The Japanese ‘lifted brutality to a higher level’
—Mark Johnston, military historian
Allied troops silenced the last pockets of Japanese resistance at Sanananda with unsparing thoroughness. This was hardly resistance: the enemy were reduced to a few hundred tottering, barely human, beings who waved their guns or swords in the vague direction of the advancing Allies. Many were partially blind, a symptom of disease and starvation—the ‘fog of war’ had a literal as well as metaphorical dimension along this wretched shoreline. The coast was strewn with corpses and the air thick with the stench of putrefaction. Burial parties worked in respirators. The gruesome clean-up took until the end of January, under the nervous gaze of Blamey, who made his first trip to the Gona–Buna killing fields on 5 January 1943.
The last days of the Imperial Japanese Army at Sanananda and the nearby Giruwa field hospital is evoked with great courage and honesty in Japanese diaries, written by abandoned troops many of whom were barely able to raise a pencil. Wada recorded that each man’s daily rice ration late in January had been reduced to two teaspoons each, ‘or only half that. There were many days when there wasn’t…a single grain.’ He observed that most of the men felt death was preferable to life: ‘From the point of view of normal society, it was another world, a world beyond all imagination.’1 ‘We are expecting annihilation and do not think of returning home,’ said an unknown Japanese officer on New Year’s Day, 1943.*
Another soldier, Takita Kenji, witnessed the desperate attempts by the wounded to board landing craft. They ‘fell all over each other trying to board, pushing out past the breakers, jostling and crowding each other out’.2
‘I think only of home,’ wrote Kawano Susumu, who was among the last patients to fight at Giruwa. ‘I have hardly eaten for 50 days. I am bony and skinny. I walk with faltering steps. I want to see my children.’ Kawano staggered to the Giruwa field hospital where so many dead lay, ‘I could not even set my foot down.’3
A particularly disturbing account of the end was that of Lieutenant Inagaki Riichi, 27, a naval paymaster and graduate of Tokyo Imperial University. He surrendered near Giruwa. His Australian interrogators described him as a ‘superior type, of good family’. He requested that his answers be kept confidential, on the grounds that if such a report ‘ever reached the Japanese people it would be received with horror’, according to his interrogator. He displayed genuine distress during the interview, of which the Allied report follows:
The PoW admitted that he had spoken with participants in cannibalism among Japanese troops. [They] admitted having eaten flesh from Japanese as well as Australian corpses…
The PoW stated that those who had…participated in cannibalism exhibited extreme and pitiful revulsion of feeling when they realised the full significance of their act. He stated that Japanese troops had been under such conditions that they were not normal human beings at the time…
The PoW described these conditions as: continuous standing in swamp water up to the arm pits, suffering from malaria with 40-degrees centigrade of fever, and such lack of food, particularly vitamin B, and to cause Tori Me (Nyctalopia or Night Blindness).
He stated that in this condition troops were unable to see the plainest object except in broad daylight. They were also deaf and reduced to such a state of delirium that their only reaction was to discharge their rifles in the general direction of any sound they might hear.4
Of the 7000 or so Japanese troops who had participated at some stage in the Sanananda campaign, 1600 were buried by the Allies, 1200 escaped by barge between November and January, 1000 escaped westward to the Kumusi, and about 3200 were unaccounted for—most probably died of disease or wounds in some dreadful jungle hole or in a later battle. To this day Papuans report the recovery of the occasional skeleton emerging from the swamps after heavy rains.
Their annihilation was total. Yet the Imperial Army’s last stand at Sanananda, Buna and Gona must rank among the most courageous, sustained and maddening in the history of warfare, a ‘remarkable feat’ concluded Dudley McCarthy.5 A starving, sick, exhausted army, relying on the most fragile supply line, which seized up altogether in January, reduced a far larger Allied force to a state of ‘baffled impotence’ for three months. This was partly due to the ineffectual American troops; on several occasions, Australian-led offensives were left floundering because the Americans failed to back them up. The Americans’ refusal to fight led Blamey to insist on using exhaused Australian troops, who had already fought across the Owen Stanleys or at Milne Bay. But it was ultimately the astonishing courage and determination of the ordinary Japanese troops on the Papuan beaches which led them to resist the Allies for so long—and renders the memory for some in terms redolent of a ‘Japanese Gallipoli’.
The Japanese deployed 11, 880 troops along the Papuan coast, of whom at least 8000 died, according to Japanese sources.6 Total Japanese war casualties, including wounded and sick, approached 100 per cent on the beaches. In the whole Papuan campaign, the Japanese fielded about 20,000 troops; at least 13,000 of these died, and wounds and disease killed or incapacitated most of the rest. A few thousand escaped and were either killed in later battles in the western Highlands of New Guinea or during the general retreat through the Pacific. Very few actually survived the war—perhaps little more than a hundred.
Horii’s men suffered a near complete loss. A Japanese analysis of the Nankai Shitai’s casualty rate shows that of the original 5586 troops sent from Kochi to Papua (excluding the 41st Regiment and later reinforcements), 5432 were killed in action—a ‘kill rate’ of 97 per cent.7 The 144th Regiment’s 3500 men suffered 3264 deaths, 93 per cent of their men. Shimada, Yamasaki and Imanishi were among the 236 survivors of the 144th Regiment’s participation in the Papuan campaign—three of the two-digit number to return to Japan when the war ended. These included the sad, solitary figure of Colonel Kusunose, earlier encountered waiting forlornly at Kochi station for the ashes of his men to come home before shuffling off to Mount Fuji to starve himself.
