Losing track of heroism
Peter Ryan
October 27, 2007
THE Kokoda Track is symbolic shorthand for Australia’s deliverance from danger during the Papua New Guinea campaigns of World War II.
It was on November 2, 1942, that we recaptured the Kokoda government station from the Japanese enemy. The devoted courage and resourcefulness of our young soldiers along that sad pathway amply justifies the choice of Kokoda as an emblem, though there was much other heroic fighting in New Guinea, and other tracks of crucial importance.
Who has heard of the Bulldog Track? Yet it was one of the most extraordinary lines of communication in modern military history. The official war historian tells us that the Australian Army never undertook a more ambitious project, “through one of the most difficult and unpleasant areas ever to confront troops”.As one of the few people who have trudged the full length of both tracks, I remember Bulldog as longer, higher, steeper, wetter, colder and rougher than Kokoda, though it did not involve the savage hand-to-hand fighting of the latter.
For the fit and intrepid, both tracks in 1942 offered a route from the south coast of New Guinea, over the towering central mountain ranges and down to the sea on the northern side. Kokoda began at Port Moresby and ended at the Solomon Sea. Bulldog, 240km west of Moresby, began at the mouth of the great Lakekamu River and led north to the beaches of the Bismarck Sea, with its islands of Manus, New Britain and New Ireland.
The purpose of Bulldog Track was to supply and sustain a tiny Australian guerilla force operating in the jungles and mountains behind the formidable enemy bases and airfields at Lae and Salamaua. These had been established after massive Japanese landings in March 1942. Enemy fighter and bomber aircraft ranged easily to our main base at Port Moresby, which suffered more than 100 air raids.
On the ground Australia had only the ridiculous little “army” of Kanga Force: 400 men at most, and often fewer than half that, as malaria, malnutrition and wounds ground them down. And yet, perhaps less ridiculous than its mere numbers might suggest: for example, by moonlight on June 28-29, 1942, they stealthily entered Japanese-occupied Salamaua town and virtually wrecked it, leaving 100 enemy dead, at a cost of three men lightly wounded. For six months on end, Australia’s Kanga Force were the only Allied troops conducting offensive operations against the Japanese in General Douglas MacArthur’s vast Southwest Pacific Area.
No flight of enemy aircraft took off to raid Port Moresby from Lae or Salamaua unobserved by scouts, with warnings flashed to Moresby. Kanga Force also monitored Japanese movements along the Markham River Valley and barge supply traffic around the coast from Madang.Based in hinterland posts around the peacetime goldfields of Wau and the Bulolo Valley - perpetually threatened but never dislodged - Kanga Force remained a thorn in the enemy’s side, a pebble in his shoe, a menacing and mysterious distraction whose shadowy presence held down many thousands of his troops.
The nucleus of Kanga Force was a remnant of old New Guinea hands from the peacetime militia New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. Sometimes identifiable by gorgeous bird of paradise plumes stuck jauntily in their decrepit felt hats, they included bush-wise gold prospectors, government officers, miners, lawyers and clerks. They were indeed a mixed bunch of comrades, from Leo Chui-Kitt, who ran a roadside store, to lawyer Col O’Loghlen who (as Sir Colman) was shortly to succeed to an Irish baronetcy. But the majority of Kanga Force troops were commandos, drawn from Australian independent companies. They were tough, well trained and apt at learning the special skills of New Guinea jungle fighting.
Thus, despite its puny size, Kanga Force was a military asset of great value, but only if it could be maintained and reinforced. And how could this be managed from Port Moresby, hundreds of kilometres away on the other side of New Guinea, across mountains, swamps and sea?
At first sight, the obvious answer was by air. Flying time was under two hours. The pre-war gold-mining companies had used air transport as a matter of course. The airstrip at Wau (despite the fearsome slope of its surface, a mountain bang-up against one end and a reputation for being suddenly blocked out by cloud) could readily handle the universal air workhorse of those days, the DC3 (or Dakota). But for long periods in New Guinea there simply were no transport aircraft. Major General Basil Morris, commanding in Port Moresby, complained to Australia that the inevitable fate of his Kanga Force would be death by slow starvation.
Sometimes a transport squadron of the US Fifth Army Air Force would roost briefly in Port Moresby and work frantically on what were deemed the most desperate tasks. The chance of their visiting Wau was always slim: it would have been suicidal to have flown lumbering and unarmed DC3s so close to Lae and Salamaua without strong fighter escort, but fighters, too, were perilously few.
In May 1942, transports and escorts became simultaneously available for a few days. Twenty sorties between May 23 and 26 landed virtually the whole of the 5th Independent Company (about 300 men, with gear) on the grass strip at Wau. Some of these flights were made by civilian aircraft from Australian commercial airlines.
It was a highly successful experiment, the first in the Pacific, of landing battle-ready troops almost directly into action and was developed into a war-winning Allied technique for casualty-saving advances. But although it was a brilliant shaft of light for Kanga Force, it was short-lived: air supply ceased under the greater urgencies of Kokoda and Milne Bay. Kanga Force retightened its belt and fell back once more on the meagre deliveries that could be sent overland.
Bulldog Track really began wharfside in Port Moresby. Men, stores, equipment and ammunition, all were crammed into diminutive wooden schooners or tiny coastwise trading steamers for the day-and-a-night voyage west around the Gulf of Papua to the Lakekamu River mouth. The gulf was visited by Japanese submarines that sometimes surfaced to dispatch a victim by shellfire; we were not considered worth the dignity or the expense of a torpedo. I made my 1942 journey in Matafele, a 600-tonne rust-bucket that, not long afterwards, disappeared at sea with all hands.
My bold http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,22653320-31477,00.html?from=public_rss
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