Eyewitness (24 page)

Some died there. Some recovered a little strength and moved on at the tail-end of another string. There were piles of forest refuse that were host to the same phosphorescent fungus I had seen above Dead Kukukuku. Sometimes a man would find a resting place on one of them. One could see the black shape of his body against the diffuse luminescence. He lay as upon a pyre of heatless embers.

Sometimes a voice, weary and quiet, would come out of the thicket: ‘Dig, I say, dig … are you going to Eora? Then tell them to send a light down the trail, will you? Tell them to send a light, Digger! Tell them to send a light!’

This was their sole complaint – that, in chasmic darkness, there was no light to guide them. A time came when I could pass them no longer. I had hoarded a worn-out flashlight against direct emergency. I flashed the light sparingly – only when the trail petered out into a clay scarp or when there was a log crossing. A line of wounded men, 100 yards long, formed up behind me. The man who walked at my back, his hand on my shoulder, had been shot twice in the chest. Behind him was a man with shrapnel in his forearm and thigh. Every now and then I would stop and turn around and flash on the light to encourage them. They saw nothing by its light that would help them, but it gave them heart. They were led by a man with a light!

After two hours the flashlight battery gave out.

The man who had been shot in the chest said: ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’ I gave him a nip out of my brandy flask and he was asleep, lying in the arsenic weed, before I had straightened up from bending over him. I started to cry. The tears rolled down my face, burning. Now there was no light. The line fell away, disintegrated. I was alone.

Just before dawn I met up with a patrol going out to reconnoitre the Kagi Ridge, and travelled with them for a time. They were raw troops and moved very clumsily and noisily. We at last reached a ridge opposite a Japanese position. The Japanese had built a long line of decoy fires just beyond the crest.

The patrol had orders to take up a position at the junction of the spur and the main ridge and from there observe and report enemy dispositions. I stayed with them until just before sunrise. I was very tired and irritable. Their noisiness annoyed and frightened me. It was a relief to be away on my own.

*

Recollection of the next day is very confused. My cough was troublesome and breathing seemed to be getting even more painful. I didn’t know it then, but I had a dose of pneumonia.

The battle remained without form. By now practically the entire available force of Australians had been thrown in, and one by one their main positions were overwhelmed by the enemy. I don’t think that the Japanese were much superior numerically, but they contrived to be superior numerically wherever it counted. Position after position was abandoned because it was held to be in danger of being ‘surrounded’. At every stage the enemy avoided frontal attack.

We had no fresh troops. At no stage did we ever have fresh troops. Every man who took part in the battle for the Owen-Stanleys was exhausted by a march over the range and by living conditions in such camps as Myola. Worse than that, what forces we had were being fed in piecemeal, and defeated in detail. The enemy was completely in command of the situation.

Early in the afternoon I got back on the trail, still congested by streams of wounded, retreating remnants of units, and by fleeing native carriers. I reached Eora village about nine o’clock at night. The natives were still bringing in stretcher cases. Walking wounded were lying or sitting in the mud about the dressing station waiting their turn for attention. I made a halfhearted attempt to help the orderlies for awhile but had to give up.

Word came through that a general withdrawal had been ordered. This meant that most of our forward supply dumps would have to be abandoned – and now there was no limit on rations. Everybody who wanted to eat, ate his fill.

Even though I had not had a meal for 48 hours, I was not particularly interested in food – until I started to eat. Ten minutes or so after cramming down a mess tin full of hot rice and beef, I got ravenously hungry. In the next hour I stowed away two cans of army stew, two packages of army biscuits, liberally spread with cheese and apricot jam, and washed down this gluttonous meal with about three pints of strong tea. I began to feel well – wonderful! The army biscuits had just been broken out and were like iron. My mouth was sore and bled from chewing. I slept for an hour, woke up hungry, and ate more biscuits and jam. Then I wrapped up in three wet blankets and didn’t stir for six hours.

Among reactions to exhaustion this was a new one. But, healthy or not, I felt almost fit next morning, and the cough was easier.

Wilmot came in about ten o’clock in the morning with a story of complete collapse down front. We discussed the situation and decided the only thing to do was to get back to Moresby with the story as fast as possible. We also heard about the Japanese landing at Milne Bay and that the position of the United States marines on Guadalcanal was critical.

