SECOND WORLD WAR WAR IN THE FAR EAST
Court-martialled and unjustly branded a coward, Irish-born Australian Dick Kelliher was determined to clear his name and prove his critics wrong. Steve Snelling tells how his chance came six months later during a bloody clash against Japanese troops fighting a desperate rearguard action in the bitter struggle for New Guinea.
Weak and weary from weeks of fighting and toilsome trekking in one of the most inhospitable regions in the world, the Australians spearheading the Allied thrust across the Owen Stanley mountains of New Guinea were close to collapse. Reduced in body and mind by disease, fatigue and relentlessly tenacious resistance from a retreating Japanese army, bent on delaying if not defeating the push towards their coastal bases at Buna and Gona, they forced themselves on, “ploughing and slipping a burdened way” along muddy tracks and through tropical jungle until their advance slowed to a crawl. By the third week of October 1942, after a month’s incessant action in which they had battled to turn the tide in the South-West Pacific, they were utterly worn out, the 25th Brigade diarist recording that the ranks of its three battalions we…
