What Japanese Commanders Said When They First Fought Australian Soldiers on the Kokoda Track
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10 days. That was the number Tokyo assigned. 10 days to cross the Owen Stanley Range, seized the airirst strip at Port Moresby, and cut Australia off from the war. 10 days. The Imperial Japanese Army had taken Malaya in 70, Singapore in 7, the Dutch East Indies in 91, Rabbal in a single afternoon. They had not lost a land campaign since 1895, not once, not anywhere.
And the force command selected for this operation, the Nanka Shitai, the South Seas force, had already steamrololled through Guam and New Britain without breaking stride. 5,000 battleh hardened veterans of the most successful military expansion in modern history. Against them stood fewer than 400 Australian militia soldiers.
Most had never heard a shot fired in anger. Some were 17 years old. A few were 16. And when Major General Tomaro Horry reviewed his intelligence briefings on these defenders, he reportedly set the documents aside after 6 minutes and told his staff a single sentence that would prove to be the most catastrophically wrong assessment of the entire Pacific War.
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They are not soldiers. They are children playing dress up. We will brush them aside. He was wrong. He was so profoundly, historically, devastatingly wrong that within 5 weeks, his own afteraction reports would contain language no Japanese commander had used since the Russo-Japanese War. Words like fanatical, words like suicidal resistance, words like incomprehensible tenacity.
And by the time the campaign ground to its finish, Hi himself would be dead, drowned in a river retreat he never should have been making. From a position he never should have underestimated, 10 days. It took 131. And those 400 teenagers, they didn’t just delay the most feared army on Earth. They broke it. They bled it. They turned it around and chased it back over the same mountains the Japanese had crossed with drums beating and flags flying.
Stay with me because what Japanese commanders actually said in their own reports, in their own words, in documents that Tokyo tried to destroy before surrender, tells a story that should have rewritten everything the world understood about Australian soldiers. But first, you need to understand what the Japanese were walking into and who they thought they were walking over.
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July 1942, the world is on fire and Australia is losing. Singapore fell 5 months ago. 15,000 Australians marched into captivity. Darwin has been bombed. 64 raids and counting. Japanese submarines have shelled Sydney Harbor. The barrier islands are gone. New Guinea is next. And if New Guinea falls, the Japanese have a straight shot at the Australian mainland. This is not strategic theory.
This is geography. Port Moresby sits on the southern coast of New Guinea, roughly 500 m from the tip of Queensland. Take Port Moresby and you own the air corridor. Own the air corridor and Australian cities burn. Everyone knew this. The Japanese knew it. MacArthur knew it. The problem was who was available to stop it.
The answer was almost nobody. Australia’s best troops, the sixth and seventh divisions, the hardened veterans of Tbrook and North Africa were on the other side of the world. Churchill wanted to keep them there. The American buildup in Australia was still months from combat readiness. And what remained on the island of New Guinea was a scattering of militia units, reserve soldiers, weekend warriors, the ones the regular army called chocoo, short for chocolate soldiers, because the assumption was they would melt in the heat of battle.
That was the joke. Nobody was laughing by August. The unit that drew the shortest store in military history was the 39th Australian Infantry Battalion Militia raised from kids across Victoria and southern New South Wales. Average age 18. Some of them had been in uniform less than 3 months.
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Their equipment was left over from the First World War. Their rifles were Lee Nfields with worn barrels. They had no jungle training, no combat experience, no armor support, no air cover, and they were being sent up a 60-mi track through some of the most brutal terrain on planet Earth to hold a position against 5,000 Japanese veterans who had never lost. The Cakakota track.
You’ve heard the name. You probably think you know the story. You don’t. Not yet. The track itself is the first enemy. Forget what you’ve seen in documentaries with neat trails and green canopy. The Cakakota track climbs from sea level to 7,000 ft through vertical jungles so dense that sunlight doesn’t reach the ground.