The affair out here – now that we had failed to retake Kokoda – was becoming of secondary importance. The remnants of the force would probably withdraw to the Moresby perimeter, and present the Japs with the problem of feeding through enough men to create a sizeable diversion.

Next morning Parer put up another extraordinary performance lugging his camera and gear out of Eora. He threw away all his personal equipment – not even keeping as much as a spare pair of socks. Even so, he had too much weight. A few miles up the trail he threw away the leather case and accessories of his Newman camera. Then the tripod went. Then a Graflex still camera. But he clung grimly to the Newman and his exposed film – staggering with weakness, pale as a ghost, and smiling quietly to himself.

‘An army in retreat, my boy,’ he said, pausing and bobbing his head at the pitiful procession strung out along the trail. ‘Not very pretty, is it? I wonder when we’ll start to win this war? I’ve seen so many retreats. Greece was a picnic compared with this.’

No, it was not a pretty sight. At Eora the wounded had been like clots of flies round the dressing station. They were forever moving restlessly in the mud, and the yellowish rain pelted down on them. The dressing station was a hut with a partition across the middle. One side was reserved for the dying and the other for an operating theatre and surgical ward.

The surgeons performed amputations during the night in the light of flashlights held by orderlies. A canvas stretcher covered by a sheet dipped in disinfectant served as an operating table. The surgeons worked kneeling. There was one mercy – a plentiful supply of anaesthetics.

The only cases that could expect more than perfunctory dressing were those completely immobilised by the nature of their wounds – mostly men shot through the abdomen or head. Limb wounds, unless very severe, were not considered to immobilise the soldier. If with the aid of a stick he could prop himself upright, he had to make his own way back.

It is surprising how much it takes to immobilise a completely determined man. Many did not wait at Eora for attention, but pushed resolutely through toward Templeton’s Crossing and Myola. They knew they had no chance of getting stretcher bearers, and they preferred to take their chance of dying by the side of the trail to the certainty of falling into Japanese hands if they gave up the struggle to keep moving.

The night I came back from Isurava I passed a man who had had his leg blown off just below the knee by a mortar bomb. He had ligatured the stump, applied two shell dressings and wrapped the remainder of the leg in an old copra sack. He crawled and hopped vigorously. He said he was quite strong enough to reach Eora.

An hour after leaving Eora for Templeton’s Crossing, 48 hours later, I passed the same man. He had obtained a dressing at the aid post and gone on. I offered to try to round up stretcher bearers for him, but he said fiercely: ‘If you can get bearers, then get them for some other poor bastard! There are plenty worse off than me.’

At Eora I saw a 20-year-old redheaded boy with shraprel in his stomach. He kept muttering to himself about not being able to see the blasted Japs. When Eora was to be evacuated, he knew he had very little chance of being shifted back up the line. He called to me, confidentially: ‘Hey, dig, 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?’

It was not bravado. You could see that by looking in his eyes. He just wanted to see a Jap before he died. That was all.

Such things should have been appalling. They were not appalling. One accepted them calmly. They were jungle war – the most merciless war of all.

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 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.

*

On the hills above Templeton’s Crossing we parted with Parer. He decided, on hearing that 1500 feet of fresh film had been dropped for him at Myola, to stay and photograph the retreat. Apologetically he asked if we could leave him a spare shirt, a pair of socks and some quinine! He clutched the rain-soaked Newman in one hand and his cans of exposed film in the other.

I think Parer must be a genius. It is certain that he is a man of immense character. He is a devout Roman Catholic. I think I understand, now, the quality that makes him say his prayers without fail, night and morning, wherever he is.

One night – at Skin Dewai, I think – he said his prayers kneeling in a hut where 50 rough, tough, cursing commandos were going to bed. Someone, who didn’t notice, called out: ‘I say, Parer …’

Parer looked up. ‘Just a minute,’ he said mildly, in a clear, penetrating voice, ‘I am saying my prayers.’ There was silence until he had finished – and no word of comment.

