Why Japanese Veterans Said the Australians in New Guinea Were Worse Than the Jungle | WW2

Decades after the Second World War ended, Japanese veterans who had survived New Guinea spoke of the campaign with a particular kind of horror. They remembered the hunger, the disease, and a jungle that seemed determined to kill every man who entered it. But when they spoke about the Australian soldiers they had faced there, the tone of their memories changed.

Their words became more careful, more unsettling, as if the Australians had become part of the nightmare itself. So, what happened in those jungles that made Japanese veterans remember them as something worse than the jungle? There’s a saying that circulated through Japanese ranks during the war, a piece of soldier’s shorthand passed from unit to unit like a warning.

Java, they said, was heaven. Burma was hell. But nobody came back alive from New Guinea. It was meant to describe a place. By the end of the war, for the men who survived it, it had come to describe something closer to a verdict. This is the story of the New Guinea campaign, fought between 1942 and 1945 across some of the most punishing terrain on Earth.

It’s the story of how the Imperial Japanese Army, having swept through half of Asia in a matter of months, was stopped, broken, and ultimately annihilated. Of the roughly 140,000 Japanese soldiers sent to fight there, barely 13,000 walked out alive. Most of them didn’t die in combat. They starved.

 Some, in the final months, ate each other. And the men who hunted them through those last desperate years were not the professional soldiers Japan had expected to face. They were ordinary Australian citizens, dismissed before the war as too soft for real fighting who became something else entirely in that jungle. Not just an army, a terror the Japanese hadn’t accounted for.

This matters today because it refuses the tidy version of the Second World War that most documentaries prefer. The one with clean victories and honorable sacrifice. New Guinea offers something raw. It shows what happens to soldiers when they’re abandoned by their own high command, when supply lines collapse entirely, and when the line between soldier and something less than human starts to blur on both sides.

It’s a story that has been quietly avoided for most of the last 80 years, and it deserves to be understood in full. To see how it began, you have to go back to January 1942, when Japanese forces took Rabaul on the island of New Britain almost without resistance. It became the staging ground for everything that followed, a fortress from which Japan intended to sever Australia’s supply lines to the United States.

This was never, despite a myth that has persisted for generations, a planned invasion of the Australian mainland itself. No invasion fleet was ever assembled for that purpose. The actual objective was Operation FS, a plan to isolate Australia by seizing New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Fiji, cutting the country off from American reinforcement entirely.

Port Moresby, on the southern coast of Papua, stood directly in the way. When a naval defeat at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 closed off any seaborn assault on the city, Japanese commanders made a decision that would prove catastrophic. They would march there instead over the mountains along a track that ran through a place called Kokoda.

The planners in Tokyo believed the Kokoda Gap was a wide valley suited to a fast and decisive advance. It was nothing of the kind. It was a jungle-choked mountain range climbing past 4,000 m, a maze of razorback ridges and near-vertical gorges that swallowed men and equipment whole. Rain fell in walls for hours at a time.

Within days, malaria, dysentery, and tropical ulcers were spreading through both armies faster than either side could treat them. Weapons rusted and jammed. Boots rotted off men’s feet. This, more than any single battle, was the terrain the entire campaign would actually be decided by. And it would end more lives than any exchange of gunfire.

Standing in the path of the Japanese advance were the last soldiers anyone expected to hold a line against a veteran army. Australia’s professional troops, the second AIF, were fighting in the Middle East or had already been lost in the fall of Singapore and Rabaul. What remained to defend New Guinea were the militia, teenage conscripts contemptuously nicknamed chocolate soldiers by veterans who assumed the heat of real combat would make them melt.

 Facing them was the Nankai Shitai, the South Seas Detachment, an elite force under Major General Tomitaro Horii, seasoned by years of fighting in China and the earliest Pacific conquests. On paper, there was no contest at all. But something happened on the Kokoda Track that Tokyo hadn’t accounted for. At Eora Creek in late August 1942, badly outnumbered boys from the 39th Battalion, later reinforced by the veteran 2/14, held their ground against Horii’s advance in a defense so stubborn, it bought crucial time for reinforcements

to reach the line. A Japanese intelligence diary captured during the fighting recorded the shock plainly, describing an enemy that had counterattacked with bayonets along the entire front, defying death in a way nobody had expected from Western troops. It was the first sign of something the Imperial Army would come to understand only slowly and at enormous cost.

The soldiers they dismissed as untrained conscripts were prepared to die exactly where they stood and often did. Just weeks earlier at Milne Bay on the eastern tip of Papua, Australian and American forces had already delivered a warning of what was coming. In late August and early September 1942, they defeated a Japanese amphibious landing outright, the first time in the entire war that a Japanese ground assault had been decisively beaten back.

