Kokoda (24 page)

The track had been formed by the feet of natives over centuries as they went from village to village for trade and tyranny, love and war. In the early years of Europeans in New Guinea, this track had been considered as being almost exclusively for the natives, on the grounds that ‘white fellas’ simply wouldn’t be able to make it across. Despite the fact that a few white men and indeed one white woman had successfully traversed the track in those early years of European settlement, the view about the inherent difficulty of it as a thoroughfare remained, even when gold had been discovered not far from Kokoda. Two large parties set out from Moresby to get to the goldfields and were never seen again. At least not by Europeans.

Certainly MacArthur concurred with the previously expressed view of General Morris that it seemed only a remote chance that the Japanese would launch a land-based attack on Moresby by way of this track—in the same fashion as they had overwhelmed Singapore—but if they did, then Buna was the obvious place for the Japanese to establish a beachhead. For MacArthur to consolidate forces at Buna, therefore, would serve both offensive and defensive purposes. Once it was secured, a regiment of American engineers and a labour force would come in by sea and build the airfield and base, from which the wider Allied forces could then launch raids on Japanese positions.

After due consultations, MacArthur issued an order in the third week of June for Major General Morris to send out forces to first secure Kokoda and thence proceed to Buna. MacArthur’s rough timetable called for the force to cross the mountains, secure the Kokoda airfield by the middle of July and then Buna by early August when the American engineers would arrive.

Reluctantly, as he did not like to denude Port Moresby of its already thin defences, Major General Morris in turn gave the orders for his men to make rapid preparations to do exactly that. But he was never a believer, writing at the time: ‘Even if the Japanese do make this very difficult and impracticable move, let us meet them on ground of our own choosing and as close as possible to our base. Let us merely help their own supply problems to strangle them, while reducing our own supply difficulties to a minimum.’
¹⁰²

It was decided that Captain Templeton’s B Company of the 39th Battalion, which was without doubt the best of what was available, would be given the duty of following MacArthur’s orders. They would be joined by some platoons from the Papuan Infantry Battalion, and supply and medical detachments which, put together, would be called ‘Maroubra Force’. Other companies of the 39th would follow them thereafter.

Generally, the men of the 39th greeted the news with great excitement. After months and months of digging ditches, fixing roads and constructing shelters, it was a chance to throw down the shovel, get out of stinking Moresby and maybe even have a go at the bloody Japanese. In the frenzy of activity that resulted from the order being given, a key figure came into the orbit of Maroubra Force and it became his role to organise ‘supply’ and ensure that they would always have sufficient rations and munitions no matter where they were on the track.

His name was Bert Kienzle, and though his nominal position was as a lieutenant with ANGAU, his value was that he was a capable and charismatic man who’d lived in New Guinea for many years, actually since the days of the 1927 gold rush, and knew the territory backwards. Though Kienzle hadn’t found gold in those early days, he was one of the very few Europeans to prosper in the country, and had in fact established a thriving rubber plantation at Kokoda, which was so successful he’d been obliged to build an all-weather airfield to service the plantation. So Kienzle, a mountain of a man who was well over six foot tall for his eighteen stone, brought to Maroubra Force three notable attributes: he’d already traversed the Owen Stanleys, spoke fluent pidgin English and was familiar with the ways of the six hundred native porters who would carry supplies forward in the absence of even one available transport plane.

Also, there was a
humanity
about Bert, borne of no little suffering. He’d seen his mother die on the day his youngest brother was born, had not only seen his German-born father interned in Australia during the Great War, but had been interned himself with his three brothers and sisters and stepmother. Such suffering had given him an empathy for those who suffered too, and one of his first moves was to improve the appalling conditions that the very restive porters were being kept in.

Kienzle’s facility with the natives was crucial because their ways were indeed particular and they would provide the key manpower to set up the ‘staging camps’ at ten-mile intervals along the course of the track. At each staging camp there would be a dump of supplies that the porters would carry in, and each camp would have its own platoon to dole out whatever was needed to the passing soldiers. To run each post, Kienzle was also training up a group of specially selected staff officers.

