Kokoda (56 page)

Kengora Tanaka
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Look there!

On the night of 6 September, the Australian troops dug in on Mission Ridge, gazing across to the opposite side of the valley, could see what at first glance looked like a long line of glow-worms in perfect formation… but then they realised.

It wasn’t fireflies, it was some two thousand Japanese soldiers, with burning bits of the insulated signal wire which they had cut up for illumination, massing by night for an attack that would surely not be long in coming. It was absurd that something so dangerous should look so beautiful, but there it was. It was enough to make each of the Australians think of Christmas, but then again Christmas had never seemed further away.

Given the absence of even one gun with the capacity to send lead to the far side of the valley, there was nothing for it but to dig in and prepare for the attack. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

Still, as they watched, mesmerised, in the highlands of New Guinea, it seemed like all the fireflies had gathered into one enormous mass and were now shining as bright as the full moon in the middle of the distant hill. Were the Australians dreaming? No, they were not. What they witnessed was the Japanese forming up an enormous funeral pyre and burning their dead. Such was the way of life, and death, in those mountains so far from home for both sides.

It was something, anyway. At 8.00 a.m. the following day, after Potts’s urgent messages to Port Moresby had for once been acted upon, the Australian forces on Mission Ridge had the great pleasure of hearing the roar of eight Boston bombers and four Kittyhawks overhead and then seeing them diving upon the Japanese positions at Efogi, strafing and bombing. They could see the Bostons release their bombs, then lurch suddenly upwards with a change in engine pitch as the planes were released of their burden.

The result of the bombs was even better. With each plume of dust and smoke across the valley, another cheer went up from the Australians. While it helped morale, in the end, though, it changed little.

Proof that the Japanese had been neither destroyed, nor dissuaded from their task came in the late afternoon when the Australians first heard the boom of a Japanese mountain gun from across the valley, and then missiles began to lob among them, almost immediately killing two men from A Company and wounding five others. Clearly, it was
they
who were now being softened up for the attack that would surely come on the morrow, if not before.

Just before sunset, at a pause in the artillery fire, there was a mail call, and the men eagerly scrambled for news from home by the very last rays of light. (Jenny had her first teeth. Jimmy had learnt to ride his bike. Mum was feeling poorly, but had picked up after receiving your last letter, even though she still can’t understand why whole paragraphs had been cut out by the censor’s scissors! We are all missing you, darling. Auntie Deb sends her love and Uncle Ronnie his best regards. He says to say he’s sure you’re doing Australia proud and that if your dad was alive he would have been telling everyone you were a chip off the old block, and that he reckons you are too. Please keep your head down and come home safe to us. All my love… )

All her love…

Beneath a tree on a rare break, the new Commanding Officer of the 2/14th Battalion, Captain Phil Rhoden, read again and again the cable which had just arrived from his girlfriend back in Melbourne, Pat Hamilton. Though for some reason it had arrived in an envelope on which some official or other in Moresby had marked ‘Not Urgent’, it was the three simple words on the telegram that Phil thrilled to… ‘Yes I will,’ she had cabled in response to his request for her hand in marriage.
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That wharfie back at the docks in Townsville who he’d been worrying about all this time—the one he’d given the letter to, just before going up the gangplank—had clearly done the right thing.

At first light on 8 September, the Japanese launched a simultaneous, concerted attack on the Australians’ positions atop Mission Ridge and Brigade Hill behind. After the bitter battle at Isurava and then Alola, the Japanese General Horii had advanced his tactical approach to fighting such jungle battles and wanted to take out both the forward defensive and rear fall-back positions at the same time. Despite the terrible attrition rate the Japanese had suffered thus far, the attacking force still outnumbered the defenders by more than six to one, so it was always going to be tough for the Australians to withstand the onslaught. But no one had expected it to be this tough.

