Perhaps White’s feelings stem from an entry the next day in Johnston’s real diary – ‘Barney Darnton is going up to Wanigela for the Buna show and I have been asked to go as the Australian representative. At first decided to go and then decided against it. Too many other things are in the air and it’s the wrong time to be cut off from all other news sources.’
While Johnston did go to the north-coast battles at Buna and Gona later in the year, it indicates a different kind of reporting to White’s – White walked in and was there with the soldiers, observing and telling their stories. Johnston, for the most part, was back at headquarters getting stories by talking to blokes who had been there.
In My Brother Jack Johnston has his alter ego, David Meredith, say:
I never walked the Kokoda Trail, although I did walk some of it. I saw something of the fighting at Buna and Gona, but my visits there were short. In a sense these were no more than the necessary skirmishes made to pick up the vibrant colour, the human textures, that would be woven into the more detailed and comprehensive pictures of the struggle which could only be done competently – or so I was able to convince myself – from some base headquarters far behind the fighting front.
After the war he was appointed first editor of the magazine Australasian Post , married Charmian Clift and went to live on a Greek island to write fiction full-time in 1954. My Brother Jack was the resultant Australian masterpiece, for which differences in journalistic attitude can be forgiven. Johnston died in 1970.
*
I have an idea that the name of the Kokoda Trail is going to live in the minds of Australians for generations, just as another name, Gallipoli, lives on as freshly today, 27 years after it first gained significance in Australian minds. For thousands of Australians who have walked the weary, sodden miles of this dreadful footpath – and these Australians are the fathers of the next generation – it will be an unforgettable memory.
Five days ago the Japanese began their resistance again – on the wide shallow plateau of the Gap, the pass through the forbidding spurs of the main range. The weather is bad, the terrain unbelievably terrible, and the enemy is resisting with a stubborn fury that is costing us many men and much time. Against the machine-gun nests and mortar pits established on the rugged spurs and steep limestone ridges our advance each day now is measured in yards. Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6700 feet, fighting viciously because they have only a mile or two to go before they reach the peak of the pass and will be able to attack downhill – down the north flank of the Owen Stanleys. That means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonising track, who have buried many of their cobbers, and who have seen so many more going back, weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and bullets and grenades of the enemy. Tiny villages which were under Japanese domination a few weeks ago are back in our hands – Ioribaiwa, Nauro Creek, Menari, Efogi, Kagi, Myola – and we are fighting now for Templeton’s Crossing.
Fresh troops are going up the track, up the slimy trail from which the tide of war has ebbed, leaving the debris of death and destruction all the way along the green walls that flank the snaking ribbon of rotten mud. The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotchpotches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects. I remember years ago how we used to laugh at newsreels showing the motley troops of China when they were fighting the Japanese. These men on the Kokoda track look more unkempt, more ragged, than any of the Chinese of those old film shots. The men coming back, sick or wounded, look worse. But you can see they are rather proud of the scraps of rag tied round their feet, the slings made of mud-caked puttees, the slouch hats that look like dish-cloths. They have already fought the Jap and they are willing to give advice to newcomers.
‘How’re you keepin’ sport?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘What are the Japs like?’
‘Stiff!’
‘Wait till we get stuck into ’em!’
‘OK, sport. We’re waitin’.’
Already a new language is springing up on this green and slimy trail. Whenever Australians are in an area for long enough they soon invent a new slang to describe it. They adapt themselves to discomforts, give them ironical names and laugh them off. A few weeks ago these troops were still talking the language of the Middle East, which had been their home for more than two years. They talk now like the men who have been in New Guinea for months. The curses of New Guinea are varied enough to provide troops with their main subjects of conversation; but, in rough order, the worst are mosquitoes, mud, mountains, malaria and monotony. The ‘mozzies’ and malaria are worst down near the coast, but they are speedily replaced by the mud and mountains as you go inland. The monotony, of course, is everywhere, except where the fighting provides something special to think about.