The other mission for the strapping Kienzle, at the behest of Major General Morris, was to build a road along the length of the Kokoda Track, and by 26 August of that year at that. Kienzle knew that such a road could never be built over such terrain and certainly not in that amount of time, but it was one of those things that Major General Morris just didn’t want to hear. So after a little argy-bargy the senior man had pulled rank and
ordered
Kienzle, as a bare minimum, to evaluate it. (Strangely, despite having been in charge of military matters for the previous eighteen months, Morris had never had the Kokoda Track reconnoitred by competent military officers, or anyone for that matter. Its contours and form remained an impenetrable mystery to the higher echelons of the military.) Kienzle said he would do as he had been ordered,
Suh,
and continued his preparations, the key one of which was rounding up the porters for the urgent task of getting supplies in place for the 39th and for subsequent troops that might be crossing the track.

Overseeing the health of the porters was one of Kienzle’s friends from the pre-war days in New Guinea, ol’ Doc Vernon, an elderly Australian who, after attending the Shore school in Sydney and then Sydney University, had briefly worked as a doctor in the dusty Queensland town of Winton before joining the 11th Light Horse Regiment as the Regimental Medical Officer in the Great War. After being awarded a Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ he’d returned to settle in the New Guinea highlands. He was so old and deaf, courtesy of an exploding shell at Gallipoli, that the Australian Government had tried to forcibly evacuate him from New Guinea with all the other civilians the previous December; but Doc had enthusiastically refused to go, knowing that he might be useful.

And now this sixty-year-old man had found his calling, as
Captain
Doctor Geoffrey Vernon, if you please, of ANGAU, looking after the health of the native porters, initially from his base at Ilolo at the beginning of the track. Like Bert Kienzle, Doc Vernon’s command of pidgin English was superb, and his caring way with the natives over such a long period of time meant that they had an enormous amount of respect for this skinny man who had wrinkles on his wrinkles on his wrinkles—the face of a man who had lived hard and long. Kienzle knew him to be a good man to have beside him in such a venture.

It was in the early hours of 1 July 1942. In the tropical waters off Cape Bojidoru in the Philippines, Lieutenant Commander ‘Bull’ Wright, the captain of the ultra-modern American submarine USS
Sturgeon
felt alive as never before. They called him ‘Bull’ because of his love of whiskey and telling tall stories, but he sensed now that he might be about to have a story to beat them all.

Just a few minutes earlier he had been awoken from the half-sleep only a submarine commander knows by a sudden change in the sub’s course, which could mean one of two things: either the
Sturgeon
had found a target, or they suddenly
were
one. With a deferential knock on the door a few seconds later his executive officer told him, praise the Lord and pass the torpedoes, it was the former. The
Sturgeon’s
SJ radar—a state-of-the-art system capable of communicating the compass bearing of a target to the sub’s targeting system—had picked up a ship, a big ship, speeding from the Japanese controlled Philippines northeast into the South China Sea.

As speed was crucial, ‘the Exec’ had already begun the hunt, taking the sub to the surface to take its speed from nine knots to twenty knots, and embarking on a closing course. Bull Wright’s orders in this case were clear. He was to attack all targets in his area of patrol, as part of the overall American effort to isolate and weaken the Japanese aggressors.

Unbeknown to him, though, while this target was indeed Japanese shipping, the 7267-ton
Montevideo Maru
was bearing unusual cargo. Manacled and asleep well below decks were 1035 Australians, most of whom were survivors of the Japanese invasion of Rabaul. Roughly 850 were soldiers, while the rest were civilians and missionaries. These were the very prisoners whose letters home had been dropped on Seven Mile Airfield back in March by the Japanese, causing such relief in Australia that they were still alive. There were also thirty-six Norwegian sailors rescued from the cargo ship
Herstein
when the Japanese bombed them while they were loading copra in Matupi Harbour. Now they all slept as their prison ship ploughed on… and the
Sturgeon
edged even nearer.

