It was seldom that anyone got a glimpse of the enemy. Most of the wounded were very indignant about it. I must have heard the remark ‘You can’t see the little bastards!’ hundreds of times in the course of a day. Some of the men said it with tears in their eyes and clenched fists. They were humiliated beyond endurance by the fact that they had been put out of action before even seeing a Japanese.
Yet the 39th Battalion saw Japs – plenty of them. They had been in Moresby from the beginning and had a smattering of junglecraft. The others simply didn’t know how or where to look.
So it went on …
One could visualise what was happening, but one could not see it. Somewhere out in the green, clots of Australians were defending localities which they believed to be important – the ‘key passes’ of the Owen-Stanley range. They believed, because they had been told, that if they held the trail they would hold the range. The Japanese knew better. The Japanese knew that the key to the Owen-Stanley range was high ground, not a valueless trail. Our men were constantly under the fatal misapprehension that if the Japanese surrounded a position, that position was inevitably lost. The humiliating part of it was that any pack of damned fools could surround a position in this country. Our men were being beaten by affection and superstitious respect for the cookhouse! Why couldn’t they realise it would cost them less to hang on without supplies – and take their chance of spending a few days, or even a few weeks, in the bush!
The sole consolation was that wherever the enemy dared to launch frontal, man-to-man attacks, we beat him. But most of the killing was done ‘on the blind’. Someone saw movement. An entire force opened fire in the general direction of the movement, using all available automatic arms. Sometimes I wondered how anyone got killed in this blind shooting, but since our patrols had suffered heavy casualties from it, it was a safe assumption that the enemy had suffered even more heavily. Our small arms were more deadly. The Japanese apparently had no serious supply problem. They were burning up ammunition at a terrific rate. They didn’t seem to care.
*
Wilmot and I reached the brigade position just as it was decided to evacuate. The enemy had broken through on both flanks and was making an enveloping movement. The 53rd Battalion, on the right, had folded up completely across the river, and machine-gun duels were going on six or seven miles in the rear. It looked just about as dirty a spot as it was possible to get into.
A long line of stretcher cases were being brought out under fire by native carriers. Machine-gunners, bent double under guns and ammunition, staggered up the hill with the sweat and mud rolling off them.
My belly felt like lead. I had passed being afraid that a bullet would come out of the leaves and account for me; but I was deadly weary and deadly discouraged – appalled by the sense of being a partisan spectator to a disaster. Also I felt lonely. Everyone else had a job to do with his hands and his fortitude – except me. Everybody else had orders, to go or to stay – except me. My only job was to watch, and nobody cared the price of a matchbox in hell whether I watched or not.
The sequence of events is inextricably confused. I remember pulling myself up every now and then and saying: ‘You’d better remember how things happened and when – after all it is your job. Even if nobody cares whether you do it or not, it is your job.’ But even though I made painfully conscious mental notes, nothing stuck.
Wilmot was very anxious to find Brigadier P., whom he knew personally. But before we found P., the Brigade Major, Hugh C., found us. He ordered us to get out – and get out fast.
C. was the only man in that weary, straggling procession of retreat who looked to be still mentally alert. He was ghastly, mud-splashed and sweat-drenched – but his eyes were still alert and roving. He had been detailed to select a new position for brigade headquarters. You could see him trying to project his mind – to cast his aliveness and alertness like a net over the whole bloody, disintegrating, invisible confusion. You could see him trying to draw in the net of his perception and make its contents cohere, so that they might be used to achieve order and positive purpose.
We travelled together for an hour or so, not saying very much. C. selected as a temporary site a kanaka garden that commanded one of the main bends of the river.
Halfway through the afternoon it had begun to rain again. Everything was sodden, but it was not so cold as it had been higher in the hills. No-one had so much as a pup tent or a ground sheet as protection from the weather. One by one the brigade staff came in. They dropped where they stood in the dripping undergrowth.
Wilmot said he would wait for the brigadier. I decided to go back to Eora. I believed the brigade would drop back there within 48 hours and I wanted to know how the retreat on the flanks was going.
The whole defending force seemed to have fallen to pieces. Stragglers from a dozen different units were making their way back, like sheep, to the trail. The wounded were coming onto the trail from both sides of the river. A few natives were held as stretcher bearers for men who could neither walk nor crawl.
I calculated the enemy was moving troop under cover of darkness well up onto Kagi Ridge and on the spur that dominated the Myola lakes. I left the brigade just after darkness fell. There could be no doubt now. The force that had been sent to recapture Kokoda had been broken and enveloped. The tragic truth was that this envelopment would have signified nothing if we had anchored our defence on properly prepared positions and had known anything about the general lay of the country in which we were fighting.
All night I kept passing lines of wounded men. It was pitch dark. They shuffled at a snail’s pace, holding onto each other in long, pitiful strings. They were in the last stages of exhaustion, but somehow they kept moving. They were constantly sorting and re-sorting themselves. The strongest, the least seriously hurt, overtook the weaker, the more seriously hurt. At the tail of every string, men would drop off and lie face-down in the mud. Then the next string would come along. The leaders would help those who had collapsed into the bushes by the side of the trail.
