Turning Point

by Michael Veitch

  Servicing the aircraft was a virtually impossible task in the primitive conditions at Gurney. The chief engineering officer of 75 Squadron, Bill Matson, performed the same miracles he had achieved at Port Moresby, running his hands over the wings and other surfaces – he was ‘like a horse-whisperer’, one pilot said – before deciding on the most time-effective way to keep it airborne. Despite the terrible conditions, the two squadrons maintained an average of 28 airworthy aircraft between them on a daily basis. As each Kittyhawk was armed with 1500 rounds of half-inch bullets, it was little wonder the army dubbed them the ‘airborne artillery’.

  •

  By 28 August, with the Japanese closing to within 5 miles of Gurney Field, the decision was made to relocate the camp and move the aircraft out of harm’s way – albeit temporarily – to Port Moresby. Squadron Leader Keith Truscott, who had only taken command of 76 Squadron the day before, following the death of Peter Turnbull, was disgusted by the decision, regarding it as a betrayal of the men on the ground. Even worse, only the pilots were to be evacuated, leaving the ground crews to their fate. But the order had come directly from Clowes, who had consulted with the new overall RAAF commander, Group Captain William ‘Bull’ Garing, who had arrived by Hudson from Port Moresby just that day,

  The first thing Garing had done on arrival was tour Gurney Field. He sensed the panic and vowed to put a stop to it. ‘If anyone has an escape plan, tear it up now,’ he said to the men. ‘If anyone has a kit packed to get away into the jungle, throw it out. We’re staying and there’s to be no talk whatever of escape.’

  The Japanese were expected to make an attack on No. 3 Strip later that night, and the prospect of the aircraft falling into their hands was unthinkable. After the day’s usual sorties against ground targets, therefore, at 4.45 p.m. the pilots set off one by one for Seven Mile Strip at Port Moresby – just an hour’s flying time away – with orders to return at first light the next day. Lifting off the sodden runway, twenty aircraft from 75 Squadron and ten from 76 Squadron – the entire complement of Milne Bay’s airworthy fighters – flew away, leaving a strange and unfamiliar silence in their wake.

  The pilots left behind without planes were valued even more highly than the aircraft themselves, and so were likewise ordered to evacuate. Once again, 6 Squadron’s redoubtable Flight Lieutenant Henry Robertson was called upon, not this time to conduct a reconnaissance flight but to pack his Hudson full of as many young airmen as he could and ferry them to safety.

  In the gathering, drizzly dusk, seventeen nervous pilots climbed aboard the Hudson and squeezed into any space they could find. Flight Lieutenant Jeff Wilkinson remembered the atmosphere:

  There was a lot of comment because some people thought we were abandoning the ground staff and the army … we were so crowded we couldn’t sit down. We all had to stand and we were worried that the Hudson wouldn’t get off the strip.

  It was one of the most potentially disastrous take-offs in the history of the RAAF, as Robertson’s overladen Hudson required the entire length of the runway to become airborne: even with his engines at full pelt, the plane seemed destined to career headlong into the trees. Some men jammed into the Perspex nose reported that a branch or two was indeed collected, but in Robertson’s capable hands they cleared the jungle, swung to the left and landed at Moresby without further incident.

  As Seven Mile’s mechanics descended on the aircraft to spend the night carrying out drastically needed maintenance and servicing, the pilots headed for the RAAF Officers’ Club in the town. Filthy, bearded and dishevelled, they drank into the evening. When the proprietor threatened to close the bar, the men simply placed their .38 Webley revolvers on the counter. The establishment was suddenly more than happy to extend its hours.

  One pilot, however, had remained at Gurney Field. Squadron Leader Truscott had meticulously overseen the departure of all the Kittyhawks, then supervised the loading of the Hudson, offering a joke and seeking an assurance from the men that they would not proceed directly to the Officers’ Club on arrival, an assurance that was rowdily given in a chorus of smiles. For himself, however, orders or no, here was where he would remain.