Tension in the submarine was high. There was little noise in the conning tower as officers and men went systematically about their work, apart from the strained hum of the sub’s engines on full power. Bull Wright and the Exec soon selected a salvo of four torpedoes for the pursuit attack, two aimed at the target and one on either side, in case the ship sighted the inbound torpedoes and altered its course to port or starboard. By twenty past two in the morning, the
Sturgeon
had closed the gap to the point where it was just possible to fire a torpedo at the
Montevideo Maru
and dispatch it to where, in Bull Wright’s view, all Japanese shipping belonged: the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps he could have got closer still, but he wasn’t prepared to take the chance that the brutes would get away.

The final settings were applied to the torpedoes and then Bull gave the commands in his authoritative, calm voice: ‘Fire one’. This was immediately repeated by the Exec—‘Fire one’—and the whole submarine shuddered and shimmied as the first torpedo went on its way. Bull Wright and the Exec clicked their stopwatches simultaneously and then continued.

‘Fire two… ’

‘Fire three… ’

‘Fire four… ’

It was exactly 02.25 hours as the crew of the
Sturgeon
felt the last of their four torpedoes discharge, firing out at a range of just under 4000 yards from the target. Now the submarine commander and his number two looked at their stopwatches. The ‘time to run’ of the torpedo was critical if they were to know whether the torpedo had exploded prematurely or had run past the target. The second hands of the watches slowly clicked by as the seconds to run were counted down aloud by the Exec. There was a hollowness in everyone’s stomach in the conning tower as the impact time of the first torpedo passed, with no sound. Bull Wright ordered the periscope up to observe the target. Just as he located it in his periscope’s field of view, the
Montevideo Maru
seemed to alter course and, almost instantaneously, they heard two loud explosions. The submarine had done its job, and two torpedoes had found their mark.

The aquatic missiles had exploded in the bowels of the ship near its stern quarters and almost instantly the ship began to list to starboard as wild panic broke out on board. For the many prisoners below there was no chance, though several of the Japanese crew managed to launch a couple of lifeboats. Then, at 02.40 hours, stern first, the
Montevideo Maru
sank to the bottom of the ocean with over one thousand Australians still aboard.

Bull Wright didn’t wait to watch the ship sink. He ordered the
Sturgeon
to a depth of two hundred feet and to rig for counterattack, just in case there were any enemy combatants nearby, and ordered a course to establish maximum distance from their target. As the submarine serenely glided into the deep, the final noises of the ship breaking apart could be heard. Like a spring unwinding, the tension of the pursuit and attack drifted rapidly from Bull Wright’s mind as he applied his thoughts to the safety of his submarine and his men. In Wright’s and his crews’ minds, was the grim satisfaction that they had done their jobs well.

On the morning of 7 July 1942 the men of the 39th Battalion’s B Company were gathered right beside where the track began, at McDonald’s homestead just near the village of Ilolo. (Ol’ McDonald had a farm, a rubber tree plantation and—as a veteran of Gallipoli— had put it entirely at the disposal of the Australian Army so they could use it as a base for stockpiling supplies and launching their men along the track.)

At that point, to the north of B Company there was only a scattering of Western civilisation comprising a thin confetti of plantations, missions and seven ANGAU posts dotted along the north coast of New Guinea specifically looking out for Japanese shipping and planes. Somewhere out there too was a 35-strong brigade of the Papuan Infantry Battalion, commanded by a Major Bill Watson—a decorated veteran of the Great War—with five Australian officers. The PIB had set out two weeks before to reconnoitre the northern side of the Owen Stanley Range. Despite this advance guard, the men of B Company still had a sense that they were heading off into the wilderness on their own and would have to stick together. They talked about what might lay ahead and discussed a feature called the ‘Kokoda Gap’, which they would have to pass through, a gap so narrow you had to turn sideways to get through it in some parts. The way they told it, if you had just a few men with enough ammo, you could hold off an entire army at the gap.