The Nankai Shitai were just one unit committed to the larger battle in Papua and New Guinea. In his memoir, Hoshino Kazuo, a staff officer of the 41st Division, wrote that by the end of the war only 600 troops of the division survived out of an original strength of 20,000 men. Of the 200,000 Japanese troops sent to Papua, east and central New Guinea, 10,000 were alive at the end of the war8—95 per cent did not return home.
The ashes of the dead, when available, were sent to Japan. This custom ceased in Papua after 20 November 1942. Dr Sawatari Zengoro, a medical officer taken prisoner at Giruwa, explained to his interrogators that after that date ‘it became impossible in some instances even to bury the dead and no attempt was therefore made to continue cremations’.
‘Whenever practicable an entire body would be cremated, but when this proved impossible, a limb, generally an arm, would be amputated. Even this was not always feasible, in which case a hand only, or even fingers, would be utilized.’9
The ashes would be placed in the mess tin belonging to the deceased and wrapped in paper for transmission to Japan. When actual remains did not exist, the mess tin of the deceased, if available, with his ‘seal’ or identity disc, was sent home.
‘The fact that the tin did not contain ashes was immaterial, and his relations would consider his spirit was therein,’ said Dr Zengoro. He emphasised that the Japanese fully realised that soldiers might be blown to pieces, leaving no trace, and ‘in consequence did not expect actual ashes when advised of a death’. Many empty mess tins turned up in Kochi, and other Japanese cities.
The Allies suffered 7500 killed and wounded at Gona, Buna and Sanananda. The Australian 7th Division lost 5905 men in the month between 25 November and 23 December: killed, wounded, missing, or too sick to fight. Precisely 4273 troops were sent to replace them, but these were swiftly reduced, too. In late December Vasey delayed further attacks at Sanananda because he was bereft of men able to raise a gun.
Of the 14,500 American soldiers who served at Buna and Sanananda, 930 were killed and 1918 wounded—a casualty rate of 20 per cent (double that of Guadalcanal).
Total Allied deaths in Papua numbered 3095 and 5418 were wounded—8513 battle casualties. An additional 8700 US troops succumbed to disease in Papua. This falls slightly short of McCarthy’s estimate10 of total Australian and American casualties—killed and wounded (excluding the sick)—during the campaign, at 8546, of whom the large majority died on the beaches. A total of 625 Australians were killed in the Kokoda Track battles.
During the whole Papuan campaign (including the mountain, Milne Bay and beach phases)—between July 1942 and January 1943—about 22,000 Australian troops served in combat or support roles. Of these, 2165 were killed, 3500 wounded and 15,575 received treatment for disease: in the great majority of cases, for malaria.
Indeed when the sick are added to the figures—the victims of malaria, scrub typhus, dengue fever, dysentery and assorted tropical conditions—almost every Australian and American soldier who participated in the Papuan campaign can be described as a casualty of war. Curtin told Churchill on 17 February 1943, that 23,000 Allied troops were casualties of tropical diseases in Papua. Most Allied units in Papua suffered a casualty rate (i.e. through death, wounds or sickness) of at least 80 per cent—an astonishing figure—and many suffered over 90 per cent. As Eric Bergerud writes, ‘a 30 per cent casualty rate in a combat unit is considered very serious. After that point…a downward spiral in fighting spirit often begins. If a rate surpasses 50 per cent, the unit is flirting with disaster.’11
To visualise the human reality behind these statistics, consider that 91 of the 2/1st Battalion’s 1000 men were left standing after the Kokoda campaign. Their commander, Paul Cullen, was diagnosed with cerebral malaria and had a temperature of 106° degrees Fahrenheit. Most other Australian units were similarly crushed. A tiny trickle of 39th Battalion survivors shuffled out of Sanananda on 23 January: just seven officers and 25 malaria-ridden men, who marched all day to Dobodura and a waiting flight to Port Moresby. Disease was by far the greatest leveller. The Australian dead were usually buried where they fell, or near field hospitals, or in their stretchers, and later exhumed for a proper ceremony at Bomana Cemetery. A tiny number were evacuated by air—a tragic failure of military will.
In fact, the battle casualty rate in Papua was double that of Guadalcanal, which is commonly supposed to have been the more severe campaign. Of the 60,000 American soldiers sent to the Solomon Islands, 1600 were killed and 4245 wounded—a 10 per cent casualty rate. Of course, such crude quantitative judgments mean little to the families and friends of the victims of war. Some perspective is also needed: German 6th Army dead who were caught in the kessel at the concurrent battle of Stalingrad, the worst in the history of human conflict, were 60,000, a 21 per cent casualty rate.12
Allied lives were not lost in vain. The strategic importance of the ‘battle for Australia’, as it is slightly erroneously called, has been grossly underplayed, outside a few Australian texts. Kokoda and Milne Bay—the first land defeat of the Japanese—are not even mentioned in The Oxford Companion to Military History. The Australian troops held back a far larger Japanese force and saved Port Moresby, which was the linchpin to the enemy’s plan to cut off Australia. The victory delivered Australia not from invasion—the Japanese did not plan to occupy the country—but from isolation. This guaranteed the viability of the only American base in the western Pacific.
