‘Surely no war has ever demanded more of a man in fortitude. Even Gallipoli, or Crete or the desert…’
—Osmar White, Australian war correspondent
After four days in Port Moresby the fresh Australian battalions boarded trucks for Ilolo, near the start of the Kokoda Track. At 9.00 a.m. on 16 August the first AIF troops marched off. Company by company—logistically only about a hundred men could move up at a time—they departed; first the 2/14th Battalion, then the 2/16th the following day.
The forest closed behind them, as the little army of 1200 Australians slowly disappeared into the mountains. The long thin line of soldiers ‘was swallowed up by the jungle’.1 Hundreds of native carriers wound like a great serpentine tail slowly behind them. Never had war been waged in such conditions. And as the last units moved off, Rowell was heard to remark, ‘I don’t think that I’ve ever given any troops a tougher job than this.’2 Their destination was Isurava, some six days’ march north, where the 39th Battalion held the mountain pass.
An arsenal of superlatives has been hurled at the Kokoda Track. The notorious jungle path was ‘the world’s worst killing field’, a ‘green hell’, ‘the steepest’, ‘toughest’, ‘most treacherous’, and so on. The track silenced the usually loquacious writer Raymond Paull: ‘There is no language equipped…to portray its many perversities.’3 And no doubt the jungle path has exhausted—perhaps reduced to tears—many modern-day trekkers, celebrities and executives attired in the latest hiking gear.
In fact, the Kokoda Track breaches one of the less forbidding sections of the Owen Stanleys, crosses many delightful streams and passes through a landscape of raw, excrescent beauty. No doubt it is a ‘regular orgy of hill climbing’, as Vernon said, though in places it settles into little more than a hefty bush walk. As Hank Nelson observed, ‘it was a long way from being the worst track in Papua and New Guinea—it was not broken-bottle limestone country, it did not require a day or two wading in swamps and sleeping in trees’.4 Pretty little tribal villages appear at welcome intervals along the route, offering native fruit and vegetables.
None of these facts, however, addresses the barely imaginable horror of fighting a war here. No war had ever been fought in such country. The wounded would suffer unspeakable agony on their struggle back over the mountains. Long after the war, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner confided sadly to his son Brian, who then led an Australian unit in Vietnam, ‘if we’d had helicopters we could have saved half the men we lost in the Owen Stanleys’.5
The track followed a slightly different route in 1942, and the jungle has reclaimed several of the original villages; their inhabitants disappeared—some say to escape the evil spirits of war. Isurava and Efogi have relocated. The original Nauro was abandoned in 2002 after a local feud, and a second Nauro established, high on a spur. Eora Creek and Ioribaiwa have simply ceased to exist—and serve as mere camp sites for trekkers.
Between the lowest point, at Uberi, and the crest of the range, the Kokoda Track climbs more than 20,000 feet. The altitude at its highest point is 8500 feet. For every 1000 feet gained the track falls 600 feet to the foot of the next ascent.6
In 1942, the track officially started at McDonald’s Corner, the plantation owned by the McDonald family. A narrow road runs from here to Owers’ Corner, where the track plunges off a precipice to Uberi—where a flying fox was later set up—and follows the Goldie River for a mile or so, before turning up the steep spur of Imita Ridge. Into this slope Australian engineers had cut some 2000 steps—the infamous ‘Golden Stairs’, a tough prelude to far more difficult ascents ahead.
When the first troops reached the Golden Stairs, rain had washed away the steps leaving a skeletal crossbeam—a small log—suspended above a pool of mud. The logs tended to snap under the percussive footfall of hundreds of heavily burdened soldiers. Rain made the ascent exceedingly difficult. At the summit—the razor-sharp Imita Ridge—the troops beheld with dismay ‘another ridge like the one he had scaled, and another beyond, and more farther on, each clad in jungle’.7
These ‘false summits’ were frustrating in the extreme. The track rises, from crest to trough to crest, in ever-ascending stages; the peak you stood on this morning seems a stone’s throw from the one you’re on this evening.
