The Japanese take Kokoda

Early on the morning of 29 July 1942, after several hours of night-time fire, some two hundred Japanese soldiers forced their way onto the plateau on which the government station of Kokoda stood. It was held by a force of roughly a hundred Australians and Papuans. After an hour’s fighting, partly hand to hand, the defenders withdrew in the mist southwards into the mountains. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Owen, was mortally wounded. Eight days after landing at Buna and Gona, the Japanese held the village and, above all, its airstrip – the only place in this part of Papua on the northern side of the mountains where aircraft could land.

It is often written that Kokoda lies “halfway along the pass” leading through the Owen Stanley Range to Port Moresby. That was not so. Kokoda lies on a plateau in the northern foothills of the range, where the track across the mountains only begins. Counting the whole route from the coast near Gona to Port Moresby, the Japanese had indeed covered roughly half the distance, but it was the easier half. Ahead of them still lay some 96 kilometres of the Kokoda Track through jungle and over ridges rising to more than two thousand metres.

Kokoda

Before the war Kokoda was a small station of the Papuan administration, with a government officer’s house, a police post, a rubber plantation and a grass airstrip. The plateau on which it stood was tongue-shaped, with steep sides. The station occupied its northern end. From the east a path approached it from Oivi and the coast; to the south a track led to Deniki, where the climb into the mountains began. The airstrip lay west of the station. For both sides it was more important than the village itself. The Australians could fly men and supplies in from Port Moresby, saving a week’s march across the mountains. For the Japanese it would be a point at which they could build up stocks before the march into the mountains.

Defending Kokoda was not easy even for a battalion. The plateau was surrounded by paths by which it could easily be outflanked, and around it grew dense vegetation through which an enemy could approach unseen. Lieutenant Colonel Owen, commander of the 39th Militia Battalion, had far less at his disposal.

Withdrawal and return

The first days after the landing at Gona were a series of Australian defeats. Captain Sam Templeton’s B Company and the men of Major William Watson’s Papuan Infantry Battalion set ambushes for the advancing Japanese at Awala, on the Kumusi River and at Gorari, but could not stop them. On 26 July they were surrounded at Oivi. Templeton disappeared, and the rest broke through to Deniki. On the morning of 27 July Owen, having no contact with his forward platoons and expecting an attack, abandoned Kokoda and also fell back to Deniki.

The Japanese, however, did not enter the village straight away. The next morning a group of stragglers who had spent the night in Kokoda and met no one there reached Deniki. Owen decided to go back. He left two sections at Deniki and with the rest of his men went back down to the plateau. At around 11.30 a.m. on 28 July his men reoccupied the station. According to various accounts there were between 80 and 148 of them: men of B Company, the remaining Papuans of the Papuan Infantry Battalion, a few officials of the Australian military administration and Papuan policemen. Owen radioed for reinforcements. Soon two American transport aircraft carrying soldiers of the 49th Battalion from Port Moresby appeared over the airstrip. The defenders were too slow in removing the obstacles that had earlier been placed to block the strip, and the pilots decided that landing was too risky and turned back. Accounts differ as to whether this happened on 28 July or the day before, when Owen was just about to abandon Kokoda. In both versions the reinforcements did not arrive.

Owen deployed his men in a horseshoe on the tip of the plateau, around the station buildings: three platoons at the front, while a fourth at the rear, among the rubber trees, covered the track to Deniki. At around 1.30 p.m. the first Japanese were spotted.

The night of 28/29 July

The enemy was the 1st Company of the I Battalion, 144th Infantry Regiment, under Captain Ogawa – the advance guard of Colonel Yosuke Yokoyama’s detachment, some two hundred men strong. Most were soldiers with experience of fighting in China and on Guam. Through the afternoon and evening they approached from the east along the path from Oivi and worked round the Australian position on the flanks. After dark they began harassing the defenders with fire. They had light mortars and a 70-millimetre infantry gun, whose fire the Australians had nothing to answer with. The shells, falling on the plateau at intervals, wounded one soldier after another.

