The Australian Soldier in New Guinea – Jungle Genius
During the New Guinea campaigns of World War II, Australian soldiers coined a phrase which described what it took survive the conditions they endured – Jungle Genius.
In warfare, the word ‘jungle’ can mean so little or so much. In New Guinea, ‘jungle fighting’ did not mean merely battling with mortars and high trajectory guns over impenetrable forest and moss walls against an enemy less than a grenade’s throw away or ambushing him from vine-laced screens of undergrowth. It meant wading neck-deep in the black ooze of the sak-sak swamps, plunging blind across a beach by night, bayonet high, into the inscrutable silence of the fringing bush, picking your way over the sole-searing cracked rocks of a dry river bed, open as the day to the fire of the commanding hills, nosing your way – grenade in hand – over the one-man fronts of the razor-back.
Stretcher bearers carrying…
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