Indeed, it is hard to see why the war in the Solomons—which ended with the utter defeat of the Japanese on 9 February 1943 after months of desperate fighting—is viewed as the more important battle. Of course, both Papua and Guadalcanal must be taken together as twin prongs in the Japanese attempt to cut off Australia from Hawaii, and lock up the Asia–Pacific. ‘New Guinea was immensely important strategically,’ remarks one Japanese history, ‘as it was on the right flank of this line and should it fall into the hands of the enemy…would give them an easy route to the Philippines and other occupied territories.’13 Guadalcanal’s Henderson airfield was less vital, geographically and strategically, than those in Papua. That is why the Imperial Army were so desperate to hold the Papuan beachhead, in the mad hope of launching a second attempt to invade Port Moresby by land. Had they succeeded, the enemy would have captured both a solid airfield and a huge military base on the very cusp of Australia.
Guadalcanal has understandably received a disproportionate share of (American) historical attention. It involved a far greater number of US troops—mostly marines, the pride of the US land forces—and not a few regiments of demoralised, untrained, national guardsmen whose performance generally proved an embarrassment. Guadalcanal was an American success story (14,000 Japanese were killed in battle), which helped to break the spell of Japanese invincibility; Papua, notwithstanding terrific individual exceptions, was an American humiliation.
For the Australians, however, the Kokoda campaign was something of an epiphany. Their stoicism in battle and agonising mountain withdrawal displayed an inner strength touched by the superhuman. The resistance of the 39th at Kokoda and Deniki, against a force varying from six to ten times their size, was a triumph of hope and courage over experience. The Australian troops’ bloody stand at Isurava threw Horii’s battle plan fatally behind schedule, and helped to cripple his supply lines, which were successively exhausted by Potts’s fighting withdrawal despite his defeat at Brigade Hill. Milne Bay punctured Japanese hopes of opening a second flank, and lifted Allied morale.
The counter-thrust over the mountains showed the Allies on the offensive for the first time in the Pacific War. The troops were a wholly Australian force, who drove a desperately weak enemy back over the same ghastly battlefields through which Potts had come. The defeat of reinforced Japanese units at Eora Creek and Oivi–Gorari destroyed the last vestiges of resistance and forced the enemy back to the beaches. Here, the suicidal courage of the Australian troops thwarted Japanese attempts to reinforce Gona, Buna and Sanananda, MacArthur’s greatest fear.
The Imperial Army resorted to dreamy invocations to the Japanese spirit. Throughout February and March 1943 Japanese sub-commanders were still ordering their battered units to conquer New Guinea and attack Australia. On 25 February, Regimental Commander Endo Torahei in the Trobriand Islands, told his men they were ‘about to enter decisive battle area of the Great East Asia War…There is no greater feat than this…It is our objective to bring the Great East Asia War to a close by suppressing New Guinea and then subjugating Australia, which is our appointed task, thus sealing the fate of our enemy…Therefore, all officers and men, advance vigorously, fight bravely, and plunge into the jaw of death…’14
On a wider level, Curtin, in securing the return of elements of the Second Australian Imperial Force, played a critical role. The prime minister’s refusal to allow their deployment to Rangoon, under overwhelming pressure from Churchill, Roosevelt, Australia’s own diplomats in London and Washington, and most of the local media, was an act of heroic political defiance. It demonstrated Curtin’s single-minded belief in an Australian future that eluded the mediocrities who surrounded him. It envisaged Australia making its own decisions, without relying on the dubious support of the mother country. If ever a nation experienced a moment of political awakening, of independence from a cosseted, obeisant past, this was Australia’s. Curtin brought home the men needed to save the militia at Isurava, and rescued Australia from certain isolation. Of course, the availability of infantry did not assure Australian success: it had to turn to America, not Britain, for deliverance. Yet Britain’s failure to help Australia in her hour of need can hardly be cast as a ‘great betrayal’ when Britain was itself stretched to the limit in confronting both Germany and Japan.
The Australians succeeded despite, not because of, the decisions of High Command. Examples proliferate of the ineptitude and illogic of Allied GHQ in Brisbane: the order to build a road over the mountains, and blow up The Gap (even as MacArthur’s intelligence chief Willoughby insisted that the Japanese couldn’t take Moresby by land); the failure to reconnoitre the Kokoda Track, and train men along it; the dispatch of a mere company of untrained Australian militiamen over the Owen Stanleys—supposedly impregnable to the enemy—thence straight into battle against Japanese shock troops; the gross failure of supply, stranding Potts and Allen in the mountains; the refusal by Blamey to support his own, personally appointed, commanders; and MacArthur’s ego-driven reluctance to acknowledge the fighting qualities of the Australians over the Americans. These were some of the disastrous errors of judgment that plagued this wretched campaign.