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The mud is knee deep in dry season and chest deep in wet. Temperatures swing from 95° in the valleys to near freezing on the ridge lines. Malaria is not a risk, it’s a certainty. Dysentery hits everyone. Scrub typhus, tropical ulcers that eat through flesh to bone, leeches the size of your thumb, attached to every exposed inch of skin.
The track itself is often less than 2 ft wide, carved along cliff faces where a single wrong step means a 500 ft fall into a ravine nobody is coming to search. Men carrying 60 lb packs climbed sections so steep they had to haul themselves up by grabbing tree roots hand over hand. Some sections gained 3,000 ft in less than a mile. Australian soldiers later described it as climbing a vertical ladder for 10 hours while someone poured warm water over your head and punched you in the stomach.
This is where 400 militia boys were told to stop the Japanese Empire. Now let me tell you what the Japanese brought. The Nankai Shitai was not a garrison force. It was not a second line unit. Major General Tomitaro Hoi had hand selected his battalions for speed, endurance, and aggression. The 144th Infantry Regiment formed the backbone. Three full battalions of soldiers who had fought in China, stormed Guam, and crushed resistance across the Pacific with mechanical efficiency.
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Supporting them was the 41st Infantry Regiment, Mountain Warfare specialists, who trained specifically for operations in vertical terrain. engineers, artillery detachments hauling mountain guns that could be broken down and carried on human backs. A total force that would eventually swell to nearly 10,000 men on the track.
Their soldiers were older, harder. Many had 5 years of combat experience. Their officers had studied the terrain. Their intelligence told them the defenders were militia, poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly led. And on that last point, Japanese intelligence was initially right about the leadership. The 39th Battalion’s commanding officers had limited combat experience themselves, but intelligence reports cannot measure what a man discovers about himself when the jungle closes in and the enemy is coming, and there is literally nowhere to retreat to
except the ocean behind him and the country beyond it. Here is where the Japanese made their first mistake. They assumed Australians would fight like the British had in Malaya. They were catastrophically wrong. The first contact came on July 23rd, 1942. A company of the 39th Battalion, roughly 120 men under Latutenant Colonel William Owen, held positions around the village of Cakakota and its critical airrip.
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The airirstrip was the only flat ground for miles. It was the only place supplies could be flown in. Lose the airirstrip and the defenders would be cut off entirely. The Japanese hit them at night. Har’s advanced elements, a reinforced company of roughly 300 men from the 144th regiment, came through the jungle in the darkness.
They expected to overrun the position in minutes. They had done it before. Guam, Rabbal, a quick bayonet charge in the dark against garrison troops, and it was over by dawn. It was not over by dawn. Lieutenant Colonel Owen positioned his men in a tight perimeter around the airirstrip. When the Japanese charged, the Australians opened fire from prepared positions and did not stop.
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Owen himself was everywhere, moving between positions, directing fire, rallying teenagers who had never heard a gunshot outside of training. The fighting was hand-to- hand within 20 minutes. Bayonets, rifle butts, fists. In pitch darkness on a plateau in the jungle, boys who had been in school six months earlier fought the most experienced jungle army on Earth to a standstill. Owen was hit.
A bullet through the forehead. He died within hours, but his men held. When dawn broke, the Japanese had taken the air strip, but at a cost their commander never anticipated, and the Australians had melted into the jungle, regrouped, and were already setting ambushes along the track behind them. This was not Malaya.
The defenders were not surrendering. They were not panicking. They were bleeding, terrified, sick, outnumbered 5 to1. And they were fighting back with a ferocity that the Japanese had not encountered since Guadal Canal. And Guadal Canal hadn’t started yet. Now listen to what the Japanese said. Captain Tadashi Ogawa, commanding the lead company of the advanced force, wrote in his field diary after that first engagement.
And I want you to hear the exact tone of what a veteran Japanese officer put on paper after fighting Australian militia for the first time. The enemy did not behave as expected. We achieved surprise. We had numerical superiority. We attacked at night, which has always broken colonial defenders. These men did not break.