Some died there. Some recovered a little strength and moved on at the tail-end of another string. There were piles of forest refuse that were host to the same phosphorescent fungus I had seen above Dead Kukukuku. Sometimes a man would find a resting place on one of them. One could see the black shape of his body against the diffuse luminescence. He lay as upon a pyre of heatless embers.
Sometimes a voice, weary and quiet, would come out of the thicket: ‘Dig, I say, dig … are you going to Eora? Then tell them to send a light down the trail, will you? Tell them to send a light, Digger! Tell them to send a light!’
This was their sole complaint – that, in chasmic darkness, there was no light to guide them. A time came when I could pass them no longer. I had hoarded a worn-out flashlight against direct emergency. I flashed the light sparingly – only when the trail petered out into a clay scarp or when there was a log crossing. A line of wounded men, 100 yards long, formed up behind me. The man who walked at my back, his hand on my shoulder, had been shot twice in the chest. Behind him was a man with shrapnel in his forearm and thigh. Every now and then I would stop and turn around and flash on the light to encourage them. They saw nothing by its light that would help them, but it gave them heart. They were led by a man with a light!
After two hours the flashlight battery gave out.
The man who had been shot in the chest said: ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’ I gave him a nip out of my brandy flask and he was asleep, lying in the arsenic weed, before I had straightened up from bending over him. I started to cry. The tears rolled down my face, burning. Now there was no light. The line fell away, disintegrated. I was alone.
Just before dawn I met up with a patrol going out to reconnoitre the Kagi Ridge, and travelled with them for a time. They were raw troops and moved very clumsily and noisily. We at last reached a ridge opposite a Japanese position. The Japanese had built a long line of decoy fires just beyond the crest.
*
Recollection of the next day is very confused. My cough was troublesome and breathing seemed to be getting even more painful. I didn’t know it then, but I had a dose of pneumonia.
The battle remained without form. By now practically the entire available force of Australians had been thrown in, and one by one their main positions were overwhelmed by the enemy. I don’t think that the Japanese were much superior numerically, but they contrived to be superior numerically wherever it counted. Position after position was abandoned because it was held to be in danger of being ‘surrounded’. At every stage the enemy avoided frontal attack.
We had no fresh troops. At no stage did we ever have fresh troops. Every man who took part in the battle for the Owen-Stanleys was exhausted by a march over the range and by living conditions in such camps as Myola. Worse than that, what forces we had were being fed in piecemeal, and defeated in detail. The enemy was completely in command of the situation.
Early in the afternoon I got back on the trail, still congested by streams of wounded, retreating remnants of units, and by fleeing native carriers. I reached Eora village about nine o’clock at night. The natives were still bringing in stretcher cases. Walking wounded were lying or sitting in the mud about the dressing station waiting their turn for attention. I made a halfhearted attempt to help the orderlies for awhile but had to give up.
Word came through that a general withdrawal had been ordered. This meant that most of our forward supply dumps would have to be abandoned – and now there was no limit on rations. Everybody who wanted to eat, ate his fill.
Even though I had not had a meal for 48 hours, I was not particularly interested in food – until I started to eat. Ten minutes or so after cramming down a mess tin full of hot rice and beef, I got ravenously hungry. In the next hour I stowed away two cans of army stew, two packages of army biscuits, liberally spread with cheese and apricot jam, and washed down this gluttonous meal with about three pints of strong tea. I began to feel well – wonderful! The army biscuits had just been broken out and were like iron. My mouth was sore and bled from chewing. I slept for an hour, woke up hungry, and ate more biscuits and jam. Then I wrapped up in three wet blankets and didn’t stir for six hours.
Among reactions to exhaustion this was a new one. But, healthy or not, I felt almost fit next morning, and the cough was easier.
Wilmot came in about ten o’clock in the morning with a story of complete collapse down front. We discussed the situation and decided the only thing to do was to get back to Moresby with the story as fast as possible. We also heard about the Japanese landing at Milne Bay and that the position of the United States marines on Guadalcanal was critical.
The affair out here – now that we had failed to retake Kokoda – was becoming of secondary importance. The remnants of the force would probably withdraw to the Moresby perimeter, and present the Japs with the problem of feeding through enough men to create a sizeable diversion.
Next morning Parer put up another extraordinary performance lugging his camera and gear out of Eora. He threw away all his personal equipment – not even keeping as much as a spare pair of socks. Even so, he had too much weight. A few miles up the trail he threw away the leather case and accessories of his Newman camera. Then the tripod went. Then a Graflex still camera. But he clung grimly to the Newman and his exposed film – staggering with weakness, pale as a ghost, and smiling quietly to himself.
‘An army in retreat, my boy,’ he said, pausing and bobbing his head at the pitiful procession strung out along the trail. ‘Not very pretty, is it? I wonder when we’ll start to win this war? I’ve seen so many retreats. Greece was a picnic compared with this.’
No, it was not a pretty sight. At Eora the wounded had been like clots of flies round the dressing station. They were forever moving restlessly in the mud, and the yellowish rain pelted down on them. The dressing station was a hut with a partition across the middle. One side was reserved for the dying and the other for an operating theatre and surgical ward.
