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Subject:
Distorting the truth of Kokoda
Volkodav
4/19/2008 2:56:52 AM
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THE AUSTRALIAN
Peter Ryan | April 19, 2008
AS another Anzac Day approaches, we will hear again and again the name of an obscure village in the mountains of Papua New Guinea: Kokoda.
Blind Digger William Johnson is led though the jungle. Picture: Damien Parer
And as the Anzac Cove and the Gallipoli of 1915 recede further behind the mists of time and legend, Kokoda may come more to be the emotional focus of Australia's military heart.
The story of Kokoda can well bear that heavy weight. But it is extraordinary that so few Australians seem to have even a broadly accurate perception of what actually happened on the Kokoda Track between July and November 1942, and of what those events mean.
Kokoda's smallness is the first reality one must grasp when relating it to the huge scale of the Pacific war.
This does not demean it or cut it down to size; it heightens the distinction. It is not at all silly to compare Kokoda with the classical heroism of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, who defended the pass at Thermopylae in 480BC; nor with the gallant 600 who, in 1854, made immortal the Charge of the Light Brigade.
The heat and burden of Kokoda was borne by the understrength 39 Battalion: inexperienced militiamen, mostly from Victoria, many of them still in their teens. They had about 600 fit troops to put in the field.
There was nothing spectacular about Kokoda, nothing grand: no surge of massed troops, no thunder of artillery. It was all stealthy, personal, war-to-the-knife in the gloomy, cold, green jungle of the mountains.
For their attempted assault overland on Port Moresby, the Japanese landed about 14,000 men on the undefended north coast of Papua. By July 21-22, about 3000 of them were already ashore and pressing hard inland along the route that later became famous as the Kokoda Track.
A few days later, at the village of Awala - well forward of Kokoda - the vanguard of this powerful force was challenged by a single platoon (about 40 men) of the 39 Battalion, assisted by a few native soldiers of the Papuan Infantry Battalion.
Against such odds, and with the Japanese continuing to pour reinforcements in through their beachhead, the Australians fell back in a series of fighting withdrawals. Twice the enemy drove Australian troops out of Kokoda, and twice their spirited counterattacks retrieved it; twice Australia had Kokoda's small airstrip secured for aircraft to land, and twice radioed Port Moresby for reinforcements. None came. Right up-front with his men, commanding officer William Owen was mortally wounded.
By early August the battalion had been reduced to 480 officers and men; they were all that stood between the advancing Japanese and the Australian base at Port Moresby. This number kept diminishing each day as men were killed or wounded. And for each battle casualty a further two or three needed hospital treatment for malaria, scrub typhus, skin diseases, internal parasites, malnutrition or exhaustion.
Wounded stretcher cases, despite the wonderful tenderness of the native bearers, suffered excruciating agonies over the rough, steep tracks as they were borne - sometimes for a whole week - out of action and to safety.
Overwhelmed by such immensely superior forces, but still contesting every inch, the Australians withdrew as far as Imita Ridge, perhaps three days short of Port Moresby, on the flat plain below. The Japanese advanced no further, for they had been fought to the extremity of their capacity of reinforcement and resupply along the track. And now battalions of tough Australian veterans recalled from the Middle East were arriving to take over the battle and push the enemy back.
The ragged remnant of the 39 Battalion could now come out of their foxholes at last, and the survivors could contemplate with joy the prospect of leave in Australia and reunion with loved ones. Eager as they must have been to get away, these remarkable young men performed one last act of chivalry. They saw that their relieving comrades, superb soldiers though they had proved themselves to be in the desert, still had a good deal to learn about war in the jungle. So the worn-out soldiers of Kokoda volunteered to stay on a little longer, to show the new men the ropes and save some of their lives.
When finally they were being marched to the airstrip and to the planes that would carry them home, there occurred an incident of which the mere recollection brings a lump to my throat: a couple of soldiers newly arrived from Australia watched them pass: gaunt, fever-wasted skeletons, many bandaged, some leaning on sticks. Shocked, one newcomer said to his mate: "My God! Who are that mob?"
He was overheard. The officer commanding sharply ordered his troops to march smartly to attention, and the defiant cry was shouted back: "This is not a mob! This is the 39 Battalion!"
"Pride," warns the proverb, "goes before a fall." But pride also is the force that lifts ordinary men to extraordinary heights. The 39 Battalion is the only unit in the Australian Army entitled to inscribe Kokoda among the battle honours on its regimental colours.
The Japanese, brave as always, fought a grim rearguard resistance against the fresh troops who drove them back over the track; there were many savage battles and heavy casualties. Now commanded by Australia's fighting general "Bloody" George Vasey, the troops retook Kokoda government station on November 2, the date now generally accepted as the end of the Kokoda campaign. But it was an end only in a limited sense; it was late January 1943 before Australian troops had crushed enemy-organised resistance in northern Papua.
