The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  Tragically, when a rescue party eventually made its way back to Sangai village, they found the wounded Diggers had been betrayed to the Japanese and massacred. The perpetrator was never found. John Metson’s selfless action won him the British Empire Medal – and a place in the annals of the finest traditions of the Digger.

  By the time the main force of the Australians had battled their way back down the Track to Ioribaiwa, a steep ridge about 30 kilometres from Moresby, it was the Japanese who were in trouble. By then, desperately short of food and ammunition, they had lost the initiative. They saw the lights of Port Moresby in the distance, but they had run their race. Now the Australians had the advantage, with manageable supply lines and fresh troops. Nevertheless, as Phil Rhoden recalled, the Australians too had paid a heavy price for derailing the Japanese advance. Even when at the end of their tether, the Japanese inflicted grievous casualties with their mountain guns at Ioribaiwa. With amazing determination and ingenuity, they had disassembled the guns into man-sized components, which they had then lugged across the Track before reassembling them on the slope facing Ioribaiwa Ridge. There, for days, they pounded the exhausted Australian defenders across the valley. The casualties suffered by the 2/14th were typical, as Phil Rhoden recounted:

  By the time we got back to Ioribaiwa we were down from 550 to about 200 men. By the last days at Ioribaiwa we were five and 86 – five officers and 86 other ranks – the rest were either killed, wounded, sick or missing.

  At Ioribaiwa the reality of the Japanese situation struck home. Abandoned by his superiors, who were concentrating their forces and supplies elsewhere to combat the American entry into the war, the South Seas Force Commander General Horii ordered his men to ‘advance to the rear’ (there was no word for ‘retreat’ in the Japanese Army lexicon) and their journey to oblivion began. The Australian 7th Division pursued them back along the Track, demoralising them and inflicting heavy casualties in a series of fierce battles as they forced them back over the ground they had so recently won at such heavy cost.

  By early November the Australians had retaken Kokoda and raised the Australian flag over the plateau there. The Japanese withdrew to the beachheads at Buna and Gona where they had landed three and a half months earlier. On the way there, they suffered a body blow. General Horii and some of his top staff officers were drowned while crossing the swollen Kumusi River, about a third of the way between Kokoda and the beachheads. Despite the loss and a chronic lack of food and ammunition, the dwindling South Seas Force kept its resolve and was soon bunkered down at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, determined to fight to the last man.

  Clearly, the invaders were no longer an offensive threat. But, instead of quarantining them at the beachheads and effectively starving them into submission, General Douglas MacArthur, for his own reasons, was determined to force a swift conclusion. He insisted the Australians, many exhausted from their long campaign up and back along the Track, attack the Japanese in their strong defensive positions, without giving them time for the necessary reconnaissances. Corporal Col Blume of the 2/14th Battalion, having fought at Isurava and Brigade Hill, was thrown straight into battle at Gona:

  Gona was hell. We got straight off a plane and we were ordered straight in. We didn’t get time to recce. We were sent in and walked straight into a Japanese firing line. Quite a few of my platoon were killed and wounded. I was lucky.

  Charlie Butler came past. He had his eye blown out. I had to feel for his eye. I patched him up. Another chap came through, Bill Bryant, big chap, he was on a stretcher with a badly wounded leg and he said: ‘Can you do anything for me, Col?’ and I said: ‘I can only tie it up, Bill’ and I tied it up. They carried him out, following the signal wire, because that was the only way they could get out of the swamp. Later on, I heard he lost his leg.

  Driven on by General MacArthur’s constant urgings, many veterans of the Track lost their lives because of the haste with which they were thrown in against the Japanese defenders at the beachheads, in frontal assaults across open beaches. Ralph Honner felt the losses there keenly:

  As we were never in great numbers in the Australian Army, you were always protective of the ones we had. You couldn’t afford to lose lives if you could possibly save them. You couldn’t afford to put in a frontal attack across open ground at an enemy that’s going to kill us all because we’ve got nothing left.

  But, once again, ingenuity was born of necessity:

  You’ve got to devise some means of surprising them by manoeuvre, by outflanking them, by coming from the rear, by using darkness or smoke if you can, by using what I did at Gona, which is firing on them with our own artillery to keep their heads down while the infantry get in amongst them with the artillery still firing. If you have any losses they’ll be peanuts compared to the losses if you don’t have their heads kept down. Anything to keep down the losses.

  At the beachheads the Diggers were joined by American troops for the first time and the difference between the two forces was stark. MacArthur had spent the Kokoda campaign belittling the Australians’ performance, at one stage writing:

  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.

  This disparaging nonsense was typical of MacArthur’s approach, which some observers called ‘megalomaniacal’. In The Odd Couple: Blamey and MacArthur at War, Jack Gallaway called MacArthur’s press releases ‘ripping yarns’, so far were they removed from reality. Any success under his command was trumpeted in a release which implied – and sometimes openly stated – that MacArthur himself was leading the troops from the front. Successes were invariably credited as ‘Allied’ successes, while any setbacks were sheeted home to the Australian troops taking part.

