Turning Point

by Michael Veitch

  Just before 3 a.m., the first elements of the 5th Kure reached the point where the track met the airstrip, and they began to fan out along its western edge, taking up positions behind the line of logs and earth which the American engineers had thoughtfully provided, making as little noise as possible. Occasionally, brief patches of moonlight would allow them to catch a shadowy glimpse of the almost mystical prize that had so far eluded them: the Allied airstrip. The entire battle thus far had led to this, and now all they had to do was take it.

  The Japanese had no idea that there was more than one airstrip at Milne Bay, or that the one before them was not the home of the harassing Kittyhawks, nor even was it yet operational. Nevertheless, they believed that this airstrip – and, by implication, the entire Allied base at ‘Rabi’ – was now within their grasp.

  Each man made a short, silent prayer to his parents, and some to the Emperor, and awaited the signal. The decisive engagement of the fight for Milne Bay was about to begin.

  •

  On the other side of No. 3 Strip, the Australians and a handful of Americans had settled in for another long, wet and uncomfortable night. Whether it would bring a Japanese attack was still unknown. Men huddled under groundsheets, some smoking cigarettes, with the light carefully concealed. Some chatted quietly, in short bursts, but their eyes and ears remained cocked towards the blackness ahead.

  Suddenly, 150 yards from the eastern side of the strip, a loud metallic clang was heard. From an observation post near the parked US half-tracks, the Australians sent up a flare. Some men remembered it as red, others white. In any case, in its ghostly illumination – like a great, seething carpet of olivegrey – a huddled mass of uniformed men was revealed. Every man on the western side saw it, and a collective gasp went up. How had the Japanese managed to get so close without being noticed? Now everyone waited for the word to attack.

  There was a brief lull, during which both sides could throw away their cloaks of concealment and prepare for battle. Unlike at KB Mission, no chanting came from the Japanese side, but there was plenty of shouting. One voice was heard over the top of the cacophony, stating in excellent English: ‘It’s no use, we’re coming over!’ To which the indomitable Regimental Sergeant Major of the 25th Battalion, Warrant Officer Ken Barnett, was heard to reply, in his booming sergeant major’s voice, ‘Pig’s arse you are! Hit ’em with everything you’ve got!’ The words immediately inscribed themselves into Australian military folklore. No more encouragement was needed, and the silent black sky was split open by a storm of gunfire.

  At first the Japanese were protected from the bullets by the earth and log barrier. A few mortar rounds landed but they were sporadic and wide.

  In a command post near the half-tracks, Lieutenant Keith Acreman, who had ranged his anti-tank guns on the Japanese at Kilarbo a few nights earlier, assessed the situation in front of him:

  [A] flare went up from our lines and an Australian machinegunner opened up. More flares went up and more Australian firing took place but I think the enemy had not been identified until they opened fire. Then it became obvious that they were forming up on the eastern side of the Strip near its junction with the road … It turned out later that this was not an isolated pocket of Japanese but the main body which had dragged up some of their mountain guns and machine guns on wheels. All this had been done so quietly that none of us in the Troop saw or heard anything. When the Japanese started firing, we all took up positions.

  As at Kilarbo, however, the quick-thinking Acreman executed a piece of action which would have a profound bearing on the battle. Earlier that afternoon, in the waning hours of daylight, he had arranged for a signals officer to run a telephone line to his position, connected to the rear. Observing that both mortar crews were firing off target, he picked up the receiver of the field telephone, gave the dynamo handle a few cranks and asked to be connected to the mortar officer, Lieutenant Schindler, whose patrol had recently discovered the stranded Japanese tanks.

  ‘You’re dropping short,’ said Acreman. ‘Quick, give me a ranging shot on the road and the strip.’ Almost instantaneously, a whistling projectile dropped from the charcoal-black sky, landing a few feet away from Acreman’s position. It happened to be a dud, but it told Acreman what he needed to know. The mortars were targeting the junction of the airstrip and the Government Track, but on its western, not eastern side.

