Kokoda (49 page)

In a further attempt to reinforce the precarious position at Isurava, Potts ordered C Company—one of the remaining companies of the 53rd Battalion that was still functioning—to leave their position defending the now relatively quiet section of the parallel track down from Alola and move up to Isurava.

And it was at Isurava, at around two o’clock on the afternoon of 29 August, that the Japanese again broke through the perimeter and whole new waves of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared.

About three hundred yards up the hill from where the breach occurred, Colonel Key’s Battalion Headquarters was quickly made aware of the urgency of the situation and it was Colonel Key himself who ordered the counterattack. One who quickly volunteered was Private Bruce Kingsbury, a quietly spoken, gentle kind of bloke from Malvern in Melbourne, and as the Japanese soldiers began to surge, he broke into a jog-trot down the hill.

‘Where are you going, Bruce?’ Key’s Second-in-Command, Captain Phil Rhoden, asked him as he passed.

‘Just down the track, Skip,’ Kingsbury replied, even as he picked up speed, with his best mate Alan Avery right with him all the way, just as he always was.

When Kingsbury got there the situation was a lot worse than he imagined. As he looked further down the hill, he was appalled to see the many clumps of Japanese now beginning to break through, and he also saw that one of his friends, the always courageous Corporal Lindsay ‘Teddy’ Bear, had been badly hit. Teddy had blood all over his face and front—courtesy of a piece of shrapnel that had gone up his nose—and had then been shot in his left hand.
Still
not beaten, Teddy had whacked the injured hand in his shirt and kept firing with his right until shot twice in his legs he could barely move. He had also been firing the Bren gun so much that it was too hot to hold and he had been obliged to grip it by the tripod, even as he kept one finger on the trigger to keep it firing.

Much of this Kingsbury soaked up in bare seconds as he now sprinted towards Teddy Bear and grabbed the Bren gun from him.

There would afterwards be much debate as to precisely what occurred in Bruce Kingsbury’s mind at that moment—whether he was operating within the realms of conscious thought, or simply acting out of staggering, instinctive courage. What he did though became seared deep into the memory of every Australian soldier within cooee who saw it, and they were many.

Firing from the hip, Kingsbury kept charging down the hill, firing at the exhausted Japanese soldiers coming up the hill and scattering them as he went. Whenever a gun was raised against him, he somehow seemed to be able to get off accurate shots before the Japs could do him any damage.

To the observers, it almost seemed as if the bullets must be bouncing off him, so suicidal did his action seem, and yet he was still going! Stunned at what they were seeing, and inspired by it, many of the Australian soldiers charged after him and added their own withering fire to Bruce’s. Within perhaps forty-five seconds, it was all but over. Some thirty Japanese had been taken out of commission, and the potential hole in the Australian lines had been blocked. There was little Japanese resistance left on that part of the hillside, and many of the soldiers had turned tail and run back into the jungle in the face of this madman.

The other Australian soldiers were just catching up with Kingsbury—now momentarily stopped before a large rock as he changed magazines—when a Japanese sniper suddenly appeared at the top of the rock and fired off a single shot. Bruce clutched at his chest and went down, with just the slightest groan.

Alan Avery, after unleashing a fusillade of bullets which may or may not have taken out the Japanese sniper, cradled Bruce in his arms. Now that the Japanese had retreated and this part of the battlefront was in brief hiatus, the silence roared all around.

There is a limpness in the dead that is unmistakable and irrefutable, and it was obvious to all the gathered soldiers that Bruce was gone as his head lolled back and his arms flopped loosely while Alan continued to hold him in a kind of rocking motion, whispering, ‘No, God, no, please
no
… ’

Alan didn’t want to believe it,
couldn’t
believe that he now held in his arms his best friend from childhood onward, who was now, unmistakably, dead. Refusing to accept it, Avery picked Bruce up, put him in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders and trudged back for medical help while the other soldiers remained to consolidate the position that Kingsbury had won at such cost.

