‘Gona’s Gone!’
—Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, commander, 39th Battalion
Night lent a freakish quality to the Gona battleground. The field came alive with crawling men—wounded trying to crawl back to cover; stretcher parties trying to find the wounded. Allied sentries sat in trenches filled with rainwater, or on little platforms suspended above the swamp. They waited in the pitch-black for signs of enemy night patrols, which sometimes leapt out of the void with flashing bayonets and awful cries.
Most nights the armies eyeballed one another in the sodden darkness, trying to stay awake. Distant bursts of machine-gun rattled the silence; while overhead, Allied aircraft buzzed the coast and fired great orange flares that ‘illuminated the sea and the beaches so that every feature seemed to stand out like an object on a cinema screen’.1 These ‘special effects’ were to throw light on enemy barges attempting to land reinforcements, which were promptly bombed. Occasionally, as on 2 December, a low-flying Allied pilot strafed the Australians in error.
It was during this state of ‘bewildered desperation’ that the 39th joined the first concentrated attack, on 6 December. It was an unmitigated disaster—and told Honner all he needed to know about the chaos at the front: one patrol were up to their shoulders in swamp when the Japanese nailed them; enemy machine-guns then spied Honner’s main attack force, under Captain Bidstrup, whose men lumbered into sight through the smoke of bombardment and were shot to pieces. Some, riddled with wounds, lay with unexploded grenades in their hands near enemy positions. One lad, shot twice in the legs, appealed to Lieutenant Doug McClean: ‘Sir,’ he said, crying, ‘everytime I move some bastard shoots me.’ He was eighteen. Fifty-eight were killed or wounded, and for the rest of his life Honner remembered that incident with self-loathing—such was his duty of care to his troops. He resolved to force a change of tactics.
Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, schoolteacher, linguist, lawyer and classics scholar, was that rare spirit: a latter-day Renaissance man, with a touch of knight-errant, who despised war but knew that it had to be won. He gave everything to win it. The citation to the Military Cross awarded for his leadership in the Middle East, North Africa and Greece, reads: ‘Captain Honner is the Best Company Commander I have seen in this or the last war.’
He led a company in Crete where he eluded the Germans and escaped the besieged island aboard the submarine Torquay. ‘He was the coolest man I ever saw,’ was the gratifying verdict of one private soldier whose view reflected the consensus.2 Potts thought Honner’s only fault was that ‘he was too bloody brave’. Honner led from the front—in the bravest, tactical sense of personally observing enemy positions for himself before sending in his men. In battle he could be dogmatic and infuriatingly stubborn—surely qualities in a man who always applied his formidable brain to the problem.
At heart a romantic, deeply religious soul—he never missed church—Honner loved Shakespeare as a boy, and in his later years wrote lyrical love poetry with not the faintest hint between the lines that the poet had led the 39th at Isurava, Gona and Sanananda. They were poems of love, not of war. But Honner also wrote of war in a way that no Australian soldier has before or since.
Dougherty rallied his men for the last push: four battalions—numbering less than a thousand men—were to attack in force; the 39th, the freshest, had the vital job of raiding the village from the south. If they failed, the Australians failed; Gona would have to be blockaded, and starved into submission.
Honner had a pivotal role in planning the attack. In a word, he delayed it. He rejected air bombardment as ineffectual and inaccurate; he refused to attack at night because it led to chaos. He favoured high noon. And he came up with a brilliant innovation: the bombs were fused to detonate eighteen inches underground, in order to maximise havoc in the bunkers. The underground blasts would reduce shrapnel, and allow the men to move right up to the threshold of the bombardment and charge the bewildered enemy.
For a few days a stalemate ensued. The two armies threw everything at each other—in places 30 to 50 yards apart. The Australians’ mortar fire came perilously close to hitting their own men because the trajectory was near vertical.
A leaflet drop preceded the bombardment, on 8 December, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Unarmed and acquiescent prisoners were depicted above the caption: ‘This is to inform the Emperor’s soldiers that thousands of their comrades have already laid down their arms, so you too should surrender.’ It was ignored.*
A Japanese soldier in a trench near Basabua wrote: ‘Anniversary of the Greater East Asian War. Never thought I would be spending this day in a bomb shelter in New Guinea.’
At 12.30 shells rained down on the fragment of enemy-held coastline. The 39th Battalion was sent in fifteen minutes later—precisely two minutes before the artillery stopped firing. ‘I expected [the troops] would take…a minute to reach the enemy and have a minute amongst them with our artillery still firing,’ wrote Honner.3 His plan relied on highly accurate shelling, just beyond the threshold of the advancing troops; hence the use of ground artillery, not air bombardment. The shells did as he intended, bursting a foot and a half below ground, where they fell. The blast, a mini-earthquake, shook the bunkers to their foundations. Simultaneously, the Australian infantry charged.
