Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
We reassembled at a place called Koitaki in the open country down from McDonald’s Corner where we had first assembled. Here we were reinforced. We were fed like fighting cocks.
We didn’t do much and then we started to do a bit of training, then after three or four weeks they put us on planes, the old DC3 biscuit bomber, just had a floor with no seats and 25 men with their equipment on each plane and they flew us over the range to a place called Koitaki. By this time the other troops had pushed the Japanese right back to the coast where the Japanese dug themselves in at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, probably 20-25 miles apart on the northern coast and they were hemmed in by tidal swamps, jungle and it was hard to get at them.
They dug, they had good weapons pits with 44 gallon drums filled with sand dug into the ground, interconnecting trenches between each position, large tree trunks over the top so you had to really get a direct hit from an aerial bomb or 25 pounder otherwise it was attack, get in close and throw a grenade through the slits.
They were prepared, as always, to die to the last. There were, at Gona, where we went, they were sitting on top of dead bodies and machine guns and the stench after serious fighting, we were making attacks from the open beach. We couldn’t approach them from the inward side because of the swamps and, you know, a case of attacking up a 50-metre wide beach with the only protection being coconut palms which weren’t bullet proof, they were fairly soft and pithy.
We gradually wore the Japanese down and when we finally cleaned them up there were 600 dead Japanese buried and bulldozed on the beach.