  Instantly, Acreman gave the vital correction: ‘Up 400, go!’ Then, over his shoulder, he shouted a one-word order to all who could hear it: ‘Gunfire!’

  Simultaneously, the Japanese emerged from behind their protective earth barrier to make their first attack on the airstrip, and every machine gun, rifle and mortar let loose.

  Lurid colours lit up the night. Tracers made darting lines back and forth as the Vickers and Brens opened up, and the Japanese returned fire with their Type 92 ‘woodpecker’ machine guns, with their distinct punctuating, ‘peck’ sound. It was a powerful weapon, but crippled by its slow rate of fire.

  Then the mortars arrived. Like an artillery barrage, Schindler’s men poured round after round on the Japanese side of the runway. The infantrymen were amazed by their rate of fire, and convinced that it could not possibly be coming from only two crews. It was carnage. Shrapnel from mortar blasts tore off limbs and heads, and hurled body parts up into the trees, obliterating the first line of the Japanese attack. Hardly any managed to lay so much as a foot on the runway before being cut to pieces.

  From their position up on Stephen’s Ridge, a few hundred yards away, the men of the 61st Battalion looked down the length of the runway and were awestruck by what they saw. ‘It was a pretty sight,’ one of them said, ‘the tracers just kept going and going and going …’ One of the American engineers likened it to the Fourth of July, and recalled that with all the tracer flying about, he had enough light to read a map or even a newspaper.

  Flares of various colours tore the cover of darkness from the attacking Japanese, exposing their ranks, which were then targeted by the overlapping belts of Vickers and Bren machine-gun fire. Now verbal orders shouted back corrections to Schindler’s mortars. ‘Up 50, 2 degrees right! Now up 10!’

  The Japanese, in desperation, chose their best English speakers to shout countermanding corrections. Some Australians were taken aback at their powers of mimicry, but the men on the mortars were not easily fooled. If a specific target could not be found, Schindler directed his men to aim for the trees just behind the Japanese, causing devastating tree bursts that would blast wood into the Japanese soldiers, causing horrendous wounds.

  Hayashi dared not peer over the earth parapet, but he could see that this first attack was failing. Men were falling everywhere. He quickly ordered a company commander to make a secondary attack on the Australian line down towards the sea end of the strip, but only ten fit men could be found to carry it out. The leading elements of the 3rd Kure had begun to arrive, but they became jammed up behind those of the 5th Kure, and could not fire for fear of hitting their countrymen in the back. Attempts were made to set up their 37-millimetre anti-tank guns, but the Australian mortars discovered them under the flares and ranged in mercilessly.

  Not that the mortar crews were immune from danger themselves. Being a mere 250 yards from their targets, their muzzle flashes attracted fierce retaliation from the Japanese machine gunners. What amounted to a duel ensued, as each position attempted to knock out the other.

  •

  The battle of No. 3 Strip was particularly vivid for the handful of young Americans of the US 43rd Engineering Regiment, who would distinguish themselves as being the very first Americans to go into combat against the Japanese in the south-west Pacific – a task for which they were wholly untrained. Having been instructed in the skills of engineering and construction, these men were far better acquainted with bulldozers than machine guns; even their basic military training had been minimal. This, however, in no way dampened their enthusiasm for fighting alongside the Australians, for whose be
nefit they had been toiling these past weeks building the airstrips of Milne Bay.

  Staff Sergeant Sidney Sleeth, of Rochester, Minnesota, was not supposed to even be at No. 3 Strip. As ordered by the 43rd’s CO, Major Ludlow Adams, his job had been to deliver supplies to the Australians and then to proceed back to Gili Gili, out of harm’s way. Deciding he wanted a story to tell his grandchildren, however, he adopted the Australian vernacular and declared, ‘Bugger the Major! I’m staying to see what’s going to happen here tonight.’ Sleeth joined a group of fellow engineers assigned to the guns atop the two US half-tracks. In the quiet hours before the fight, he had surprised his pal (and fellow Minnesotan) Corporal Lionel Jierre by climbing onto one of the vehicle’s decks and declaring himself ready for action.

