Kokoda (16 page)

But now Green was standing at the portals of the Lodge, when, away to his left, he spied an ethereal figure standing in the moonlit garden.

‘Prime Minister… ?’ he called out softly.

The ghost-like apparition turned and moved just a few feet forward before stopping. John Curtin did not look well, his rather deathly pallor being the only thing that reflected the moon’s little light. He had had a terrible run of ill-health in recent times, but still that was not the only reason for the pallor.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ Green enquired gently.

‘Can’t sleep,’ the PM replied.

‘Why can’t you sleep?’

For more than a minute, Curtin did not reply and simply remained standing there, as if he were turning the question over and over before making reply.

‘How can I sleep,’ he said, ‘when I know that our men are out there on transports on the Indian Ocean, with all those Japanese submarines looking for them… ? How
can
I sleep?’

It was a question for which there was no easy answer. And it was an all too real possibility. Just three months earlier, the light cruiser HMAS
Sydney
had been sunk by a German raider off the West Australian coast, taking 645 Australian lives with it. Green led the PM back inside and, in an attempt at the classic Australian cure-all, they had a chat over a cuppa tea. One of Curtin’s many other worries was the preparedness of the Australian militia men in Moresby, should there ever be a Japanese attack in those parts.

Others were also forming their views about the likely fighting capabilities of the Chocos… or lack thereof.

One was Osmar White, a fine Australian journalist, accredited by the Australian Government to cover the war, and providing most of his output for Melbourne’s
Sun
newspaper. He was in his early thirties, and for the past ten years he had been knocking around the world as a freelance journalist, most particularly between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Noted for his encyclopaedic knowledge of tropical conditions, no one in the Australian press corps was better equipped to cover potential military action in New Guinea. He had been to many places in his journalistic career, one of them the Japanese jungle training school in Formosa, where he was impressed by the Japanese soldiers’ thorough preparation for jungle warfare.

On an afternoon in late February 1942, just a week or so after he had arrived in Moresby, White was surveying the ‘battle stations’ set up by the 39th, 53rd and 44th battalions—essentially the defensive perimeter of Moresby, where the soldiers and artillery were dug in against the best that the Japanese could throw at them. While he watched, the soldiers continued a little desultory digging and wheeling of soil to places unknown. The heat was high and their hearts were low.

Though fighting hard against his own response, White was far from impressed. Was this really
all
that stood between the advancing Japanese army and Australia?
These
blokes?

‘Most of them,’ he wrote later, ‘were youngsters between nineteen and twenty-three. They had lost an average of twenty pounds in weight. They were scrawny, yellow, wild-eyed, and listless in their movements. Their skins were pocked by infected insect bites.’

This impression of their general inadequacy was compounded when, having seen what he could of the newly constructed defensive ramparts, he made his way back to town in the back of an army truck that stopped to pick up a sorry excuse for a soldier who was thumbing a ride. This fellow’s face was so badly bitten he had been unable to shave for a week, and the sores oozing puss on his knees and lower legs were so bad that Osmar could barely look at them.

‘You must have been scratching yourself, son,’ one of the other men in the back of the truck said to him.

‘I don’t when I’m awake,’ the man muttered in miserable reply, ‘but a man can’t help himself when he’s asleep.’
⁵⁵

Bloody hell. Fair dinkum. What chance were these blokes going to have if they went up against hardened Japanese battle veterans? Osmar White was certainly not the only one asking the question. In the view of the men of the small AIF garrison that had already been in Moresby for many months—and who had observed the shenanigans of the new arrivals with growing dismay—the answer was just about none. The AIF men could barely believe that the Australian Government could have sent these blokes north. And while these AIF men were careful to keep their distance from the amateurs, that certainly didn’t prevent them having fun at the militia’s expense.

In one famous incident, described by another notable war correspondent, George H. Johnston, a platoon of militiamen were travelling in an army truck out in the open when the skies were filled with Japanese bombers and their escorting fighters. No sooner had the first bomb dropped and the machine-gun bullets started spurting up the dust in an angry line down the road, then the truck screeched to a halt and the militiamen piled out to take shelter under the bulk of the vehicle. Alas, so keen had the driver been to get out that he had neglected to put the handbrake on, and in the instant that the militiamen were under the truck it had commenced slowly rolling forward. Still desperate to keep under their shelter, the men were obliged to frantically move forward with the truck while remaining on all fours, as the AIF men secure in their trenches cheered them to the echo and sang: ‘Git along, little dogies, git along, git along!’
⁵⁶

And just possibly the men of the 39th might have laughed too, once they’d got over the shock of bombs dropping on them, but there was simply too much work to do to spend much time being jocular. There were ships to be unloaded, runways to be extended, roads to be built and latrines to be dug; they were still trying to build a war base more or less from scratch. The way it seemed to the men of the 39th, just about every activity involved a shovel— funny, they thought they were going to be fighting this war with rifles.

One of the biggest earthwork projects was building enormous, horseshoe-shaped earthen mounds, called revetments, to protect planes on the ground from bombs. Nothing would save the planes from a direct hit, but a bomb going off twenty yards away wouldn’t do any damage at all, as long as there was an earthen wall between the plane and the explosion. They had been proven to work magnificently well, but it was back-breaking, gut-busting work to construct them and it wasn’t long before the same men who’d hid under the truck would almost look forward to the Japanese bombing runs as a break from the tedium of it all.

