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Kokoda Track Campaign - moved and shocked

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by RedGuzzi750 (U7604797) on Friday, 2nd September 2011

  Hi folks,
  
  I have not posted here for a while but I thought I would pop my head up again. I have just finished reading the book "Kokoda" by Peter Fitzsimons and apart from highly recommending it to anyone interested in that campaign and the South East Pacific war, I was struck by a number of things;
  
  1. The incopetance of the high command, especially MacAuthur and Blamey. They issued directives from 2000 miles away that had not the slightest foundation in reality to the men slogging up and back along the muddy track.
  
  Just a few examples might suffice - Blamey and MacAuthur continually referred to the Australians having the superior forces to the Japanese. I don't know how they worked out that! The Japanese were the South Seas Force of highly trained Marines equipped and traned for jungle fighting including the correct uniforms, mortars, even jungle artillery! The Citizens Militia Forces of the 39th and 53rd Battalions had little or NO training, rifles, desert uniforms, and damn all else. And there were around 500 of them vs 2500 to 6000 Japanese.
  
  They said at one stage there were hundreds of tons of supplies (air dropped) at Myola, so the AIF 2/14 took only 5 days supplies - when they got there there was SFA!!
  
  And what really made me mad was that they considered the superb fighting retreat of the militias and the 2/14 to be a "disgrace" - and therefore sacked Brigadier Potts and General Rowell. This at about the same time the Japanese high command thought a) they were facing 5000+ australian troops, and b) the game was up and they were never going to get to Port Moresby. They had taken so many losses (10 for every 1 Australian) that the whole operation was called off.
  
  To add insult to injury - MacAuthur and Blamey took all the credit and ensured that Potts, Rowell and Ralph Honner were sidelined post war. And yet they were the heroes, along with the average blokes, some with damn all training, that fought in that bloody conflict.
  
  This about sums it up for me;
  
  "Blamey addressed the men of the 21st Infantry Brigade on a parade ground. Maroubra Force expected congratulations for their efforts in holding back the Japanese. However, instead of praising them, Blamey told the brigade that they had been "beaten" by inferior forces, and that "no soldier should be afraid to die". "Remember," Blamey was reported as saying, "it's the rabbit who runs who gets shot, not the man holding the gun." There was a wave of murmurs and restlessness among the soldiers. Officers and senior NCOs managed to quiet the soldiers and many later said that Blamey was lucky to escape with his life. Later that day, during a march-past parade, many disobeyed the "eyes right" order. In a later letter to his wife, an enraged Brigadier Potts swore to "fry his [Blamey's] soul in the afterlife" over this incident. According to witnesses, when Blamey subsequently visited Australian wounded in the camp hospital, inmates nibbled lettuce, while wrinkling their noses and whispering "run, rabbit, run" (the chorus of a popular song during the war).[32] Thereafter, "he was almost invariably" referred to as "That bastard Blamey"."

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Friday, 2nd September 2011

  hi redguzzi
  
  i havent read kokada but i read "the kokoda trail " by someone
  
  it was horrific and i always remember the throwaway comment that the aussies removed the crutch from their trousers as so many were affected by dysentry and it saved time !!
  
  st

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  Posted by RedGuzzi750 (U7604797) on Saturday, 3rd September 2011

  Yes that was very true Stalti, and Damien Parer the cameraman went one further using tubing and a bottle in his sock.
  
  I know someone who was there at the Battle of Isurava and subsequent stuff until he was shot a couple of times in 30 seconds. He is my mums partner, and a very nice old fella named Les. The stuff he told me about gave me the first ideas of how incompetant the commanders (at least the ones not on the ground) were. I think he was with the 53rd, who have a terrible reputation comparared to the 39th - but of course not only did they have no training to speak of, but a certian percentage of them had been press-ganged into the Militia for some reason or other. I know Les told me he wasn't forced to join - he volunteered well before the whole thing kicked off. The blokes who were drafted were a bad influence, and Les also said that their officers were not up to much either!

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  Posted by RedGuzzi750 (U7604797) on Saturday, 3rd September 2011

  Oh yes forgot to say, as Les was a butcher by trade he was reasonaly well fed before his military service but on the Track he went from 12 stone down to 7 stone i a pretty short period of time. Another thing he said was that the Japanese tortured Aussie soldiers to try and make thier mates come for them, and hence they would be shot. He said he could understand but never forgive it - from what he saw the japanese officers treated thier own men as animals so why treat anyone else better\?
  
  In the end the strategy was a sucessful one as with 1/5 the forces the Australians sapped the forces of Horii so much that even though they could see the sea, and the lights of Moresby, they were just never going to get there. And of course where they were stopped and turned back was the first place where the Aussies could be properly supllied and get some heavy weapons of thier own.
  
  Its interesting to think if the battle had happened 10-15 years later that helicopters would have made all the difference for the supply of the troops - even such basic ones as the S55 and the Flying Bannana could have kept the troops well supplied up there - though the altitude in places would have been a struggle.

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• Message 5

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 3rd September 2011

  RedGuzzi
  
  I do not know the detail of this campaign -nor in fact about the War in the Pacific generally..
  
  But what you have written seems to me to very typical of the way that there was a systematic attempt after the Second World War to produce examples of heroic and great leadership in order to move on from the problems of the inter-war period.
  
  By general consent the heroes of the First World War had been the rank and file like the British Tommies, and the war effectively destroyed the standing of the three great foundations of Western Civilization for the previous thousand years- the monarchy, the nobility and the Church.
  
  In a post-war Britain that T.S,. Eliot described as a "Wasteland" in the light of the sad depression of 1921- no "Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Fit For Heroes"- confidence in "the establishment" was badly damaged, and very soon starting in Italy, the Punjab, Germany, and Russia ex-soldiers started to try to take the initiative using the qualities that they had acquired during the fighting.
  
  In spite of , or perhaps because of, the policy of disarmament enshrined in the Treaties of Versailles, the world of the Twenties became a world of the marching feet of squads of men quite prepared to fight with fists or with those small truncheons carried by the Fascist Blackshirts. It led to Hitler and Mussolini, and to Gandhi - though he insisted that his followers should fight with 'ahimsa' soul-force.
  
  W.B. Yeats wrote:
  
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity.
  
  In the rubble of the Second World War with States to reconstruct it was vital to find heroes and people who could form a new "centre" around which the anarchy could eventually be resolved into a new world order.
  
  But as we face the high risk of another World Chaos like that of 1932-3 once more there seems to be a crisis of confidence in the ability of "the men at the top" and a feeling that once again it is going to come down to the rank and file "foot-sloggers" to sort the situation out. To some extent one could argue that David Cameron's Big Society is an acceptance of the fact that many decisions are best left to "the men on the ground" who know the truth of the situatioin better than High Command.
  
  Cass

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