Kokoda (25 page)

Most of the B Company men carried their personal belongings, machetes and .303 Lee Enfield rifles themselves. They secured everything they were carrying tightly to their upper torso, to prevent it from swinging and making a noise, just the way ‘Uncle Sam’ Templeton had shown them.

The reason they were travelling so lightly was twofold. A lot of the heavier equipment they would need to help secure Buna was being brought around to Buna by the Thursday Island lugger
Gili Gili
, while Bert Kienzle had set off the day before with his porters to set up the staging camps along the way and, apart from supplies, those porters were also carrying the company’s tents and ammunition.

The men of B Company were not quite footloose and fancy free, but it certainly showed how little they knew of what awaited them that there was a certain impatience to get going on their adventure, to start marching across the green hills far away, which awaited them.

At last, at around eight o’clock in the morning, Captain Sam Templeton gave the order: ‘Move out!’

With Templeton in the lead, as was his wont, B Company of the 39th Battalion was soon swallowed whole by the jungle. And at the back, filling his new role as B Company’s Acting Company Sergeant Major, was Joe Dawson. Had he had the position of CSM back at camp it would have involved a lot of dreadful paperwork, but on the track it effectively meant he was responsible for such practical things as discipline, mail-drops, liaising with the platoon sergeants, ensuring that everyone had sufficient ammunition
and
seeing that no one was straggling.

Joe’s temporary promotion had occurred because the official CSM was deemed too old to make the trip to Kokoda. Joe himself wasn’t too happy about it, as he would have much preferred to have stayed with Wally and Ray and the ‘family’ of his platoon, but Sam had asked him to do it and, when Sam asked, you never said no. (As a matter of fact, Joe always felt an affinity with Sam, because just as Joe had put his age up a year to join the army, he was just about positive that Sam had knocked a few years off his own age to be able to do the same.)

That same morning, back in Port Moresby, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Owen formally took over the post as Commanding Officer of the 39th from Colonel Conran and the rejuvenation of the 39th leadership was complete. The outgoing colonel, who had departed well before the newly promoted Colonel Owen arrived, had not felt good about formally leaving his men and battalion but, on the other hand, like many of the older officers of the 39th, he had become so ill over previous months running a battalion in such conditions, that he was no longer effectively commanding them, not from a hospital bed anyway.

For his part, the far younger and more energetic Bill Owen was pleased to take command, not simply because it was the highest post he had achieved in the army, but because he was the same Bill Owen who, six months earlier, had led the escape of 150 refugee soldiers from Rabaul and then witnessed most of them being killed in the Tol Massacre. The horror of that was with him every day and, though not a vengeful man by nature, it was certainly his hope to have some back at the Japs.

There was a lot of activity around Port Moresby that morning, and for good reason. For not only were the forward elements of the 39th on the march, but at MacArthur’s request, Australia’s 7th Militia Brigade were also on the move, on that day receiving orders to embark on troop-carriers to be transported to Milne Bay on the eastern tip of New Guinea. There the men would add their elbow grease to the construction of more airfields and also help to defend the whole area, along with the two squadrons of Kittyhawks the RAAF had based on the one operational airfield, ready in case the Japanese decided to attack.

The Japanese were certainly in the mood for doing exactly that. Just the day before at Guadalcanal, on the southern end of the Solomon Islands, some two thousand crack Japanese troops sent from the garrison at Rabaul, together with labourers and engineers, had begun constructing their own airfield. Yet one more front in the Japanese war to control the Southwest Pacific had been opened and so, too, the Emperor’s forces were stretched ever thinner, even as their supply line stretched just over 3000 miles from Yokohama, via Saipan, Truk and Rabaul to Guadalcanal.