One company crept right up to the edge of the bunker field, and fired as the bombs burst underground, then silenced the bunkers, one by one. ‘Our troops commenced the massacre of the still stunned and confused enemy…before our artillery fire ceased,’ Honner wrote. ‘They overwhelmed post after post while the enemy were still…reeling.’4 A platoon led by Lieutenant Hugh Dalby killed 38 defenders and captured four machine-guns. Sergeant Stan Ellis wiped out four bunkers single-handedly. The Australians had, at last, matched brain with brawn: Honner’s brilliant tactical mind with his now veteran militiamen.
One by one the pillboxes were grenaded, and the fleeing occupants cut down. Corporal James Truscott, a quiet, deeply religious Victorian farmer, demonstrated how this was done. After five minutes of concentrated shelling, Truscott rushed into the settling smoke with mortar and rifle grenades. His men ‘finally gouged the defenders out of their holes…and shot them down as they fled along the beach or swam wildly out to sea’.5
From 3 to 7 December, Australian units were constantly running at enemy bunkers. Severe casualties—dead, wounded and sick—reduced the 21st Brigade swiftly to a shell force. By 8 December the 2/16th Battalion had only 104 fit men, from a full strength of 800 four months earlier.
By the second week of December, the bunker fields at Gona began to collapse. Surviving Japanese troops appealed to the gods, and to the Shinto spirit. One unknown diarist, prostrate in a Gona bunker, wrote on the 7th: ‘We were heavily shelled by the enemy…It was only through the protection from the gods that some of us were safe…We could not tell if we could survive tomorrow…I thought of my beloved wife as well as my younger brothers and sisters…Everyone expected to die at any moment.’6 Indeed, they were short of ammunition and grenades, and their daily rice allowance was a quarter of the standard ration. Of the 2500 troops hospitalised, 20 to 30 died a day during December.
General Herring’s long, unofficial ‘sitreps’ to Blamey—candid private letters between old friends—conveyed the triumphal mood among the Australian troops. ‘The enemy garrison or what is left of Gona must be having a rotten time’, he wrote on the 6th. ‘Our fellows on the west of the creek pick off about six Japs a day…They look on the successful hitting of a Jap in the same way one might regard the bowling over of a rabbit…’7
A narrow corridor, barely 200 yards wide, across a shallow swamp, offered an apparent escape route inland for some 800 to 900 Japanese troops trapped at Gona. About a hundred tried to run the gauntlet that night, and were destroyed by Australian machine-guns. Another group stole along the shore, and were slaughtered on the sand; the survivors plunged into the water, trying to swim around Basabua Point. They were shot in the water. ‘Swimming for the open sea…phosphorescent water boiled up around them and guided the merciless Australian fire.’8
Gona fell on 9 December. The 39th broke into the village and occupied it; two battalions of the 21st Brigade advanced along the beach from the west. Early that morning, Australian forces held the beaches, from Gona Creek all the way to Basabua Point.9 That day Honner wired his famous message to HQ: ‘Gona’s Gone!’ It headlined an Australian newspaper.
Herring sent a delighted message to Blamey: ‘GONA GONE cheered us all mightily, & we are planning ways of making the Japs who are left hate the war more and more.’10
Canberra promptly congratulated Blamey on the victory, which owed little to Blamey’s tactics of hurling men at machine-guns over open ground, and everything to Honner’s smart innovations. But such distinctions eluded Canberra’s politicians—Curtin never involved himself in tactical detail, unlike Churchill.
It is fascinating to observe Blamey going about his business at this time. No doubt he was doing everything in his power to deliver the result Canberra wanted. To this end, he had an eye for the bigger picture, the unseen opportunity. Consider his letter to Fred Shedden, secretary to the War Cabinet, on the day Gona fell: ‘I am particularly anxious to wind up this campaign in order to get down to discuss the immediate utilisation of the resources of this place. It hurts one to see rubber trees…and not to be able to bring them into production.’11
On a day in which hundreds of his men lay dead or wounded, Blamey busied himself with schemes for harvesting the Papuan rubber crop. Other generals were capable of entering thoughtfully into the world of the ordinary troops—Vasey and Allen, for example. But Blamey remained coldly remote. A greater man, perhaps, might have thought to acknowledge the sacrifice of Gona before lunging for the trophy. But then, a greater man might have missed the chance of bringing the rubber crop into production, something that would aid the Allied war effort. The war effort needed men like Blamey.