  During the Kokoda campaign, MacArthur went on record saying the Australians actually outnumbered the enemy on the Track, and he attacked General Blamey over what he claimed was unsatisfactory progress by his troops there:

  Operational reports show that progress on the trail is NOT, repeat NOT, satisfactory. The tactical handling of our troops in my opinion is faulty. With forces superior to the enemy we are bringing to bear in actual combat only a small fraction of available strength enabling the enemy at the point of actual combat to oppose us with apparently comparable forces.

  Ironically, the very first US Army unit to try to join in the action during the final stages of the Kokoda campaign reflected just how successfully the Diggers had handled their task. One battalion of the US 126th Regiment was sent in a classic American ‘cut ’em off at the pass’ manoeuvre up the Kapa Kapa Track, a native path that ran roughly parallel to the Kokoda Track. The Americans hoped to outflank the retreating Japanese and cut off their retreat. After 42 days (compared to an average of 10 days by the Australians along the Track) the Americans eventually stumbled out of the jungle on the other side, but they were completely unfit for combat operations for some months. They had not encountered a single enemy soldier. They became known as the ‘Ghost Battalion’.

  This reality check had little impact on MacArthur’s attitude or self-aggrandising approach. His obsession with personal publicity is legendary and well documented. The Pacific War Encyclopedia noted that between December 1941 and March 1942, the US Army Forces Headquarters in the Far East issued 142 dispatches. Of these, 109 mentioned just one name: the theatre’s commander, General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur’s dispatches reveal that he never embraced the concept of an ‘Allied’ command. Rather, he saw the Australian contribution as a tool to be used as he saw fit, all under the triumphant MacArthur standard.

  During the battles for the beachheads, MacArthur’s persistent clamouring for a quick victory resulted in needless Australian and American casualties. It also highlighted the difference in combat p
erformance between the Diggers and their American allies as they fought alongside each other for the first time. The American forces at Buna were listless. The Australian General Vasey reported to Blamey that the US 126th Regiment had ‘maintained a masterly inactivity’. The comparisons between the two armies moved Blamey to write to MacArthur (no doubt with some relish, after MacArthur’s earlier unjustified slurs against the Diggers):

  It’s a very sorry story. It has revealed the fact that the American troops cannot be classified as attack troops. They are definitely not equal to the Australian Militia and from the moment they met opposition they sat down and have hardly gone forward a yard.

  Once again, in the pestilent swamps and beaches of Buna, Gona and Sanananda, the Diggers proved themselves courageous and resourceful warriors, who adapted to the dangerous and difficult task of defeating a heavily entrenched enemy with little concern for its ultimate fate. The Australians bore the brunt of the bitter fighting there, instinctively understanding the need for committed close-quarter fighting, as distinct from the Americans who, according to the Australian General Herring’s report to Blamey, failed to come to grips with the situation:

  I think it is fair to say that 32 US Div has still not realised that the enemy will only be beaten by hard fighting, and that while bombing, strafing, mortars and artillery may soften his resistance to some extent, the men who are left will fight it out and will have to be taken out and killed in hard fighting.

  MacArthur reacted according to type. He called in his top general, Robert Eichelberger, and ordered him to head to Buna with the following line, straight out of Hollywood: ‘Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive!’

  This, at least in a limited way, addressed the root cause of many of the problems at the beachheads – the simple fact that the top brass had never been there and had little appreciation of the immense problems facing the troops. In fact, despite his penchant for press releases that stated he was leading the assaults, MacArthur never actually saw the battlefield. It rankled with Bob Eichelberger, who was quoted by MacArthur’s biographer William Manchester as saying:

  The great hero went home without seeing Buna, before, during or after the fight while permitting press articles from his G.H.Q. to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur … just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.

  (To understand the forces generating the incessant pressure from MacArthur which so dominated the battles for the beachheads, we must look at the wider picture. At the time, General Dwight Eisenhower, for whom MacArthur entertained a long-standing jealousy, was enjoying great success in North Africa, while the great American Admiral ‘Bull’ Halsey was winning fame at Guadalcanal. MacArthur could see himself being forced into a backwater and out of the limelight.)

  Eichelberger sacked many of the US commanders on the ground within days of arriving at Buna. But this changed very little. The Japanese were still fighting to the death in concealed bunkers, many with log roofs and good fields of fire across open ground. They had to be taken one by one. The cost was high. Ralph Honner recalled that the CO of the 2/16th Battalion, Colonel Albert Caro, a veteran with his men of the Track, objected to the needless carnage at Gona:

  Charlie White, whom I taught at school, led an attack along the beach. He was hit and wounded but he got up and went on until he was killed. There was no point in doing it. They couldn’t take anything. They couldn’t capture anything. They couldn’t get through. But higher command ordered that they do this along the open beach. Caro protested – his battalion commander – and was sacked because he protested against useless slaughter. The battalion commander shouldn’t have to bear the burden of carrying out stupid orders.

