‘I suppose the Japs will try to capture Port Moresby, because it would give them a marvellous striking base for air blows against the Australian mainland. If it becomes necessary, we must be prepared to make Port Moresby the Tobruk of the Pacific’
—Major-General Basil Morris, commander of Allied forces in Papua and New Guinea after the fall of Singapore
A mood of lazy sullenness prevailed in Port Moresby in early 1942. If this was the ‘last chance saloon’ there was little to be cheerful about. Entertainment amounted to the occasional cinefilm and a drinking binge. There were no mixed bars, no brothels on the European model, none of the traditional forms of R&R to relieve the troops. Apathy reigned.
One militia battalion, the 49th, was in Port Moresby when the Aquitania dropped anchor; this unit had garrisoned the town for twelve months. They inspired less confidence than the arriving ranks, if that were possible: the bored troops lolled about, drinking and sleeping in a state of bemused inertia. Disease—mostly malaria and dysentery—had spread through the battalion, and ‘tropical breakdown’ was alarmingly frequent. As late as 11 July, ten days before Yokoyama landed at Gona, the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General Vernon Sturdee, described the 49th as ‘quite the worst battalion in Australia’.1
The new arrivals swiftly sank to the level set by the 49th. They received no jungle training and were ‘in the charge of inexperienced officers who appeared to have little or no control over them’.2 Brawling and looting were commonplace. In one instance, drunken troops ransacked one of Port Moresby’s two pubs, for which a senior officer of the 39th was ‘reposted’.
The first Japanese air raid on Port Moresby, at 3.00 a.m. on 3 February 1942, stunned the troops and terrified the native population. A ‘wholesale exodus’ ensued,3 as the locals ‘went bush’. Native police fled with their prisoners; desertions temporarily immobilised seaborne communications. ‘By today no native servants will be left,’ wrote Group Captain William Garing. It seemed to him that Port Moresby would be abandoned, in the same way as Rabaul.
The remaining civilians—the women had been evacuated in December—panicked: ‘They thought the end of Port Moresby had come. The general feeling was that Port Moresby was going,’ the troops observed.4
Three hours after severe air raids on the 5th, the looting of Port Moresby began in earnest. The militia simply stole whatever they felt they needed. It degenerated into wholesale theft. After the last civilians evacuated the town on the 18th, ‘savage looting’ became an ‘open go’.5 The troops thought they might as well salvage the spoils of defeat before the Japanese arrived. The battalion history of the 49th defends this behaviour: ‘The troops took the view that these things were going to be destroyed anyhow—no civilians were left—so they took furniture, goods, refrigerators…’6 The army led the charge, with the navy and air force mopping up. The native people did little stealing, but quite happily indulged in some ‘receiving’.
Threats of punishment had no effect whatsoever. The military police were too feeble to restrain them; the indigenous constabulary had gone bush; and the militia’s own guard were utterly powerless. Indeed, some indulged in the orgy of snatch and grab.7 Hundreds of items were sent home to Australia: 500 packages arrived by post from soldiers at Port Moresby and about 350 from members of the air force, according to the Brisbane police commissioner. They contained rolls of cloth, table and bed linen, apparel, glassware, and many other articles.*
General Morris was ordered to conduct an inquiry.8 His findings revealed why so many troops were used for manual labour: after the air raids, they were the only labour available to fortify the town. Most of the civilians and natives had evacuated Port Moresby in terror. Between January and June 1942, a thousand troops a day were engaged in unloading ships or working on the roads.