Within three hours of the first shots being fired at the 2/27th Battalion in the forward positions, the Japanese—in yet one more demonstration of their extraordinary ability to move through jungle previously thought impenetrable—had successfully launched flanking movements which cut the track between the frontline positions and Pottsy’s Brigade Headquarters in the rear.

This isolated Potts and his men, and cut them off from the bulk of their force, not that it seemed to worry Potts personally. Tom Grahamslaw was staggered at the way Brigadier Potts continued to walk around with his head held high, refusing to duck for cover like all the rest merely because Japanese bullets were whistling all around. It hadn’t even fazed him that the native hut he had originally been occupying had been one of the first targets hit by the Japs, killing one of the men inside.

Still, there was no doubt that the brigadier realised the situation
was
desperate, and was working furiously to ensure that his forces provided maximum resistance. An important part of this resistance, he felt, was to see the track behind the main force cleared. It represented both the supply line and key route for the evacuation of the wounded, whose numbers were already mounting, and it was uppermost in all of their thinking that whatever else,
whatever else
, they had to keep themselves on that track between the Japs and Moresby. Which left them with only one possible solution. The Japs entrenched on the track would have to be removed, blasted out of there by Australian soldiers.

When the news came through, Stan Bisset was in an urgent conference with the new Commander of the 2/14th, Phil Rhoden, and the Commander of the 2/16th, Colonel Albert Caro. The message from Brigadier Potts was that the track was cut between them and they must send a force through to clear it from their end, while he would send a force from his. As part of the same message he ordered that if Brigade Headquarters was wiped out and he, Potts, were killed, then Colonel Caro was to take over and ensure that the men fell back to Menari using the previously reconnoitred alternate route.

Both Rhoden and Caro moved swiftly. Each rustled up a group of men from their own battalions to follow orders. Phil Rhoden selected Captain Claude Nye and his 2/14th B Company to push back towards Potts and Brigade HQ, to clear the track. Nye was an experienced operator and—as Stan would think of it ever after— surely knew that the order was something very close to a death warrant. But he merely said ‘Yes, Sir… ’ and proceeded to gather his men to do what had to be done.

From Brigade Headquarters, Potts personally gave the orders to Captain Breton ‘Lefty’ Langridge to do the same thing, to take his own men and push through in the opposite direction. Lefty simply removed his dog tags and handed them to his closest friend, on what was clearly the very good chance that he wouldn’t make it…

The feeling of each captain was tragically prophetic. Of Nye’s group of twenty-five soldiers, no fewer than seventeen, including Nye himself and the great Charlie McCallum were killed, though eight did get through. Gone too, were Lefty Langridge and twenty of his own men.

Just a small way down the hill from this tragic scene, the 2/16th’s Captain ‘Blue’ Steward, was working furiously with his medical orderlies to preserve the life in those who retained a heartbeat, but were on the edge. And here was a soldier he knew a little, a fellow by the name of Kevin Tonkin who had been a professional golfer before the war. A piece of shrapnel had slit his throat as surely and as cruelly as a bayonet wielded by a Jap, and though the fellow couldn’t speak—as his breaths came in and out of the gaping wound—his
eyes
, well, his eyes said everything. They were saying to him now with great urgency and desperation, ‘Will I live, Doc?’

