Warrior of Kokoda

WARRIOR OF KOKODA  A Biography of Brigadier Arnold Potts

Bill Edgar

Published by Allen and Unwin 1999,  $29.95

This book is an unusual product to have come from the Army Military History series.

While it focuses on the life, and particularly the military career, of Arnold Potts, it is far from a standard military biography.  Rather, largely through the medium of Potts’ letters to his wife, it recounts the story of the great love of between them, against the background of Australia in the first half of the Twentieth Century.  The background does, however, have its interest in the manner in which it sheds light on the events in Papua in the latter part of the critical year 1942.

The general events of the period are well known.  As the fighting ebbed and flowed across the Owen Stanley ranges, three senior Australian officers were relieved of their commands.  Bill Edgar’s book brings out the distant family connection between Potts and Blamey (Potts’ sister’s ‘erstwhile gentleman friend’), but makes little of it.  However, Edgar does make it painfully clear that the principal cause of the relief of the three officers was the bureaucratic (in the widest sense of the word) survival of Blamey, and particularly MacArthur.

The position regarding the relief of the three officers can be summarised briefly.  Although his troops succeeded in delaying and wearing down the advancing Japanese, Potts was relieved for failing to carry out orders that, in the prevailing circumstances, were quite unrealistic.  Allen was relieved for being too slow to carry out the extremely difficult task of pushing the Japanese back across the mountains, just as the last significant resistance before Kokoda, at Eora Creek, was breaking.  This gave Vasey the honour of raising the flag over the recaptured village a few days later.  And Rowell was relieved essentially because he could not put up with the presence of Blamey at his Port Moresby headquarters for a few days.

In the final analysis, it is likely that the reliefs of Potts, Allen and Rowell had no practical effect on the outcome of the campaign.  Other capable officers were readily available to replace them (just as other capable officers could have replaced Blamey and MacArthur), and only the sense of injustice remains.  Perhaps more sympathy could generally be given (as it is in this book, through the medium of Potts’ letters to his wife) to the soldiers who were wounded or died trying to carry out the impossible task given to Potts, and the difficult one set for Allen.  Certainly Blamey had his chance to do this in his Koitaki speech, failed miserably, and possibly didn’t even realise at the time that he had lost a golden opportunity to improve the morale of his troops, and incidentally, his reputation.

In summary, a good book, both for its perspective on Australian military history, and for the insight it gives to the personality of a man who deserves to be better known.

JOHN DONOVAN