One of the least known of all the campaigns of the Second World War is that of the Kokoda Trail over the Owen Stanley Mountains in Papua New Guinea. But among land battles it ranks with Stalingrad and the Burma Campaigns for sheer toughness, and with Stalingrad, Alamein and the Normandy landings in importance.
A no-holds-barred fight between the Austrafians and Japanese, the Kokoda Trail campaign - sometimes called the Battle of the Ranges - lasted seven months and put an end to the myth of Japanese infantry invincibility. It also saved Australia from invasion - with the naval battle of the Coral Sea - and gave Australian military history a name to place alongside Gallipoli and Tobruk.
After their attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and their steam-roller successes in the Pacific and SE Asia, the Japanese turned their eyes to Australia. No matter how successful a landing on the Australian mainland might be, they first had to capture the islands to Australia’s north. Lightly defended. New Britain and New Ireland quickly fell. Next on the list was New Guinea, whose northern part was Australian mandated territory, while the southern part, Papua, was Australian soil.
The capital. Port Moresby, was the Japanese target. On the southern coast of the island, it was the most vital supply link with Australia. A second force would take Milne Bay at the eastern end of
New Guinea and a third would menace the Bulolo Valley and another key settlement, Wau, in the north.
The first people to know of the Japanese arrival off the north coast, 63 air-miles from Moresby, were a lieutenant and a sergeant at Buna Government Station, who, on 21 July 1942, watched an enemy cruiser shell shore targets. The sergeant ran to the radio hut and on emergency frequency sent off his report:
A JAPANESE WARSHIP IS SHELLING OFF BUNA,
APPARENTLY TO COVER A LANDING AT GONA OR
SANANANDA. ACKNOWLEDGE, MORESBY. OVER. . .
Over and over again, the message was repeated, but Moresby did not acknowledge.
Soon it was too late to matter. The Japanese had landed their vanguard of 2,000 troops to begin a thrust across the forbidding mountains. There was little that generals in Port Moresby or their leaders in Australia could do.
The elite divisions of the volunteer Australian Imperial Force were not available at the time. The 6th and 7th were either on their way back from fighting German, Italian and Vichy French troops in the Middle East or regrouping in Australia, the 8th had been lost in the lightning Japanese conquest of Malaya and the 9th was Eighth Army’s trump card in the first Batde of Alamein. Until the 6th and 7th Divisions could be brought in, the defense of Papua depended on militia battalions. The militiamen had not volunteered for service outside Australia, most were city conscripts and many considered they had been ‘shanghaied’ to Port Moresby without being told where they were going.
The men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) - volunteers to a man - despised the militiamen as ‘chpkos’, chocolate soldiers. With some outstanding exceptions, morale was low in the militia units. In Moresby many were unloading stores from ships, digging slit trenches for air-raid defense and guarding airfields. Virtually untrained in jungle warfare, the most arduous of fighting, they rotted in tropical heat.
Meanwhile a formation known as ‘Maroubra Force’ (after a famous Sydney beach) commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel W. T. Owen was trying to stem the Japanese advance. The striking unit of this ‘force’ consisted of one grossly understrength battalion - the 39th - formed
Of a few hundred militiamen and stiffened by AIF reinforcements. Their average age was 18. If the Japanese could defeat them and take Kokoda airfield - the only way the defenders could receive adequate reinforcements and supplies - they might well be in Port Moresby before the AIF veterans could arrive.
The batde developing was to be fought in a terrible climate in jungles, swamps and mountains. The Owen Stanley range, which reaches a height of 13,000 ft, is a maze of ridges, spurs, valleys and rivers. Each big river is laced like a shoe with numerous small ones. The northern coast has flat and perpetually swampy ground, blanketed with dense and smelly rain forest which the sun never penetrates. The mountain jungles drip water continuously. Such tracks as exist are steep, muddy and treacherous. In places the jungle is thick with vines and creepers armed with spikes the size of fingers. Paths had to be hacked with machetes.
Vast areas are infested with malarial mosquitoes, leeches and other insects which burrow into the flesh and cause painful, itchy swellings. Here and there the jungle is broken by clearings of kunai - elephant grass. But because these were ideal for ambush, troops learned to avoid them.
Much fighting took place on a one-man front - the width of the track. Many Australians were killed or wounded by Japanese snipers, tied into position high up in the trees. They would allow perhaps a hundred troops to pass while they waited to pick off an officer or NCO. As a precaution the Australians abandoned badges of status and nobody was addressed by rank. Even senior officers were known by a makeshift codename. A CO might be ‘Dick’ or ‘Curly’ to his troops. The Japanese sniper who waited so patiently for a target was nearly always killed - as he knew he would be - by the troops he had allowed to pass.
