Kokoda (10 page)

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor the one and only bright spot for Australia was that at least a British naval squadron, boasting the mighty battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Repulse,
had arrived at the British naval base in Singapore, just six days before Japanese troops had stormed ashore on the Malayan Peninsula to the north. This was no small measure of security, given that Singapore was famed as an ‘impregnable bastion’, and with firepower the like of which those two men o’war were packing, there was every reason to think it would remain so. Surely, they would at least put a serious crimp in whatever territorial ambitions the Japanese were harbouring in this part of the world.

And Mother England had, after all, made a firm promise that Australia would not be abandoned and that Singapore…
would… not… fall
. Certainly, all of Australia would have loved to have believed it, but under the circumstances they were a lot less confident than they had been. After all, just three months before the ‘day of infamy’, one of Churchill’s ministers, Duff Cooper, had declared on a visit to Singapore that ‘Japan is an isolated power facing overwhelming superiority in the Pacific’. And even Churchill himself had assured: ‘Singapore is as far away from Japan as Southampton is from New York. The operation of moving a Japanese army with all its troopships would be forlorn.’
²²

Of all the terrible things about being in a ship with enemy bombers flying overhead, perhaps the worst is that at first flurry there is simply no way of knowing whether or not the bombs are on their way or not. You hear a searing, rising whistle and look up, but at that angle the bombs do not stand out and all you can see is sky or the bombers themselves. So all you can do is wait and hope. And that is what the men of the
Repulse
were doing at 11.18 a.m. on the morning of 10 December 1941 when they saw enemy bombers pass over, going from starboard to the port side at an altitude of 21 000 feet. With the
Prince of Wales
, the
Repulse
was just returning from a fruitless mission up the east coast of Malaya, trying to attack the Japanese invasion flotilla that had landed the soldiers when the Japs had found
them
and…

And they were bombs all right, and they soon sent the
Repulse
to the bottom of the ocean, followed less than an hour later by the
Prince of Wales
. When the first scattered reports of their sinking appeared in Australia, Prime Minister John Curtin refused to believe them and rushed to Sydney’s ABC studios to deny them in a nationwide address. He was just about to go on air, when a producer rushed in to say, ‘Prime Minister, you can’t deny it for it’s true—it’s just been broadcast on the BBC.’ Curtin’s face turned ashen.
²³

The Japanese were rampant. In the land battle, each Japanese soldier had been issued with a pamphlet ordering him to take no prisoners, and with the following instruction: ‘When you encounter the enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger coming face to face at last with his father’s murderer. Here is a man whose death will lighten your heart.’

Following so closely on the shock defeat of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, it now seemed like nothing and no one could stop the Japanese.

Well, well, well, B Company of the 39th Battalion… Colonel Conran looked at the report before him and gleaned enough to form at least a rough outline of what had happened. As well as training up the militia, Camp Darley also had various units of the AIF passing through—usually fresh recruits getting ready to join elements of the 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th divisions overseas as reinforcements—and there had inevitably been a lot of friction between these ‘professional soldiers’, and his own men of the militia. He knew that the AIF men regarded the militia as ‘play-soldiers’ unworthy of wearing uniforms and that they’d generally felt free to express that view. But what had started as jests, had turned to jibes, to jeers, to full-blown insults to… last night.

Last night, a bunch of AIF blokes had launched an all-out attack on B Company in its barracks, using fists, feet and their own steel helmets for weapons. They had been met by a B Company intent on defending their turf, using their own fists and feet, and throwing in rifle butts for good measure.

It was a curiosity of the military that while its whole raison d’etre was to fight, all fighting
within
the ranks was usually a severely punishable offence. But in this case, Colonel Conran wasn’t too upset at all. There was no doubt from the report that it was the AIF who had started it, and B Company couldn’t be blamed for responding in kind. The important thing was that his men had given a singularly good account of themselves, inflicting a good deal of damage on the aggressors and belying all notions that they were mere chocolate soldiers. It was, after all, a term unlikely to be used again by the attackers, once they got out of hospital, at least not within earshot of B Company.