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When we reached their positions, they fought with bayonets and their hands. Several continued fighting after being wounded in ways that should have been fatal. One soldier with a wound through his chest attacked three of my men with a rifle used as a club before he was killed. I do not understand these Australians. They are not like the British. They are not like the Dutch.
They fight as though they are protecting their own homes. Read that last line again. They fight as though they are protecting their own homes. He was more right than he knew. Port Moresby was the last door. Behind it was Australia. Those militia soldiers understood something with absolute crystal clarity. Something that no amount of training or experience could replicate.
There was nowhere else to go. The Japanese could afford to lose a battle. The Australians could not afford to lose a single ridge line. Every position they gave up brought the enemy closer to home. Not to London, not to Washington. home, their homes, their mothers, their country, and that made them dangerous in a way the Japanese had never encountered.
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The withdrawal from Kokoda was fighting retreat, not route. Understand that distinction because the Japanese didn’t. Their playbook said, “A defending force that loses its primary position collapses, falls apart, streams to the rear in disorganized panic.” That is what happened in Malaya. That is what happened in Burma.
That is what happened everywhere the Japanese had fought western le forces. The 39th battalion did not collapse. They pulled back to Dencki. They dug in. They fought again. They pulled back to Isarava. They dug in. They fought again. Every village, every ridge, every river crossing. The pattern repeated with the mechanical stubbornness of men who simply refused to understand they were beaten.
The Japanese would attack with overwhelming numbers. The Australians would fight until their positions were flanked or overrun. Then they would pull back, not in panic, but in organized fighting withdrawal to the next defensible position and do it all over again. And each time the Japanese advanced, they paid for it.
Colonel Masau Kusunosi, commanding the 144th Infantry Regiment, submitted an assessment to Horai after two weeks of fighting that contained a sentence no Japanese regimenal commander had written since the war began. The rate of advance is unacceptable. Enemy resistance exceeds all intelligence estimates. Request additional forces.
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Unacceptable. That word echoed through the Japanese command structure like a gunshot. Kusenos was not a man who requested help. His regiment had taken Guam in 48 hours. And now he was telling his general that fewer than 400 Australian teenagers were costing him a week per mile. Do the arithmetic on that.
5,000 Japanese soldiers, 400 Australian defenders. The Japanese should have been moving at the speed of their boots. Instead, they were measuring progress in hundreds of yards. And every h 100red yards came with a body count. AI responded by committing more troops. He pushed the 41st Infantry Regiment forward. He brought up engineers to improve the track for resupply.
He personally moved closer to the front, something Japanese generals almost never did in the Pacific. And in his communications back to 17th Army headquarters in Rabbal, Horry began using language that would later be studied by every military historian who examined the campaign. The enemy fights with a savagery we did not anticipate. Their withdrawal is not retreat.
It is a fighting method. They yield ground slowly and extract a price for every meter. Our casualties are becoming operationally significant. Operationally significant from a general who had given himself 10 days. Now, let me take you into the jungle because the reports and the numbers only tell part of it. The part they don’t tell is what it sounded like, what it smelled like, what it felt like to be 19 years old, running a fever of 103 from malaria, down to your last magazine, watching shapes move through the trees at 3:00 in the morning, and
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knowing that every single one of them wants to kill you. Private Bruce Kingsbury was 24. He’d been a bank clerk in Melbourne. He was at Isurava when the Japanese launched their heaviest assault of the entire campaign. Over a thousand soldiers hitting the Australian perimeter from three directions simultaneously.
The Australians were down to roughly 200 effectives. Ammunition was running out. The line was buckling. Kingsbury grabbed the Bren gun. He charged, not backward, not sideways, forward, directly into the Japanese assault, firing from the hip, screaming. One man running straight at a thousand. The Japanese advance stalled. They actually stopped.
