‘You will be in action and tomorrow night you might be dead’
—General Blamey to militia troops on the eve of Sanananda
The memory of Sanananda lingers in the minds of veterans with the immediacy of a dreadful dream. Singular details—the whiteness of a skull in a village hut; endless mosquitoes; swamp water lapping a gun platform—tend to fix in their memories, and augment the misery of the unsaid, or the unrecalled.
The loss of Sanananda–Giruwa, the main Japanese HQ on the Papuan coast, signalled a larger defeat for the Imperial Army: it was a total moral and spiritual collapse. A raw honesty pervades Japanese diaries during this final maelstrom. The more perceptive troops comprehended the scale of the disaster engulfing them, and charted their own destruction with scorching intensity. Others seemed incapable of comprehending failure, and lapsed into a state of inertia and denial. The unthinkable was happening: the army of the gods was being systematically wiped out for the first time in the Pacific War and, indeed, in Japanese history. There was no reference point in the troops’ training for such an event. Men were staggering about without food, and officers abandoning their men and ordering the wounded and sick to fight on.
The high-flown language of General Adachi Hatazo’s ‘message to the troops’ of 26 November horribly demonstrated the gulf between High Command and the men. It had no purchase with the starving ranks on the Papuan beaches: ‘The flower of the army and navy,’ Adachi declared in a bulletin from Rabaul, ‘having organised like iron…with a spirit like rock, is now trying to smash the offensive power of the US…It is truly said that the eyes and ears of the world are upon this fight…What honour you have been given! Isn’t this the highest ambition a man can have?…Now you men with the high fighting spirit! Show the tradition of the glorious Imperial Army in the battlefields…by a firm unity like iron and stone.’1
Sanananda was a bizarre confrontation. The battleground ‘looked like a beaded necklace, and was one of the most freakish dispositions of forces in military history’.2 Picture a raised, narrow road running north–south from Sanananda village, the main Japanese HQ on the coast, to Soputa, a few miles inland, where the Allied armies were massed. Along this road place several Japanese camps, ringed with bunkers and trenches; intersperse these with Australian and American positions, hastily fortified.
A jungle swamp lay on either side of the road, so the camps tended to be on islands of firm ground. At points, the swamp rose and fell with the tide, and the jungle closed around the road like a cowl.
The terrain, wrote a disgusted Lieutenant-Colonel Allchin of the Australian 2/10th Battalion, was ‘nothing but dirty, filthy, typhus-ridden jungle and swamp…walls of green jungle foliage with its drawling roots reaching out into the stagnant pools infested with mosquitoes…’3
Sanananda Road did indeed resemble a necklace or chain, with the difference that the links, instead of connecting, were constantly trying to blow one another apart. Bloody skirmishes flared along the road as patrols tried to reinforce or resupply their troops. To do this they had to creep around enemy camps under the cover of jungle. It was a deadly game of leapfrog. Supplies were hauled up, and wounded carried out, through the trackless swamps on the roadsides. Even by New Guinean logistical standards, it was a unique challenge.
Native carriers were unavailable; they could not work in combat zones, and refused to carry corpses. So the troops acted as stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded through enemy-held territory. Captain John James spent Christmas Day getting out thirteen wounded, for eight of whom rough stretchers were made. Sometimes the stretchers collapsed, depositing wounded men into the swamp. The harrowing journey exhausted the padre of the 2/7th Cavalry Regiment, Chaplain Francis Hartley, who described the experience:
Four men were required for each stretcher. These bearers had to carry their arms in their free hands…There were times when, to our strained hearing, the noise along the track sounded like a herd of elephants crashing through the undergrowth…
Whenever there was a stop for rest, armed men would penetrate the jungle off the track and watch against a possible ambush.
