Rod Beecham

Gideon Haigh likes cricket, literature and history, and his writings on cricket are accordingly shrewd, learned and illuminating. He writes particularly well of Jack Gregory and of George Headley. Gregory was the embodiment of the Anzac legend: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, an artilleryman in the Great War. He played for an AIF eleven in England after the war, took dazzling close catches, demolished Cambridge University with ferocious fast bowling and went on to test match triumphs with Australia against Eng-land in the 1920s. Injuries that so often cut down bowlers of explosive pace curtailed his career. Headley, on the other hand, was a batsman in the early West Indian sides, a black man in teams of mixed race captained always by whites, representing a divided nation of particularist energies. Haigh writes with great understanding of the immense difficulty of maintaining form, as Headley did, in a team that always lost.

Japanese troops landed and occupied Lae and Salamaua in north-eastern Papua on 8 March 1942. In an elaborate operation scheduled for early May, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby to safeguard their positions in New Guinea and in the Rabaul area, to provide a base that would bring northern Australia within range of their warships and bombers, and to secure the flank of their projected advance towards New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.

Countermoves by the US Navy defeated this attempt. Therefore, in June 1942, Lieutenant-General Harukichi Hyakutake’s XVII Army was ordered to gather its divisions from Davao in the Philippines, from Java and from Rabaul, and to prepare for a revised attack on Port Moresby. In a two-pronged approach, one Japanese group would take Milne Bay (south-eastern Papua) by an assault from the sea and advance on Port Moresby along the coast; the other would attack overland from Buna and Gona (northern Papua) along the Kokoda Trail.