How An Australian Brigade Climbed Under Fire To Destroy Japan’s Strongest New Guinea Fortress

There is a place in New Guinea that should not have been taken. Look at it from the air  and you will understand. A spine of rock running north and south through  the Finisterre range, 6 and 1/2 km long. At its highest point, 1,497 m above sea level, cloud sits on  it like a lid.

 When the cloud lifts, you see what it is, a razorback, a blade of country dropped between two valleys with  cliffs falling away on either side and along the top, a single goat track of a path. In places,  that path is only wide enough for one man. One man walking forward with nothing on his left and  nothing on his right.

 And ahead of him, dug into the rock like teeth in the jaw, a regiment of Japanese infantry who have been waiting for him. They called it Shaggy Ridge. It got that name from an Australian officer, Captain Robert Clampitt of the 2/27th Battalion, whose nickname was Shaggy Bob. His company was the first Allied unit to creep up and look at the place. The name stuck.

 Soldiers do that. They take a piece of country that is trying to kill them and they give it a name like it was a dog. Shaggy. As if naming  it could make it smaller. It could not be made smaller. By late 1943,    the Australian 7th Division had pushed up through the Markham Valley and the Ramu Valley following the Japanese as they fell back from the coast.

  The Japanese kept retreating until they reached the Finisterre range and then they stopped. They climbed up onto Shaggy Ridge and they dug in. The 78th Japanese Infantry Regiment took the high outcrops, built bunkers from logs and earth, set machine gun pits and mortar positions to cover every approach and waited.

They knew what they had. They had a piece of country that would chew up infantry one rifle at a time. The slopes were too steep to climb under fire. The summit was  too narrow to deploy a platoon abreast. There was no flanking. There was no envelopment.    There was the single track along the top. And there were the cliffs.

 The Australians spent 2 months  looking at it from late October through November, through most of December. Patrols crept along the track and were driven back. Artillery worked over the Japanese positions. And the Japanese disappeared inside the earth and came out again afterwards. Air strikes scoured the ridge and burnt off the scrub and left the bunkers untouched.

 Then the Australians did what they had been trying to avoid. They decided they would climb up there and take it on foot. Now the place needs a map in your head. Picture the ridge running north and south. At the southern end, where the track first climbs onto the spine, the Australians named the first outcrop Green Pinnacle.

 Past Green Pinnacle, further along the blade, came a knob the men called the Pimple. The Pimple was the key. The Pimple was a rocky boil on the back of the ridge that you had to take before you could go further. North of the Pimple came another bump, Green Snipers Pimple, and beyond that the highest point of the whole ridge, McCaughey’s Knoll, named afterwards for the lieutenant whose platoon got there first.

Keep going north and the ridge bent towards two more features sitting almost on top of the Kankiryo Saddle which the Australians named Prothero 1 and Prothero 2. To the east, off the spine, ran another formation called Ferret Ridge. Where Shaggy Ridge and Ferret Ridge met    at the Kankiryo Saddle was the prize, the hinge of the whole Finisterre defense, the piece of ground the Australians had to own if they wanted to cross the mountains and meet the 9th Division coming up the coast.

  Green Pinnacle, the Pimple, Green Snipers Pimple, McCaughey’s Knoll, Prothero 1, Prothero 2. Six rocky teeth in the upper jaw of one mountain, each one a fortress. So, now picture yourself in the dawn of the 27th of December, 1943.    You are with B Company, 2/16 Battalion. You have been on this ridge for weeks.

You have watched men come back down on stretchers, and you have watched the cloud roll over the Japanese positions every afternoon. This morning, the cloud is high and the air is washed clean by the night’s rain. You can see the pimple. You can see all the way along the spine to where the Japanese have been sitting and looking back at you.

 And from somewhere behind you, you hear the artillery start. It is the 2/4 Field Regiment. They are firing 25-pounders. The shells go over your head with that long ripping noise that 25-pounders make, and you watch them go in. 3,500 shells, one after another, on every part of the ridge above you. You hear  the Boomerangs come in next, Australian aircraft, low and angry, with the Kittyhawks of the United States Army Air Corps behind them.