The Australian militiaman may have acquired his first fridge, but he was ‘inadequately equipped in every way’ for combat.9 The weapons were ancient, World War I issue .303 rifles and clapped-out Lewis machine-guns. The troops would not be shown how to use their Bren guns until days before they went into battle. They received no jungle training. The training they did get was half-hearted. Few could fire their rifles properly; some men were not even shown how to clean and dismantle their weapons. None had any experience of anti-aircraft fire, except aboard the Aquitania, where they ‘shot down’ box kites meant to symbolise low-flying Zeros. Bill Guest, a 39th veteran, recalled that ‘…the kites were hauled in and there were found to be a total of three holes in them…as usual, many of our antiquated guns did not function due to stoppages’.10
There was a blimpish charm to lessons in the use of the new ‘Tommy guns’, the hip-fired Thompson submachine-gun beloved of Chicago gangsters. Some units first laid eyes on the weapon in Port Moresby in February 1942. During a lecture, Captain Bill Merritt explained the correct firing pose: ‘You take an aggressive stance, an expression of pugnacity and determination on your face…’ To which a private inquired, ‘Are we supposed to frighten [them] to death, Sir?’11
From mid-February Japanese air raids on Port Moresby were a near daily occurrence. The Zeros, Mitsubishi 97s, flew over the mountains from the north like tiny ‘silver butterflies’; they made ‘a noise like millions of bees’.12 The Australians responded with unprotected ground artillery. After an attack they would rush out, shake their fists and jeer at the Japanese pilots. But the pathos of their condition troubled them. ‘Where the hell are our planes?’ was a constant refrain. Allied fighters were then unavailable. As late as December 1941 Australia’s home air defences amounted to two squadrons, each with two Empire flying boats and six or seven Catalinas and little else.
Dreadful mistakes were made in this dazed environment. When, on 20 March, four strange fighters zoomed across the Seven-Mile drome the troops ran out, waving their mess tins…and were promptly strafed. ‘In our eagerness to see the Kittyhawks we had welcomed Zeros!’ said Corporal Jack Boland.13 The next morning, four more aircraft appeared, at the same time and from the same direction. The ground troops would not be fooled again, and opened fire. Two planes were hit, including the squadron leader’s. Then the troops noticed to their horror the blue and white markings of the Allies: the Kittyhawks had arrived.
That afternoon brought heartening news: the full complement of Australia’s 75 Squadron landed safely; thirteen more Kittyhawks taxied into their hangars. In coming months, dozens of P-40 fighters, bombers and transport and supply planes, from American and Australian units, landed at Port Moresby. Few of the Australian pilots had more than a handful of flying hours in the Kittyhawk, but at least their planes were in New Guinea at last.
All this time, from January to June 1942, not a single unit reconnoitred the Owen Stanleys; not a single jungle patrol went up the Kokoda Track. Everyone presumed the Japanese would take Port Moresby by sea or air; they believed, like MacArthur, that the Owen Stanleys protected them from overland attack.
Meanwhile, the returning troops of the AIF were held back in Queensland to build fortifications and train in country ‘in no way resembling the jungle and mountain terrain of New Guinea’.14 Not even advance parties, or staff officers, were sent to Port Moresby to study the actual conditions. A seemingly wilful ignorance imbued High Command, and trickled down to the most gormless private.
In April 1942, a new commander arrived to invigorate the garrison. Brigadier Selwyn Porter, the hard-driving hero of the Syrian campaign, emerges as one of those bull-headed officers who function in a realm of slight, if authentic, eccentricity. It is probably an unfair exaggeration to compare him to the demented but hugely effectual Captain Grief, of George MacDonald Fraser’s Burmese classic.15 On the other hand, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh would surely have placed Porter in the biff ‘em school of command alongside Brigadier Ritchie-Hook.16 Porter, like Ritchie-Hook, had a habit of issuing stern advice to the troops, the response to which was surely one of fascinated hilarity.
