‘I want every man who is capable of walking…to start off for the top of the hill. We haven’t got enough bearers to carry everybody, but this place must be cleared tonight’
—Captain Rupert Magarey, 2/6th Field Ambulance, to Australian stretcher cases
The Australian evacuation from Isurava continued through three days and nights of pouring rain. The walking wounded bumped and shuffled along the trail towards the Eora Creek gorge. Those unable to walk—the stretcher cases—lay at Alola awaiting bearers.
Stretchers were hastily constructed by torchlight out of poles, vines and blankets. Kienzle and Vernon brought up new stretcher-bearers from Myola to help carry out severely wounded men. As they withdrew, shock turned to silent despair. The Australian army appeared to have ‘fallen to pieces’ amidst the ‘bloody, disintegrating, invisible confusion’1 of defeat. In the darkness behind, the Japanese were in full pursuit; ahead lay only the mountains and the jungle, for 80 miles. Australian stragglers and the wounded left behind in enemy-held territory were bayoneted.
The elusiveness of the Japanese soldier infuriated the Australian troops. ‘You couldn’t see the bastards!’2 muttered a frustrated twenty-year-old private with severe abdominal wounds. His last words were a plea for a gun, to kill the enemy before he expired.
‘Almost all the troops I’ve seen,’ Chester Wilmot wrote at the time, ‘reported either that they didn’t see the enemy at all, or else that they could not see him till he was within a few yards…’3
As they pulled out, the Australians wearied of the enemy’s incessant nocturnal taunts. Near Abuari, the Japanese muttering provoked an Australian to shout, ‘Go to bed you silly bastards and let us get some sleep!’4 One Japanese scout crept up to Lance-Corporal Alex Salvaris and whispered in English, ‘Where are you, digger?’ Salvaris, who was virtually next to the Japanese soldier, politely replied, ‘Here I am,’ and fired into the scout’s face.5
The Australian stretcher cases at Alola lay within range of Japanese guns. The Eora Creek field hospital was a six-hour walk from Alola, down one of the steepest sections of the track. Somehow these men had to be carried back over such country.
Medical orderlies crept on hands and knees along the muddy stretcher lines, applying dressings and administering morphine. Bullets flew overhead. None of the wounded wept, recalled Major Henry ‘Blue’ Steward, confirming the observation of the war correspondent Quentin Reynold: ‘The wounded don’t cry.’6 ‘They die quietly’, observed Ralph Honner, of the men under his command in the 39th Battalion.
To help carry them out, fresh teams of native porters were sent back into the battle zone. They were terrified; of 140 new carriers dispatched to Alola from Eora Creek on 30 August, only twenty arrived. Many deserted; others were among those commandeered to carry the packs and rifles of troops then returning down the track.
Even so, some 900 brave carriers were already doing the job. Carrying out the wounded demanded immense endurance, courage and agility—and manpower. On 29 August 42 badly wounded men were brought in, requiring 336 carriers, according to Kienzle. On 31 August another 300 native carriers were urgently sent up from Myola.
In the end, Papuan Infantry Brigade and Australian troops had to assist the evacuation. Their progress was agonisingly slow. ‘Carrying [the wounded] by Europeans,’ wrote Captain Rupert Magarey, of the 2/6th Field Ambulance, in his diary, ‘over even moderately hilly tracks at anything like a reasonable rate is impossible.’7
A small composite unit (of 2/14th and 2/16th troops) protected the evacuation with covering fire, buying time for stretchers to be made. During this respite, they saw a chance to inflict a brief counterattack on the Japanese troops arriving at Alola. Shouting hoarsely, they rounded on their tormentors and charged with bayonets across open country. The pursuers momentarily fled. This small victory was immensely heartening—the AIF hadn’t yet seen Japanese soldiers running away.
The wounded crowded into Eora Creek field hospital on the night of 30 August. One side of the camp was set aside for the dying or dead; the other for the operating theatre: a hut with a canvas awning, set in mud. Amputations were performed by torchlight; the surgeons worked through the night, kneeling over their operating tables, which were canvas stretchers soaked in disinfectant and draped with blood-soaked sheets.
