Kokoda (53 page)

‘Hey, Dig,’ he addressed him, ‘bend down a minute. Listen… I think us blokes are going to be left when they pull out. Will you do us a favour? Scrounge us a Tommy gun from somewhere, will you?’
²¹⁷

White was staggered at the youth’s unbelievable courage. This was not bar-room bravado. This was all too real. One look in this kid’s eyes and you could see it all: he knew he was going to die and just wanted to do his bit before he went. And his bit was to first see a Jap and then take him out. That was all. Under any other circumstance the whole thing might have been appalling, the tragedy of the whole damn thing, this kid’s life ebbing away and all he could think of was killing another bloke. But this was not appalling. This was a jungle war without mercy and this is what it was like. There was a greatness to the kid’s approach that took the breath away.

Osmar White wrote this all down later and, after describing the scene, also invoked his emotions on the spot.

‘I was convinced for all time of the dignity and nobility of common men. I was convinced for all time that common men have a pure and shining courage when they fight for what they believe to be a just cause. That which was fine in these men outweighed and made trivial all that was horrible in their plight. I cannot explain it except to say that they were at all times cheerful and helped one another. They never gave up the fight. They never admitted defeat.

They never asked for help. I felt proud to be one of their race and cause, bitterly ashamed to be so nagged by the trivial ills of my own flesh. I wondered if all men, when they had endured so much that exhausted nerves would no longer give response, were creatures of the spirit, eternal and indestructible as stars.’

In a nearby hut at that moment, Brigadier Potts and Colonel Honner were, in their own way, fuming. Back at GHQ in Brisbane, Thomas Blamey and General MacArthur had been apprised of the Australian withdrawal from Isurava and weren’t happy about it. Not by a long shot. They were so unhappy, Blamey had personally sent a message to his commanders on site urging them to take the fight to the Japanese, take the offensive, and push right back at them.

‘Tired Australians fight best,’ he added by way of encouragement, from the comfort of his headquarters in Queensland, with his personal valet always on call.

It was the sort of message that both Honner and Potts did well to keep tight to themselves for fear of the reaction it might produce if it got out. Tired Australians fight best, do they? How about Australians missing arms and legs who had gone without sleep and food for five days straight against an enemy who outnumbered them five to one? How did
they
go?

Ultimately the choice of how to respond to the order rested with the senior man, Potts, and he made the only sane choice possible. To follow the Blamey order was tantamount to murdering his own men in the service of ignorance; to ignore it, and continue a fighting withdrawal, was to preserve as many lives as possible and still weaken the Japanese. Both Potts and Honner were fully aware by this time that every day they delayed the Japanese on their thrust to Moresby was a victory in itself; that the further the Japs moved from their own base the more their supply lines were stretched thin and their meagre resources further strained, while the reverse was true for the Australians. Under these conditions the jungle was at least as great a killer of the Japanese as the Australians, and simply keeping the Japanese stranded in it for as long as possible was a sound strategic move, while equally doing everything they could to preserve the health of their own troops.

Certainly there would come a point where they would make a final stand, but the logical place for that stand was a spot where they could be most easily reinforced, while the Japanese would be as far from their own support as possible.

‘We will continue to pull back anyway,’ Potts told Honner, perhaps aware that he was likely signing off on his own army career by doing so, but he would be at least able to sleep soundly ever after for making the right decision.

Good God Almighty he hated this job. It had seemed okay at the start of the war, sort of cushy and safe, riding all over Melbourne delivering telegrams to people, meaning he was often the messenger bringing glad tidings of babies born, engagements announced and ‘
I’ll be home soon!
’ Now, though, it always seemed to be the same thing. Time and again he would have to bear telegrams from the government. He would knock on people’s doors and at the very instant they opened it and saw him in his Telegraph Office uniform, they would start to shake and shudder and often cry, as with trembling hand they opened his proffered telegram, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t say what they most feared it would. But when it was from the government, it nearly always did.

Like now. He had knocked on the door of Mr and Mrs G. S. Bisset at their house in Surry Hills, and it had been opened by the kindly looking Mrs Bisset. At the first proper sight of him, though, her hand had flown to her mouth as she had tried to stifle a sob. And then, eventually she had read the government’s officious words:

URGENT 212 CARRINGTON 4.30 PM URGENT

MR & MRS G.S. BISSET

IT IS WITH DEEP REGRET THAT I HAVE TO INFORM YOU THAT VVX14631 LIEUTENANT THOMAS HAROLD BISSET DIED ON THIRTIETH AUGUST 1942 AND DESIRE TO CONVEY TO YOU THE PROFOUND SYMPATHY OF THE MINISTER FOR THE ARMY
…

IT IS WITH FURTHER REGRET THAT WE MUST ADVISE THAT VVX2119 LIEUTENANT STANLEY YOUNG BISSET IS MISSING IN ACTION
…

This lady hadn’t fainted on the spot as some of them did, but she had rocked back on her feet and with a strangled cry called for her husband. Enough. He couldn’t stand it. Tipping his cap one more time, and mumbling his own regret, he had backed away, only breathing again when the door had closed behind him, muffling too little the enormous cry of anguish that now flowed from behind it. Good God Almighty, he hated this job.

Pulling out of Eora for the push south, Osmar White could barely believe it; for there, up ahead on the slope, was the same amputee he had seen just south of Isurava two days ago, still with his copra sack on his bloody stump, still variously hopping and crawling his way forward. After the barest amount of medical treatment at Eora he had decided to keep going. Again, Osmar White offered his help, this time to see if the bloke would like him to try to round up some stretcher bearers for him, but again the bloke would have none of it.

