How Australia’s 39th Battalion Took Gona From a Japanese Garrison That Fought to the Last Man

A brigadier is standing in a tent on the northern Papua and coast and he is reading a signal. The signal is two words long. Those two words have cost him three weeks. They have cost him two brigades. They have cost him hundreds of Australian dead and hundreds more Australian wounded. And the ground the signal describes is a strip of coastal jungle less than a mile deep.

 The brigadier has watched battalions of the finest infantry the second Australian Imperial Force could put into the  field walk into that strip and come back out as remnants. He has watched them do it again. He has watched them do it again after  that. And the man who sent him the signal is not a career soldier from the Middle East.

 He commands a battalion of part-time militia. They are the men this army once called chocolate soldiers. Unfit for battle. Untrained.  Too young. The battalion that would melt in the sun. To understand two words,  you have to go back 19 days. You have to go back to  attack one. Gona sits on the northern coast of Papua at the mouth of a shallow creek.

 Before the war, it was a Church of England mission. A white-washed chapel. A school. A scatter of native huts. Coconut palms leaning out over the beach. A postcard place. In July of 1942,  the Japanese landed here and began their overland drive on Port Moresby. And after that drive was broken on the Kokoda Track the survivors came back to Gona  and dug in.

 Dug in is not the right word. The men who fortified Gona were not line infantry. Many of them were an army road building unit under a Japanese major named Yamamoto and they were fortification  specialists. And what they built in the four months before the Australians came for them was one of the most sophisticated defensive positions  the allies would face in the whole New Guinea campaign.

 They built it out of coconut  palm logs, 3 ft thick, laid in layers with iron plate and rail sections and drums filled with wet sand between them. They roofed the bunkers with more logs and packed earth over the top and let the vegetation grow across the roof until the ground healed over and swallowed the position whole.

 The bunkers stood barely a foot above the earth. Some of them were entirely below it play. Where the ground was too wet to dig, they raised the bunkers seven or eight feet up on stilts of coconut log and grew the jungle back around them. Each bunker held three to five machine guns. Each machine gun had a lane cut for it through the kunai.

Each lane crossed the lane of another bunker so that any man moving on the position was in the fire of two guns at once and often three and often four. Between the bunkers ran communication trenches so that a section could shift its guns from one aperture to another and open fire from a place no one had noticed a minute before.

 The garrison had cut the kunai grass down to the ground in front of the position. Anyone crossing that killing ground would cross it in the open. On the landward side, the ground was swamp. On the seaward  side, the ground was beach and the beach was mined. The only approach to Gona was across the flat cut kunai from the south in daylight in front of guns you could not see until they killed you.

 Yamamoto had somewhere between 800 and 900 men.    His orders were plain. He would hold Gona. He would not withdraw. When he could no longer hold, he would die where he stood and so would every soldier under him. That was the position. That was the plan.  On the 16th of November, 1942, an Australian Brigade left the Kumusi River and marched east across the coastal plain to attack it.

   They were the 25th Brigade under Brigadier Ken Eather. They were the men who had pushed the Japanese back over the Owen Stanley Range. On paper, they were three battalions strong. In the mud, they were less than a thousand men in total. Malaria had already begun to hollow them out.

 The march  to the front cost them more casualties before a shot was fired at them. On the 18th of November, a company of the 2/33rd went forward to see if Gona was defended. Gona was defended. Attack one. The plan for the 20th of November was direct. Three battalions would move north across the kunai from the south and west    and take the village in a single day.

There would be no artillery. There was no artillery to be had. There would be some air support if the weather allowed. The weather did not allow. The men would move at first light through the wet grass. They would cross the open ground and they would go into the position on foot. They went in.

 They found the ground. The ground was the thing no one had briefed them on because no one on the Australian side yet understood what the ground was. It was flat.    It was open. It was cut back to the level of a man’s boot. The kunai stubble left nothing to crawl behind. Every man  walked forward upright into fire from bunkers he could not see.

The bunkers waited until the leading files were 40 yards out and then they opened and the guns crossed and the men who were hit fell into grass that hid them from their mates    and their mates went past them. And by the time the Australian sections realized there were guns behind them as well as in front of them, whole platoons were down.

 The ground gained on the 20th of November    was measured in tens of yards. Some sections reached the outer wire. A few reached the edge of the coconut grove. None reached a bunker they could see. The forward companies pulled back at last light. They carried what wounded they could carry. Some of the wounded lay out in the kunai and could not be reached.