A single Australian with a Bren gun running at them was so far outside their tactical framework that the lead elements hesitated. And in that hesitation, the Australian line reformed, positions were reinforced, the perimeter held. Kingsbury was killed by a sniper. Minutes later, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, the first of four that would be earned on the Cakakota track.
But what matters here, what matters for understanding what the Japanese were writing in their reports is what his charge looked like from the other side. A Japanese platoon commander, Lieutenant Sakamoto, wrote about that day, not about Kingsbury by name. He didn’t know his name. He wrote about what he saw.
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A single enemy soldier emerged from the position, firing an automatic weapon and running directly toward our lead section. He was making a sound, not a battlecry as we understand it, but something between a scream and a laugh. My men stopped advancing. I could not get them moving again for several minutes.
When we finally reached the position where the soldier had fallen, we found that he had advanced over 50 m alone. He had killed or wounded at least eight of our men, one soldier. I reported this to battalion and was told similar incidents had occurred along the entire line between a scream and a laugh. That is how a Japanese officer described an Australian going to his death. Think about that.
But Isurava was not an isolated moment of madness. It was the pattern. And the pattern is what broke the Japanese psychologically before it broke them physically. The Australians fought differently. The Japanese were trained in mass assault. overwhelming force concentrated at a point. Bayonet charges to close the spiritual superiority of the Japanese warrior overcoming material disadvantage.
It was a doctrine rooted in Bushidto. It had worked everywhere. It worked in China. It worked against the British. It worked against the Americans at Batan. It did not work against the Australians in the jungle. The Australians didn’t stand in neat lines and try to match the Japanese bayonet for bayonet. They fought dirty. They used the jungle.
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They set ambushes so close that the opening shots were fired at ranges of 10 to 15 ft. They let Japanese patrols walk past them, then hit them from behind. They booby trapped their own abandoned positions. They rigged dead bodies. They fought at night, something no western force was supposed to be able to do against the Japanese.
and they were quiet in ways that unnerved Japanese soldiers who had been trained to believe they were the masters of jungle warfare. Sergeant Morrison of the 39th Battalion told his men something before their first ambush that became a kind of mantra along the track. Don’t shoot until you can see what color his eyes are.
Then put two in his chest and move. Don’t wait to see him fall. Move. They’ll be on you in 30 seconds. The ambush doctrine that the Australians developed, not from any manual, but from raw survival instinct, produced results that the Japanese could not reconcile with their intelligence assessments. A patrol of eight Australians would hit a Japanese column of 50, kill 6 to 10 men in 3 seconds of concentrated fire and vanish into the undergrowth before the response came.
The Japanese would spend an hour searching for an enemy that was already a mile away, setting up the next ambush. Colonel Kusunoz wrote about this specifically. The Australians do not fight as a conventional force. They appear and disappear. When we fix their position and attack, they are gone. When we advance carelessly, they are suddenly behind us.
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Our flanking patrols are being ambushed and destroyed. I have lost 17 scouts in 3 days to an enemy I cannot locate. 17 scouts in 3 days from an enemy that supposedly consisted of untrained militia. And here is the detail that sits at the heart of what the Japanese commanders kept writing about. The thing they could not get their heads around, the observation that appeared in report after report from every level of the Japanese command on the track.
The Australians would not stay dead, not literally, metaphorically, operationally. The Japanese would fight a brutal engagement, take a position, count the enemy dead, and calculate that the defending force must be combat ineffective. Finished. Done. No unit can take those losses and continue fighting. They would advance confidently toward the next ridge.
And the Australians would be there, dug in, ready, fighting with the same intensity as if the previous battle had never happened. Major Koiwi, who commanded a battalion of the 144th Regiment, expressed this bewilderment more clearly than anyone. We have been fighting the same enemy for 23 days. By our calculations, based on verified casualties inflicted, the force opposing us should have ceased to exist 12 days ago.
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Yet every morning they are in front of us. Every night they probe our positions. I have concluded that either our casualty estimates are wrong or these men are being reinforced by methods we cannot detect or they simply refuse to accept that they have been defeated. Read that third option. They simply refuse to accept that they have been defeated.
