Some of the details of the American soldiers’ relationship to the Australians and the returning Australian soldiers are from C. P. Murdock’s Saturday Evening Post article, “The Red Arrow Pierced Every Line,” E. J. Kahn’s G.I. Jungle, and Gentle Knight.
For the personal details on General Harding, I depended upon Leslie Anders’ wonderful biography Gentle Knight.
When Harding left San Franciso, his son Davis, who was finishing up his doctoral dissertation in English, wrote him. “Good luck, dad,” Davis wrote. “I like the idea of having you for a father.” Harding, Anders writes, responded with appropriate lines from Kipling:
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide, O it’s “special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.
E. J. Kahn wrote that soldiers knew so little about Australia they expected to be “met at a primitive wharf by aborigine porters on kangaroos.”
For details on the division’s training in Australia, I relied on Milner’s book, his interview with Harding, which can be found at the Office of the Chief of Military History, and Anders’ biography.
When Harding renamed Tamborine Camp Cable, Sergeant Gerald Cable’s mother wrote him, thanking him for “the high honor you have done my son’s name.”
To discuss the medical problems in the South Pacific, I used Simon Warmenhoven’s letters and a number of splendid books and articles, many written by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall.
Medical Department, United States Army in World War II, a series published in Washington, D.C., by the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, provides both organizational studies and numerous physician-written accounts of the clinical problems encountered in the war against Japan. The Medical Department produced forty-eight books on World War II. They are divided into a number of sub-series dealing with preventive medicine, internal medicine, surgery, etc. One very helpful book is on preventive medicine: Communicable Disease: Malaria, edited by Ebbe Curtis Hoff. There are seven other volumes in this sub-series that deal with medical problems other than malaria. I also used a book published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., in its United States Army in World War II series. It is coauthored by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, titled The Medical Department: Medical Service in the War Against Japan. Chapter IV deals with jungle warfare. Three more publications were of enormous help. They are Condon-Rall’s “Allied Cooperation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience” (Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 46, October 1991, pp. 493-513), her “Malaria in the Southwest Pacific in World War II” (in Roy M. MacLeod, editor, The University of Sydney, Australia, Science and the Pacific War, Science and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-1945, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 2000), and her “The Army’s War against Malaria: Collaboration in Drug Research during World War II” (Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1, fall 1994, pp. 129-143).
Milner and Ham describe in detail the intelligence reports that said Japan was planning to invade New Guinea.
The early days of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) and Major General Basil Morris’ dismissal of the possibility of a Japanese overland invasion, and the subsequent invasion, are found in Alan Powell’s wonderful book The Third Force.
An especially gruesome piece of history is the story of Miss May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, two young Anglican sisters assigned to the Gona Mission, who fled the Yokoyama Advance Force on July 21, 1942. When hundreds of Japanese troops slid down ropes onto barges to be transported through the puzzle of reefs to shore, Hayman and Parkinson plunged deep into the jungle with only a compass. Father James Benson, who ran the mission at Gona, led them. For months he had urged the sisters to leave Papua along with the rest of the white population that had evacuated, but they had refused. “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” Father Benson prayed as they fled the Japanese.
Benson, Hayman, and Parkinson eluded the Japanese advance troops of the Tsukamoto Battalion until a native collaborator named Emboge from the Orokaivan people betrayed them near the village of Doboduru. The two sisters were taken to a plantation near the village of Buna, not far from the Japanese landing site, and were bayoneted to death. Mavis Parkinson was the first to go. A Japanese soldier forced her into an embrace. When she struggled to free herself, he dug his bayonet deep into her side. May Hayman, who held a towel over her eyes, was bayoneted in the throat as she listened to her friend die.
Emboge and his accomplices were later arrested and hanged.
“What else could we do?” Emboge pleaded. “The kiawa [white men] treated us badly before the war and they deserted the people when the Japanese landed at Buna.”
A sympathetic ANGAU officer witnessed the hanging. “I lay awake most of the night,” he wrote, “listening to the drums beating, and the wailing of the mourners…. I had seen death in various forms during the preceding twelve months, but nothing affected me as much as the hanging…. Perhaps it was the courage they displayed when the time came for them to die. Be that as it may, the punishment meted out to them was in accordance with their own tribal code of ‘an eye for an eye.’”
Arthur Duna’s quote is found in John Dadeno Waiko’s book, PNG: A History of Our Time. Duna’s account of the invasion is substantiated by a number of interviews that I conducted in Buna in 2005 and 2006. More information on the Japanese invasion can be found in Waiko’s “Damp Soil My Bed; Rotten Log My Pillow: A Villager’s Experience of the Japanese Invasion.”
Regarding the invasion from the Japanese perspective, I relied on a number of sources: Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment; Lost Troops; Southern Cross, and also a collection of ATIS documents at the National Archives. Milner also provides details. A whole host of Australian authors, including Ham, David Horner, Les McAulay, Peter Brune, Victor Austin, and Raymond Paull have written riveting, well-researched books about the battle along the Kokoda track.