At the Regimental Aid Post, Dr Don Duffy did not take long in his diagnosis. One look at the red hole where the bullet entered above Bruce’s heart told him the truth. If he was alive the wound would be gushing blood, but of that there was no sign. To confirm it, he pulled back Bruce’s eyelids and… alas. The eyes were the window of the soul, and there was never the slightest doubt when the soul had departed, as was clearly the case now with Bruce.

‘I’m sorry Alan,’ the doctor said softly, ‘he’s gone.’

Alan Avery wept, wept as he had never wept before. For his valour and extraordinary courage under fire, Kingsbury would be posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross medal, the highest Commonwealth military award for bravery.

Though Bruce Kingsbury’s sacrifice had retrieved the situation that afternoon, the predicament of the surviving defenders was grimly obvious. Despite the heroic nature of the Australians’ battle to date, still the Japanese mortars and charges were taking their toll, still there was no sign of the Japanese running out of soldiers to charge at them. Three times B Company had given ground on the high side of the perimeter and three times had taken it back, but they had now lost so many men that it would soon be beyond them to retrieve the situation one more time.

One bright spot at least was when Lieutenant Sword and his men arrived, just before sunset. Honner later recorded his feelings.

‘I was surprised to see a grimy, bearded figure leading in a tattered line at twilight. I did not recognise him until he saluted and announced: “Sword, Sir, reporting in from patrol.” There was more than mere formality in my answering salute.’
¹⁹⁸

Happily, Lieutenant Johnston’s walking wounded from the 39th were only minutes behind them, and the men of the 2/14th were staggered and heartened all at once to see that the same scarecrows they’d seen off two days ago were now, voluntarily, back with them and bearing arms. They looked at these ragged bloody heroes, with their swollen feet, tottering countenance, open wounds and determined expressions with awe. Once again, many of the men of the AIF regretted every barbed joke they might have made at these blokes’ expense. Chocolate soldiers, indeed!

Despite their collective bravery, however, there was only one sane move possible and Lieutenant Colonel Key, commanding the 2/14th, requested Brigadier Potts’s approval to authorise it. That was to pull back from their present position to a mile down the track to the Isurava Rest House—a small collection of huts to accommodate any travelling missionaries, magistrates and officers, or the like. They would be unlikely to hold their present position for another day, and by carefully withdrawing they would give themselves the advantage of fresh defensive positions that the Japanese would again have to pay heavily in blood to take.

To stay would be to risk annihilation, and that would have accomplished precisely nothing. Potts, though reluctant, deferred to his man on site. He knew that Key would never make such a request unless the position really was untenable, so he sent back the signal that Key could proceed to withdraw that night. Recognising that the front would now be moving towards them, Potts took the precaution of immediately sending back the very worst of the seriously wounded from Alola. All the rest would be needed to hold a gun and stiffen the defence for what was coming.

In the meantime, now that authorisation had been given, Colonel Key requested that Stan Bisset reconnoitre the Isurava Rest House, and determine strategic positions for each company.

Even as Stan was being given his orders out on the western sector of the battlefield, his brother Butch and 10 Platoon continued in a ferocious fire-fight with an onslaught of Japanese. As Butch and his men were the ones occupying the high ground, they were always the ones who were going to be getting the most heat from the Japanese as they tried to outflank the Australians—and so it proved. Over the previous twelve hours, the Japanese had launched no fewer than eleven company attacks on them, with each company comprising around a hundred men. How many of the beggars
were
there? The 10 Platoon didn’t budge. A strong, disciplined unit, there was no question of the men retreating, and all knew that this was
it
: do or die.

Butch kept talking to the men, moving among them distributing ammunition and grenades, keeping as low to the ground as he could. He was just handing out the third lot of grenades, though, when in the fast fading light a Japanese soldier of the 144th Regiment spied what he was sure was movement at the exact spot where all the fire from the Australians had been coming, and squeezed off one quick burst of machine-gun fire in hope. He was rewarded with the unmistakable groan of a man who had just been hit, and then what was almost certainly the thud of a body. Well, maybe not a thud. At that distance, and with that level of noise, there was no way you could hear something so relatively placid as a groan or slumping body, but somehow you could
feel
it when you had a hit. He hoped so, anyway.

