Veterans head back to Kokoda

[Andy in West Oz]

Six war veterans head back to Kokoda - Breaking News - World - Breaking News

Harry Barkla spent his 21st birthday sitting in a foxhole on the Kokoda Track before all hell broke loose at the Battle of Isurava in August 1942.
The 86-year-old from Bendigo returns to that Papua New Guinea battlefield for the first time on Tuesday with five other Australian World War II veterans to mark 65 years since the battle and to remember lost mates.
"I was lucky, I was a runner for the platoon so I very seldom got any forward positions.
"It was scary enough when you went on forward patrols and had to walk back to battalion headquarters to get them a message," Barkla recalled.
The fighting withdrawal conducted by his 39th Battalion meant many bodies were left behind and could not be found when the tables turned and the Australians pushed the Japanese back.
"The biggest majority only have a memorial, because they've got no known grave," Barkla said at the Bomana War Cemetery near Port Moresby.
A small memorial service for the visiting veterans was held at the cemetery on Tuesday morning, attended by Australian Defence Force staff, Port Moresby RSL members and Australian High Commissioner Chris Moraitis.
Joe Dawson, a veteran of the 39th Battalion from Forster in NSW, found the graves of two of his mates among the rows of white headstones at Bomana.
"They were indeed mates, they were the best," the 85-year-old said.
"Today's been a wonderful day for me, it's been pretty emotional."
Dawson recalled some of the hardships of the steep and gruelling Kokoda Track.
"All the skin had come off the bottom of my feet, the boots were all rotten of course. I then had to walk back to Port Moresby."
Dawson said that after the campaign on the track, the 39th Battalion proceeded to take Gona on the north coast after bloody engagements with well dug-in Japanese.
The battalion lost more men at Gona than on the Kokoda Track.
"It was a stinking place, you could smell bodies and blood and cordite, I still get the smell back occasionally," Dawson said.
Another 39th Battalion veteran Peter Holloway from Melbourne quoted the Duke of Wellington to describe the fighting on the Kokoda Track: "Unless you were there, you cannot comprehend the horror of it."
Holloway proudly displayed the 39th Battalion banner with its brown over red circular emblem referred to as Mud Over Blood, a fitting symbol for the battalion's Kokoda experience.
"When they sounded the last post I got quite emotional, I thought of all my mates, we were devastated," he said after today's service.
The three veterans join Peter Hutchison and Lionel Smith of the 2/14th Battalion and Alan Hooper of the Papuan Infantry Battalion to fly by helicopter to Isurava tomorrow for a ceremony marking the intense battle there from August 26 to 29, 1942.

[spidge]

When he spoke of the Last Post, I had a tear in my eye!