The Japanese retreat along the Kokoda Track

On the morning of 28 September 1942 the battalions of the Australian 25th Brigade came down from Imita Ridge and advanced on the ridge at Ioribaiwa, some 30–40 kilometres in a straight line from Port Moresby. The day before, Brigadier Kenneth Eather had ordered an attack “with all forces”, and for a week Australian artillery had been shelling the Japanese positions. The attack struck thin air. The trenches on the ridge were empty – the last Japanese rearguard had left on the night of 25–26 September. It also turned out that the Australian shelling had done the Japanese little damage.

Under this date chronologies usually record that the Japanese “continue their retreat” along the Kokoda Track. This is an accurate description: the retreat had begun a few days earlier, on 24 September, and on 28 September the Australians discovered it. For them it meant the end of two months of falling back across the Owen Stanley Range and the start of a pursuit that in November took them back to Kokoda and to the Kumusi River.

Closest to Port Moresby

Major General Tomitarō Horii’s South Seas Detachment had landed at Buna and Gona in July, captured Kokoda and its airstrip on the night of 28–29 July, and in August and early September pushed the Australians back from Isurava and Brigade Hill to the southern slopes of the mountains. On 14–16 September Colonel Masao Kusunose’s regiment attacked at Ioribaiwa. Eather, fearing that the Japanese wedge would tear his defence apart, withdrew on 16 September to Imita Ridge, the last ridge before the start of the track. Major General Arthur Allen, commander of the 7th Division, made it clear that there would be no further retreat.

From the ridge at Ioribaiwa Japanese soldiers could see the lights of Port Moresby at night, and beyond them the Coral Sea. According to accounts they celebrated, convinced that their goal was only a few days’ march away. In reality they were in no condition to go any further. On Imita Ridge the Australians now had a short supply line, fresh battalions and – for the first time in the campaign – artillery of their own: on 20 September two 25-pounder guns of the 14th Field Regiment, hauled by tractor to the end of the motor road, opened fire on Ioribaiwa from a range of about 10 kilometres. For several days Americans had also been arriving in Port Moresby – the regiments of the 32nd Division, brought from Australia by air and by sea. The Japanese did not attack Imita Ridge. For nearly two weeks there were only patrol clashes and ambushes on both sides.

Why the Japanese turned back

The decision to retreat was taken not on the track but at Rabaul and in Tokyo. On 7 August the Americans landed on Guadalcanal and seized the airfield under construction there. Recapturing the island became a more urgent task for Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake’s 17th Army than the march on Port Moresby. At the beginning of September, at the other end of New Guinea, the Japanese attempt to take Milne Bay, which was to have given them a base on the seaward side, ended in defeat.

According to the Japanese official history, published in Steven Bullard’s translation by the Australian War Memorial, Horii had been receiving instructions not to force the advance since the end of August. On 28 August he was told to reach the southern slopes of the mountains but to concentrate his main body on their northern side; on 8 September, to gather the 41st Regiment in the Kokoda area. Horii pulled back some of his troops, but his advance guard pressed on. When on 12–14 September Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s force suffered a bloody defeat on Guadalcanal, the command concluded that it could not hold two fronts at once. On 19 September Hyakutake, having learned that the Japanese had taken Ioribaiwa, sharply ordered the leading units to withdraw north of the village of Mawai, and an order of 23 September instructed that the Isurava and Kokoda area be held as a base for “future operations”. The same history also gives as a reason the fear of an Allied landing at Buna, in the detachment’s rear.

The decisive factor, however, was supply. Every sack of rice had to be carried from the coast near Buna through Kokoda and over the mountains on the backs of soldiers and carriers. The bridge over the Kumusi at Wairopi and the tracks beyond it were under constant attack by Allied aircraft. A convoy carrying four independent supply companies, which was to have reached Buna around 20 September, was delayed; the Japanese official history states plainly that “the supply mechanism of the South Seas Detachment had broken down”. At Ioribaiwa the daily rice ration was cut to about 180 millilitres per soldier, and the captured stores that had been counted on did not exist – the retreating Australians had destroyed the dumps they could not carry away.