It is worth quoting Colonel Kingsley Norris’s famous description of the track, written in 1942:
Imagine an area of approximately 100 miles long. Crumple and fold this into a series of ridges, each rising higher and higher until 7000 feet is reached, then declining in ridges to 3000 feet. Cover this thickly with jungle, short trees and tall trees, tangled with great entwining savage vines.
Through an oppression of this density, cut a little native track, two or three feet wide, up the ridges, over the spurs, round gorges, and down across swiftly flowing mountain streams. Where the track clambers up the mountainsides, cut steps—big steps, little steps, steep steps—or clear the soil from the tree roots.
Every few miles, bring the track through a small patch of sunlit kunai grass, or an old deserted native garden, and every seven or ten miles, build a group of dilapidated grass huts—as staging shelters—generally set in a foul, offensive clearing.
Every now and then, leave beside the track dumps of discarded, putrefying food, occasional dead bodies and human foulings. In the morning flicker the sunlight through the tall trees, flutter green and blue and purple and white butterflies lazily through the air, and hide birds of deep-throated song, or harsh cockatoos in the foliage.
About midday and through the night, pour water over the forest, so that the steps become broken, and a continual yellow stream flows downwards, and the few levels areas become pools and puddles of putrid black mud.
In the high ridges above Myola drip this water day and night over the track through a foetid forest grotesque with moss and glowing phosphorescent fungi. Such is the track which a prominent politician described as ‘being almost impassable for motor vehicles’.8
It is a lurid portrayal, and largely correct—with the caveat that in mid-August dead bodies were not seen along the track.
On the first day, the Australian troops saw through the canopy two formations of Japanese Zeros and heavy bombers soaring high overhead towards Port Moresby. They dismissed them as another air raid on the poorly defended town. But this time the bombers’ targets were intricately involved in the fate of the troops. They destroyed or seriously damaged 28 Allied aircraft, Rowell’s entire available fleet of transport planes, then parked on the tarmac at Seven-Mile drome. These were the planes requisitioned to drop Potts’s 40,000 rations and supplies at Myola—the same fleet Rowell had ordered to be dispersed and camouflaged. The American brigadier-general responsible had failed to execute Rowell’s order.*
The mangled wrecks lay burning under a great cloud of black, oily smoke. Delayed action bombs exploded, fuel dumps burst into great clouds, petrol barrels ‘kept popping’, and an ambulance on Hellfire Corner overturned, killing the occupants. ‘The strip was a tragic sight,’ observed White. ‘The entire runway was ankle-deep in debris—fragments of blackened and twisted duralumin, shattered motors, parachute packs ripped open and the silk blasted into pieces the size of a pocket handkerchief.’9
It is unclear when Rowell got this news, because on 23 August he believed adequate supplies had been previously dropped at Myola.
The destruction of the fleet was a death sentence for the army then trudging over the mountains. Rowell wired Blamey with the disastrous news. Worse was to come: only five days’ supplies were reported to be at Myola instead of the supposed 25, according to one of Rowell’s staff officers who’d gone there on 11 August. They were either lost or pilfered, or they’d never been dropped.
‘Once more,’ concluded Lex McAulay of this fiasco, ‘it was the frontline soldier who had to pay for the stupidity, mistakes and bloodymindedness of those in the rear.’10
Unaware of the looming catastrophe ahead, the troops trod on, stamping the rough trail into a wider passage. Most had acquired long wooden walking sticks, slashed from the trees. In the afternoon, the rains usually came, pouring onto the slopes, steaming the canopy, dripping off the trees, and draining rivulets of yellowish mud down the track. The march in such conditions turned into a grinding series of skids and slides. On the second night they scrambled up to the village of Ioribaiwa, the last section, in places a hand-over-hand climb.
