Kokoda (26 page)

Among these conditions, still the thing the men found most soul-destroying of all was the false crests. Often, after labouring for hours to get to the top of a ridge that steepened as it rose, they would begin to see the hoped-for lightening in the jungle foliage ahead, maybe even a patch of blue sky. It was a sign that the summit might have been reached at last. Yet, all too often, another three minutes climb revealed that it was merely a spur, and the true summit remained, upward, ever upward. And then another and another, till the soldiers developed what they called ‘laughing legs’ or ‘happy knees’, where the leg muscles became so exhausted and spasmridden you couldn’t stop your agonised knees from shaking even when you were standing still.

Sometimes the men would throw themselves to the ground and gulp in vain for enough air to ease their tortured lungs, gasping for all the world like the stunned fish that used to be thrown up on to the wharves at Port Moresby after a Jap bombing. Moresby… it seemed so far away, and a virtual Shangri-la of urban sophistication compared to the wilds they were in now.

Weighed down as Bert Kienzle’s porters were, it wasn’t long before the 39th caught up with them, and from that point they all continued together. Of all of them, none was stronger up and down the hills, oddly enough, than the ol’ fella, ‘Uncle Sam’ Templeton. It was for good reason that the admiring native porters said of him: ‘IM E WOKABAUT STRONG’ as in, ‘he walks very vigorously…’ He was a big bear of a man and the heavy haversack on his back seemed as nothing to him. Many a youngster struggling up a hill looked up to see Templeton’s hand reaching down to pull him up a difficult rockface, or offering to take his rifle or pack to the top of the hill so he could get his breath back. Sometimes Templeton ended up carrying five rifles at a time, together with a couple of rucksacks. The porters would look at Templeton carrying the five rifles in amazement and recount it to the other porters: ‘IM E KARIM FAIPELA MUSKETS!’

Like a supremely masculine version of a mother hen, Templeton was constantly moving back and forth along the line to make sure that everyone was coping with the strain, and ensuring that those who weren’t were given the helping hand they needed. That was Sam all over, constantly moving around on his own, while still somehow being solicitous of everyone.

After camping the first night at the top of Ioribaiwa Ridge, they had made their way the next day to the village of Nauro, which lay on the far side of the awesome Maguli Range. Then it was another day’s trek to the village of Menari, then to Efogi up at the shivering altitude of 5000 feet, before the descent to Eora Creek.

Now the scenery is changing… we are entering a moss forest. We have climbed up into the 8000-feet belt of timber. Be careful here, the eternal mists and dripping mosses have rotted the very earth you walk upon. Step from root to root. Feel how the green-coated earth pulses like a drum beneath your weight—you can sink to your height in rotting vegetation here.

Stop for a moment. The silence of death is in this forest. The trees themselves are dead… rotted with the moss which drapes twigs, branches, and trunks with a dripping green beard… it is a fantastic picture from a Grimm’s fairy tale… and over all drips a perpetual mist…
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Back in Port Moresby, there was a sudden stirring in the tropical torpor of military administration. On 13 July, General MacArthur’s man on the ground, Major General Charles A. Willoughby— MacArthur’s eyes and ears and the nerve centre for Allied Intelligence in New Guinea—made a formal recommendation that both Milne Bay and Buna prepare themselves to repel Japanese landings, and be closely watched in the meantime. Just three days later, though, Willoughby changed his mind and ‘declared that the Japanese purpose was to consolidate areas they already held, not to invade new ones…’
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This came as a great relief to all concerned.

Finally, when the men of the 39th’s B Company staggered into the village of Kagi, the first lot of porters was sent back to the beginning of the track to bring up the next lot of supplies. Lieutenant Peter Brewer, the patrol officer from the government station at Kokoda, then greeted B Company with fresh porters to take them the rest of the way. In the fog of the men’s exhaustion, swirling aptly with the billowing green clouds of the endless ranges, the village of Isurava came and went and most gave it barely a glance.

