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By Root 977 0

war was unfolding on Papua New Guinea – after Greenland, the largest island in the world. The Japanese began establishing small forces on the eastern coast in March 1942, with the intention of seizing Port Moresby, capital of Australian-ruled Papua, two hundred miles distant on the south-west shore. Initially the Japanese intended an amphibious descent on Moresby, but this was frustrated by the Coral Sea actions. American success at Midway a month later denied the Japanese any prospect of a swift capture of New Guinea through seaborne landings. Tokyo’s local commander, Col. Tsuji, made a personal decision instead to secure the island the hard way, by an overland advance, and forged an order supposedly from Imperial headquarters to authorise his operation. MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief for the South-West Pacific, deployed his limited strength to frustrate this.

Australian units began moving towards Papua’s north coast in July 1942, but the Japanese secured footholds there first, and began to build up forces for an advance over the Owen Stanley mountain range to Port Moresby. The ensuing battles along its only practicable passage, the Kokoda Trail, were small in scale, but a dreadful experience for every participant. Amid dense rainforest, men struggled for footholds, scrambling through deep mud on near-vertical tracks, bent under crippling weights of equipment and supplies; rations arrived erratically and rain almost daily; disease and insects intensified misery.

‘I have seen men standing knee-deep in the mud of a narrow mountain track, looking with complete despair at yet another seemingly unsurmountable ridge,’ an Australian officer wrote to his former school headmaster. ‘Ridge after ridge, ridge after ridge, heart-breaking, hopeless, futile country.’ The need to manpack all supplies and ammunition rendered the Kokoda Trail campaign a colossal undertaking: every soldier bore sixty pounds, some a hundred. ‘What a hell of a load to lump uphill all the way through mud and slush,’ wrote Australian corporal Jack Craig. ‘Some of us lose our footing and finish up flat out. One feels like just lying there for ever. I don’t think I have been so exhausted in all my life.’ Many men suffered agonies from bleeding haemorrhoids as well as more deadly tropical diseases.

As for the Japanese, an Australian shrugged that ‘This is not murder, killing such repulsive-looking animals.’ But one of his comrades, detailed by an officer to finish off a hideously wounded enemy soldier, wrote afterwards: ‘Then came the beginning of some of the terrible things that happen in combat … I have lived to this day with those terrified eyes staring at me.’ A young chaplain wrote from the rear areas of the Papuan front:

I do not believe there has ever been a campaign when men have suffered hardship, privation and incredible difficulties as in this one. To see these men arrive here wounded and ill from terrible tropical diseases, absolutely exhausted, clothes in tatters and filthy, long matted hair and beards, without a wash for days, having lain in mud and slush, fighting a desperate cruel foe they could not see, emaciated through having been weeks in the jungle, wracked with malaria and prostrated by scrub typhus, has made me feel that nothing is too good for them … I have seen so much suffering and sorrow here that more than ever I have realised the tragedy of war and the heroism of our men.

Observations such as this came from the heart, and were characteristic of a witness who, in the nature of things, could make no comparison with the plight of combatants fighting in Russia, the central Pacific, Burma – the other notably dreadful theatres of war. Conflict in a hostile natural environment, where amenities and comforts were wholly absent, imposed greater miseries than fighting in North Africa or north-west Europe. But the experience of combat for months on end, prey to fear, chronic exhaustion and discomfort, loss of comrades, separation from domestic life and loved ones, bore down upon every front-line fighter, wherever he was. Many, especially