On a personal level, generals MacArthur and Blamey revealed themselves to be profoundly flawed individuals, captive to the twin sirens of power and fame. They never saw the dismal place into which they were sending demoralised young troops to die; they undermined their own forward commanders with the envenomed relish of the egomaniac; they rewarded themselves with the baubles of high office, with ostentatious disregard for the suffering of the men.
Apologists, in dwindling numbers, believe Blamey and MacArthur were the great helmsmen of the piece, the leaders who extricated their armies from a desperate situation. Blamey’s own account of the war, written by his PR department, shamelessly portrays him as the man of the moment whose arrival in Port Moresby on 23 September 1942 transformed the Australian war effort. He did no such thing. Rowell and Potts had exhausted their adversaries before Blamey appeared. To Eichelberger’s disgust, MacArthur let it be known that he led from the front—notably at Buna; MacArthur never saw the front.
Indeed, in the eyes of many officers and troops, Blamey and MacArthur actually frustrated rather than furthered the prosecution of the war in Papua. The net effect of their decisions demoralised rather than inspired the men. No soldier and few officers had a good word for either commander. Potts did his best to turn the near annihilation of his undersupplied men into a bitterly fought withdrawal, which sapped Japanese strength; for this Potts was sacked and sent back to Darwin in disgrace, and his men tainted with the charge of cowardice.
Blamey and MacArthur failed to see the point of Potts’s action. They never credited the reasons—an acute lack of supplies, ammunition and troops—for his decision to withdraw. He could have retreated. But they never accepted his action as a delaying tactic, designed to draw out the supply lines of a much larger force that he couldn’t hope to defeat in combat. No government has since recognised Potts’s achievement. No plaque, or rest area, commemorates him. Only the few remaining veterans at diminished reunions, and the pages of battalion histories in libraries, survive to honour Potts as ‘this great fighter’15, ‘the warrior of Kokoda’16 and ‘the fighting brigadier of the Kokoda Trail’.17
Nor would Brisbane see fit to assist Tubby Allen, who was thwarted at every step. Blamey delayed or failed to fulfil Allen’s supply requests. Rowell was repeatedly undermined until he lost his way. It was almost as though Blamey and MacArthur feared their forward commanders would eclipse their own dazzling roles in the rear.
In fact, Allied victory in Papua had little to do with Blamey and MacArthur and everything to do with the prodigious abilities and courage of a few outstanding officers, and the dogged loyalty and bravery of their men: witness Potts and Honner at Isurava, Clowes at Milne Bay, Cullen and Hutchison at Eora Creek, Vasey at Oivi–Gorari, Catterns at Soputa, Honner at Gona, Wootten at Buna–Sanananda, and Eichelberger at Buna. None of these men were satisfied with the way GHQ prosecuted the Papuan war. For many, GHQ and Landops seemed at best ineffectual; at worst, actually disruptive. That criticism found its most bitter expression in Rowell, a proud, talented man, who no doubt deserved to be sacked for withholding, however briefly, intelligence from Blamey. In fairness, Rowell found himself in an intolerable position; Blamey knew his old adversary’s Achilles heel, and was determined to snap it.
These conclusions relate purely to the Kokoda campaign, and not to the wider legacy of the war, and the lives of the men involved. Clearly Blamey had rare skills as a staff officer, and was a great military administrator. He held the Australian army together in the Middle East, and Curtin deeply admired his ability to get things done, not least in organising the return of the AIF to Australia.
McCarthy spoke of Blamey’s ‘unappreciated humanity’.18 Historian Chris Coulthard-Clark concurs with Horner’s generous assessment of Blamey’s contribution:
While [Blamey] had little opportunity to display his ability as a field commander in the Pacific, he quickly grasped the nature of the war: the need to use sea and air, the debilitating effects of climate and terrain, the necessity for thorough training and fitness, and for frequent reliefs for commanders and soldiers, the importance of logistics and the value of accurate intelligence. He did not immerse himself in detail…but he had at times a clear and at times astonishing grasp of detail…Blamey did not waste Australian lives. And he always protected Australian interests…19
If so, one is left wondering why so many of Blamey’s attributes did not emerge in Papua, where the very absence of training and fitness, the failure of logistics, the denial of seapower, and the waste of Australian lives in the beach battles, were so painfully manifest. As for Blamey’s humanity, one wonders how a man who failed so dismally to inspire or elicit the respect of his men, can be so described.
MacArthur’s claim to military greatness would await his later victories in the Huon Gulf, and the great rollback of the Imperial Army to the crimson shores of Okinawa. Some believe his greatest legacy came in peace, not war, in the deftness with which he imposed democracy on post-war Japan.
In Papua he failed. He misjudged Japanese plans for a land invasion; he failed to lead the American army to a successful outcome; he viciously disparaged battle-weary Australian troops; he sought scapegoats for his own errors.
Nor did he, as he later claimed, single-handedly rouse Australians to the offensive. It was simply untrue that he switched the offensive from Australia to New Guinea within days of his arrival in Melbourne. If so, why were the AIF withheld in Queensland, futilely building defences? Why wasn’t Port Moresby better reinforced? Why were militia troops (the 14th Brigade) dispatched to New Guinea ahead of the AIF, a decision that ‘made us weep’, said Rowell. Indeed, if it was MacArthur’s decision to take the war to New Guinea why were Blamey and Curtin not told? As the official historian writes, ‘If MacArthur had a radical change of policy in mind immediately after his arrival, Curtin and Blamey were not made aware of it, and the steps to reinforce Port Moresby were singularly cautious.’20 In truth, Australia would launch the counteroffensive, when the men and arms were available.