Generally, these tiny villages were little more than small outposts with a tenuous hold against the encroaching jungle, but they did help to afford some shelter from the driving rain. It gave the men pause to think that they were from a supposedly more sophisticated nation, yet here they were dragging themselves like mangy dogs out of the rain and into skilfully constructed bone-dry huts made in two days flat by a so-called ‘primitive’ villager who had neither hammer nor nail. The men would rest for a night and hope that their clothes would partially dry over the fires that perpetually smouldered in the breezy constructions.
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Most importantly, the villages always had market gardens, which would help to alleviate the soldiers’ strictly rationed and monotonous diet of tinned bully beef, biscuits and ‘goldfish’ (army-issue canned herrings, which the men detested).

The villagers tended to be shy but friendly, especially in these early stages of the war. True, many of the younger children had never seen anything as strange as a white man in their lives, and would sometimes burst into tears at the sight, but it usually didn’t take them too long to get used to the soldiers’ pasty complexions and red, puffing faces. In no time the children would be laughing and carrying on, running to get the exhausted soldiers paw-paw and water. It was a part of tribal culture to share whatever food they had with visitors. And in the face of such joyousness one or two of the older men would suddenly fall quiet as they were reminded of their own children waiting for them at home.

By 15 July, some eight days after B Company had begun its journey, the soldiers were camped in the village of Deniki, within cooee of their first destination, the government station outpost of Kokoda. With its landing strip, magistrate’s house, native hospital, station gardens, police station, officers’ houses and surrounding rubber plantations, Kokoda was the only outpost that resembled ‘civilisation’ in these parts.

By the time they got to Deniki, Templeton and Kienzle realised how exhausted both the soldiers and the porters were. They gave them a day’s rest in the small nondescript village perched in the foothills on the northern side of the Owen Stanleys, while they went forward to have a look at Kokoda on their own. Kienzle was particularly keen to get back to the homestead at his rubber plantation to see how it was faring. As they walked on the rare and pleasant flatlands that separated Deniki from Kokoda, he and Templeton talked. There was an easy relationship between these two old hands and each had come to respect the other’s ability enormously over the previous difficult days.

Naturally enough, they discussed those difficulties. The real problem was that when you were sending out that many natives on such long a trek, a huge proportion of what they were carrying had to be consumed by the porters themselves—about half the provision for an eight-day walk. It made it almost impossible to carry any of the other many necessities of war. And even allowing for luggers like the
Gili Gili
, bringing 20 tons of ammunition and general supplies to Buna, it was still a massive operation to get any of that stuff inland. The only way to do the job properly was to bring things in by air. In just twenty minutes flying time, one full cargo plane could land as many supplies at Kokoda as 160 porters could manage in eight days. And though cargo planes were precious commodities at Moresby, Templeton agreed that when he made his report to the higher authorities he would make the point forcefully that they must have aerial supply.

Arriving at Kokoda, both men had to get busy. After checking on his plantation homestead, the next day Kienzle said his goodbyes to Templeton and B Company—who had now moved forward to Kokoda—and headed off back to Moresby to organise the next lot of native porters to bring up supplies for the next company of the 39th, which was shortly due to embark on the track…

Templeton took one of his best men with him and headed the other way, north towards Buna where, in the nearby small and inconspicuous harbour of Oro Bay, the
Gili Gili
and three men of the 39th had landed with all their heavy stores. To shift them, ANGAU officer Tom Grahamslaw had assembled another large group of native porters.

In Kokoda, B Company spent their time recuperating and doing a few patrols in the immediate area. Joe Dawson, for his part, spent a lot of time distributing ammunition to the men, and one of his key jobs was to prime the boxes of Mills 36 hand grenades the porters had carried forward to get them ready for battle. This involved carefully—oh… so…
carefully
—unscrewing the base plug of each grenade, which the men called ‘pineapples’ because of their distinctive surface, and putting in the fuse and cap, before screwing the base back on.
And any slip… meant death
. That done, the men of B Company at least were now better equipped in case there was any action.

