THE STORY OF
JIM STILLMAN
KOKODA VETERAN AND LEGEND
RESEARCHED AND WRITTEN BY
DEBBIE COSIER
On January 1, 1942, 20 year old Private James
Robert Stillman (V24503) found himself in Papua
New Guinea on the verge of what he thought
could be the greatest adventure of his life.
He was a member of the 39th Infantry Battalion, a hastily comprised citizen’s
militia sent to Port Moresby once it became apparent that the Japanese were intent on setting up a colonial empire in the South
Seas, including occupying and controlling Australian territory. If their overall lack of military training was anything to go by, no
one was seriously planning on sending the 39th Battalion into battle. They were sent to PNG as a precaution, a garrison force
assigned to defend, operate, develop and maintain the seaport and airfield at Port Moresby.
In the meantime, a fully trained and experienced Australian Infantry Force was being brought back from their World War II
engagements in Europe and Africa to do the real fighting. Only problem was, the Japanese were not marching to anyone else’s
schedule but their own.
The next six months would prove the most difficult and defining period in the lives of most of those young, inexperienced
soldiers of the 39th Infantry Battalion. Many would not return home. But it was a period that would also see them rise to the
occasion and become the unlikeliest heroes in this harrowing jungle-and-swamp saga. They would be thrown into a fight they
were unprepared for, against overwhelming military odds, under environmental conditions that were as difficult to survive as
the armed battles. They were on their own for the start of the Kokoda Track Campaign, and those like Jim Stillman who were
still on their feet after this first epic battle would fight again in the deadly Northern Beaches Campaign where more Australian
diggers were lost than during any other part of the war in PNG.
A mist-shrouded war memorial now overlooks the vast Owen Stanley Ranges at Isurava in remembrance of the diggers who
fought there. Etched on stone pillars are the words: courage, endurance, mateship and sacrifice. These are the celebrated
values of the Kokoda Spirit shown by Jim and his fellow diggers. However, Jim has a much less complicated description of the
character of the young men who served with him in Papua New Guinea in 1942. To him, the 39th were simply a “top mob – a
very good bunch of blokes”.
Leading up to PNG
Jim originally joined the 20th Light Horse Brigade in Melbourne, a voluntary Citizens Military Force or ‘militia’. He was working
as a butcher in Alexandra, his home town in rural Victoria before he commenced full service with the 39th Australian Infantry
Battalion in October 1941 in response to a call for volunteers soon after Japan’s intentions became apparent in the South
Pacific.
The truth of the matter was that by this stage in World War II, Australians felt stripped and defenceless. Our troops were
fighting for England, the motherland, far from home. Against the express wishes of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
Prime Minister John Curtin turned some ships around and headed them towards Australia. In the meantime he called up any
enthusiastic and able-bodied 18 to 20 year-olds from the domestic militia – among them Jim Stillman of the 20th Light Horse –
as well as veterans from previous conflicts to provide some depth.
“We were sent to Camp Darley in Bacchus Marsh for about four weeks, where all we did was march. We didn’t learn much
there really. We had a week out in the bush to live on our wits. Quite a few people missed some chooks, I can tell you! But we
had to eat something and the army said we had to live off the land.”
The sum total of his military training, this was deemed enough for a garrison force and Jim was sent off on the Aquitania with
2000 others in late 1941. They passed at least two other cruise ships that had been converted to wartime troopships (the
Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary) and Jim recalls how small these ships made the Aquitania seem by comparison. Their
destination, they discovered, was Port Moresby, where they were to defend a strategic airfield on the southern coast of Papua
New Guinea, not so far from the northern-most tip of Australia. Strictly speaking it was against the law to use militia as a
fighting force outside of Australia but Papua New Guinea was Australian territory so Curtin exploited this loophole and the 39th
arrived on Moresby’s shores on January 1, 1942.
According to the stories of the time, the 39th Battalion were known as ‘Chocos’ or ‘Chocolate Soldiers’. Because of their youth,
inexperience and lack of training, it was believed they might ‘melt’ if they faced the heat of battle. Nobody seriously considered
that they would or should be used in actual combat. The belief was that the real fighting would be left to the soldiers of the
Australian Infantry Force (AIF) – who would arrive some time later.