Around each perimeter the dead served as signposts to approaching stretcher parties. Thus Chaplain Hartley welcomed the gory scene, as he approached the American-held camp called Huggins’ roadblock, of ‘mangled and rotting Japanese corpses scattered everywhere. Blank-eyed skeletons stared…from beneath broken shelters. Bones of horses with their saddles and harness rotting around them shone white as the morning sun peering through the creepers caught them in their beams.’ It meant that Huggins’ was a hundred yards ahead.4
The Allied plan was simple: to destroy the southernmost enemy positions around the heavily defended junction of the Sanananda and Killerton tracks; then spread out around Huggins’ roadblock, which was halfway to Sanananda village. A great envelopment of the Japanese would ensue, as the Australian and American armies closed on the last enemy bunker fields from the east, west and south. ‘Our objective,’ noted Blamey, ‘is the seizure of the coastal area with the immediate objective of preventing reinforcements landing.’5
The ultimate goal was the elimination of every last vestige of the Imperial Army. The Japanese soldier ‘has a breaking point,’ said Vasey. He ordered ‘the complete and utter destruction of the enemy in the Sanananda area at the earliest possible moment’.6
Blamey proposed a leaflet drop, for New Year’s Day, to give the Japanese ‘an opportunity to surrender’.7 His staff drafted the following:
To the Japanese Commander –
Buna has fallen and Gona has fallen. The position held by Japanese troops has been contracted to a small area which is now completely under direct artillery fire from our positions.
Japanese forces are now isolated and can no longer obtain reinforcements of supplies. Further resistance can only lead to unnecessary bloodshed. To avoid this you are urged to surrender.
If you are not prepared to accept this invitation…I am prepared to allow you to remove your sick and wounded from the area under safe conduct…
If you desire to accept this offer your representatives should proceed southwards on the Sanananda–Soupta [sic] Road starting…at 0900 tomorrow morning. The party should be unarmed and should consist of not more than three officers. They should carry a large white flag…
Leaflets dropped over Gona and Buna in November had had little effect. It required more than Allied confetti to capture the mind of the world’s most indoctrinated army. In any case, MacArthur discouraged the leaflet idea. He bluntly told Blamey:
I am not in favour of attempting any negotiation with the Japanese in the Sanananda area. If they wish to surrender they are at liberty to initiate such procedure under the customs of war.
Their hospitals, if marked, will be carefully respected by our troops. If not marked the responsibilities are theirs. My campaign experience in the Philippines convinces me that it is utterly impossible to negotiate with this enemy and that any attempt to do so will be twisted to our disadvantage. I believe the present operations should go to a definite and positive conclusion unless the enemy initiates unconditional surrender.
Most cordially, DOUGLAS MACARTHUR8
His cordiality was severely strained. Deep friction arose between Blamey and MacArthur in January. It had hit a raw nerve in late December, when MacArthur recommended that a fresh US regiment be sent to relieve the American troops at Buna, and not to Sanananda, as previously agreed.
Blamey refused. Surely it was the Americans’ turn to relieve the Australians. The Australians at Sanananda were a skeletal force, many of whom had been driven to fight for almost five months. One battalion had an effective strength of 55, and another 89 (a battalion normally has 1000 men). The militia were on their knees. And the 16th Brigade—veterans of Eora Creek and Gorari—had 198 men left out of an initial strength of 1700; of these, 922 had been evacuated sick,9 and virtually all of Cullen’s battalion were wounded, dead or in hospital.
Bill Jenkins, a sergeant in the 16th Brigade, recalled the sense of careless numbness felt by the men during this final phase of the battle. As he waded through a swamp, he remembered, ‘You didn’t care what happened to you at that stage, you were so buggered. You didn’t care what happened to you. From my battalion of 700—less than 50 were active.’10
Indeed the quality of the Australian troops then fighting at Sanananda was far worse than these statistics suggest. Seriously sick men were being ordered into battle. Hitherto unpublished reports reveal that the 21st Australian Infantry Brigade—veterans of Kokoda, Isurava, Brigade Hill, Ioribaiwa, Gona and now Sanananda—were fighting with temperatures of 104 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Those with acute malaria were refused evacuation.
‘I have been obliged,’ wrote the helpless commander of one battalion,11 in his ‘Most Secret’ report, ‘to keep men in front line posts for periods up to 3 days with high fever. Some of these men even suffer with hallucinations caused by their fevers and consequent delirium, making them most unreliable and actually a danger to their sub-units…’12 He urgently request their relief.
Another top secret dossier revealed that 32 men with chronic malaria and other illnesses had been sent into battle. The authors, Captain Roderick Strang and Major Frank Sublet, recommended their immediate evacuation. ‘Already some of the men have died from scrub typhus fever…The matter is urgent.’13
So much for the state of the combined 2/16th and 2/27th Battalion; but during December, three Australian militia battalions14 were also sent to Sanananda, led by Brigadier Selwyn Porter. Incredibly, one of these was the 39th, veterans of Kokoda, Isurava and Gona. Nothing more poignantly illustrated the despair at the front than this: on 21 December they hobbled up to Huggins’ roadblock on the Sanananda Track to relieve an American regiment.