The full reality of the Kokoda Track fighting hit the Australian civilian population like a kick in the stomach. With television some time away, images of war were not commonplace in everybody's living room. But countless families made a regular thing of a Friday or Saturday visit to the cinema.
One night, the usually relaxed audiences registered mostly suppressed gasps of horror or simply stunned silences. On the screen was Damien Parer's newsreel of the Kokoda Track. This brilliant photographer (and surpassingly good and decent man) showed life in Papua ("Yes - just up there").
In the darkened cinema could be viewed the knee-deep mud, the rain, the steep, near-unclimbable hills, the sunken eyes of sick and underfed boys, the walking wounded guided and supported by gentle Papuan villagers, the agonies of the stretcher cases being carried over the rough ground. There was worse, which Parer could not film or show: for example, the Japanese rounding up the Anglican missionaries to murder them with sword and bayonet. A more thoughtful expression appeared on faces of Australians after they had seen Parer's film.
The fighting men on Kokoda faced three enemies. Two of them we take for granted: the Japanese and the hazards of terrain and disease. The third enemy was no less deadly: the consequences of years of neglect by Australian governments (of whichever political side) of the threat everyone knew was looming, and which would break as soon as there was the distraction of a war in Europe.
Australian forces were thrown into the Pacific conflict utterly unprepared. They lacked any fundamental doctrine to guide them in a war in this region; there had been few staff or technical studies; they lacked equipment and supplies.
No thought had been given to the sort of medical services that would be vital for an army fighting in the tropics; the war was half over before malaria control was made effective. When the Japanese landed near Buna in 1942, some of their terrain maps were better than their enemy's, though Australia had been administering Papua since 1906.
The light machine gun at first on issue to the troops who faced the Japanese on Kokoda was the Lewis gun, considered obsolete since 1918. Some Australian men were already well up the track before they saw a modern Bren gun. They unpacked it from its factory grease and were still working out how to use it when they went into action.
Many of the men were clothed in the light khaki uniforms suitable for the desert, but in the green of the jungle clearly defining a target for any enemy marksman. Some received their first jungle greens in a novel way: ordered to halt along the track beside some coppers of green dye, they stripped, dipped their clothes in, dressed again and went off to war, still dripping.
The "friendly fire" of government neglect probably cost Australia far more lives than the acknowledged enemies, Nippon and disease.
Certain ill-informed Australians today seek to purloin the true story of Kokoda, some to harness its glory to an uncouth chauvinist nationalism, others to enlist it to support a more narrow party-political ideology. A rough-and-ready summary of their reasoning would include the following assertions: Kokoda was Australia's self-contained victory - nothing to do with allies; it was the first engagement won against the Japanese; Kokoda, won solely by Australian arms, saved Australia from a Japanese invasion.
Every one of those propositions is a palpable falsehood.
The Japanese archives clearly establish that they had no intention to invade Australia. Such an adventure was once tentatively proposed by the Japanese navy. It was given an instant cold bath by the imperial army, which pointed out that nothing like the required resources existed.
Months before Kokoda was fought (or even heard of), the US Navy had won the battles of the Coral Sea (May 1942) and Midway (June). The enemy fleet was so mauled that it proved incapable even of protecting the Pacific assets Japan already had. An attempted invasion of Australia was an absurdity.
Kokoda was not a first victory. In September, with Kokoda still dragging on, Australian forces wrapped up a conclusive and strategically significant victory at Milne Bay, on the easternmost tip of Papua. Though fighting far away in Burma, the British field marshal Bill Slim saw it all. He wrote: "It was Australian soldiers who first broke the spell of the invincibility of the Japanese army."
But he was not speaking of Kokoda.
The Japanese Kokoda campaign was directed by their higher command in Rabaul. The same headquarters was responsible also for Guadalcanal in the Solomons, where US Marines landed on August 7. This extensive battle, the result of which gravely threatened the enemy's grip on New Britain and the islands, distracted Japanese attention from Kokoda and used resources that otherwise might have been employed there. Who says we got no help from our allies?
Finally, being within the agreed boundaries of the Allied southwest Pacific area, Kokoda was part of the supreme command of US general Douglas MacArthur. Australia may not have liked him greatly, and there were times when he was not much help to this country. But he was supreme commander, and principal military adviser to Australian Labor prime minister John Curtin. We have to face it.
And (if we have any regard whatsoever for the plain truth) we should be proud that a small band of sorely pressed Australian soldiers, on an obscure and hardly crucial battleground, performed a feat of valour and steadfastness of which the glory still reflects on us all.
Let us make sure that the shine is never tarnished by the grubby paws of ideology.
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