Truth was the first, disastrous casualty of MacArthur’s war. Some argued that he was a victim of his own overzealous PR machine, as General George Kenney, the Allied air chief and the supreme commander’s close friend, ludicrously suggested. ‘His public relations officers invariably adored MacArthur almost to the point of idolatry,’ Kenney wrote. ‘To them unless a news release painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the Universe, it should be killed. No news except favourable news, reflecting complete credit on an infallible MacArthur, had much chance of getting by the censors.’21 Kenney seemed not to understand that it was MacArthur, not his PR hacks, who approved his press releases.
The Japanese defeat was partly self-inflicted, of course. The failure of the Japanese command structure needs little elaboration: clearly many officers let down their men. They dealt brutally with the troops, failed adequately to supply them, and blindly put their trust in the shimmering phantom of the Japanese spirit, when medical care, food, ammunition and reinforcements were needed. When the spirit failed to conquer physical collapse, many officers simply abandoned or deserted their dying troops.
Of course, the ordinary Japanese soldiers’ supine obedience to their country’s aggressive martial code made them complicit in their own destruction. Indeed, it might be said that the Japanese infantryman fought to die, while the Allied infantryman fought to live. Perhaps herein lies the seeds of the Allied victory—the Australian soldier’s fear of death was more powerful than the Japanese soldier’s disregard for life.
The Kokoda campaign was a war fought without mercy. Why, warrants a little attention. The Australians hated the Japanese troops with a peculiar intensity. The Japanese were not simply another enemy whom the Australians blundered into by dint of the Great Game, or on British orders, or through historical accident. Were the Turks so hated? Were the Germans? Not with anything like the visceral, personal loathing felt towards ‘the Jap’. One Australian private—a veteran of the Libyan and Greek campaigns—typified the attitude of the Australians at the time: ‘My regard for Tony [the Italian] was always impersonal and for Fritz…tinged with admiration, but none of us know anything but vindictive hatred for the Jap.’22 US propaganda departments produced lapel buttons; the German version depicted Hitler with the caption: ‘Wanted For Murder’. The Japanese version read: ‘Jap Hunting License—Open Season—No Limit’. Sociologists may analyse the darker reasons of such extreme antipathy for as long as there are academic tenures in Australian universities.
No doubt some Australian troops were ‘racists’ who would despise the Japanese in peace and at war. Yet the term racist is inapposite. Most Australians were ‘racists’ during the war if this defined anyone who believed in keeping Australia white. In 1941, Curtin defended the fight against Japan on the grounds of maintaining the ‘principle of a White Australia’. (Australia’s White Australia Policy was the first Act on the statute books after Federation in 1901.)
Curtin simply reflected the popular will and civilian fear of the ‘terrifying strangeness’ of the enemy, in Tom Keneally’s apt phrase. ‘In my childhood,’ said the author of An Angel in Australia (a novel set in Sydney during World War II), ‘two images of the Japanese were predominant. One moment the rock-jawed digger was worth ten Nips; the next week Australia would be this violable maiden being slavered over by buck-toothed Jap militarists.’23 The Australian people did not generally appreciate the political exploitation of this fear. When the Curtin Government launched a hate campaign in March–April 1942, the Sydney Morning Herald creditably argued that Australians needed no stimulus to fight the Japanese aggressor, and certainly not ‘a torrent of cheap abuse and futile efforts in emulation of…Goebbels’.24 The hate campaign was opposed by 54 per cent of Australians surveyed in a Gallup poll on the issue. Menzies nobly spoke out against inciting racial hatred as an instrument of war.
It was one thing to frame public policy around a notion of Anglo-Saxon purity; quite another to expect a man to kill for this reason. Most Australian troops were ordinary young men, subjected to terrible circumstances. They were indoctrinated not so much to hate the Japanese as to hold him beneath contempt, as one might regard a hostile animal who must be slaughtered. The process began at Allied army camps where the troops were exposed to the most virulent military propaganda.
This was psychological war at its most thorough. The Japanese had to be dehumanised to be beaten; and Australian commanders found plenty of material with which to achieve this: the Tol Plantation massacres; the emerging horror of Nanking; the atrocities at Milne Bay. The Japanese ‘super-soldier’ was cast as a subhuman beast, a species of rodent. The Australian soldier was urged to hunt down and kill the ‘Nip’ with extreme prejudice. At a jungle training school in 1942, Australian recruits were told that the Japanese was ‘a cunning little rat…full of little ruses and tricks’.25
Portraying the Japanese as an animal helped to quell fear, and boost confidence—the confidence of the predator. Training and innate prejudice merged into a deep repugnance of the Japanese race. Australian troops were encouraged to think of the enemy as ‘bloody little yellow swine’, ‘semieducated baboons’, ‘yellow stinkers’, ‘filthy monkeys’—these were some of the less vehement epithets. Such attitudes permeated the command structure. Blamey set the most prominent example. The Japanese was ‘a subhuman beast’, he told recruits in 1942. In early 1943 reinforcements were told that the Japanese were ‘a curious race—a cross between the human being and the ape’.26 General Gordon Bennett, who escaped the fall of Singapore, called the Japanese an ‘oriental yellow Hun’. The US Admiral William Halsey perhaps set a new standard for racial vilification during war; referring to the Japanese as ‘yellow bastards’, ‘stupid animals’ and ‘monkeymen’, he urged his men to ‘Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill More Japs. Get some more monkey meat.’27
Not all Allied troops turned into knee-jerk Jap-haters because Blamey or Halsey or an officer told them to. It was the actual experience of war that pitched the Australian mind into a new and unfamiliar place. It took more than propaganda and their commanders to ignite the sort of ferocity unleashed at Oivi–Gorari and on the Papuan beaches.