When the Bombing Started
“We were only there for about four weeks before the Japanese started bombing us. They’d come over at about 11 o’clock,
midnight, 1 o’clock every night and they’d drop a bomb here and there to try and mess up the airfield. It used to drive us nuts
because all we had were Vickers and Lewis machine guns and couldn’t shoot them at 20,000 feet up,” says Jim.
Following the first bombing raid, the soldiers realised they needed to dig slit trenches for protection. However, it was a full week
after that first raid before Jim finally dug his first trench because there were no shovels to be found anywhere! (They had similar
supply issues with other essentials such as mosquito nets.) Instead, they dug with anything they could find, including their
helmets, empty bully-beef tins, bayonets and bare hands.
“Then the enemy started bombing us during the day time with Mitsubishi Bombers and Zero Fighters and we’d crawl into our
trenches. With small arms’ fire, we managed to bring down two Japanese fighters that got too low. They made a few holes in
the airfield each raid, but after they left we’d get in a truck load of stuff and fill them over.”
The Japanese’ desire to wipe out the airfield became more urgent leading up to their May 4-8 naval attack on the port from the
Coral Sea. Answered by the combined naval and air forces of the United States and Australia, the Battle of the Coral Sea (also
known as the Battle for Australia) proved an important win for the Allies, who were able to continue the fight from Moresby for
the narrow margin of territory between themselves and the invading Japanese land army.
Battle for Kokoda
The Japanese now focused their attentions on an overland invasion after establishing beachheads on the north coast of Papua
New Guinea at Gona, Buna and Sanananda, and sending their jungle-trained blooded veterans of the 144th Japanese Regiment
1
along the ‘Kokoda Track ’ on the most direct overland route towards Port Moresby. The 144th had won every Allied encounter
in the South Seas to date, and had superior numbers and fire power. The only opposition standing between them and the
northern-most tip of Australia was the inexperienced 39th and 53rd Battalions made up of mostly citizen’s militia.
By late July, the unforeseen had occurred and Jim’s first encounter with the formidable enemy looked like it would be just
around the corner – and there was no AIF in sight! His first battle was the second battle for Kokoda on August 8-10, 1942. This
was referred to as the second battle because the 39th’s B Company, who had been reconnoitring the track, had already encountered the advancing Japanese at Kokoda. Vastly outnumbered, B Company had put up good opposition but was forced to
abandon Kokoda Village on July 29. This was a serious loss for the Allies because the Kokoda airfield was a critical strategic
position for flying in supplies. With the need to drive the Japanese back to the northern beaches (180 kilometres from Port
Moresby over mountainous terrain), the Kokoda airfield would ensure the diggers had full stomachs, plenty of weapons,
ammunition, and reinforcements for rest, recovery and replacing casualties.
1 The
Kokoda Track was a single-file native trail that crossed the country from the northern beaches to the south (Port Moresby) across the inhospitable Owen Stanley
Ranges.
Now, without the convenience of fresh supplies Jim and the other members of A Company would have to carry what they
needed. Hence, they were loaded up with 90 pounds (31 kg) of food, bedding, weaponry (.303 rifle) and ammunition (two
bandoliers of bullets) and sent up the track. They did not have the man power to take more effective, heavy-duty weapons with
2
them. So Jim, who was a mortar man, carried a rifle like the rest of A Company.
Travelling over terrain that had only ever seen light foot traffic in the past (and was mostly held together by tree roots) the track
now began to break up with the cumulative effect of trampling boots and constant rainfall. At times, Jim was forced to sling his
rifle over his shoulder and use both hands and both feet to either scale up or slither down parts of the track that were nearly
vertical. Author of Kokoda, Peter FitzSimmons comments on another difficulty of the track:
“Never did it take the shortest route between two points, but instead meandered up
the very steepest of the hills, plunged into the deepest valley and then detoured
right to the edge of disaster above a cliff-face before heading for a swamp.”
[Chapter 7, Kokoda, 2005]
Jim says: “I lost more than 30 pounds [13 kg] on the track. The packs got too heavy so we had to cut our ground sheet, blanket
and towel in half. I was a big bloke in those days. I carried mine alright but a lot of them never made the length of the track.
Their knees packed up, their ankles packed up and they had to be sent back.”
