Eyewitness (23 page)

Most unenvied job at the lake was that of ‘marker’. The marker had to stand perilously close to the dropping area and take compass bearings on bundles that undershot or overshot clear ground. The bush was so dense that only a small percentage were ever recovered, even though scores of natives were employed searching. The total loss, including food or material damaged beyond use by the fall, was about 25 per cent of the cargoes. Even so, the transports put down as much as 25 tons in a day. Supply parachutes, then scarce, were used only to deliver mortar bombs and fuses and machine-gun ammunition.

The force now had five complete three-inch mortars and about 300 bombs. These had gone down front. Everybody was reassured by the presence of ‘artillery!’ News came through that the 39
^th
had been forced back from Deniki and that the 16
^th
was relieving it on a line that ran through the village of Isurava. This meant that the Japs were at last getting into the Owen-Stanleys themselves and that something was wrong.

Supply difficulties were self-evident. Planes were reported to be making experimental droppings at the villages on the trail between Myola and Moresby. Several men had been killed or injured by packages crashing through the grass roofs of the huts.

The third day at Myola we heard that the situation at Isurava was deteriorating. The Japs had anticipated the push on Kokoda and had hit first. We decided to move forward immediately.

From Myola to Templeton’s Crossing was the worst stage on the Owen-Stanley trail. For long stretches it was precipitous – no more than a muddy cleft in a clay cliff, down which one swung on lawyer vines and supple branches made ragged and greasy by thousands of pairs of clutching hands.

More and more wounded or sick were coming back along this fearful route. Most of them were walking skeletons. Their eyes were bright with fever. They travelled a few yards in a burst, then paused. You could see the loose skin on the sides of their necks palpitating like a lizard’s throat. Their greeting was unvaried. They said ‘Good day, dig. Pretty tough, eh?’ – and grinned. The grin didn’t mean anything – or did it?

Templeton’s Crossing was a dry camp with kunda bunks by the riverbank. We stayed the night and pushed on.

I will never forget the scene as Eora came into sight halfway down the last ridge. Hundreds of men were standing about in mud that came up to their shins. The whole village, built of pandanus and grass, looked as if it were about to founder in the sea of mud. The huts leaned drunkenly. There were piles of broken-out ration boxes and firewood half submerged. The men were slimed from head to foot, for weeks unshaven, their skins bloodless under their filth.

Lines of exhausted carriers were squatting on the fringes of this congregation eating muddy rice off muddy banana leaves. Their woolly hair was plastered with rain and muck. Their eyes were rolling and bloodshot with the strain of long carrying. Some of them were still panting.

It was Mubo Gorge over again – only this time there was a whole army in the jungle instead of a few bands of elusive scouts. Machinegun fire was almost continuous. A Jap .50 caliber was going
dub-dubdub
away in the east. They said the Japs were gradually cracking us. The 2
^nd
/16
^th
was moving into position. The 53
^rd
militia had broken on the right flank and was on the run.

*

It took great effort to write coherent notes on the happenings of the next few days. It was impossible to say: ‘This happened, and then this happened.’ Everything was confusion.

Parer, excited by so much cinematic material at Eora, decided to stay there and get it on celluloid while he could. Wilmot and I joined a small party of stragglers from the 16
^th
going down to battalion positions. All distinguishing insignia had to be taken off because the Japs were reputed to have an uncanny ability to spot officers. Losses among commissioned men had been disproportionately high. We went down, stumbling and teetering over bad log crossings. Machine-gun fire sounded, without intermission, from the hills on either side.

The Japanese were ‘infiltrating’. Their patrols had penetrated far into the hills on the flanks of the trail positions. Indeed, they ignored the positions we were anxious to defend, and were striking out boldly into the trailless forest of the high hills. Our men were not prepared for such tactics. The bulk of them were troops trained for desert warfare. They were more than half afraid of the country. You could see that in their movements, in their whole attitude. They were far more afraid of the country than the Japanese.

