After Kokoda
Now the Australians became the pursuers as the shattered invaders retraced their steps back along the Track to the beachheads where they had landed two months earlier.
On November 2, Kokoda was recaptured. Shortly after that, General Horii and some of his senior commanders drowned while crossing the Kumusi River north of Kokoda. The retreat turned into a rout until the Japanese regained their beachheads at Buna, Gona and Sanananda where their comrades had prepared a network of interconnected defensive positions and from which they determined to fight to the death.
Clearly the South Seas Detachment no longer posed an offensive threat. But, instead of isolating it and starving it into submission, General MacArthur insisted that the Japanese be swiftly despatched.
The Diggers were joined by American forces but many of these underperformed and it was left to the Diggers, already veterans of the Kokoda campaign, to carry the brunt of the fighting. Again, many survivors of the horrors of the Kokoda Track lost their lives in attacks against an enemy that was heavily entrenched and grimly determined to fight to the last.
And, all the while, MacArthur was trumpeting about how he was leading his men from the front. Not so according to his biographer William Manchester:
“The great hero went home without seeing Buna, before during or after the great fight while permitting press articles from his GHQ to say he was leading his troops in battle. MacArthur … just stayed over at Moresby 40 minutes away and walked the floor. I know this to be a fact.”
In the pestilent swamps and beaches of Buna and Gona, every metre was paid for in blood. On December 9, Ralph Honner was able to send his famous cryptic report: ‘Gona’s gone’ Buna succumbed on January 2 1943. Eventually Sanananda fell on
January 22 1943, ending one of the most gruelling campaigns in Australian military history.
It was a total disaster for the Japanese. Less than 10 percent of the original 14,000 invasion force ever returned to their homeland.
Overall, in the Papuan campaign, 2165 Diggers were killed and 3533 wounded.
Ask any of the Diggers of Kokoda and they will tell you they were just doing their duty, as Phil Rhoden said:
“We were fighting for Australia, on Australian soil for the first time. It was important that we won because if we didn’t win who knows what would have happened.”
