Bob Iskov's story

The result was that three or four days later I was sent to report to Colonel Honner of the 39th Battalion who'd also come down to join us near Gona. And he was going to - the 500 Japanese had attacked these Haddy's patrol at midnight in a thunderstorm. And Haddy had, after holding the Japanese off for a while, Haddy had told his boys to make their own way into the bush and he stayed behind to cover them. So he gave his own life to cover his troops. And the 500 Japanese had attempted to get through to Gona, failed to do so, they'd pulled back and occupied this village and were stationed there.

So Colonel Honner was going to go inland on the track we'd come out, so I was to guide him, his battalion, down the track. And I was up front with the forward section and single file virtually again like the Kokoda Track. And I heard voices and I sent a message back down the line: "we'd made close contact, we could hear voices."Message came back: "fire if necessary." Three figures come walking up the track together, talking away like schoolboys on a picnic. And I let them get within about two metres from me and I had a Thompson submachine gun so I opened fire, just one burst, and collected the three of them. I only used six rounds, I was credited with being very, very economical killing. One was a Colonel, next was a Major and one was a Lieutenant. What the hell they were doing wandering around in the jungle? Someone tried to tell me after they were going for a swim. Well there was no creeks or rivers anywhere close and the sea was alongside them. I think if they wanted a swim they would have swum in the sea.

And anyway, the Colonel had maps of Darwin in his satchel. He had all this paraphernalia - his sword hanging on his side, his binoculars and a row of nine ribbons on his chest. One of those was The Order Of The Rising Sun which is the equivalent of our Victoria Cross. The Order Of The Sacred Treasure, The Order Of The Golden Kite and the fourth one has never really been identified and he had five ribbons of service, mainly in China. But he was obviously fairly new to the area. He was fit, pudgy, he hadn't been on a starvation diet for too long. But I was commended for capturing the documents. People who asked after us said that the Japanese never intend to come to Australia. I said, "well was that bloke going to Darwin to play golf?"

Just before Christmas the battalion was down to 40 men, the rest had all been invalided out of sickness. There was one very, very serious disease there called scrub typhus. It was transmitted by a small mite that lived on the animals and there were things like possums, tree kangaroos, rats and so on. This small mite lived on them but dropped off into the kunai grass patches and it got onto the soldiers. Congregated, tended to gather around the belt, the waistline or around the gaiters which were close fitting on your ankles. And it transmitted this disease called scrub typhus and there was no cure for it. It never affected the natives, they'd built up an immunity over thousands of years. But people died in as a little as five days.

One of those blokes had been on the Amboga patrol with me, Bruce McDonald, fittest bloke I've even seen. Said he was feeling a bit crook when he got back, so I sent him to the aid post. He came back with handful of aspirins, they said "stay on duty, your temperature's only 103," that's in the old Fahrenheit. Next day he was worse so I sent him back again and five or six days later he died back in [Port] Moresby in hospital.

But an Australian and an American doctor worked on this and they found a cure for it and it ceased to be a problem after a while. But there were many other diseases like fevers and jungle sores and malnutrition and just stress. When people have been living in the jungle, seeing their mates die around them, not getting a cup of tea, living on their nerves for weeks on end, and it started to catch up with them. But I never saw anyone actually throw in the towel. They wanted to stop and help their mates out.

I was waiting at a point where I was to meet Lieutenant Schwind and his group and I spotted three Japanese coming down the track towards me from the inland direction. They were thin and miserable, unarmed and obviously in a pretty bad way. And we took the three Japanese prisoners and moved back towards Gona, stopped overnight under a small native grass hut at the side of the track. The Japanese were very glad to get a tin of bully beef and bowed, to try and thank me I guess, and behaved themselves pretty well.