 You watch the bombs come off and fall onto the ridge, and you feel the ground  shake even down here in the gully where you are forming up. You think, “Nothing can live through that.” You are wrong, but you do not know it yet. You start climbing at 9:00. Right at 9:00, your platoon commander says the word, and you stand up and start. First part is not too bad.

 It is a slope, a steep slope, but a slope with handholds in the roots and the grass  clumps. You go up on the balls of your feet because going up on your heels gets you nothing. Your rifle is across your back on a sling. You have grenades in your pockets, and on your webbing, you have water for the day, and you have by now, in this third year of fighting, the habit of climbing. The slope steepens.

 It steepens until it is no longer a slope. It is a face. Shale in scaling sheets, sliding under the boots  of the man above you. Bamboo. Vines, roots. The engineers  made bamboo ladders for this. Light, lashed together ladders for the men to climb. The ladders are in the gully behind you. You did not bring them.

There was nothing to lean them against. You go up on your hands and knees.    Hands and knees. Hands and knees. The rifle banging against the back of your skull every time you reach forward. Your palms cut on the bamboo. Your knees go through the cloth of your trousers and start to bleed.

 The man above you is 2 m up the slope. You can see the soles of his boots. They have a chip out of the heel of the left one. You stare at that chip and you climb. You do not look down. Above you,    somewhere on the lip of the rock, a Japanese machine gun is firing. Not at you. Not yet. It is firing at the platoon to your right, on the other shoulder of the slope, sweeping their line as they come up.

You hear the bursts and you do not look. You climb. Looking is what gets you killed up here. Way. Looking takes a second and a second on this face is a second when your hand is not finding the next root. Your sergeant is on the slope to your left. He calls out a name. The name is the man who was 3 m above you and you watch the soles of his boots go still and then slide and then he goes past you going the other way, very fast, not making any sound and you flatten yourself into the shale and let him go. You do not know if he is

dead or wounded or only knocked off the face. You do not turn your head. You keep climbing. You reach the lip.  You roll over the lip. You are on a piece of ground the size of a kitchen floor    and there is a Japanese pillbox 8 m in front of you, log-roofed, embrasure pointing the wrong way, and you can hear them inside it.

 You can hear them speaking. You take a grenade off your webbing, and you pull the pin, and you count two, and you throw. And the man beside you throws his,    and the man behind him throws his. Then you go forward at the run. This is how the Pimple began to fall. The B Company  assault on the Pimple was not poetry, and it was not gallant.

It was 4 hours of men climbing on their hands, of grenades, of a Japanese pillbox blasted by engineers with high explosive    when the riflemen could not get into the embrasure, of a forward platoon getting halfway up a knob of rock, and then having to fight inch by inch for the rest.

 The Australian attack was halted near the summit when one strong Japanese pillbox  sat directly across the only approach. The next morning, the 28th of December, the engineers brought up their charges. They blew the pillbox. By midday,  the Pimple was Australian. The price was small. Three men of B Company killed, eight wounded, 28 Japanese dead on the position.

 The figures were so light that the staff officers, back in headquarters,    reading them off the signal pad, thought they must have been wrong. They were not wrong. They were small because the artillery and the air strike had done what artillery and air strikes are supposed to do, and because B Company had gone up that slope with a kind of patient ferocity  that does not show up in the casualty returns.

 D Company relieved them in the afternoon.  D Company pushed on. By the night of the 28th,    the Australians had taken two more knobs along the ridge. The second of them captured by a four-man rush led by a lieutenant called McCaughey,    whose name went on to the highest point of the whole feature.

 McCaughey himself was killed by Japanese artillery a few days later on the position he had named. The Japanese counterattacked that afternoon. They came in a force of about 80 men screaming up the spine into the new Australian positions. The Australian artillery caught them in the open at 22 minutes past 2:00 in the afternoon.

Their attack failed before it reached the new wire. And then for a while the front went  still. It went still in the way that the front goes still when both sides have hurt each other badly and both sides know that  the real fight is still to come. The Australians sat on the pimple and looked north.

 North up the spine was Green Snipers Knoll and the rest of McCoy’s Knoll and then the dogleg up to Profero 1 and 2 and the Kankiriyo Saddle. The Japanese sat on those features and looked  south. Between them was 3 km of ridge so narrow that a section, eight men,    could not deploy across it. Headquarters changed the troops on the line.

