The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [30]
That night, after again being beaten back by the Australians, Lieutenant Hirano wrote that one of the company commanders, a friend of his, had been killed. “Only this morning,” wrote Hirano, “he and I…were gaily conversing over a cup of ‘sake’ from his canteen. Now it is only a memory. How cruel and miserable this life is!” Despite their personal sadnesses, the Japanese army did not relent. Facing a torrent of fire from the Australian Bren and tommy guns, Horii’s troops kept coming, preferring death to the dishonor of staying back.
At noon, the Japanese threw caution to the wind. Scaling a steep hill, they ascended straight into the throat of the Australian defense, breaking through. The Australian troops withdrew down the track. Isurava was now General Horii’s.
The four-day battle for Isurava was a bloodbath. The Australians lost 250 men. Hundreds more were wounded. One battalion was reduced to half its initial size. For the Japanese, the victory was Pyrrhic at best. Horii lost over 550 men, and had more than a thousand wounded.
After Isurava, Horii’s army continued to chew up ground. With each new conquest, Horii would symbolically raise the Japanese flag. For Damien Parer, an Australian war photographer, it was a terrible sight.
Parer and the Australians could not know, though, the price Horii was paying to fly the white Japanese flag with its dazzlingly red sun. In each village it seized, Horii’s men were forced to build great, pyramid-shaped funeral pyres to cremate their dead. “Our casualties are great,” a Japanese officer wrote in his diary. “The outcome of the battle is very difficult to foresee.” Lieutenant Sakamoto, a machine gunner with Horii’s advance force, wrote somberly of corpses “piled high.”
As General Horii’s desire to take Port Moresby took on a quality of stubborn fanaticism, his preoccupation with his supply line grew. Thanks to relentless bombing by U.S. Fifth Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force units, the line was hanging by a thread. “It is humiliating,” wrote Sakamoto, “to see enemy planes strafing us, and not a single plane of ours to assist us.”
As the Nankai Shitai approached Eora Creek, Horii demanded that his commanders “exercise the most painstaking control…so that every bullet fells an enemy and every grain of rice furthers the task of the Shitai.” He then cut the daily ration of rice to one and one-half pints per man. According to Sakamoto, men were already slashing through the jungle to search for “taroes and yams to satisfy our hunger.”
Still, by early September, the Japanese attack on Port Moresby had acquired an air of inexorability. Horii’s men had fought their way over the divide. They had climbed “breath-taking cliffs” and waded through “muddy swamps,” and seized the vital Australian dropping grounds at Myola on the southern slopes of the Owen Stanleys. Now, in addition to trying to stop the Japanese, the Australians had to contend with their own supply problems. With Myola in Japanese hands, carriers had to lug huge loads on their backs all the way from Port Moresby. To make matters worse, frightened native carriers, sensing that the Australian army’s defeat was imminent, dropped their supplies and fled into the jungle.
While Horii’s army was routing the Australians on the Kokoda, other Japanese soldiers were attempting to capture Milne Bay.
At the extreme southeastern tip of New Guinea, Milne Bay is strikingly beautiful. On both sides of the bay, four-thousand-foot jungle-clad mountains rise precipitously out of the blue-green tropical waters. Between the mountains and the bay lies a thin coastal strip of swamp, sand, and dense, dripping rain forest.
The Japanese had never even expected to be at Milne Bay. Their initial plan was to seize the island of Samarai, southeast of Milne Bay, and launch a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby from there. However, when Japanese planners discovered that the Allies were constructing a garrison and an airfield at Milne Bay, they switched gears, choosing at the last minute to invade.
The Allied base was located at the head