The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [29]
At Isurava, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner and his men were under orders to “stand and fight.” If any man could hold, it was Honner. He was widely regarded as the best company commander in the Australian army and his unit, the 39th, was the top unit in the Australian militia.
Honner’s men watched the approach of Horii’s troops. Adorned with leaves and branches they marched “as purposefully as soldier ants.” As the Japanese neared Isurava, they divided: One group scrambled up Naro Ridge, which overlooked Isurava; another moved to the east in the vicinity of the Abuari waterfall; the third, advancing from Deniki, stuck to the track.
At 7:00 a.m. on August 26, the battle for Isurava commenced with the crack of rifles, the insistent pounding of Juki heavy machine guns, and mortar and mountain-gun fire.
Despite the dramatic beginning to the battle, General Horii was actually biding his time, waiting for nightfall. Twelve hours later, when darkness descended over the mountains, Horii’s troops began to move out. Once in position, they began to rhythmically chant, beginning in the rear and rising to the front lines like a crashing wave. Then, the cries of the Nankai Shitai soldiers tore through the jungle: “Banzai! Long live the Emperor!” Suddenly “all hell broke loose,” wrote Honner. Horii’s troops were “shooting, stabbing, hacking, in a…surge of blind and blazing fury.”
It was a suicidal assault, and the ensuing battle was a blur. Men screamed, bayonets flashed, bullets ripped through flesh. Separated by only a few yards of jungle, they lunged for each other’s vital areas like wide-mouthed animals. Honner’s men had never encountered such rage. They fired haphazardly into the tangle of onrushing soldiers. Japanese fell by the dozens, but still they came.
If not for the timely arrival of elite AIF soldiers, Isurava might have fallen that evening. But together Honner’s men and the fresh AIF forces beat back the Japanese. According to Honner, the reinforcements were a “providential blessing.” Honner’s men were “gaunt spectres with gaping boots and rotting tatters of uniform hanging around them like scarecrows…. Their faces had no expression, their eyes sunk back into their sockets. They were drained by [disease], but they were still in the firing line…” One AIF soldier wrote that he “could have cried when [he] saw them.”
The morning of August 27 dawned quietly, and the Australians began to search the jungle for what Honner grimly called the “jetsam of death.” Lacking litters, medics draped bloodstained men over their shoulders and floundered back to camp.
On the Australians’ eastern flank, the scene was just as grim. Unable to stop the oncoming Japanese, Australian soldiers lunged into the overgrown jungle, leaving behind ammunition, food, clothing, and weapons. Soon, according to Honner, “Mortar bombs and mountain gun shells burst among the tree tops or slashed through to the quaking earth…. Heavy machine guns…chopped through the trees, cleaving their own lanes of fire to tear at the defences…bombs and bullets crashed and rattled in unceasing clamour.”
Day and night the Japanese kept up the bombardment, while patrols tested the Australian perimeters, sneaking in to bayonet soldiers distracted by the mortars. At the Naro Ridge Front, Horii’s troops dispensed with stealth. Honner wrote: “Through the widening breach poured another flood of attackers…met with Bren gun and tommy gun, with bayonet and grenade; but still they came, to close with the buffet of fist and boot and rifle-butt, the steel of crashing helmets and of straining, strangling fingers.” Corpses, according to Honner, “soon cluttered that stretch of open ground.”
August 28 came and went, but on the evening of August 29, Horii assembled his troops for what he hoped would be the coup de grâce, an attack so ferocious it would “shatter the Australian resistance beyond hope of recovery.