 The price was 76 killed and wounded in a single day. That was attack one. Attack two. The plan for the 22nd of November was to try again. There was no other plan. The 25th Brigade was already down to something under 900 men and every man who could still walk was still expected to walk. Either went back at the position with what he had, the 231st led.

The 225th came in on the flank. They tried to work in from the west and south at once and forced the garrison to split its fire. The garrison did not split its fire. The garrison had spent months practicing this. The moment the Australians opened their approach, the machine guns behind the coconut palms cut across the kunai in overlapping cones and where two cones met the ground was not survivable.

Sections that had crossed 60 yd on the 20th crossed 40 on the 22nd. Sections that had reached the outer wire  had pulled up short and could not get past it. Grenades from concealed positions came down on men who could not see who had thrown them. By the afternoon, the attack was  over.

 The forward files came back through their own dead. There were now bodies out in the grass from two attacks    and the sun was on them and the men in the rifle pits behind the line could smell them. The ground gained was less than the ground gained on the 20th. The price was 129 killed and wounded  across the 22nd and 23rd.

 The 25th Brigade was now down to less than 800 men. That was attack two.    Attack three. The plan for the 24th of November was different only in one thing. This time there would  be air support. Ball as came over in the morning and worked the position for perhaps 20 minutes. The bombs went into the coconut palms. The coconut palms took the bombs and gave nothing back.

 When the aircraft left, the palms were shredded and smoking, but the bunkers under them were untouched because the bunkers were built to survive things worse than any bomb the Allies could put on them at this stage of the war. The 25th Brigade went in through the smoke. The bunkers opened at the same range as before. The sections that reached the outer wire were the same sections minus their dead from the 20th and their  dead from the 22nd.

They found the wire uncut. They found the ground the same. They found the guns firing from the same lanes. Two officers were hit within minutes of leaving the start line. A platoon of the 231st lost its sergeants inside an hour.    Runners could not get across the open ground to bring word back to company headquarters.

   The attack failed by midday. The ground gained was again measured in yards, not tens of yards, yards. The price was another hundred casualties.    And by the 26th of November, the Brigade could no longer put a proper attack together. Eather    asked to be relieved.

 He had brought roughly a thousand men out of the mountains.    He now had, in effective terms, less than a battalion. That was attack three.    The 21st Brigade was on its way in. The 21st Brigade was itself a shadow.    It was the Brigade that had held at Isurava and Brigade Hill on the Kokoda Track.

 The Brigade that had fought the Japanese to a standstill in the mountains and then walked back over them. Three battalions, the 214th, the 216th, the 227th.  On paper, three battalions of infantry. In fact, at Gona    in late November, barely a thousand men between them. Some companies could not muster 40 rifles.

 Some platoons were commanded by corporals.    The Brigade Commander was Brigadier Ivan Dougherty, who took over from Eather and read the same maps    and looked at the same aerial photographs and understood, as Eather had understood that there was no other way in. You went across the Kunai. You went into the guns. Attack four.

 The plan for the 29th of November was to hit Gona from the east. The 214th would move up the beach. The 216th  and 227th would work in from the south. There would be an air strike first.  There was an air strike first. It fell mostly on the correct ground    and it destroyed nothing that mattered.

The battalions went in. The 214th got onto the beach. The beach was mined. Men going up the sand at a run stepped on mines and were killed and the men behind them slowed and the machine guns in the coconut palms above the beach opened onto the slowed men and killed more. A platoon reached  the eastern edge of the village.

 A platoon held there for a time. A platoon could not stay. The 227th came in from the south and lost 32 men in the first minutes and pulled back at dusk.  The 216th went into the same wire the 25th Brigade had gone into and found the wire in the same place and the guns in the same place and the ground  in the same place.

 There was nothing new to find at Gona. Everything at Gona was already in its place    waiting. The ground gained was a foothold on the beach that could not be held. The price was another day’s dead and another day’s wounded    and the beginning of the same arithmetic the 25th Brigade had learned first.

 That was attack four. Attack five. The plan for the 30th of November was the same plan. Come in  again. Try the beach again. Try the south again. Bring the 214th  back for another push up the sand. The 214th pushed up the sand. The mines were still on the sand. The guns were still in the palms.    Somewhere a hundred yards inland the bunkers waited, and the bunkers had not been touched. They went  in.

 They came back. They took a bit of ground on the beach. Then they did not have it. The ground gained was a bit of beach. The price was more of the same men. That was attack five. Attack six. The plan for the first of December    was to try one more coordinated push before Doerty acknowledged that the 21st Brigade could not do this on its own.

