacks in early December. They hurled themselves at the Japanese with a ferocity comparable to the enemy’s ‘human bullets’. Officers charged into the breach with their men. Privates Maurice Valli and George Thompson and Captain Treacy (who had earlier relayed Buckler’s plea for help in the mountains) were among those who dashed along the beach, firing their Brens from the hip; all were shot dead. Captain Joe Cuming and his second-in-command, Captain Justin Skipper, of the 2/27th, were found dead at the foot of a tree, ringed by spent cartridges and Japanese dead. Lieutenant Charles White and Lieutenant George Hicks of the 2/16th both died leading their men into battle.
Not all attacks ended with a swag of posthumous citations. Private Jack Breakey took the lead in blasting into Gona village, after which, forced back, and with his platoon reduced to six men, he swam Gona Creek with four of the wounded and then swam back under fire to retrieve a dying sergeant. For his efforts, Breakey won a Military Medal. Another was Sergeant Reg Roach, of a transport platoon, who, within five days, led a dawn attack, night patrol and machine-gun raiding party, in the course of which he dragged a severely wounded warrant officer to safety and silenced two enemy machine-guns. He, too, received a Military Medal; as did Private Dickenson, who succeeded in killing four Japanese in a Gona hut ‘with complete disregard for his own safety’. Though badly wounded, Dickenson ‘stood his ground until the order for withdrawal was given’. During a charge across the village of Gona, a platoon led by Lieutenant Leo Mayberry wiped out five Japanese machine-gun posts, for which Mayberry was awarded the Military Cross. Notwithstanding their losses, the 21st Brigade managed to capture a wide section of beach between Gona and Sanananda.11
The Koitaki factor played itself out with tragic results. The Australians demonstrated a willingness to die on the Japanese scale, as the order to charge enemy bunker fields exacted a terrific casualty rate. Competent, decent commanders resisted this wanton waste of their men; they were removed, and their careers shattered, as Honner wrote.12 It was as though the charge of cowardice pursued their men with the relentless momentum of the Furies’ in a Greek tragedy. Within five days of fighting at Gona, the 21st Brigade lost 340 men out of 800, with no clear result. The 2/16th and 2/27th battalions were so weak they were amalgamated into a composite unit, under Lieutenant-Colonel Caro.
Though numbers of dead were small, the casualty rate matched that of the huge pitched battles of Europe and later in the Pacific. It was seriously distracting at New Guinea Force HQ. Vasey complained that the casualty rate was too high. The commanders were sending men to die for no reason. Had the Somme taught them nothing? What was the point of charging machine-guns over open ground? But what could they do? Any break in the offensive, any relaxation, let the Japanese regroup and land reinforcements. The prospect of failure met with menacing impatience in Port Moresby and Brisbane. On the 2nd, staring down the muzzle of defeat, three Australian brigadiers—Eather, Dougherty and Porter—met at Gona HQ. They decided once more to throw all they had at the machine-gun nests. They didn’t have much. The 25th Brigade had been relieved, with most of the men sick, wounded or exhausted.
The brigadiers needed fresh troops. They decided on one battalion then resting in Port Moresby: the 39th. Once more this extraordinary militia unit, first to fight the Japanese at Kokoda, then to hold the enemy for three weeks at Isurava—and leavened with 100 of the better troops of the 53rd—returned to support the Second Australian Imperial Force. The poignancy of militia coming to the relief of a near-spent AIF brigade was eminently satisfying for Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, who remained the commander of this unbreakable unit.