Kokoda (17 page)

The Chief of the Naval General Staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, fully supported this contention and noted that by the estimation of the First (Operations) Section of the Naval General Staff, just three divisions of the Japanese Army would be capable of occupying key population centres in Australia. After all, on this very day, 7 March 1942, the news had just come through that the Imperial Japanese Army had notched up another important conquest with the fall of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies.

So now, with all the newly gained territories, the Japanese war machine was also blessed with a sure supply of the resources, raw materials and manpower it needed to move into overdrive. Prime Minister Tojo himself had recently boasted to the Japanese parliament that when Japanese forces had invaded Borneo they had secured seventy of the hundred and fifty oil wells in working condition and with the half a million barrels they could deliver in the next year, there would be no further problems with oil supply.

Against this, the Japanese Army itself was a lot less sure. It was still engaged in the war in China, as well as in holding the perimeters of the new Japanese Pacific empire which extended over almost two million square miles and, even more crucially, in defending their own homeland against possible Russian attacks. The Japanese Army had been surprised at how quickly Singapore, Malaya and Burma had fallen, and its leaders were still gathering themselves.

One other thing that gave them pause was their view of how the Australian population would react. A Japanese Army document written at this time, called the General Outline of Policy on Future War Guidance, noted that ‘if the invasion is attempted, the Australians, in view of their national character, would resist to the end… ’
⁵⁸

In sum, the Imperial Japanese Army felt that they would need ten divisions to satisfactorily quell Australia and, as their manpower was already stretched thinly across most of the Pacific, this was not feasible at this time.

As a compromise—and keeping the possibility of invading Australia open—a preliminary plan was decided to secure Port Moresby. The central plank of the plan was to launch a seaborne invasion from the east, by way of the Coral Sea which curled around the eastern tip of New Guinea. With a Japanese base then securely entrenched at Moresby, the Land of the Rising Sun would be well placed to launch an invasion on Australia, as their planes could now easily bomb Darwin and North Queensland. The Japanese would also be in a relatively secure position to rebuff any Australian incursions against Japan’s newly established empire in the Pacific, which now stretched from Tokyo, through the Philippines and all the way to Singapore and then Burma. With the successful invasion of Port Moresby, the boundary fences of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would be secured.

A preliminary invasion of New Guinea, on a much smaller scale, had already been planned for some time. On 8 March 1942—at around the same time as Rangoon fell—Japanese forces totalling some three thousand troops landed at Lae and Salamaua, on New Guinea’s north coast. These two settlements stood on opposite sides of the bay through which the Markham River flowed to the sea, on terrain suitable for airfields near the newly established beachheads. The Japanese intended to be there for the long haul, with the soldiers coming complete with their own specially printed ‘occupation money’, which they intended to use to purchase the natives’ produce and labour, just as they had been doing in Rabaul. It was the same money they planned to use when later they occupied Australia and New Zealand.
⁵⁹

The Japanese secured the landings at Lae and Salamaua with so little resistance, that just a few days later Imperial General Headquarters formally embraced another plan put forward by the Japanese Navy to capture not only Port Moresby by seaborne invasion, but also the ring of islands formed by Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. This desire to take over islands was a hallmark of the Japanese campaign. While Britain still took the view that when Britannia ruled the waves, the rest would naturally follow, Japan regarded the water merely as a thoroughfare to get to the next bit of land, and while a strong navy was important, it was not an end in itself. And occupying islands and establishing airfields ensured air-cover for the next step forward.

These minor Japanese landings on the north coast did not overly worry the Australian military authorities at Port Moresby, even though the Japs were now just 170 miles away. They felt secure knowing that while the enemy was settling in on the other side of the island, the impassable Owen Stanley Range would separate them from the Australian forces. As Major General Morris told the correspondents who asked, while there was apparently some kind of track which led over the mountains, it was only a rare white man who had made it across, and there was no chance that an entire battalion of Japs could get through to the other side intact. It was, as they described it, a
boong
track, and nothing else.

Up north, nearer the landings, the natives weren’t so sanguine. News of the Japanese arrival on the coast travelled quickly from village to village and from plantation to plantation throughout much of that part of the island. The general view of the natives seemed to be that the heavily armed newcomers were ‘invaders’, and this perception was encouraged by the white plantation owners and ANGAU officers.

‘
JAPUN MUN E CUM LONG STILIM GROUN BILONG YU.’ ‘The Japanese men are here to steal your land,’ Tom Grahamslaw told the natives as he moved among them, his eyes flashing angrily on their behalf, ‘and will stop at nothing to get it. MUN NOGUT. They are a terrible people who will burn your villages, KILIM OL MUN, kill all the men, and rape the women. But do not be afraid. If the Japanese invaders come, they will get a very big surprise. I, and many of the other BIKPELA PAPA BILONG GROUN landowners, will go to Port Moresby and come back with many, many soldiers, who will drive the Japanese back to the beaches and back onto the big boats they came in on.’ Generally, in the face of such speeches, the native labourers would listen fearfully at this extraordinary and upsetting news. A new force was indeed unleashed in the land…

Despite Tom Grahamslaw’s warning that the Japanese would rape the native women, that was not the situation in Rabaul, where strict punishment was meted out to any Japanese soldier who interfered with a local woman. For even the more brutal of the Japanese authorities had realised that what had occurred during the likes of the ‘Rape of Nanking’ had gone too far, and had since taken measures to ensure that it didn’t happen again.