They love mosquito stories, and the more fantastic they are the better they like them. There was one about a Jap airman who was found lying on a hill. The official explanation was that he had been shot down by our fighters, but the boys in the know say that he was picked up at Lae by a mozzy, who carried him over the Owen Stanleys, looking for a nice quiet place to eat him. He saw a flight of Fortresses heading north, and, mistaking them for his wife and kids, he dropped the Jap and fell into formation.
I heard another one on the same lines about an ack-ack gunner who caught a mosquito in his sights, and, mistaking it for a Zero, opened fire with a Bofors gun. The third shell chipped one wing, and the fourth exploded right under his tail. The boys raised a cheer as they saw him come down smoking, but instead of crashing he picked up a rock and threw it at them. They can show you the rock, too.
Moresby’s best mosquito joke, I think, is a perfectly authentic signboard that stands alongside a shallow pool on the main road in the garrison. It was erected by an anti-malaria squad which forgot to paint in the hyphen. The pool was filled with gamboesia, the little imported minnow that eats mosquito larvae, and the sign reads: WARNING. DO NOT SPRAY. MOSQUITO EATING FISH.
On the Kokoda track, however, after you’ve been walking a few hours, you soon get above the mosquito country. As the troops toiled and grunted up they would often stop and gasp with amazement at the enormous butterflies that drifted to and fro, or alighted on their arms to drink the sweat. The insect life, from scorpions to butterflies, is impressive.
However, you eventually reach a stage when the novelty of flora and fauna, and even of the Japs, gradually wears off. Your mental processes allow you to be conscious of only one thing – ‘the track’, or, more usually, ‘the bloody track’. You listen to your legs creaking and stare at the ground and think of the next stretch of mud, and you wonder if the hills will ever end. Up one almost perpendicular mountain face more than 2000 steps have been cut out of the mud and built up with felled saplings inside which the packed earth has long since become black glue. Each step is two feet high. You slip on one in three. There are no resting places. Climbing here is the supreme agony of mind and spirit. The troops have christened this stretch ‘The Golden Staircase’.
Worn out and sodden with sweat – notebook and cigarettes were just soggy pulp – we stared up the endless steps that twisted up into the tree-tops. There was a long pause.
‘Think I’ll wait for a lift,’ somebody murmured reflectively.
A longer pause broken only by the laboured gasp of breathing. We waited for somebody to start the climb. A young corporal turned to me with a look of disgust.
‘I suppose we’d better get cracking,’ he said. ‘But what gives me a pain in the guts is to think that I was the bloody idiot who used to go to bloody mountains for his bloody holidays!’
Near this point is a tiny jungle camp where the Japanese had their advanced headquarters only a couple of weeks ago. The Australians have already erected a rough signpost bearing the legend ‘Under New Management’. The whole track is studded with these signposts that testify to the unquenchable humour of the Diggers. Among the anonymous c
artographers and signwriters whose pastime it is to erect these noticeboards there doesn’t seem to be much unanimity. The track starts off with a beautifully painted board bearing the name, in mock Japanese characters, of ‘Tokyo Road’. Getting up toward Imita Ridge, where the Australian withdrawal ended last month, it quite inexplicably becomes ‘Buna Boulevard’. Less than a mile beyond stands a fingerpost bearing the neat inscription ‘Kokoda Highway’, but by the time you have reached the next ridge the name changes again to ‘Rabaul Road, via Kokoda and Buna’.
Near the end of the motor road, if you can use the word ‘road’ to define a tortuous, mud-covered and unbelievably narrow switchback that tunnels through the green forest, three signs have been erected. The first reads: ‘To next stopping place – by air, 3 miles; by foot, 3 months.’ Fifty yards on we come to ‘Sorry, no taxis. All drivers called up.’ The final notice reads: ‘Get your travel priority here.’
