Larrikins in Khaki

by Tim Bowden

  It was decided to launch a dawn attack on 6 December. It was still dark as the 39th Battalion troops readied themselves. Under a monster barrage and covering smoke, they moved forward, following one of the other companies. The smoke made it difficult for them to see clearly and the Japanese kept firing into the smoke. Casualties mounted. While many of the enemy were killed and a small amount of ground had been gained, the attack was not the hoped-for total success. B Company suffered some casualties, but the leading company in front was cut to ribbons.

  Another attack was ordered and this was to be preceded by an aerial bombardment, so the troops were moved back to their previous positions as they were too close to the target in the hard-won new ground. The troops were unhappy about this.

  The RAAF needed a white T-shaped sign on the ground, with the top of the T facing the enemy positions. Joe Dawson and a few other troops were chosen for this unenviable task to mark the spot. The first hurdle was to find some white material. Dawson thought the air force must’ve thought they all slept in white sheets!

  However I managed to gather up all the army towels from the troops. A lot of these had been cut in half to take up less space in the haversack. Fortunately there was some kunai grass hiding us from the sight of the Japanese. With dry throat and tight stomachs, we hacked at the grass to get a level spot to lay out our T. Strangely enough, despite all the noise we were making, not one single shot was fired in our direction.

  The aerial bombardment was a farce. Carried out by Wirraways, some of the bombs landed behind the Allied lines. None of the bombs hit the target. All it did was let the enemy know to get ready for another attack. The commanding officer called off the attack at the last minute, and after the planes flew away he also asked that aircraft be kept away from the area.

  The next attack was planned for 8 December, this time behind a mortar and artillery barrage. Before that, surrender leaflets were to be dropped on the Japanese Gona garrison. The attack started about 1 pm in the heat of the day and continued into the night. B Company followed the lead companies. During the night some of the Japanese tried to fight their way through these positions and all of them died. Early in the morning three Japanese crossed the track behind the Australian positions and ran into kunai grass. Someone threw a grenade and killed all three of them. On the following morning, most of the Japanese positions were taken except a few on the edge of the beach area. These were soon cleaned out and Colonel Honner was able to signal by field telephone: ‘Gona’s gone!’

  It was time to bury the Australian dead and working parties were brought in. Dawson wrote later that the smell of that place still haunts him:

  There were dead everywhere. It was beyond all comprehension. We also had to check around the pillboxes to make sure there were no live Japanese among all corpses. I came across the bodies of two Australians, their heads within a foot of the Japanese emplacement on the beach side. I thought of the time, ‘just another yard, just another yard’.

  Rear echelon brought us a hot meal—boiled rice with a dash of bully beef mixed through it and some hot black tea, which appeared to be a shade of purple. The brew had been made in a tin that had previously stored dried apples, which discoloured the tea. Even so, I enjoyed it and ate my rice, but not with a great degree of relish. The stench of death didn’t help the appetite much.

  Dawson was totally exhausted and had just laid back on his haversack on the wet kunai grass and was almost asleep when a voice shouted, ‘Hey Sarge, there’s couple of wounded Japs over here!’ He grabbed his Owen gun, only recently taken from one of his unit’s wounded men, and ran over to the spot. There, just off one of the narrow tracks through the high grass, were two Japanese soldiers, one lying full-length face down and breathing heavily, the other sitting cross-legged, his right arm supporting his left arm from which the bicep muscle had been carved out, most likely from a piece of shrapnel. The whole wound was just a seething mass of maggots.

  I pulled out my first field dressing, ripped it open and bound up the wound, maggots and all, and called for a stretcher. At that point I was wondering about the Japanese lying down and struggling to breathe. The soldier that found them said to me, ‘Why don’t you just shoot them Sarge?’

  ‘You found them, so I suppose I didn’t for the same reason you didn’t,’ I replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Probably because we don’t want to be like them,’ I told him.