The 227th would attack from the south. The third militia battalion would come in with them. A company from the 216th  would go up on the flank. There would be some artillery this time. A few short 25-pounders had been dragged forward through the mud. They fired what they could. It was not enough. The battalions went in.

They went into the same ground. They found the same guns. They found the same wire. They came back with more casualties, and the 21st Brigade had now lost 430 men in five days of fighting. 430 men out of a brigade  that had gone into the fight with barely a thousand in five days. The ground gained was almost none.

 The price was almost half the brigade. That was attack six. Doerty  asked for more men. There were no more men to give him. The 16th Brigade was at Sanananda, and Sanananda was its own killing ground,    and would remain so for many weeks. The Americans were at Buna, and Buna was going as badly as Buna. There was one battalion that could still  be brought forward.

 There was one battalion sticking on an airstrip in the mountains that had been rested  since September and could be lifted across the Owen Stanleys and dropped into the beachhead. That battalion  was the 39th. Come back with me for one minute. Come back into the mountains where these men had been.

 The 39th battalion had been raised as garrison troops for Port Moresby in early 1942. They were militia. They were not, in the language of the day, AIF. They were not volunteers for overseas service. They were young men, most of them 19 and 20. Most of them from Victoria, called up under the national service scheme, and given rifles and packs and told to go and hold a jungle track called Kokoda against the Japanese Imperial Army.

 They were commanded first by a lieutenant colonel called Owen, who was killed at Kokoda in the first weeks of the campaign. They were commanded next by a man named Cameron, who did what he could. They were commanded from the 16th of August by a lean, quiet Western Australian lieutenant colonel called Ralph Honner.

Honner had fought in Libya. Honner had fought in Greece. Honner had escaped from Crete after the German airborne assault by getting into a small boat and rowing. Honner arrived at Isurava on the Kokoda track    at the head of a battalion of boys most of the regular army had written off. And he took them into the worst ground on the ridge,  and he held that ground for four days against a Japanese force that outnumbered him many times over.

 The 2/14th came up beside him, and the two battalions held the line together. And when at last they had to give it up, they gave it up in order, together, walking down the track and turning to fight at every ridge and stream all the way back to a place called Ioribaiwa  within sight of Port Moresby. Then the Japanese ran out of food and men, and the tide turned.

 And the same men who had walked backwards over the mountains walked forwards over them again. And by early September, the 39th had been pulled off the track.    They were exhausted. They were sick. They had lost more than half their strength to  bullets and malaria and dysentery and starvation. They had come out of the mountains looking, in the words of one man who watched them come, like something that had once been an army and was no longer sure of it.

They had been rested.    Some of them had been reinforced. Some of them had not. On the paper the army was still keeping. On the first day of December 1942, the 39th battalion    could put roughly 400 rifles into a fight. Roughly 400 rifles. That was what Honner brought with him when he flew across the Owen Stanleys and marched into the coastal plain    and reported to Brigadier Dougherty and was told what the ground looked like.

 He was told what the ground looked like. He said, “We will attack it.” Attack seven. The plan for the 6th of December    was a repeat of the plan for the 1st of December with one difference. This time the 39th would come in from the south and the composite battalion of the 2/16 and the 2/27, now amalgamated  because neither battalion could put a full unit into the line on its own, would push along the coast under Major Sublet.

 There would be artillery, there would be some air support, there would be smoke laid down to cover the last of the open ground. Honner walked his company commanders forward the night before. He looked at what was in front of them. Bunkers that could not be seen. Kunai cut to the boot. Machine gun lanes crossing each other in the open.

 He had walked forward on worse ground in Libya and he had walked backward on worse ground on the Kokoda track. But he had not walked forward on ground quite like this. He walked his men in at dawn on the 6th of December. The bunkers opened at the same range. The lanes crossed at the same angle. The kunai was still cut to the boot.

 The 39th crossed the open ground and got closer to the position than any Australian battalion had got before. D company got up close enough to see the apertures. D company was, in the words of one report written that evening, literally shot to pieces. The company commander was hit. The senior platoon commander was hit. The section leaders were hit.

 What was left of D company came back through the Kunai with wounded slung across shoulders and rifles slung across backs and faces without expression. The composite battalion did as well as it could along the coast. It could not do enough. The attack failed. The ground gained was closer than any battalion had come.

