How Australia’s 39th Battalion Turned the Kokoda Track Into a Battle of Time and Endurance
Their own army had once dismissed them as “chocolate soldiers”, men who were supposedly likely to melt when the pressure became real. Many were teenage clerks, shop assistants and apprentices from Melbourne suburbs. They had limited training, uneven equipment and little reason to believe that history would remember them. Yet along the Kokoda Track in 1942, Japanese officers repeatedly estimated that they were facing a much larger Australian force than was actually present. In one striking example, a position held by only 77 Australians was assessed as containing as many as 1,200 men.
These were not isolated errors. Similar estimates appeared for weeks in records prepared by experienced officers. The issue was not poor arithmetic but the evidence before them: terrain, repeated contacts and movement made a small exhausted force appear to have reserves. The Australians did not stage an elaborate deception. They kept appearing where the Japanese did not expect them.
The 39th Australian Infantry Battalion had been raised rapidly in 1941 from Victorian militia units. Under the law of the time, militia soldiers could not automatically be sent outside Australian territory. That distinction encouraged contempt from some members of the Australian Imperial Force, whose volunteers had fought in North Africa, Greece, Crete and Syria. The militia were sometimes called “koalas”, creatures that were not to be exported or exposed to serious fighting. The nickname sounded humorous, but it carried a harsh judgement: these young men were considered useful for home defence and little more.
Their equipment reflected that judgement. Priority went to formations already serving overseas, while the 39th often received older uniforms, weapons and stores. Some items had been in service for many years. The battalion was sent to Port Moresby as part of a garrison, more as a precaution than as the centrepiece of a major defensive plan. Few decision-makers in Canberra expected a powerful Japanese force to attempt an overland advance across the Owen Stanley Range. When the battalion was ordered north along the track in June 1942, many of its soldiers did not fully understand the scale of the task waiting for them.
Survivors later described young militia men moving past experienced troops who were travelling in the opposite direction. The veterans were not necessarily cruel; many simply assumed the boys ahead of them would not matter for long. That quiet indifference may have been more painful than open mockery. People do not study the faces of men they have already decided will fail. Several days of difficult walking ahead lay a plantation airstrip near Kokoda, a place then unfamiliar to most Australians. The soldiers advancing towards it had little preparation for mountain warfare, jungle disease or a campaign in which food could become as decisive as ammunition.
On 21 July 1942, Japanese forces began landing near Gona and Buna on Papua’s north coast. These were not lightly trained occupation troops. The South Seas Detachment was built around experienced infantry, including men who had already fought successfully in earlier campaigns. Mountain artillery came ashore with them. Their objective was Port Moresby, and the most direct overland approach crossed the Owen Stanley Range along a narrow track. Japanese soldiers began the advance with limited rations, expecting a campaign that would move faster than the four difficult months that followed.
B Company of the 39th was commanded by Captain Sam Templeton, the battalion’s only officer with First World War experience. The younger men called him “Uncle Sam”. Their memories of him were personal rather than ceremonial: a hand reaching down from a steep rock face, an officer taking a rifle from a struggling teenager and carrying it up the climb, a steady presence when confidence was thin. On 26 July, with the Australian position under severe pressure near Oivi, Templeton moved towards the rear of the perimeter to inspect the line. He did not return. He was believed to have been captured and killed, and his body was never recovered.
That loss might have shattered the company. Instead, Papuan police constable Lance Corporal Sanopa found a creek bed through Japanese positions and guided two surrounded platoons through the jungle at night towards Deniki. The episode shows how heavily the campaign depended on Papuan police, scouts, guides and carriers. Their knowledge repeatedly made movement and survival possible, although many names received little space in official records.
The terrain performed much of the deception. A popular story later claimed that Japanese commanders expected a road across the Owen Stanley Range and were surprised to find only a footpath. The reality was more complicated. Japanese intelligence had gathered information about Papua before the campaign, and senior officers knew that no proper road crossed the mountains. But knowing the character of the ground on paper was not the same as solving its practical problems while carrying artillery, food and medical supplies through rain, mud and steep jungle.
The track often followed narrow ridge lines with sharp drops on either side. In many places, two men could barely move abreast. This sharply limited the fighting frontage, meaning that a regiment with thousands of soldiers might bring only a small group into direct contact at one time. The remaining troops waited behind in a long column, unable to see what was happening ahead. Numbers listed on a strength report looked impressive, but on a front only a few metres wide, those numbers could not be applied at once.
Every Australian position forced the Japanese into an expensive routine. The column had to stop. Forward troops had to identify the position, deploy under uncertain conditions, search for a flank and climb through difficult country to reach it. Each delay consumed time, strength and supplies. To a headquarters following the campaign on a map, resistance on one ridge and then another could easily look like fresh Australian units entering the battle. In reality, the same tired men were often withdrawing, reorganising and taking position again.
This was not a simple retreat. It was a fighting withdrawal: ambush the leading elements, hold long enough to force the enemy to deploy, break contact before being trapped, then repeat the process from the next defensible ridge. Awala, Gorari, Oivi, Kokoda, Deniki and Isurava can be read as a sequence of lost positions. They can also be read as a schedule for converting ground into time. The battalion was not stopping the Japanese permanently. It was making every kilometre costly.
After one phase of the fighting, survivors of B Company were seen filthy, unshaven and physically depleted. An officer concluded that they had run and sent them back in disgrace. The decision removed from the battalion some of the few soldiers who understood how the Japanese attacked. It also illustrates the emotional cost of a fighting withdrawal. From a distant headquarters, controlled delay can look almost identical to failure. Men may be carrying out a sound method while being judged as fugitives by their own side.