Postscript:
On September 24th, 1944, when this book was in galleys, the following notice appeared in the
New York Times
: ‘Damien Parer, 33 years old, Paramount News war correspondent, has been reported by the Navy Department as having been killed in action by enemy machine-gun fire on Sept. 17 while filming front-line operations at Peleliu Island, east of the Philippines …’

George Johnston

George Johnston is most famous for his novel
My Brother Jack
(1964), among other things a terrific account of newspaper life in Melbourne in the 1930s on the Melbourne
Argus.
The main character is David Meredith, a war correspondent not unlike Johnston.

Johnston was one of the first two correspondents appointed in New Guinea in 1942 – the other was Osmar White. White, however, had little time for Johnston the journalist. He said in a 1990 interview for the Australian War Memorial that, ‘Johnston of course rewrote MacArthur communiqués. I didn’t respect him as a war correspondent. He’s a very nice bloke personally, but I didn’t hold him as a war correspondent. He never tried to beat the propaganda gate.’

Perhaps that is a bit unfair. Johnston’s actual diary entry for October 16th, 1942, the same date as the extract from his book
New Guinea Diary
published here, shows him well aware of the problem:

Up here everybody is incensed at the new censorship bans including MacArthur’s personal censorship of Stone’s [a journalist’s articles] on his visit here which have been slashed to ribbons to convey the impression (a) that he went right up to the front-line (which he certainly did NOT), and (b) that was NOT his first visit to New Guinea. Everybody is furious and Harold Gaund (U.P.) has cabled a demand that he be recalled or that his resignation be accepted. Censorship now is just plain Gestapo stuff!

Perhaps White’s feelings stem from an entry the next day in Johnston’s real diary – ‘Barney Darnton is going up to Wanigela for the Buna show and I have been asked to go as the Australian representative. At first decided to go and then decided against it. Too many other things are in the air and it’s the wrong time to be cut off from all other news sources.’

While Johnston did go to the north-coast battles at Buna and Gona later in the year, it indicates a different kind of reporting to White’s – White walked in and was there with the soldiers, observing and telling their stories. Johnston, for the most part, was back at headquarters getting stories by talking to blokes who had been there.

In
My Brother Jack
Johnston has his alter ego, David Meredith, say:

I never walked the Kokoda Trail, although I did walk some of it. I saw something of the fighting at Buna and Gona, but my visits there were short. In a sense these were no more than the necessary skirmishes made to pick up the vibrant colour, the human textures, that would be woven into the more detailed and comprehensive pictures of the struggle which could only be done competently – or so I was able to convince myself – from some base headquarters far behind the fighting front.

After the war he was appointed first editor of the magazine
Australasian Post
, married Charmian Clift and went to live on a Greek island to write fiction full-time in 1954.
My Brother Jack
was the resultant Australian masterpiece, for which differences in journalistic attitude can be forgiven. Johnston died in 1970.

*

I have an idea that the name of the Kokoda Trail is going to live in the minds of Australians for generations, just as another name, Gallipoli, lives on as freshly today, 27 years after it first gained significance in Australian minds. For thousands of Australians who have walked the weary, sodden miles of this dreadful footpath – and these Australians are the fathers of the next generation – it will be an unforgettable memory.

Five days ago the Japanese began their resistance again – on the wide shallow plateau of the Gap, the pass through the forbidding spurs of the main range. The weather is bad, the terrain unbelievably terrible, and the enemy is resisting with a stubborn fury that is costing us many men and much time. Against the machine-gun nests and mortar pits established on the rugged spurs and steep limestone ridges our advance each day now is measured in yards. Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6700 feet, fighting viciously because they have only a mile or two to go before they reach the peak of the pass and will be able to attack downhill – down the north flank of the Owen Stanleys. That means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonising track, who have buried many of their cobbers, and who have seen so many more going back, weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and bullets and grenades of the enemy. Tiny villages which were under Japanese domination a few weeks ago are back in our hands – Ioribaiwa, Nauro Creek, Menari, Efogi, Kagi, Myola – and we are fighting now for Templeton’s Crossing.

Fresh troops are going up the track, up the slimy trail from which the tide of war has ebbed, leaving the debris of death and destruction all the way along the green walls that flank the snaking ribbon of rotten mud. The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotchpotches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects. I remember years ago how we used to laugh at newsreels showing the motley troops of China when they were fighting the Japanese. These men on the Kokoda track look more unkempt, more ragged, than any of the Chinese of those old film shots. The men coming back, sick or wounded, look worse. But you can see they are rather proud of the scraps of rag tied round their feet, the slings made of mud-caked puttees, the slouch hats that look like dish-cloths. They have already fought the Jap and they are willing to give advice to newcomers.