It broke, quietly but permanently, the myth of Japanese invincibility on land, and it cost Japan a crucial flanking position it never recovered. The advance toward Port Moresby continued regardless, grinding closer through September until it finally stalled less than 40 km from the city at a ridge called Ioribaiwa.

It didn’t stop because the Australians had overpowered them. It stopped because Horii’s supply lines had collapsed completely. There was no more food coming up the mountain, no ammunition, no relief. What followed was a slow disintegrating retreat back across the same terrain that had nearly broken them on the way in.

General Horii did not survive it. In November, attempting to cross the flooded Kumusi River on a makeshift raft after his own horse had already drowned beneath him, he was swept into the current and killed. The commander who had led the emperor’s finest jungle fighters to within sight of Port Moresby died alone in the brown floodwater.

And with him went whatever cohesion remained in the Japanese withdrawal. What followed at the beachheads of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda over the winter of 1942 into early 1943 was closer to a siege than a battle. The Japanese, pinned against the coast and swampland thick with disease, began to starve in earnest.

 Rice rations that had already been cut were cut again and again until soldiers were reduced to counting individual grains in their palms. This is where the story crosses into territory most accounts of the Pacific War pass over quickly. Faced with starvation, some Japanese units turned to eating the dead. First their own fallen comrades, and eventually, in a horror that Tokyo would later try to legislate out of existence, the bodies of enemy soldiers and local Papuan carriers as well.

One soldier who survived it, a young conscript named Kokichi Nishimura, would say decades later that no one who lived through the siege at Gorua could have done so without eating human flesh. “Nobody wanted to,” he said. “It was the last resort. It was eat or die.” By November 1944, the collapse had grown severe enough that Japanese High Command issued a secret directive, Army Order Number 371, threatening execution for any soldier caught consuming the flesh of a fellow Japanese soldier.

What the order left unaddressed is almost more telling than what it forbade. It said nothing about the consumption of enemy dead or local civilians. Command had, in effect, quietly tolerated what it could not prevent, drawing a line only around whose flesh was permissible and whose was not. On the Australian side, something else was hardening, and much of it traces back to a single image.

In October 1943, an Australian commando named Sergeant Leonard Siffleet, captured while attempting to establish a coast-watching station in Dutch New Guinea, was interrogated, tortured, and publicly beheaded on Aitape beach. A photograph of the execution, found in April 1944 on the body of a dead Japanese officer, spread through Australian ranks like a current.

Whatever notion of a fair fight had survived until that point went with it. General Thomas Blamey, commander of Allied Land Forces, would later tell an American newspaper that his men no longer regarded the Japanese as human beings in any conventional sense, describing them instead as something between a man and an animal, vermin to be dealt with rather than an enemy to be respected.

It is an ugly line, and it reflects an ugly truth about where the war had gone by that point. Australian patrols routinely killed wounded Japanese soldiers rather than take prisoners. Quarter on either side had become a rare and unreliable thing. What made the Australians so effective in this environment went beyond hatred alone.

Drawing on hard lessons learned in the deserts of North Africa at places like Tobruk, Australian units adopted a doctrine of aggressive night patrolling, actively hunting Japanese positions in the dark rather than waiting to be found. It preyed on the mind as much as the body. Soldiers who had once been the hunters found themselves stalked night after night by an enemy that never seemed to sleep or rest.

One captured account described the jungle war as unending, unrelenting, unforgiving, a force closer to malevolence than to ordinary combat. Their equipment worked against the Japanese, too. American Thompson submachine guns and British Sten guns, prized elsewhere in the war, jammed constantly in the mud and humidity of the jungle.

The Australians carried something different, a homegrown weapon called the Owen gun, designed by a 24-year-old engineer whose invention had initially been dismissed by the top brass as little more than an American gangster’s toy. Its magazine sat on top of the weapon rather than beneath it, letting gravity feed the rounds in and push mud and debris straight back out through the bottom.

Soldiers dunked it in swamp water to prove a point, then fired it wet, and it rarely failed them. In a war being decided as much by weather and terrain as by tactics. That single piece of reliable engineering meant men lived who otherwise wouldn’t have. Behind the front lines, an equally vital and far less visible war was being fought by the native Papuan carriers Australian troops came to know as the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, who moved supplies up impossible mountain trails and carried wounded men back down them often under fire with no formal

recognition for years afterward. Further behind the lines still, a secretive Australian intelligence unit known as Field Unit 12 operated deep in Japanese-held territory tracking enemy radar signals with early detection equipment while living entirely off the land. A strange blend of cutting-edge technology and primal jungle survival that most histories of the campaign never mention at all.

Command, meanwhile, was not always equal to the men doing the fighting. After the brutal defense at Isurava, the exhausted survivors of the 21st Brigade were addressed by General Blamey in terms many of them never forgave. He suggested in front of men who had just held a mountain against a veteran Japanese division that it was the rabbit who ran who got shot, not the man holding the gun.