That was the Japanese conclusion. Not a compliment in a postwar memoir. Not a generous reassessment decades later. That was a battalion commander in the field trying to explain to his superiors why his advance had stalled against an enemy that on paper no longer existed. And he was right. The 39th Battalion had been virtually destroyed as a fighting unit.
Their casualties were staggering. At one point, the entire battalion could muster fewer than 70 men capable of holding a rifle. But those 70 men fought as though they were 700. They fought because they could see the coast behind them. They fought because nobody was coming to save them.
They fought because the alternative was not captivity. The Japanese were not taking prisoners on the Cakakota track. The alternative was annihilation of themselves, of their mates, of the country they’d left behind. Now, I need to tell you about the reinforcements because this is where the story pivots from desperate defense to something the Japanese never saw coming.
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The second 14th battalion and the second 16th battalion arrived on the track in late August. AIF Australian Imperial Force volunteers veterans. These men had fought RML in North Africa. They had held Towbrook. They were lean hard and they were absolutely furious about what had been done to the militia boys they were relieving. Brigadier Arnold Pots took command and the dynamic on the track shifted.
Not immediately in territory, the Japanese still had numbers, they still had momentum. Conducted what military historians now call one of the finest fighting withdrawals in the history of warfare. A controlled, punishing retreat that bled the Japanese at every turn while preserving his own force for the counterattack he knew was coming.
But the Japanese didn’t know it was controlled. They thought they were winning. Their reports from early September reflected increasing confidence. Hurry signaled Rabbal that Port Moresby would fall within weeks. The forward units could smell the ocean. Then the Australians stopped retreating. They stopped at a place called Iori Baywa, the last ridge before the coastal plane, 30 mi from Port Moresby.
Close enough that on a clear day you could see the smoke from the town. This was it, the end of the line. There was no more track behind them. There was only home. And then something happened that no Japanese intelligence officer had predicted. Something that violated everything the Japanese understood about how Western forces behaved when pushed to the brink. The Australians attacked.
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Not a probing attack. Not a limited counterattack to straighten a line. A fullscale screaming bayonets fixed assault back up the track they’d been retreating along for 2 months. The 25th Brigade. The 16th Brigade. fresh units arriving behind the now reinforced veterans and they came at the Japanese with a violence that the Nankai Shitai had never experienced from any enemy in any theater.
Hurry’s communications back to Rabbal in the final days of September tell the story of a general watching his victory dissolve. Enemy has launched major counterattack along entire front. Forward positions overwhelmed. Request permission to consolidate. Consolidate. That was the Japanese word for retreat. Permission was denied.
17th Army ordered Hi to hold. Tokyo could not accept that the advance on Port Moses had failed. The Imperial Army did not retreat. It was doctrinally impossible, spiritually unacceptable. But the Australians didn’t care about Japanese doctrine. They kept coming. The fighting during the Australian counteroffensive was by every account from both sides among the most savage of the entire Pacific War.
Hand-to- hand combat on ridgeel lines so narrow that two men couldn’t stand a breast. Bayonet fights in mud so deep that men drowned in it. The Australians fought up slopes that the Japanese had fought down over the same bodies that had fallen weeks before through positions littered with the wreckage of both armies. And the Japanese broke.
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Not all at once, not in a clean collapse, in stages. Unit by unit, ridge by ridge. The Nankai Shidai began pulling back. First to Templeton’s crossing, then to Aora Creek, then to Cakakota itself. The same villages they’d taken in July. The same track they’d marched along with flags and drums.
Now they were stumbling back along it, starving, sick, wounded men left in the mud because there weren’t enough healthy soldiers to carry them. Lieutenant Sakamoto, the same officer who had written about the Australian with the Bren gun, wrote his final diary entry before the retreat from Aora Creek. We entered this jungle believing we were the greatest soldiers in the world.
