History of The Kokoda Track
From its entry into World War II with the surprise destruction of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the Japanese Army quickly established a reputation of invincibility. Pearl Harbour signalled a massive onslaught which saw Japan invade Malaya and Thailand and attack Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island.
On January 23 1942, 20,000 troops from the Japanese South Seas Detachment (the Nankai Shitai) overwhelmed the 1400-strong Australian garrison at Rabaul on New Britain Island in PNG, an Australian Protectorate. For the first time in our history, Australian territory had been invaded.
This shock was compounded when the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore fell on February 15 1942. Some 130,000 British and Allied troops were trapped there, including virtually the entire Australian 8 th Division – about 15,000 Diggers. They began the tortuous road which would see them decimated in Changi and on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
The war was on Australia’s doorstep and we were hopelessly ill-prepared, as war correspondent, Osmar White, pointed out in his book Green Armour:
“It is difficult to imagine a nation more completely open to even the most hastily prepared invasion than Australia was in the first three months of 1942. All that stood between her and the Japanese were a few hundred miles of unguarded sea, a few hundred miles of uninhabited jungle, a few groups of palm-filled, roadless islands and her own shellback of desert – the inert armour or a neglected and undeveloped north.”
The government rushed back our most experienced troops from the Middle East and, in the meantime, sent a handful of untried militia battalions to Port Moresby to try to hold on until the AIF troops could return to defend their homeland.
These young militia soldiers had volunteered just months earlier and had received minimal training before being put on to transport ships and sent to PNG. They were under-trained, under-equipped and vastly outnumbered. Their average age was eighteen and a half.
Yet it would be these young Diggers who would shatter the myth of invincibility surrounding the Japanese invaders – hardened veterans who had been undefeated in almost constant combat since they invaded Manchuria in 1937.