  Native stretcher bearers picked up the Japanese with the arm wound and moved off when a lieutenant came dashing up waving his .38 pistol. I thought he looked rather thoughtfully at the stretcher moving off, but then turned and promptly put a bullet through the one on the ground who was going to die anyway. To this day I have wondered two things about that—first why I just didn’t shoot them both, or secondly whether the poor blighter with the wounded arm survived. I’m sure that if they had been discovered during the heat of battle they would both have been shot.

  It was later discovered that throughout the fighting in Papua, most of the Australian soldiers captured by Japanese troops were murdered. For the remainder of the war Australian troops generally did not attempt to capture Japanese soldiers and aggressively sought to kill their opponents—including some who had surrendered. Later, when short of food, the Japanese cannibalised parts of the bodies of the dead, their own as well as Australians. The Japanese themselves regarded capture as the ultimate disgrace and dishonour to their emperor, and often killed themselves if they had time to do so. Understandably, having seen their own comrades bayoneted to death, the Australians were not inclined to be merciful either.

  The action continued, but Dawson had been feeling very sick for a few days.

  Every part of me seemed to be aching but I put it down to being tired. None of us had had a good sleep for God knows how long and we seemed to be for-ever wet. At this point the rain had cleared and it seemed a bit brighter. I was squatting down, loading up a few Owen gun magazines and trying to eat some emergency rations. A runner was sitting opposite and facing me as a few Japanese mortars went off on our right flank. I thought at the time they were probably trying to locate our mortars. It was almost dusk and we had not bothered to dig in as we were hoping to move forward the next morning.

  Suddenly one of the bombs went off very close behind us, in line with the runner. With that, he shot up in the air and took off like a rocket back along the track towards company and battalion headquarters. It took a second or two for anything to register with me. Looking back on it, I think my reaction time was beginning to slow down. Anyway, I went after him, found him at the Regimental Aid Post on an improvised stretcher with a bloody great hole in his back. The thought occurred to me at the time that he saved my life simply by sitting where he was, otherwise I would have copped that shrapnel somewhere above my belly button.

  While at the regimental aid post, Dawson asked one of the orderlies to give him something to put on a painful sore in his groin which he thought might have been the start of a tropical ulcer. Before that could be looked at, the orderly stuck a thermometer in his mouth and took his temperature, reading it with difficulty as night was almost upon them. Then he looked at Dawson and said, ‘Mate, if your temperature goes up another peg, you’re dead! You be right back up here at first light. There is a stretcher party leaving at daylight and you’re going with it.’

  The orderly gave Dawson some tablets to take, to reduce his temperature. Dawson reported his situation to the company commander, who sent a runner to get another NCO to take over his platoon.

  Rain set in again. By then we were used to being wet most of the time, if it wasn’t raining it was sweat. During the night in the early morning hours I was lying face down in a small depression in the ground, facing on a slight angle towards our front line and partly towards the track. I thought I saw a movement on the other side of the track. The rain had stopped and even though it wasn’t light, it wasn’t pitch dark.

  To get a better look Dawson raised hims
elf up on his left arm and eased his Owen gun forward slightly and caught a glint of light and white metal. It was a sword being held by a Japanese officer. In that fraction of a second, the officer spotted Dawson and charged towards him at a gallop.

  He was almost on top of me with his sword raised for the swing. I fired one short burst and he dropped. His boot landed in my lower back. Instinctively I humped up and rolled over expecting him to turn and have another go but he had gone on into the dark. I yelled out to the nearest section that there was an enemy soldier behind the lines, and to pass it on. I thought afterwards he was probably after our mortar.

  Dawson decided then to move back to the RAP to await his evacuation. His head was throbbing and his whole body was aching. As it turned out, he was so seriously ill he was flown to Port Moresby and sent by hospital ship back to Australia to the Heidelberg Military Hospital in Victoria. One bonus was that, after convalescence, Joe used his brief home leave to get married to his long-time love, Elaine Colbran.