The surgeons performed amputations during the night in the light of flashlights held by orderlies. A canvas stretcher covered by a sheet dipped in disinfectant served as an operating table. The surgeons worked kneeling. There was one mercy – a plentiful supply of anaesthetics.
The only cases that could expect more than perfunctory dressing were those completely immobilised by the nature of their wounds – mostly men shot through the abdomen or head. Limb wounds, unless very severe, were not considered to immobilise the soldier. If with the aid of a stick he could prop himself upright, he had to make his own way back.
It is surprising how much it takes to immobilise a completely determined man. Many did not wait at Eora for attention, but pushed resolutely through toward Templeton’s Crossing and Myola. They knew they had no chance of getting stretcher bearers, and they preferred to take their chance of dying by the side of the trail to the certainty of falling into Japanese hands if they gave up the struggle to keep moving.
The night I came back from Isurava I passed a man who had had his leg blown off just below the knee by a mortar bomb. He had ligatured the stump, applied two shell dressings and wrapped the remainder of the leg in an old copra sack. He crawled and hopped vigorously. He said he was quite strong enough to reach Eora.
An hour after leaving Eora for Templeton’s Crossing, 48 hours later, I passed the same man. He had obtained a dressing at the aid post and gone on. I offered to try to round up stretcher bearers for him, but he said fiercely: ‘If you can get bearers, then get them for some other poor bastard! There are plenty worse off than me.’
At Eora I saw a 20-year-old redheaded boy with shraprel in his stomach. He kept muttering to himself about not being able to see the blasted Japs. When Eora was to be evacuated, he knew he had very little chance of being shifted back up the line. He called to me, confidentially: ‘Hey, dig, bend down a minute. Listen … I think us blokes are going to be left when they pull out. Will you do us a favour? Scrounge us a Tommy gun from somewhere, will you?’
It was not bravado. You could see that by looking in his eyes. He just wanted to see a Jap before he died. That was all.
Such things should have been appalling. They were not appalling. One accepted them calmly. They were jungle war – the most merciless war of all.
I was convinced for all time of the dignity and nobility of common men. I was convinced for all time that common men have a pure and shining courage when they fight for what they believe to be a just cause.
That which was fine in these men outweighed and made trivial all that was horrible in their plight. I cannot explain it except to say that they were at all times cheerful and helped one another. They never gave up the fight. They never admitted defeat. They never asked for help.
I felt proud to be of their race and cause, bitterly ashamed to be so nagged by the trivial ills of my own flesh. I wondered if all men, when they had endured so much that exhausted nerves would no longer give response, were creatures of the spirit, eternal and indestructible as stars.
*
On the hills above Templeton’s Crossing we parted with Parer. He decided, on hearing that 1500 feet of fresh film had been dropped for him at Myola, to stay and photograph the retreat. Apologetically he asked if we could leave him a spare shirt, a pair of socks and some quinine! He clutched the rain-soaked Newman in one hand and his cans of exposed film in the other.
I think Parer must be a genius. It is certain that he is a man of immense character. He is a devout Roman Catholic. I think I understand, now, the quality that makes him say his prayers without fail, night and morning, wherever he is.
One night – at Skin Dewai, I think – he said his p
rayers kneeling in a hut where 50 rough, tough, cursing commandos were going to bed. Someone, who didn’t notice, called out: ‘I say, Parer …’
Parer looked up. ‘Just a minute,’ he said mildly, in a clear, penetrating voice, ‘I am saying my prayers.’ There was silence until he had finished – and no word of comment.
Postscript: On September 24th, 1944, when this book was in galleys, the following notice appeared in the New York Times: ‘Damien Parer, 33 years old, Paramount News war correspondent, has been reported by the Navy Department as having been killed in action by enemy machine-gun fire on Sept. 17 while filming front-line operations at Peleliu Island, east of the Philippines …’
Fighting Back
George Johnston
George Johnston is most famous for his novel My Brother Jack (1964), among other things a terrific account of newspaper life in Melbourne in the 1930s on the Melbourne Argus. The main character is David Meredith, a war correspondent not unlike Johnston.
Johnston was one of the first two correspondents appointed in New Guinea in 1942 – the other was Osmar White. White, however, had little time for Johnston the journalist. He said in a 1990 interview for the Australian War Memorial that, ‘Johnston of course rewrote MacArthur communiqués. I didn’t respect him as a war correspondent. He’s a very nice bloke personally, but I didn’t hold him as a war correspondent. He never tried to beat the propaganda gate.’
Perhaps that is a bit unfair. Johnston’s actual diary entry for October 16th, 1942, the same date as the extract from his book New Guinea Diary published here, shows him well aware of the problem:
Up here everybody is incensed at the new censorship bans including MacArthur’s personal censorship of Stone’s [a journalist’s articles] on his visit here which have been slashed to ribbons to convey the impression (a) that he went right up to the front-line (which he certainly did NOT), and (b) that was NOT his first visit to New Guinea. Everybody is furious and Harold Gaund (U.P.) has cabled a demand that he be recalled or that his resignation be accepted. Censorship now is just plain Gestapo stuff!
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