The Japanese who landed at Gona and Buna trapped many Europeans at the plantations, missions and hospitals. Only a few escaped and crossed the mountains to safety. Most of those captured were murdered. In front of terrified natives, an Anglican mission party - two ministers, two women, two half-caste mission workers, a six-year-old boy and an army officer - were beheaded one by one with a sword - the boy last of all.
After several aggressive rearguard actions Col. Owen’s battered battalion was forced back. When the forward Japanese troops met opposition they deployed and engaged while support moved in with
Machine-guns and mortars. With probing attacks the Japanese found out the width and depth of the defenses by drawing Australian fire. Stronger support units would then move around the Australian flanks to force a withdrawal or to wipe out the enemy by a rear attack. The Japanese often shouted, fired furiously, blew whistles and pulled noisily at the jungle in attempts to frighten the Australians into withdrawal. They sometimes shouted orders or requests in English to lure them into ambush, but without mastery of the Australian accent or slang this rarely worked.
The administration post of Kokoda - 1,200 ft above sea level and 45 miles from Port Moresby ~ possessed the only airfield between Port Moresby and the northern coast. To defend this vital place Col. Owen had about 80 men in all - 60 young soldiers and a handful of Papuans from the Papuan Infantry Battalion under Major Watson. This small exhausted force cheered mightily when they saw aircraft approaching with reinforcements. Then the planes sheered off, climbed steeply and vanished. Word had been flashed to them from Army HQ in Melbourne, 2,000 miles away on the mainland, that Kokoda had fallen. Had those planes landed the epic of the Kokoda Trail might never have happened.
That night 500 Japanese attacked Kokoda. In this first pitched battle on Papuan soil, attackers and defenders became mingled in the confused fighting. Col. Owen was mortally wounded. Maj. Watson, assuming conunand, extricated the survivors and withdrew to the native village of Deniki.
For several days the 39th, under Major Alan Cameron, fought a savage rearguard action. With malaria and dysentery adding to their casualties, the battalion was in poor shape by the time it reached Isurava. Here on 16 August, what was left of Maroubra Force was taken over by an AIF veteran officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, who had been ordered hurriedly to the crumbling front.
Honner, with service in Libya, Greece and Crete, looked at his thin, gaunt and tattered men. TTiey had been unable to change their clothing for weeks. Their boots were rotting on their feet. Despite great care, their Bren light machine-guns and Lee-Enfield rifles were rusting. When it got through, their food was bully beef and biscuits. They lived in continual rain without shelters or groundsheets. At night they shivered, blankedess, in the cold. Supplies were dropped from aircraft but much was lost in the jungle. Yet these men could still fight and Honner decided on a stand at Isurava. He had a few
Hundred men and his largest weapons were 3-in mortars firing a 10 lb shell. Against this puny force were three battalions of the Japanese 144th Regiment, with another full regiment, the 41st, coming up fast. Supporting them were a mountain artillery battalion and two engineer units - about 4,000 men in all.
Despite these odds, the Australians fought the Japanese hand-to-hand in a series of ambushes and raids for two weeks. One group of 39th sick and wounded were on their way down the trail to Moresby. Upon hearing that their battalion was fighting for its life they disobeyed orders, turned round and hurried back into action.
Another battalion placed under Honner’s command, the 53rd, was not so valiant. Slow to move forward and reluctant to fight, it was removed from an offensive role after its CO was killed. Its men were made carriers and porters on the Kokoda Trail.
On 25 and 26 August, Major General Horii, the Japanese commander, launched a full-scale offensive. On the 28th the Japanese, shouting ‘Banzai!* made frontal attacks on Australian positions. Violent hand-to-hand fighting followed. Horii did not know it then but he was too late to win the campaign.
The AIF had arrived at Isurava.
The 150 survivors of the 39th had left Isurava the day before the battle, fighting their way out down the trail. They were young, tired veterans who had held on for as long as they had been asked. The Japanese now faced men of the first AIF battalion to reach the battle - the 2/14th, soon joined by part of the 2/16th, both part of the 21st Brigade. On 29 August, Gen. Horii concentrated five battalions in a narrow valley for a decisive blow against the still heavily outnumbered Australians. Along the entire 350-yard Australian front he unleashed a storm of artillery shells, mortar bombs and continuous machine-gun fire; then wave after wave of infantry went in. The Australian veterans fought off every attack. One platoon repulsed 11 attacks of 100 or more men. It lost its commander and every NCO. A private soldier took command, with other privates acting as NCOs.