This wasn’t relief; it was a case of one group of near-broken men replacing another. Some Australians didn’t have boots: they wore bandages around their ‘red-raw and white-swollen’ feet;15 all were sick with dysentery or malaria. The Americans were no better off: of the 1400 sent to Sanananda in November, less than 200 men remained ‘effective’ by mid-December.16
Vasey, who’d led the Allied troops for three months—longer than any other commander at the front—noted their pitiful numbers and wretched condition, and ordered the 39th not to attempt ‘any large-scale operations’.17 In this statement of the obvious lay a seam of compassion. Nor did Vasey deserve his new nickname, ‘Butcher George’. He openly resisted more frontal assaults, and walked out of at least one officers’ meeting in disgust.
Vasey’s frustration erupted with a volcanic critique sent to Herring on 24 December, after more failures at the front: ‘My experience of the past two months,’ he wrote, ‘convinces me that for success in jungle warfare, such as is taking place in the Sanananda–Soputa area, the first requisites…are high morale, a high standard of training, both individual and collective…and superiority of numbers. I regret to have to report that none of these conditions is present in my command.’18
How did they fight? Several militia attacks failed, or dissolved in confusion. One Captain Horace Henderson found himself alone in no-man’s-land. He died because ‘the remainder of his party left him to the task without aiding him’, wrote Porter.19 The 2/7th Cavalry Regiment fared better, but could not break the Japanese hold on the Sanananda Road.
The affrighted ranks nonetheless threw up extraordinary instances of individual courage. Two cases were exceptional: Captain Henry Cobb, a saddler of Caboolture, Queensland, attempted to crawl along a shallow drain running parallel to the road. The Japanese had this guarded; most of Cobb’s men died and he disappeared. The Allies later discovered his body. Mortally wounded, he’d buried his haversack containing valuable maps and documents and then bled to death on top of the burial site.
An undecorated corporal, Ed Connell, a butter grader of the tiny town of Monto, Queensland, was wounded in the open. He yelled at his advancing comrades to leave him alone—in case the Japanese shot them too. But the Australians kept approaching. So Connell ‘raised himself from the ground with one last effort to draw the [enemy] fire…deliberately threw himself into it and fell dead’.20
In a grim echo of the Koitaki factor, the 53rd Battalion21 was determined to erase the memory of Isurava. What they gave in courage they lacked in experience. After surprising themselves by capturing a Japanese position on the road, they were pushed off it because they seemed unable to use their grenades. Herring blithely remarked: ‘This battalion would appear to require still a good deal of training.’22 Other militia battalions fought with the same untutored courage.
Everyone criticised their lack of training, but no one seemed prepared to do much about it, far less accept responsibility. It was always someone else’s job. This was a constant theme throughout this miserable war. Did it vex Herring’s conscience that commanders such as he were ultimately responsible for preparing young men for battle? If so, it was too late; the men were dying.
In one day at Sanananda, 7 December, Porter’s militia brigade lost 138 killed and wounded, leaving him with an effective strength of 650 (his brigade started at about a third of its normal size). The overall Allied casualty rate soared. Along the Sanananda Road, in December alone, 1932 Australians were removed from battle—dead, wounded or sick. This, from a combined force of about 2500.
Near the end of December, the Australian militiamen at Sanananda were branded ‘incapable of offensive action’, according to another ‘Most Secret’ report: ‘The trained and resolute leaders have become casualties, and those remaining are not up to the standard of the units.’ Seven were arrested ‘on charges of cowardice and there were numerous cases in other units’.23
Herein lay the blackest farce of Sanananda: severely ill, poorly trained men were threatened with arrest for failing to fight. No top brass were officially indicted for this gross neglect of the troops, the direct result of which was wholesale slaughter, incapacitation and mental collapse.
Consider Brigadier Selwyn Porter. Porter wrote of his own men at Sanananda:
I regret to report that [the militia] are NOT fit for war under the present conditions…What success these units achieve…is due to a percentage of personnel who are brave in the extreme; and, is the result of unskilled aggression. Unfortunately, the latter personnel have been almost exterminated [or] are likely to be exterminated…The remainder lack confidence in themselves and their weapons, and they lack discipline, due entirely to lack of training and, in some cases, cowardice…24
But Porter was their commander. It was he who nominally led them into battle. It is difficult to conceive of a more disturbing example of unwitting self-incrimination.
