The Cards Stack Up Against Japan - New Guinea And The Solomons

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THE CARDS STACK UP AGAINST JAPAN - NEW GUINEA AND THE SOLOMONS


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WWII* Chapter 27

After Japan's lightning success of the first two months of 1942, there had been a strong body of opinion in the Japanese High Command, particularly in the Navy, that Japan should press on and take Australia, partly for the resources it offered and the prestige of its capture, but more as a means of preventing its becoming the base for an Allied counterattack. Those who disagreed with the idea of conquering Australia did so largely on the grounds that its sheer size would make it impossibly expensive to hold and garrison. That view, as we know, prevailed.
Nonetheless, it was agreed that New Guinea - the second largest island in the world - should be taken for its strategic position. During May 1942, Japan's planned capture of Port Moresby in New Guinea from the sea had been thwarted by the Battle of the Coral Sea, but on July 21st Major-General Tomataro Horii's South Seas Detachment had landed east of Gona with the intention of taking Port Moresby from the landward side, across the Owen Stanley mountains, via the village of Kokoda. To US and European military planners, this would have seemed an impossible task, but the training and native skills of the Japanese soldiers made them as capable of marching through jungle and apparently impenetrable vegetation as the western armies were of marching along a highway. In fact, the Japanese believed from aerial reconnaissance that there was a road over the mountains; only later did they discover it to be a two feet wide path known as the Kokoda Track.
By July 28th, the advance party had taken all the initial territory between their beach-head and Kokoda with virtually no resistance, and had captured Kokoda itself with surprising ease, largely because the Allies had not so far taken the Japanese attack as a serious threat to New Guinea as a whole, or to Port Moresby in particular. On August 24th, General Horii arrived in Kokoda at the head of 8,500 troops that had been put ashore in the wake of the initial landing. He found that a force of Australians - some of them relatively raw militiamen, the rest battle veterans recently returned from North Africa - was putting up a determined stand in the mountains at Isurava. His bombardment of their positions marked the beginning of a bitter struggle; not only did the Australians hold that position for three hard days, inflicting massive casualties on the Japanese, but they made Horii's army fight for every inch of that mountain trail.