Kokoda Disaster

To what extent was the Battle for Kokoda a Disaster?
To a small extent the Battle of Kokoda was a disaster. While there were some disastrous aspects of the campaign, the overall success of the campaign shows that it was not a disaster, but a victory. During the first part of the campaign, admittedly, the Australians made some mistakes, but some mistakes don’t equal a disaster, especially once the odds turned in their favour in the second part of their campaign.
While the Australians were outnumbered, their total body count is about 11000 casualties less than the Japanese. In the final battle, there were 5000 Japanese soldiers versus 7000 combined Australian and American troops in stark contrast to the very start of the invasion where there were 14000 Japanese troops working their way up the Kokoda track. In the battles that followed the first landing of the Japanese on Papua New Guinea, the Australians were vastly outnumbered, but even then, the casualties were less than the Japanese, if only by a little bit. While more bodies meant progress according to

Senjinkum was the take no prisoners policy in the Japanese army. It stated that you should never let yourself become a prisoner of war because it was cowardly, and that if the enemy surrendered you would not take them prisoner, but kill them, because they were cowards for surrendering. Either way, the Japanese were brutal. While at the beginning of the campaign, it was believed that all you had to do was hand an Australian a gun and send him off to the front, it was a completely different story. Once the Militia troops arrived in Port Moresby, their only grasp at sanity was their same fighting spirit. Comradeship became the lifeblood of these troops. This is what drove them to the ferocity seen at Gona, because they had not only seen their friends and comrades dead, but carved up and eaten like animals by the