So, as well as taking severe disciplinary measures against any soldier who transgressed, they introduced a new idea—
jugun ianfu
— which translated to ‘military comfort women’. In essence, they were women taken from Japan’s occupied territories who were forced to work as sexual labourers for the Japanese troops, to keep their morale high and ensure that they remained well behaved among the locals. Later estimates calculated that there were between 80 000 and 200 000 comfort women scattered around the Co-Prosperity Sphere serving the needs of the six million soldiers, sailors and airmen that Japan had under arms. The ‘comfort’, however, certainly didn’t extend to the women as they were forced to submit to an average of twenty to thirty soldiers a day, seven days a week, with Sunday always the busiest.

In Rabaul, the comfort women worked in the old Cosmopolitan Hotel, on the edge of Chinatown, but now converted into a military brothel. It had water on three sides with Japanese Military Police situated outside, ensuring that order was maintained. Inside, Japanese doctors worked hard to ensure that the women did not succumb to any venereal disease, as this would have subsequently affected the fighting ability of the soldiers.

For a young woman by the name of Okryon Park, however, who originally hailed from the small town of Muju in the newly established Japanese colony of Korea, the thought occurred that if she got a venereal disease, at least she would be able to get some relief, as the doctors always gave a week’s break to any woman showing symptoms. As it was, Okryon’s vagina was swollen and bleeding from constant, systematised rape. Generally, the men were meant to use condoms, but Okryon found that some simply refused and beat her if she dared complain. Pregnancies that resulted were terminated by the doctors.

This was of little concern to the Japanese military men who kept arriving. The soldiers arrived in trucks from the early morning until four o’clock in the afternoon, whereupon the non-commissioned officers took over until seven o’clock in the evening, and then commissioned officers until ten o’clock at night, though sometimes the very senior officers stayed all night.

A ticket system operated. Regular soldiers purchased a white ticket, the non-commissioned officers blue and the higher officers red tickets. Like the other women, Okryon collected the tickets and handed them in at the end of the shift, so the authorities could keep track of how many men she had ‘comforted’. The only break in the routine was on Japanese national holidays when high-ranking officers who had not been before were allowed to visit, and all the comfort women had to stand together to sing the Japanese national anthem.

How had Okryon come to this? It was the question she kept reflecting on as the wretched weeks and then months went by. She had been born the third child of a loving family, with parents who never scolded her, or even demanded that she worked in the rice paddies with them, preferring that as a happy child she enjoyed herself by playing. But a bad marriage, followed by two other disastrous relationships, estranged her from her family and their simple life, and she had found herself in the big city with an infant son, constantly struggling to get the money necessary to survive. At the age of twenty-three, with the Japanese occupying Korea, she finally heard of a way out of her woes. Apparently the Japanese needed women like her to go to the battlefields and work doing domestic duties, washing clothes and so forth for the senior officers. The pay was so good she would be able to pay her debts quickly, and then return to reclaim her boy from the friends she’d left him with.

But no sooner had she arrived in this building in Rabaul with thirty other women than the soldiers had stormed in and raped them. The women had fought with all their strength, but there was no escape and they simply had to try to survive. Of all the many brutal indignities she was obliged to submit to, the one she found most appalling was having to say
‘Iratsyaimase’
to every successive soldier and officer. It translated to welcome.
⁶⁰

Crying herself to sleep most nights, the one thing that kept Okryon going was the hope that her son was okay and she would one day be able to see him again…

Up in the Philippines the ‘Lion of Luzon’, General Douglas MacArthur, remained ensconced in his heavily fortified tunnel of Corregidor. His troops continued to do it tough upstairs, and also on the adjacent Bataan Peninsula, where, since retreating to Corregidor, MacArthur had returned only once, and then only for a couple of hours. It did not sit well with his troops and gave rise to two popular ditties. The first focused on the soldiers’ predicament:

We’re the battling bastards of Bataan,

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.

No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,

No rifles, no planes, no artillery pieces,

And nobody gives a damn.
⁶¹

And the other on MacArthur himself:

Dugout Doug MacArthur lies ashakin’ on The Rock,

Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock,

Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan,

And his troops go starvin’ on.

Chorus:

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding,

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding,

Send to Franklin the glad tidings

That his troops go starving on.
⁶²

While the troops were not happy, neither was Washington. MacArthur’s extraordinary popularity across America meant that he was effectively untouchable and they certainly couldn’t relieve him of his command. For one thing, the effect on public morale would have been devastating—but there were other ways. In early February, the US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, had sounded out MacArthur about leaving the Philippines with his family and taking up a new command. MacArthur was still considering it. One thing that appealed about the offer—going to Australia had been mentioned—was that it was becoming obvious that the Americans were not going to hold out much longer. MacArthur would not contemplate being captured by the Japanese, and he was less than keen to have his name on the bottom right-hand corner of a whole tableau of defeat. Maybe the answer
was
to go to Australia and use that as the launching pad to storm back to the Philippines when American strength was greater…

The news of the Japanese landings on the north coast of New Guinea, as small in scale as they were, did not sit well in Australia. Though it had taken some time for details to emerge, on 14 March, John Curtin lifted the tone of his language one more notch in a radio address that was also broadcast to America.