Under the command and care of Bert Kienzle and Doc Vernon— the latter a recurring vision of khaki clothes and long brown limbs moving up and down the line—the native porters, many of whom were Koiari tribesmen, were going well. In small groups of between eight and a dozen men, bound by the fact that they were WONTOKS coming from the same tribal area, the porters murmured their way forward across the mountains. There was no system at all in the way they carried their loads, or even what they wore. One man in a lap-lap, another in shorts, the other in something akin to a dress salvaged from somewhere because he liked the colours. The first carried his load in a sugar bag that he simply slung across his back; the next had tied a vine between two smaller fully-laden bags and then used his head as the point from which to suspend them, thus leaving his hands free; still another was doing it ‘Chinese-coolie’ style, with two bags hanging from either end of a strong staff placed horizontally across his shoulders.

Who were these porters and why were they chosen? There were a variety of reasons, not all of them pleasant. Under the provisions of the National Security (Emergency Control) Regulations, many of the porters had been conscripted by the field officers of ANGAU, who had authority over the villages in their region. These officers, together with some of the native policemen still in their service, were extremely insistent with the natives—in several unfortunate cases to the point of brutality—saying that the ‘GAUMAN’, ‘government’, had made a ‘LO’, ‘law’, that the men had to provide their services or they and their village would face severe penalties. Many of the native porters in that situation had, thus, left behind weeping families, and been brought to this place virtually under guard.
¹⁰³

For many ANGAU officers like Tom Grahamslaw, though his own methods of persuasion remained civilised, this kind of forced recruitment did not sit well. The traditional role of Australian field officers in the villages had been as a kind of paternal government protector. But now the needs of war had converted them practically into mini-dictators, having them demand that the natives do what they were told to. At least Grahamslaw was personally instrumental in ensuring that the native porters recruited from his own region would get not the six shillings a month the government had offered, but the figure he
insisted
upon, which was ten shillings.

Together with this still minimal salary though, the natives received something else, which they highly coveted—the tobacco sticks they got as part of rations. In many parts of New Guinea these tobacco sticks were practically currency in itself. Just one stick could get you a good bunch of beetlenut, a whole basket of sweet potatoes or a couple of coconuts. You could gamble with them and, of course, you could smoke them, which the porters did, more or less constantly, in between chewing beetlenut and mumbling softly to each other, and moving forward to they knew not what…

The men of the 39th’s B Company had no maps. They had simply been told that if they headed off up the track and followed their feet they would eventually come to Kokoda, and they were doing their best to do exactly that. Finding their way wasn’t the problem.
Making
their way was, for while they were carrying light packs, the going was beyond tough. After walking for a mile alongside the Goldie River, the track suddenly reared up at them rather like an angry snake—with a bite more or less the same—as it went straight up a spur on the Imita Range. Gasping for air, shocked at the strain, the men wondered how on earth Bert Kienzle’s native porters had managed to get up there the previous day, barefoot and laden down with at least three times the weight they were carrying. And it wasn’t as if the agony was over once they reached the top of the Imita Range. For, as they bested it, before them was range after range of similar topography, and there was nothing they could do but stagger forward. They soon learned that it was better for each Digger to leave at one minute intervals rather than all together, so that time would not be wasted for all those clogged up behind the weakest link in the chain.

How far were they travelling? That was entirely beside the point. On such a track as this, distance was not measured in anything so prosaic as yards or miles, it was all a matter of time and how many days march remained before a particular destination was reached. The usual answer was ‘more than you’ll be able to bear’, for as they marched on, their feet became blister farms and the straps of their rucksacks chafed the skin of their straining shoulders red raw. One of the most infuriating things about the bloody track was that so much of it just didn’t make
sense
! Never did it take the shortest route between two points, but instead meandered up the very steepest of the hills, plunged into the deepest valley and then detoured right to the edge of disaster above a killer cliff-face before heading for the swamp.