‘If you can get bearers,’ he just about snarled, ‘then get them for some other poor bastard! There are plenty worse off than me.’

The sad thing is, the bloke was right. The very fact that he was alive and strong enough to snarl so bore testimony that there really were a lot who were worse off.

In fact, by this time there was actually no one still on the track who could be properly defined as ‘able-bodied’ or ‘fit for action’. For even those who had been spared a bullet or shrapnel to this point were starving and almost certainly suffering from dysentery. The latter condition continued to ravage the troops, so much so that it was a common sight for the soldiers heading back down the track to have cast all modesty aside and simply cut the back out of their trousers. Bacillary dysentery was the worst of it, with the men passing a combination of blood and mucus…

The sheer
frustration
of it. After hacking like mad things through the jungle for three days and three nights, Stan and his men came out on a high ridge where a break in the jungle afforded a superb view of the Eora Creek village. They arrived there just in time to see the Japs attack the Australian rearguard. Even at a distance of over a mile, and maybe as much as a mile and a half, they could hear the tiny pops of gunfire, the cushioned
WHUMP
of the grenades, and the odd scream. Hopefully it was the Japs who were screaming, but either way there was nothing Stan and his men could do. The whole thing was so far away they all looked like ants. At least they knew what the situation was and that the bulk of the Australian forces couldn’t be too far ahead. They just had to keep going and try to catch up to them.

By this time several of Stan’s men were doing it very tough indeed, but there was no choice. Move out. Move on…

Right in the middle of those ‘ants’ none other than Stan’s old mate from the
Aquitania
and the Middle East, Alan Haddy, was in the thick of the action, holding the line against the Japs—and giving the wounded Australians behind them as much time as possible to get out. It was the late afternoon of Friday 1 September and Haddy, typically, was the one the men looked to, even as the battle continued into the night. Through the machine-gun fire and the constant explosions of grenades, it was his voice that could be heard, guiding with calm: ‘Hold your fire until they come right up, then give them curry.’
²¹⁸

The men did exactly that. Every group of attackers that got within cooee was greeted with a brace of grenades, and it was from the glare of those grenades that the Australians were able to get a bead on the Japanese soldiers coming behind. By the time the Australians had pulled out at dawn the next morning, as the weight of Japanese numbers meant that they were simply unstoppable, there were no fewer than 170 dead Japanese soldiers lying before the position the 2/16th had defended.

In response, General Horii could barely stand it. Every time it seemed like he had the Australians cornered with no chance of salvation, they found a way to get out, to escape, to live to fight another day. Just when he reached for their throat to administer the death grip, somehow,
somehow
they slipped away, and remained between his forces and Port Moresby.

There was a
very
hard choice that had to be made. In his own return from Eora Creek, Damien Parer was struggling. Now severely weakened by ten days of malaria, dysentery and insufficient food and sleep, there was no way he could continue to carry all his film and equipment back. In desperation sheer, going up a particularly brutal hill, he asked Smoky Howson if he would mind carrying some of his valuable stuff.

Smoky, never a man to beat around the bush, gave it to him straight: ‘You can go and get fucked,’ he said, ‘I have enough of my own to carry.’ And fair enough too. Damien regretted asking even before he had heard the response, and begrudged Smoky nothing. Still, without help, some things would simply have to be dumped, and it certainly wasn’t going to be his precious film.
²¹⁹

Did he need socks? No. Tripod? He could do without. Ditto a few personal effects, his Graflex still camera, accessories for his Newman camera and leather case, and some rolls of film which he had not yet exposed. At one point Captain Max Bidstrup saw him throwing the film into Eora Creek and offered to carry it for him. No, Damien replied, it was all right.

In the general scheme of things—as highlighted by Smoky Howson’s pointed observations—Damien felt rather like Osmar White, that his concerns were as nothing to those of the real fighting men. What he had considered important equipment was essential only to him. And even when he did accept a small amount of help from a nice kind of bloke he met by the name of Tom Grahamslaw, he insisted on parting with a precious bag of dried apricots from his kitbag in return, as something of equal value to the favour done.

Still, when he caught up briefly with Ossie and Chester at Templeton’s Crossing, he found that some more film had been dropped for him and he just couldn’t help himself. He decided to take more film of the withdrawal, and bade them only leave him some quinine and a change of shirt.

As described by Parer’s biographer, Neil McDonald, ‘The last the two reporters saw of Parer, he was standing in the rain, clutching his Newman in one hand and his tins of exposed film in the other.’
²²⁰

As to White and Wilmot, the nature of their own journalistic calling was that they needed to get to Moresby at all speed to get their stories out before events overtook them.

Not long after they left Eora Creek, however, they came across a terrible tragedy. Captain ‘Tubby’ Jacob—the only officer Smoky Howson really liked—had taken over command of C Company after Captain Dean had met his end. As they fell back from Eora Creek, Captain Jacob had seen a soldier ahead of him stumbling blindly through pure exhaustion. In an effort to help the soldier, the captain had taken the soldier’s rifle onto his free shoulder, not knowing that the safety catch was off.

A couple of hours later, the now equally exhausted Captain Jacob had slipped while traversing a maze of tree roots and the rifle had discharged, sending a bullet first into his groin and then up through his abdomen. His men had done for him what they could, which was very little, but from the first they knew it was a job for Nobby. Father Earl was shortly on the scene, just in time to administer to the 22-year-old his last rites.