The 21st Brigade, which had taken the pimple, came back into reserve. Two fresh brigades were brought up. The 15th Brigade took the holding  ground. The 18th Brigade was given the task of taking the rest of the ridge. Brigadier Frederick Chilton commanded the 18th. He had under him three battalions, the 2/9, the 2/10, the 2/12.

 He had with him the 2/2 Pioneer Battalion in support. He had artillery from the 2/4 Field Regiment    and air from the Royal Australian Air Force and the Americans and supplies brought up by Jeep to a place called Guys Post. He looked at the ridge.  He looked at the spine where the 2/9 would have to fight along the single track.

 He looked at Faria Ridge to the east where the 2/10 would have to climb to break in from the side and he looked at the western shoulder of Profero 1 where if a battalion could get over the river and through the country behind the saddle,    they could come up the back of the whole Japanese position. He gave that climb to the 2/12.

 He called  it Operation Cutthroat. There was nothing pretty about the name, and there was nothing pretty about the plan.  The plan was three battalions on three different cliffs, climbing on three different mornings, hitting three different parts of the Japanese line at the same time, so that the Japanese could not concentrate.

 The 2/9 would push the spine.    The 2/10 would force Barrier Ridge from the east. The 2/12 would do the worst thing. They would cross the Menai River in heavy rain, climb the eastern face of Canning’s Saddle, traverse country no human had crossed in the recorded history of this  campaign, and come up the back of Prothero 1, where the Japanese had decided no one could come.

 The 2/10 and the 2/12  started their approach marches on the 19th of January, 1944.  The 2/12 had country to cross that scheduled them two days behind the others. Their attack was set for the morning of the 21st. On the 20th, the 2/10 went forward against Kam Saddle. They ran into hard resistance. They were stopped. They tried again.

 The day closed without them taking the saddle,    but with them well placed for the next morning. That night, the 2/12, lying in the rain on Canning’s Saddle, knew what was waiting for them at sunrise.  So, picture yourself again. 20 minutes past 9:00 on the morning of the 21st of January,    1944.

You are with the 2/12 battalion. You have spent the last two days getting here. You have crossed a river in flood. You have climbed a saddle in the dark. You have not slept.  The rain stopped at 3:00 in the morning, and the ground steamed. And now there is a thin sun in the sky, and you can see above you the slope that goes up to Prothero 1.

 It does not look like a slope. It looks like a wall. It looks like the side of a building. In places where the rock is loose, you cannot use your hands and feet alone. You wrap your fist around a vine. The vine is as thick as your wrist. You pull. The vine holds. You pull again. You go up. The man beside you is doing the same thing on a vine of his own, 3 m away. There are 40 of you on this face.

You are spread across the face like beads. You climb in silence. The order was silence. Bayonet on. Round in the chamber. Safety off. Climb. The Japanese do not know you are here. This is the part you will never quite get used to, that they do not know that you are climbing up at the back of a position the Japanese have built to be approached from a different direction, that every step you take up this slope is a step the enemy has not planned for.

 There is a kind of held breath in the whole battalion as you go up, the kind of held breath you might have if you were sneaking through a sleeping house in the dark. You make 100 m. You make 200. A man somewhere below you slips and starts to slide. He grabs a root. The root holds. Nobody breathes. He pulls himself back onto the face. You climb on.

You can see now the rim of Prothero 1. You can see the top of the bunker line. You can see sticking out from one of the bunkers the snout of a Japanese mountain gun, a 75 mm mounted in a back door embrasure of a bunker covering the slope that is now under you. It is not pointing at you yet. It is pointing  south towards Shaggy Ridge proper, where the 2/9 started their own  attack this morning.

 From its position, that gun has spent the morning savaging the 2/9 as they pushed up the spine. They have taken bad casualties because of it. They do not know that you are about to come over the lip of the bunker behind it.    You are 80 m from the rim. The platoon commander is Lieutenant Charlie Brathwaite.

 He gives the signal you have been waiting for. Push up. Push up. You go from a climb to a scramble. You can hear, now, the men on the position. You can hear a Japanese voice giving an order. You can hear a machine gun, the kind the Australians call a woodpecker for the sound it makes,    firing on a fixed line out to the south.