Soon the Japanese advance patrols had scaled the high moss forest above the Eora Creek gorge, and the hospital was ordered to evacuate. Medics swiftly packed up their most vital supplies. Doctors were told to stop operating—fracture alignments and amputations ceased—and only to stem blood loss in cases deemed ‘absolutely necessary for the immediate saving of life’.8 One medic, Captain Wallman, was busy amputating a man’s hand when this order came through. He gave the wound a ligature, liberal sprinklings of sulphonamide powder and a new dressing, and sent the man and his half-amputated hand up the track in a morphine-induced daze.
Medical officers Magarey, and Steward, of the 2/16th Battalion, had the hellish job of deciding who must be carried and who could walk. A limb wound, unless exceptionally severe, was not thought worthy of a stretcher. Abdominal wounds were written off as hopeless cases—‘no abdominal or thoracic surgery was possible at any time’.9 The medics could only nurse these doomed youths, many of whom lay whispering for their mothers and girlfriends before they expired.
On the night of 31 August—one that ‘will never be obliterated from the memories of those who endured it’10—the walking wounded trudged across Eora Creek and up the steep bank toward Templeton’s Crossing. It rained incessantly, drenching their bandages and reducing the trail to a mudslide on which they slipped and crawled in agonising confusion. Some troops assigned to a stretcher refused it, and hobbled or dragged themselves up the track. Men with smashed legs and sucking chest wounds were seen crawling from the hospital. Private John Wilkinson observed sadly: ‘The war would have been different if we’d had helicopters.’11 Honner later mourned the huge losses that modern technology might have averted.
The jarring journey over the mountains would take two weeks. There were incredible stories of survival. One private, John Blythe, was literally riddled: shot in the chest, chin, back, right hand and leg. Steward bluntly told him: ‘I’ve bandaged you up and you’ve got no chance of reaching Moresby. Goodbye.’ ‘Thanks very much,’12 Blythe cheerfully replied, and he was carried away. The journey took twelve days; he weighed six stone on arrival, half his normal weight. They amputated his arm, but somehow he lived.
The troops’ apparent imperviousness to pain amazed the medics. Two 2/14th corporals—Lindsay ‘Teddy’ Bear, shot twice in his right leg, once in the left foot and once in the hand, and Russ Fairbairn, shot in the stomach—managed to will themselves unaided, back over the track. Bear’s wounds had reduced him to a crab-like scuttle, and Fairbairn helped push him over the mountains to Myola.
The war correspondent Osmar White encountered a soldier whose leg had been blown off just below the knee: ‘He’d ligatured the stump, applied two shell dressings, and wrapped the remainder of the leg in an old copra sack.’13 Two days later White saw the same soldier at Templeton’s Crossing, to where he’d crawled and hopped in excruciating pain. White offered to find a stretcher, to which the man angrily replied, ‘If you can get bearers, then get them for some other poor bastard. There are plenty worse off than me.’14
The Sisyphean resolve of such men formed the substance of the Kokoda legend. And they were thankful in one respect: none would swap their limb wounds, however horrible, for ADSO—‘A Dick Shot Off’.
But these were the walking wounded, the relatively fit. What about the stretcher cases?
