Ah, the sheer luxury of it. The luxury, for the 39th Battalion, after seven straight weeks of bloody battles and endless trekking, to have been withdrawn from the frontline, to be able to stagger back down the track
away
from the sound of oncoming Japanese guns. It was, of course, a luxury mixed with an enormous sense of sadness; for they were heading south minus 125 of the number who had originally trekked forward all those weeks ago.
(Could it really be
weeks?
The weird thing about this war, many reflected, was that time warped. Sometimes ten seconds could pass like a tortuous ten minutes, as in when you knew a mortar that maybe had your name on it was whistling down towards your vicinity. And yet when an entire day was filled with repelling neverending Japanese attacks, the whole thing passed in a blur that felt like it lasted… ten minutes! Under those circumstances, the concept of weeks was a calendar term only, with little meaning for them.)
Nevertheless, in that short amount of time, just under a quarter of the 39th’s battalion strength was lost. Now, the 39th regrouped the best they could in the tiny village of Menari, perched on the southern slopes of the Owen Stanley Range.
It was there that Ralph Honner received a message from Brigadier Potts, with his warmest congratulations on their performance, and the request that the message be passed on to the battalion. Colonel Honner went one better. Instead of merely passing the message to his adjutants to tell the men, he decided to call a full parade.
So they formed, a mob of ragged bloody heroes with tattered clothes, odd boots, hollow eyes, crutches, leaning on each other to remain standing, and instead of rifles—which they’d passed on to the 2/27th—holding the sticks they’d used to support their trek back.
But when Colonel Honner came before them they stood to attention like the guards at Buckingham Palace, stock-still and proud, as he saluted them with great feeling. Honner would later record of his feelings at this proud, poignant moment: ‘As I glanced along the lines of pallid and emaciated men with sunken eyes and shrunken frames that testified to the hardships they had long endured, I saw no hangdog look—only the proud bearing of tired veterans who had looked death and disaster in the face and had not failed.’
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For now, though, Honner simply communicated to them his heartfelt message, and Joe Dawson, standing up near the front with his mates Ray and Wally, listened carefully. Not Joe, Ray, nor Wally, not even Ralph Honner, or practically any of them, noticed the scarecrow figure just twenty yards away who had set up his camera and was now filming, laying down the scene for posterity. Damien Parer had arrived in Menari just a short time before, with the exquisite timing of the born chronicler-for-the-ages he was, and had summoned the last of his strength to stealthily capture these precious moments.
‘Men,’ Colonel Honner said, standing with the odd combination of perfect military bearing and a warm smile on his face, ‘the first thing I want to say to you is “congratulations”. Over the last two months you have performed magnificently under very difficult circumstances and have every right to be very proud of what you have achieved. You have done Australia proud, and you have done yourselves proud. Brigadier Potts has specifically asked me to commend you on your performance, and to tell you that news of your magnificent deeds has travelled far.
All of the Australian Army is proud of you.
’
At these last words, there was something of a stirring among the men of the 39th. For so long maligned as ‘Chocos’ and sometimes ‘rainbows’—because they were said to always come out after the storm had passed—to have affirmation that the AIF was proud of them, and claiming them as their brothers in arms, was grand news indeed.
Colonel Honner continued: ‘For the rest of your days you will be able to recall these days with the warmth of knowledge that when the heat was on you did not buckle, did not take a backward step. None of us will forget our fallen comrades, but your own efforts have ensured that they will not have died in vain… ’
At this, a dark shadow of melancholy passed across the 39th, while Parer continued to film, as each soldier remembered individual comrades and the circumstances of their deaths. Honner continued, now a little more forcefully.
‘Some things though it may be better to forget. I have heard some talk among you that some of you might feel that you might have been let down by other battalions and companies. While I understand that kind of talk under these difficult circumstances, I ask that you let it go. I remind you that those men are no better or worse than you, but that their circumstances were different. Had they been side by side with you they might have performed magnificently. Had you been side by side with them you might have performed less well. I repeat: the fact that their leaders may have failed them, and yours didn’t, doesn’t mean they were any better or worse than you are…
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‘The principal thing though is that
you
have done very, very well indeed.’
In the history of the 39th it was a shining moment of redemption that would stay marked in their memories forever more. And Damien Parer captured it all.
By this time at Milne Bay, it was clear that the Japanese thrust had been blunted and turned. For the previous ten days, the dug-in Diggers of the 18th Brigade—handsomely supported by Kittyhawks flown by the pilots of 75 and 76 Squadrons RAAF and a small force of American Ack-Ack gunners—had first stopped the invaders and then pushed them back close to where they had landed, inflicting heavy casualties on the way. Intelligence reports had it that Japanese ships pushing into Milne Bay were not bringing in fresh reinforcements, but were
evacuating
the ones they had.
Still, though, the Japanese had some sting left in them. For the night after Ralph Honner had delivered his jungle oration to the 39th Battalion, a powerful Japanese armada entered Milne Bay and began shelling Australian positions, doing a great deal of damage. One Japanese warship had powerful searchlights and, scanning the newly constructed docks, picked up the vision splendid of the SS
Anshun
, a 4000 ton Australian supply ship, in the process of unloading its stores and munitions. Though the gunners of the Australian ship did what they could, and fired furiously back at the Japanese warship with its vastly superior firepower, in twenty minutes it was all over, with the
Anshun
on its side and half-submerged.