At the end of the ‘road’, where only a thin, slimy foot track spills itself down a slippery and almost perpendicular wall of red clay, there is a crudely built cookhouse, considerably less pretentious than even the average army cookhouse in the field. This calling place, famous along the track, is the ‘Café de Kerbstone – Gestapo Gus, Proprietor’. A small tent back along the track is labelled ‘All-night Diner’.
At the moment this track is Australia’s road of adventure and you must never be surprised at the people you meet or the tales you hear.
Yesterday, beneath a tangle of lawyer vines, I yarned in the drizzling rain with a British Army officer who had carried the gleaming badges of the East Lancashires into a strange setting. The man was Major H.M. Ervine-Andrews, who won the Victoria Cross in the retreat to Dunkirk. And we talked – of all things – about salmon fishing in Ireland.
It is along this track that you meet the real traditional Australian hospitality. You find it in wayside tents, in tumbledown native huts, and in rude shelters made of branches leaning against the knife-edge roots of jungle trees. The scrub is parted, and a grinning face, usually unshaven, pokes through with the invitation ‘Are you in a tearin’ hurry?’ A grimy thumb is jerked over a sun-tanned shoulder with the words, ‘I’ve got a billy on now, and the tea’s almost ready.’
The tea is always good Australian billy tea, and the yarns you hear are always worth listening to. The talk is largely of three Ts – the track, the tucker and Tojo (any Japanese is ‘Tojo’). But you may hear, too, of experiences in Bardia, Benghazi, Greece, Lebanon or ‘good old Cairo’, for these men have been around. They haven’t struck anything tougher than this jungle war, but I’ve yet to hear a single man complain.
A tumbledown native hut somewhere in New Guinea is the centre of all punting activity concerning the Melbourne Cup. It carries the sign: ‘Quotations for Melbourne Cup. Best Odds Given. No Credit.’ The bookie told me Skipton was favourite, but I could get 5 to 1 if I ‘jumped in early’.
His book for the last two Melbourne Cups had been in the Middle East, but business was good here, and bets had come down the track from Myola Lakes, Templeton’s Crossing, Efogi, Kagi, Menari, Nauro Creek and Ioribaiwa – bets ranging from ‘two bob each way’ to ‘20 quid straight out’.
Single pages torn from newspapers, showing starters, jockeys and weights, have gone almost from hand to hand the length of the jungle track, until eventually they have disintegrated.
These grand fellows along ‘Tokyo Road’ have a great hunger for news of the mainland, and all it means to them. I have seen the tattered remnants of a six-weeks’-old newspaper, which has been read – advertisements and all – by an estimated number of 600 men, and has travelled 50 miles up and down the track before being written off as no longer legible.
All the way up the track you meet small, sturdy natives, who pick their way barefooted through the mud, quietly and steadily as though they could go on for ever. The boys from the Middle East called them ‘wogs’ at first, because it was their name for the Arabs. Soon they learnt the New Guinea army term, which is ‘boong’. Before they have been there long they are calling them ‘sport’, which seems to be the second A.I.F.’s equivalent for ‘Digger’.
There is nothing more interesting to watch than the growing friendship between the Australian soldier and the Papuan. It is a goodhumoured, rather paternal relationship, with a lot of genuine kindliness in it. As a whole the New Guinea natives are nimble and tough, and they retain the physical fortitude and the honesty of primitive peoples unspoiled by casual contacts with the white men. It is their uncomplaining and lion-hearted endurance, and their innocence of greed and deceit, which have won the hearts of the troops.
Like all other colonial races, the Papuans have learned to treat the white man with a certain amount of awe. They call him ‘taubada’, which means something like ‘lord’ or ‘master’, and they do what he tells them. They are a little bewildered to hear the white man call: ‘How are you, sport?’ as they pass him, but I do not think that it is having any ill-effects on their morale, and I think it is helping to develop in them a vague sense of loyalty to a cause which they can only dimly begin to understand. The only recompense they get is a few handfuls of cigarettes, and it is the only recompense they fully understand. The troops are generous with their smokes, and a cigarette means more to a Papuan than a pound note.
