Fear Drive My Feet Read Free Page A

in
1945.
    The events described in the following chapters deal chiefly with the period of our
unrelieved defeats, when the character of the war in New Guinea was most curious
and interesting.
    The Japanese took Rabaul in January 1942 after heroic, but hopeless resistance, from
the Australian garrison. In March they occupied the important north-coast towns
of Lae and Salamaua. There was no resistance. What could a few dozen men of the New
Guinea Volunteer Rifles do against the Japanese who swarmed in thousands from their
landing-craft? In much the same way the Japs helped themselves at their leisure to
the greater part of the north coast. They made an assault on Port Moresby itself
which came very near to success.
    There is real fascination in this early period of hopeless inferiority in numbers
and equipment.
    When the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua the few New Guinea Volunteer Rifles
men retreated to hideouts in the bush or fell back on the township of Wau in the
mountainous goldfields inland. The N.G.V.R. had been civilian residents of New Guinea
– gold-miners, planters, government officials. They were joined by a single Australian
commando unit, the 5th Independent Company, and the two units were grouped under
the name Kanga Force, with its headquarters in Wau. In parties of a few men they
conducted a fantastic campaign of patrolling and harassing the enemy from behind
both Lae and Salamaua. Everywhere they were outnumbered hundreds to one, and their
communications spread out over a hundred miles of tracks.
    In the Lae sector they had to face all the text-book conditions of jungle fighting
– dense growth, swamps, malaria, steamy heat, crocodile-infested rivers, and so on.
In the Salamaua area the main problems were mountainous terrain – probably as rough
as any in the world – dense rainforests, cold and damp.
    The enemy was strong enough to have taken Wau, with its important airfield, any time
he chose, but the aggressive activity of our patrols bluffed him for a whole year
and kept Wau in our hands. All this time Kanga Force was short of supplies. There
were no transport aircraft to fly in material from Port Moresby or Australia. Stores
therefore had to be carried round the south coast from Port Moresby to the mouth
of the Lakekamu River by steamer. There they were transhipped to pinnaces and moved
up the Lakekamu to Terapo, where they were transferred into whaleboats and canoes
for a two-day journey upriver to Bulldog. At Bulldog all stores were made up into
fifty-pound ‘boy-loads’ and sent off to Wau on the backs of carriers, nearly seven
days’ walk over mountains heart-breaking in their height and steepness. To reach
our troops in the Lae forward area another four days’ carry was needed.
    In sober truth this was probably one of the most extraordinary lines of communication
in military history.
    Somehow Kanga Force held on, patrolling, harassing, watching enemy movements. Elsewhere
on the north side of the island, behind Finschhafen, Madang, and Wewak, the position
was even worse. There was no regular military force in the rear of the enemy. Our
only contact was from small special parties, often one white man and a few trusted
natives. They lived – often in conditions of frightful privation and danger – in
the jungles and mountains behind the enemy’s coastal bases. At last, in January 1943,
the Japanese decided to make an assault on Wau. Reinforced by a fleet which had
landed troops early in the same month, they set out from Salamaua and very nearly
achieved their objective.
    Our air transport position was now good, but the 17th Australian Brigade, ready to
rush to Wau to stem the advance, was held up in Port Moresby by bad weather. When
they arrived in Wau their planes landed among Japanese fire on the aerodrome. But
they saved Wau and pushed the Japanese back to Salamaua. Within the next seven months,
combined land and sea operations with the Americans gave us back Lae and Salamaua. There
was