On the evening of September 14, 1942, General Tomitaro Horii sat in a valley just behind the fighting at Ioribaiwa and made a decision. The Japanese offensive along the Kokoda Trail, which had carried his South Seas Force through some of the toughest country in the Pacific, was over. The advance would be canceled, and his men would go back north over the same ridges they had taken at such cost. Two days earlier, his leading troops had stood on the last high ridge above Ioribaiwa and looked through a gap in the trees.

Half hidden in mountain mist, something glittered below. A war correspondent with them recognized it at once: the sea. That evening they made out the lights of Port Moresby. Men embraced on the stony ridge, pointing and crying.

Horii had landed on New Guinea on August 18, and his offensive along the Kokoda Trail had opened on the 26th. He had been unenthusiastic about the overland plan at first, but once ashore, according to the Japanese official history, he carried it out like a new man. From then on it was ridge after ridge, in heat and rainstorms, Australians giving ground while the Japanese hauled supplies over some of the steepest terrain in the Pacific. But the army that could see the sea had been emptied out from behind.

Since early September, the front-line ration had been shrinking. By the time Ioribaiwa fell, the men were down to less than a cupful of rice a day. On September 17, the day after they took the ridge, the American official history records there was not a grain left to issue. Whole battalions were foraging along the trail, stripping native gardens of sugarcane, taro, yams, and pumpkins.

The high country was poor, and there was not enough in it to feed an army for long. Food existed. It was sitting at the coast in the rear. It just was not getting up the mountain.

The reason was an American general named George Kenney, who had taken command of the Allied Air Forces on August 4. His deputy, Ennis Whitehead, ran the aircraft out of Port Moresby. Between them they had discovered that a modified A-20 bomber was devastatingly effective against supply trains and barges. It carried eight machine guns firing forward and a parachute fragmentation bomb that Kenney himself had invented.

The runway at Buna took so many hits that Japanese naval construction troops could not keep up with repairs. Bombers struck the suspension bridge at Wairopi on the supply road up from the coast again and again. Supply columns left the trails altogether. The Japanese official history describes raids of ten or more aircraft two or three times a day from early September.

Transport ships stayed in port because nobody could promise an escort. Very little survives of what the men themselves said about the retreat, and what does survive is not defiance. A battalion commander, Major Koiwai, described the climb back in a later recollection. His men had so little strength that even a small hill cost them great effort.

Most carried injured comrades on stretchers, including the company that should have guarded the rear. With no rice in them, he wrote, they went up the mountain counting each step and gasping for breath. Many stooped over and wept, with no strength even to urge themselves on. His own heart, he said, felt full of sorrow.

Horii himself, the Japanese official history says, held back his weeping when he made his decision. Tokyo had been sending orders for some time, but they were arriving too late to matter. On August 29, with Milne Bay going badly and Guadalcanal absorbing everything, General Harukichi Hyakutake at Rabaul told Horii to halt as soon as he reached the southern foothills of the range. Imperial General Headquarters agreed two days later and told him to go on the defensive once he was across.

On September 8, the 17th Army told him to gather the 41st Infantry Regiment at Kokoda. On the 14th, it told him to put a battalion at Buna against a possible landing. According to the Japanese official history, either those orders never reached him or he ignored them. An editor’s note in that history explains why.

Telegrams from his headquarters took three days to reach Rabaul, and replies must have taken at least as long. The army was sending instructions to a general who could not be reached in time to obey them. The Japanese official history is clear that it was Horii who stopped the advance, and that he did it before any of those orders could have caught up with him. The reasons the history gives are plain.

Rice was down to under a cupful a day. No storehouse had been captured. No supply had come up. To go further, in its words, would be suicidal.

At Buna, staff were also afraid of a landing. His plan was to leave a minimum at the front, send everyone else back to carry food, and send parties to take what the native villages had. Tokyo’s orders came after, and they confirmed the direction he had already chosen. On September 18, Imperial General Headquarters ordered that everything be subordinated to retaking Guadalcanal.

The South Seas Force was released from holding the foothills and told to prepare the defense of the beachhead around Buna and Gona. The next day, General Hyakutake ordered the front line back north of Mowi as soon as he heard Ioribaiwa had fallen. The dates do not quite sit together. The American history places the Tokyo orders on the 18th and quotes a Japanese diary in which Horii tells his commanders on the 20th that the halt is only to recover strength for a crushing blow at Port Moresby.

The Japanese history has him canceling six days earlier. Both accounts are given here as they stand. The wording of the orders may matter. The translator of the Japanese official history points out that withdrawal was not in the army’s vocabulary.

The preferred term was *tenshin*, which means advance in a different direction. The translator adds that orders to fall back were written as preparations for future offensives. A talk about a crushing blow could mean something else, but that is a reading, not a finding. On September 25, Lieutenant Colonel Kowada, who commanded one of the battalions on the ridge, put the withdrawal on paper.

The stretcher cases and the artillery would go first. The rest of the battalion would follow after nightfall on the 26th, with one company trailing behind as rear guard. The order also asked every unit to keep the plan secret. The withdrawal began at 10:00 that night, an hour ahead of schedule.

The Japanese history says there was no immediate Australian pursuit. When the Australians did move two days later, the American history records that they took Ioribaiwa against only token resistance. The main body of the force reached Kokoda by October 4. Rations there were still only 360 milliliters of rice a day, twice what the ridge had allowed, and still short.

Colonel Kusunose, who had commanded the regiment through the whole advance, fell ill and was evacuated. Lieutenant Colonel Tsukamoto took his place. That same night, 10,000 portions of rice, forty days’ worth each, were unloaded at Buna from the transport *Yamamaru Maru*. The history says it rescued the immediate supply situation.

The men who had seen the sea from the ridge had made the long climb back over the same mountains, most of them half-starved, many of them weeping from exhaustion. The offensive toward Port Moresby was over, and the South Seas Force would not come south again.