The crew has not seen you. The sentry on the back of the position has not seen you. You are 60 m from the rim. A head appears over the lip. A Japanese soldier looking down. You see his face. He sees yours. There is a half second when nothing happens. Then his mouth opens and he shouts.

 The mountain gun jerks on its mount. You can see the men around it heave it sideways. You can see them swing the trail. You can see the muzzle come round towards the slope  below them, towards you, and you start to run up the rock. You start to climb in great clawing  handfuls because the gun is going to fire at point-blank range and there is no cover on this face. None.

   Nothing but the angle of the slope. The gun fires. The first round goes over your head. You feel the heat of it. You feel the air shake. You hear, behind you and below you, a sound that is not a sound, a kind of opening of the ground, and you do not look back. The gun fires again. This time it does not go over your head.

This time it goes in among the men on the slope. They go away. You do not have any other word for it. They go away. You keep climbing.    Lieutenant Brathwaite is to your left. He has his pistol out. He is shouting, but you cannot hear what he is shouting. There is a private named Richard Lougee climbing on your right and he is going up the rock like an animal with his Owen gun on a sling eating the slope.

 And you climb with him because climbing with him is the only thing left to do. The gun fires a third time. You are at the lip of the bunker. You roll over it. You are inside the Japanese position. The mountain gun is 2 m to your right. Its crew is standing up to swing it again. Lug is past you. He is on the lip of the supporting pillbox where the woodpecker is firing.

He puts a burst from the Owen into the embrasure. The woodpecker  stops. He puts another burst into the embrasure to make sure the woodpecker does not start again. Braithwaite is at the gun. The crew of the gun has time to do nothing. Australian rifles come up around the gun in a half circle. The crew goes down.

The gun is taken. A gun killed 50 men of your battalion before it was taken. 50 killed and wounded together. Among the wounded    was your commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Bourne, hit by a fragment on the slope. Among the killed was a private named Roy Parnell. Tex Parnell, the men called him.

He was hit very badly when the doctor reached him on top of Protheroe 1. The doctor said the arm would have to come off. Parnell who had climbed the face with a wound that had already taken half his blood said “Okay, Doc. Wicket off.” The doctor whipped it off there on the position with the night coming down and the Japanese counterattacks already starting from the north.

 Tex Parnell died the next day. The 2/12 ended the 21st of January with 13 dead and 48 wounded on Protheroe 1. They had the gun. They had the bunker. They had the back door into the Japanese line. They had a piece of high ground that 24 hours earlier    no one had thought a battalion could reach. Now go back to the spine.

 At the same time, the 2/12 was climbing Profero. A company of the 2/9 was climbing something the Japanese were certain could not be climbed at all. Green Snipers Pimple was the next outcrop north of the Australian line on Shaggy Ridge proper. It sat between the Australians and McCaughey’s Knoll. It had been held for 2 months.

The Japanese had laid out the position with the assumption that any attack must come along the spine, which was where their machine gun pits faced. The eastern flank of the pimple was a near vertical drop    broken by ledges and scrub. The Japanese had put a single observation post on that flank because they considered it impossible.

   The 2/9 decided to climb it. The patrol that did the reconnaissance came back with a sketch. The sketch  showed the ledges. It showed the dead ground. It showed where, by climbing in stages, a section could get up to the flank of the position without being seen. The plan was an indirect approach.

 While the rest of the company made noise on the spine to draw the Japanese, a small force would go up the cliff. Under the artillery, they went. Picture yourself one more time. You are on the eastern flank of Green Snipers Pimple    on a ledge so narrow that you cannot turn around. The man behind you has his hand on your back.

 The man in front of you has his hand reaching backwards for yours. You are climbing in a chain. Above you, the Japanese position. They are firing south towards the noise. They are looking the wrong way. You can hear them. You can hear from the spine to your west the rifle fire of your own platoons, the demonstration that is keeping the Japanese eyes off you.

 You climb. You feel for handholds without looking. Look only when you have to. The cliff is high. You make a ledge. You go up. You make another ledge. You go up. You hear the Japanese shouting on the position above you, and you hear them shifting their guns by inches, still pointing them south, still not at you.