‘How’re you keepin’ sport?’

‘Not too bad.’

‘What are the Japs like?’

‘Stiff!’

‘Wait till we get stuck into ’em!’

‘OK, sport. We’re waitin’.’

Already a new language is springing up on this green and slimy trail. Whenever Australians are in an area for long enough they soon invent a new slang to describe it. They adapt themselves to discomforts, give them ironical names and laugh them off. A few weeks ago these troops were still talking the language of the Middle East, which had been their home for more than two years. They talk now like the men who have been in New Guinea for months. The curses of New Guinea are varied enough to provide troops with their main subjects of conversation; but, in rough order, the worst are mosquitoes, mud, mountains, malaria and monotony. The ‘mozzies’ and malaria are worst down near the coast, but they are speedily replaced by the mud and mountains as you go inland. The monotony, of course, is everywhere, except where the fighting provides something special to think about.

They love mosquito stories, and the more fantastic they are the better they like them. There was one about a Jap airman who was found lying on a hill. The official explanation was that he had been shot down by our fighters, but the boys in the know say that he was picked up at Lae by a mozzy, who carried him over the Owen Stanleys, looking for a nice quiet place to eat him. He saw a flight of Fortresses heading north, and, mistaking them for his wife and kids, he dropped the Jap and fell into formation.

I heard another one on the same lines about an ack-ack gunner who caught a mosquito in his sights, and, mistaking it for a Zero, opened fire with a Bofors gun. The third shell chipped one wing, and the fourth exploded right under his tail. The boys raised a cheer as they saw him come down smoking, but instead of crashing he picked up a rock and threw it at them. They can show you the rock, too.

Moresby’s best mosquito joke, I think, is a perfectly authentic signboard that stands alongside a shallow pool on the main road in the garrison. It was erected by an anti-malaria squad which forgot to paint in the hyphen. The pool was filled with gamboesia, the little imported minnow that eats mosquito larvae, and the sign reads: WARNING. DO NOT SPRAY. MOSQUITO EATING FISH.

On the Kokoda track, however, after you’ve been walking a few hours, you soon get above the mosquito country. As the troops toiled and grunted up they would often stop and gasp with amazement at the enormous butterflies that drifted to and fro, or alighted on their arms to drink the sweat. The insect life, from scorpions to butterflies, is impressive.

However, you eventually reach a stage when the novelty of flora and fauna, and even of the Japs, gradually wears off. Your mental processes allow you to be conscious of only one thing – ‘the track’, or, more usually, ‘the bloody track’. You listen to your legs creaking and stare at the ground and think of the next stretch of mud, and you wonder if the hills will ever end. Up one almost perpendicular mountain face more than 2000 steps have been cut out of the mud and built up with felled saplings inside which the packed earth has long since become black glue. Each step is two feet high. You slip on one in three. There are no resting places. Climbing here is the supreme agony of mind and spirit. The troops have christened this stretch ‘The Golden Staircase’.

Worn out and sodden with sweat – notebook and cigarettes were just soggy pulp – we stared up the endless steps that twisted up into the tree-tops. There was a long pause.

‘Think I’ll wait for a lift,’ somebody murmured reflectively.

A longer pause broken only by the laboured gasp of breathing. We waited for somebody to start the climb. A young corporal turned to me with a look of disgust.

‘I suppose we’d better get cracking,’ he said. ‘But what gives me a pain in the guts is to think that I was the bloody idiot who used to go to bloody mountains for his bloody holidays!’

Near this point is a tiny jungle camp where the Japanese had their advanced headquarters only a couple of weeks ago. The Australians have already erected a rough signpost bearing the legend ‘Under New Management’. The whole track is studded with these signposts that testify to the unquenchable humour of the Diggers. Among the anonymous cartographers and signwriters whose pastime it is to erect these noticeboards there doesn’t seem to be much unanimity. The track starts off with a beautifully painted board bearing the name, in mock Japanese characters, of ‘Tokyo Road’. Getting up toward Imita Ridge, where the Australian withdrawal ended last month, it quite inexplicably becomes ‘Buna Boulevard’. Less than a mile beyond stands a fingerpost bearing the neat inscription ‘Kokoda Highway’, but by the time you have reached the next ridge the name changes again to ‘Rabaul Road, via Kokoda and Buna’.