  The Australians were more than grateful for the presence of the Americans and their half-tracks, not just for their firepower but for the added height their armoured steel plating afforded them as they observed the enemy positions across the strip. Mostly the Australians had to be content with assessing the enemy from ground level, behind their low barrier of earth and logs.

  After several wet and miserable hours in the dark, just before 3 a.m. Jierre heard noise from the other side of the strip and watched an Australian flare sail into the sky. ‘This looks like the big thing,’ he said to his crew, rousing them from under groundsheets. Suddenly the peaceful, rainy tropical night became a bedlam of noise.

  There being room enough in the half-tracks for only a handful of men, the other Americans were dispersed among the Australians on the ground. One corporal hit upon the idea of filling the magazine of his Thompson entirely with tracer bullets, so he could light a path to a Japanese machine-gun position he had spotted in the gloom on the other side. Above him in the half-track, the American gunners opened up with their larger half-inch and .3-calibre weapons. Sergeant Paul Marquis and Private Henry Coffman recalled expending no less than 900 rounds between them. ‘The barrels of our machine-guns were so hot they shone like Neon lights,’ Coffman later recalled. Having forgotten to put on his shoes, he was forced to dance a jig to avoid the hot spent shells that clattered onto the metal floor at his feet.

  At one point an Australian officer, Lieutenant Pat Livingstone, climbed up to direct some of the American fire. Suddenly, he yelled, ‘Duck!’ and grabbed two Americans by the collar, pulling them below the protective metal shield as a streak of Japanese machine-gun fire whined through the space occupied the moment before by their foreheads.

  Sergeant Sleeth was not so lucky, receiving a bullet in his arm as he tried to clear a jam in his .50-calibre gun. Previously, he estimated, he’d expended upwards of 1700 rounds in three hours.

  Other Americans also fought with Australians for the first time beside No. 3 Strip. Anti-aircraft gunners and men trained to man coastal batteries added their weight to the firepower that utterly overwhelmed the Japanese. One awestruck US serviceman later commented that it was impossible to walk more than two feet along the western side of the strip that night without encountering a man with a machine gun or a rifle.

  •

  With his ranks thinning around him, Hayashi ordered his men to regroup a few hundred yards away in the jungle, and attempt a second attack. The lull in the fighting allowed the Australians to reload, and further deliveries of mortar bombs replenished the dwindling piles of ammunition. Meals, too, were delivered by the tireless army cooks, who risked their lives to bring simple but hot meals in dixie tins to the men manning the guns defending No. 3 Strip.

  Just after 4 a.m. the second Japanese attack began. This time, blood-curdling shouts and screams accompanied their attempts to cross the runway, but their efforts to intimidate the defenders were unsuccessful. Again, the word went up – ‘Fire!’ – and Australian bullets shattered this second wave of Japanese marines as it had the first, their falling shadows illuminated eerily by the pale light of crackling flares. This second attack likewise petered out in the face of overwhelming Australian and American firepower. One Japanese sailor recalled that ‘there didn’t seem to be any place we could put ourselves … we advanced but we were like rats in a bag and men were falling all around. I thought we were going to be wiped out …’

  Still Hayashi refused to consider a withdrawal, convinced that Commander Yano would soon appear with the balance of his men of the 3rd Kure to save the day. It was not to be. When Yano did finally arrive, his men found the situation chaotic, and all but irredeemable.

  A well-aimed hand grenade then burst beside Commander Hayashi, wounding him mortally in the face and leg. His men urged him to withdraw, but even as he refused, more of his staff of the 5th Kure fell around him.

  Commander Yano, seeing that further frontal assaults on the junction of the runway and the track would be fruitless, ordered Lieutenant Yoshioka Fumiharu to take his 200 fresh marines of the 5th Yokosuka up a track that seemed to wind away to the north, and from there attempt an outflanking manoeuvre around the top of the airstrip. But the men of the 61st Battalion, dug in on Stephen’s Ridge, were waiting for just this moment.

