Kokoda (13 page)

So as the soldiers scratched and itched and made endless trips to the latrines during the night—sometimes wearing a gas mask, if they simply couldn’t stand the smell—in the daytime they were obliged to work. Most of this was of the ‘hard yakka’ variety. They continued to unload the ships bringing supplies from Australia, and also work on building the roads and air-raid shelters which were now being constructed all around the town. Down at Bootless Inlet on the edge of Port Moresby they constructed barbed-wire barricades and sandbag weapon pits, against the day that the Japs might try to land there. In an effort to fool the enemy into thinking there were a lot more defending troops than there actually were, they also constructed rather flimsy kinds of sheds, designed to look like major barracks from the air. There would also soon be a massive campaign underway to hack another five airfields out of the unforgiving land around Moresby, in an effort to turn the joint into a base for offensive operations.

All up, it was hot, terrible, dusty work, and there was very little time for anything so prosaic as military training. Not that they were the only ones who were suffering in that particular part of the world.

It was just the day after the 39th Battalion landed in Port Moresby, Sunday, 4 January 1942, and it happened at another Australian territory, Rabaul, some 450 miles nor’ by nor’east. Twelve natives from the nearby Trobriand Islands, who had just been mercifully plucked from a stricken canoe which had been adrift in the adjacent Solomon Sea for six weeks, were sitting down to their first meal in eight days when they looked up. There was a strange rumbling coming from the skies. Within twenty seconds, twenty-two Japanese bombers were overhead at an altitude of 12 000 feet and unleashing bomb after bomb, tumbling roughly towards Rabaul’s airfield below. One of the bombs crashed through the roof of the Rapindik Native Hospital just to the south of the airfield where those saved natives were having their meal… and killed them all. Another brace of bombs landed right on a munitions dump, and so great was the subsequent explosion that most of the valves in radio transmitters around the settlement were shattered, so as well as being attacked the town was suddenly cut off from communications with the outside world.
³²

These were the first Japanese bombs to fall on Australian territory, and this was the first signal of enemy intent in the area. By the time the raid was over—and the air-raid siren warning just then began to wail—fifteen natives were dead and another thirty were injured. The surgeon who removed shrapnel from one native counted no fewer than six types of metal in the chunk and was quick with his conclusion: ‘Pig-iron Bob will find no friends in Rabaul…’
³³
According to the
Rabaul Times
on 9 January 1942 the one saving grace: ‘We are fortunate, up to the present that no casualties have occurred other than amongst natives…’
³⁴
Quite.

Over the next three weeks, Japanese planes continued to soften up Rabaul’s defences. In response, there was no doubting the courage displayed by many of the Australian defenders, and none more so than the pilots in the RAAF’s tiny and antiquated 24 Squadron, who were sent up in Wirraways—simple, glorified advanced trainer aircraft with a couple of guns attached—to take on the infinitely superior Japanese Zeros.

While the ‘Wirras’ took half an hour to get to 12 000 feet and were ponderous and only lightly armed, the Zeros were something else again. Usually launched from aircraft carriers, these principal fighter planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy were fast, manoeuvrable, and were essentially a ‘flying gun’, coming complete with two 7.7 mm machine guns and two 20 mm cannon. The only time the Wirras could remotely approach the speed of the Zeros was, alas, while hurtling towards the ground in a trail of black smoke—and this happened painfully often.

The sanguine courage of the Australian pilots was best represented by the words of their leader, Wing Commander J. M. Lerew—he of the ‘huge and bristling red moustache and a permanent grin’
³⁵
— who managed to send a message to Royal Australian Air Force Headquarters in Townsville that proved sadly accurate for most of his men: ‘
Nos moriture te salutamus
’. The famous gladiatorial salute of ancient Rome, it translated to: ‘We who are about to die, salute you’.
³⁶
In the principal dogfight of the Rabaul campaign, sixteen Australian crew members in eight Wirras took off to engage in combat with no fewer than eighty bombers and forty Zeros. When the battle was over, only two Australian planes had survived while six RAAF men had been killed and just five others set foot on the ground again unscathed.

Finally, it was happening, as indicated by the thousands of propaganda leaflets that the Japanese dropped on the Rabaul citizenry, giving them a stark warning:

To the officers and men of this island. Surrender at once and we will guarantee your life treating you as war prisoners. Those who resist us will be killed, one and all. Consider seriously. You can find neither food on this island, nor way of escape and will die.

Signed
,

Commander in Chief of the Japanese Forces.

The Japanese were coming all right. They were a fine body of fighting men, five thousand strong, and were black from head to toe, with black shoes, shorts and singlets, and black camouflage paint daubed all over their faces, hands, legs and arms. Nestled in hulls of an armada of twenty-five Japanese warships, they were the soldiers of the 144th Regiment. They were the pride of the elite, jungle-trained South Seas Detachment—whose principal task it was to suppress all resistance to Japanese hegemony of the Southwest Pacific.

The mood on the Japanese ship in the pre-dawn hours of 23 January 1942 was one of confidence, mixed with a holy sense of mission. After all, the core of the regiment had been together since 1937 when it had achieved its first great victory in Manchuria, before following up with equally stunning victories in other parts of China. Just in the last month, these troops had stormed the American defenders at Guam and acquitted themselves admirably, wiping out a numerically superior force which was also better armed. Against such a tough, superbly trained and totally ruthless enemy, the Americans stood little chance. The 144th were, in short, crack troops, and their destination on this day was Rabaul, with its superb natural harbour and two airstrips, nestled beneath its majestic volcano.

