‘To save a further call on stretcher-bearers he has actually crawled on his hands and knees for days’
—Captain Ben Buckler, of Corporal John Metson
After Isurava, 170 Australian soldiers were cut off behind enemy lines in the jungle. Many were badly wounded and couldn’t walk, or keep up; their mates stayed back with them.
The most senior example was Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Key, commander of the 2/14th Battalion. Key and his entire HQ staff had been caught in friendly fire during the last fighting at Alola and forced off the track. Key, who would later win a posthumous DSO for his leadership at Isurava, struck south along the Eora Creek bed, hoping to find his men at Abuari. After ten days of pushing through the jungle, his party were caught by the Japanese. They were taken back to the northern beachhead.
‘Captured Lt-Col K and four others,’ noted one Japanese soldier. ‘Though questioned they stubbornly refused to speak.’1 A witness during the interrogation, Keishin Tsuno, was so impressed by Key’s silence that he, too, tried to keep silent when the Australians captured and questioned him. It was a fitting epitaph for Key’s party; few suffered in silence under Japanese interrogation methods.
It seems they took Key to Buna where James Benson, then a prisoner of the Japanese, recalled seeing ‘a tall gaunt Australian with the star and crown of Lieutenant-Colonel’ brought into camp with a bad leg wound. He was emaciated and exhausted.
If this was Key—as seems likely—his fate, and that of his men, was decapitation, either in Buna, or in Rabaul.2 A Japanese prisoner later stated: ‘An Australian 2nd Lieutenant was captured…After examination he was beheaded that night…’3 Key was the third Australian battalion commander to die within two months of fighting on the Kokoda Track. To put this in perspective, only one battalion commander had been killed in the Middle East during five substantial campaigns fought over two years.4
One astonishing story of lost troops survives in all its haunting pathos, thanks to a diary of surpassing descriptive power belonging to Captain Ben Buckler, whose 42 men were severed from the main body of their battalion5 at Isurava Rest House.
Tending the wounded had delayed their withdrawal, and they were stranded behind Japanese lines. They built stretchers out of timber and blankets and struck out alone, hoping to circumvent the enemy. To begin there were two stretcher cases, three walking wounded and one ‘crawling case’: the young corporal John Metson, a St Kilda salesman, who was shot in both ankles. Eschewing a stretcher, Metson got along on his hands and knees, which he’d bandaged up. In this manner he dragged his useless legs over the ranges for three weeks. Buckler observed: ‘To save a further call on stretcher-bearers he has actually crawled on his hands and knees for days.’6
On 4 September, Buckler dispatched a platoon commander, Captain Maurice Treacy, to get help while he waited with the wounded at a native garden on the hills above Eora Creek, which was now in enemy hands. Here Buckler’s party lived for six days on sugar cane and sweet potatoes. While reconnoitring an abandoned Japanese camp nearby, he encountered nine Australian bodies—‘had the unpleasant task of removing identity discs from the week old corpses’7—and salvaged 21 tins of bully beef from their haversacks.
Help did not come in time: on 11 September, the day before Treacy reached an Australian base, Buckler spotted Japanese boot prints—the telltale webbed toe—in the garden, and ordered his men to move out. They pressed three carriers, who had earlier deserted, into service, and headed north-east toward the coastal village of Tufi. By this time the party numbered 47: two officers, 37 others ranks and eight wounded, four on stretchers, three ‘limping cases’, and the crawling Metson. Of the stretcher cases, Privates Yeo and Mayne were both shot through the knees, which were badly fractured; Sergeant Knights had a bullet lodged in the thigh and a deep flesh wound.
On the 17th a soldier shot a wild pig. They dismembered and stewed it, and poured the blood off into a mess tin. ‘Nothing was wasted…the three carriers divided up the entrails.’8 The hide was carried for two days, scorched and eaten. At a nearby village members of the Biagi tribe provided sweet potato, sugar cane and bananas, and the troops regained their strength. But the Biagi refused to work as stretcher-bearers, so the troops offered 34 shillings and threepence in silver and copper coins to entice them.
Seven days later Buckler’s band, ‘like white apparitions’, entered the village of Sangai, where friendly villagers supplied shelter and food. Some huntsmen carried ‘huge 12 foot pig spears’.9 Buckler decided to leave the wounded here and press on for help. Two village chiefs, Faria and Ewoki, gave assurances they would look after the seven sick and wounded troops.
Before he left, Buckler dutifully listed their names, rank, next of kin and addresses in his diary. Corporal Metson and Privates Mayne, Hunter, Snelgar, Knights and MacDonald were from Victoria; and Private Yeo from Perth. It makes eerily melancholy reading, the little list of ‘next of kin’ written in Buckler’s pencil beside each soldier’s name: ‘father, cousin, father, mother, father, wife, father…’
Private Thomas Fletcher volunteered to stay with the stretcher cases, for whose care he had two shell dressings, fourteen field dressings, towels and soap. There was no morphine. Their pain was intolerable and two of the wounded, Buckler later reported, ‘went mental…these men lost their senses and had no confidence in coming through. They had to be left at Sangai.’10
Buckler’s patrol departed, passed perilously close to the Japanese-occupied track between Buna and Kokoda and crossed a swinging rope bridge high over the lower reaches of the Kumusi River. The natives assisted by piggybacking their weapons across: ‘It is a queer sight,’ wrote Buckler, ‘to see an old warrior of the spear age place down his weapons and shoulder a Bren gun over the waters.’11
There were lighter moments, as on the night of the 23rd when a full moon sparkled on the stream, and Buckler felt moved to sing, ‘Roaming in the Gloaming’, to an unrecorded response.