The retreat

On 24 September the 2nd Battalion of the 144th Regiment left Ioribaiwa. The 3rd Battalion stayed behind as rearguard and withdrew on the night of 25–26 September. At first the retreat was orderly: the Japanese had prepared successive delaying positions along the track in advance, and the strongest of them – at Templeton’s Crossing and above Eora village – were manned by a force made up mainly of the 2nd Battalion of the 144th Regiment. The main body fell back towards Kokoda and Isurava, where, as ordered, it was to dig in.

For the soldiers themselves it was a march of exhausted and sick men. Many suffered from malaria and dysentery, and hunger grew worse by the day. The Australians following in their tracks found the bodies of men who had died of malnutrition and evidence that some had eaten roots, grass and wood. According to Dudley McCarthy’s Australian official history and later research, including that of Yuki Tanaka, they also found – in October – traces of cannibalism: the bodies of fallen Australians and Japanese, left earlier at Templeton’s Crossing, from which flesh had been cut. After the war some Japanese veterans admitted in their accounts that such acts had occurred during the famine in New Guinea. These discoveries – together with news of the killing of prisoners and civilians – reinforced the conviction among Australian soldiers that they were fighting an enemy to whom no mercy should be shown.

The Papuan carriers whom the Japanese had brought from Rabaul or recruited on the north coast suffered too. Many of them ran away; the sick and wounded, according to Australian findings, were not infrequently killed.

The pursuit begins

Patrols of the 25th Brigade set off after the Japanese at once. One patrol of the 2/25th Battalion established that the village of Nauro had also been abandoned by 30 September. General Allen, however, advanced cautiously: every step north took his soldiers further from Port Moresby, and supplies once again had to be carried over the mountains or dropped from aircraft. The fresh 16th Brigade entered the fighting, and the headquarters of the 7th Division took direct command of the pursuit.

On that same 28 September the epilogue of the “command crisis” played out in Port Moresby. Five days earlier the commander of the Allied land forces, General Thomas Blamey, had arrived there, sent by Prime Minister John Curtin under pressure from Douglas MacArthur, who did not trust the Australian commanders. Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, until then commander of New Guinea Force, regarded this as a vote of no confidence and protested openly. On 28 September Blamey relieved him, and his place was taken by Lieutenant General Edmund Herring. By an irony of fate, Rowell lost his post on the very day it became clear that his soldiers had stopped the Japanese.

Place in the war

The retreat from Ioribaiwa marked the end of the only Japanese attempt to take Port Moresby overland. After the defeats in the Coral Sea in May and at Milne Bay in September, Japan had lost its last chance of seizing a base from which it could threaten northern Australia. From then on the initiative in New Guinea lay with the Allies.

The pursuit, however, was not easy. In October the Australians had to storm prepared Japanese positions at Templeton’s Crossing and above Eora village, suffering heavy losses, and MacArthur and Blamey put so much pressure on Allen that he was relieved on 28 October. On 2 November the Australians took Kokoda and its airstrip without a fight, which eased the supply situation. In the Battle of Oivi–Gorari (4–11 November) they broke Horii’s main body, and the orderly retreat turned into a rout. Horii himself drowned in the second half of November while travelling by canoe down the swollen Kumusi towards the coast; the current carried the canoe out to sea, where it capsized in a storm. The remnants of his detachment and fresh reinforcements manned the fortified beachheads at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, where the Australians and Americans fought them until January 1943.

For Australians the Kokoda Track campaign became one of the most important symbols of the war – alongside Gallipoli in the First World War – a story of defending their own country in the harshest conditions. For the Japanese it was, together with Milne Bay, one of their first retreats on land in the Pacific War, and a foretaste of how ruinous fighting at the end of long and inadequate supply lines would prove for them.