I now believe we were wrong. Not about Japanese courage, about Australian determination. These men fight for something I can feel but cannot name. It is not emperor worship. It is not ideology. It is something in the ground itself. They fight as though this jungle is their home. It is not their home. But they fight as though it is.
I do not think we can beat them here. Something in the ground itself. A Japanese lieutenant trained from childhood in the spiritual superiority of the Yamato race. a man who believed with his entire being that the Japanese soldier was the supreme warrior on earth. And he wrote that about farmers and bank clerks and school boys from Victoria.
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The retreat became a catastrophe. The same track that had punished the Australians now destroyed the Japanese. But worse, because the Australians had been retreating toward their supply lines, getting closer to food, ammunition, medical support with every step backward, the Japanese were retreating away from theirs. Every step backward took them further from Rabal, further from resupply, further from survival. Starvation set in.
Japanese soldiers stripped bark from trees. They ate grass. They ate leather equipment straps. They ate things that cannot be repeated in this script. The medical situation was apocalyptic. Malaria, dysentery, beri, tropical ulcers. Men who had crossed the Owen Stanley’s as the most feared infantry in the Pacific were now skeletal figures crawling through mud too weak to carry their rifles.
And behind them came the Australians. Relentless, merciless, pushing, ambushing, cutting off retreat routes, destroying rear guards, giving the Japanese exactly what the Japanese had given to every retreating army they’d ever chased. No quarter and no rest. Hi never made it back. On November 19th, 1942, Major General Tomitaro Horry drowned while attempting to cross the Kumusi River on a makeshift raft.
The current took him. The man who had given himself 10 days to take Port Moresby died in a river running away from it. His body was never recovered. Think about that. The general who looked at his intelligence briefings and said they are children playing dressup died fleeing from those children. Drowned in retreat, his command shattered, his force decimated.
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his mission, the only overland advance toward Australia that Japan would ever attempt. An unqualified, undeniable, irreversible failure. And what were the final numbers? Because this is a story about a number, and the number needs its reckoning. The Japanese committed approximately 10,000 soldiers to the Cakakota campaign.
Of those, over 6,000 were killed, wounded, or died of disease. 60% casualties. Some battalions ceased to exist entirely. The 144th Infantry Regiment that had taken Guam in 48 hours was functionally destroyed. Battalions that had crossed the mountains at full strength came back with fewer than 100 men. The Australians lost 625 killed on the track, over,600 wounded. But they held.
They held against an enemy that outnumbered them at every engagement. They held when they had no air cover, no artillery support, no armor, and sometimes no food. They held when they were sick, exhausted, and watching their mates die in mud that sucked the boots off their feet. And the 10 days that Horry promised, 131 days, 13 times longer than planned.
And at the end of those 131 days, the Japanese were not in Port Moresby. They were dead in the jungle. The post-war examination of Japanese records revealed something that the Australian government didn’t publicize at the time and most history books still don’t emphasize. The Cakakota campaign fundamentally altered Japanese strategic thinking about Australia.
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Before Cakakota, the Japanese high command viewed the Australian military as a subsidiary of the British, colonial troops who would fight with British methods and break under Japanese pressure the way they had in Singapore and Malaya. After Cakakota, the Japanese reclassified Australian forces, not as colonial troops, not as British auxiliaries, as a primary threat.
Colonel Suji Masanobu, one of Japan’s most influential staff officers, the man who had planned the conquest of Malaya and was instrumental in the fall of Singapore, reviewed the Cakakota reports and wrote an assessment that circulated through Imperial General Headquarters. The Australian soldier is not the British soldier in a different uniform.
He is a different species of fighter. In Malaya, the British fought for an empire they could not see from where they stood. The Australian fights for the dirt under his boots. He does not surrender. He does not retreat beyond a point his own mind determines. When he reaches that point, he attacks. This is more dangerous than any tactic.
