The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [44]
Horii refused. “I’m not going back, not a step,” he raged. “I cannot give such an order.” Horii, according to Seizo Okada, then, “grasped his samurai sword,” and held it near Tanaka’s neck and vowed not to “retreat an inch.”
Darkness settled over Ioribaiwa Ridge, and Horii was determined to push on to Port Moresby. How could he retreat, he asked, “after all the blood the soldiers have shed and the hardships they have endured?” Besides, the Japanese army had never retreated before. Horii could not bear the disgrace. Then came a third message, bearing orders from Rabaul, instructing Horii “to withdraw completely from the Owen Stanleys and concentrate on the coast at Buna.”
If Horii was resolved to disobey the order to withdraw, the next message left him no option. It came directly from Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo. “The Emperor himself” had authorized it, according to Seizo Okada.
When the order to retreat was circulated, Horii’s troops were in disbelief. Imanishi Sadaharu, who had fought in China for three years and had landed with the Yokoyama Advance Force in July, wrote that Japanese soldiers “didn’t know how to retreat.” Besides, how could they withdraw when Port Moresby was within their grasp? According to Seizo Okada, “Hot-blooded commanders advocated a desperate single-handed thrust into Port Moresby.”
When Takita Kenji, a naval officer, heard the news, he wrote of a “terrible grief” that “cut deep into our hearts.”
“Like a bolt from the blue,” wrote Lieutenant Hirano, who just a week before had walked back to Isurava to bring forward supplies for the assault on Port Moresby, “we received an order to withdraw. It left us momentarily in a daze.” Earlier Hirano had sworn to the souls of his dead friends that he would continue their “aspirations.” Now he wrote of his regret over the futility of their deaths.
In the late morning on September 25, the Australians began an artillery bombardment of Ioribaiwa Ridge. With each roar of the cannon, the Australian soldiers whooped and howled. They had winched, lugged, wrestled, and pushed a cannon thousands of feet up to Imita Ridge and now they were celebrating its thunderous blasts.
Lieutenant Sakamoto described the shelling. “Ten shells landed directly in front of the Okazaki Tai. Spent all day in the trenches…2nd Battalion area pounded with mortars all night.” The following day, September 26, he chronicled the start of the Japanese withdrawal. “Butai to leave present position at 1700…No. 6 Coy [company] acting as rear guard.” That evening, before abandoning Ioribaiwa Ridge “through the woods under the moonlight,” Sakamoto took a moment to record a few lines in his diary. “It is truly regrettable,” he mourned, “having to leave this hard-won area and the bodies of comrades behind. Sleep peacefully, my friends. We will meet again in heaven.”
The following day, he scribbled a few more sentences: “Tired and dizzy. Marched almost unconsciously…Men are searching in the moonlight for food. Sickness increased. Everyone is pale and weak.”
According to Seizo Okada, as the Japanese soldiers retreated, they dug up native gardens “inch by inch.” If at first the natives, who were paid in worthless Japanese invasion currency, were uncertain about which side they would support, the sight of plundered gardens and abused bearers, stumbling with exhaustion, their wounds “crawling with maggots,” convinced them to align themselves with the Allies. Deprived of the prize of Port Moresby, once proud and disciplined Imperial Army troops sank into madness, turning to mindless acts of rage and destruction.