The strangest thing about being shot is the lack of immediate pain— at least searing, agonising pain. Rather, for Butch Bisset it felt like a very hard punch in the stomach that knocked him off his feet and took the wind right out of him. Then came,
oh mother
, the moment when he put his hand to his stomach and it came away,
oh mother,
wet. That he was hit he knew only too well. That it was bad was apparent from the moment he held his hand up in the wan light to see it completely covered in his own blood. Somewhere within him as many as six bullets were lodged, each one having severed blood vessels which now continued to pump more blood into the menacing twilight with every beat of his heart. Oh
mother
. The disbelief. The shock. Was this a dream? Had it really happened? Was there no way out? Was this
it?
Oh mother. He felt faint, as he sat there, trying to collect himself, trying to hold his intestines in with one hand, while he set up his rifle with the other… eager to take out any Jap that came his way. Oh mother.

Around and about Butch at that time, both with his own platoon and other nearby platoons, a furious rearguard action was soon underway to abandon the position while safely retrieving as many soldiers as possible—wounded or otherwise. In all the maelstrom, one man stood stronger and more courageous than the rest.

Corporal Charlie McCallum was the best axeman in Gippsland, his mighty arms capable of chopping through two solid feet of log in just over ninety seconds. It was he who volunteered to be reverse point man—in effect the rearguard for the rearguard—the first man the Japanese would encounter in their pursuit. No matter that he already bore three wounds, to his arm, his leg and his groin. She’ll be right. Leave me with enough guns and plenty of ammo and I’ll get the job done.

So it proved. The power of his arms was such that he was capable of firing a Bren gun from his right hip even as he hoisted a Tommy gun to his left shoulder and did the same, and that is exactly what the first Japanese soldier was hit by when he came into range. The two soldiers immediately behind him were equally cut down.

When his Bren ran out of ammunition, Charlie kept firing with the Tommy while changing the magazine on the Bren, but even then it was a close run thing. One of the charging Japanese soldiers got to within a yard of him before the axeman cut him down. In a momentary lull while the Japanese regrouped to decide how to take this madman down, the corporal received the signal that the main body of troops was now clear and he could withdraw himself, back past the point where the rest of the rearguard had set up the next ambush point. For his bravery in the face of such massive opposition Corporal McCallum was later awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

At the moment that Butch had been shot, Stan had been just fifty yards away, trying to check that everything was all right with 10 Platoon. Before he could get to Butch, though, and amid terrible fire, he met one of Butch’s men, Tom Wilson, who’d had his hand blown off. As Stan led him to the Regimental Aid Post to get medical attention, it was Tom who told him.

‘Butch has been hit pretty bad. The boys are trying to bring him in.’

Stan felt like a giant hand had just grabbed his heart and squeezed hard, nearly choking the life out of him.

In a daze, Stan organised the corps medical officer and his close friend, Captain Dr Don Duffy, to be ready for Butch when he arrived, before following his original orders to assess the new fall-back position in the area of the Isurava Rest House.

When he worked out the most defensible position—about three hundred yards back from the Rest House on the Alola side—he found it to be filled with the soldiers from the 53rd Battalion’s C Company that Potts had called for the previous afternoon. They had moved only a little way up the track before stopping to have a bit of a rest.

‘I am sorry, fellows, but you will have to move from here,’ Stan told them. ‘These positions will shortly be needed by the 2/14th and the 39th when we fall back here.’

‘We’re not moving anywhere,’ one of the privates replied belligerently, his words backed by the fact that neither he nor his comrades showed the slightest inclination to accede to Stan’s request.

‘Where are your officers?’ Stan responded sharply, amazed at such insubordination to a superior officer.

‘Gone… dunno… gone,’ the soldier replied, still entirely uninterested.

‘I am
ordering
you to move,’ Stan said with some feeling.