“They Said They Were Invincible” — How Australians Handed Japan Its First Defeat

“They Said They Were Invincible” — How Australians Handed Japan Its First Defeat

The picture almost nobody in the world saw in the autumn of 1942 looked like this. A Japanese officer in a soaked tunic stood knee-deep in black tropical sludge staring at his tank half swallowed by the swamp and understood there was nowhere to run. Around him in the tall kunai grass lay the bodies of his soldiers, the emperor’s finest marines, the very men before whom Malaya had fallen, Singapore had fallen, the Philippines had fallen.

A hundred meters from him in the mud and under the pouring rain, an Australian corporal from Brisbane was rolling a cigarette. His boots were coming apart on his feet, his rifle was rusting inside 24 hours, and he did not care one bit what the Tokyo newspapers said about the invincible Imperial Army. Because he had just broken that army.

It happened at a place called Milne Bay on the far eastern tip of New Guinea, and it was the first land defeat the allies inflicted on Japan in the Second World War. And London and Washington worked very hard to make sure you never heard about it. To grasp how impossible what happened at Milne Bay really was, you have to remember what the civilized world believed in the middle of 1942.

It believed one simple and terrifying thing. The Japanese soldier was unbeatable. Not as a figure of speech, but in the most literal sense. In the eight months since the strike on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Army had not lost a single land battle. It had rolled through Malaya in 70 days while British command swore it would take a year.

It had taken Singapore, the fortress the official propaganda called impregnable, and marched 80,000 allied troops into captivity. Winston Churchill himself called it the worst disaster in the history of British arms. It had smashed the Americans in the Philippines, kicked the Dutch out of the East Indies, sent the battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse to the bottom of the South China Sea, and rolled through Burma so fast that General William Slim wrote in his diary a bitter line about an army that retreats faster than the enemy advances. Newspapers from New York to Melbourne printed the same grim phrase over and over. The Japanese infantryman was a superhuman. He lived on a handful of rice. He saw in the dark. He marched 50 miles a day through jungle no white man could cross. He felt no pain, and he knew no fear.

One British staff officer put it this way. This is not an army. This is a natural disaster. And the natural disaster was now moving on a tiny patch of coconut plantation crawling with malarial mosquitoes. Milne Bay looks unremarkable on a map, a long finger of water pointing east at the very tip of Papua. For the Australians and the Americans, the place had one vital strategic meaning.

Allied engineers were carving three airstrips out of the jungle there, and whoever held those airstrips held the key to the Coral Sea and to the approaches to Port Moresby. And Port Moresby was the last barrier before Australia itself. Tokyo wanted Milne Bay, and Tokyo intended to take it. The job was handed to the elite of the Imperial Navy, a force with the long and menacing name Kaigun Tokubetsu Rikūsentai, the Special Naval Landing Forces, whom the Japanese press called the Marines of the Emperor.

These men had been handpicked. They were bigger than the average Japanese soldier. They went through fanatical training, and they came ashore with Type 95 Ha-Go light tanks, the squat little machines that scared every Allied infantryman who ever saw one crawl out from behind the trees. Japanese intelligence, as it imagined, had done its homework.

The report sent to Rabaul claimed the bay was defended by a handful of airfield engineers and perhaps a company or two of second-rate militia. Three days of sharp fighting, the planners estimated, and the rising sun would fly over airstrip number three. This is where the story begins to turn because Tokyo had made one small but fatal miscalculation.

It had badly undercounted the defenders. What was actually waiting in the mangroves of Milne Bay was close to 9,000 Australians. These were not engineers. These were veterans of the Australian Imperial Force, the 7th and the 18th Brigades. Men who had already bled the Germans in the sands of North Africa, who had come through the siege of Tobruk and the hell of El Alamein, tanned black by the desert sun, wiry, contemptuous of anyone who walked around in a clean tunic.

Beside them stood the militia, the citizen military forces, the boys the regulars sneeringly called chocolate soldiers because they were convinced these kids would melt at the first skirmish. They were boys from the dairy farms of Queensland, from the factories of Sydney, from the tram depots of Adelaide, lads who had never fired a shot at a human being in their lives.

The staff back in Brisbane worried about them openly. The desert veterans rolled their eyes and muttered that the youngsters would bolt at the first mortar round. They were wrong. They would admit it before the week was out. The man commanding this strange mixed force was Major General Cyril Clowes, a quiet Tasmanian gunner who did not give speeches and did not pose for photographs.

Clowes had one enormous advantage over every Allied commander who had faced the Japanese before him. He refused to panic. While the telegrams from MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane grew more hysterical by the hour, demanding immediate counterattacks, demanding reports, demanding miracles, Clowes stayed silent, studied his maps, and let the enemy walk into the worst ground on the planet.