Porter knew a thing or two about New Guinea, as shown in his December 1941 paper, ‘NOTES ON NEW GUINEA’. It is a document of surpassing grimness relieved by flights of prosaic exuberance. No one could accuse him of opacity. Porter’s ‘OBJECTIVES’ for the Australian militia were clear: ‘Kill the invader, give him no rest, no peace, no resources…harass him, deceive him, the role of all ranks will be fashioned towards these ends once he has landed.’17
His tips under ‘HEALTH’ left little hope: ‘Malaria is common; as are dengue fever, and bacillary dysentery and pneumonia…in addition, tropical ulcer, amoebic dysentery, sycosis ringworm, dhobi itch, syphilis, prickly heat etc, are also encountered.’ Porter revealed no more of his thoughts on the subject.18 In his section headed ‘NATIVES’ Porter wrote, ‘Languages are many and varied. [Between] the tribes or clans, having sought each others’ heads for generations, little social communication exists.’ Porter’s ‘OTHER HINTS’ included: ‘(i) Don’t go without footwear. (ii) Don’t drink alcohol until the late afternoon. (iii) Don’t take advantage of the honesty of the Chinese. (iv) Wear head-gear during the day when not in the shade. (v) Give cuts and sores immediate attention.’
Scenes of sloth and inebriation greeted the brigadier on his arrival in Port Moresby. Drunk, bare-foot troops somehow fashioned an existence in this bomb-shattered town strewn around the grimy waterfront, on which a single jetty was supposed to feed MacArthur’s vaunted defence of Australia. Brown hills denuded of vegetation rolled northward; when it rained, muddy yellow streams deluged the low-lying areas. Tattered, shirtless men stood idly about the roadsides, their faces expressionless, their movements listless.19 At the sound of air raid sirens they would rush to their trenches in an undisciplined rabble. The town’s ‘defences’ amounted to ‘red scars of excavated earth’ that easily betrayed their position on the ridges to Japanese bombers.20 The atmosphere was like living in a vast open-cut mine.
Morale was virtually non-existent. Senior officers supinely obeyed distant orders, when they should have been pleading for reinforcements. As Major-General Morris explained, his raison d’être was to transform Port Moresby into an air base, not an infantry training camp. One officer appeared before Porter ‘emaciated and almost transparently thin from dysentery’.21 He was sent home for a prolonged rest.
Porter, having quietly absorbed this hapless environment, gathered his officers together. The brigadier fumed: ‘The Brigade is not in a fit state to fight a battle. Officers and men are so obviously backward that the training programme will go on around the clock. I will make no allowance for the weather.’22 In a country in which the weather made no allowances for men, Porter was taken seriously. At once he set in motion a wholesale reorganisation of New Guinea Force.
One of his innovations was a school for ‘junior leaders’. The brigadier launched a competition for the ‘best defensive post’, with the prize of a fortnight’s leave. The excellence of the response amazed him. One section of the 39th Battalion produced a superbly camouflaged post, went home, and promptly disappeared. Later found AWOL in Melbourne, they were arrested and court-martialled.
Nonetheless, the timing of Porter’s reinvigoration was fortuitous. On 8 May, Ultra code-breakers intercepted Japanese wires, and confirmed the imminent threat of a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby. From his Melbourne HQ, General Sir Thomas Blamey, the commander-in-chief, Allied Land Forces, warned that ‘a serious attack against you…will develop in the immediate future…Australia looks to you to maintain her outposts, and is confident that the task is in good hands.’23
The threat exposed profound flaws in the organisation of the Australian army in New Guinea. It was, in a word, chaotic. With no time to reshape the town according to his desires, Porter ordered his troops back to their old defence lines—those prior to his shake-up. A traffic jam resulted as soldiers and machines scrambled to find their old posts; maps were lost; unreliable telephone lines confused the units; great breaches in perimeters opened up as soldiers thinned and dispersed. Many fled to the hills.
Amidst the chaos, Porter found a reason to be cheerful. The men of the 39th, alone among the Australians, seemed to be pitching for a fight. They dug in and pleaded for more mortar bombs than the official issue. The brigadier happily obliged them. Why restrain a unit from wanting to kill more Japanese? he reasoned.24
To Porter’s relief, the danger passed. In the Battle of the Coral Sea, the ships never met; the battle was fought in the skies, and the Japanese withdrew. This deflection persuaded General MacArthur that Australia was secure from attack. He pronounced victory. It was an early example of the supreme commander’s tendency to declare victory before thousands of casualties confirmed that his declaration was premature.