The main assault began at around 2.30 a.m. on 29 July. The Japanese climbed the steep slope towards the defenders’ positions. The Australians fired machine guns and rolled grenades down the slope. The fighting lasted about an hour and in several places came to hand-to-hand combat. Owen went from post to post to keep up his men’s spirits and in the front line was shot above the right eye. He died shortly afterwards. Major Watson took command. Encirclement threatened, and there was nothing left to defend. Under cover of thick mist the remnants of the force withdrew along the track to the south and reached Deniki around dawn on 29 July.

According to Australian studies, the defenders lost a few killed and a few wounded in this fight, the Japanese a dozen or so killed and about 26 wounded. Among the dead was Captain Ogawa, killed by the Australian rearguard in the final phase of the fighting. Owen already had one defeat behind him: as an officer of the 2/22nd Battalion he had survived the fall of Rabaul and escaped from New Britain. According to Australian studies he was posthumously awarded the American Distinguished Service Cross.

On the same day, 29 July, a second Japanese convoy arrived off Buna with a further part of Yokoyama’s detachment. Allied aircraft hit the transport Kōtoku Maru, which managed to unload most of its troops but sank on the way back to Rabaul. A third convoy, on 31 July, was turned back under air attack.

What the loss of Kokoda meant

For the Australians the loss of Kokoda meant above all the loss of the airstrip. From then on every soldier and every box of ammunition had to go on foot from Port Moresby over the mountains – about a week’s march – or be dropped, with or without a parachute, into valleys such as Myola. Thousands of Papuan carriers, recruited by the Australian administration, often by compulsion, carried supplies up and the wounded down. Australian soldiers later called them the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”.

The Japanese, however, could not use the captured airstrip as they had wished. They lacked transport aircraft, and Allied aircraft dominated Papua by day and destroyed anything they tried to build there. Their supplies too went on foot or on horseback, from Buna via the Kumusi. The further into the mountains they went, the more their supply failed.

In Port Moresby and Brisbane it was still not believed that the Japanese would make a serious advance across the mountains. General Douglas MacArthur and his staff regarded the landing at Buna mainly as an attempt to build an airfield. The command in Australia sent new forces to Port Moresby together with the headquarters of I Corps under Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell, who in August took over New Guinea Force, but the first brigades of the 7th Division, made up of veterans of the fighting in North Africa and Syria, began arriving in New Guinea only in mid-August.

Place in the war

The first battle of Kokoda was a small engagement: fewer than four hundred men fought on both sides together. Yet it marked the beginning of one of the most important campaigns in Australia’s history. At the beginning of August the remaining companies of the 39th Battalion reached Deniki, and Major Allan Cameron took command. On 8 August, after a strafing attack by P-39 fighters, the Australians attacked in three columns. Captain Noel Symington’s A Company entered Kokoda without much resistance, but the other two were halted. Cut off and without supplies, the company held the village until the evening of 10 August and then withdrew by a roundabout route. Kokoda remained in Japanese hands.

On 18 August the main body of the South Seas Detachment landed at Buna, and its commander, Major General Tomitarō Horii, moved to Kokoda. At the end of August the Japanese defeated the Australians at Isurava, in September at Mission Ridge and Brigade Hill near Efogi, and in mid-month they reached Ioribaiwa Ridge, from which, as many accounts have it, they could see the lights of Port Moresby at night. There their march ended. The Americans had been fighting on Guadalcanal since 7 August, the Australians had repulsed the Japanese landing at Milne Bay, and Horii’s starving and sick soldiers were ordered to retreat. The Australians followed them across the mountains and on 2 November 1942 reoccupied Kokoda, this time without a fight. Its airstrip became a supply base for the fighting against the Japanese beachheads at Buna and Gona, which lasted until January 1943. Horii drowned in November while crossing near the mouth of the Kumusi River.

The night battle for Kokoda of 28/29 July was one of the first clashes between the Australian militia and the Japanese on territory administered by Australia. The poorly trained militiamen, regarded by the veterans as second-rate soldiers, delayed the advance of an incomparably stronger enemy for several weeks and gave time for reinforcements to be brought in. As a result, the 39th Battalion and the Kokoda Track campaign became one of the most important symbols of this war in Australia.