  Just before he closed the Hudson’s door on its uncomfortable passengers, it pushed open against him, and out stepped another pilot, Truscott’s flying companion from their Spitfire days in England: Flight Lieutenant Clive ‘Bardie’ Wawn, who was likewise going nowhere. Truscott remonstrated with him but Wawn was unmoved. Truscott even threatened to pull rank, but Wawn simply stated that as long as Truscott was staying, so would he. Truscott relented, and as the two watched the Hudson climb away to the west, Truscott patted his old friend’s back and quietly thanked him.

  The soldiers had been surprised to hear the Kittyhawks taking off again in the late afternoon, then surprise turned to despair as they watched them form up and disappear, their engines fading away to the west. Group Captain Garing did his best to assure the men that their departure was strictly temporary, and that, come the morning, they would return. The soldiers, as cynical as soldiers anywhere, but having come to rely on their airborne artillery, decided to believe that one when they saw it.

  The departure of the Kittyhawks may not have been permanent, but the relocation of the RAAF’s camp was. In his remarkable memoir Fighter Squadron Doctor, 75 Squadron’s medical officer, Bill Deane-Butcher, recalled the chaos of the move, and the sense of desolation after the aircraft and pilots had departed: ‘About three hundred men were left on the strip including Bill Matson, the engineering officer, and me. We were an Air Force Squadron with no aircraft and no pilots and no-one seemed to be in charge.’

  Believing they were about to be overrun in a Japanese breakthrough, many of the ‘orphaned’ ground staff huddled in groups to discuss their prospects. None had been trained or equipped for ground fighting, yet many were prepared to defend the airstrip as best they could. Some, wrote Deane-Butcher, checked the meagre stocks of ammunition and reacquainted themselves with their rifles. ‘One man had a piece of sandpaper busily sharpening the tip of his bayonet. Some took their guns and set off to join the Army in the fighting.’

  Others, meanwhile, were compelled to relocate to the new camp, in the middle of one of the larger coconut plantations, a mile or so to the south towards Clowes’ Milne Force HQ at Hagita. This, if anything, was an even more blighted place than the one they had left, even lacking running water.

  The journey was particularly torturous for the worst of Deane-Butcher’s malaria patients. There being no transport available, the doctor led them himself – a procession of wretched men who could barely place one foot in front of the other – across miles of knee-deep mud. He reported that he himself was ‘weary, parched and confused’.

  Rounding a bend, he was struck by a surreal scene. In the muck, a trestle table was neatly set up, and beside it stood a smiling man who was wearing an unfamiliar and impossibly neat uniform. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, sir?’ the man asked, indicating a tidy row of cups and a steaming urn.

  From that moment, and for the rest of his days, Bill Deane-Butcher was never reluctant to utter the phrase: ‘Thank God for the Salvos.’

  •

  To the relief and surprise of the Australians, the Japanese did not launch their attack on No. 3 Strip that night. The Kittyhawks, as promised, returned the next morning, their engines re-tuned and replenished with clean oil and new filters. Overnight, the Port Moresby mechanics had also removed the mud with high-pressure hoses, and the US Army Air Corps stores had been plundered for brand-new half-inch Browning machine-gun barrels, which had been earmarked for their own Airacobra squadrons.

  The night of Saturday, 29 August was also quiet. Like the Australians, the marines of 5th Kure SNLF, having fought nonstop for three days and nights in the most unforgiving conditions, with barely a scrap to eat, were exhausted. At Steele’s Clearing, their advance had been checked, their first real setback of the campaign. For the moment, they were content to rest and regroup, but the
ir immediate objective remained unconquered.

  CHAPTER 27

  REINFORCEMENTS

  The most iconic image of the Milne Bay campaign was captured by the official war photographer’s lens somewhere along the Government Track near the village of Kilarbo on 2 or 3 September. It shows a small number of Australian soldiers, their backs to the camera, making their way east, away from the viewer. The men are in shorts and tin hats, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Although their identities are unknown, there is no doubting the historical significance of the moment as, beside them, on either side of the track, like a pair of primordial beasts, lie the two Japanese Type 95 Ha-Go tanks, abandoned.