  ‘The Beachhead Battles’, as they were known, of Gona, Buna and Sanananda that Joe Dawson’s 2/39th Battalion took part in, rank among the bloodiest and most savage campaigns of the Pacific War, from November 1942 to January 1943, on a 25-kilometre stretch of the northern Papuan coast. The Japanese retreated there, following their defeat at Eora Creek and Oivi-Gorari on the Kokoda Track. Urgently needing a victory, the Supreme Allied Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, badly underestimated the Japanese forces that were there, fully armed, supplied and itching to do battle after the failure of the Kokoda push across to Port Moresby. MacArthur’s intelligence reports told him there were only between 1000 and 4000 Japanese, most of whom were sick and wounded after the Kokoda withdrawal. He assigned the Australian Seventh Division to capture Gona and Sanananda, leaving the American Thirty-Seventh Division to seize Buna. In reality, the beachheads were defended by some 10,000 well dug-in Japanese servicemen.

  The campaign started at the beginning of the wet season, which compounded the difficulties of the ‘green hell’ the Allied troops found themselves trying to negotiate. Most of the terrain was dominated by tidal swamps, which could be ankle-deep or up to soldiers’ necks. What wasn’t swamp was dense jungle and scrub, while occasional open swathes of territory were covered in 2-metre-high kunai grass.

  Trenches, and even fox holes, dug by both sides filled with water. General Robert Eichelberger, who took command of the American Thirty-Second Division in December, wrote:

  The psychological factors resulting from the terrain were also tremendous. After a man had lain for days in a wet slit trench or in the swamp, his physical stamina was reduced materially. This reduction served to make him extremely nervous and attribute the unfamiliar noises of the jungle to specters of Japanese activity. These reactions preyed on his mind until he was reduced to a pitiable, abject state, incapable of aggressive action. (James Brien, The Bloody Beachheads: The battles of Gona, Buna and Sanananda, November 1942–January 1943)

  Disease had a far greater impact on all combatants in the Beachhead Battles than any planners could have foreseen. Malaria was the greatest threat, but scrub typhus, ulcers and dysentery were almost universal. By January, for every one battle casualty, 4.8 casualties were admitted to forward area hospitals. The Japanese attrition from disease was similarly shocking. One Japanese soldier recalled that between 20 and 30 servicemen died each day in December. Much of the Allied communications technology failed in the wet conditions and the Australians’ 25-pound artillery shells were ineffective against the enemy’s formidable network of trenches and bunkers protected by fallen palm logs (as described by the 39th Battalion’s Sergeant Joe Dawson). Furthermore the Japanese held these positions with great tenacity and took a heavy toll on attacking infantry.

  General MacArthur never visited this front during the campaign from his headquarters in Port Moresby. On 20 November MacArthur told the Australian commander General Thomas Blamey that ‘all columns will be driven through to the objectives regardless of losses’. He told General Robert Eichelberger, when he replaced his predecessor:

  I want you to remove all officers who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions, and corporals in charge of companies—anyone who will fight. Time is of the essence … I want you to take Buna or not come back alive. (James Brien, The Bloody Beachheads)

  Although victory on the three beachheads was achieved through frontal assaults, the use of light tanks and aerial bombardment, casualties on both sides were heavy. The Allies came up against the fanatical determination of the Japanese to die rather than surrender. At Buna, Lance Corporal Seiichi Uchiyama wrote in his diary: ‘No thoughts of returning home alive. Want to die like a soldier and go to the Yasukuni Shrine.’ (James Brien, The Bloody Beachheads)

  Few prisoners were taken by the Allies. Even the sick and wounded in hospitals resisted capture by fighting or taking their own lives.

  But despite their tenacity in defence, the Japanese could not hold out when faced with dire shortages of food and medical supplies. The last defenders at Sanananda did not receive any rice rations after 8 January, and ate only what they could scavenge from their comrades or corpses. It is not surprising that many Japanese soldiers resorted to cannibalism, although with reluctance. Soldiers would carve off portions of soft flesh or liver from the bodies of friends or foes alike, which greatly angered Allied soldiers when they discovered this practice at Sanananda.

