Kokoda (40 page)

Dawn. The high ranges of New Guinea, just north of the village of Menari. The first strains of light reveal slightly stirring clumps on the jungle floor. They are the men of the 2/14th, who, at last light of the previous day, had more or less dropped exhausted where they fell, with barely enough strength to pull their ground sheets and half-blankets around their bodies as some protection from the endless rain.

Now, a piercing whistle reverberates through the clearing. It is a whipbird, just warming up for what will soon be an endless cacophony of calls throughout the day, but still that does not wake the exhausted men. What does, is the sergeant major, moving quietly from bundle to bundle, giving them a quiet shake to indicate that the day has begun and that they will shortly move out. As the men emerge from their bundles one by one to head off to nearby trees to perform their ablutions, they look like nothing so much as baby giraffes, tottering uncertainly on legs they are not at all sure of, as their whole bodies rebel against any instruction to move again. But move they do, bit by bit, murmuring the odd ‘g’morning’ to each other. The company now has the fire going, the billy is soon boiling, and their breakfast biscuit will soon be washed down with scalding black tea as the first of the men move out. Before they know it, it’s on again, all the slithering and sliding and sucking it up, just to try to keep going. Somehow, through it all, the men of the AIF kept moving along the track, towards their goal of relieving the 39th and their own task of sending the Japs back to the sea.

Amid the exhaustion of it all, one thing among many particularly worried the Australians—their khaki clothing. It had been perfect for the desert sands of Syria where they blended into the background, but it was hopeless for the dark green jungle where they stood out from as much as a mile away. As one lot of Diggers got to the top of a hill, they could look across a valley and clearly see the bunch of Diggers ahead of them on the next hill, shining like lighthouses on a dark night. They presented, in short, perfect targets. And on top of all that, such lightweight fabric did not protect them from the cold nights, which at the high altitude of the highlands could get very chilly indeed.

While the men of the 39th had experienced exactly the same problems, and simply accepted it, neither the 2/14th nor the 2/16th were so disposed. Something had to be done before they got into action and, typically, something
was
done. At night, after their meagre dinner was eaten, the massive cooking pots were commandeered and water boiled up in them. When it had come to a rolling boil, large chunks of jungle foliage were thrown in, and the khakis thereafter. It worked, a little. At the least the uniforms’ khaki colour was dulled to a more greenish hue, and as the 2/14th pressed on day after day they began to blend in a little more with the jungle around.

Every battlefield, every topographical feature on the earth’s surface, comes replete with its own natural defences, shelters, avenues of attack, escape and so forth. Ralph Honner liked to expend considerable energy examining the battlefield for such features before configuring and placing his troops for strategic advantage. This is why he spent most of the morning of 18 August walking around with his senior officers, looking things over.

The village of Isurava had some two hundred natives in times of peace, but as was consistent in the whole Kokoda campaign, they had simply disappeared the moment the fighting and soldiers had got close. The grass huts they left behind would have absolutely no chance of stopping any bullets, but they were useful for obscuring the enemy’s vision along certain sightlines and for providing a place for the severely wounded to shelter from the incessant rain.

The warpath that was the Kokoda Track ran in the north/south direction, right on the western side of the village, which was in itself perched on the side of a hill. On the northern perimeter of Isurava there was a large vegetable garden which then gave way to dense rainforest. On the southern perimeter the forest came right to the village edge. Two creeks, which became known to the soldiers as ‘front creek’ and ‘rear creek’—with front creek on the northern side, closest to the Japanese—ran roughly along the northern and southern perimeters in an easterly direction down into the Eora Valley, providing additional obstacles for any invading force to get across. On the eastern side of the village the ground was thickly wooded, with a very steep slope also leading to the valley floor below.

The Australians expected that the Japanese would attack from the western side of the village, where the ground was higher and the forest more sparse. An expanse of relatively open ground between the forest and the perimeter would also allow the Japanese to mass their troops before sending them charging at the Australian defences across easier ground.

Which company of the 39th to put on this, then, the battalion’s most vulnerable front? Honner had no doubt. When he had taken over command of the 39th the previous day, he had had a brief meeting with the outgoing Major Cameron, who had once more been scathing in his assessment of B Company who, in his view, had so woefully failed at Oivi and Kokoda. His strong recommendation was that B Company be broken up and scattered into the other companies as reinforcements.
¹⁵⁷

Honner had listened carefully and considered the recommendation, but now, after consultations with his senior officers and some deep thought on his own part, decided to do quite the opposite. Instead of obliterating B Company, he would give them the position of greatest honour and responsibility—he would give them the western perimeter of Isurava, the position which would be guaranteed to take the most heat and the one which had to be held at all costs.

Honner’s view was not only that Major Cameron’s assessment might have been a bit harsh from the outset—the bulk of B Company had acquitted themselves well—but also that he simply couldn’t afford to have one company cease to exist in a situation where the Australians were already likely to be outnumbered by a factor of five to one. He had to make the most of what he had, trust in the men, and ask them to put their best foot forward. To bolster B Company further he put Lieutenant Bevan French at their command, in place of Sam Templeton. Honner had met French only the day before, but already liked the cut of his jib, and that was that.

From the first, the decision to give B Company the hardest but most crucial assignment looked to be inspired. For, from the moment Honner explained to them that they were the ones upon whom the whole battalion was relying, it seemed like the men of B Company grew another foot taller.

