How four pillars on the Kokoda Track will change Albanese forever

On Anzac Day 1992, prime minister Paul Keating famously got on his knees to kiss a shrine to the fallen of the Kokoda campaign, before giving a momentous speech:

“The Australians who served here in Papua New Guinea,” he gravely intoned, “fought and died, not for defence of the old world, but the new world. Their world. They died in defence of Australia and the civilisation and values which had grown up there. That is why it might be said that, for Australians, the battles in Papua New Guinea were the most important ever fought ... ”

Wonderful. In the Australian pantheon of military remembrance, it was the first key move away from telling the Gallipoli story repeatedly – a campaign in which our brave forces fought for England and lost – to a story far more resonant to our age, where our blokes fought magnificently for Australia and won.

As we approach Anzac Day on Thursday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is both figuratively and literally forging along the path set by Keating. As we speak, the PM is struggling his way on a two-day trek from Kokoda to the most famous battlefield of the campaign, in the tiny village of Isurava, where members of the Australian Imperial Force, backed by the “ragged bloody heroes” of the 39th Battalion militia, were able to hold up Japanese forces for five crucial days, badly depleting their forces.

The PM honouring the Kokoda campaign in this way is no small thing. For, while Keating kissing the ground was a magnificent gesture, Albanese walking it – even if he is only doing a truncated version of it with PNG Prime Minister James Marape – may well shatter, batter and tatter him, as it does all who attempt it. The track pokes and prods its way across the spine of New Guinea through billowing green clouds of jungle, gripping only tenuously to the sides of mountains above raging torrents, sometimes glugging through marshlands, most often going up slopes that rear up like snakes, just a few degrees off vertical, to altitudes well above 2000 metres.

But it will at least give the PM a feel for what the Diggers faced in those dark days of 1942 when, after 13,000 Japanese soldiers landed on the north coast of New Guinea around Buna and Gona, an initial 4000 highly trained troops set off down the track, hoping to attack Port Moresby just six days later and secure its harbour. In the first instance, all Australia had to stop them were the militia of the 39th Battalion, who held them up for a couple of days at Isurava before being relieved by the veteran Diggers of the Australian Imperial Force who – home again after being the first to stop the German land forces in the deserts of North Africa at Tobruk – set about being the first to stop Japanese land forces, in the jungles of New Guinea.

At the Isurava shrine where the PM will speak at dawn on Thursday, four pillars bear the four values that defined the campaign: Courage; Endurance; Mateship; Sacrifice.

As one who 20 years ago wrote a book on the Kokoda campaign, allow me to recount four episodes that are emblematic of those values.

COURAGE

On the third day of the battle, the decimated 39th Battalion is replaced by the AIF soldiers. In the mid-afternoon, in those steaming jungle conditions, the Japanese break through on the northern perimeter. The whole battle hangs in the balance … Three hundred yards up the hill from where the breach has occurred, Private Bruce Kingsbury, a quietly spoken, gentle kind of bloke from Malvern in Melbourne, sees what has happened. He grabs his best mate from childhood, Private Alan Avery, and the two race down the hill.

As Kingsbury arrives, the situation is worse than he feared, with streams of Japanese coming through, and his friend, courageous Corporal Lindsay “Teddy” Bear, badly hit. Teddy has blood all over his face and front courtesy of a piece of shrapnel that has gone up his nose and he has been shot in his left hand. Still not beaten, Teddy whacks the injured hand in his shirt and keeps firing with his right until he is shot twice in his legs and can barely move. He has been firing the Bren gun so much it is too hot to hold and he has to grip it by the bipod, even as he keeps one finger on the trigger to keep it firing.

Kingsbury soaks up all of this in seconds as he sprints towards Teddy Bear and grabs the Bren gun.

Firing from the hip, Kingsbury keeps charging down the hill, firing at the soldiers coming up and scattering them as he goes. Whenever a gun is raised against him, he somehow gets off accurate shots before the Japanese can do him any damage. Inspired by what they are seeing, many Australians charge after Kingsbury and add their own withering fire. Within perhaps forty-five seconds, it is all but over. Some 30 Japanese are taken out of commission, and the potential hole in the Australian line has been blocked. The other Australians are just catching up with Kingsbury – momentarily stopped before a large rock as he changes magazines – when a Japanese sniper appears and fires a single shot. Kingsbury clutches his chest and goes down, with just the slightest groan.

Avery, after unleashing a fusillade of bullets towards the sniper, cradles Kingsbury in his arms. There is a limpness in the dead that is unmistakable and irrefutable, and it is obvious to all that Kingsbury has gone as his head lolls back and his arms flop loosely, while Alan continues to hold him in a kind of rocking motion, whispering, “No, God, no, please no ….”

But Avery refuses to believe his best friend has gone, and so picks Kingsbury up, puts him in a fireman’s carry and trudges for medical help while the others remain to consolidate the position won at such cost.