All personal details on Herman Bottcher come from soldiers’ recollections and two articles: “Fire and Blood in the Jungle” by George L. Moorad in the July 3, 1943 issue of Liberty Magazine and Mark Sufrin’s article “Take Buna or don’t come back alive” in the Historical Times.
Chapter 4. Sons of Heaven
Details on General Horii are taken from Lida Mayo’s book, Bloody Buna.
Using G-2 daily summaries housed at the National Archives and Milner, I was able to detail Allied intelligence failures.
There are a number of excellent books on the militarization of Japanese society: John Toland’s The Rising Sun, Soldiers of the Sun by Meirion and Susie Harries, Tojo and the Coming of the War by Robert Butow, David James’ The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire, Japan’s War by Edwin Hoyt, and Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which investigated Japanese war crimes after the war, harshly condemned bushido. Although a willingness to die in the execution of one’s duty was a genuine part of the historic samurai ethic, the original conception of bushido left room for honorable surrender, both for the samurai and his enemies. Bushido’s twentieth-century perversion, however, engendered what military historian Eric Beregrud called “a cult of death,” in which no compassion was given and none was received.
Japanese quotes and diary entries are from ATIS documents.
The Australian perspective is from Ham, Brune, and Horner.
Chapter 5. Cannibal Island
Excerpts from Harding’s letters home appear in Anders’ biography and lend insight into Harding’s humanity.
Excerpts from MacArthur’s speech are taken from Blakeley. Anders also includes portions of MacArthur’s speech.
For a perspective on just how much it rains on the island of New Guinea, consider that Seattle, Washington, which is often considered the wettest place in the United States, gets an average of about seventy to eighty inches of rain per year. Milne Bay, one of the wettest places on the island’s ea
stern half (Papua New Guinea), regularly gets two and a half to three times that.
For this section I relied on a number of fascinating books: Gavin Souter’s New Guinea: The Last Unknown; Osmar White’s Green Armor and Parliament of a Thousand Tribes; New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History by Clive Moore, Documents and Readings in New Guinea History, edited by J. L. Whittaker and a host of others; Tim Flannery’s Throwim Way Leg; Prowling Through Papua by Frank Clune; W. N. Beaver’s Unexplored New Guinea; F. Hurley’s Pearls and Savages; L. M. D’Albertis’ New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw; and Captain J. A, Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea. Stephen Anderson’s article, “How Many Languages Are There in the World?” which appeared in the May 2004 edition of the Linguistic Society of America’s scholarly publication, was also very helpful.
Souter’s book, in particular, describes successive stages of exploration in New Guinea, and is full of fascinating anecdotes about the von Ehlers expedition and others.
First Contact tells the story of the “discovery” of the New Guinea Highlands by Australian gold prospectors Michael Leahy and his brothers. (There is also a film called First Contact based on Leahy’s film footage. It is widely considered an ethnographic classic.) The bulk of the book is about the events of 1933, when Leahy led a series of prospecting expeditions into the highlands and initiated the first contacts between highlanders and Europeans. The account is based on his diaries and later writings and on interviews with the native highlanders who witnessed the events. The book is full of photos taken at the time.
Chapter 6. Forlorn Hope
Many of the Company E details are derived from Lutjens’ diary, a series of lectures he delivered on the Papuan Campaign after returning to the United States, E. J. Kahn’s fascinating two-part series in the Saturday Evening Post called “The Terrible Days of Company E”, Art Edson’s letters home, James Hunt’s notes on the company’s early days in New Guinea, and his correspondence with Herbert “Stutterin’” Smith.
When General Kenney got news from Port Moresby that Lutjens and his men had arrived safely, he, in his own words, “rushed upstairs to General MacArthur’s office to give him the good news” and asked him if he could “haul the rest of the regiment.” Kenney continues, “He congratulated me most enthusiastically but told me that he had already ordered the rest of the regiment shipped by boat and that the loading had already begun. I said, ‘All right, give me the next regiment to go, the 128th, and I’ll have them in Port Moresby ahead of this gang that goes by boat.’”
Shortly after the 32nd landed in New Guinea, Harding’s staff threw him a birthday party in Australia. Harding made a speech, urging listeners to remember three important values: “time, equipment, and lives.” His preference was “to save human lives and take just a little longer to accomplish our mission.” As Anders notes, Harding wrote his wife: “I must admit,” he said, “that I rather like the idea that the men, that I’ve grown to think so much of, should think the ‘Old Man’ is all right. I hope that I never give them any reason to think otherwise during the tough times that we are destined to see together.”
Descriptions of the village of Gabagaba and its people are based on my 2005 and 2006 interviews with a number of village elders there, Lieutenant James Hunt’s recollections, and Art Edson’s letters home. The natives, according to Edson, “run around with nothing on.” Edson adds, “There is times when we feel like doing the same thing, and a lot of times too.” Edson also writes about how much weight the natives are able to carry. He says, “I saw one yesterday that carried a heavy pole about forty feet long on his shoulder.”
Native villages were decimated by ANGAU recruitment practices. In The Third Force, Alan Powell includes two native songs that reflect their sense of dislocation and sadness:
“All the women were standing by the river bank for their husbands.