Life changes as you push up the track. Standards of living deteriorate, sometimes below normally accepted standards even of primitive existence. Thoughts become sombre, humour takes on a grim, macabre quality. When men reach the nadir of mental and physical agony there are times when sickness or injury, or even death, seems like something to be welcomed. Near Efogi, on a slimy section of the track that reeks with the stench of death, the remains of an enemy soldier lies on a crude stretcher, abandoned by the Japanese in retreat. The flesh has gone from his bones, and a white, bony claw sticks out of a ragged uniform sleeve, stretching across the track. Almost every Australian who passes, plodding up the muddy rise that leads to the pass, grasps the skeleton’s grisly hand, shakes it fervently and says: ‘Good on you, sport!’ before moving wearily on.
There are many Japanese graves, some crude, some elaborate, all marked with the piece of sapling bearing Japanese ideographs. There are many crudely pencilled signs stuck in the bushes or nailed to the trees: ‘Bodies two Australians ––th Battalion, 25 yards into bush’; ‘Twelve Jap bodies 50 yards north-west’; ‘Unknown Australian body, 150 yards down slope’. In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long lines of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgettable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war.
There are the bodies, too, of native carriers, tossed aside by the Japs to die, discarded callously and left unburied in the jungle. These natives were recruited in Rabaul, sent to Buna roped together in the stinking holds of Japanese freighters, and then thrown into the enemy’s carrier lines. They received little food, no medical attention, and payment with worthless, newly-printed Japanese 1s. notes of their invasion currency. They died in their hundreds of overwork, malnutrition and sickness.
Since then the Japs have made their stand in the toughest area of the pass through the Owen Stanleys – a terrible terrain of thick mountain timber, great rocks drenched in rain, awesome precipices and chasms. Often the troops have to make painfully slow progress by clawing with hands and feet at slippery rock faces overlooking sheer drops into the jungle. The almost constant rain or mist adds to the perils of sharp limestone ridges, narrow ledges flanked by chasms, slimy rocks and masses of slow-moving mud.
In this territory the Japanese are fighting, with a stubborn tenacity that is almost unbelievable, from an elaborate system of prepared positions along every ridge and spur. Churned up by the troops of both armies, the track itself is now knee-deep in thick, black mud. For the last ten days no man’s clothing has been dry and the troops have slept – when sleep was possible – in pouring rain under sodden blankets.
Each man carries all his personal equipment, firearms, ammunition supply and five days’ rations. Every hour is a nightmare.
General Allen, who fought in the last war and who has been leading these Australians in the attack on the Kokoda Trail, says without any hesitation: ‘This is the toughest campaign of the A.I.F. in this or any other war.’
Yet the fighting spirit of the Australians is inspirational. Today I spoke to some of the badly wounded. One man had a terrible wound caused by a bullet from a Japanese sniper which had entered his face and come out from his chest. He grinned at me and said: ‘We can’t be worried, sport. You can’t afford to lose your sense of humour in this bloody country!’
The other day I was given the copy of a letter written home by one of these young Australians – a NSW private named Barney Findlay. It’s worthwhile reprinting some of it:
Some of the old unit are so thin now that you would be shocked to see them. This trip is a physical nightmare. We have been overloaded all the way, and all of us are carrying on our backs more than native porters do. Remember those tinpot marches of two hours in the morning we used to grumble about? They weren’t very much training for this. Yesterday we were 12 hours on the track and most of us were ‘out on our feet’, but we had to keep going. It’s hard to explain how gruelling these marches are, but I’ll try.
You spend four hours rising 2000 feet painfully step by step with your heart pounding in your throat, resting every 100 feet of rise. And then when you gain the top, it is only 15 feet wide, and you immediately start to descend 2000 feet. This is dangerous as well as painful, because you get ‘laughing knees’, and only your prop stick in front of you keeps you from falling headlong. The farther down you go the weaker your knees become, but you don’t lie down and die as you feel like doing, you keep resting and going on and on.
Eyewitness Page 25