A nation reflects

On Remembrance Day, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we reflect on the cost to our nationof war.
Remembrance Day is one of only two days of the year that the people of Australia are called upon to stop and remember those service personnel who have laid down their lives.
They fought and died in battles in places whose names have become chapters in Australia’s history Bardia, Tobruk, El Alamein, Greece and Crete, Milne Bay, Kokoda, Buna, Sanananda, Shaggy Ridge and Borneo.
Our people also died in the skies over Britain and Europe, in the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Mediterranean Sea, in Korea and Vietnam.
Millions of words have been written about those who gave us our nationhood with their blood on the beaches of Anzac Cove at Gallipoli and on the bloody battlefields of France and Belgium.
Members of the Pakenham subbranch of the RSL wish to highlight two of these battles fought at the most crucial time in Australia’s history of World War II.
A failure in either of these battles would surely have ended with the enemy being given an open sesame to an invasion of the Australian mainland itself.
The great ABC correspondent Chester Wilmot wrote ‘One day late in August 1942 we stood on a spur of the Owen Stanleys and looked down the deep valley which leads to Kokoda, five thousand feet below.
‘All we could see was a blanket of dark green treetops broken only here and there by the white waters of the turbulent creek at the bottom.
‘The valley was almost as deep as it was wide and its sides swept up from the creek bed steeply and in some places precipitously.
‘Somewhere under these tree tops wound the track which leads from Kokoda up the valley and over the range to Port Moresby.
‘And two miles away somewhere under those tree tops in the dark damp forest Australian and Japanese troops were fighting desperately for the possession of this track.
‘It didn’t look much to fight for. It was just a series of muddy footholds in the mountain side… so slippery that you had to sling your rifle and leave your hands free to grab the nearest vine or branch as your feet slid from under you… so steep that in some places you could scale the mountain face only by using both hands and feet… so muddy that at times you slashed through a quagmire more than ankle deep and felt the cloying mud suck your feet back at every step.’
That was the track they were fighting for down there.
On the Kokoda Track where initially the 39th battalion, a battalion of young 18 and 19yearold Australian militia soldiers, inexperienced, poorly trained, lightly equipped and outnumbered six to one could not hope to match the battlehardened, well equipped and jungle fighting experienced Japanese soldiers.
They fought the best of Japan to a standstill, they fought and held and retreated, fought and held and retreated again and again, day after day and night after night over a period of one month giving Australia the precious time it needed to get our own battle hardened AIF back from the Middle East and up to New Guinea.
When this battalion of young men were finally relieved near Port Moresby by the veterans of the 2/14th Australian Infantry Battalion only 50 out of nearly 650 who met the Japanese near Kokoda stood up on parade.
They had stopped the Japanese less than 30 miles from Port Moresby.
Port Moresby was to have been the main Japanese base for the invasion of Australia.
The 39th Australian Infantry Battalion (militia) had earned their sobriquet of ‘Those ragged bloody heroes’.
From the beginning the battle for Buna was undertaken against all the established and rudimentary rules of war.
History will record that the 18th Australian Infantry Brigade stepped into a battle that was stacked against it but won a victory that was critical not only to the New Guinea campaign but to the history of our young nation.
The battle for Buna began on the 18 December, 1942.
The story of that day can best be told by Sergeant Bill Spencer, a member of the Intelligence section of the 2/9th battalion.
‘The battalion moved up to their start line at 5.30am.
‘At 6.50am the Vickers guns opened up, which in unison with the artillery and mortars provided a concentrated barrage.
‘At 7am the tanks moved forward into a barbarous inferno ahead of the walking paced infantry.
‘The roar of their engines added to the mounting crescendo of noise from both Vickers and enemy machine guns and a wall of small arms lead – it was like nothing the 2/9th battalion had experienced.
‘The sky seemed to rain debris as small pieces of undergrowth and bark floated down like confetti and the repeated crack of bullets and chatter of automatic weapons and explosions close by, the acrid smell and eye irritating smoke from discharging weapons and grenades, added to the extreme discomfort experienced by the men.’
Soldiers were dropping like sacks.
There appeared to be utter confusion, but among all the chaos the courageous men moved resolutely forward.
One American General described the scene as something he had never seen before and never expected to see again, while the tank crews described the advance as ‘men going in for a cup of tea’ such was the soldierly bearing of the 2/9th.
There were no sounds from the wounded as the pain of a gunshot wound comes later and sudden death was always silent.
Casualties were immediate and heavy as the thin, green, determined line moved forward.
The bodies of those who had fallen became sprinkled with leaf and bark ripped from the undergrowth by bullets and shrapnel, which somehow softened the starkness of death.
The battle continued for another 14 days.
The soldiers faced another enemy almost as ferocious as the never surrender Japanese soldiers, that was malaria, typhus and numerous other tropical diseases.
Buna, the biggest Japanese base in New Guinea fell on 2 January 1943.
Huge losses were suffered by both sides but the conflict put the end to any further threats to Australia itself.
During the battle of Buna the 18th brigade lost 56 officers and 840 soldiers killed or wounded.
In 14 short days the 2/9th had 18 officers and 351 soldiers killed or wounded.
The Pakenham subbranch of the RSL invites all residents to be in Main Street, Pakenham, at 11am on Friday, 11 November for the traditional standto ceremony and the sounding of the Last Post.
Lest We Forget.