They were continually worried by the idea of being ‘cut off’. To their minds, being cut off meant that one must wander in the jungle, wander in the hills, wander in the valleys … up and down and up and down those heartbreaking razorbacks, until one died of hunger or exhaustion.

You could
see
them thinking that way. The commandos on Huon Gulf thought that way until they learned better – until they learned that it was almost as easy to move off the trails as on them. A bushman thought of these hills as friends to conceal and protect him; a formally trained soldier thought of them as deadly enemies eternally ready to baffle and trap him.

I travelled for awhile with a young officer belatedly going down to join his unit. He had gone off into the bush at Myola to look for an overshot load of air-dropped mortar bombs. He had not gone half a mile before he lost himself. He wandered for four days before he managed to get direction again from listening to the sound of the planes dropping loads on the lake. No-one could blame the man for his lack of bushcraft. But the troops were being led by such men as he – men never trained to be bushmen; men who never could be bushmen, because they lacked the instinct.

Machine-gun fire became more intense as we went on. Most of it was on the fl anks, but some was dead ahead and we heard one or two bursts directly behind us. The Japs had moved on without opposition to Kagi Ridge, and it seemed as if Myola itself might already have fallen to a flanking attack. Occasionally there would be the dull, echoing crash of an exploding mortar bomb. Absolutely nothing could be seen.

It was uncanny. The bullets made a strange noise among the leaves – a low, deadly whispering. The whispering could be heard before the rattle of the discharge. The enemy was holding positions on the other side of the river and kept up an intermittent fire on every clearing. There were numerous clearings, and to pass them we divided up into twos and threes and dashed across them bent double.

After a time my nerve broke under the constant gauntlet running and I refused to play. Every time we approached an open space I would detour into the bush and scramble along the clay scarps under cover – or worm a way through the dense undergrowth. This proved just as rapid a means of getting to the other side of the clearing as the more direct method. More and more wounded and stragglers were coming back. The engagement was becoming really heavy.

Three hours out from Eora, we learned that the Japanese had been mortaring the brigade headquarters position. Elsewhere they were using .50-caliber guns to clear fields of fire. Large sections of the forest were rotten with fungus and it was possible to cut down sizeable trees with a few well-placed bursts.

The whole battle had become a blind groping in a tangle of growth. One party came in with a story of having travelled for miles just under the crest of a steep ridge, parallel with a party of Japanese. No-one on either side was willing to show his head against the skyline for a shot, so they fought it out by tossing grenades at one another over the crest. The Mills grenade won. It had real, lethal quality. The Japanese were using a light grenade. One man of the patrol had his teeth knocked out by a Japanese grenade striking him in the mouth. It fell to his feet and exploded. All he suffered in addition to his loss of teeth was a peppering of shrapnel in one thigh.

It was seldom that anyone got a glimpse of the enemy. Most of the wounded were very indignant about it. I must have heard the remark ‘You can’t
see
the little bastards!’ hundreds of times in the course of a day. Some of the men said it with tears in their eyes and clenched fists. They were humiliated beyond endurance by the fact that they had been put out of action before even seeing a Japanese.

Yet the 39
^th
Battalion saw Japs – plenty of them. They had been in Moresby from the beginning and had a smattering of junglecraft. The others simply didn’t know how or where to look.

So it went on …

One could visualise what was happening, but one could not
see
it. Somewhere out in the green, clots of Australians were defending localities which they believed to be important – the ‘key passes’ of the Owen-Stanley range. They believed, because they had been told, that if they held the trail they would hold the range. The Japanese knew better. The Japanese knew that the key to the Owen-Stanley range was high ground, not a valueless trail. Our men were constantly under the fatal misapprehension that if the Japanese
surrounded
a position, that position was inevitably lost. The humiliating part of it was that any pack of damned fools could surround a position in this country. Our men were being beaten by affection and superstitious respect for the cookhouse! Why couldn’t they realise it would cost them less to hang on without supplies – and take their chance of spending a few days, or even a few weeks, in the bush!