Indeed, a minority of Japanese troops themselves fully awakened ‘the killing instinct’ in the Australians, as Mark Johnston shows. The Japanese ‘lifted brutality to a higher level’.28 He argues that the sight of mutilated Australian corpses was crucial to understanding the ‘unusually murderous behaviour of Australian troops’. During Milne Bay, Brigadier John Field wrote in his diary, ‘[t]he yellow devils show no mercy and have since had none from us’. Cam Bennett, of the 2/5th Battalion, wrote that Japanese treatment of captives ‘divorced them from any consideration whatever’ whenever the Australians had a chance to kill them.29
Alas, the actions of thuggish Japanese officers smothered the claim to humanity of many ordinary Japanese footsoldiers, whose diaries reveal the courage and decency of the reluctant conscript, the doctor, the primary school teacher and the peasant, many of whom were bludgeoned into submission by a regime that simply killed dissent.
That side of the enemy barely surfaced, of course. Sergeant Victor Austin, of the 39th Battalion, attempted, and failed, to humanise the Japanese in his unit history, To Kokoda and Beyond:
I have tried to give the Japanese a more human visage but I would say at that time they were still considered to be…not quite human beings. But as I say I tried to humanise them and obviously they weren’t all fanatical brutes. There were sensitive natures even amongst them, but they had a different attitude…
They were part of a society where discipline was something so ingrained and their notion of their honour as soldiers was such that they fought fanatically.30
The Japanese soldiers viewed the Australians rather differently. They did not particularise their hatred along racial grounds; the enemy was the enemy, be he Chinese, Filipino, or Australian. The Imperial Army was ordered to destroy any foe, of any race, for whom they felt simply a generalised contempt. True, there was endless propaganda against the white imperialists; just as there was against the Chinese devil. As Warrant Officer Shimada said, ‘the Australians were the enemy—it was not racial or anything—we were supposed to hate them. The Australians were just another enemy we were supposed to hate.’31 Tanaka similarly argued that the Japanese were motivated to kill anyone bearing the mark of the enemy—Chinese or Filipino or British.
Yamasaki remembered: ‘I was given an order; I simply knew I had to destroy the enemy.’32
Neither side took prisoners, if they could avoid it. The Australians took a tiny number on the Kokoda Track and the beaches; the Japanese took a handful. Both sides killed surrendering as well as captive troops. The policy was in part practical: how were they to cart prisoners back down the trail when they had so few carriers for their own wounded?
In any case, the sight of mutilated Australian corpses sealed the fate of most Japanese who fell into Allied hands. The Japanese simply executed most of those they caught, or who failed to cooperate—troops, civilians, natives. An unusual exception was the Reverend Benson, who survived, it appears, partly because of his collar.
Even the more tolerant, intelligent Australian commanders—Honner, Potts, and Vasey—settled early upon a no-prisoner policy. As Potts wrote to his wife: ‘Our little yellow mongrel friends. Did I hope at one time that our crowd could learn to hate? My dear it has happened…in the future any Jap we meet may kiss himself goodbye on both cheeks. No we didn’t take any prisoners, and if I’m ordered to produce one I’ll have to swallow hard and do the job myself.’33
Sergeant Robert Johns, MM, recalled: ‘During our bloody encounters along the Kokoda Trail and at Gona there were few opportunities for taking prisoners. It was that sort of war. In fact through all our campaigns against the Japanese, I can only remember taking two prisoners, one of them badly wounded. It all sounds a bit barbarous now.’34
Japanese prisoners airlifted to Port Moresby were hurled out of the planes by Allied aircrews, according to claims by Charles Lindbergh. There is no evidence for this; it may even be that Japanese prisoners were simply free to jump, should they wish. Perhaps some did, such was their shame of being held captive.
While victors can be relied upon not to leave records of their wartime disgraces, it is safe to say the Allies did not mutilate or subject Japanese prisoners to slow, torturous deaths. There were, however, sporadic bursts of Allied rage against the few Japanese prisoners taken; six bound and gagged Japanese troops were gunned down at Wau airfield, for example. An untold number were bludgeoned or shot in the secrecy of the jungle. A handful of bound enemy prisoners were bayoneted to death by members of the 16th Brigade. This was part of the reason why the unit’s commander, Major-General Cullen, refused to give evidence at the war crimes tribunal. Cullen spoke out against Allied treatment of prisoners. ‘It was my battalion and I felt pretty guilty, but it was understandable. I’m not really critical of the soldiers.’35
In January 1943 MacArthur set in train a process—‘by stealth and by the employment of subterfuges that were undignified and at times absurd’36—to marginalise Blamey. MacArthur’s ‘machinations’ degenerated into an unseemly scrap for the conqueror’s mantle, and it was to Blamey’s credit that he chose quiet indifference in response to this American jockeying for power. Nonetheless, the only Australian general on MacArthur’s staff was sidelined. Blamey would soon lose his role as commander, Allied Land Forces, as the ground war swept westward along the coast of New Guinea, and north to the Philippines.