After eight days’ trekking, Jim’s A Company finally arrived at Kokoda. Under the command of Captain Symington, A Company
took up position on the Kokoda plateau on August 8, ready for their first encounter. They didn’t know if the other companies
had reached their intended destinations or not as there was no communication. They only knew that they were finally in
position.
Jim remembers those days like it was yesterday: “When we first arrived, the Japs were all out trying to pin down Australians
from the other companies of the 39th and there was only about half a dozen where we were. Those we didn’t kill took off into
the bush, but the next day [August 9] they arrived back [at the plateau] and there must have been a thousand of them against
only one hundred and something of us. It was a hell of a fight.”
Throughout the hours of August 9 and 10, the fighting was fierce and there were many casualties. Jim recalls coming under fire
from Japanese soldiers who took to the branches of the trees. “I did a fair bit of sniping. They’d climb into the trees and tie
themselves up there. They’d shoot anybody that moved, any movement in the jungle….They killed a lot of blokes. But in the end
many a Jap was dead in a tree at the end of a rope.”
Jim had deadly accuracy due to his hunting experience with his Uncle Teddy as a boy 3. Similarly, he was skilful at lobbing
grenades far and with accuracy because he was tall and like many Aussie lads who played cricket in that era he had a very good
bowling arm.
Jim reflects back on those first days: “Everything’s frightening in war – especially when you’re on guard duty. Every little noise
and twig-snap you’d wonder, is that a Jap?”
Jim dreamed of returning home one day to his sweetheart, Olive Allen, whom he’d met when he was just 19 and she 18, and
would married on December 16th, 1944. She was doing her part for the war effort too, working in the Godfrey Hurst Mill at
Geelong. He wanted what most Aussie blokes wanted: to make a quid, to settle down and have a family, and to enjoy his
beloved sports. He was a good athlete in his time and a fierce supporter since the early days of his favourite team, the Geelong
Cats. These compelling reasons to live made it very hard for him to comprehend the attitude of the Japanese soldiers: “They
seemed to want to die. When they charged they’d yell their heads off and charge with their bayonets. Nothing would stop
them. You’d shoot them and shoot them and more and more would keep coming.”
As time progressed, it became clear that the 39th would be unable to hold on to Kokoda. They were running out of ammunition
and food. An Allied plane flying low over the valley on August 10 raised their hopes but disappeared just as quickly, not willing
to land under such conditions. Without the supplies, support and communication, this was an impossible position to maintain.
Finally, Captain Symington gave the order to leave on dark because it looked like they would be overrun before long. “We got
orders to keep one shell in our .303s and take to the bush.”
2 The
Japanese did not face the same logistical problems, however: they could spare the 40 men per machine dedicated to setting up, pulling down, moving, and
setting up two 90 mm mountain guns over and over again. This became one of the decisive factors in the initial months when the Australians lost so much ground,
due in part to fact that they were the target of constant artillery fire.
3 Jim’s
Uncle Teddy was killed when the Japanese ship he was travelling on as a prisoner of war was attacked by an American submarine just off the coast of the
Philippines. Approximately 800 Australian lives were lost.
The situation was dire. “When we left Kokoda we split up into three groups but the Japs got in amongst us and we all split up
into two or three. It was a shocking trip because we had no idea where we were.” He and his virtually defenceless crew spent
two nights alone in the jungle with nothing to eat. It required a lot of guesswork to find their way out, but with numerous native
tracks to choose from they eventually found one that led them back to Deniki. From Deniki they found their way back to Isurava, where they rejoined the rest of their Battalion.
Just as miraculously, the Japanese advance finally stalled.
Battle for Isurava
At Isurava, the 39th Battalion had some time to recover during a ceasefire that lasted for close to two weeks. Jim recalls how
Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner took command of the 39th Battalion. “He was an inspiration to the boys. He went around to
everyone and said we can’t give in, we’ve got to stop them. We’ve got to stop them!”
By now, under the command of their highly experienced commanding officer Colonel Ralph Honner, the 39th had formed a tight
fighting corps. “We had some hellish fights around Isurava,” Jim recalls. “Everybody thought they might die there…. And a lot of
guys did. It’s a funny feeling – ‘Am I gunna die? Am I gunna die? Am I gunna die?’ You forgot about that once the fighting got
going... Then it was bullets, bullets, bullets.”