  Ralph Honner believed that many casualties at the beachheads resulted from the Diggers’ reactions to a bizarre incident that had occurred on 7 November, at Koitaki Plantation near Port Moresby. Here, General Blamey addressed the veterans of the 21st Brigade, the troops that had fought the bloody withdrawal down the Track from Kokoda to Ioribaiwa. No exact record of Blamey’s speech was made, but the Diggers who heard it have never forgotten it. Blamey told them they had been beaten by inferior troops in inferior numbers. He then made a comment that haunted him for the rest of his days. David Horner quotes Blamey’s personal assistant, Major Carlyon, who was present at the parade:

  He told the men that they had been defeated, that he had been defeated, and that Australia had been defeated. He said this was simply not good enough. Every soldier there had to remember that he was worth three Japanese. In future, he expected no further retirements, but advance at all costs. He concluded with a remark which I think was particularly ill-chosen and unfair … ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘it’s not the man with the guns that gets shot; it’s the rabbit that is running away’.

  Ralph Honner always maintained that this unjustified slur against the Kokoda veterans, from a commander who clearly had no understanding of what they had endured and what they had achieved, left deep psychological scars. These resurfaced when the same troops were thrown in against the entrenched Japanese at the beachheads. The result was an attitude by many that, no matter what, they would leave no doubt as to their courage. In doing so, many exposed themselves to far greater risks than were necessary and many paid the price. On 8 December, the 39th Battalion broke through into what was, by then, the shell of the village at Gona and Colonel Ralph Honner sent back his famous signal: ‘Gona’s gone!’

  At Buna the Americans were stymied, as David Horner wrote in Crisis of Command:

  In Urbana Force Eichelberger continued to urge his troops, and they pushed their way between the Japanese defences, but by 24 December they had been held up. Caught between [the Australian commander, Brigadier] Wootten’s successes and MacArthur’s demands, Eichelberger was beginning to feel the burden of command. The next day he wrote to MacArthur: ‘I think that the all-time low of my life occurred yesterday. We had seven line companies available. I had given five of them to Grose to make the attack … [He] took counsel of his fears and … delayed the advance.’

  During the preceding month the pressure on all commanders had been extreme. The constant exhortations from MacArthur, who knew his own career was balanced on a knife edge, placed the division commanders in a position where they were forced to accept heavy casualties yet achieve little.

  With Brigadier George Wootten, the commander of the Australian 18th Brigade, leading a combined force of Australian and US troops, Buna eventually fell on the evening on 2 January 1943. The cost was 2870 battle casualties, 913 of them Australian. MacArthur sent out his customary press release, claiming the Americans had taken Buna and had now defeated the Japanese at the beachheads. He ignored the fact that the Japanese were still holding out strongly at Sanananda (which would not fall until 22 January) and he omitted any mention of his faithful commander, General Bob Eichelberger. For his part, Eichelberger was generous in his praise for the Diggers of the 18th Brigade. He wrote in his memoirs:

  One cannot compare the Australians who made the frontal attack at Cape Endaiadere with their American comrades two miles away fighting the water before Buna Mission. The Australians were fresh; they were veterans, they were not sick; they were well fed and well clothed. They fought with courage and tenacity and won a brilliant victory taking tremendous losses.

  Later he added of the 18th Brigade:

  I would say no finer soldiers ever fought on a desperate field.

  This generosity was not always reciprocated by the Australians. Private Griffith Spragg recalled one Australian brigadier called on to report first on his own situation at Sanananda and then on that of the units fighting alongside him:

  On one of his flanks was this American brigade and, after making a complete and detailed report of his own situation, he merely, under the heading of the ‘Right Flank’, put: ‘Hebrews 13, verse 8’ and if you look that up, it says: ‘Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today and forever’.

 
By the time Sanananda fell, the 39th Battalion, the Militia battalion that had borne the brunt of the initial Japanese assaults at Kokoda and Isurava, had been reduced from around 550 troops to little more than a platoon (32 men). With little thought to the magnificent heritage the unit had created in its short history of around 18 months, Higher Command disbanded rather than reinforce it. Its remnants were scattered into other units. (Some 60 years later, to the delight of its handful of World War I veterans, the 39th Battalion was reborn as the 39th (Personnel Support) Battalion on 8 August 2004, with responsibility for preparing and outfitting Australian troops deployed for overseas service.)

  The official World War II historian, Dudley McCarthy, made special mention of the remarkable record of the 39th Battalion in the Gona campaign – the battalion which had done so much to elevate the status of the Militia. Ironically, he also praised men from the maligned 53rd Militia Battalion, who had joined the 39th as reinforcements: