The Japanese land at Buna and Gona

On 20 July 1942 three Japanese transports, escorted by two light cruisers and several destroyers, sailed from the harbour of Rabaul on New Britain. On board was Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama’s advance force: infantry, engineers, mountain gunners, labourers from Taiwan and more than a thousand carriers recruited on New Britain. Their destination was the north coast of Papua, the Australian territory in the south-eastern part of New Guinea. In the early evening of 21 July Yokoyama’s troops went ashore near Basabua, between the Anglican mission at Gona and the government station at Buna. There was no one on the beach to stop them. A few hours later the first company set off inland, towards the village of Kokoda at the foot of the mountains, beyond which, on the other side of the island, lay Port Moresby.

Chronologies often combine under the date of 20 July the landing in the Buna–Gona area with the Japanese march across the Owen Stanley Range and the beginning of the Australian delaying actions on the Kokoda Track. In fact on 20 July the convoy was only just leaving Rabaul (some accounts give 19 July). The landing took place on the evening of 21 July, and the first clash with Australians and Papuans, near Awala, on 22 or 23 July, depending on the account. The Japanese did not reach the mountains until the end of the month.

Port Moresby after the Coral Sea and Midway

Port Moresby, the small capital of Papua on the Coral Sea, was in 1942 the most important Allied base in New Guinea. From there Australian and American aircraft attacked Rabaul and the Japanese airfields at Lae and Salamaua, and since February the town itself had been bombed almost daily. For the Japanese it was a threat to Rabaul; for the Australians, the last barrier before northern Queensland, less than a thousand kilometres away. Whoever held the airfields at Port Moresby controlled the air over the Coral Sea.

The first Japanese attempt to take the town, a seaborne landing as part of Operation MO, came to an end in early May. After the carrier clash in the Coral Sea, the decisive episode of the Battle of the Coral Sea, Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue turned the convoy carrying Major General Tomitarō Horii’s South Seas Detachment back to Rabaul. A month later, at the Battle of Midway, Japan lost four large carriers, and on 11 July Imperial General Headquarters suspended the plan to occupy New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa. Without carriers, another seaborne landing at Port Moresby was out of the question. That left the overland route: from the north coast of Papua, across the mountains, to take the town from the rear.

In June the newly formed 17th Army under Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake was ordered to examine this possibility. Pre-war Japanese information spoke of a road linking the coast with Kokoda and on to Port Moresby. Aerial photographs taken at the end of June settled nothing. The study was called the “RI study”, and the landing at Buna itself Operation RI. Horii was sceptical: he feared he would be unable to supply his troops along such a long mountain route. The decision was forced by Lieutenant Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, a staff officer from Imperial General Headquarters, who on 15 July turned up at 17th Army headquarters in Davao and announced that the study had been turned into an order to carry out the operation. According to Japanese studies, Tsuji was acting on his own initiative; when this came to light in Tokyo, nobody cancelled anything. On 18 July the 17th Army issued an order to take Port Moresby overland. Yokoyama’s force was to seize a beachhead, reconnoitre the route across the mountains and prepare it, and Horii’s main force was to follow in August.

A belated Allied plan

The Allies were not entirely taken by surprise. As early as 9 June General Douglas MacArthur, who since his arrival in Australia had commanded the forces of the South West Pacific, asked General Thomas Blamey, commander of the land forces, what had been done to defend the overland approach from Buna. A Japanese advance through Kokoda was nevertheless considered unlikely. In Port Moresby it was believed that there was a narrow pass in the mountains, “the Gap”, which could easily be blocked by a handful of men. In reality it was a dip in the ridge some 11 kilometres wide, useful to aircraft but of no significance to infantry.

MacArthur was thinking above all of the offensive. He wanted to build an airfield in the Buna area that would bring American bombers closer to Rabaul. On 10–11 July a flying boat landed a reconnaissance party there. On 17 July New Guinea Force headquarters received the orders for Operation Providence: Australian infantry and American engineers were to occupy Buna and build an airfield. The next day the date was put back by a week. The Japanese got there first. Historians of the campaign regard this difference of a few days as one of the most consequential delays of 1942 in the Pacific.

The defence of northern Papua rested on very weak forces. Since June Major William Watson’s Papuan Infantry Battalion had been operating there – some three hundred Papuan soldiers with white officers, scattered in patrols between Awala, Ioma and Cape Nelson. On 24 June its headquarters moved to Kokoda. At the same time Major General Basil Morris, commander of New Guinea Force, sent the 39th Battalion north across the mountains. It was a militia unit – Australian conscripts intended for home defence, poorly trained and until then used mainly for construction work in Port Moresby. Veterans of the Middle East contemptuously called such soldiers “chocos” (chocolate soldiers), since they were supposed to melt in the first heat. On 7 July command of the battalion was taken over by Lieutenant Colonel William Owen, an officer of the Australian Imperial Force who at the beginning of the year had escaped from Rabaul after the garrison there was overwhelmed.

On 8 July Captain Sam Templeton’s B Company set out on foot from near Port Moresby along the Kokoda Track. It was guided by the planter Bert Kienzle of the Australian military administration, who had organised the Papuan carriers. After a week’s march, on 14–15 July, the company reached Kokoda. These two units, called Maroubra Force after the operation’s code name, were to delay any Japanese advance from the coast. Together they numbered a few hundred men.

A land without roads

Papua in 1942 was a country almost without infrastructure. Beyond the immediate surroundings of Port Moresby there were no roads. On the coasts stood copra and rubber plantations; inland, scattered villages and a few government stations. From Buna to Kokoda ran a track some hundred kilometres long, crossed by the Kumusi River, over which a wire-rope suspension bridge hung at Wairopi. Kokoda lay on a plateau at the northern foot of the mountains. It had a government station, a rubber plantation and, most importantly, the only airstrip on the northern side of the range in that area.

From Kokoda a foot track ran south across the main ridge of the Owen Stanley Range – before the war a route for mail runners and patrols – about 96 kilometres to the roadhead near Port Moresby, although in a straight line the distance was some 60 kilometres. The track climbed to more than 2,100 metres, constantly plunging into deep valleys and climbing to further ridges. For most of the way it ran through dense jungle; in the wet season it turned to mud, and on the higher stretches the nights were cold and misty. In the lowlands at both ends of the track malaria was rife, and dysentery was a threat everywhere. Every round of ammunition, every tin of food and every wounded man had to be carried on someone’s back.

The landing

Yokoyama’s advance force consisted of the 15th Independent Engineer Regiment, the 1st Battalion of the 144th Infantry Regiment from the South Seas Detachment and a mountain artillery company from the 55th Regiment. In addition there was a company of naval infantry from Sasebo and a company of a naval construction unit, which was to build an airfield near Buna. According to the American official history the first echelon numbered some 1,800 soldiers, about a hundred labourers from Taiwan and about 1,200 carriers from New Britain, as well as several dozen horses. Japanese figures speak of a total of more than 4,000 men of Yokoyama’s force landed in successive runs. The convoy – the transports Ryōyō Maru, Kinryū Maru and Ayatosan Maru – was covered by Rear Admiral Kōji Matsuyama’s 18th Cruiser Division, with Tenryū and Tatsuta, and three destroyers.

The Japanese were lucky: in those days Allied aircraft were hunting another convoy, off Salamaua. On the afternoon of 21 July a Japanese seaplane strafed the station at Buna. A few salvoes from the ships fell on the coast. At around 5.30 p.m. unloading began near Basabua, a few kilometres east of Gona. The small Australian radio station party at Buna withdrew without a fight. The mission staff at Gona fled inland. Single bombers kept coming in until dusk, and on the morning of 22 July American B-17s and B-26s sank Ayatosan Maru. According to the American official history, about forty men were killed and some vehicles lost, but most of the troops and equipment were already ashore. From then on Allied aircraft attacked the beachhead daily, but were unable to cut the Japanese supplies.

Yokoyama did not wait. That same night an advance party, numbering about 230 men according to Australian findings, set off along the track towards Kokoda, partly in lorries, partly on bicycles. The main force set about building roads, depots and an airfield.

First clashes

Captain Templeton was at Buna on the morning of 21 July and was on his way back to Kokoda when he learned of the landing. He sent two platoons of B Company towards Awala and Gorari and left the third at Kokoda. Papuan patrols shadowed the advancing Japanese. According to the American official history, they first sighted them at 5.50 p.m. on 22 July near Awala. That same night or the following afternoon – accounts differ – Lieutenant John Chalk’s platoon of the Papuan Infantry Battalion fired the first shots on Papuan soil from an ambush. The Japanese reply with machine guns and mortars was so heavy that many of the Papuan soldiers scattered into the jungle. A platoon of the 39th Battalion that was to prepare another ambush fell back all the way to Wairopi.

On 24 July the Australians destroyed the wire bridge over the Kumusi and fired on the Japanese as they crossed the river in rubber boats under mortar cover. On the same day Lieutenant Colonel Owen flew into Kokoda and went forward with Templeton. On 25 July at Gorari about a hundred Australians and Papuans laid an ambush, killing two Japanese and wounding a dozen or so, before falling back to the hills near Oivi. On 26 July aircraft flew a platoon of D Company into Kokoda in two lifts. In the afternoon the Japanese attacked Oivi and began to surround the position. Templeton went out to warn the approaching reinforcements and disappeared. According to Japanese documents cited by the Australian historian Peter Williams, he was taken prisoner and murdered. Major Watson led the rest of the men out through the jungle by night to Deniki on the edge of the mountains, guided by a Papuan corporal, Sanopa. On 27 July Owen, too, having lost contact with his forward platoons, abandoned Kokoda and fell back to Deniki. Within a week of the landing the Japanese had covered almost the whole distance from the coast to the mountains.

Objective: Port Moresby

For the Australians the landing at Buna and Gona was proof that the war had arrived on their doorstep. The Prime Minister, John Curtin, had for months been demanding the return of the Australian divisions from the Middle East and support from the United States. In New Guinea the Japanese were now on the same side of the Coral Sea as Australia, on territory it had administered for decades. On the mainland people feared invasion. Japan was not planning one – its General Staff had rejected the idea as early as the beginning of 1942 – but the capture of Port Moresby would have given it airfields from which bombers could attack northern Queensland and Allied convoys.

The headquarters in Brisbane and Melbourne long regarded the landing at Buna as an attempt to build an airfield there and at most a reconnaissance towards the mountains. The army did not seem ready for a major offensive across the mountains. So the first reinforcements were sent in small groups, by air to Kokoda, and the 7th Division’s new brigades, veterans of North Africa and Syria, were not sent to New Guinea until August. Until then the Japanese were held up only by a single militia battalion, Papuan soldiers and the terrain.

Place in the war

On 21 July 1942 began the Kokoda Track campaign, one of the most famous campaigns in the history of the Australian Army. On 29 July the Japanese took Kokoda with its airstrip. In August Horii’s main force landed near Buna, and the 39th Battalion and the units that came to its aid were pushed back into the mountains. After heavy fighting at Isurava at the end of August and on the ridges near Efogi in September, the Japanese reached Ioribaiwa in mid-September, a few dozen kilometres from Port Moresby. At the same time the Americans landed on Guadalcanal, and the Australians repulsed a Japanese landing at Milne Bay. The Japanese command could not conduct both campaigns at once, and in September ordered Horii to withdraw.

The beachhead at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, which Yokoyama’s force had occupied without a fight on 21 July, became in November 1942 the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war. The Australians and Americans did not take it until January 1943, after fighting in which losses to disease exceeded battle casualties. The march that began with the landing near Gona was Japan’s last attempt to take Port Moresby. From the autumn of 1942 the initiative on the island passed to the Allies.