One other thing caught Colonel Conran’s eye. The whole brawl had been immediately brought under control by B Company’s Lieutenant, Sam Templeton, as soon as he had arrived on the scene. This had been accomplished by Templeton uttering a few sharp words to his own men, and then personally hurling a few of the AIF men out the door as a warning to the others that they had better heed his call to withdraw.

Colonel Conran was not surprised. A big bear of a man, ‘Uncle Sam’ as his men called him, was a special case. At fifty-six years old, or thereabouts—Conran would not have been surprised if Templeton was older than he claimed—the lieutenant was already a vastly experienced military campaigner having served in the nascent submarine unit in the Great War, fought against the forces of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and participated in the Irish Rebellion…
²⁴

At the outbreak of this war he had been unable to join the AIF, partly because of his advanced age and partly because he had flat feet. (The view of the Australian Army was that if you didn’t have a mini Harbour Bridge between the two pads of your feet, then your fighting ability was in serious question.) So he had joined the militia and been an asset from the first day. His word among his men was law, not because they feared him, but because they respected him. He did not speak often, but when he did they listened, and no one resented him calling anyone ten years or more younger than him, ‘Laddie’.

All up, Conran decided to let the whole thing slide. He would utter some gruff words, threaten holy hell if anything like this happened again, and observe the form, but he certainly wouldn’t do anything to break up a group that was not only in a mood to fight but could clearly fight well. For as a group, there was no doubt that the 39th had a bit of ‘mongrel’ in them, and Conran and his senior officers were still laughing over another near-blue at a pub in the nearby town of Bacchus Marsh, when a rather weedy-looking private had sized up to an enormous local yokel, jabbing him in the chest and saying ‘I’ll
do
you mate… ’ before adding with an encouraging nod to his mates behind, ‘won’t
we,
fellas… ?’

As it happened if the men weren’t ready for a scrap then Conran didn’t want them in the battalion. A short time later, the colonel was told that some men in the 39th were not happy as they felt that they’d been shanghaied into the battalion from the contributing units without having any say themselves. Calling the men into full battalion parade, Colonel Conran advised: ‘I have been apprised that some of you men have come here under duress, and that is a state of affairs which is repugnant to me. Therefore, I inform you that any man who does not wish to remain a member of the battalion may say so now, and he will be returned to his previous unit, immediately…’
²⁵
Some took him up on it, and were immediately replaced by men who were better disposed to fight with the 39th, should it indeed come to it. And more and more it looked like it would…

As December of 1941 trudged mournfully on, three American bases in the Pacific—Midway, Wake and Guam—were bombarded by Japanese planes, before the latter two were occupied by the crack Japanese troops of the South Seas Detachment, the body of the Japanese whose specific job it was to quell this part of the world. Midway was able to hold on, and then only just.

In the Philippines things were desperate, and it was not long before they became so desperate that despite the ongoing heroic communiqués coming from General MacArthur, the good general left the defence of Bataan to his less fortunate troops, and moved himself, his family and his staff to the far better provisioned island fortress of Corrigedor, where ten thousand of his best soldiers awaited. They based themselves in one of the island’s many tunnels, where half a football field of solid rock lay between them and any stray bombs.

Not that this slowed down any of the heroic communiqués. In the first three months after the Philippines came under attack by the Japanese, MacArthur’s headquarters released no fewer than 142 such communiqués, of which 109 were devoted exclusively to extolling the military virtues of just one person: Douglas MacArthur.
²⁶
As MacArthur’s soldiers were the only Americans engaged in serious military action anywhere in the world at that time, each communiqué was devoured by the American media, and the natural tendency under the circumstances was to follow MacArthur’s lead and put progressively larger heroic haloes around his name. Anything less would have been unpatriotic, and this was no time for hard questions about whether it might have been MacArthur’s ineptitude that had led the Philippines into this predicament in the first place.

