Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009 ISBN 9781741758399
The campaign along the Kokoda Track (or Trail, as my Father’s
generation would have it), is an icon of Australian military achievement.
Pushed back over the Owen Stanleys by a superior Japanese force, the militia forces of Australia eventually halted the attack at Ioribaiwa and Imita Ridge,
and then with the help of AIF forces returned from North Africa, they pushed
the Japanese back to the Northern coast of New Guinea and destroyed them in the
battles around Buna, Gona and Sanananda. There have been many Australian
treatments of the campaign, with Peter Brune’s Those ragged bloody heroes
one of the best, along with the Official History.
The path of infinite sorrow is that altogether rarer
thing, a history of the Kokoda campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. Collie and
Marutani have written the Japanese side of the story using, as a base, interviews
conducted in the early 2000s with some Japanese survivors of the campaign. The
result is an interesting and enlightening book.
Many Australian accounts of the campaign emphasise the
terrible conditions and the fear of an unseen enemy, portraying the Japanese as
supermen, with the jungle being their natural habitat. It is enlightening to
read that the Japanese struggled just as much with the conditions, and saw the
Australians as dangerous enemies, who were rarely seen owing to their natural
ability to fight in the jungle – and brave beyond compare because they wore
hats rather than helmets in battle!
The authors give a good account of the leadup to Kokoda,
describing Japanese attempts to reach Port Moresby by ship failing after the Battle of the Coral Sea. When a force was landed on the coast, its task was not
to reach Moresby, but merely to reconnoitre the track leading to Kokoda to see
if it was suitable for an army to campaign along. Instilled with martial
spirit, the over-enthusiastic officers of the South Seas Detachment turned their
reconnoitring mission into a full-scale assault, and soon overwhelmed the Australian force holding Kokoda.
As the Australians dropped back, the problem of supplying an
attacking force over a precipitous walking track became more acute, and by the
time the Japanese reached Ioribaiwa they were at the end of their tether
logistically and physically. The troops could see the lights of Moresby at
night, but neither had the strength or the numbers to take the next ridge, let
alone face the Allied troops that would have awaited them closer to the town. Supply
was not only a problem along the Track itself, but also to the rear bases at
Buna and Gona, as the combination of Allied air attacks and the prioritising by
the Japanese of the assault on Guadalcanal meant that few supplies were getting
onshore in New Guinea.
The Japanese withdrawal back to the Northern coast became a
rout, with troops falling out of line with disease or hunger, to be left to die
or make a futile final stand when the Australians came down the track. When the
retreat had been completed, the coastal beach-heads were defended by a
force that consisted of some infantry, engineering
and other non-combatant forces, and those ill or wounded troops that could hold a rifle.
Despite an ingenious and deadly system of interlocking
bunkers, it was only a matter of time before the Allied troops (the U.S. Army
had now joined the fray) over-ran the Japanese defences, leaving only a few
able to escape death or imprisonment. It was a complete defeat for the
South Seas Detachment
.
This book is a well-written account, easy to follow for
those unfamiliar with the battles of the campaign and - by using interviews
as the basis for the narrative – brings the reader right into the misery and
pain of soldiering in New Guinea in 1942. There is some discussion of grander
strategy, but as this book is focusing on the soldier’s experience, it is
always in the background.
While there is an
acknowledgement in the text of the brutality and cannibalism of the Japanese
soldiers during the campaign, it is rather lightly brushed over, perhaps in
deference to the feelings of the Japanese who were interviewed. While there can
be some argument that the instances of cannibalism were driven by the extreme
circumstances of the Japanese troops, who were literally dying of hunger by the
end of the campaign, to excuse the bayoneting of bound prisoners in cold blood
with the lines “This is not inconsistent with Japanese military training….Military
training is not for the squeamish; he who hesitates in hand-to-hand fighting is
lost.” is a very cheap way out of looking at the issue. It’s clear in the book
that the Australians were just as proficient in hand-to-hand fighting as the
Japanese, and yet their superiors didn’t find it necessary to make them kill
defenceless people. A greater insight into why the Japanese felt the need to
kill like this would have been a welcome addition to the book. Not many
prisoners were taken by the Australians, as most of the Japanese fought to the
death, and after a few instances of Australians being killed by wounded
Japanese, they “took no chances.” The New Guinea Campaign was war at its cruelest,
of that there is little doubt.
While there is no doubt of the courage of the soldiers on
both sides of this campaign, we can question the strategic and tactical nous of
the officers on both sides. That the Japanese could have ever thought they
could attack Moresby in any sensible way via the track was wrong thinking, and
each step beyond Kokoda made the idea more absurd – they were just wasting men
and material for no good purpose. The Allied tactics of island fighting had yet
to be perfected, and the continued frontal assaults of the bunkers at Buna and
Gona without adequate artillery or tank support were for the most part futile
and wasteful as well.
In the end it was the overwhelming technological and
numerical advantage of Allied ‘planes, artillery and tanks that ensured not
only the end of the New Guinea campaigns, but the defeat of the Japanese Empire. After the war, veterans of Kokoda from both sides struggled to make
sense of their experiences: those few Japanese veterans who made it back to
Japan mostly did not want to relive what had been a terrifyingly traumatic
experience. My great-uncles who fought with the AIF in the campaign also
suffered for the rest of their lives, but at least they were on the winning
side.
Given this is an Australian trade publication, the apparatus
of the book is good – useful maps and notes, and a reasonable bibliography and
index. For the student of the Pacific War, especially of the New Guinea
Campaigns, The path of infinite sorrow is required reading.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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