As to the other areas of the perimeter, E Company was allocated the northern side to the left, which fronted onto both the village garden and the track which went towards Deniki, while C Company took over the northern side on the right, D Company took the southern side facing the exceptionally dense rainforest, and A Company had the eastern flank above the steep slope. The area to be defended by the whole battalion was no more than five hundred yards across in any direction, and against the possibility that the Japanese were able to break through in any sector, Honner organised for a reserve of two platoons to be on standby to immediately move to stem the breach.

On the frontlines the men had to be spread widely enough to cover the whole perimeter, but still close enough that the arcs of fire from their guns interlocked each other. It was all about setting up a defensive structure so that each man supported the one next to him, and that each section, platoon and company did the same. Again and again and again over the ensuing days, Honner made the 39th practise manoeuvres designed to plug any holes in the perimeter. With one group pretending to be the storming Japanese, each company had to work out precisely what its men would do if that happened; how they would fire to cut down the infiltrators and precisely whose responsibility it would be to hurl them back.

Honner further drilled into his men the necessity of understanding that whenever the Japs probed one position and were stopped, they always sent out flanking movements, and if you were prepared for that, you could be there waiting for them. And what if this section was in danger of being wiped out altogether? How would his mobile unit be contacted? Where would they go once they arrived? Was this unit familiar with the terrain? No. Well let’s get them here so they can work things out.

Little by little as they practised, Honner could feel the confidence growing and was satisfied. In his view confidence was everything, as with it men would fight and support each other, whereas without it, the battle was already lost.

As part of the same program, Honner ensured that, apart from the foxholes the 39th had dug and were manning, they also had fall-back foxholes to retreat to should the Japanese fire become too withering. And one other thing. He wanted all their foxholes to be dug
deep
. Just one look at the way they had been constructed to this point told him they were too shallow and he wouldn’t have it.

The difference between being able to hold a position and having to abandon it, the likely difference between life and death itself, may well be the simple extra effort to get the thing done right in the first place, and that is what they were going to do. They don’t call you blokes ‘Diggers’ for nothing, so keep digging. They kept digging using, in the regrettable absence of appropriate tools that had never been issued, helmets, bayonets, bully-beef tins and their bare hands. And no matter that in those wet climes a combination of the high water table and high rainfall meant that as often as not the bottom two feet of their foxholes were filled with water. In a choice between wet feet below, or a bullet above, wet feet won every time.
More
digging!

Happily, as he moved around among the men, Honner himself seemed to inspire even further confidence. As a student at the University of Western Australia he had played rugby for the First XV and captained the university’s athletics team, and he was if not strictly speaking a man’s man—in the slightly overbearing blokey sense of the word—he was still certainly a man’s officer, always projecting an air of great competence and resolution, mixed with compassion for how the men were faring. A word here, a question there, it was clear to them that the bloke actually
cared
that they were getting as much sleep as possible, that their food supplies had improved, and that they were looking after their many sores and wounds as best they could with whatever rudimentary medicine they could get their hands on. He wasn’t telling them to change the position of a particular foxhole out of pure military bloody-mindedness but because, he explained to them, the position he was suggesting would marginally increase their safety and strengthen their defence. They could see the bloke knew what he was talking about and took their cues accordingly.

Meanwhile, Honner had plenty of other things to worry about. Chief among them was preventing the Japanese from finding out just how poorly manned and equipped they were to defend Isurava. He felt certain that if the Japanese knew there were fewer than four hundred Australians to defend the whole plateau, they would either simply come in with all guns blazing, or even more devastatingly, just go around the 39th to cut off their supply lines, and choke them lifeless in nothing flat.

To prevent that, it was necessary to keep the Japanese at as great a distance as possible for as long as possible, and maintain a forward patrol positioned forty-five minutes march along the track. The patrol’s job was to provide ample warning of any major Japanese move against the forward position, and also to ensure that the brutes couldn’t easily move any of their scouts forward to observe just what kind of a skeletal skeleton crew was actually defending the position at Isurava. With that in mind, Captain Bidstrup’s D Company ambush that had been so effective a week before in nailing the Japanese, was now replaced with a constant changing of the guard to ensure maximum alertness.
¹⁵⁸
Each platoon manned the position for twenty-four hours before being replaced by a fresh platoon in the first hour of dawn. The relieved platoon then fell back two hundred yards until just before noon, when they were free to head back to Isurava. The next platoon, meanwhile, was on standby to reinforce the duty platoon at a moment’s notice, should they come under attack, and so on.

While Honner was delighted with the way this seemed to be working, he was worried about the defensive and offensive capacities of the 53rd Battalion, which had moved up from Moresby and which, at that point, was situated at Alola, the next village down the track towards Moresby and who were protecting the 39th’s rear. Since their arrival in New Guinea, the men of the 53rd Battalion had never really seemed much chop, and had in fact spent most of their time in the simple hard labour of unloading ships. One of the main reasons was that at their core they still had around a hundred men who felt, with some justifiable rage in the circumstances, that they had been shanghaied to this God-forsaken land in the first place, and still wanted no bloody part of it. They were intent on doing as little as possible until they could get home again. Such an approach made for very ordinary soldiers, and though there were a few who were exceptions, many of them were very ordinary indeed.

Still another reason for Honner’s concern, though, was that the 53rd lacked the experienced leadership of the 39th. Whereas the latter had eagerly absorbed all the veteran AIF officers that they could when the officers had become available earlier in the campaign, the 53rd had continued for the most part with their own militia officers. However well intentioned, these officers had no experience in leading soldiers under fire, and Honner continued to worry about just how well they would hold up when it came to battle. On his own trip north to Isurava he had passed many of the troops of the 53rd Battalion and been appalled at their clear lack of fighting capacity, plus their general lassitude and obviously low morale.