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To Salamaua, by Phillip Bradley; Cambridge University Press, 2010, 390 pages, $59.95.

Phillip Bradley established a high reputation with his two earlier studies of important operations in the New Guinea fighting in the Second World War; they were On Shaggy Ridge and The Battle for Wau. His new book, To Salamaua, adds to his already substantial laurels.

It cannot, for the author, have been an “easy write”, for the events spread themselves over a long slice of time and a broad swathe of country. They open in March 1942, when the Japanese invaders established for themselves powerful bases and airfields at Lae and Salamaua. These seaports on New Guinea’s north-east coast placed Port Moresby within range of Japanese bomber and fighter aircraft, and heavy raids were frequent. The enemy remained in occupation for over a year and a half, until Australian forces re-entered Lae on September 4, 1943, and Salamaua a few days later.

Although fighting occurred somewhere on most days of those painful eighteen months, it consisted chiefly of small and scattered guerrilla-type clashes, deep in the wide-spreading Lae–Salamaua hinterlands of mountains, swamps and jungles. Typically, little bands of a dozen or two dozen green-clad Australian infantrymen or commandos would fall upon parties of Japanese in ferocious close attack through thick jungle curtains. The Australians might be armed with sub-machineguns, their faithful .303 rifles, with perhaps a Bren light machinegun. Japanese parties tended to have stronger numbers, but they almost always suffered heavier casualties. It was not at all unusual to find a dozen dead Japanese on the ground after an action which had cost our troops two or three fatalities; an extreme example was the engagement at Northern Knoll, where the enemy lost eighty-two men compared with six Australians. But no Allied soldier of that campaign can ever forget the dogged heroism of his enemy: “surrender” was not a word they knew.

Only two episodes involving substantial forces offered Bradley’s pen the chance to spread itself a little, depicting the high drama of a substantial “clash of armies”. They were the

sea–air Battle of the Bismarck Sea early in 1943, and the land-based tussle over possession of the inland goldmining town of Wau.

In the Bismarck Sea affair, the Japanese sent a convoy of sixteen ships from their main base at Rabaul, carrying reinforcements and supplies for their dwindling Lae and Salamaua garrisons. Combined US and Australian air forces smashed the convoy to atoms, sinking outright twelve of the sixteen Japanese ships. It was an emphatic demonstration that the enemy had lost superiority in the air, and a clear pointer to our eventual victory in the Pacific.

Inland, at Wau, a strong Japanese force from Salamaua showed brilliant enterprise by getting right into the edges of Wau town, bringing small-arms fire to bear on the airstrip. The enemy, by using old and overgrown tracks which we had neglected, achieved complete surprise. Wau (as Bradley recounted in detail in his earlier book) was saved only by the rushed arrival by air of elements of the Australian 17th Brigade: if the Bismarck Sea battle had boosted Allied confidence in final victory, Wau was a caution that much blood would yet be spilled in achieving it.

Readers today are told at once by Bradley what was at the time a strategic secret, kept well hidden from the men in the field fighting the battles: our higher command truly wanted Salamaua to be recaptured, but not too quickly. Salamaua, in a sense, was a feint, a decoy; as long as the Japanese continued to believe it was our prime objective, they continued to reinforce it with troops drawn off from Lae, which had indeed fallen into a feeble state when we assaulted it early in September.

There was, however, one other reason for Lae’s weakness: the Japanese, seeing the writing on the wall, had rescued many troops by evacuating them inland and northward across the mountains. This stealthy withdrawal had been detected as early as May 1943, by two immensely shrewd and brave native policemen, members of my own small intelligence patrol in the high country north of the Markham River. Naturally their discovery was radioed instantly to General Herring’s New Guinea Force Headquarters in Port Moresby, where it was brushed aside as “native rumour”. Not until September 15 did Herring signal to his senior commanders on the spot that these overland withdrawals had in fact occurred.

One of my few disappointments with Bradley’s first-rate book is that (unless I missed it) he makes no reference to the work of the police anywhere, although the Royal Papua and New Guinea Constabulary was on the Australian Army’s War Establishment, and their services in the face of the enemy towered out of all proportion above their scanty numbers. (An afterthought: perhaps a little more acknowledgment would have been in order also for the long-suffering native cargo-carriers without whose sore labours supply would simply have failed.)