At this stage, the captain was experiencing exceptionally vivid dreams of food and home: ‘I…walked through a maize crop and there came to our home. There was my family sitting around watching my mother cook and butter some steak!’12 Unable to sink his teeth into it, he awoke, gnashing the air. At Ilomo he paid the natives five shillings for fruit and vegetables. The men dreamt of a plate of hot bully beef. ‘Funny,’ Buckler observed, ‘how circumstances alter tastes—sometimes bully is rather despised as a dish.’13
Anxious about Fletcher’s party, Buckler left his men at Kuru on the 26th and pressed on alone. He passed Jaure and Suweri where, at the foot of the Owalama Divide, he tried to recruit a guide. The Suweri locals initially refused as the alpine moss forest, like Myola to the Koiari people, was named diriva gabuna, a place of ghosts. Buckler shrugged and pressed on. Eventually they agreed to send a small native boy, who ran after the lone Australian into the haunted mountain pass.
They camped in a high forest, where ‘all I could do was huddle up in half a blanket and gas cape and listen to the moans of the little native who was covered only by a small thin piece of beaten pig skin’.14
At 1.30 p.m. on 28 September, a month after he left the track at Alola, Buckler rounded a corner and walked into an American camp at the Oidobi Rest House. His relief must have rivalled Stanley’s, on finding Dr Livingstone. The Americans ‘seemed to have been conjured up by a spiteful Papuan mountain djinn…or an image of wishful thinking to a man who had endured a month of strain and vicissitude’, wrote Raymond Paull.15 After sharing a plate of bully beef, the Americans—the recently arrived 126th Regiment—guided the exhausted captain to Dorobisolo, half a day on.
Here, Buckler met the press—some sixteen war correspondents. A war artist sketched his face. Commando patrols were sent immediately to retrieve the stragglers. Some 33 survivors were brought into camp. A New York Herald Tribune correspondent, Lewis Sebring, witnessed their return:
Sunken eyes looked at us from bearded faces as the Australians, in tattered uniforms, painfully shifted from sitting positions, rising to reach for outstretched hands…the crowd parted as the Aussies crunched up the gravel.
The men who had not yet been in the fight looked in awe at those who had. Two ambulances received a half-dozen wounded who had walked through the jungle with the rest. One limped from a piece of shrapnel in his back. Others had bandaged legs and arms. A colonel watching every move of the men commented that despite [their] condition…they carried all their firearms, ammunition and equipment. That is a great tribute to the leadership and discipline of these troops.16
Fletcher’s stretcher party was still at Sangai, and on 6 October, Buckler flew back over the mountains in an American bomber, with food and medical supplies. The plane circled the village, but found no sign of Fletcher and the seven sick and wounded. On the 7th Buckler tried again; and his plane dropped two packages. Again, no sign of the men. The answer lay in the dust of the deserted village. A Japanese patrol had got there first, shot Fletcher, and bayoneted the sick and wounded where they lay. Metson received a posthumous British Empire Medal for his epic feat of endurance in dragging his broken body over the mountains for three weeks.
The story has an intriguing epilogue. Buckler greatly admired the American can-do attitude, and sought their support for his idea of forming an Orde Wingate-style Australian parachute regiment: ‘Now equipped as a Yank and living with 126th Regiment,’ he wrote, soon after he recovered.17
The idea had been burning in his mind as he walked over the mountains, and he approached Colonel Lawrence Quinn, of the 126th. Quinn told GHQ, ‘[Buckler] has in mind trying to obtain certain items of our uniform and possibly some of our equipment…I thought we might be able to lend him a hand.’18
The captain was brought back to Brisbane to explore his paratroop plan. He was asked to list his ideas for defeating the Japanese. In this, Buckler revealed a gift for parade ground prose that rivalled Porter’s. Some of his ideas were excellent. Beards, he said, were ‘a natural camouflage’, and more effective than painting their faces green. ‘I would suggest that all infantry be allowed to retain their whiskers for camouflage purposes.’ This would have the added benefit of reducing kit weight ‘by deletion of shaving material’. He claimed that a sniper had once picked out the only clean-shaven officer in his battalion. One of his more inventive tips was the development of a triple-purpose stick for use on the Kokoda Track: it would be ‘a walking stick, camouflage screen and umbrella’.19 This did not get up.
He urged a course in native customs and languages, as well as a lesson in Japanese phrases to counter their English jibes. He suggested, as a first step, that all Australian troops learn the Japanese for, ‘Stop there’, ‘Come forward’ and ‘Japanese bastard’. Most radically Buckler recommended that dehydrated meat, bacon rashers, and vitamin pills replace bully beef. The jury is still out.