Still, on one occasion when the Japanese appeared overhead Osmar White was there when an Ack-Ack gunner had just had e-bloody-nough. Straight after the bombers had dropped their deadly load, the Digger jumped from his pit, shook his fists and roared at the departing planes: ‘Why don’t you come down, you dirty little yellow bastards, and let us have a crack at you!’
⁵⁷

Making the Japanese bombing even more frustrating for the men was the fact that they had no aerial resistance to put up against them. For months the defending forces had been promised their own squadron of Australian Kittyhawks, all to no avail. The planes had so often been promised for a ‘tomorrow’, which never came, that they became known as ‘Tomorrowhawks’.

By the end of February 1942, the sum total of Port Moresby’s aerial defence consisted of two tired Catalinas and a Hudson held together with bandaids, fencing wire and constant prayer. It was pathetic, and the running gag among the soldiers was that they were all cross-eyed, because they spent their time simultaneously digging below and looking up for what they now called ‘Betties’, the Jap bombers.

While they were busting to have a go at the bloody Japanese— fired up by an unending stream of horror stories coming from refugees straggling in from Rabaul—there was also a serious streak of realism among the Diggers about how long they could hold out if the Japs really landed. In Rabaul, they knew, resistance had lasted no more than twenty-four hours. And there were also intelligence reports that the original five thousand Japanese soldiers had now been joined by another two thousand as Rabaul had become their major launching base.

If then, the Japs really did land a full-blown invasion force on Moresby, it was clear that after the Australians had given the brutes merry hell they would need a fall-back position so they could hopefully be evacuated back to Australia. There was only one possibility for that—the small settlement of Daru. Four hundred miles west of Moresby on the southern New Guinea coastline, and just a hundred miles from the tip of Australia’s Cape York, it was their only chance of retreat. It was for this reason that, as White walked around and got to know the Diggers a little better, he kept hearing talk of the ‘Daru Derby’.

Upon inquiry, he found that most soldiers had formed themselves into informal small groups and had made actual route and supply plans for making their way to Daru. Many soldiers kept a bag with essential supplies—iron rations, waterproof cape, mosquito tent, 140 rounds of ammunition—constantly on hand for that purpose.

None of this indicated an unwillingness to fight, even though in self-mockery another running gag was that after the war was over they would all have the ‘Cross of Papua’ pinned to their chests, replete with its yellow ribbon, and they sometimes referred to themselves as the ‘Mice of Moresby’, as opposed to the famous and revered ‘Rats of Tobruk’. Rather, it was a realistic assessment that after they had given whatever they could to the Japs, shooting through to Daru would be the best thing for both themselves and Australia, which would then be in even more urgent need of them. Between times, they kept preparing for the invasion that they knew was close, as frustration rose that they couldn’t give the Japs a bit of what-for themselves.

Tom Grahamslaw had a problem. Like many of his ilk who had lived in New Guinea long before the war and understood the native culture, he had been recruited by the Australian Army to work in civil administration (soon to become ANGAU) and found himself working as a senior officer—he was now Captain Grahamslaw— based in the village of Awala, just inland from Buna on the north coast of New Guinea. The problem was that a part of his function was to oversee the administration of justice, and his first case was a potentially explosive one.

At least the facts were fairly straightforward. Shortly after Rabaul had fallen, a group of fleeing Europeans had been escorted from the north coast along the treacherous track to the nearest airfield, Kokoda—well inland—by a native village constable, named Kenneth. The constable had looked after them impeccably, seeing to their porters, accommodation and food. He had done it so well that one of the Europeans had given him a glittering ring as a token of appreciation—which is where the problem had arisen.

In the course of the journey, Constable Kenneth listened closely to the conversation of the refugees and decided that the Japanese simply couldn’t be stopped, and that they would shortly reign supreme. He now returned to his village and announced that no less than the King of Japan had made him, Kenneth, the king of the whole region, as proved by the glittering ring he now showed them. To display fealty to both himself and the King of Japan, Kenneth announced that he now required the village—under orders from the ‘captains’ he’d appointed from among his friends—to build an airfield and barracks, ready for the Japanese troops when they arrived. And they had begun to do just that when one of Tom Grahamslaw’s colleagues arrested Kenneth.

The only thing to do with him, Tom decided, was to put Kenneth behind bars in Moresby—well away from any possible Japanese landings. The natives had to be shown that it was the Australian Government that still ran things in these parts, and that anyone who cooperated with the enemy Japanese would be dealt with
severely
. For it really was a situation that had to be watched closely. In the Great War of three decades earlier, the first Australians killed had died at the hands of New Guinea natives working for the Germans.

That wasn’t going to happen this time.

As it happened, though, it began to look more and more like Constable Kenneth was prescient. The net amount of resistance Australia had offered to this point in, most notably, Malaya, Singapore and Rabaul had been minimal, and the first discussion among the Japanese leadership about invading the great southern continent had, by early March of 1942, evolved into fully detailed plans. The view that such an invasion should be prioritised was put most cogently by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese Naval General Staff—an extremely influential man as he was credited with being the driving force behind the stunningly successful Pearl Harbor raid. The admiral asserted in strong terms that the way forward was to establish a major naval base on the east coast of Australia, which could be used to put a stranglehold on the nation’s economic centres, and also thwart all attempts to use the island continent as a base from which the Americans could relaunch a campaign on the Philippines.