  Exactly what happened will never be known, but the picture tells at least part of the story. Having rampaged their way up the track after being offloaded from one of the larger Japanese barges on the night of the invasion, having crashed their way through KB Mission, and then striking their way up the track and scattering the best efforts of the Australian defenders, having lit up the inky night with their powerful headlights and machine-gun fire, they had finally come to grief a mile or two from their objective of No. 3 Strip – yet more victims of the Milne Bay mud.

  Lieutenant Acreman’s brave stance at Kilarbo had been prompted by the panicked cry that ‘the tanks are coming’, but as he and his men of the 101st Anti-Tank Regiment were forced by the Japanese infantry to retreat from their position, he could only wonder what had prompted the enemy to abandon their invincible battering ram. The answer was simpler than he might have guessed: they’d got themselves bogged.

  In the photograph the tanks face west, somewhere short of Kilarbo; both are halfway off the path, their outer track sunk into the morass, and one of them is tilted at a crazy angle.

  No record exists of the frantic attempts that were surely made to extricate them, but it seems that their 120-horsepower engines proved insufficient for the unforgiving terrain of Milne Bay. In an extraordinary stroke of ill-fortune for the Japanese, both tanks had foundered simultaneously, preventing one from coming to the aid of the other, and no other vehicle had been landed that could pull them out. For the Japanese, it was a disaster. Their armour, which had so far swung the battle in their favour and confounded their enemy, was now dead by the side of the road. From now on, the Japanese marines would have to continue the battle on their own.

  •

  At first light on the morning of Friday, 28 August, at the Japanese rear HQ in the little village of Hilna, just to the east of KB Mission, Paymaster Captain Chikanori Moji stood in a small clearing beside the grass hut he was occupying and once again turned his ear to the west. In the gathering daylight he remained motionless, listening intently to sounds of the dawn, his hopes gradually rising, until one far-off note caught his ear, followed by another. Above the sound of the birds and the incessant rain, he could now clearly make out the distant throb of aircraft engines.

  Moji’s shoulders sagged, and once again he cursed this wretched place. For yet another night, the marines had failed in their objective of taking the Allied airfield, and the Kittyhawks would soon be in the air once again. Another hellish day lay ahead.

  By this third morning of the battle, Moji could not remember when he had last slept. Communications with the front areas had been sporadic at best. Wounded men had made their way back in small parties, telling of the successes at KB Mission and how the Australians had melted before the Japanese combination of tanks and infantry. For a while, hopes for victory had been high.

  Moji knew, however, that the men were hungry. Each night the navy had ferried more supplies ashore and removed many of the wounded, but, come the daytime, the prowling aircraft would attack, forcing the dumps to be established further and further back from the beach, deeper in the jungle. But the Australian pilots seemed possessed with an uncanny second sight, scenting out their targets even here, and attacking them through the cloak of jungle green.

  As the morning wore on, news trickled in of a fight at a clearing following the victory at KB Mission which had not gone well. The Australians had lured the marines into a trap, raking them with machine-gun fire and grenades, killing a score of men, before the remainder, for the first time, were forced to pull back into the jungle. This unsettling news however, was upended around midday when Lieutenant Fujikawa, commanding the small detachment of 200 or so men of the 5th Sasebo, rushed into Moji’s hut brandishing a small sheet of paper. ‘Reinforcements being sent. Secure coastline,’ read the message from Rabaul. That very night, the cruiser Tenryu would deliver 568 fresh troops of the 3rd Kure SNLF, as well as a further 201 from the 5th Yokosuka. It was the best news possible – and had arrived just in time, as a major attack on the airstrip was then being planned.

  Moji, however, tempered the enthusiasm with a question: ‘Where will they be landing?’ There would be little point, he believed, in the men arriving at the same lonely piece of shore they had mistakenly claimed on the night of the invasion, and the torturous trek towards the airfield would soon exhaust the freshness of even the new soldiers. Further, with the element of surprise gone, they would be advancing on the well-prepared Australians from an expected direction. As Moji said after the war: ‘The failure would be repeated unless the reinforcements landed on the other side of Rabi or immediately in the vicinity of Rabi.’

  Fujikawa agreed, and arranged for a signaller to communicate with the Tenryu and advise the captain to proceed further to the west.