Next the Japanese warship turned its attention to an even easier prize, the HMAHS
Manunda
, a fully lit hospital ship caring for the wounded and dying Australian soldiers. Now the Japanese searchlights swivelled upon the ship for even better illumination, showing up its distinctive green and white hull. The only defence the
Manunda
possessed was a large red cross on its funnel, indicating its status as a non-combatant medical facility. Like a massive lion nosing up to a gazelle paralysed with fear, the Japanese warship hove to, about a thousand yards to the starboard side of the Australian vessel, which was now an easy target for a torpedo or sustained artillery fire.
On the
Manunda
, the entire crew, daring not to breathe, looked straight into the valley of the shadow of death as they stared at the hulking silhouette of the massive Japanese destroyer across the all too narrow patch of water that separated them. Below deck, many critically injured Australian soldiers knew something was up, but they did not know what. On the bridge, Captain James Garden was in full command, but knew that any attempt at flight was pointless. They just had to sit there, and wait.
Hail Mary, Mother of God.
And then the Japanese ship moved off into the darkness, growling softly, until it disappeared out of Milne Bay and all was silent once more.
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The invasion of Milne Bay proved to be a complete rout for the Japanese. Of the 2800 soldiers landed, only 1318 were evacuated, while at least 750 were killed during the battle, with most of the remaining enemy troops killed by Australian patrols as they tried to make their way overland to the Japanese base at Buna. On the Australian side of 9000 defenders, the losses were a quarter of that, with 161 killed and 212 wounded.
All up, whatever the casualty count, the fact that the Japanese had pulled out made Milne Bay nothing less than a great victory, which would be hailed as such by many of the Allies around the world. In Burma, the great British leader Sir William Slim would later note that at Milne Bay, ‘the Australian troops had inflicted on the Japanese their first undoubted defeat on land. If the Australians, in conditions very like ours had done it, so could we. Some of us may forget that of all the Allies it was the Australian soldiers who first broke the spell of the invincibility of the Japanese Army. Those of us who were in Burma have cause to remember.’
An exception to this prevailing mood of ‘all hail the Australian soldiers’, however, was to be found back at General Headquarters in Brisbane. There, Douglas MacArthur—impatient for the Australians to deal with the Japanese so they could move on to retaking Rabaul and then on to the main game of returning to the Philippines—had continued to be dismayed to see the markers of the Australian position move back down the track. What was
wrong
with these Australian soldiers?
As soon as the news came through that a resounding victory had been achieved at Milne Bay, MacArthur cabled General George C. Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff in Washington. ‘The Australians have proven themselves unable to match the enemy in jungle fighting. Aggressive leadership is lacking. The enemy’s defeat at Milne Bay must not be accepted as a measure of relative fighting capacity of the troops involved. The decisive factor was the complete surprise obtained over him by our preliminary concentration of superior forces.’
225
Read: the credit was MacArthur’s. Just wait till he could throw the American troops, now nearly ready, into action.
For public consumption, MacArthur’s communiqué on the subject set the tone, in distinctly unmilitary language: ‘The move was anticipated and prepared for with great care… The enemy fell into the trap…
’
226
Read: the credit was MacArthur’s.
One who most definitely did not believe that the highest military leadership was deserving of much credit at all was Chester Wilmot. Now back in the correspondents’ hut on the outskirts of Moresby, he was busily turning all his copious eyewitness notes on the campaign into reports for both the ABC Radio network and an ABC feature magazine. As well, he had accepted a highly unusual request from General Sydney Rowell—with whom he got on well and admired— to use his skills as a trained and impartial observer to write a report on the jungle campaign as he had witnessed it. In this task, Chester had not missed his mark and wrote strongly of ‘the disorganisation of supply’; the troops abysmal ‘lack of camouflage’; and the fact that it seemed that no one at headquarters had any understanding of just what conditions were like up there.
227
A similar theme showed up in his reports for the ABC, in one of which he got right to the nub. It was difficult to write, but it was heartfelt and he knew it needed to be said:
We must feel proud of the men who fought so gallantly to halt the Japanese in the Owen Stanley Range, but the fight was costly…
The main reason for this was a comparatively small one. But campaigns are often lost by little things. Our troops in the mountains were vitally dependent on air supplies. Ten days before the Japanese made their attack, they raided Port Moresby. They found an aerodrome packed with transports and bombers lined up wing-tip to wing-tip on the runway… a perfect concentrated target. They didn’t miss. On the road to the front our reinforcements were held up four days waiting for supplies to come through. In those four days the Japanese gained the initiative and launched their attack. But for that raid… but for our failure to disperse our aircraft on the ground, our troops would have been at the front in time. They would have been in position to stop the Japanese, they might even have been able to seize the initiative from them. In Greece and in Malaya we lost more planes on the ground than we did in the air, because of inadequate dispersion. But we still had to have the bitter lesson of Moresby, before we took real steps to see that it didn’t happen again. But by this time the damage had been done… a chance had been lost… And because of this I felt bitter as I stood on the spur of the Owen Stanley Range looking down on the treetops in the valley that leads to Kokoda… I was bitter for I knew that somewhere under those treetops there were unnecessary Australian graves.
Chester Wilmot
War Correspondent
HQ New Guinea Force.
7.9.42.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Strafing and bombing by enemy aircraft became fierce around this time, and resulted in heavy casualties for [us] Japanese. In addition, malaria and diarrhoea plagued us, and many men fell ill. However, it was instructed that those who were required to be hospitalized should be sent forward… and should be hospitalized at the field hospital that was scheduled to be built shortly in Port Moresby… the physical strength of the soldiers was exhausted day by day due to the food saving requirements. Nevertheless, their morale was still excellent, and they were anxious to capture Port Moresby as soon as possible in order to receive dinner at the enemy’s expense…