The sole consolation was that wherever the enemy dared to launch frontal, man-to-man attacks, we beat him. But most of the killing was done ‘on the blind’. Someone saw movement. An entire force opened fire in the general direction of the movement, using all available automatic arms. Sometimes I wondered how anyone got killed in this blind shooting, but since our patrols had suffered heavy casualties from it, it was a safe assumption that the enemy had suffered even more heavily. Our small arms were more deadly. The Japanese apparently had no serious supply problem. They were burning up ammunition at a terrific rate. They didn’t seem to care.

*

Wilmot and I reached the brigade position just as it was decided to evacuate. The enemy had broken through on both flanks and was making an enveloping movement. The 53
^rd
Battalion, on the right, had folded up completely across the river, and machine-gun duels were going on six or seven miles in the rear. It looked just about as dirty a spot as it was possible to get into.

A long line of stretcher cases were being brought out under fire by native carriers. Machine-gunners, bent double under guns and ammunition, staggered up the hill with the sweat and mud rolling off them.

My belly felt like lead. I had passed being afraid that a bullet would come out of the leaves and account for me; but I was deadly weary and deadly discouraged – appalled by the sense of being a partisan spectator to a disaster. Also I felt lonely. Everyone else had a job to do with his hands and his fortitude – except me. Everybody else had orders, to go or to stay – except me. My only job was to watch, and nobody cared the price of a matchbox in hell whether I watched or not.

The sequence of events is inextricably confused. I remember pulling myself up every now and then and saying: ‘You’d better remember
how
things happened and when – after all it
is
your job. Even if nobody cares whether you do it or not, it
is
your job.’ But even though I made painfully conscious mental notes, nothing stuck.

Wilmot was very anxious to find Brigadier P., whom he knew personally. But before we found P., the Brigade Major, Hugh C., found us. He ordered us to get out – and get out fast.

C. was the only man in that weary, straggling procession of retreat who looked to be still mentally alert. He was ghastly, mud-splashed and sweat-drenched – but his eyes were still alert and roving. He had been detailed to select a new position for brigade headquarters. You could see him trying to project his mind – to cast his aliveness and alertness like a net over the whole bloody, disintegrating, invisible confusion. You could see him trying to draw in the net of his perception and make its contents cohere, so that they might be used to achieve order and positive purpose.

We travelled together for an hour or so, not saying very much. C. selected as a temporary site a kanaka garden that commanded one of the main bends of the river.

Halfway through the afternoon it had begun to rain again. Everything was sodden, but it was not so cold as it had been higher in the hills. No-one had so much as a pup tent or a ground sheet as protection from the weather. One by one the brigade staff came in. They dropped where they stood in the dripping undergrowth.

Wilmot said he would wait for the brigadier. I decided to go back to Eora. I believed the brigade would drop back there within 48 hours and I wanted to know how the retreat on the flanks was going.

The whole defending force seemed to have fallen to pieces. Stragglers from a dozen different units were making their way back, like sheep, to the trail. The wounded were coming onto the trail from both sides of the river. A few natives were held as stretcher bearers for men who could neither walk nor crawl.

I calculated the enemy was moving troop under cover of darkness well up onto Kagi Ridge and on the spur that dominated the Myola lakes. I left the brigade just after darkness fell. There could be no doubt now. The force that had been sent to recapture Kokoda had been broken and enveloped. The tragic truth was that this envelopment would have signified nothing if we had anchored our defence on properly prepared positions and had known anything about the general lay of the country in which we were fighting.

All night I kept passing lines of wounded men. It was pitch dark. They shuffled at a snail’s pace, holding onto each other in long, pitiful strings. They were in the last stages of exhaustion, but somehow they kept moving. They were constantly sorting and re-sorting themselves. The strongest, the least seriously hurt, overtook the weaker, the more seriously hurt. At the tail of every string, men would drop off and lie face-down in the mud. Then the next string would come along. The leaders would help those who had collapsed into the bushes by the side of the trail.