  It was all over by 22 January, and MacArthur finally had ‘his great victory’. The Japanese presence in Papua had been almost completely eliminated.

  Important lessons had been learned by the Allies about jungle warfare, small unit tactics, the role of aircraft and artillery in the jungle, and infantry–tank cooperation. But the victory had come at a terrible cost. Australian War Memorial Scholar James Brien later wrote in 2013:

  Australian battle casualties numbered 240 officers and 3230 other ranks. The veteran Australian units which had entered the campaign returned from it a shell of their former selves. The untried American troops had also suffered heavily in their limited fighting role, with 687 men killed in action and 1918 wounded. Japanese losses were even greater. While exact estimates are difficult, it is reasonable to assume that somewhere around 7600 Japanese soldiers did not return from the beachheads. (James Brien, The Bloody Beachheads)

  The Beachhead Battles, concluded Brien, ‘deserve to be recognised in Australian military history as some of the hardest and bloodiest fighting the Australian army was involved in during the war’.

  After only two weeks convalescence (and an all-too-brief week’s honeymoon in Victoria), Joe Dawson was transferred to a convalescent depot in Ballarat, one of the coldest places in the state. ‘Whoever decided to put it there must have been a nut case. It was a farce. We were housed in tents and issued with only two blankets and a groundsheet, with a straw palliasse for a bed. The wind blew off Lake Wendouree as if it came from the North Pole.’

  Route marches around the area were the only training activity. At that time it was possible to catch a tram to Ballarat, where Dawson for the first time began to drink beer. That was not easy with beer rationed and scarce. ‘But there were 80 hotels in Ballarat at that time, so with a bit of luck you could find one where the beer was “on”.’

  Dawson also came down with another dose of malaria—a legacy from his Kokoda Track experiences—but was eventually discharged to return to his unit which was then in the Atherton Tablelands for more combat training. (It was not his beloved 39th Battalion, which had by then been disbanded.) Later in 1943, a thoroughly bored Sergeant Joe Dawson was delighted when routine orders came out asking for volunteers for the 1st Papuan Infantry Battalion (PIB).

  He applied, even though he realised it meant not coming back to Australia for a long time. He thought anything would be less boring than training and exercises around the Atherton Tablelands and he also had some knowledge of the activities of the PIB from th
e Owen Stanley campaign. He was accepted after an interview, and then with a few others from the area boarded the Katoomba on his way back to Port Moresby in October 1943.

  Dawson was moved to the PIB training depot at Bisiatabu, before Owens Corner on the way to the Kokoda Track. They lived in large grass-roofed huts. Fortunately, they were issued with green mosquito nets. He was posted to Depot Company and given a squad of raw recruits, including his assistant Sergeant Samai. According to Dawson:

  He was a rather colourful fellow. He was in the first Papuan Infantry Brigade and had transferred from the Papuan Constabulary. He was very helpful in teaching me Motuan, the lingua franca of Papua in those days. It was sometimes referred to as Police Motu.

  The recruits were a motley looking lot, various shades of black and some almost white. Many of them had a skin complaint—their skin was flaking which looked like scales. They were given regular doses of peanut oil, which worked as their skin was soon healthy and shiny. They were all very keen to learn. The uniform was either a green or khaki rami—wrap-around lap-lap—with a web belt. Everything else was bare, including their feet. They were paid two sticks of trade tobacco and ten shillings a month—the NCOs got more. After a few weeks they were beginning to shape up like top parade soldiers and I was proud of them. This was followed by the all-important weapons training.

  On 23 December 1943 Dawson was hit with another dose of malaria and went to the casualty clearing station. On Christmas Day he was transferred to the 2/1st Australian General Hospital. It was to be his second Christmas in hospital.