A deceptive calm prevailed in the aftermath of the sea battle. Disappointed by the shambles, Porter moved to shake up the garrison: fresh, young AIF officers replaced the militia’s ageing World War I commanders. New orders were distributed. Efficiency and duty were stressed.
The brigadier couldn’t resist issuing his ‘LESSONS RESULTING FROM THE RECENT THREAT OF INVASION’. This said as much about the want of discipline as it did about Porter’s vibrant personality (the capitals are emphatically his):
1. Disobedience of Orders & Instructions…there are instances which appear to prove that certain elements of the Brigade have to be shocked into action…
Orders have been issued that the troops will shave, pay ordinary courteous compliments, wear their colours with pride, work under camouflage when digging and so on. The fact that these orders need repeating is deplorable…It is an indication of bad leadership and bad organisation of the chain of command…Shaving and saluting will NOT win a war; but, they are signposts of other features that will NOT win a war…Look to the discipline of British troops who saved the situation in FLANDERS, LIBYA, SYRIA and ABYSSINIA, because minor discipline was a habit and major discipline became a matter of course. You are not merely required to obey. You must go further. You must SEEK improvement…Do not consider the ‘Battle of MORESBY’ over and won. It has NOT commenced.25
It was sound advice; the war could not be won by a mob of bearded men who didn’t know how to salute. Nor could it be won by sick, understrength, untrained troops, as Porter acknowledged in July, days before the Japanese landed at Gona. He noted that one regiment had not arrived; a battalion was understrength and ‘backward in all respects’; a brigade, the 14th Militia, had forfeited two companies; the rest were understrength and disabled with sickness; and both the 30th and 14th Brigades were ‘NOT’ properly trained for likely operational tasks. ‘Deduction: At best…a much mutilated [i.e. fragmented] force of inadequate and uncertain strength…’26
Worse, the 30th Brigade HQ was ‘badly organised’ and incapable of acting or moving in the field. It possessed only one civilian car, useless on any but first-class asphalt, and three one-ton trucks. Of the transport facilities, the vehicles were of poor quality and the workshops, overworked and understrength. One transport officer had been ‘conscientiously working himself into a state of nervous and physical collapse’, as did many technicians.
Of the troops’ training, Porter rated it as ‘Practically nil…Officers know nothing of recent campaigns…This is a very serious shortcoming.’As far as an understanding of the topography went, the Australians had no maps or aerial photos of vital areas.
Porter had correctly assessed his failure to invigorate the garrison. Nonetheless, he had flashes of insight that cut through the murkiest thinking in Brisbane. He believed an attack overland from the north coast ‘was the most likely…option’, of which he concluded: ‘It would be an admirable threat to be carried out as a distraction, in conjunction with an attack on our position from the sea.’27
Porter could be eminently pragmatic. The state of the men’s personal kit was, not surprisingly, ‘BAD’. Porter made a list of hints necessary to combat mosquitoes, vegetation and humidity. He recommended tightly woven mosquito-proof shirts, ventilated hats and gaiters of the American kind. It would have been even better had the Australian Q-store made these items available. Porter wrote with searing finality of the quality of his jeeps and troop carriers: ‘I wish to report that the time has arrived when the transport as a whole must be regarded as being below the lowest degree of serviceability.’
This ineluctable truth applied to the men as well as their machines. The Australian militia would never be combat-ready. In April 1942, three months before Yokoyama’s veterans set foot at Gona, the Australian militia battalions in New Guinea received the lowest ‘F’ grade in a report on combat efficiency. ‘Unit training is not complete,’28 was the blunt conclusion of Major-General George Vasey. Port Moresby, the most important air base in the South Pacific, found itself garrisoned by the worst troops in the Australian army, ‘stationed in the most threatened area’.29
Into this scene of incompetence walked a man who merits profound gratitude for his contribution to the Australian war effort. His name was Bert Kienzle, a tough Australian plantation owner of Teutonic roots who knew the country like the proverbial back of his hand, understood the local dialects and could competently organise and lead the mountain tribes.