  •

  At 8.15 that evening, the Tenryu led a convoy of six ships into Milne Bay. They were earlier than expected. During the afternoon, despite the low cloud and bad weather, the ships had been discovered and attacked by a 6 Squadron Hudson piloted by Squadron Leader David Colquhoun. In a daring low-level pass through intense anti-aircraft fire, he dropped his four 250-pound bombs on a ship at the rear of the convoy – but for little result, beyond shaking the confidence of the raw Japanese soldiers onboard.

  It was pitch dark when the ships dropped anchor in the still, ink-black water, not far from the shore. The signaller frantically relayed messages to the ships, but by the time they were noted the barges had been dispatched, and Fujikawa and Moji heard the familiar sounds of their motors in the darkness. The captain of the Tenryu, edgy from the afternoon’s air attack, had ignored their advice and landed his men at exactly the same spot as three nights earlier.

  Moji decided that the CO of the expedition, currently with his men near the airstrip, Commander Masajiro Hayashi, must be consulted, and headed off along the muddy Government Track to find him. Not far along, however, he encountered a large column of men heading back towards him. Hayashi had made a decision to withdraw the bulk of his forces for a few hours’ rest. At the head of the column were the walking wounded. They were in terrible shape, thought Moji, although even the fit men hardly looked in better condition. He recalled:

  [T]hey were truly a column of troops exhausted by combat, staggering noiselessly along the pitch-dark muddy road in two columns; hobbling along leaning on tree branches, some supporting wounded around the shoulders, others being carried on backs, some on stretchers. Others had arms in slings, limping and bowed.

  These men had endured three days of fighting and with hardly a mouthful of food nor a moment of sleep, their white bandages grubby and smelling of blood.

  ‘Is the CO here?’ Moji asked, but no-one answered.

  He searched the length of the column but Hayashi could not be found. Returning to Wahahuba, he found that Hayashi had beaten him back to the beach, and was in a deep and tense conversation with the CO of the newly arrived 3rd Kure SNLF, Commander Minoru Yano.

  Having just stepped off the boat, Yano looked resplendent, though faintly ridiculous, in stiff white webbing, trimmed moustache and a perfectly pressed uniform. He was keen to get his men into battle. ‘Let’s go into the attack straight away!’ he urged Hayashi as his troops filed off the barges and formed up on the beach.

  Moji stood off, but listened intently to the
conversation between the two officers, who knew, but did not like, one another from their officer training class. The somewhat imperious Yano was the same rank as Hayashi, but was expressing his fury at his colleague’s decision to withdraw his men.

  ‘They’re all exhausted,’ Hayashi responded slowly, with lifeless eyes. He explained firmly that the men were in need of rest, food and medical attention. It would be unreasonable to expect them to attack immediately.

  There was an ominous silence; Yano was not the only one astonished by Hayashi’s apparently timorous attitude. Moji later confessed that ‘this was not an attitude I had previously heard from a Japanese commander’.

  After further argument about which of them was in charge, they found a compromise. With the capture of the airstrip being of paramount importance, the marines – both the fresh and exhausted – would immediately make their way up the track to establish a foothold as far west as possible. Then they would rest, dispersing into the jungle during the day to await the order to attack the airstrip the following night.

  Getting as close as possible to the Australians, it was argued, might lessen the chance of air attack, with the Kittyhawk pilots being wary of hitting their own. Hayashi reluctantly agreed to the plan, knowing that his weary men would now have to turn around and slog some of the eight miles back up the track to the airstrip before they could grab some rest.

  Captain Moji regarded the young and eager Yano with disdain. ‘You’ll soon get yours,’ he thought darkly to himself. Behind him, the wounded lined up to be transported back to the ships and evacuated. Some had collapsed into the mud; Moji had no idea if they were dead or alive.

  The fresh troops of the 3rd Kure were shocked at the condition of their colleagues returning from the airstrip. One soldier recorded: ‘From within the darkness, the soldiers of the Hayashi unit came out and scared us … according to what some of the wounded said, they had not eaten one mouthful because the food had been bombed by the enemy.’