The Way It Was in New Guinea

Hell’s Battlefield: The Australians in New Guinea in World War II
by Phillip Bradley
Allen & Unwin, 2012, 528 pages, $49.99

Phillip Bradley, in my eyes, stands established as a high authority on Australia’s military history in the Pacific. His status rests not only on his powerful, thorough and scrupulous use of a scholar’s normal sources: the documents and archives, careful and extended interviews with surviving veterans, and so on. All this is underpinned by what I call the sometimes brutal discipline of the boot: however difficult and dangerous it may now have become to reach a former battlefield, or the more obscure clashing place of patrols, Bradley has been there. The man has worn out as much of his own boot-leather on battlefields as many a soldier has shredded in his whole service.

This is clear from his several earlier and excellent books covering the Wau, Lae and Salamaua cam­paigns; the Markham and Ramu rivers; the brilliant and gallant Australian victory at Kaiapit.

During the (roughly) two years covered by those actions, I had continuous active service in “Bradley’s area”: native affairs administrator and magistrate for native matters; scout, coastwatcher, participant in pitched battles; general Army dogsbody. Sometimes ranging hundreds of kilometres into Japanese-held territory, I had a wide view of the whole scene, even if from a curiously detached angle.

Meeting Bradley half a century later, his sketches and photographs lately taken on the very spots made it all live again. (“Now, you’ll recall this grassy knoll just behind Wandumi village …”) We were standing there together!

The history of their own warlike past seems each year to reach out to more and more Australians. At the drop of a hat they will cross the world to attend some tragic anniversary in Turkey, the unveiling in London of a new memorial to our airmen of the Second World War, the dedication of yet another symbol for the thousands slaughtered in the trenches of France and Belgium.

Or, nearer home, they will trek for themselves the course of the ill-omened Kokoda Track, or go to Rabaul to say a further prayer for the thousand Australian captives sunk in the Japanese prison ship Montevideo Maru.

And, we must suppose, for each Australian who so ventures abroad, half a dozen will be reading about it all. Publishers pour forth a stream of new books, some of them glowing additions to our national legend, many of them horrible botches which had better been aborted at the instant of conception. The arrival of Hell’s Battlefield could not have been better timed, for offering a fine example of how the job should be done.

For starters, the volume is crisply designed and clearly typeset. It invites not merely reading, but keeping on your shelves for reference for ever, for its well organised statistics, tables, bibliographies and references. It has been stoutly bound—a real book from Griffin Press in Australia. The maps, generously supplied, have a detailed clarity which I have rarely seen surpassed. A shrewd selection of pictures (all good, even if in some cases also ghastly) completes the process of our understanding. And as a final earnest of its good manners the pages (well—mostly) will lie open on your table while you read them.

Naturally, most of this book is occupied by the hairy-chested, red-blooded business of actual fighting: the fierce attacks with Owen gun and bayonet, the stealthy ambush with bomb and bullet, and the consequential deaths, woundings, rescues and escapes. All this Bradley handles with his accustomed balance and clarity.

Again, as we expect of him, he presents for modern eyes all the concomitant horrors of tropical warfare, even when the guns are not firing: oppressive heat; the stifling claustrophobia of dense vegetation—tall grasses as often as jungle; deadly or depressing malaria and a host of other diseases; the constant rain which kept men soaked to the skin for days (sometimes weeks) on end; the agonising, days-long stretcher-borne journeys by the wounded, out of battle and towards medical succour. We are spared nothing of the suffering of the earth-bound foot soldier. That’s how it was.

However, the author finds space (and understanding) for several themes of quite a different order, and far from the foxholes. They were more likely to lurk in General MacArthur’s plush headquarters in Melbourne or Brisbane; or in some caucus committee in Canberra; or in the more spartan but still safe, dry and clean HQ of New Guinea Force in Port Moresby. Some are of great interest, though small edification.

Even the flying lead of the front line provides no sure protection from the dubious hand of politics, and New Guinea offers no exception to this unhappy rule. The Supreme Commander, US General Douglas MacArthur, was perhaps the most political commander of modern times. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, to support his manoeuvrings with his own Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, or the iron-willed US Naval Chief, Admiral King, or even President Roosevelt himself, he would order up a victory as we might place a string of sausages on our shopping list. Thus, late in 1942, at Buna on the north coast of Papua, his own General Harding, in command of two American regiments, was making no progress. MacArthur sacked Harding and handed the job to the Australians, with directions to hurry. The task fell to the single 2/9 Infantry Battalion, though it was unprepared for such a sudden assignment out of the blue. Despite the handicap of such a bad start, these magnificent men delivered MacArthur what he wanted on December 18, 1942. But did anyone ask by how much the butcher’s bill had been increased by the exigencies of politics? How many more young Australians might have lived to “go home to Mum” if their gallant enterprise had remained a purely military operation?

Smoothly co-ordinated field operations by Allied ground forces were hamstrung by the Australian eccentricity of running two separate armies. One was the true corps d’élite of the Second Australian Imperial Force, created early in the war and enlisted to serve anywhere in the world the Empire called them. The other was the less highly regarded militia, intended for home service within Australian territory. Relations between the two armies were sometimes poor, and in New Guinea officers as high-ranking as brigadiers (who should have known better) sometimes treated the militia with open dismissive contempt. Bradley gives examples. True, some militia performances were disappointing. Yet surely it means something that, when wartime dust finally settled over New Guinea, only one Australian unit emerged with the right to inscribe “Kokoda” among the battle honours on its colours: the 39th Battalion, of the militia.

That judicious scholar Gavin Long, Australia’s official historian of the war, held that we had laid on the New Guinea people “burdens heavier than we were prepared to accept ourselves”. We certainly failed to draw out the many thoughtful contributions they might have made to our joint “war effort”, if we had asked them. (Bradley knows much of this; see, for example, his pages 44 to 46, where he extols the brave Sergeant Katuwe’s exploits on the Kokoda Track. It would make me happy if he could make more space for “Indigenous Participation” in his next edition.)

Patrolling high in the Saruwaged Mountains north of Lae, my little group of tough constables and I were most unexpectedly fired on one day by a strong Japanese patrol traversing what we had hitherto regarded as “our patch”. Pato and Watute, two barefoot black veterans, volunteered to investigate. Minus their uniforms, suitably dirtied up, and clad in grubby, ragged loincloths, they vanished for a week to move about among the locals, chewing betel nut and smoking as they gossiped the nights away. (Pato understood the local language.) They returned with an account (in Pidgin) of a detailed plan by the Japanese high command to evacuate their entire Lae garrison. (Too hazardous to maintain it, with the Americans now in such control of air and sea.)

Here, surely, was golden intelligence for General Herring, GOC of New Guinea Force. As soon as a rendition into passable English could be drafted, it was radioed to Port Moresby.

There followed a rather long silence. His eventual response was to disparage Watute and Pato’s masterly deductions as mere “native rumours”. Herring’s reward came a couple of months later when, with sound and fury, strong Australian forces “burst” their way into Lae. There was nobody there. Game, set and match to two elderly black detectives.

New Guinea was like that, and may Phillip Bradley go on writing about it for years to come.