At Eora Creek on 30 August there were not enough natives—many of whom fled as the Japanese drew near—to carry the rising number of Australians who couldn’t walk. These men were in danger of being surrounded and massacred where they lay. Magarey addressed the dozens of besmeared faces blinking up from the mud: ‘I want every man who is capable of walking…to start off for the top of the hill. We haven’t got enough bearers to carry everybody, but this place must be cleared tonight.’15 The stretchered troops were told to drag themselves out. ‘A personal appeal was made to the men to walk, even if only for a few 100 yds without assistance.’16
‘Like slave drivers we urged them on, some hobbling, some staggering like drunks,’ remembered Steward. ‘They slithered, crawled and clawed their way through the mud, faces twisted with effort…Men can rise from dreadful pain to superlative heights…’17
The guns of the surviving remnant of the 39th Battalion covered the doctors as they strove to save the wounded. The AIF battalions fell back under the same protective fire. It was the second time Australian militiamen had covered the withdrawal of an AIF unit, and the poignancy was not lost on Smoky Howson, who found himself posted near a deep pit in the clearing near the Eora Creek village (the pit is still there): ‘The Japs chased us back to Eora Creek and in a bloody great hurry…We took up positions there, but no-one knows why, because Eora Creek is down in a valley with bloody great mountains on all sides…my Bren was right alongside a deep hole. I kept thinking, “If I get hit I’ll go straight into that pit”.’18
About 200 or 300 yards up the southern slope of the gorge several carrier teams, terrified by the encroaching fire, abandoned their wounded on the side of the track. The patients lay there, dazed and staring into the darkness. Australian troops ran back to retrieve these stretcher cases, grabbing the hewn handles of the stretchers by torchlight.19 Steward helped to carry some of the last out—‘till then we never knew the effort needed, nor fully appreciated the work the carriers were doing’.20
All but three stretcher cases were evacuated from Eora Creek that day. These badly injured men—two with abdominal wounds, one with an open chest wound—were given up for dead. Magarey calculated they had half an hour to live. Later a medical patrol returned and found one of these men miraculously alive. The youth opened his eyes and asked an officer, ‘You’re not going to leave me here, sir? I won’t be left behind?’21
Magarey arranged to get the boy out—which was done—and he lived for several days on the shoulders of the fuzzy wuzzy angels.
The Japanese wounded faced a less arduous ordeal: a one-day journey downhill to Kokoda, where air evacuation was possible (though rarely used due to frequent Allied air raids). That did not help the Japanese stretcher cases, hundreds of whom were strewn through the forest, awaiting bearers. The worst cases were left to die; it was impossible to spare carriers for men who were doomed anyway. The Japanese were nothing if not practical in these matters.
The wounded found themselves crowding into the Kokoda field hospital, optimistically built for 150 patients. In early September, they ‘packed in like sardines’.22 There were no beds; the men lay on sapling leaves. The tiny wards were ‘lined up like pigsties’; their roofs made of ‘blackened rotting banana leaves’, supported by thin poles, from which water dripped interminably. There was no morphine; the Japanese soldier was expected to bear his pain. A fresh graveyard of little white sapling markers stood appropriately near the hospital entrance.
Takita Kenji, an officer in a Naval Propaganda Squad, visited the patients:
[They] lay strewn in their blood-stained, blackened uniforms. Large drops of water fell on their faces…they didn’t even have the energy to avoid them. They were…tormented from the pain of their injuries, or distressed by high fever. Were they praying for life? Or just waiting for death? Some several hundred of these inmates were probably embraced by unbearable torment. The hospital, where not a word was uttered, had sunk to the pit of a deathly silence.23
The Japanese army tended to deny the seriousness of disease; they treated it as shameful, a blot on the Imperial Army. The indomitable Japanese spirit would conquer pain, wounds and sickness. Medical resources suffered accordingly. One patient, a 24-year-old soldier, remembered the Kokoda field hospital but could not remember seeing any doctors: ‘When patients went to the hospital,’ he told his Australian captors, ‘they got worse instead of better. Food was worse than that received by troops. They ate grass roots part of the time.’24
The army’s medical services were woefully equipped, and their guidelines to troops, highly inappropriate. A Handbook of Hygiene in the Tropics (found on a Japanese corpse) suggested precautions against leprosy and plague. Its ‘Strict encomiums to cleanliness’ advised troops on horseback to wash and dry the ‘inside of thighs and posterior’ to stop saddle sores; all troops were to ‘prevent the decay of teeth by cleaning them before going to bed’.25
Takita left the field hospital in deep dismay. He accurately foresaw that ‘epidemics and deficiency in diet’ would destroy the soldiers’ fighting strength. ‘High command cannot by any means understand this.’ He gave the army ‘less than one month’ without food and medical support.26
The Australian field hospitals in the Owen Stanleys were little better: mere cordoned-off clearings, perhaps with a tarpaulin, in which the stretcher cases were lined up in rows. What else could be done in such terrain? They were slightly less abysmally equipped. Captain Allan Hogan, a regimental medical officer, reckoned medical services were virtually non-existent during the Australian withdrawal. They did, at least, contain morphine.