Because the real general at Milne Bay was not Clowes, and it was not the Japanese rear admiral on the other side. The real general was the mud. Anyone who has not stood in it cannot imagine the mud of Milne Bay in the wet season. The rain did not fall in any ordinary sense of the word. It crashed down from the sky in sheets so dense that a man could drown standing up.

8 inches in a single night was normal. 10 was nothing extraordinary. The coconut plantations turned into black syrup that came up to a soldier’s knee, then to his thigh. Rifles rusted within 24 hours. Boots rotted off men’s feet in 3 days. Tropical ulcers ate the flesh down to the bone. Malaria came on so fast that whole platoons were shaking with fever before they ever saw a Japanese soldier.

And through this liquid hell, the Imperial Navy’s finest were going to push a tank assault. The jungle seemed to be laughing at them. The first landings came in the pre-dawn hours of the 26th of August in 1942. The Japanese barges ran aground in the wrong place, several miles east of their intended beach.

And the marines of the emperor stepped onto the shore straight into a swamp. They pushed forward anyway, because they were Japanese, and because the word retreat did not exist in their vocabulary. By the next night, they had forced their Ha-Go tanks up the single muddy track leading to the airstrips with headlights blazing on full, exactly as Imperial doctrine prescribed.

Blind the defenders, sow terror, break the line. It had worked in Malaya. It had worked in Burma. It had worked everywhere. Here, it was not going to work. Lying in the tall kunai grass along the track was the 61st battalion, Queensland militia boys, and the 25th battalion of the 7th Brigade, and their sergeants had told them one single thing: do not run.

The little fellows bleed just like anybody else. What followed cannot be called a battle in any textbook sense. It was a close-quarters knife fight under pouring rain at distances so short that men could hear each other breathing. The Australians let the tanks roll past, let the headlights sweep over their heads, and then opened up with everything they had on the infantry walking behind.

Bren guns on fixed mounts turned the track into a corridor. Grenades went into the mud at arm’s length, and the tanks, those dreadful Ha-Go tanks, began doing something no crewman had planned for. They began to sink. The mud took them one after another, sucking them to the axles, then to the hulls, then to the turrets, until the Japanese drivers were forced to throw open the hatches and try to crawl out under a hurricane of Australian rifle fire.

The armored spearhead of the attack had vanished, swallowed by the Papuan bog by dawn on the 27th of August. The marines of the emperor learned for the first time in the war what it felt like to stand on the wrong side of the terror. The ground where this drama played out had a name that nobody in Brisbane or Washington had ever heard before, and almost nobody would hear afterwards: the Gama River plantation.

A place of straight rows of coconut palms, a crumbling wooden mission house, and a single track running parallel to the shore. Defending the eastern approach to this plantation on the night of the 27th was a scratch force built around the men of Charlie Company of the 61st Battalion, supported by two attached two-pounder anti-tank guns that had been manhandled forward through the mud at the cost of enormous effort.

The gunners never fired a shot in the end because the swamp did the anti-tank work for them, but the crews stayed at their posts all night anyway, soaked to the skin, counting the Japanese muzzle flashes in the darkness. The company commander was a solid Queenslander named Bix, a bank clerk in civilian life who walked his perimeter in the dark speaking quietly to each man by name, telling them that the Japanese would come again before dawn and that nobody was to fire until the Bren guns opened up first.

The discipline of those militia boys that night was something the regular army would never again be able to sneer at. And come they did at around 3:00 in the morning in what the Japanese naval commander must have believed would be the decisive blow. A column of marines led personally by a naval lieutenant named Hayashi came forward along the track at a steady walking pace, not firing, conserving ammunition, relying on surprise and on the old reliable shock of the bayonet.

They were 30 meters from the forward Australian section before the first Bren opened up. What happened in the next 90 seconds was remembered later only in fragments by the men who survived it. Hayashi himself fell at about the 30-meter mark, still urging his men forward. The Australian section leader, a lance corporal from the Darling Downs whose name appears in only one surviving battalion report, was killed standing up behind his gun.

His loader, a 19-year-old apprentice carpenter from Toowoomba, pulled the body aside, took the grips, and kept firing until dawn. The Japanese left more than 70 bodies on that short stretch of the track. The Australians lost nine men and counted 14 wounded. When daylight came, a section of Charlie Company walked the ground and found a naval officer’s map case still strapped to Hayashi, along with a small printed leaflet stamped with the seal of the Rabaul Garrison, containing detailed instructions on how Australian prisoners were to be treated once the airstrips had been secured. The instructions were never needed. They kept coming. You have to give them that. Four nights in a row, they launched screaming charges against the perimeter of airstrip number three. Waves of men with bayonets fixed, calling out in English to confuse the defenders, shouting that they were friends, that they were Indians, that they were wounded, anything to get within grenade range.

Four nights in a row, the Australians cut them down in the open. The 61st Battalion, those militia boys the veterans had laughed at, held a position called KB Mission against odds of three to one and did not give up a single yard. By the time the 18th Brigade, the hardened AIF men with the sand of the desert still in their gaiters, moved up to finish the job, the Queensland lads had already broken the back of the best troops the Imperial Navy could put into a landing barge.