There, a garrison of only fourteen hundred Australian soldiers, consisting of men from the 2/22nd Battalion, plus eighty members of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and men from other detachments, would just have to put up the best battle they could. The truth of it, though, was that Australia was woefully ill-prepared to thwart Japanese ambitions in this part of the world, even though Rabaul was squarely in Australian territory, and it had been obvious for some time that Rabaul was a prime target. Trouble was, the few ancient guns that the foreshores of Simpson Harbour boasted were not even pointed in the direction of the invading Japanese forces.

In the end, the organised resistance of Rabaul lasted no longer than twenty-four hours, as the Australian survivors fled for their lives. As they fled, they traded stories of what they had seen, including accounts of wave after wave of Japanese soldiers hitting the shoreline and then using the dead and injured bodies of
their own men
as a kind of buffer to help get across the defensive rolls of barbed wire the Australians had put in place to stop them. Wave after wave after wave of them, and they just kept on coming.

The invaders also proved to be without mercy in their treatment of the vanquished, and were ruthless in their pursuit of the Australian soldiers trying to get back to Australia to fight another day.

Down at a place called the Tol Plantation, just fifty miles south down the coast from Rabaul, a former bank officer by the name of Captain Bill Owen had just forded a river with a couple of fellow officers to reconnoitre the lie of the land ahead for the hundred and fifty tired and wounded soldiers who had managed to escape from Rabaul when they heard the throb of motors. As Owen and his two companions took cover across the river until they knew more, five Japanese motor launches suddenly hove into view and sprayed the other shore with heavy machine-gun fire. All the Australian troops who surrendered were quickly tied up. Not long afterwards they were led one by one into the jungle, and each one was shot or bayoneted or both—their blood-curdling screams leaving no doubt in the minds of the waiting soldiers just what fate lay ahead. In the undergrowth, Bill Owen and his fellow officers wept with frustration at their inability to do anything to save their countrymen and comrades. Still, they were in no doubt as to their duty; had they tried to intervene, they too would have been cut down, which would have served no purpose. Their job really was to live to fight another day, and by God when that day came they
would
.

This horrible encounter with the Japanese became known as the ‘Tol Massacre’, and it would stand for decades to come as one of the lowest benchmarks of Japanese brutality.

On a day in late January 1942, Curtin was in Melbourne and just about to board a train to Perth when a journalist asked the prime minister what he made of the first attacks on Rabaul.

‘Nearer, clearer, deadlier than before, the cannon’s opening roar… ’ Curtin replied, drawing from one of the famous passages from Byron’s ‘The Eve of Waterloo’. ‘Anybody who fails to perceive the immediate menace which this attack constitutes for Australia, must be lost to all reality…’
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As it turned out, very few were lost to that reality and the view that things had definitively changed was confirmed with intelligence reports that the initial invasion force of five thousand had quickly been joined by another twenty thousand Japanese soldiers and endless shiploads of supplies, weaponry and ammunition.

This still did not prevent, however, Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Army Minister, Francis Michael Forde, shortly afterwards expressing his disappointment at the way some Australians had behaved in the face of the Japanese aggression. ‘The civilians who took to the bush at Rabaul,’ he said, ‘should have stayed at their civil posts or plantations…’
³⁸

Despite this official insensitivity and ignorance in Australia as to just what the people on the ground in the northern climes were up against, the upshot was that in short 25 000 frontline Japanese soldiers had been installed in a secure harbour with ample stores. Put together with the newly secured airfields that Rabaul boasted, the Land of the Rising Sun was now better placed than ever to reach out even further into the Southwest Pacific.

To emphasise this dominance, a pack of sixty Japanese planes had dropped bombs on the settlements of Bulolo, Lae and Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea at around noon on 21 January, destroying some twenty-two Allied military and civil aircraft in the process. (The sum total of defences ranged against the planes was one ancient Lewis Gun from the Great War at Salamaua, three at Bulolo and one at Lae.
³⁹
) The only fortunate thing in the whole disaster was that there had been few casualties, with only one man killed, a pilot by the name of Kevin Parer who, among other things, was Damien Parer’s first cousin. He had been killed while trying to scramble skywards.
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Affirming the obvious, that Moresby itself was now in grave peril and that the situation was desperate, Major General Morris did two key things. The first was to pass an edict that every able-bodied man in the Territory under forty-five years of age had to present himself for military service. The second was to issue a message on the morning of 27 January 1942 to all commanding officers of the various units making up the Moresby Garrison: ‘No position is to be given up without permission; outflanked positions must continue to resist; even the smallest units must make provision for counterattack… We have the honour of being the front line defence of Australia. Let us show ourselves worthy of that honour.’
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For starters, most of the men of the 39th were simply trying to show themselves worthy by not drowning in the monsoonal rains that had just arrived; but still they did what they could to strengthen their defences.

And sure enough, proof positive that Moresby’s new neighbours, the Japanese in Rabaul, were seriously interested in paying a kind of courtesy call came at three o’clock on the morning of 3 February 1942, when the shrieking sound of air-raid sirens suddenly filled the air in Moresby. Only a short time later, the roar of plane engines arrived with exploding bombs. No one was killed in that particular raid, but when it was followed by another one two days later, the city as a whole was so shaken up by the certainty that the Japanese were on their way that panic was widespread. Many of the native police simply abandoned their posts and headed back to the hilltop villages whence they came. Among some of the Australian forces there was a sudden massive breakdown in discipline, which manifested itself most damagingly in widespread looting of government stores. There was a sense that you might as well help yourself to anything you wanted because, after all, there was no point in leaving it for the Japs!

An Australian bloke by the name of Tom Grahamslaw watched all the stealing with disgust. He’d lived in these parts for many years—mostly on the nearby island of Samarai as a customs agent— and had returned to Moresby in response to Major General Morris’s edict that all able-bodied men make themselves available to serve with the armed forces.