 The price was another day’s dead. But the position had been hurt.  Not the walls of it. The men inside it. Yamamoto’s garrison was down. He had been getting no reinforcement. A Japanese barge force of 200 men had tried to land on the 1st of December and had been driven off. Another attempt would not come.

 What was in Gona was what would fight in Gona.    And after the 6th of December, it was by best estimate half of what had been there in November. Half of 800 is 400. Half of 900 is 450. The Australians had been attacking the position for over 2 weeks  and had lost more men than the garrison had ever had. That was attack seven.

Dougherty went to Veazy and told him what he was going to do. There would be one more attack. It would be the 39th attack. Honner would plan it. Honner would run it. If it did not succeed, the beachhead at Gona would be contained and left  and the weight of Australian effort would shift east to Sanananda.

This was,  in Dougherty’s phrase, his last throw, attack eight. Honner walked the ground. He walked the ground the night before the attack and he walked it in the morning of the attack. And he stood with his adjutant and his company commanders and he told them what he was going to do differently.

 The Australian gunners now had a proper allocation of ammunition for one shoot. 25-pounders, some way to the  rear, could deliver a barrage of about 250 rounds. Up to now, the barrages at Gona had been fired with instantaneous fuses, which meant the shells burst on the top of the log roofs and did not damage the bunkers underneath.

 Honner asked for delay fuses.  Delay fuses meant the shells would drive into the earth before they burst. Delay fuses meant the shells would take the roofs apart from below. He asked for the barrage to be lifted just as his companies came out of their start line.    He asked to attack under the barrage. Attacking under the barrage was dangerous.

 Attacking under the barrage meant your own shells would fall short and hit your own men. Attacking under the barrage also meant the enemy could not lift his head from the bottom of the bunker while your men were crossing the open ground. Honner calculated the risk. He judged that the delay fuses would not throw his own men as heavily as instantaneous fuses would have done.

 He judged that the ground gained by crossing the Kunai under his own fire would be more than the ground he would lose to his own fire. He judged that this would work. He was gambling with the lives of men who had already gambled at Isurava and won and gambled at Brigade Hill and won and had a small remaining amount of luck left.

 At 3:00 in the afternoon on the 8th of December 1942, the guns opened. The shells went into Gona for perhaps 15  minutes. The roofs of the bunkers came in. Log and earth and sand fell into positions    that had been sealed against the sky for 4 months. Men who had been dry in those positions were no longer dry.

 Men who had held their fire against every attack were now looking up at open sky. The 39th came out of the Kunai. They came out standing. They walked forward under the last of their own shell fire and the shell fire lifted forward of them as they came  and the ground gained in the first minute was more than the ground gained on the 20th of November and the 22nd of November and the 24th of November, and the 29th of November, and the 30th of November, and the 1st of December, and the 6th of December put together,  

 they reached the outer wire. They went through the outer wire. They found bunkers that were open at the top. They put grenades in through the openings. They put bayonets in through the doorways. Sections that had trained for this without ever really knowing what it would look like,    now knew what it looked like and did it anyway.

 A platoon commander who had been at Isurava    went in ahead of his men into a communication trench and cleared it with a Bren gun on his hip. A private who had come out of the mountains 10 weeks earlier weighing 40 lb less than his enlistment weight went into a bunker with a grenade and did  not come out.

 By nightfall on the 8th of December, the 39th battalion  had taken half of the Gona position. Half of a position that had cost the 25th Brigade and the 21st Brigade  every man they had. Half in an afternoon. The composite battalion of the 216th and 227th  had come along the coast in support and had taken the beach.

 That was attack eight. The night  of the 8th of December was very dark. Honner reorganized in the dark. He pushed forward wire. He set his companies on the ground they had taken. He made sure his machine guns had good arcs onto the ground he had not yet taken. The Japanese, for their part, tried in that dark to move.

Yamamoto had roughly 100 men left.    He had watched his position collapse from the top down in an afternoon. He knew he could not hold what remained through another day.    He also knew he had orders that did not permit him to withdraw. He tried to withdraw anyway.

 He  gathered his last 100 and went east through the swamp toward Girua hoping  to reach the other beachhead. The Australians on the eastern flank heard them moving. Parties opened fire. Most of the 100 were killed in the marsh. A few reached Giruwa. Yamamoto was not with them. Attack nine.  The plan for the 9th of December was to finish it. There was not a plan.

 There was a walking forward through what was left of Gona  in bright morning light. There was a small enclave in the northeast of the position  near the mission chapel where perhaps 40 defenders were still fighting. Honner sent one company forward against it. The company went forward. The defenders  fired. The company fired back.