‘I saw what the country could do to raw troops,’ observed White at Ioribaiwa. ‘Most of them were big men and fit…They made the last few 100 feet climb out of the valley in 5- or 10-yard bursts. Half of them dropped where they stood when they reached the plateau. Their faces were bluish grey with the strain, their eyes staring out. They were long beyond mere breathlessness. The air pumped in and out of them in great, sticky sobs; and they had 100 miles of such travelling ahead.’11
This ritual repeated itself for six days and nights: stragglers, swearing breathlessly, would stumble into camp after dark, where hundreds of men lay on wet, muddy groundsheets in cramped clearings on the slopes and tops of razorbacks. The rain fell in blinding sheets, and drenched everything through. Fires were initially banned.
At dawn, advance patrols rose from their drenched lean-tos and ground sheets and set off to prepare the forward camp for the day’s incoming lines of men. One of these dawn starters was Stan Bissett, an intelligence officer (and former Wallaby) who seemed to be everywhere at once—goading and willing the troops, encouraging the die-hards and even singing—he had an excellent voice, and, on one occasion, entertained the camp site. His brother, Harold ‘Butch’ Bissett, was also a highly popular member of the battalion. The pair were the epitome of the tall, rugged, sports-loving Australian; it seemed nothing could diminish their optimism, cheerfulness and determination.
The Owen Stanley Range was a peculiarly terrifying environment in which to fight a war. The troops—on both sides—fought a constant mental battle against the unknown and the unseen. Night was so dark as to seem corporeal.
‘The strange small noises took hold of the imagination, and were transferred into the stealth of some lurking beast or the enemy at one’s elbow,’ wrote Paull.12 Geoffrey Lyon, a young officer with the 21st Brigade, said:‘It was a war of shadows. I can distinctly remember before I went up the track a chap came down who was wounded. He said, “I haven’t seen a Japanese yet.” That’s how it was. The nefarious war of shadows.’13
‘The intense jungle,’ concluded a 7th Division medical report, ‘induced feelings of claustrophobia. The intolerable quietness was rent by eerie sounds, and occasionally, the crashing of enormous rotting trees.’14
Every shadow hid a potential danger for troops not yet ‘jungle conscious’: ‘A withered bush may hide a Jap sniper,’ observed Honner, ‘a fresh palm frond, or banana leaf in an unnatural position is probably being used for the same purpose.’15 For now, they were safe from such dangers—the Japanese had not yet advanced beyond Deniki—but the process of acclimatisation involved constantly scanning the jungle for the slightest aberration.
Birds of paradise—the national emblem of New Guinea—were rarely seen. Most often the troops rose to the loud, harshly slurred note of the friarbird, a ‘large, slim-necked drab bird with pugnacious habits and a raucous call’ that ‘often perches atop dead branches’. Its cry went ‘keeyo keeyoway’.16 But the sounds and sights of the local fauna were incidental ephemera consigned to the subconscious by men on the watch for a very different species.
The terrain did offer one advantage: concealment. The troops were always on the hunt, or being hunted. The jungle provided cover for, and from, infantry patrols, and a natural shield against frontal attack. It enabled lethal flanking manoeuvres. The dense canopy blocked the flight of mortar shells (and sometimes sent them crashing back down onto mortar crews).
The terrain, it could be said, actually saved lives—unlike Gallipoli, where the Turkish hillside commanded a murderous view of the beach; or the Somme, a gentle plain across which men were ordered to march into German machine-guns. And while obscenely hot in the lowlands, bitterly cold at the peaks, and miserably wet throughout, the Papuan climate did not kill with the thoroughness of the blackened finger of Russia’s winter, nemesis of the armies of Hitler and Napoleon. But the one thing this country did inflict with deadly consistency was sickness, hunger and utter exhaustion.
*This was Brigadier-General Ennis Whitehead, who had earlier agreed with Rowell’s concern about the vulnerability of the aircraft.