It is a characteristic. We cannot train against a characteristic. We cannot train against a characteristic. Stay with that sentence. A Japanese colonel who helped destroy the British Empire in Southeast Asia, who watched 130,000 Allied troops surrender at Singapore, was telling Tokyo that the Australians were fundamentally qualitatively different, not better equipped, not better supported, different in some way that could not be counted by doctrine or numbers or spiritual will.
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And it wasn’t just one officer. The pattern of Japanese commentary about Australian soldiers after Cakakota is one of the most remarkable and least discussed threads in Pacific War historioggraphy. General Adachi Hatazo, commanding the 18th Army in New Guinea after Cakakota, issued instructions to his officers that specifically addressed fighting Australians as opposed to other Allied forces.
When engaging American forces, expect heavy preliminary bombardment followed by cautious infantry advance. When engaging Australian forces, expect no warning. They will close to bayonet range before you know they are there. Prepare accordingly. Expect no warning. That assessment, born directly from what happened on the Cakakota track, shaped Japanese defensive planning across New Guinea for the remainder of the war.
And every time the Japanese fought Australians after Cakakota, the pattern held. Lei, Salamoa, Finch Halfen, Buuna, Gona, Shaggy Ridge, Waywack. At every engagement, the same reports filtered back through Japanese channels. The Australians fight differently. They come closer. They stay longer. They do not stop.
But all of that, the campaigns, the reclassification, the doctrinal shifts, all of it traces back to those first weeks on the Cakakota track to 400 militia soldiers who were not supposed to last a day. You need to understand something that gets lost in the military analysis. Those boys on the track, the ones from the 39th Battalion, the ones the regulars called Chocoo, they didn’t know they were making history.
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They didn’t know that Japanese officers were writing stunned assessments about them. They didn’t know that their stand would be studied at war colleges for decades. They knew their mates were dying. They knew the Japanese were coming. They knew that behind them was the ocean and beyond the ocean was home and nobody was going to defend it if they didn’t.
Private Stan Bisset, 18 years old from the 39th Battalion, survived the track. Years later, when asked what drove him to keep fighting, when everything said he should have broken, he gave an answer that explains the entire campaign better than any general’s memoir ever could. We were scared. We were sick.
Blok were dying everywhere. And we didn’t know what we were doing half the time. But you couldn’t go back. There was nothing back there except mom. And you weren’t going to let them get to mom. You weren’t going to let them get to mom. That’s it. That is what the Japanese ran into on the Cakakota track. Not tactics, not technology, not training.
A bunch of teenagers who decided in the worst conditions on Earth against the worst odds imaginable that the enemy was not getting past them and then made it true through sheer bloody-minded, teeth-gritted Australian refusal to quit. The Japanese wanted 10 days. They got 131. They wanted Port Moresby. They got the Kumusi River.
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They wanted children playing dress up. They got the fight of their lives. And when it was over, when the last Japanese soldier had been chased back over the mountains, when the bodies were buried and the wounded evacuated and the track fell silent for the first time in 4 months, Major General George Vasey, who had led the counterattack, stood on the Cakakota plateau where it all began, looked at the airirstrip where Owen had died and said something that every Australian should know, but too few do.
The 39th Battalion held the pass. They were outmanned, outgunned, and outgeneralled at every turn. They should have been destroyed in 24 hours. But they held. And because they held, the rest of us had something to hold on to. 10 days, 131. That was the Cakakota track. That was what the Japanese found when they finally met Australian soldiers who had everything to lose and absolutely nowhere to go.
And the reports those Japanese commanders wrote, the ones filled with words like fanatical and incomprehensible and we cannot train against a characteristic. Those reports are the truest measure of what happened on that track. Not Australian propaganda, not Allied spin. The enemy’s own words written in shock, written in respect, written by men who went into those mountains believing they were invincible and came out knowing they were not.
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Because 400 boys from Victoria proved them wrong. In the mud, in the rain, in the dark, with nothing but lean fields and the knowledge that mom was behind them. 10 days.