Up at Buna on 20 July, now that the
Gili Gili
had been unloaded, Templeton and his officers and the native porters headed back towards the small village of Awala, just a short distance inland where they could take a brief break at a government station there before making their way back towards the main body of B Company at Kokoda.

Unbeknown to Templeton, at that very moment just under two thousand Japanese soldiers, composed largely of men from the crack 144th Regiment and a company of marines from the elite 5th Sasebo Naval Landing Force, were on a convoy of ships leaving Rabaul. They, too, were intent on making their way to Kokoda and beyond. For this was the beginning of the planned land invasion of Port Moresby, starting on the north coast of New Guinea, and pushing across the Owen Stanley Range via Kokoda and down to the New Guinea capital. The other key component of this expedition was the 15th Independent Engineer Regiment whose job was to ease the passage of the massed forces by widening the track into a road, building light bridges, cutting steps into possibly difficult sections of the track and establishing a series of staging posts where supplies could be stockpiled. Everything had to be done to facilitate the passage south for the Imperial Japanese Army.

An indication of the priority placed on this mission was that the whole force was under the command of the highly regarded and accomplished Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama, an engineer. Only after his men had established the beachhead and pushed the passage through to Kokoda itself, would he hand his command to Major General Tomitaro Horii, whose South Seas Force was built strongly around the 144th Regiment. The main body of the South Seas Force was due to land on 7 August. It would then be Horii’s role to take them all the way through to Moresby.

The morale of the Japanese soldiers on this night of 20 July as they headed south on their ships was high. This was simply to be the latest in a long string of victories for the Imperial Japanese Army. They had learnt the finer points of jungle fighting in their way down the Malayan Peninsula, had defeated many of Britain, Australia and India’s finest in the siege of Singapore, destroyed a lot of the American resistance in the Philippines, laid havoc through the rest of Southeast Asia and were yet to taste defeat. It was unlikely that whatever Australians or natives they might encounter in New Guinea would give them too much trouble.

Still, always at times like this, on the eve of the next battle, thoughts inevitably turned to home and the loved ones left behind. Since time immemorial preludes to battle have generated in men thoughts of just what the battle was for, and where they had come from to get to this point…

In this instance, there was no doubt what these soldiers were fighting for. While the natives of New Guinea might be loyal to their families, their village and their WONTOKS in that order; and the Australians loyal to their flag, their country and their mates; the Japanese soldiers were fierce in their devotion to the holy Japanese Emperor, the most divine flower of the Chrysanthemum Court.

The famous Japanese battle-cry of ‘
Banzai!
’—frequently screamed just before a soldier charges straight into enemy fire—translated roughly as ‘Long live the Emperor!’ and from a young age most of these young men had been taught that there could be no higher calling than to be killed in battle in the service of the Emperor. Reinforcing that point for each of them were words in the Imperial Japanese Army Instruction Manual, which they carried with them at all times.

If one were to be captured in battle, the manual stated: ‘Upon release one should return to duty with the will to wipe out the humiliation and to seek death with the courage of the will to die. However, if an officer of high principle, usually the only course is to commit suicide.’
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There was no excuse for being captured if wounded, as the manual also made clear: ‘Under no circumstances should you cling to life by accepting defeat, nor should you forget the dignity of our Imperial forces to the extent of enduring the disgrace of being taken prisoner.’

The convoy of Japanese ships ploughed on through the night, the marine life scattering at their first vibration…

CHAPTER EIGHT

ATTACK!

The ingenuity required on the frontier, which Australians call the ‘convict mentality’, was very real. There was also a genuine ruggedness to the national character. Physical courage was highly prized. A broken nose was easy enough to come by in pre-war Australia… It is, I think, safe to say that somewhere along the line the ‘Protestant work ethic’ lost some of its intensity in Australia. An Australian infantryman who served [in New Guinea] told me they were glad to hear of the Japanese attack because that freed them from an ugly road building detail in the mud. Soldiers who would rather fight crack Japanese assault troops than build roads, win wars.