Medical supplies often didn’t arrive. Don Barnes, an ANGAU medical assistant, held ‘a small roll of plaster and a pair of nail scissors’ with which to treat the wounded streaming into Deniki after the fall of Kokoda.27 No salt tablets were issued until late in the campaign—‘the Army had not yet grasped that salt was needed by soldiers sweating in the mountains’28—and the wonder of penicillin did not arrive to comfort the armies in New Guinea until 1944. In the Owen Stanleys, medical science seemed at times to have degenerated into a helpless, medieval state in which a doctor’s role was merely to ease the pain of inevitable death.
Japanese-inflicted rifle wounds were small bullet holes—the enemy did not appear to use explosive bullets (though there is some suggestion they were used later). The wounds inflicted by mountain gun and mortars were of a different order—deep flesh wounds, shattered bones—and usually fatal. Open wounds became quickly infected, and sometimes gangrenous. Lieutenant Alf Salmon’s chest wound, the ‘little charmer’ with which he’d earlier walked back over the Owen Stanleys, turned out to be a bullet hole five inches long, requiring many stitches. ‘[The wound] is pretty open and will take a long while to heal,’ he told his wife on 19 August 1942. ‘The medical orderly made a bit of a mess of it…They had lost their needles and sewed me up with an old needle—the one and only needle they had.’29
Steward used morphine for those in dreadful pain; sulphonamide tablets for oral use, and powder on open wounds. The main problem was blood loss; wounds haemorrhaged constantly on the bumpy stretcher journey. To support broken limbs, he made splints out of bayonet scabbards ‘or a branch off a nearby tree’.30 He added ruefully that ‘imparting hope’ was the best medicine for a wounded soldier in such conditions.
Or a fag. Cigarettes were a wonderful relaxant. Pain suppressants, with the exception of morphine, were non-existent. Valium and Serepax were then unknown; alcohol was usually only available to officers. So the troops smoked—all the time. ‘Cigarettes have crippled and nearly blinded me,’ said Bill Crooks many years later. ‘But without cigarettes there would have been no success in the war…awake 24 hours on end men…would smoke sixty or seventy a day.’31
Surprisingly few lost their minds. Mental collapse was quite rare; Bob Iskov of the 2/14th Battalion recalls only a few cases during the retreat, of ‘blokes throwing in the sponge’. Not until after the war did many experience serious psychological damage.*
A few troops were accused of self-inflicted wounds. ‘The unfortunate men,’ said Magarey, who disbelieved the claims, ‘received scant sympathy and treatment.’ Yet cases of small hand and foot wounds did flow into Queensland hospitals in suspiciously large numbers. Captain John Oldham claimed that between 10 and 25 per cent of these were intentional. There has been no investigation.
Nor were the Australian doctors spared accusations of being overprotective. So great was the need for fighting men, Frank Sublet criticised the medics for wrongly diagnosing dysentery. ‘They haven’t all got dysentery!’ he boomed. ‘Some of them are putting it over you!’ To which Steward countered, ‘I say they have got dysentery, but if you expect me to look up every arse to make sure you’re making a big mistake.’32
Almost every man had some form of bowel disorder, varying from mild diarrhoea to bacillary dysentery, with the passage of blood and mucus. Vernon tried to reduce the prevalence of dysentery by improving latrine sanitation. He observed that a number of latrines ‘were too shallow, roughly dug and finished, and were already being prospected by flies’.33 He ordered them to be dug again, but was ignored. On his return to Ioribaiwa on 25 August, ‘I found the same pits breeding myriads of flies and dysentery rife’.
By the end of the first week of September the long file of walking wounded, like the creeping queue at a soup kitchen, was strung out for miles over the Owen Stanleys. All night, Osmar White and the photographer Damien Parer passed lines of dazed troops heading for Myola (where, they hoped, light aircraft might evacuate them).
