Kokada book highlights

My Highlights from the book Kokoda by Paul Ham

As you go through, stick them.’ A rather quiet, introspective soldier refused. He was told, ‘It’s for all our safety’—and he was reminded of an incident when an apparently dead Japanese had shot a passing Australian. The quiet soldier said ‘Okay’, and lunged his bayonet into the nearest Japanese body, which groaned and crawled forward. The Japanese had been hiding his rifle. The Australian shook with revulsion and never quite recovered from the incident. He died later in the campaign.

The Japanese bound and bayoneted dozens of tribesmen who refused to cooperate with them. Women were raped, sometimes with bayonets. One native woman was pegged down and slit from her throat to her vagina; a teenage girl was nailed to the ground with a bamboo stake through her chest. The genitals and anuses of several native men and women were mutilated; the breasts of several women were chopped off and left on or beside their bodies. One woman was disembowelled, and one man’s buttocks were hacked off. At Moteo the Japanese tied a man’s hands with signal wire and shot and bayoneted him several...

But the…information that [the] wounded would have to fend for themselves, received in the darkness of a tent at midnight, to men just awakened from their sleep, was shattering.’9 Of 65 Australian Victoria Crosses won in World War I, thirteen went to troops who rescued the wounded under enemy fire. ‘Now the men were told that if hit…they would have to get back as best they could.’