The Japanese estimate of 1,200 defenders where only 77 were present provides the clearest evidence that the method was having an effect. A small unit appearing repeatedly on new ground does not necessarily look small to an enemy. It looks like a force with reserves, depth and organisation. Japanese officers counted real engagements, but they interpreted each engagement as evidence of additional troops. The Australians gained time not because they were invisible, but because they were visible in ways that suggested far more strength than they possessed.
That system could continue only while food and ammunition reached the forward positions. Here the campaign depended heavily on Papuan carriers and on the organisation of the supply route. Lieutenant Bert Kienzle, a plantation manager familiar with the region, helped develop a relay system rather than requiring each carrier to walk the full length of the track. The logic was practical and unforgiving. A man carrying food for both himself and a soldier would consume much of the load during a long journey. The longer he travelled, the less useful cargo reached the front.
By dividing the route into stages, carrier teams could work on familiar sections and pass loads forward. Each man needed less food for his own return journey and could carry a greater proportion of ammunition, medical supplies or rations for the troops. It was not a glamorous innovation, but campaigns are often decided by arrangements that never appear in heroic paintings. Somewhere along the track, an unnamed carrier balanced a heavy ammunition box, walked one section, handed it to another man and turned back. The record may not preserve his identity, but the system depended on thousands of such journeys.
In early August, Kienzle reached a dry lake bed near the crest of the range, an unusual stretch of open kunai grass in overwhelmingly steep country. He named it Myola. The area offered a possible supply base, and air drops were tested. Dumps were also developed at points including Efogi, Kagi, Eora Creek and Alola. These arrangements gave the Australians an important advantage. Every kilometre they withdrew shortened their own supply route while lengthening the Japanese line.
The withdrawal was therefore doing more than purchasing time. It was moving Australian troops closer to their food and reinforcements while pulling the Japanese farther from the beaches and depots behind them. This did not make the campaign easy. Air drops were inaccurate, supplies were lost, carriers were overworked and wounded soldiers had to be moved through terrible conditions. Yet the underlying direction favoured the defenders. The Japanese advance created its own increasing burden.
By mid-August, the 39th prepared to hold the ridge at Isurava while waiting for experienced regular troops. The Australians positioned forces to watch side tracks that might allow the Japanese to turn the main defence. On 26 August, the Japanese attacked with mountain guns. The Australians had no comparable artillery support. In practical terms, shells arrived without an answer, while men lay in shallow pits and listened as the guns adjusted their range.
Traditional retellings often present the battle as approximately 1,800 Australians facing around 6,000 Japanese, while some historians using Japanese personnel and casualty records argue that the forces directly engaged at Isurava were closer in size. Such disagreements matter because memorial stories tend to become cleaner than the surviving evidence. The courage of the men does not require exaggerated numbers. Their situation was already severe: they were exhausted, poorly supplied, operating in punishing terrain and facing experienced opponents with artillery.
Elements of the 2/14th Battalion, veterans of Middle East campaigns, reached the ridge and could have allowed the militia to withdraw. Yet the exhausted 39th remained in the line because the relief force needed help immediately. Many of the militia soldiers were still teenagers. This decision is difficult to read without emotion. The same young men once treated as temporary, second-rate troops were now considered essential to the survival of an experienced formation.
On 29 August, Japanese troops broke into part of the position. Private Bruce Kingsbury of the 2/14th, one of the few survivors of a platoon that had been overrun, volunteered to join another platoon’s counterattack. Advancing with a Bren gun, he helped recover important ground before being killed shortly afterwards. He received the Victoria Cross, the first awarded to an Australian for actions in Australian territory. His bravery became one of the best-known stories of Isurava, but it stood beside many acts that were never formally recognised.
The defenders held for four days. That period, rather than a permanent victory, was the result. The line eventually gave way and the withdrawal continued south. On 31 August, the remnants of the 39th answered roll call. Accounts differ over exact casualties, but the survivors remembered the shock of seeing only a fraction of the men who had stood on the ridge days earlier. At aid posts, some wounded soldiers who could still walk reportedly collected rifles and returned towards the fighting.
Three weeks later, the battalion stood on parade. Photographs show what the track had done to them. They had entered the campaign as boys and emerged with hollow faces and the posture of much older men. Sam Templeton was still missing. Sanopa’s route through the Japanese lines had brought two platoons to safety, yet his contribution occupied little space in many official accounts. The contrast is painful: national memory often celebrates a few names while depending on many others it barely records.
It is worth being fair to those who initially doubted the militia. The 39th was undertrained, poorly equipped and inexperienced. Those observations were accurate. The mistake was believing that those weaknesses determined the outcome in advance. Along the Kokoda Track, frontage, tempo, terrain, supply and the willingness to continue mattered just as much. The Japanese kept advancing, but they also kept calculating an Australian force larger than the one actually before them.
The campaign also left a practical military lesson. Delay, depth and withdrawal can become a coherent method when shaped by terrain and governed by supply. A small force does not always need to defeat a larger one in a single battle. It may need to slow it, stretch it, confuse its estimates and survive long enough for the strategic situation to change. What began as improvisation under pressure became an example studied as doctrine.
If families still carry the names of men from the 39th Battalion, the Papuan Infantry Battalion or the carrier lines, those names deserve careful remembrance. History becomes human when it returns from numbers to individuals: the teenager lifting a rifle, the officer reaching down from a rock, the constable finding a path through darkness and the carrier passing a load to the next man. Together, they explain how a force that looked small on paper became, in its opponent’s eyes, an army spread across the mountains.