The insult became known as the Koitaki Incident, and it produced one of the strangest acts of quiet mutiny in Australian military history. When Blamey later toured a field hospital, wounded soldiers lying in their beds openly nibbled on lettuce leaves as he passed, humming the chorus of a popular song about a rabbit on the run, it told him, without a single word of insubordination spoken aloud, exactly what they thought of him.

By 1944, what remained of the Japanese 18th Army, under General Hatazo Adachi, had been pushed into the Aitape-Wewak region, a stretch of coastal plain rising into distant mountains. What followed there wasn’t a campaign in the traditional sense. It was a hunt. The Australian 6th Division spent nearly a year tracking down the starving remnants of Adachi’s force, a pursuit so grinding, and in the eyes of some officers and later historians, so strategically unnecessary that it remains genuinely disputed to this day.

The Japanese Army being hunted had already been cut off, starved, and rendered militarily irrelevant to the wider war. Critics have called the campaign an exercise in political vanity, a way of keeping the Australian Army visible in the closing months of a war it risked being sidelined from. Command argued it was necessary to clear sovereign Australian territory and free American units for the advance on the Philippines.

 Both positions still have defenders. It was in this final grinding stretch of the war that something almost unthinkable happened. In May 1945, a Japanese officer named Lieutenant Colonel Masaharu Takana, led 42 of his surviving men to an Australian patrol and surrendered. This should not have happened. The Senjinkun, the military code every Japanese soldier had been raised on forbade surrender absolutely.

Death was meant to be preferable to capture in every circumstance without exception. But Takenaga’s men were starving. Abandoned by their own regiment and terrified of being shot on sight if they simply walked toward Australian lines with empty hands. So, they did something almost bureaucratic in its desperation.

They found a leaflet the allies had dropped as propaganda, wrote their own terms of surrender on it in English, and tied it to a pole in the jungle for a patrol to find. 42 men walked out of the mountains behind a handwritten note breaking a taboo that had held for the entire war. It remains one of the only mass surrenders of its kind recorded anywhere in the Pacific campaign.

 And it says almost everything about how far this army had fallen from where it started. The war in New Guinea finally ended on the 13th of September, 1945 at a place called Cape Wom near Wewak. General Adachi walked forward and handed his sword to Major General H. C. H. Robertson. Behind him stood the survivors of his command, roughly 13,000 men out of the 140,000 who had once served under his authority.

Photographs from that day show soldiers who look less like an army and more like ghosts, hollow-eyed and wasted down to bone. There was no triumphant procession, just an exhausted formality closing out a catastrophe that had already been decided by starvation years before the paperwork caught up to it. Adachi did not go home.

He was tried at Rabaul for war crimes and though he had not personally ordered the worst of what his men had done in their final desperate months, he refused to distance himself from any of it. He insisted on carrying the full weight of command responsibility including for the cannibalism his starving soldiers had turned to when there was nothing left to eat.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, he wrote a final letter before taking his own life with a paring knife in his cell in September 1947. In it, he described his men as having fallen like flowers scattered in the wind and said he did not know what apology he could possibly offer his emperor for what had become of the army entrusted to him.

For most of the men who survived, the war simply ended and life resumed, however, unevenly. But for at least one of them, it never really did. Kokichi Nishimura went home to Japan, built a successful engineering business, married and raised a family, and then at 60 years old, he walked away from all of it. He handed the company to his son, left his wife and returned alone to the jungles of New Guinea where he spent the next 25 years living in a small hut working a metal detector through the mud in search of the remains of the 56 men

who had served alongside him in his old platoon. Nearly all of them had died around him decades earlier. He wasn’t looking for glory. He was angry, by his own account, at how his government had abandoned its own dead leaving them in unmarked ground as though their deaths had meant nothing at all. He kept digging until he had recovered as many of his comrades as he find.

And he died in New Guinea in 2015, still close to the ground where they had fallen. None of this fits easily into the story we’re usually told about the Second World War. There were no clean victories in these mountains, no moment either side could point to and claim an unqualified moral high ground. There was a jungle that killed almost everyone equally, an army that starved until parts of it turned against themselves, and another army that grew so hardened by what it witnessed that it largely stopped extending mercy

at all. Somewhere in that collision, the old rules of war simply dissolved on both sides at roughly the same time. Perhaps that’s the real answer to why Japanese veterans, decades later, remembered the Australians the way they did. It wasn’t superior numbers, and it wasn’t superior weapons alone, though the Owen gun certainly helped.

 It was the particular patient ruthlessness of soldiers who had been mocked as too soft for war, and who had decided somewhere in that jungle never to be underestimated again. What remained afterward were the men who had to live with what they’d seen and what they’d done to survive it. And in Nishimura’s case, a man who spent a quarter of a century in the mud trying to give the dead something the living had denied them.

A name and a place to finally rest.