During the fighting on this day Sergeant R. N. Thompson led a fighting patrol of seven men to push the enemy back along the track. One of his men was 24-year-old Private Bruce S. Kingsbury, armed with a Bren and grenades. Seeing that the Japanese were getting ready for a fresh assault, Kingsbury charged them. Japanese machine-gunners opened fire on him from farther
Back but Kingsbury ran on, sweeping the enemy positions. The patrol finished what Kingsbury had begun and regained 100 yards of track - considerable in jungle warfare. While Thompson was preparing a holding. position a Japanese sniper killed Kingsbury. He was awarded a posthumous VC. At another point Acting Corporal Charles McCallum - wounded three times - killed 40 Japanese in a brief, furious action while extricating the survivors of a forward platoon from a dangerous position. He won the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
The Australians held Isurava for four days before Japanese pressure became too great. The Australian commander. Brigadier A. W. Potts, could not challenge Horii’s control of the upper spurs and ridges without weakening the defense of the main track, the Australians’ lifeline route to Moresby. The 2/14 and 2/16th Battalions made a slow, dehberate withdrawal. A bloody bayonet charge checked the Japanese but their outflanking movements isolated parties of Australians. Those captured were killed on the spot.
Others finally reached safety after such privations that only a tropical, mountainous jungle can inflict. One badly wounded soldier crawled for three weeks on his hands and knees. Most wounded men were luckier, being carried to medical help by native porters - lauded by the Australian public as ‘the Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels’.
At lora Creek an ever-thinning line of Australians killed 170 Japanese and kept their line intact before withdrawing to Imita Ridge, the last defensible point of the Owen Stanleys. Here they held while the Japanese dug in on the facing ridge - lorabaiwa. Horii had a chance to smash through but again he was too late. The three battalions of a fresh AIF Brigade, the 25th under Brigadier K. W. Father, relieved the exhausted 21st Brigade.
While the Japanese were striking for Port Moresby over the mountains a linked action was developing at Milne Bay, 200 miles to the east. The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) had established Kittyhawk fighter-squadrons there in July 1942 and the 7th Infantry Brigade (militia) and 18th Infantry Brigade, AIF - both under Major-General C. A. Clowes - were moved in to defend them. A few hundred Americans had also arrived. On 24 August a Japanese invasion got under way and troops and tanks landed from barges the following day.
On 4 September the first VC of the New Guinea campaigns was earned at Milne Bay by Corporal John Alexander French. When
Japanese machine-guns held up the advance, Corporal French ordered his section to take cover and with grenades rushed the first of a group of three machine-guns. He silenced the first, returned for more grenades and put paid to a second. Firing a Thompson sub-machine-gun he rushed the third gun and killed its crew. He died from wounds on the edge of the gunpit.
By 7 September, after much patrol fighting, Japanese naval attacks and RAAF strikes on enemy troop barges, the Japanese had lost the batde and at least 1,000 dead - mostly elite marine assault troops. Fighting was invariably savage. One Australian was found dead with 30 Japanese corpses around him. The heads of two had been smashed in with the butt of the Australian’s sub-machine-gun.
Crackers with a slow-burning wick led a few Australians to their deaths. A Japanese would creep through the long grass, place a lighted cracker and then steal away and position himself. When the cracker exploded, an Australian would turn towards the sound and perhaps advance towards it. The Japanese sniper would see the sudden movement and have time to aim and fire. Here, as elsewhere in New Guinea, men often died without ever seeing the enemy in the impenetrable jungle darkness.
Milne Bay was the first clear-cut land victory over the Japanese anywhere in the war. Strategically it confined the main Japanese operations in Papua to the Buna-Kokoda area and spelt failure for the Japanese plans to capture Port Moresby.
This was not clear at the time and in the Owen Stanleys the Australian 25th Brigade was preparing for the counter-attack which would push the enemy out of the mountains. These men had already beaten the Foreign Legion in Vichy French Syria.
Using the Australian-made Owen gun, a 9 mm light sub-machine-gun for close quarter fighting, the Australian infantry soon dominated the valley between the Imita and lorabaiwa ridges. For the first time the Australians had artillery - two 25-pounders painfully dragged up the tracks. Australian aircraft, for the first time able to help their infantry, destroyed the bridge over the wide, treacherous Kumusi River - cutting Horii’s supply lines. On 26 September Horii, obeying an order from his HQ at Rabaul, began a withdrawal. Men too sick or weak to keep pace were simply left to die.
The Australian pursuit was governed by the ability of the RAAF to drop supplies. Ground troops rarely recovered more than 30 per cent of a drop. The track was so bad that, even without enemy opposition,
A battalion would sometimes cover only a mile a day. Every day at noon, rain fell in solid sheets over the mountains, turning the tracks into narrow streams of black and yellow mud. Hidden in this mud were countless tree roots to catch the boots of tired soldiers. Steps cut into the track deteriorated into mudpools.