All the children were standing by the riverbank for their fathers.
On the riverbank all were standing.
On the canoe bank all were standing.
When the husbands looked back they saw their wives and children were waving to them.”
“We have left our homes and beaches
To labour for the war in different places,
In far flung places. In these hard times
We wander aimlessly from home.
…In our little homes before the war
Partings from dear ones were unknown.
…We now wonder by our campfires
Of our homes, our dear ones, and our wives.
Longing, hoping, praying deeply.
To return to home once more.”
The first European to make contact with the simple, seafaring Motu people south of Port Moresby was Captain John Moresby. He spent days trading with them and asked in his diary, “What have these people to gain from civilization?”
During the early days of colonial occupation, a simplified Motu language, called “Police Motu,” was spread throughout the territory by native constables. In the nothern half of the island the German planters faced the same language barriers the British and Australians did in the south. The Germans’ solution was Pisin, a local word that became known as Pidgin. Pidgin has taken many words from various languages, including German and English. Be careful, for instance, is “Lukautim gut!”
A few of Gabagaba’s village elders remember how fascinated villagers were by America’s black engineers.
Chapter 7. The Bloody Track
Scenes of jubilation are taken from Seizo Okada’s Lost Troops. Captain Nakahashi’s quote is taken from Paul Ham’s Kokoda.
The Battle of Bloody Ridge was perhaps Guadalcanal’s most famous battle. In it, U.S. Marines repulsed an attack by the Japanese 35th Infantry Brigade. The Marines were defending Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, which they had captured from the Japanese in early August 1942. Kawaguchi’s unit was sent to Guadalcanal to recapture the airfield and drive the Allied forces from the island. Kawaguchi’s six thousand soldiers conducted several nighttime frontal assaults on the U.S. defenses. The main Japanese assault occurred on an unnamed ridge south of Henderson Field that was manned by troops from several U.S. Marine Corps units, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Merrit Edson. Although Kawaguchi’s men nearly defeated the Marines, the Americans held. The battle became known as the Battle of Edson’s Ridge or Bloody Ridge.
Accounts of General Horii’s deception and the Japanese supply situation are from Lida Mayo’s book. Specific quotes are from ATIS documents. Details of the messages received by General Horii and Horii’s horror at being asked to retreat are from Mayo’s book.
Ham writes that Captain Nakahashi uttered the same words about the message coming “like a bolt from the blue,” though the rest of the quote is different. Ham writes that Nakahashi said that the news, “caused an overflowing…of emotion, which could not be suppressed; it was compounded by feelings of anger, sorrow and frustration. The purpose, the dreams and the desires of the officers and soldiers of the South Seas Force had vanished in an instant.”
Ham writes that it took fifty Australian “sappers” using a powerful pulley system to get the cannon up the steep spur of Imita Ridge. The Australian engineers had cut two thousand steps ino the ridge, creating what the Australians called with irony the “Golden Staircase.”
Details on the beginning of the Australians counterattack are from William Crooks’ The Footsoldiers.
MacArthur’s quote to Brigadier John Edward Lloyd is from Ham.
MacArthur took great personal satisfaction from his appearance at Imita Ridge. American war correspondents had written that Port Moresby might go the way of Singapore. In reality, MacArthur was not anywhere near the front; it was five miles to the north at the village of Nauro.
According to McAulay, the 16th Brigade was made up of crack troops, Australia’s best. They had fought in the Middle East and in North Africa. Most, prior to returning to Australia, had also trained in the jungles of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon)
. They were also well outfitted with camouflaged, long-sleeved shirts, long pants, gaiters, steel helmets with nets, and new boots with spikes.
In General Vasey’s War, Horner writes of Vasey’s speech to his commanders: “The Japanese are well trained in jungle warfare. In this form of warfare they are like tigers, cunning, silent and dangerous. Like tigers, too, they are vermin; they must be destroyed. One does not expect a live tiger to get to give himself up to capture so we must not expect the Japanese to surrender. He does not. He must be killed whether it is by shooting, bayoneting, throttling, knocking out his brains with a tin hat or by any other means our ingenuity can devise. Truly jungle warfare is a game of kill or be killed and to play it successfully demands alertness of all senses but particularly of ears and eyes.”
Chapter 8. Marching into the Clouds
Details on Jim Boice and his trek are from Boice’s diary, newspaper articles, and conversations with Boice’s son William Boice Jr.
Boice sent back 1st Lieutenant Bernard Howes with his trail notes, saying that he believed that subsequent groups would “take proportinately greater time on these trails.”
Details on the Kapa Kapa and plans for the overland advance are from Milner, Gailey, Mayo, the National Archives, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, and interviews with veterans of the march.
Specifics of Medendorp’s march are from his report, his lengthy reminiscences, and interviews with his sons and his sister Alice.
Description of the carriers are based on Medendorp’s writings, conversations with villagers of Gabagaba, Powell’s book The Third Force, photographs, and T. E. Dutton’s comprehensive study, The Peopling of Central Papua.
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