And, of course, Blamey had an immense amount to do. He was under great strain. He had strategic responsibility for a vast area, which is often forgotten by troops absorbed in their own exigencies. His letter to Herring on 16 December is revealing of this broader perspective: ‘I had a very interesting visitor today, General Van Der Graff, who commanded the division that landed on GUADALCANAL…He told me that the Americans had cleared the whole of the Southern part of the Island and there only remains 14 miles…on the Northern end to clear…’12 Thirty thousand Japanese troops were killed or wounded in that raid.
It took a further week to destroy the Japanese between Gona and Haddy’s village; by 20 December, the Australians had driven the enemy as far as Amboga River. Allied pilots had rebuffed Japanese attempts to land reinforcements—six destroyers carrying 800 troops were sunk or forced back to Rabaul on the 7th.
Yet, the Japanese had successfully landed more men at Mambare Bay, on the 12th, confirming intelligence taken from Japanese bodies.13 The remarkable Major-General Oda Kensaku, Horii’s successor as commander of the Nankai Shitai, was among them. He bypassed Gona and made for the main Japanese HQ at Sanananda, where he took control of the remaining Japanese forces from Yokoyama.
In the end, 750 Japanese were left to fight west of Gona. Of these, 400 were survivors of Horii’s retreat, and hence useless due to their physical state. The rest fought with their usual suicidal energy.
There were moments of black farce in the dying days. On one occasion three Japanese officers, including a lieutenant-colonel and a major, were seen strolling down a track with their towels for a swim. They were shot dead on sight by Australian scouts. At Basabua, a Japanese soldier sank his teeth into an Australian corporal’s face and bit off a ‘large piece of flesh’.14 The corporal became the only known soldier to be classified ‘BIA’—Bitten in Action.
Japanese troops who were not killed committed suicide or tried frantically to escape. A few surrendered. Their last stand at Gona inflicted 129 Australian casualties, of whom the 39th Battalion accounted for 107 (31 dead, 74 wounded, two missing). In two weeks of fighting, the 39th Battalion lost 65 per cent—228—of its 350 men. And by early January, the 2/14th Battalion managed to field just 21 forward troops from a usual strength of about 800. Such was the devastation wrought by war and disease.
‘As far as we were concerned, the battle was now over,’ wrote Private Jack Boland of the 39th. The few survivors trudged back to their HQ and were airlifted to Port Moresby. A satisfying irony was that these men—so derided when first sent to defend Australia in July—had played a critical part in the destruction of one of the toughest pockets of Japanese resistance. They became the ‘pivot on which the capture of Gona finally swung’.15
The scene of the aftermath at Gona defies the descriptive powers of those who weren’t there; Major Bill Russell was:
The headless palm trunks and few poles of houses [were] reminiscent of pictures of the battlefields of France in the First World War. The heavy rains seemed not to be able to wash away the stench of death. Imagination gave the drinking water, obtained by digging sumpholes, a flavour which the chlorine tablets couldn’t hide. The water in the great craters made in the soft earth by the earlier bombings and in the sago swamp beyond, was oily and putrid. When the sea rose before the wind it uncovered for reburial those whom the enemy had buried too close to the water. At night, when the heavy rains blotted out all vision…and the sea blotted out all sound, it seemed that nature wished to cover her shame. Only in the morning, when in the rain-washed air the great cross which had survived the destruction of Gona Mission gleamed white in the sunlight…then there seemed room for hope and faith that such sacrifice could not be in vain.16
It was ‘a shambles with dead Japs and Australians everywhere’, wrote the 2/16th diarist.17 Bloated corpses bobbed to the surface of the swamps and lagoons—some ‘nudged past us’ when the men tried to brush their teeth, observed Honner.18
The Japanese had used bodies as sandbags. Half-submerged limbs provided firing steps; corpses had been ‘strewn along the parapet as protection against…sniping’.19 Rice supplies, green with mould, were found stacked between rows of the dead, for added protection; to escape the intolerable smell, the Japanese had fought in their gas masks. The air itself was ‘sickening to breathe’.20
The Australians cleared Gona with appreciable haste. In two days they buried 638 Japanese corpses. Several hundred more were interred along the beachfront. Herring told Blamey: ‘It would appear the [Japanese] garrison must have been close to 1000, which makes the achievement of our fellows very satisfactory & the losses suffered by us well justified.’21 Many survivors disagreed, including Ralph Honner, for whom the battle of Gona was a shocking waste of young men’s lives. Frank McLean of the 2/27th Battalion, seriously wounded at Gona, was one of many troops traumatised by the experience: ‘For many years…I could not sleep, recalling this one real experience in my life,’ he said.22 No Japanese troops lived to remember it. The Government congratulated Blamey on the victory, who replied that it was ‘necessary to kill every Jap in this area before this was accomplished’.23