Near the end of the motor road, if you can use the word ‘road’ to define a tortuous, mud-covered and unbelievably narrow switchback that tunnels through the green forest, three signs have been erected. The first reads: ‘To next stopping place – by air, 3 miles; by foot, 3 months.’ Fifty yards on we come to ‘Sorry, no taxis. All drivers called up.’ The final notice reads: ‘Get your travel priority here.’

At the end of the ‘road’, where only a thin, slimy foot track spills itself down a slippery and almost perpendicular wall of red clay, there is a crudely built cookhouse, considerably less pretentious than even the average army cookhouse in the field. This calling place, famous along the track, is the ‘Café de Kerbstone – Gestapo Gus, Proprietor’. A small tent back along the track is labelled ‘All-night Diner’.

At the moment this track is Australia’s road of adventure and you must never be surprised at the people you meet or the tales you hear.

Yesterday, beneath a tangle of lawyer vines, I yarned in the drizzling rain with a British Army officer who had carried the gleaming badges of the East Lancashires into a strange setting. The man was Major H.M. Ervine-Andrews, who won the Victoria Cross in the retreat to Dunkirk. And we talked – of all things – about salmon fishing in Ireland.

It is along this track that you meet the real traditional Australian hospitality. You find it in wayside tents, in tumbledown native huts, and in rude shelters made of branches leaning against the knife-edge roots of jungle trees. The scrub is parted, and a grinning face, usually unshaven, pokes through with the invitation ‘Are you in a tearin’ hurry?’ A grimy thumb is jerked over a sun-tanned shoulder with the words, ‘I’ve got a billy on now, and the tea’s almost ready.’

The tea is always good Australian billy tea, and the yarns you hear are always worth listening to. The talk is largely of three Ts – the track, the tucker and Tojo (any Japanese is ‘Tojo’). But you may hear, too, of experiences in Bardia, Benghazi, Greece, Lebanon or ‘good old Cairo’, for these men have been around. They haven’t struck anything tougher than this jungle war, but I’ve yet to hear a single man complain.

A tumbledown native hut somewhere in New Guinea is the centre of all punting activity concerning the Melbourne Cup. It carries the sign: ‘Quotations for Melbourne Cup. Best Odds Given. No Credit.’ The bookie told me Skipton was favourite, but I could get 5 to 1 if I ‘jumped in early’.

His book for the last two Melbourne Cups had been in the Middle East, but business was good here, and bets had come down the track from Myola Lakes, Templeton’s Crossing, Efogi, Kagi, Menari, Nauro Creek and Ioribaiwa – bets ranging from ‘two bob each way’ to ‘20 quid straight out’.

Single pages torn from newspapers, showing starters, jockeys and weights, have gone almost from hand to hand the length of the jungle track, until eventually they have disintegrated.

These grand fellows along ‘Tokyo Road’ have a great hunger for news of the mainland, and all it means to them. I have seen the tattered remnants of a six-weeks’-old newspaper, which has been read – advertisements and all – by an estimated number of 600 men, and has travelled 50 miles up and down the track before being written off as no longer legible.

All the way up the track you meet small, sturdy natives, who pick their way barefooted through the mud, quietly and steadily as though they could go on for ever. The boys from the Middle East called them ‘wogs’ at first, because it was their name for the Arabs. Soon they learnt the New Guinea army term, which is ‘boong’. Before they have been there long they are calling them ‘sport’, which seems to be the second A.I.F.’s equivalent for ‘Digger’.

There is nothing more interesting to watch than the growing friendship between the Australian soldier and the Papuan. It is a goodhumoured, rather paternal relationship, with a lot of genuine kindliness in it. As a whole the New Guinea natives are nimble and tough, and they retain the physical fortitude and the honesty of primitive peoples unspoiled by casual contacts with the white men. It is their uncomplaining and lion-hearted endurance, and their innocence of greed and deceit, which have won the hearts of the troops.