How An Australian Brigade Climbed Under Fire To Destroy Japan's Strongest New Guinea Fortress

#ShaggyRidge #AustralianArmy #PacificWar A blade of country dropped between two valleys, six and a half kilometres long, with cliffs falling away on either side and a single goat track running along the top wide enough for one man. Dug into the rock like teeth in a jaw, a Japanese regiment had been waiting for two months. The Australians called it Shaggy Ridge. On the twenty-seventh of December, nineteen forty-three, B Company of the Two Sixteenth Battalion started climbing. This documentary reveals how the Australian Seventh Division took the most impossible piece of country in New Guinea, a razorback ridge a thousand four hundred and ninety-seven metres above sea level where no platoon could deploy abreast, no flanking move was possible, and the Japanese Seventy-Eighth Infantry Regiment had built a fortress they believed could not be approached from behind. Discover the four-man rush led by Lieutenant McCaughey that took the highest point of the ridge, the bamboo ladders the engineers built for slopes too steep to climb with hands and feet alone, and Operation Cutthroat, the plan that sent the Two Twelfth Battalion up a cliff at the back of Prothero One that the Japanese had decided no human being could ever climb. 🔥 In this video: The Pimple Assault: How B Company climbed a near-vertical face on hands and knees while a Japanese machine gun raked the slope. The Engineers' Charge: The Australian high explosive that finally cracked the bunker holding up the entire assault on the twenty-eighth of December. Operation Cutthroat: Three battalions, three cliffs, three different mornings, hitting the Japanese line from three sides at once. The Back-Door Climb: How the Two Twelfth Battalion crossed the Mene River in flood and came up the unguarded eastern face of Prothero One. The Mountain Gun: The seventy-five mm Japanese gun mounted to fire south, swung round at the last second to fire down on Australian climbers at point-blank range. Sources of Where I get my facts: Dexter, D. (1961) The New Guinea Offensives. Canberra: Australian War Memorial. Coates, J. (1999) Bravery Above Blunder: The 9th Australian Division at Finschhafen, Sattelberg, and Sio. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Pratten, G. (2009) Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Threlfall, A. (2014) Jungle Warriors: From Tobruk to Kokoda and Beyond. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Johnston, M. (2007) The Proud Sixth: An Illustrated History of the 6th Australian Division. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Disclaimer: This video is a historical documentary intended for educational purposes. #ShaggyRidge #AustralianArmy #PacificWar #SeventhDivision #FinisterreRange #OperationCutthroat #NewGuineaCampaign #WWIIHistory