It was at Isurava that Jim remembers one of the most terrifying experiences in his time on the Kokoda Track. “I was in a trench
one night with a good bloke, Headley Norman. The sun had just set and it was a bit hard to see. Next thing I knew, a Jap jumped
into the trench beside me.” Jim, who describes himself as a ‘left-hand batsman, left-foot kicker and right-hand bowler’, collared
the guy.
“I had my left arm wrapped around his neck and had him by the shirt front when another Jap jumped in the other side! I swung
my other arm around his neck and grabbed his rifle.” All out of spare arms, Jim didn’t dare let go. Headley shot the invaders,
saving Jim’s life. “It was either they die, or I die,” he says with a faraway look in his eye. It came down to the only equation that
equals survival in war.
At Gona a few months later, Headley Norman, just 18, was shot and killed by a sniper. “He was a great bloke, Headley,” says Jim.
Years later, Jim made a point of contacting Headley’s family so he could describe the heroic acts of his good friend.
Some of Jim’s most powerful memories are of the sounds he heard while jungle fighting; where your capacity to hear an enemy
often outweighs your ability to see one through the impenetrable foliage or the darkness of night. The rustle-rustle-rustle of
Japanese cutting through the scrub at night, the sounds from artillery fire as it left the distant hills and, shortly after, the shock
of an explosion nearby. This is what constitutes the night terrors of those who fight wars.
“The fighting was all the time, not just during the day. You were never in one spot long enough to get a good rest. They also had
a couple of 90ml mountain guns. One of their mortars was on a ridge and we hated it. I went out on a couple of patrols to try to
find and destroy it, but they’d fire a few shells then move them and we never could find them.”
Jim recalls how a Japanese shell landed near the trench of two boys from the 39th. The shell did no visible damage to their
bodies but they were dead, completely drained of colour.
The desperate situation soon became even more ominous. Jim remembers his commanding officer telling them one morning
that the Japs had broken through the line. “We were running short of ammo, so we fixed bayonets and cleaned them out. We
lost a few good men – but they lost more. It was shocking.”
After constant bombardment and the arrival of enemy reinforcements, it looked as if the Japanese would finally completely
encircle the 39th and finish them off. Almost miraculously out of the jungle marched the long-anticipated AIF 2/14th to
reinforce them. Jim and his battalion were finally relieved of duty.
But would they take their well-earned rest? No. They decided not to leave the 2/14th to face slim odds alone – staying on to
fight with their brothers of the AIF at Isurava.
By the end of August there was no holding the enemy back. Once again, the Australian troops were forced to fall back in a
fighting withdrawal to Eora Creek, Templeton’s Crossing, and finally Efogi by September 5.
“We would ambush the Japanese as they came along the track, then send some more back to set up another ambush. Each
time we ambushed them, it slowed them down considerably…. We had several groups doubling back through each other and
keeping the Japs busy while we evacuated the wounded. I was on rearguard as one of the strongest and fittest. We were about
a day behind the Aussies who were heading back and they never caught up to us.”
Exhausted, Jim and his comrades were finally sent back down the track to Koitaki to rest. Those of the 39th who had survived
the six long weeks in battle now resembled scarecrows. “It had been a can of bully beef and some of the old army biscuits and
that’s all we had every day for weeks. After a while they used to send dozens of natives up the track with food, but we got very
thin with little food and then there was the malaria, dengue fever, dysentery… Lucky I escaped Scrub Typhus. A lot of boys died
from Scrub Typhus.” There were not enough men from the original 39th left to re-form the battalion, but their spirits were
unbroken.
After a month at Koitaki, the 39th were returned to Port Moresby in mid-October.
Finally Turning the Tide
While the Japanese had made a lot of headway and almost driven the Allies to the southern Papua New Guinea coastline, their
supply lines were choked by hardship and distance, dwindling to almost nothing. Simultaneously, the battle in the Guadalcanal
was a big drain on their resources. Ironically, being pushed back towards home base the Australians were finally well-supplied
and could escalate the pressure on their weakening enemy. The tide was turning.