Or take Blamey’s pep talk to the militia on the eve of Sanananda. The day before they left their Port Moresby barracks, Blamey told the militia units: ‘You will be in action and tomorrow night you might be dead.’25 It was a statement of singular callousness, even by Blamey’s vigorous standards. This is not a judgment of today’s armchair strategists, or media bleeding hearts. The troops and officers of the time physically recoiled from the man. Colonel Stan Sly described Blamey’s remark as a ‘shocking theme’26 with which to send inexperienced troops into battle.
It is intriguing to observe Blamey in his extremity. The Allied land commander undoubtedly had an immense amount on his mind at this time. But his jottings and letters, of which the selection here is merely of rich anecdotal interest, reveal a man at once relaxed and convivial—indeed, one might say, indecently jolly.
He was immensely pleased with himself, of course, and in rude good health, boasting to his brother: ‘Even here in this tropical area I find that men ten years younger cannot pace it with me.’27
There was Blamey the budding entrepreneur, fascinated by the possibilities of local horticulture. Alerted to a new vegetable strain, he found a colleague’s suggestion ‘re Blue Boiler Pea’ very interesting, and the issue of a vegetable after germination ‘a new proposal to me’.28
And there was the caring Blamey—at least where his mates were concerned. Herring thanked him on 9 January for the delivery of medicated soap and new shoes.
None of these things—Blamey’s Christmas turkey, special treats, or fascination with orchids and blue boiler peas—were unreasonable; they certainly weren’t illegal. Blamey felt he deserved his perks and saw no reason not to pursue his self-indulgences. Their interest lies in the context. He wrote these snippets—of which there are many examples—during the bloodiest confrontation of the entire campaign. Other commanders, notably Eichelberger and Vasey, were pointedly not self-indulgent or ostentatious. They felt a fellowship of suffering with the troops. Blamey, on the other hand, seemed not to care: a parody of the blundering general, he emerges more Blimpish than Colonel Blimp.
And then he would do something exceptional—such was Blamey’s peculiar genius for doing the unexpected. He got the message about the troops’ woeful condition, and demanded their immediate relief, forcing MacArthur to back-pedal on the relief of the Americans at Buna. The supreme commander had to mollify his Australian Second-in-Command by saying that his recommendation to send fresh American troops to Buna was advisory only, and not an order. MacArthur did not ‘for a moment agree’29 that he was unduly interfering with land strategy, Blamey’s domain. It was agreed: the Americans would go to Sanananda.
And so nearly 4000 fresh soldiers of the 163rd Regiment30—well-trained, disciplined combat troops under Colonel Jens Doe—were sent to Soputa, the starting point for the final assault in Papua along the wretched Sanananda Road. On 2 January they were joined by Wootten’s 18th Brigade, then thundering along the coast after their victory at Buna. The combined force swung all the strength they had at the last Japanese stronghold by the sea.
Vasey sat and waited for their arrival. He had exhausted his infantry; not a single unit could mount an attack. So a few days of inaction followed, as the American regiment and Wootten’s men assembled.
The commanders met on the 4th to hammer out the final plan for the defeat of the Japanese in Papua. Four generals—Vasey, Eichelberger, Herring, and Lieutenant-General Sir Frank Berryman (Eichelberger’s chief of staff)—and one brigadier, Wootten, sat around Herring’s tent at Dobodura.
They had no accurate estimate of the size of the army they faced, such was the woeful state of intelligence on the enemy: ‘we did not know whether there were one thousand Japs at Sanananda or five thousand’, wrote Eichelberger soon after the meeting.31
They swiftly agreed on a plan. It envisaged a double envelopment of Sanananda village. It was to be a joint American–Australian action, led by the Australian 18th Brigade, supported by MP3 tanks of the 2/6th cavalry, and the American 163rd and 127th infantry regiments—in sum, about 4000 men moving through jungle and swamp.
‘New plans were again made to end the ghastly nightmare which the Sanananda affair had become,’ the Australian official historian observed. In a striking summary of the campaign, he wrote, ‘The primaeval swamps, the dank and silent bush, the heavy loss of life, the fixity of purpose of the Japanese for most of whom death could be the only ending, all combined to make this struggle so appalling that most of the hardened soldiers who were to emerge from it would remember it unwillingly as their most exacting experience of the whole war.’32