Grenades went into the last of the coconut log bunkers. Bayonets went into the last of the communication trenches. A young Australian officer took a bullet through the throat at eight yards. A Japanese soldier came out of a firing slit with a sword and was shot at close range.  Two more came out of a doorway with their rifles held up empty.

Two more came out of a doorway with grenades in their hands and blew themselves up on the men who had come to take them. At half past four in the afternoon on the 9th of December, the shooting inside Gona  stopped. The Australians walked into the position for the first time. They walked into what the position held.

 What the position held  was not a shock in the way war is usually a shock. It was a slow shock. It was the shock of seeing what men will do when they are told they must not leave and given four  months to prepare a place in which not to leave. The bunkers were floored with the dead. Some of them had been dead for weeks.

  The defenders had been fighting on around and above their own dead because the ground outside the bunkers was covered by Australian fire and the dead could not be moved. In some bunkers, the living had built up the dead as sandbags along the fire steps because there were not enough sandbags. In some bunkers, the smell was such that the Australian sections coming through them stopped at the doorway and did not go in until an officer went in first.

The fighting position by the mission chapel held roughly 40 bodies in an area a small farm shed would have covered. Yamamoto was among them. He had gone back into his position after the failed breakout and died at his post. The count of Japanese dead inside Gona was at least 638 and by some records more than 800 and by the honest count of the men who buried them they stopped counting after a while because the burying itself became the thing.

 The count of Australian dead and wounded and missing across the three weeks was 750. Some sources say more. Some sources say almost 900. If you add the men who fell from disease as they were falling from bullets the 25th Brigade had come out of the mountains a thousand strong and was now less than a battalion. The 21st Brigade had come into the beachhead a thousand strong and was now less than a battalion.

 The 39th Battalion had gone into the fight at 400 rifles and was now after the  8th of December at somewhere close to 200. That was the arithmetic of Gona. On the 9th of December sometime late in the afternoon    Lieutenant Colonel Honner sent a signal back to 21st Brigade headquarters. The signal was in his own words.

   The signal read Gona’s gone. That was all. Two words. They were the shortest sentence sent about the longest fight  the Australians had yet fought in that campaign. They said in the way a soldier says a thing to another soldier that the position was taken. They  said in the way a commander says a thing to his brigadier that he had done  what he had been asked to do.

 They said in the way any man says a thing when there is no other thing left to say that it was over. The brigadier read them and put the signal down. They were part-time soldiers. They were the militia the regular army had called unfit for battle. They were the boys from Melbourne and country Victoria who had been called up before they had reason to think of themselves as men who would ever fight.

 They had been sent to Port Moresby  without proper training. They had been sent up the Kokoda Track without proper equipment. They had been asked  to hold a jungle ridge called Isurava against soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army    who had taken Malaya and Singapore and Rabaul before they came for Kokoda.

They had held that ridge. They had walked back over the mountains and walked forward again. They had been rested for 2 months, if you could call it rest. They had been asked, when there was no one else to ask, to walk across cut kunai grass into interlocking machine-gun fire from bunkers no eye could  see and no bomber could reach.

They had walked across the cut kunai grass. They had gone into the bunkers. They had paid the full price for the ground. And they had ended  it with two words, Gona’s gone. The 39th would fight for a few more weeks after that 9th of December. There was still a Japanese pocket to the west of Gona at a place that would be known afterwards as Haddy’s Village.

 And Honner’s men and elements of the 2/14th would clear that pocket by the 18th of December, buying it in the same currency they had bought Gona. Then, the battalion would be pulled out. Then, it would be flown  back across the Owen Stanleys. Then it would go home to Australia to rest and reorganize.

 And in July of 1943, it would be  disbanded. Its remaining men absorbed into other units of the AIF. And the number 39th would come off the order of battle. That is where the battalion ends in the books. That is not where it ends in the story. In the story, it ends on the 9th of December 1942 at half past 4:00 in the afternoon in a strip of ground half a mile deep on the northern coast of Papua with a lieutenant colonel bending over a signal pad in the shade of a shattered coconut palm and writing in his own hand in two words everything that could be

said about  three weeks of fighting. The brigadier read it. He kept it. He kept it because it was and remains the cleanest signal any Australian commander sent in that war. Two words for three weeks. Two words for two brigades. Two words for hundreds of dead in the kunai and hundreds of dead in the bunkers.

And one town called Gona that had once been a mission with a whitewash chapel and coconut palms leaning out over the beach. Two words. Gona’s gone.