The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [69]
By October 26, the Australians had been bogged down at Eora Creek for four days, and MacArthur’s temper boiled over. Again, he had a message sent to the front: “In spite of your superior strength enemy appears able to delay advance at will. Essential that forward commanders should control situation and NOT allow situation to control them. Delay in seizing KOKODA may cost us unique opportunity of driving enemy out of NEW GUINEA.”
A day later, acting as MacArthur’s personal henchman, General Blamey relieved Allen of his duties. Then, mounting a furious attack from a nearby ridge, the Australians descended on Horii’s troops. Those enemy soldiers who fled into the jungle survived; those who fought died. The Japanese lost hundreds of men at Eora Creek, but the Australians, too, paid a dear price for victory. Nearly three hundred Australian soldiers were killed or wounded.
By late October, Major-General George Vasey was leading the Australian counteroffensive. Vasey was a man of courage, driven to succeed. On November 1, as the Australians bore down on Kokoda, he told his officers, in words reminiscent of General Horii’s, “The enemy is beaten. Give him no rest and we will annihilate him.”
As Vasey spoke of defeating Horii’s army, the Japanese general, having been told that Rabaul would provide him with 20,000 reinforcements, resurrected his dream of capturing Port Moresby.
The following day, Horii and his army abandoned Kokoda. He chose the west side of the Kumusi River, near the villages of Oivi and Gorari, to make his stand.
“We will hold the position until reinforcements arrive,” wrote an exuberant Lieutenant Sakamoto. “The tide is turning in our favor.”
A mile separated the villages of Oivi and Gorari. Though Horii had three thousand soldiers at his disposal, many were so weak they could barely shoulder their weapons. Desperate for protein, they killed horses, and then again resorted to cannibalism. This time, though, the Japanese soldiers were not eating Australians. “We ran short of rations,” Sakamoto wrote on November 4. “We devoured our own kind to stave off starvation.”
Five days later, according to Sakamoto, the “enemy began its offensive. They have encircled us, while throughout the morning their planes bombed and machine-gunned us.”
Cutting off all their possible escape routes, Vasey had laid a death trap for the Japanese. On the dark and rainy night of November 11, four thousand Australian troops, wrote Dudley McCarthy, the official army historian of the Kokoda campaign, “were gathering themselves for the kill.” When they attacked, they came at the Japanese from all sides, nursing a hatred of the Imperial army so intense that only slaughter could satisfy it. Lieutenant Sakamoto died in the fighting.
General Horii, however, escaped. Hoping to reach the coast and reassemble his army with the addition of reinforcements, he fled to the Kumusi River. Swelled by recent rains, the Kumusi surged at its banks. The bridge was gone, bombed into rubble by Allied pilots. Realizing that the river was too deep to ford, Horii fled on a raft with a small group of officers, leaving Colonel Yazawa at the river’s edge to tend to nearly three thousand men.
Yazawa had to act quickly. Soon, Vasey would be in hot pursuit. Yazawa ordered the men to construct basic rafts. Shoving them into the slashing current, they prayed that their rafts would hold up. Some did, but others fell apart, sending the soldiers tumbling into the river. Men drowned by the dozens as the river pulled them into its muddy depths and swept them downstream. Trucks waited to transport those who had made it across. With room enough only for the seriously wounded, most were forced to walk.
Seizo Okada, the war correspondent who had landed in New Guinea with the Yokoyama Advance Force in late July, vividly described the scene. “Their [the Japanese soldiers’] uniforms were soiled with blood and mud and sweat, and torn to pieces. There were infantrymen