While all of this transpired on the Track, Jim was suffering from the malaria virus caused by bites from infected mosquitos, and
was in and out of the medical tent.
However this didn’t mean he was exempt from contributing once he returned to Port Moresby. You had to have a temperature
of more than 104ᵒF (40ᵒ+ Celsius) to be relieved of duties. So on September 18, 1942, he found himself in a trench above Port
Moresby where the track branches off at the top of the range. Sharing his foxhole with another two diggers, there was
something special about this day. It was his 21st birthday and his fiancé Olive had sent a cake that the three men were
devouring with relish. “Boy did we make a hog of ourselves on that cake! Best feed we’d had in weeks!” he recalls. The Army
were under the impression that he was actually 22 on this particular date. Not that Jim would inform them of the error. (He
would never have been allowed to join the 20th Light Horse if they had known his real age!)
Finally, the AIF turned the Japanese around. They captured two 90mm mountain guns at Ioribaiwa Village that had been the
scourge of their existence for two long months and pointed them at the retreating Japanese. Over the next three months, the
tide receded northwards, with Kokoda falling back into Allied hands by November 2, 1942.
The Northern Beaches Campaign
At the end of November, 1942, the survivors of the 39th Battalion were attached to the 30th Brigade and Jim and his fellow
diggers boarded a Lockheed Hudson, destination: Popondetta. This small village and airfield was in the northern foothills of the
Owen Stanley’s. From there, they would head through scraggy jungle, endless disease-infested swampland, course grassland
and coconut groves in their hunt for the enemy. The 30th Brigade would soon become attached to the 21st Brigade in this
‘exercise in extermination’ ordered by Allied High Command.4
But alas, the Japanese had resupplied and reinforced their beachheads and were well dug in. They had constructed a
formidable system of fortifications with interlocking bunkers, consisting of foot-thick palm trunk frames supported by steel and
sand-packed oil drums. They extended in a triangular perimeter – the base of which was about 10 miles in length between the
coastal villages of Gona and Buna (Cape Endaiadere) and inland to Seputa.
Historian Paul Ham (Kokoda, 2004) states that only a direct hit from artillery or tank shells, or a grenade aimed directly through
the fire slits would have destroyed the occupants. In the treetops sat heavily armed and camouflaged sharpshooters.5
The battle would not be easily won. On November 19 and 20, a week or so before Jim arrived, Japanese positions were bombed
from the air and softened up with long-range artillery. The month finished out with waves of Allied soldiers being launched at
the Gona bunkers and Japanese machine-guns repulsing them like toy soldiers. There was little gain and much loss of life for the
Allies.
4 Ham,
P., (2004), Kokoda, Harper Collins Publishers, Sydney, Australia.
hard to estimate the real numbers of Japanese troops that the Allied forces (both Australian and American – largely inexperienced – by now) were up against.
Estimates vary from 5,000 to 13,000 and this number changed during the three months of fighting the Northern Beaches Campaign.
5 It’s
Days from Hell
6
By the time Jim and the other reinforcements arrived in Popondetta, walked up to Seputa and then headed towards Gona,
things were looking ugly. If the jungle battle on the Kokoda Track had been devastating, the Northern Beaches were apocalyptic:
The dead and wounded lay on open ground, within dozens of yards of the enemy.
Their bodies could not be retrieved until nightfall; the wounded groaned
through the days, a constant reminder of Allied impotence
against hidden machine-guns.
[Ham, P., 2004, Kokoda
Jim’s son Geoff Stillman has been silent witness to many conversations between his father and many other PNG Veterans over
the years. He suggests that the impact of the Northern Beaches experience was much more severe on Jim’s psyche than the
Kokoda Track Campaign. “This is the battle that stuck in his mind the most. When you go [to Gona] now, there are beautiful
coconut palms around but back then everything was smashed to pieces. Bomb craters everywhere. The Japs were even fighting
behind piles of dead soldiers, with machine guns sitting on top.”
This is consistent with Jim’s reflections on the war in Gona: “You never get used to battle. Shocking thing really – killing men like
that. It’s ridiculous! I can tell you in two words how the war was: bloody awful.”
Yet in equal measure, Jim recounts stories of mateship born from the hardship of war. On one occasion, he and Phil Gartner
took advantage of a treetop recently wrested from Japanese snipers. “I think it was the only gum tree on that side of the range.
