Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: People of all ages like legends, big events and characters. Why do you think Kokoda and Long Tan have become legendary for Australians?

Paul Ham: Well legends, I think, have to withstand the scrutiny of truth, the facts of the evidence, and so I was deeply sceptical of the legends when I started out. I had to look at the whole – what was behind the legend, and certainly they are legends because there is a lot of truth behind what happened. And in the case of both Long Tan and Kokoda – I don't like using the word legend, but certainly the evidence bears out the impression we have of those campaigns – of the soldiers at their best. At their best, they did a phenomenal thing at Kokoda. I mean you saw the – Australian soldiers were 80 miles over this jungle, mountainous jungle, facing an elite unit of the Japanese, who vastly outnumbered us; three to one is a conservative figure. And when wounded, there were no helicopters; all we relied on to take out our wounded over those 80 miles of jungle, mountainous jungle, were our own soldiers and of course, the Papuan natives, the so-called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, who took them out on their shoulders.

Now the book recounts in detail what that actually meant on the ground, every night; it took days, it took more than a week to get them back. They had very little morphine, very little penicillin: they were in agony most of the journey. At night the Papuan natives would form a ring around them, these bodies, to protect them. They would try to fan them with palm leaves to make them feel better – they were with fever. Many died on the journey back. Now this is a legendary withdrawal of the wounded and the dead, and by any measure, according to any scrutiny you want to apply to that, it was a phenomenal journey and undertaken with extreme courage and endurance.

The soldiers at the front line also fought with extraordinary courage. They knew they were fighting for their country; at the time that's how they saw it – that this was a battle for Australia. The fact that the Japanese did not intend to invade Australia is beside the point. Soldiers weren't aware of that at the time; we can't superimpose that hindsight judgement on their attitudes of the time. So the legend of Kokoda, if we want to call it a legend – certainly the example of self-sacrifice, of courage, of willingness to do whatever it took – and people may glaze over what I've just said as trite clichés – but it stands up to scrutiny, that is what happened.

Vietnam is a more complicated war, as I have said, and far more difficult, in this brief time we have, to go into detail. But the battle of Long Tan, if we just look at what happened there, briefly, and I'm taking Long Tan, as you did, out of the context, out of the whole war of course. We all have issues with Vietnam. It was a deeply unpopular war towards the end of the 60s, but the battle of Long Tan was an extraordinary victory to the Australians.

Now for what that's worth, I'm not going to discuss right here, but I will discuss what actually happened there briefly. You had a jungle, and in the middle of it was a rubber plantation. A rubber plantation, if anyone has seen a rubber plantation, is lines and lines of rubber trees which form a canopy overhead which blots out the sunlight, so you're constantly in shade. And these lines of trees are in columns, in rows, very neatly arranged and this is where the battle was being fought. In this area were two and half thousand Viet Cong soldiers and North Vietnamese soldiers, whose plan was to attack the Australian base, which is where we had the concentration of our troops. One company of Australians went out, not knowing that there was this huge concentration of enemy. One company is a hundred soldiers; in fact 108 went out, including three New Zealanders. They went out in the rubber plantation and were attacked. Four platoons – three platoons per company, 30 men per platoon – were attacked on all sides, three sides. It should have been a complete and utter defeat. The Australians should have been defeated; it was a miracle that they survived. How did they survive? The front troops were calling in artillery from the Task Force Base, two kilometres back; it was calling it in and bombing the waves of attacking Viet Cong.

Now when these hundreds of enemy soldiers got so close that the forward Australians knew it was finished, they thought it was all over, they called down the artillery on themselves. They said, 'We are finished. We are done for,' and they radioed back the grid reference, which is of the actual forward soldiers. In other words they were going to commit suicide but in the interest of protecting those who were back. So the bombardment was to continue right up to these soldiers. In the event the guys manning the artillery pitched the shells forward 50 metres, so the projectiles landed 50 metres in front of the Australian troops. The momentum of the projectiles flung the shrapnel forward – in other words, the enemy were hit.

Now this is a war; shocking things were going on and the enemy, the Viet Cong, lost hundreds and hundreds of soldiers as a result of that artillery. That was the battle of Long Tan. It lasted five or six hours; it was fought in torrential rain, a monsoonal downpour that they'd never seen the likes of before. And miraculously the Australians survived and lost 18 men, to the 500 at least of the enemy. Now the battle of Long Tan is a very controversial battle and the issues relating to it are being discussed even now; the medal issues: who should have been awarded the medal – that's just been the subject now of a government enquiry. But the book recounts this in detail and how you deal with an enemy who were literally going to throw themselves in hundreds, in waves, at the Australians. How do you deal with that? They're incredibly courageous and – I take that battle just in isolation of the larger political issues and social issues involving any understanding of Vietnam.