In February 1943, the Allied armies turned their attention to the New Guinean highlands and the dense jungle around Salamaua, Lae and Wau, where the Japanese had regrouped. For months, Kanga Force, a tiny Australian guerrilla unit under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Fleay, had harried the Japanese. Reinforced first by the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, and now by Allied armies, Kanga Force became part of the final offensive to clear the Japanese from New Guinea. These were short, sharp, ferocious battles, largely forgotten, but critical in driving the enemy out of the south-west Pacific. The three highly decorated battalions of the 21st Brigade—veterans of Kokoda, Gona and Sanananda—again played a critical role. Honner, fittingly, led the 2/14th during the so-called mop-up. Badly wounded, he was returned to Australia, and later became the nation’s ambassador to Ireland—one of the outstanding commanders of the war, at whose funeral in May 1994 an uninvited Japanese guest bowed to his family.37
The enemy made one last-ditch attempt to reclaim their grip on New Guinea. In the Battle of the Bismark Sea they dispatched 6400 troops from Rabaul to their garrison at Lae, using a convoy of eight troop transports defended by eight destroyers and about a hundred fighter aircraft. It was the Australian air commander, Garing, who convinced Kenney to prepare a massive, coordinated air attack against the enemy convoy. The ships were sunk, and thousands of Japanese strafed in the water as they swam for shore. The US Rear-Admiral Samuel Morison defended this as ‘a grisly task but a military necessity since Japanese soldiers do not surrender and, within swimming distance of shore, they could not be allowed to land and join the Lae garrison’. Hundreds made the beach, where the Papuan natives ‘had the time of their lives tracking them down as in the old head hunting days’, Morison said.38
The 39th Battalion was disbanded after the Papuan campaign. But they were not forgotten and, along with their battle insignia—brown over red (or ‘mud over blood’)—the performance of the Australian militiamen who first met the Japanese on the Kokoda Track gradually became the stuff of legend. It is a legend that withstands the harshest scrutiny.
In 1972 a few 39th survivors—Alf Salmon, Jack Boland, Jack Sutherland, Ron Weakley, Len Murrell, Lloyd Lott, Val Petersen and John Akhurst—joined their Japanese counterparts in a reunion, the only instance of this happening among the Australian armies.
‘The Japanese, led by two generals, finished their battle hymn,’ reported Alan Downer, a journalist for The Sun.39 ‘Then it was the Diggers’ turn—with “Waltzing Matilda”. The Japanese joined in.’ An old Japanese general, Shigeru Sugiyama, ‘son-in-law of the once mighty General Tojo’, bowed neatly from the waist, and told the Australian reporter: ‘Never could we find a time and place to outwit and outmanoeuvre the 39th. And now we have waited 30 years to meet them here and tell them so. To tell them that when our men of the great Nankai Division landed in New Guinea in 1942, they thought they were facing an Australian army some 10,000 strong on the Kokoda Trail. Not, for the first two months of battle, just one battalion of young and untested men—this 39th Battalion—only some 600 strong!’
After the war, Blamey was promoted to field marshal—Australia’s only one—the reward for a lifetime’s service to Australian arms. If the Papuan campaign tended to blot that record, no one, least of all his annointed disciples in the army and his political friends, were about to say so, and his name now emblazons Australia’s military complex in Canberra, part of a questionable legacy.
In George Vasey, we observe a different calibre of man—whom civilian Australia has largely forgotten. In 1945 they knew him well—Women’s Weekly put him on their cover, and he was hugely popular. Of the top commanders in Papua, Vasey was among the true heroes. He fought with his men at the front for three months—longer than any other commander—under the most dreadful conditions. This is what he said when asked what he did immediately after a battle: ‘The first thing I do is call for the casualty list. I go away to my tent…not to be disturbed…to be alone with my God and my conscience. It weighs heavily…[the realisation that] you have no option but to be responsible for creating all these widows, fatherless children, these mothers robbed of sons…’40
True to form, Blamey sought to deny Vasey his rightful place in the eyes of posterity. This appalling man relieved Vasey of his command of the 7th Division, with a lie, according to Vasey’s wife, Jessie. Extremely ill in bed, Vasey through his delirium heard Blamey say, ‘And don’t think because you are lying here, George, anyone is going to ditch you for your job.’41 Blamey had in fact promised Vasey’s job to a rival officer—a day earlier. Vasey died in a plane crash on 5 March 1945; he was 49 years old, and nationally and sincerely mourned.
