In 1942 Japanese soldiers haggard but undaunted advanced night and day through a jungle of fog and rain and mud over the Owen-Stanley Mountains of New Guinea, then Australian territory, toward Port Moseby under order to secure the island and thereby create a tactical separation between Australia and America. Possibly no theater in WWII anywhere else in the world at the time featured more man on man savagery than what occurred on the island of New Guinea[1]. The supreme commander in the A-P theater along with his Australian counterpart, displeased with the progress of the Allied forces, would sack three high level troop commanders in the land campaign although historians have since shown that this indicated a gross misunderstanding of the lethal precision of the actual fighting going on beneath the jungle canopy. Inside the war room waving a pointer at operational maps on which the collective strength (or lack of it) of real human beings is belied by color-coded dots and arrows on what amounts to a game-board. This kind of central command style had worked variably well in other WWII campaigns, but not in New Guinea, not in 1942. From a God’s eye point of view were one to part the canopy and look closely one would have witnessed a horror, unprecedented even in war, that drove some soldiers, actual boots-on-the-ground guys, into irretrievable madness.
The Australian war correspondent Osmar White tells the story of one Lick Lick, a native of New Guinea who along with his fellow natives had been enlisted by the Australians in the fight against the Japanese invaders. Described as no taller than 4’9″ Mr. Lick Lick, one day while out on patrol, was late to return to the rendezvous point carrying a large sack made from indigenous material bulging with thirteen heads. The heads of Japanese soldiers. Prior to the war the native people of New Guinea, so-called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, had been described as kind, warm-hearted and always welcoming toward visitors to their island. But then the Japanese invaded and routinely killed them for practice. Japanese soldiers were exemplars of lethality, capturing natives then tying them to a tree whereby a troop commander would run ’em through repeatedly so as to demonstrate to the rank and file the proper way to thoroughly kill a man, the enemy. This made the native people mad. Though of course the real enemy of the Japanese were the Allied troops, Australian militias and, somewhat later, Americans. So the angry natives aligned themselves with the Allied force, and were crucial in helping the Australians especially navigate the dense jungles and high mountains and were even enlisted in the fighting and killing of the Japanese. At the rendezvous point holding tight his sack of heads, Mr. Lick Lick asked for a brief leave of absence which he was granted. In a nearby village one by one he removed the heads from his sack and displayed them on posts for all to see. Troop commanders admonished him for his excess savagery of the dead but then Lick Lick told the commanders that the soldiers weren’t dead, only injured, so I finished ’em off first. Sometimes, lacking a proper bush knife for beheading, other native fighters like Lick Lick would instead take a dead Japanese soldier and find a sharp spine protruding from a tree trunk and skewer the dead man through the neck and then spin the body until it detached from the head. They’d learned from the invaders how to thoroughly kill a man.
Some eighty-three years later, in America, an inept dry drunk would address a stoic assembly of generals and admirals posturing to lecture them on the real meaning of Lethality and the Warrior Ethos. The 4’9″ tall Lick Lick was heard hooting from his grave.
- Source: Dan Carlin’s (most excellent) Hardcore History podcasts – Episode 66.