Christmas of 1941 was an essentially grim affair in Australia, with many of the population worried about their loved ones fighting overseas. As well, most Australians were feeling a growing anxiety about the country’s future, and were worried about how long other European outposts around the Pacific could hold out.

In Hong Kong, the answer was only hours, as the Crown colony fell to Japanese forces on Christmas morning with eleven thousand British soldiers being taken prisoner. A sign of things to come was when Japanese soldiers entered Hong Kong’s principal hospital, raped many of the Chinese and British nurses, and bayoneted to death seventy of the patients.

That news would take a while to break in Australia, but in the meantime, at the Lodge, John Curtin, missing Elsie terribly, had requested that six Western Australian airmen from the local airbase join him for Christmas lunch, men equally far away from their own families.

At the 39th’s Camp Darley, Christmas Day had begun with what was known as a ‘Tarpaulin Muster’—a roll call for everyone from lieutenants to cooks to drivers to make sure that all were present and accounted for, and that no one had slipped away in contravention of the order Colonel Conran had made several weeks before that all leave was cancelled. It had become clear that the 39th was going to be moving out shortly, to a destination unknown. For the last few weeks the men had been regularly obliged to pack their kits, stow them in a truck and roll out, never knowing if this was just practice or the real thing. Each time they had returned to camp, but the fact that each man had been obliged to make out a will and designate a loved one to receive his pay, or part thereof, while he was away, showed that they were dinkum going to be on their way very soon.

For his part, Joe Dawson, of the 39th Battalion’s B Company, had no doubt who he wanted his army pay going to—his girlfriend, Elaine Colbran. He loved her. She loved him. Joe had no doubt that, all else being equal—as in, if he didn’t get himself killed in this war—he and Elaine would marry, and he wanted her in charge of their growing nest egg while he was away. When the paymaster advised that this was unwise, as girlfriends often just spent the money, Joe was uncharacteristically abrupt: ‘Just do it!’

And on the subject of Elaine, Joe decided that he just couldn’t stand not seeing her on Christmas Day, whatever the damn rules were. And given that they had already had one Tarpaulin Muster he figured that there was little risk of another. Quietly, he slipped away across some back paddocks, walked to Bacchus Marsh, and got a lift into Melbourne from there. There was never trouble getting a lift when you were wearing a uniform, even if it was only a militia uniform.

For one delightful afternoon Joe sat with Elaine in the front parlour of her parents’ house, holding hands and talking. Goodness, she looked lovely. It was a measure of Elaine’s love for Joe that she had given him three precious things. One was a silver wristwatch that she had saved up for. Even more precious was a set of rosary beads, originally from Ireland, which the nuns had assured her had been personally blessed by the Pope. Finally, a small leather case which had tiny medallions with the images of six saints on them, which he was to keep in his breast pocket at all times, over his heart, as another way of making sure that he was kept safe. Whatever else, Joe
had
to stay safe, and come back to her.

Although Joe made it back to Camp Darley before midnight, there was still hell to pay the following day when his platoon commander, Lieutenant Allan ‘Kanga’ Moore, hauled him up and demanded to know where the hell he had been at the second Tarpaulin Muster.

‘But Sir,’ Joe lied fluently. ‘I just went for a run and a walk around the camp precincts. As you know, I do that quite often to keep fit. If I had known there was a “tarpaulin” on, I would have been here!’

Fortunately, there was no time for Lieutenant Moore to pursue it. Already, grumbling trucks were pulling up outside ready for the whole battalion to pile into with all their kit. This time though, there was no turning around. The trucks went straight to Bacchus Marsh railway station, where a specially commissioned train awaited them. Grumbling not a little at the weight of all their packs, as the soldiers carried their kit from the trucks to the train, they had soon boarded. Before long the Victorian countryside was rattling past them backwards, as they sat up like Jackie, crammed in ‘six bums to a bench’, like the sergeants said. They were on their way for real…