The Hell of Shaggy Ridge
High in the Finisterre Mountains in north-eastern New Guinea is a feature known as Shaggy Ridge. For the men of Australia’s 7th Division fighting the Japanese during the Second World War, this razor-backed ridge represented hell on earth.
Historian Lachlan Grant details the gruelling four-month-long campaign from October 1943 to January 1944 in the latest issue of Wartime.
Film footage of the battle of Shaggy Ridge is a valuable part of the Memorial’s collection, but is rarely seen today. This clip is taken from Jungle patrol: the New Guinea story of 8 Australian Soldiers, shot by the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1943. The film unit flew with an Australian patrol into the Ramu Valley, and marched with it to Shaggy Ridge.
The footage shows artillery bombardments and air attacks on the well-entrenched 78th Regiment, which had dug in around the major features of the six-and-a-half-kilometre-long ridgeline. The shelling supported a company of the 2/27th Battalion, which had successfully established a toehold on the southern slopes of the ridge. Its commander, Lieutenant Bob “Shaggy” Clampett, provided the inspiration for the name of the feature.
The Japanese endured a month of strafing and bombing, and managed to hold their ground. It became clear that the only way for the 7th Division to meet its objective of crossing the Finisterre Range to join the Allied advance along the Huon peninsula coastline was a frontal assault on the single track running along the ridge.
“In places the single pathway along the ridgeline was only wide enough for one man to pass, with sheer drops on either side,” Grant writes. “This made outflanking the Japanese prepared positions impossible. The soldiers who fought there would come to describe the battle of Shaggy Ridge as occurring on a one-man front.”
Fierce fighting took place at sites known as the Pimple, McCaughey’s Knoll, and Prothero – which was a particularly harrowing experience for the Australian soldiers.
Many of these men were veterans of Tobruk, Milne Bay and the beachhead battles, but it would be the attack on Prothero that would mark the low point of their war. Dwelling on the damage caused by the Japanese mountain gun at Prothero, Sergeant Geoffrey Lowe reflected that “Tobruk was a picnic” when compared with the battalion’s experience on Shaggy Ridge.
The gruelling campaign was a success, and by April 1944 Australian patrols had linked up with American troops heading the coastal advance. However, it came at great cost: the 7th Division and its supporting units had lost 204 killed and 464 wounded in action during the New Guinea campaign from September 1943 to April 1944. But battlefield casualties were small compared with the number of men lost to illness and tropical disease.
“In total, over time, some 13,576 members of the division were evacuated sick, mostly with tropical diseases such as malaria,” Grant writes. “While most would return to their unit following treatment, on paper this figure equates to 96% of the division’s average strength – meaning that almost every soldier who fought in the campaign was sick at some point.”