 The artillery is coming into the south of them, on the spine, smothering them, and your section commander has his hand up flat against the rock to feel for the next pause in the artillery, when the artillery walks, when you can go.    The artillery walks, you go. You come up over the rim of the position.

 You come up at the side of a Japanese gun pit whose crew has been looking the other way for an hour. The first thing they know is the sound of an Owen gun behind them. The position fell that day.  Green Snipers Pimple, considered impossible for 60 days, fell because the Japanese had decided that a slope steeper than 40° could not  be climbed by infantry, and the Australians had decided it could by the night of the 21st of January.

 In three places along Shaggy Ridge, the Japanese line had been broken into. The 2/12 held the back door at Prothero 1. The 2/9 held  Green Snipers Pimple. The 2/10, having forced Cam’s Saddle on the second day’s effort, was pushing along Faria Ridge towards Kankiryo from the east.

 The Japanese tried that night to take it all back.    They came in from the north in the dark on Prothero 1. They came in patrols and then in companies. The 2/12, still bleeding from the day, took them on the wire. There were Japanese inside the position twice during the night.  Both times they were driven out.

 Lieutenant Colonel Bourne was on a stretcher, wounded,    refusing to be evacuated until the position was secure. The Australian artillery, controlled from inside the captured bunker line, walked rounds along the approaches every 15 minutes through the night, breaking up the formations    before they could form.

 By dawn, the Japanese had spent themselves, and Prothero 1 was still Australian. The 22nd  of January was another day of hard fighting. The 2/12 pushed south along Shaggy Ridge from Prothero 1. The  2/9 pushed north from Green Snipers Pimple. Between them lay less than a kilometer of ridge with the remaining Japanese garrison squeezed between two Australian battalions on the only piece of country a battalion could fight on.

 The Japanese  still had Prothero 2. They still had McCaughey’s Knoll. They still had the high ground on the saddle.    They lost it all that day and the next. A small patrol from the 2/2 Pioneers,    which had been working ahead of the main force, slipped past the Japanese flank    and put itself on the eastern extremity of the Kankireo Saddle.

It was a position the Japanese had not expected anyone to reach. The 2/12 took Prothero 2. The 2/9, after a small patrol had  scaled the steep sides of McCaughey’s Knoll under cover of an artillery program, took the highest point of the whole ridge.    By midday on the 23rd of January, the 2/12 and the 2/9 had linked up across the spine.

 All of Shaggy Ridge was in Australian hands. The  2/10, hammering along Faria Ridge, was within a kilometer and a half of the saddle. One Japanese position remained. It  It was called Crater Hill. It was the old Japanese Regimental Headquarters, a knoll northeast of the saddle, and it was the strongest piece of fortification the regiment had built anywhere in the Finisterres.

   The 18th Brigade looked at it. The 18th Brigade decided not to attack it. They had seen what the mountain gun on Prothero had done to the 2/12. They had seen what a single bunker line in the right ground could cost. Instead, they put Crater Hill under siege. Patrols isolated it.

 Artillery worked it over day and night with the spotters on Prothero 1 and 2 looking down into the position and walking shells onto every roof. Aircraft came over and dropped bombs onto it. The Japanese inside Crater Hill could not be supplied. They could not be reinforced. They could only be hit and hit and hit again.

 On the 1st of February, a company from the 2/9 and a company from the 2/10    went up Crater Hill expecting a fight. They found no one. Crater Hill, the Japanese had slipped away in the night and gone north into the country towards Madang where they would be hunted for 2 more months by Australian patrols moving down to meet the Americans coming up  the coast.

 The 18th Brigade had taken the ridge. The cost was 46 killed and 147 wounded. The Japanese cost was more than 500 casualties with 244 confirmed dead. The Australian official histories,  when they came to be written, would describe the ridge as one of the most demanding pieces of ground assaulted by Australian troops anywhere in the war.

 The 2/12, whose Prothero climb had broken the back of the position, would lose more men in that single day than they had lost at Tobruk. Many of the men who climbed Prothero had been at Tobruk. They had been at Milne Bay. Some of them had been at the Buna Beachhead where the 7th Division had bled in the swamps to take  a piece of coast the Americans could not.