We decided the next morning not to worry about having any breakfast, it was only two hours walk down to Haddy's Village on the coast and we'd go there and they'd have the billy boiling at least. So we got down there probably about 8 o'clock in the morning and there was no one there. So immediately we thought maybe they've been withdrawn, and then I spotted a body lying on the beach, 60 or 70 yards up to the west. So I got Lieutenant Schwind to give me some cover and I jogged up and it was Lieutenant Alan Haddy. Then we discovered there was a large number of Japanese footprints in the sand heading back towards Gona, cutting off our escape route. So one of the boys said that these three prisoners might be a bit of a nuisance. One bloke put his hands up in supplication: "No shoot please." We had no idea that he understood any English at the time. So I said: "No, we're not going to shoot you."

So we moved into, oh, they found another fella dead under one of the, there was only three huts there, and they found Private Stevens' body under one of the huts. So we went inland and we picked up, after an hour or two, we picked up the remains of Haddy's dozen men in two small groups. They had a couple of wounded with them, so we escorted them back towards Gona by this inland route. And we had to stay overnight in the jungle. Jack Schwind and his batman and the Police Sergeant headed off back to take word back and get some medical help out for the 2/16th [battalion] wounded.

It was rather funny, I was to take sentry duty about 10 o'clock and the three prisoners were put down to rest just quite near us. And we were at the base of a big banyan tree, it was a 20 foot circumference with large segments of roots coming up so you could get and inch in between each one of them, it was quite a cosy position to lie back, to put your head back against the tree and the roots either side. And I asked the other chap how the prisoners were and he said: "All correct." I was a Sergeant by this time by the way. So the moon was behind the clouds and a bit misty rain, and the moon come out fitfully, and I had a look and there are only two prisoners there. So I alerted the rest of the troops and what the hell's this bloke up to, is he going to cause any mayhem, 'cause he could have gone and tried to get a weapon off some of the sleeping troops. Anyway I found him around the other side of the banyan tree, sheltering from the rain. We got him by the ear and told him to get back where he belonged. He was throwing his arms up and saying he didn't like the rain on his head and so on. I said: "I don't like it either, mate. You bastards caused this bloody war." I had to put him back in his place.

And next morning the stretcher bearers came out for the two wounded and patched them up and we went back and I had to hand these prisoners over at Brigade Headquarters. And a big Provo [Provost Marshal], a Police Sergeant, came and took them and he tied their hands behind their backs with signal wire and put a Tommy gun in the back of the last bloke and marched them off down the road - I thought "you big hero." But I never saw or heard of them again.

Serious battles took place at Efogi, and again the Japanese attempted to encircle us. We got a chance to fire our mortar there, we got a good position there behind a bit of a ridge. And our officer who was doing the observation up front actually saw a mortar bomb. You could see the mortar bombs if you followed the flight from the barrel and he had a good pair of binoculars apparently, and the bomb landed on a Japanese officer's helmet.

We must have annoyed the Japanese because they got onto us with a mountain gun. They had this mountain gun, which [is a] small piece of artillery designed to be carried on mules, part broken into pieces and carried on mules. Up there of course they had no mules, they used natives and Korean slave labour to carry the mountain gun up the ranges.

They're very high velocity and accurate guns. We didn't know where they were but they knew where we were, so they landed the bombs fairly close to us. One bomb knocked the gun askew and Bruce Cooper, who's a tough Kalgoorlie miner, got a bit of shrapnel in his backside. So he said: "I carried your bloody mortar so far, Mr Schwind, some poor 'b' will have to carry me now!" So they made a stretcher and got him on it.

We got word the Japanese where starting to cut us off, again, surround us. We fired off all our ammunition and we threw our mortar over a cliff face. And we were told, ten of us I suppose, we were told to go down and take position up astride the Kokoda Track and hold the Japanese if they should come down the track in our vicinity. So we're standing behind trees, a finger on the trigger for an hour or more, no sound of any fighting and we suddenly started to wonder what's happening. Have we been forgotten? Fortunately a messenger came down and told us to move up the ridge, to the right, off the track. And after about a quarter of a mile a chap in front of us, a Wangaratta boy named Norm Wilkinson, dropped dead in front of me with a bullet through the heart. It was just a "twang". I don't know whether it was a stray bullet, someone suggested it might have been a sniper but I said a sniper would have shot the officer first, then the sergeant and me next. But anyway we took one of his identification tags off from around his neck and left his body there.

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.