The Diggers of the 39th, struggling up and over these Godforsaken mountains, tried in vain to come to terms with their new surroundings. This was like no place they had ever been before, or even heard of. For many of them, particularly those from the often long, low, featureless plains of western Victoria, it was beyond their imagination. The mountains and ranges continued to the far horizons. To all points of the compass, valleys, crevasses and creases sprayed out seemingly at random, many of them filled with thick mist and most of them, the men knew, entirely uncharted by Europeans.

Through it all somehow, the track, the bloody track, poked and prodded its way roughly northward, sometimes gripping grimly to the side of a mountain above a raging torrent, sometimes going from rock to rock in that torrent for as long as a mile, sometimes glugging along beneath four feet of marsh, often going up a slope which was just a few degrees off vertical to an absolute height at the top of the ranges of over 7000 feet. Then, it wasn’t just the gut-wrenching agony of reaching the top only to find that a dozen more hills exactly like it lay between them and sundown, it was the bone-jarring agony of the equally steep descent, torturing knees that had never been subjected to such punishment, and all the while risking falls that could maim a man for life. Before half a day had passed, nearly all of the Diggers had used their machetes to good effect by hacking a walking stick out of the jungle, which seemed to help marginally. At least it eased the ache in their knees as they descended by taking some of the strain. Plus, for many of them, a walking stick somehow felt appropriate, as they were suddenly feeling very, very old.

As the day wore on, it was all that the company medic, Warrant Officer Jack Wilkinson, could do to keep them moving as a body of men. When they made camp on that first night in the small village atop Ioribaiwa Ridge, most of Wilkinson’s time was spent strapping up twisted ankles, handing out salt tablets and trying to ease blisters, chafe and fevers. For all his ministrations, and liberal lashings of the old hardy potash permanganate on the worst of the blisters, some of the men were suffering so badly that they had to be immediately sent back because they were obviously not going to make it. Wilkinson was vastly experienced in patching up soldiers, having previously served with the AIF in the Middle East before joining ANGAU, yet he could barely believe how quickly the jungle had taken its toll on these men.

The men slept like the dead despite the moisture and mosquitoes, and, always in the morning, the track, the bloody track, lazily ribboned out in front of them and the survivors of the trek thus far had to push themselves to follow wherever it led. If only the track would just go away! Sometimes it did, all but disappearing when the ever-pressing jungle occasionally succeeded and seemingly squeezed it out of existence altogether.

Man might find it hard to long endure such conditions, but just about every other life form seemed to prosper there as nowhere else. Particularly in the marshy lowlands, the hot blanket of throbbing, humid, fetid air covering the track was thick with gases and mists and teemed with enormous insects of infinite variety but universal sting, the like of which would have done the new genre of the Hollywood horror movie proud. Amid the vines, trees, wild orchids, palms, ferns, staghorns and all the rest, snakes, spiders and leeches slithered and sheltered together, competing for space. It was the classic Darwinian environment, where only the strongest survived, and that strength was measured either by the force of the individual organism or, failing that, by having enough numbers of weaker organisms to prevail anyway.

But this was simply the start of nature’s array of horrors. There was also the weather. The usual way of rain is that it consists of so many separate droplets. But the men discovered that New Guinea rain—which on most days started at around noon and continued for hours—wasn’t like that at all. There were no drops. Instead, it sort of gushed, rather like a tap turned on just above your head. Sometimes as much as ten inches of rain fell in a single day as part of an average annual rainfall of
16 feet
. Buckets of rain from the outside, buckets of sweat from the inside, and such humidity all around that none of it evaporated.

Put together it meant that clothes were permanently wet, as were the contents of your rucksack. All too often, zealously guarded cigarette papers or letters were just turned to mush, and remaining scraps of toilet paper into a kind of horrible puree.

How did a soldier survive in such conditions? Only just. For apart from the sheer life-sapping exhaustion of it all, the troops soon became aware that even the slightest medical matter—a blister, a scratch, an ulcer—quickly turned serious and continued on its way from there, as the body’s natural defences were overwhelmed by what grander nature had in store for all who ventured into the jungle.