At the Regimental Aid Post, Dr Don Duffy does not take long in his diagnosis. One look at the red hole where the bullet entered above Bruce’s heart tells him the truth. He pulls back Bruce’s eyelids and … alas. The eyes are the window of the soul, and there is never the slightest doubt when the soul has departed.

“I’m sorry Alan,” the doctor says softly, “he’s gone.”

Alan Avery weeps. For his valour and extraordinary courage under fire, Kingsbury would be posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross medal.

ENDURANCE

When I once asked my erstwhile biographical subject Kim Beazley what he regarded as the toughest battle ever fought, Kim – a noted student of military history – never hesitated.

“Kokoda,” he said flatly. His point was that, while in most other battles you could outflank the enemy, at Kokoda the jungle is so thick all around that you could pretty much judge where the front line was by the pointy end of the bayonet of the poor bastard who was first in line going up the track. It was the conditions of the track, the heat, the humidity, the vicious climbs and descents through always pressing jungle that called on the soldiers’ last reserves of endurance.

“Yes, you knew them well, the bank clerks, farmers and school-teachers,” one contemporary account ran, “the factory workers, jackaroos and mechanics who go to make up ‘our patrols’. But they have changed in some indefinable way since you last saw them ... The evil vapours of the jungle, and feverish fires of malaria, have sapped the sun-bronze from their faces, have drawn their muscular bodies to sinew and whipcord: their faded green shirts and slacks are continuously mud-bespattered, clammy with sweat and rain.

“The jungle stamps an indelible imprint on those who fight in it. But guts, endurance, self-sacrifice and initiative, all stretched to breaking point many a time, have left their imprint, too, so that a less war-weary age could say, ‘These men have the look of great fighting men’ ... ”

Not everyone could manage it. Nearing the end of Australia’s victorious Kokoda campaign, the American general Douglas Macarthur – Supreme Commander of all forces in the South-West Pacific – was eager that his own American forces have the glory of giving the Japanese the coup de grâce, and so sent his 126th Regiment, good ole farm boys from Idaho and Iowa, up a parallel track with much the same challenges, to cut the enemy off at the pass. The Americans emerged six weeks later as a shattered force, despite having seen no Japanese soldiers, nor fired a single shot in anger. Several had died en route from the privations of the jungle – beset by the all too common maladies of malaria, malnutrition and dysentery – while most of the rest had to receive urgent medical attention. As described by Australian author Jack Gallaway, they became known as the “Ghost Battalion” and were unable to resume any effective action for months afterwards. Just the track alone had been enough to finish them.

MATESHIP

This was, of course, not an exclusive Australian preserve, and one episode helps establish a bond between Australian and Japanese soldiers.

Right in the middle of a fire-fight, Father Nobby Earl appears, walking with a shovel over his shoulder towards an Australian soldier who had just been shot dead in no-man’s land. As soon as he moves in front of the Australian soldiers they stop firing … and now the most extraordinary thing happens.

The Japanese also stop firing. Yes, Father Nobby is clearly distinguishable as a man of God, with his priestly “dog-collar” plainly visible; but it is by no means certain all of the Japanese would recognise that, and just one shot would have brought him down. But nary a one comes.

The two forces wait in the simmering jungle as Father Nobby digs a shallow grave, manhandles the soldier into it, covers it again and says his prayers. Then he puts the shovel once again over his shoulder and walks back towards the Australian perimeter. At the very instant he is out of harm’s way, the Japanese unleash a fusillade to wake the newly dead.

In the purely Australian preserve of mateship, after the mighty if shattered 39th Battalion had been relieved by the soldiers of the AIF, things turn extreme, so a runner is sent down the track to bring them back. The runner first comes across 30 walking wounded. We need you back, and we need you now.

Of those men, 27 immediately turn around and head back to Isurava. Of the three who didn’t, one had lost a foot, one a forearm, while the other had taken a bullet in the throat. The rest got there and fought for their mates.

SACRIFICE

Getting the seriously wounded back to Port Moresby for medical help along that crippling track is hell on earth, and all the more difficult for the fact that it takes four Papuan porters – referred to by the Diggers as “Fuzzy-wuzzy angels” – to carry one wounded Digger. Most wonderfully though, many of the wounded perform their own triage. When a 27-year-old man from Sale in Victoria, Corporal John Metson – who was shot in the ankle at Isurava – is offered a stretcher, he simply says “be buggered”, and insists he will crawl back. Wrapping torn blankets around his hands and knees, he sets off for Port Moresby, some 60 miles away, refusing all offers of help, including those of a few still strong soldiers who offer to piggyback him part of the way.

In a similar fashion, journalist Osmar White reports seeing an amputee trying to hop and crawl back from Isurava, with a copra sack on his bloody stump. When White offers to help, by rounding up some stretcher bearers for him, the bloke will have none of it.

“If you can get bearers,” he snarls, “then get them for some other poor bastard! There are plenty worse off than me.”

These are the values, and this is the campaign, that Prime Minister Albanese is vaunting by his venture to Kokoda.

Bravo.

Lest we forget.

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz