‘Potts’s tactic was to keep us between the Jap and Moresby. He had a wonderful attitude, was completely fearless’
—Keith Norrish, 2/16th Battalion
The Japanese converged on Eora Creek on 1 September and found only abandoned hospital huts, destroyed weapon pits and scattered food. A few corpses lay in their stretchers. Potts’s men had either carried stores away, or punctured the cans and bags, and dumped their contents in the creek.1 It was the first phase of a scorched-earth policy he planned to employ all the way back over the mountains.
The Japanese had eaten deeply into their two-week rice ration, and they were hungry. Their rations approached depletion after the delay at Isurava. They were already supplementing the food they carried with native garden produce and ‘Churchill supplies’.
Major-General Horii clearly understood the danger of advancing at the end of a faltering supply line without adequate resources. On the night of 1 September, he issued an urgent instruction. ‘All Tai commanders and those in authority of whatever rank,’ he ordered, ‘must exercise the most painstaking control…so that every bullet fells an enemy and every grain of rice furthers the task of the Shitai.’2
The daily rice ration was cut to an average of about 11/2 pints per man, and troops were ordered to collect fruit and vegetables from native gardens. Discipline lapsed. Japanese casualties at officer level were mounting, and several companies now lacked commanders or even qualified officers.
During the first week of September, Potts’s much-needed reserve force, the 2/27th Battalion, set out from Owers’ Corner to join Maroubra Force. With the threat of seaborne invasion removed after the victories at Milne Bay and in the Coral Sea, they were no longer needed in Port Moresby.
It was just as well, because Potts’s force was ‘pathetically depleted’.3 Most of his men were unfit for action. Five hundred were dead, wounded, sick or missing. After the loss of Key, Captain Phil Rhoden, a Melbourne solicitor, took command of the 2/14th.
Potts rallied his men. The one thing in his head was to keep an Australian fighting force between the Japanese and Port Moresby. He aimed to turn a terrible setback into an opportunity and gathered his officers together. His battalion commanders (then Rhoden and Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Caro of the 2/16th) were given the grave responsibility of executing a set of new tactics immediately.
The Australian army was not going to retreat, Potts said. They were going to withdraw fighting. They would fight the Japanese every inch of the way back over the mountain; resist the aggressor at every opportunity; draw in and then strangle his supply lines. Every bend in the track, every creek, copse and spur would serve as an ambush and attack opportunity. Potts knew well the difficulty of trying to supply an army over the mountains. Now the Japanese would learn the same lesson: he devised a fighting withdrawal that would reverse the equation, and subject the Japanese troops to constant harassment and their supply lines to the full trauma of this merciless country.
Australian patrols were given a crash course in jungle combat. They were to use the jungle to advantage, plan ambushes, and fan out around the enemy through virgin forest. They were not to cling to the track. These instructions were adopted immediately, with promising results. An Australian ambush above Eora Creek succeeded in killing ten Japanese soldiers, and the advancing enemy were stopped dead. Japanese officers had to wave their swords to get their men moving. Some refused. The Koiwai Battalion’s diarist noted, ‘The Australians resisted stubbornly; we have failed to defeat them.’
This phased skirmishing continued all the way back to Myola. ‘Had Potts not withdrawn, we would have been completely encircled by 7000 Japs,’ said Keith Norrish, of the 2/16th Battalion. Norrish vividly described how the fighting withdrawal worked:
Potts knew the only way to survive was to withdraw, to set up ambushes—and withdraw. So we’d send a patrol out every 15 minutes to face the Japs. The patrols were armed with two Tommies and a Bren gun.
They’d eliminate the first Jap patrol, and then our fellows would withdraw, and come back to the main force. Then we’d attack in force, with a pincer movement on either flank. We’d give them a fair hammering, and withdraw again. Potts’s tactic was to keep us between the Jap and Moresby. He had a wonderful attitude, was completely fearless, and always had a word for anybody.4
The tactic was repeated again and again, using fresh troops each time. ‘One lot would hold, the next lot would dig in; when the first lot couldn’t hold any more they’d fall back through the next lot, and leapfrog their way back,’ explained Frank Taylor.5
At Templeton’s Crossing the Australians destroyed everything they couldn’t carry—the carriers cheerfully slashed heavy bags of rice and punctured tins of bully beef—and on the night of 3 September they reached Myola. Hot food and a change of clothing awaited the troops here. Mail was distributed. Some men hadn’t removed their boots in a week, and ‘exposed their puffed and leprous-looking feet to the sun’6—and to the brigade’s ‘chiropodist’, one Corporal Clark, a window dresser from Victoria. Clark found himself paring away rotten foot tissue from crumbling, waterlogged socks.
The respite didn’t last, and soon Myola itself was threatened. It seemed the enemy never slept; true, Horii deployed his fresh troops while resting others. His total forward combat strength exceeded 3000. Potts had only 500 men—the 39th and 53rd battalions had returned to Port Moresby—and most of these were unfit to fight (his reserve battalion had not yet arrived).
Little of this was properly appreciated in Port Moresby, or Brisbane, as revealed in Rowell’s wire to Blamey on 3 September:
…I have told ALLEN to order POTTS to hold MYOLA at all costs…Every yard the enemy makes increases his own supply difficulties, which we hope to accentuate by air action. Unfortunately some of our bombs fell among our own troops today at KAGI, but that is always possible…The enemy is resourceful and well trained, and is not afraid to die. His defeat is not going to be a walkover, but will only come from the most stubborn and bitter fighting…7
With so few men Potts could not hold Myola—which, being a wide-open space was, in fact, indefensible—and he abandoned the vital drop zone. Had he chosen to stay and fight, his army would assuredly have been wiped out. He saved his men’s lives, but would incur the wrath of Brisbane. Rowell and Allen could only sit and read Potts’s wires with rising anxiety:
4 Sept: to ALLEN from POTTS:
…country utterly unsuitable for defended localities. Regret necessity to abandon MYOLA intend withdrawing EFOGI…men full of fight but utterly weary…remaining companies of 2/27th battalion too late to assist.
They withdrew hastily: demolished the supply depot, spoiled the food supplies, and fell back to Efogi. The decision infuriated Brisbane. The loss of Myola handed the main Allied dropzone to the Japanese (though this didn’t help them, since the Allies virtually controlled the air). ‘The abandonment of Myola must have sickened Potts,’ writes the official historian Dudley McCarthy. ‘More than any other man he knew its importance.’8
Rowell and Allen were literally between a rock and a hard place. They were under extreme pressure to arrest the withdrawal. On one hand, Blamey and MacArthur breathed orders down their necks to regain the offensive; on the other, they began to understand Potts’s problem (in fact, the dimmest civilian standing on Lake Myola can see why Potts couldn’t defend it, even with fresh troops, but none of the high commanders had seen the country).
Allen was reduced to sending mild encouragement. He alerted Potts’s attention ‘to the desirability of assuming the offensive’. Potts ignored this, and stuck to his guns. He technically disobeyed orders, and continued the fighting withdrawal—a stroke of inspired disobedience. He saw that his little army were better off alive, held together as a barrier, than dead in a heap on this ‘place of ghosts’.
On 5 September, during a violent squall, the Japanese poured into the abandoned Myola. They feasted on leftover rations, which had been deliberately spoiled, and ‘yielded a prolific crop of gastric disorders’.9 The mass outbreak of food poisoning caused another day’s delay, to Horii’s fury.
An extremely brave Japanese machine-gunner emerges as an influential commander at this point. Lieutenant Sakomoto—who never shirked his duty, not even in extremis—chronicled the Japanese experience in excruciating detail. He kept a furtive diary. On reaching Myola, he wrote, ‘…discovered large quantities of enemy rations such as corned beef, milk, jam etc. First taste of milk for a long time.’ He shared it with his men, who were still feeling the side effects the next day: ‘Many suffered diarrhoea by over-eating captured provisions.’10
That afternoon Potts rendezvoused with the long-awaited 2/27th Battalion at the village of Efogi. Colonel Geoff Cooper, their commander, was a scion of Adelaide’s Cooper brewing dynasty. The brigade’s three battalions were united for the first time in the mountains. Cooper related an unfortunate incident on the way: at Nauro, biscuit bombers had missed their targets, and dropped their loads onto the thatched huts sheltering the men, which killed one and injured five.
Potts sent the fresh troops to the front position on the track, and continued the phased withdrawal. But New Guinea Force HQ back in Port Moresby was unimpressed. The next day Potts received a stern order from Tubby Allen, which reflected the alarm in Brisbane: ‘Absolutely essential you give no further ground,’ Allen barked, ‘and that you lose no opportunity to hit the enemy with strong, offensive patrols. Contact will be regained at earliest. 2/14th and 2/16th battalions will be rallied at once.’
The order was impossible to fulfil. Potts had one combat-ready battalion (itself at half strength), and the Japanese were reinforced. The Australians were now fighting an army about five times their size. He replied to Allen at once:
6 Sept: to ALLEN from POTTS:
Situation not sufficiently stable…2/14 and 2/16 very little physical reserves…enemy appears able to follow up his advantage for at least 4 days. 2/27 bn only tps in condition to fight. Please expedite foot powder, boots, socks, methylated spirits and bootlaces. Urgent need.11
He resolved to stick to his new tactics. They had the advantage of letting him choose his battlefields. Imperceptibly to those in Brisbane, Potts’s men were drawing the enemy into a death trap. They had shored up their losses, regrouped and struck back. By 6 September, Potts had converted his ‘inspired disobedience’ into a brilliant defensive manoeuvre, more accurately described as ‘calculated disobedience’.