This old New Guinea hand was a godsend. Kienzle saw immediately the vital importance of the indigenous people—as carriers and stretcher-bearers—and on 1 July took charge of all ‘native labour’, under the control of ANGAU (the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit). His job was to turn the Papuan natives into an army of willing workhorses able to conquer on foot the insuperable supply—and medical—problems posed by the Kokoda Track.
Kienzle met his first team of Papuan workers at the native labour camp at Ilolo: ‘I found the natives numbering about 600…very sullen and unhappy. Conditions in the labour camp were bad and many cases of illness noted. Desertions were frequently being reported,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 July.30
It was an inauspicious beginning to a wonderfully heroic working relationship between Kienzle, the Papuan people and the extraordinary Captain Geoffrey Vernon, who was responsible for the carriers’ medical needs. Without the compassion and organisational abilities of Kienzle and Vernon, the legendary fuzzy wuzzy angels may never have found their wings—or more appropriately, their war legs.
Kienzle was given his first big logistics job on 1 July 1942, three weeks before the Yokoyama Advance Force landed at Gona. It was a task of sublime absurdity: he was ordered to build ‘a road from Ilolo to Kokoda’, the deadline for which was the end of August 1942. A road over the Owen Stanleys would have taken the finest engineers, using the best technology, years to construct. None exists to this day.
The idea that the Owen Stanleys could be made roadworthy in a month revealed the depths of Allied ignorance of the terrain; it might have been laughable, had it not been so dangerous. But Kienzle adopted his usual, wry insouciance in the face of the impossible. He accepted the order, as was his duty: ‘A colossal engineering job and not to be taken lightly!’ he wrote. One can see the smile on his face, as he added, ‘I was one of the very few men who knew the country to be traversed and had walked over it recently on foot.’31 Work started on the road on 5 July; earthworks never got further than Uberi, half a day’s march from Owers’ Corner, the jump-off point of the Kokoda Track.
It was about this time—early July—that Major-General Morris sent a company of the 39th Battalion over the mountains to guard the Buna and Kokoda airfields and collect supplies being sent around the coast by boat. Kienzle was asked to guide them:‘I was informed that a company of troops…had been waiting for someone to guide them across the Owen Stanley Range for several days.’
They had to be guided across the mountains before he could start the road in earnest. As he led this little band of some 120 troops over the Kokoda Track, Kienzle made some telling entries in his diary. They would have been of great use to the generals in Brisbane:
10th July. With the exception of Uberi, no camp or staging place on track to Kokoda had sufficient accommodation for a company of men…shelters for native carriers were non-existent.
19th July. The track to KOKODA takes eight days, so the maintenance of supplies is a physical impossibility without large-scale co-operation of plane droppings.
24th July. One of my last requests…was for the laying down of a telephone line from HQ to Kokoda or ‘the front’ where the enemy were being contacted.32
*Looting was not restricted to Port Moresby: there was extensive looting at Darwin. Ships would often sail away packed with contraband. One man, Ingraham, a ship’s steward, was found to have in his possession:‘An electric refrigerator, a sewing machine, a typewriter, one set of snooker balls, six golf sticks [sic], 26 lady’s hats, four lady’s handbags, three lady’s stoles, four Chinese cummerbunds, seven lady’s umbrellas, 18 dozen lady’s hairnets, 360 pearl buttons, 31 pairs of child’s bloomers, 28 lady’s frocks, 49 pairs of lady’s bloomers, 24 lady’s belts…’ (Inquiries into Looting at Darwin and Port Moresby, CBS A5954 256/3).