The Japs had built a stairway right to the top of it and Phil and I climbed up that tree to cover the beach.” In his typical narrative
style, Jim recalls how they enjoyed the view: “The telescopic lenses on the .303s were so clear, we could almost see if people
had fleas!”
By November 30, the Allies had the Japanese surrounded at Gona, Buna and Huggins Roadblock. But how would they rout
them? Jim says they eventually succeeded in eliminating Japanese opposition at Gona during December 1942 and he puts this
down to the persistence and brilliance of Colonel Honner. “He snuck off down Gona Creek and spent all night and all day
studying the Japanese positions. He said there was only one way we would take it. We’d had three goes at it and had failed
because they were so deeply entrenched… He said the only way to get them is if we bombard them all day from daylight and
went in during the late afternoon.”
The Allied bombardment continued towards dusk and Jim and the others were finally given the orders. What followed was the
longest two minutes of their lives. The men suffered under the bombardment from their own side as they crept towards Japanese ramparts. However, according to plan, the enemy remained unaware of what was happening and Allied retribution visited
swift and lethal upon them. “We caught the Japanese unaware and it was a slaughter. We attacked at about 4 o’clock in the
afternoon then it took all night and all the next day. We took about 700 Japanese and lost about 59 of our own, with many more
wounded,” says Jim. “At West Gona, we took another 170, then they sent us down to Huggins Road Block where we relieved the
127th American Forces.”
The End of the Road - Huggins Roadblock
With the villages of Gona and Buna back under Allied control, the diggers had finally loosened the Japanese’ grip on Papua New
Guinea. The last remaining Japanese fortifications existed at Huggins Road Block and Sanananda.
“Most of the time you were under pressure – being shelled or bombed or strafed by Jap planes. It just went on and on. You had
your own little trench where there was just the two of you; built zigzag so they couldn’t strafe straight through it. It wasn’t a
very long trench as it was only for the two of you. We had them in Moresby and in the jungle, at Gona and Sanananda.
Everywhere you dug a trench.”
Life remained on a knife edge. On guard duty one night Jim could hear some rustling in the bushes 20 or 30 metres away. He
knew it was a Jap who was trying to ferret them out of their trench. He says he put up with it for a while before waking his
sergeant. “‘Give ‘im a hand grenade, Jimmy,’ the Sergeant said to me. So I threw two. But there was nothing there in the
morning. They must have got away.”
6 Jim
remembers how the Japanese bombed the Red Cross hospital in Seputa sometime after they left the village.
7
It wouldn’t be until the end of January, 1943, that the Allies finally and completely defeated the Japanese in PNG . However, Jim
came under an attack of a different kind before his battalion finished their work. One morning, he reported in sick with another
serious bout of malaria. The medic took his temperature and said, “Oh yes, you’re over 104ᵒF [40+ᵒC].” With that he was
ordered to make his own way back to Popondetta airfield, a 39.6km solitary walk while delirious with fever. “It took me nearly
two days to walk that all by myself. I was a pretty big guy then but when you suffer from malaria and lack of food you get pretty
weak.”
After spending a few days on his back at Popondetta, he was finally flown back to Port Moresby where he was hospitalised for
four weeks before being sent to Camp Wandecla on the Australian Atherton Tablelands to recover. Eventually he was sent
home. The battle in Papua New Guinea was at an end and it appeared that Australia could breathe easy at last.
This was not the last of Jim’s service in World War II. After convalescing for a year in Australia, finally marrying his sweetheart
Olive and a few days into his honeymoon, he was called back to duty. He spent the next Tour of Duty at Headquarters in Lae
where his ongoing malaria prevented him from fighting. He was finally discharged in November 1946.
“It’s funny how many people you meet who don’t know much about it. Anybody who
was on it… the memories… they keep flooding back, you know? Bits and pieces you
remember now and again that you nearly forgot about. How good the young
fellas were to one another. That sort of thing. They were remarkable young blokes
really. They were all 18, 19, 20. They were all good blokes.”
– James Robert Stillman, February 5, 2015.
7 Fighting
continued in some parts of New Guinea until WWII ended in August 1945, however the Japanese never reoccupied Papua.