  The Japanese made no attempt to disguise themselves as they charged up the slopes of the ridge. As in a terrible infantry battle on the previous war’s Western Front, they were scythed down by the Australian Bren guns. Some Australians even remembered hearing the rattle of the tins set up along the path as the Japanese stumbled into them. The warning was soon redundant, as the enemy attempted in vain to storm the ridge.

  Three attempts were made by the Japanese to storm across No. 3 Strip and push beyond, and each failed. Finally, in the grey pre-dawn, the Australians and Americans heard the unfamiliar sound of three short bugle blasts, the rarely used signal to withdraw.

  In the carnage and confusion, the Japanese units had become scattered and their leadership collapsed. With Hayashi and several of his senior officers dead, no-one knew who was in charge, and as the dawn came up, the defeated marines made their way towards the cover of the jungle and the Government Track. As they did so, a terrible but familiar sound reached their ears: the deep-throated roar of aircraft engines.

  •

  Several miles to the east, emerging from a hut near Wahahuba, Captain Moji heard the aircraft as well – as he had done every morning since his arrival in this blasted place. This night, however, he had also been listening to the sounds of the battle drifting across from the airstrip. The question that burned in his mind – how had his men fared? – was emphatically answered by the sound of the Kittyhawks preparing, once again, to wreak destruction on the Japanese at Milne Bay.

  CHAPTER 30

  THE COUNTERPUNCH

  As the dawn appeared, the Australians and Americans adjusted their eyes to the growing light, barely believing what the day was revealing. The Japanese had fallen silent. Their cries, and the distinctive staccato of their heavy machine guns, had gradually fallen away, so that now only a few ill-directed shots could be heard. The men were ordered to be ready for the enemy to make a dawn charge, but as the minutes ticked by the silence continued.

  Then, slowly at first, the notion dawned that the Japanese – who had conquered everything before them, who had slashed their way through Asia, and whose soldiers were almost revered as a race of supermen – had, in this wet patch of tropical mud, been finally stopped. The men looked at each other, not wanting to jinx the moment by articulating the thought.

  By 8 a.m. the Kittyhawks were in the air, searching for quarry, jauntily waggling their wings to the men on the side of the strip as they bolted overhead to begin their ‘morning rounds’.

  The day began to reveal the carnage of the night. Along the eastern side of the runway, a green mass appeared to have been dumped, lying in odd configurations: this was the Japanese dead. Then, more and more, a chorus of moans could be heard from the wounded who had been left behind in the jungle. It was, for most of those listening, an intolerable sound, but after a while the sounds of single pistol shots were also heard. As the cries gradually diminished, it became
clear that the Japanese were killing their wounded.

  Private Don McFarlan remembered of the morning: ‘The sight across the Strip was a mess. We were gazing on what had been dense jungle and it looked like a field of tomato stakes. It was unbelievable what the firepower had done.’

  Major General Clowes, having for a week been uncertain as to the Japanese strength and intentions, and also blinded by the weather, a lack of maps and a paucity of intelligence, now knew that the enemy’s primary tactic had been to attack the airstrips and the Allied camp directly along the track, an attack which had now been shattered along the eastern edge of No. 3 Strip. Finally, the fog of war was lifting. No subsequent follow-up forces had been deployed, and the plan Clowes had nurtured since the start of the conflict could now begin.

  It was not a moment too soon. For the last week, Clowes had endured rising criticism from generals MacArthur and Blamey and, less directly, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, George Vasey, over his management of the battle.

  Vasey’s letters and directives of the time are illustrative, revealing a man unsuccessfully trying to steer a path between conflicting egos and vastly different approaches to the conduct of the war. ‘I’m afraid the last week was a trying time for many of us,’ he confided in a note to Sydney Rowell in Port Moresby. ‘GHQ [i.e. MacArthur’s HQ] is like a bloody barometer in a cyclone. Up and down every two minutes!’ Vasey explained that, in the eyes of the man he obliquely referred to as ‘the Great’, meaning MacArthur, Clowes had committed the unforgivable sin of not carrying out their hastily issued directive of ‘Clearing the Northern shore of Milne Bay’ by moving against the Japanese immediately, and with everything he had, following their landing.