Far from the fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the deaths of millions—in Papua, New Guinea, the Philippines, Saipan, China, Burma, Okinawa and in the Tokyo firebombing—the last Japanese troops in the jungles of Bougainville learned of their country’s surrender via floating pamphlets printed from a linocut in August 1945. The linocut was carved from a piece of linoleum taken from the floor of an officer’s tent while he was asleep, and hacked out with an army jack-knife by the light of a jeep headlight. The 1st Australian Army Mobile Printing Unit, working three shifts, printed 500,000 copies of the leaflet.42
The war in the Pacific was over. In September 2003, Shimada and Yamasaki, as they’ve done every year since Kokoda, commemorated the 144th regimental reunion with a Shinto ceremony, after which, at a lively reception, they sang old war songs on a karoake machine.43 Some families still refused to attend, in protest at the failure of the previous organiser Morita, now dead, to commit suicide while a prisoner at Cowra. The surviving veterans pledge to this day that they never doubted their faith in the Emperor even during the worst extremes of the war.
Horii’s body was consigned to an ordinary grave, not the usual general’s tomb. Nishimura visited it near Kakogawa City, a depressing experience. ‘General Horii’s grave was…built in the joint names with his son. Perhaps it was because he was the defeated general.’
Vernon and Kienzle went about their businesses in Papua; the fuzzy wuzzy angels returned to their villages and gardens. In 1945 they organised a ‘very very big feast,’ said Havala Laula. ‘We killed 25 pigs at Menari. It was a big ceremony, with dancing and singing.’44
Vernon had performed a unique service—on par with Simpson of Gallipoli. ‘The Australian people…failed to realise that the fuzzy wuzzy angels’ patience, tenderness and fortitude with wounded Australians rewarded, in part, Vernon’s unsparing services on their behalf,’ is the just summing up of this extraordinary man.45
‘The Papuans must not be idealised,’ wrote Vernon. ‘They came into the war unwillingly…yet a great majority showed up very favourably under the hardship of the campaign. We have expressed much gratitude to the Papuan and by and large they have shown marked loyalty in helping us; let us show it in the future by conserving rather than by exploiting the race.’46
Sixty years on little has changed; the fuzzy wuzzies live much as they did then, in villages without sanitation, proper medical care or running water, dependent on their market gardens for food. In fact, their circumstances have regressed; little Australian aid finds its way to their mountain villages, which no longer receive weekly air deliveries of supplies and mail—a distant echo of the shortages faced in very different circumstances by Tubby Allen and Arnold Potts.
The Australian troops returned home in a state of silent wonder that they’d survived. A substantial minority later suffered nervous disorders, alcoholism, broken marriages and career failure.47 Laurie Howson, who died in 2003, was in and out of psychiatric clinics for years, and eventually developed a novel medical regimen of his own. It seemed to work—he rallied and even found romance in his last few months alive. Others held down jobs and happy long-term relationships. Frank McLean carried shrapnel in his head for decades, suffered eye and neck injuries and recurrent bouts of malaria. Yet he married and raised three children. His biggest regret was losing an eye: ‘It’s very hard to catch a ball,’ he said in 1990, before he died.48
Successive Australian governments disgracefully refused to grant ‘special consideration’ of the medical claims of the 39th, because the men could produce no medical records—the battalion had lost them on the Kokoda Track. Honner, Norris, Steward and other officers pressed the claims of the men; some cases dragged on until the mid-1970s. As late as 1985, Steward was still buttressing his unit’s claims, with a letter to officials, which stated: ‘Many of these men experienced a variety of mental disturbances, including hallucinations. Because of appalling conditions, few if any medical records were kept by RMOs [regimental medical officers].’49
Veterans of the 2/1st Battalion remember one act of homecoming assistance with unbridled delight. When the war ended, Basil Catterns wondered, ‘What are the troops going to do when they get home?’
He decided to organise
…a little university, or Tafe, where we’d have classes, where some of us who know all about sheep farming or know about newspapers and someone who knows something about real estate or collecting stamps or coins…we can have that too. We discussed everything I could think of, except the one thing I knew was on their minds, sex.
So I went and sought a doctor, and said ‘Doc, I want you to come and address the battalion about sex because it’s on their minds.’ And he said, ‘I will not address the unit as a whole, individually they can line up and come and see me and I will discuss anything with them at all, but I’m not going to do that.’ I said, ‘Have you got any books about it?’ And he said, ‘No, what do you want books for?’ I said, ‘if I had a book I’d give the bloody thing myself.’
There was a library at Wewak, and Catterns hopped in a jeep and headed there. Except ‘there were no books at all on sex—only a little book which if I remember correctly was something about the art of love, written of course in the nineteenth century’.
Catterns read this book, assembled the whole battalion, and, in a booming parade ground voice, lectured them on the art of love and sex. ‘It worked beautifully. The word “foreplay” had never been invented then but the idea, the message was there, that love is an art and that if you practise and be creative—and I was careful to say “your partner”, I didn’t say “your wife or your woman”, in case there really was someone who was homosexual—it worked beautifully’.50
Some years later in George Street, in Sydney, a veteran confronted Catterns: ‘Basil Catterns,’ he said, ‘I was up there at Wewak with you and I remember that lecture you gave about sex, and I remembered it and I got married when I came back and I’ve now got three lovely teenage children, and it’s been a happy marriage all the time, thanks very much.’