Present at Salamaua were all the command difficulties one expects in scattered and complex military operations between allies. General MacArthur was up to his usual tricks of claiming more credit than he deserved. The early US troops who landed on the beach south of Salamaua were green and of limited effectiveness; their starchy Colonel Archibald Roosevelt threw a prima donna act at having to serve under Australian command. (He was lucky.) There were edgy relations between New Guinea Force HQ in Port Moresby (Lt-General Herring) and the commander on the spot (Maj-General Savige). There were personal antipathies—some extending back to the First World War I— between certain Australian colonels and brigadiers. The newly appointed commander of our brilliant 17th Brigade, Murray Moten, was too portly for the hard track work or inspecting his forward troops, and earned reproof. (Behind his back, I never heard any of his men call him anything but “Custard Guts” – not a good look.)

Bradley’s treatment of these hiccups is judicious and tactful, but the facts are there for any reader with eyes to see.

Forgivable strains sometimes broke the surface in areas where lead was flying. On August 19, General Berryman, Brigadier Moten and Lt-Colonel Conroy went forward to inspect an area recently recaptured, and went “poking about the bushes with their pistols”. Enraged at their gratuitous (and dangerous) intervention, that peerless infantry officer Captain Cam Bennett of the 2/5 Battalion snapped at the general: “I wish to God you’d go to buggery and take the brigadier with you!” Berryman, very senior and very tough—not for nothing was he nicknamed “Berry the Bastard”—took the path of wisdom, roared with laughter and said “Come on, Moten. We must be worrying Bennett.”

Phillip Bradley describes the terrain with terse accuracy, though its full horrors must always escape anyone who has not actually walked (or crawled) in it: steep, high, jungle-matted, wet and cold. (He does not mention the particular besetting torment of loathsome, ravenous and pants-invading leeches.)

Damien Parer found the going tougher than Kokoda. As in his other books, Bradley shows the sovereign virtue of a writer who has traversed most of the tracks for himself. I suspect that he has worn out as much of his own boot leather as any soldier who fought there.

The men were ravaged by malaria, scrub typhus, dysentery and skin diseases. Rations were scanty and starvation often just round the corner. Treatment of the wounded, though devoted, was inescapably rough; take for example the man with a ghastly sucking chest wound, being stitched together for his agonising journey back: on the ground, out in the open, at night, by a medical orderly (not a doctor). With the enemy near, the only safe lighting for the job was the glow of a cautiously drawn cigarette.

The author populates his grim green world with true portraits of the men who endured it. We see the heroic and saintly photographer Damien Parer, lugging his heavy camera, but ready always to put it down to give a man a hand. When not actually photographing, he was busy dragging out a wounded soldier under fire, or carrying supplies desperately needed by the men up front.

We see the huge and amazing stretcher-bearer “Bull” Allen. Awarded the Military Medal earlier at Wau for his recues under fire of wounded men, he emerged even more frequently from the jungle at Salamaua with a wounded man (alas, sometimes with a dead one) across his shoulders. It was the general view on the spot that he had amply earned the VC several times over: the Australians gave him no further recognition, but the Americans awarded him their Silver Star.

This is a well-made book, and well edited. (I found only one actual error: The new US airstrip at Tsili Tsili was in the Lower Watut Valley, not the Upper Watut—very different terrain indeed.) The maps, vital to the full understanding of such a story, are well chosen and plentiful. Unfortunately, they are not reproduced as clearly as the maps in the Official War History (to some of which these present ones appear to be indebted).

Bradley has performed two signal services: he has created a splendid history for future generations; and he has built a fine memorial to the men who served.

Perhaps his work will encourage scholars and writers to move on from the over-supply of hackneyed and often ill-conceived books about Kokoda. It might, even, help indirectly to expose the false and fatuous delusions of the Left about their “Battle for Australia”.

A collection of Peter Ryan’s columns, many of them with wartime themes, is in production with Quadrant Books.