Sergeant Jeffrey Lowe of the 2/12 was one of them. He had seen what siege warfare in North Africa looked like.    He had seen what the Japanese could do in the jungle. He had seen the worst of two wars. When somebody asked him later    what Prothero had been like, Lowe gave the answer that ended up in the regimental histories.

He said Tobruk was a picnic. Not as a comparison, as a verdict. Tobruk was a picnic in his memory when set beside the mountain gun firing at the 2/12s from the back door of a bunker at point-blank  range on a slope so steep that men had to climb it with vines. The total cost of the New Guinea campaign for the Australian 7th Division from September 1943 to April 1944 was 204 killed and 464 wounded in action.

 The figure does not include the cost of disease. More than 13,000 men of the division were evacuated sick over the same  period, mostly with malaria and other tropical illnesses. For every man hit by a Japanese bullet on Shaggy Ridge, there were dozens more who came down off the mountain shaking with fever and could not stand.

  The ridge took a price in blood and it took a price in marrow and it kept taking long after the last shell had  fallen, but the ridge was taken. Picture at the end what could not have been pictured at the beginning. Picture an Australian in slouch hat and dirty greens sitting on the highest point of the Finisterre Range on the Kohist Knoll where the cloud breaks in the late afternoon and you can see clear away to the north beyond the next valley, beyond the river bends and the green tongues of jungle to

where on a clear day in clear air you can see Madang, the whole north coast, the Bismarck Sea    beyond it, a thin gray line at the world’s edge. Two months ago he was at the bottom of this ridge looking up. Three weeks ago he was all a face climbing on hands and knees with shale running out from under him with the soles of the man above him at his eye line with a Japanese woodpecker firing on a fixed line on the platoon to his right.

 Yesterday,  he was inside a bunker that had been built to hold a Japanese mountain gun and the mountain gun was Australian property now with its breech open and its barrel cooling and a corporal sitting on the trail of it eating a tin of bully beef. Today he is on the top of the ridge that should not have been climbable, and the ridge belongs to him.

The 2/16th started it on the 27th of December. The 2/12th  broke it on the 21st of January. The 2/9th and the 2/10th  closed it on the 23rd. From the bombardment at the foot of the pimple to the empty bunkers on Crater Hill    was 26 days. 26 days of climbing, 26 days of vines and shale and grenades and rain, and the white sound of the artillery walking ahead of the infantry.

It was not  the longest battle of the New Guinea campaign, and it was not the bloodiest. There were valleys to the east and beachheads to the south where, by sheer arithmetic, more Australians died in less time, but Shaggy Ridge was the one where the geometry of the ground itself was the enemy.

  Where, before the Japanese could be fought, the cliffs had to be fought. Where men went up a slope so steep that the engineers had built ladders for it,  and then discarded the ladders because the ladders would not hold, and went on up on their hands and their knees with their rifles banging against the backs of their skulls.

 Where infantry, in the last hard months of the Pacific War, did what infantry was not supposed to be able to do, and took a mountain. The track is still there, so is the ridge. So are the names. Green Pinnacle, the Pimple,    Green Sniper’s Pimple, McCaughey’s Knoll, Profero 1, Profero 2, Kankiriyo Saddle.

 The names sit on the ridge like markers, and once a year a party of Australians,  sometimes the grandchildren of the men who climbed, walk up the track    and stand on the top where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers stood with their hands cut on bamboo and their knees through their trousers. They look north.

  They look at the cliffs falling away. They try to imagine, and they cannot quite imagine what it was to come up here under fire. What they can  imagine is the answer Geoffrey Lowe gave when he was asked, “Tobruk was a picnic.” That is what the men who took Shaggy Ridge said about the place that took them.

That is the line in the end that says it best. There is no comparison to be drawn. There is no peer event. There is only the ridge and the men and the cloud closing over them at the end of every afternoon and the slow and patient ferocity of an Australian infantry brigade climbing where no one was supposed to be able to climb, taking a mountain the Japanese had decided was theirs, and walking it back foot by foot, vine by vine, bunker by bunker, until the only Japanese left on Shaggy Ridge    were the ones who could not be carried

out. The ridge had a name. By the end of January 1944, so did every Australian who climbed it.