‘They shuffled at a snail’s pace, holding onto each other in long pitiful strings…They kept sorting and re-sorting themselves,’White observed. The stronger overtook the weaker, and at the end of each ‘string’ men would ‘drop off and lie face down in the mud. Some died there. Some recovered…and [joined] the tail of another string.’34 Others collapsed on ‘pyres of heatless embers’—the phosphorescent fungus that grew along the trail, whose light they found heartening. Parer, the ubiquitous photojournalist who filmed the campaign (and won an Academy Award for his documentary*), remarked to his colleague, ‘An Army in retreat, my boy? Not very pretty is it? I’ve seen so many retreats. Greece was a picnic compared to this.’35
Of all their torments, the darkness was peculiarly disturbing. Night in the Owen Stanleys seems to have a substance so dense you imagine you can touch it. Preying on their minds was the thought of the enemy somewhere in the jungle, and some men reverted to a childhood horror of the ‘chasmic blackness’: ‘Tell them to send a light down the trail, will you? Tell them to send a light, digger!’ a plaintive voice cried out one night.36
Osmar White produced an old torch, and a line of wounded a hundred yards long formed up behind him. Now and then he flashed the light back down the line, and the beam shone over the troops. One, White noticed, was shot twice in the chest; the next soldier had shrapnel wounds in his forearm and thigh. White’s battery lasted two hours, flickered out, and the wounded vanished in the enveloping darkness. The soldier with the sucking chest wound lay down, mumbling, ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’
White, a pretty hardened reporter, lost his composure at this sight: ‘I gave him a nip out of my brandy flask…and he was asleep, lying in the arsenic weed…I started to cry…Now there was no light. The line fell away, disintegrated. I was alone.’37
When they reached Myola—with hopes of air evacuation dashed—new stretchers were built, wounds dressed, and they were sent on their way, back through Efogi, Menari and Nauro, to Uberi. They were either limping along or on the shoulders of the fuzzy wuzzies.
There was neither time for sleep nor long rests. Magarey pressed them harder. ‘Every man who could walk had to…It was necessary to be quite ruthless in this respect…over and over again men arriving at medical posts could be given only short rests and then pushed on again.’38 The endurance of those with leg wounds was ‘almost incredible’, he noted.
For days they continued in this state. The sight deeply moved Colonel Kingsley Norris, the 7th Division’s chief medical officer, who came up the track as far as Nauro: ‘It is impossible to resist the feelings of a slave driver…’ he said.39
On 9 September about two hundred wild-looking men walked into Ilolo near the start of the Kokoda Track. They were skinny, hungry, dirty, unshaven, dressed in rags, some without shirts or trousers. Many were wounded. All had dysentery. Fresh troops preparing to march off over the mountains ‘just stood and stared’. 40 These survivors of the 39th Battalion, who’d been fighting in the mountains since July, stripped, threw their rags onto a bonfire, and took a ‘glorious wash’ in the river.
Soon, the stretcher cases started coming in. They were transferred to field hospitals near Owers’ Corner, and later flown back to Queensland. The 2/9th Australian general field hospital, near Rouna Falls, had 600 beds in October. By December it would hold 2000 patients, so overcrowded that stretcher cases were slid under bunks. 41 Sister Murie was solely responsible for 120 patients, of whom 40 to 50 were very ill or seriously wounded. So crowded was the hospital, she reached those on the tent’s edges by lifting the tarpaulin from the outside, standing shin-deep in mud with a lantern to guide her way. ‘We dreaded the moonlit nights,’ she said. 41 On one occasion a bomb fell on the hospital but failed to explode.
In the eyes of returning troops, these pretty young nurses were visions of angels descended. ‘To them, it seemed as though we were Heaven-sent,’ said Sister Murie, aged twenty.
The troops were given a while to recuperate. Many were sent to the stinking ‘Lightning Ridge’ Dysentery Hospital, where each man was issued on arrival with a baked bean tin in which to pass his daily sample—‘just slime’, observed Private Kevin ‘Spud’ Whelan. Smoky Howson was sent to a base camp hospital in Port Moresby where doctors bored into his ‘upstairs department’ to relieve fluid from a head wound.
Within weeks, the 39th Battalion was sent back over the mountains to fight at Gona.