The chocolate soldiers, as it turned out, had not melted. They had set like concrete. A separate and forgotten part of this story belongs to the pilots of the Royal Australian Air Force, 75 Squadron and 76 Squadron, flying American Kittyhawk fighters. These lads took off from the second strip under fire, sometimes with Japanese bullets cracking past them as they lifted the wheels, and went after the landing barges and the assault boats at zero feet.

So low, they came back with palm leaves jammed in their radiators. Their commander was Squadron Leader Peter Turnbull, a young officer who had buried his best friend 4 days earlier and went into every sortie with a face showing nothing but exhaustion and a cold, steady anger. On the 27th of August, Turnbull’s aircraft went down over the enemy positions.

He was 26 years old. The number three strip that he had defended from the air was later renamed in his honor. Not one frame of official newsreel survives about any of this. The Melbourne papers gave Turnbull four lines on page seven beneath an advertisement for women’s shoes. The counterattack, when it came, was methodical and merciless.

The 25th Brigade and the 2nd 12th Battalion began pushing the Japanese back down the same muddy track they had come up, and now the advantage of terrain flipped completely. Every abandoned tank became an Australian machine gun nest. Every clearing in the kunai grass hid a sniper from Wagga or Toowoomba. The Australian advance moved at the pace of a funeral procession, methodical, patient, allowing the Japanese no time to reorganize, allowing them no clean fighting withdrawal.

The men of the 2nd 12th had brought with them the habits learned in the wadis around Tobruk, where patience was worth more than speed, and they applied those habits now in the jungle with murderous effect. The Japanese signals back to Rabaul grew shorter and more desperate. Food and ammunition were running out.

The wounded could not be evacuated, and dysentery was killing as many men as Australian bullets. A prisoner taken by a patrol of the 2nd 9th Battalion in the final days of the fighting, a young naval rating who had been lying in a shell hole for almost two days, told his captors through an interpreter that his unit had been informed before the landings that they would be facing second-line garrison troops and untrained natives.

When the interpreter explained to him who he had actually been fighting, the young sailor said nothing for a long moment and then asked for a cigarette. Then, on the 5th of September in 1942, something happened that had never happened before in the short and triumphant history of the Japanese war machine. An order came from Rabaul that should never have come.

Abandon the operation. Evacuate by sea. Run. The numbers tell a story that the Japanese propaganda office would go on hiding right up to the end of the war. Out of roughly 2,800 naval infantry who had landed at Milne Bay, more than 600 never went home and hundreds more were wounded or lost in the swamps. Australian losses were heavy, too.

Around 167 men gone forever and more than 200 wounded. But the perimeter had held. The airstrips had held and far more importantly than any patch of ground, the myth had cracked. The spell was broken. Japanese soldiers had been beaten in open land combat by an Allied army and had been forced to retreat into their own boats.

It was not supposed to happen. And it had just been done by a bunch of Australians whom nobody in London or Washington had seriously counted on. And here begins the part of the story that still makes an old Australian’s blood pressure rise. You can leaf through the British newspapers of September 1942 and not find the name Milne Bay on any front page.

You will find columns about the Western Desert, about the Malta convoys, about Stalingrad, about Royal Air Force raids on Germany, about the little battle in the Papuan mud that had just cracked the most fearsome army in Asia, almost nothing. The American press was no better. The communiques from MacArthur’s headquarters carefully avoided mentioning that the decisive ground troops had been Australian, preferring the vague phrase “Allied Forces.”

It was as if the victory had to be laundered first before it could be shown to the English-speaking world. The diggers noticed. They always noticed everything. A quiet, bitter kind of pride began to settle into the kit bags of the men who had been there. The kind of pride that does not need a parade and does not wait for a medal.

In the end, it took a British officer, strangely enough, to finally say the truth out loud. Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the man who would later lead the 14th Army to victory in Burma, wrote the words that every Australian who had fought at Milne Bay had been waiting to hear. “Australian troops had, at Milne Bay, inflicted on the Japanese their first undoubted defeat on land.”

Some of us may forget that, of all the allies, it was the Australian soldiers who first broke the spell of the invincibility of the Japanese Army. The men who were there did not need those words. They knew it the morning they walked past the drowned hulks of the Ha-Go tanks and saw the rain finally easing over airstrip number three.

They knew it when the Japanese survivors staggered back to their barges and did not look over their shoulders. They knew it when a young militia corporal from Brisbane, asked later by a reporter what the secret had been, shrugged and said only that the mud had been a terrible place for anyone to try and be a hero and that most of the lads had just wanted a dry smoke and a cup of tea.

No flags, no speeches, just a nod, a cigarette, and the quiet knowledge that the invincible army had come, the invincible army had gone, and the Queenslanders in the kunai grass were still standing there.