On one spur of Imita Ridge engineers cut and blocked with logs
2,000 steps ~ ironically nick-named the Golden Stairway. This was not the record number; Maguli Ridge had 3,400 steps.
The track was disheartening. For every 1,000 ft of altitude the troops climbed they dropped 600 ft to the start of the next ascent. Between Uberi and the crest of the Owen Stanley range the track climbed more than 20,000 ft in this switchback fashion. It crossed many rivers by log or vine bridges. At times it climbed or skirted precipices.
The temperature lurched from humid, oppressive heat to bitter cold. When not rain-drenched the soldiers were sweat-soaked. In these conditions a man was too old for jungle warfare at 30. The Japanese were so hungry that they frequently ate flesh cut from Australian or their own dead. But they often turned and fought back - on one occasion holding the Australians for eight days. Beheading or bayoneting captives, the Japanese remained a disciplined and formidable foe. Cleverly concealing their weapon pits which they made proof against mortar fire, they had to be prised out of every position.
Their food supply improved as they fell back to their bases. They could also use artillery, which the Australians were denied. The guns could not be taken across the ranges. But the Australian advance was irresistible and, on 3 November, they re-entered Kokoda.
To commemorate the recapture the Australian conunander, Major-General G. A. Vasey, raised the Australian flag and presented medals to five natives for loyal and meritorious service. A great crowd of carriers assembled for the ceremony - the first of its kind in the campaign. ‘Without your help’, Vasey told the natives through an interpreter, ‘we would not have been able to cross the Owen Stanleys.’ All the carriers received gifts of knives and rami - the native kilt-skirl.
Vasey might have added that without Dr G. H. Vernon and Captain Herbert Kienzie the natives would not have been an effective force. Vernon had fought in the First World War as Regimental Medical Officer to the 11th Light Horse Regiment and
Had returned to Australia with the Military Cross. Stone deaf - from a bursting shell at Gallipoli in 1915 - he was working in Papua as a government medical officer when the war with Japan broke out. The Australian Government evacuated the women, children and older men. Although Vernon was 60, he refused to leave, even when threatened with arrest. Instead, he took upon himself the medical care and much of the organization of the native carriers between Owen’s Comer - at the end of the motor road from Port Moresby - and on to Kokoda. His first dramatic act was to post himself to the 39th Battalion when he heard that the unit was temporarily without its medical officer. In this way he served through the first battle of Kokoda, patching up many wounded and treating the dying Col. Owen. He was one of the last four men out of Kokoda.
Resuming his work with the natives, Vernon - himself a strong mountain walker - kept the carrier line working. Everything that went up to the troops was carried on the backs of these natives. Unavoidably loaded and worked to the limit they came to love Dr Vernon. He saw to it that they had proper rest periods and treatment. Having taken supplies up, the natives became stretcher bearers and brought out many badly wounded men. On those tortuous tracks and crossing mshing rock-strewn rivers, eight men were needed for each human load. Carrying a stretcher in these conditions was an appalling task. Sometimes it had to be held at arm’s length above the head. Yet the bearers always managed to be gentle and careful.
Herbert Kienzle - a rubber planter when war came - was also responsible for organizing and maintaining much of the native line of communication across the Owen Stanleys.
Strangely, Vernon got no official recognition for his extraordinary labors, which contributed in no small measure to his death in 1946, aged 64. Kienzle received an MBE, the lowest class of the Order of the British Empire.
From Kokoda, the Australian infantry pushed on steadily. At Gorari on 11 November two battalions of the 25th Brigade - 2/25th and 2/31 st - made fierce bayonet charges, killing 580 Japanese in fighting that lasted five days.
This action - by jungle warfare standards a major battle with serious casualties - demonstrated Gen. Vasey’s tactical skill. By clever maneuvering he had caught the rarely surprised Japanese off guard. The victory precipitated the collapse of organized resistance
Outside the Buna-Gona beach-head. The able, determined Gen. Horii, in an effort to evade capture, tried to cross the white-water Kumusi River on a raft and was drowned when it overturned.
The last bitter phase of the fighting was fought at Buna, Sanananda and Gona in a vast morass of swamp, mud and battle-tom jungle. Many Australians, exhausted by combat, fever, lack of sleep and poor food went out on patrols with high temperatures. In November 1942 alone the evacuations numbered 1,500, but by now American troops were reinforcing the Australians. Their numbers and weight of firepower were decisive. In other parts of northern New Guinea fighting would go on until 1944 but the Battle of the Ranges was over.
The 39th Battalion, which had begun the Battle of the Kokoda Trail, was in at the end. Colonel Honner led it back over the mountains to victory in action at Gona.
On 23 January 1943, the Kokoda Trail campaign completed, the battalion held a roll call. Its strength amounted to seven officers and 25 men - out of a normal 800.
World History
