Kokoda by Paul Ham

From The Week of January 23, 2012

For humans, war should hold no surprises. It has been perpetrated so often, with such ferocity, that we ought to be quite familiar with the depths of its depravity. And yet, there are crimes of war so dark, both in the ordering and in the executing, that they shock even the most hardened cynics and leave them fearing for what will become of us. Of these shamefully numerous incidents, the Kokoda Campaign was one of the worst. This is Mr. Ham's lively and opinionated account of its many sins.

In July 1942, during the darkest hours of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army, seeking to cut Australia off from its allies, landed and occupied the island of Papua New Guinea, then an Australian possession. If Japan could hold and utilize the island, it would not only have a friendly base from which to launch attacks against shipping and naval interests, it would have a platform from which to begin an invasion of Australia itself. Having never seriously faced such an existential threat to its sovereignty, and with its military assets all-but-entirely deployed elsewhere, at the behest of and under the command of the British Empire, Australia was, to say the least, ill-prepared for this dark reality. A force would have to be hurriedly assembled, armed and hurled into the breach in hopes of buying the country time to recall its regular troops from their distant theatres and re-deploy them at home.

Thus, without training, and often without even the basic necessities of combat, the 39th battalion was scraped together, thrown onto Papua New Guinea and ordered into some of the most forbidding mountains in the region. There, for the next six months, they engaged with and halted the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army, some of the most supremely trained and ideologically driven soldiers in the world. Imbued by the divinity of their emperor and sworn never to retreat, let alone be captured, their thousands should have swiftly overwhelmed the mongrel force of Australians slapped together to impede them. Yet, in battle after battle, skirmish after skirmish, the stubborn defenders resisted, often with their lives, forcing the Japanese to pay dearly for the ground they won, lost, won again, and finally, fatefully, relinquished. For not even the fabled will of the Japanese soldier could withstand months at war without food, without home, and without hope of victory, not against a resilient foe able to resupply, recharge and replenish its forces.

As powerful as it is scathing, Kokoda is both a detailed history of a crucial WWII battle and a stinging indictment of those who orchestrated it. For as much as Mr. Ham, an Australian-born journalist and historian, celebrates the willpower and the tenacity of the belligerents to endure any hardship in the achievement of their goals, he does not allow more than a handful of pages to pass, in his lengthy account, without condemning the pigheadedness and pugnaciousness of the leaderships that ordered it. Though the author castigates both sides for the extent to which they worsened the suffering of the men under their command, he saves most of his bitter fire for the Australian brass which, but for a few beleaguered lights, is almost universally portrayed as a collection of selfish and stubborn politicians, more interested in promotions and medals than in the health of their men. In this, there is no doubt that Mr. Ham's sympathies lie firmly with the soldiers who fought fiercely and died horribly in a most terrible war.

Mr. Ham is a talented author. Though his narrative occasionally digresses into the lives and the quirks of figures somewhat peripheral to the Kokoda campaign, his vivid depictions of the ugliness of war, his psychological profiles of the men who prosecuted it, and his revealing portrayals of the politicians who oversaw the whole mess infuse his history with energy, authenticity and gravitas. He leaves no hero unheralded nor villain unscorned in an attempt to frame what must have been one of the most difficult chapters of a long and costly war. Excellent if grim work. (4/5 Stars)