‘Looking as dispassionately as possible at that man’s throat,’ Steward later wrote in his memoirs, ‘I hoped he couldn’t sense the lump in mine. Emotion clouds calm clinical judgement, but the hardest thing is to not flinch from the gaze of the man you know is going to die.’
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At another point in this same action, a fellow who was with the 2/16th—a married man with children—stood up to make a charge and was immediately shot twice in the chest. As he fell, his last words were ‘I don’t want to die’.
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The death and destruction was not confined to the Australians. Down the hill from this carnage, one platoon of Japanese soldiers had been all but wiped out when they attacked. Corporal Kohkichi Nishimura’s platoon had begun the day with forty-two soldiers, but now, shortly after noon—six solid hours of attacking and rebuttal— there were just eight survivors. Realising the likelihood that they would not get to sundown alive, these eight soldiers made each other a solemn promise: whichever of them survived would return after the war was over and retrieve the bones of all of their original platoon who had died, and return those bones to their homeland.
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Smoky Howson thought he was going to die. By now—moving back towards Moresby with the 39th—it was almost more than he could do to stay standing, he was so exhausted he could only just manage to put one foot in front of the other. And he was thirsty too, as dry as a dead dingo’s donga, as his water had run out and it hadn’t rained for
hours
. At least he was a little lighter than before, having left his gun and ammo with the fresh blokes of the 2/27th on Mission Ridge, keeping only his precious grenades with him—otherwise he would have felt naked. He was just coming down one particularly steep stretch when he saw through the fog of his exhaustion a bloody big red flag. The Rising Sun! The bloody Japs were ahead! It was a fine line, the difference between life and death. Tearing a grenade free, he was just about to hoik it at the bastards when he realised…
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The flag wasn’t that of the Japs at all, but that of the Salvation Army blokes, the forward line of God’s Army, who had moved up the track on their own mission to provide sustenance and care where they could.

Now Smoky didn’t know if he was Protestant, Catholic or Callithumpian, but that wasn’t what this was about. After he’d clipped his grenade back into his belt, the smiling Salvo officers gave Smoky and his mates tobacco, hot tea and a bit of cake. And as it turned out, it was the kindness of them giving him cake that put Smoky over the edge. He burst into tears. This had been a long campaign, and he had an awful lot bottled up inside him. Marginally restored, he kept moving back down the track, vowing that for the rest of his life—however long or short that might be—the Salvos would never have a problem getting a quid out of him.

Back at Mission Ridge, the fight went on. Tragically, despite the many deaths of the likes of Nye, Langridge and their men, and despite the fact that the track was temporarily clear of Japanese because of it, the situation was not retrieved. The Japanese were simply attacking in numbers too great to overcome and, as the blessed dusk began to at last fall on 8 September, Potts gave the orders for his own men to fall back to Menari. The forward forces would get out by the recently discovered alternative route to Menari. Even then, it could have been total disaster bar one thing…

In any withdrawals, the key was always to leave behind a strong rearguard who could keep up a withering volley of fire against any pursuers and give the main body of their own troops time to get away. This rearguard position was, of course, one of extreme danger, but it was a measure of the enduring esprit de corps of the Australians that on this occasion there was no shortage of volunteers to do the job.

(And the very act of calling for volunteers marked an important philosophical difference between the Australians and their opponents. The mighty Imperial Japanese Army did
not
call for volunteers. It gave
orders
, and those orders were obeyed, no matter what.)

The most important job of this rearguard was to buy time to evacuate the wounded who simply could not be saved if the Japanese were allowed to quickly come along the track unimpeded.

And sometimes it is just like that in war: ordinary men, do extraordinary things. So it was with just six men from the 2/27th’s B Company, commanded by Captain Bert Lee. Almost as a collective version of what Bruce Kingsbury had accomplished a week earlier, they broke from their precious cover and rose as one charging down the hill at the Japanese troops who had been pressing the remnants of the Australians so hard. Firing their Bren guns, throwing grenades, bayonets flashing in the firestorm, the result was that many of the Japanese simply turned and fled, breaking contact. Thanks to this extraordinary action by their comrades, the rest of the 2/27th— carrying their wounded with great difficulty—had the crucial time they needed to withdraw…

With this last thrust of the Australians, Corporal Kohkichi Nishimura’s platoon was now down to just one—himself. And it was far from a sure thing that he was going to make sundown. Though the magazine of his own gun was now empty, all around him lay his dead comrades with their own guns by their side. He picked up one of the guns and prepared for the next onslaught.

He did not have to wait for long. For just before dark, an Australian soldier who had been creeping up on his position on the far flank, put the barrel of a Bren gun on to his helmet and gently began to squeeze the trigger.
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