To understand the battle, stand on the plateau. It juts north from the higher ground like a flat finger, bounded on the east by Eora Creek and on the west by the airstrip. Tracks approach from three directions: from Oivi in the east, where the Japanese were coming; from Pirivi just to the southeast; and from Deniki to the south, where any retreat had to go. Lieutenant Colonel William T. Owen put three platoons forward among the rubber trees and kept one in reserve on the Deniki track. His force of 39th Infantry Battalion survivors, Papuan Infantry Battalion soldiers, Royal Papuan Constabulary members and a handful of signallers from the 30th Brigade had already been bloodied at Oivi, where Captain Sam Templeton had been captured and executed by the advancing Japanese. They were the men who had walked out of that fight. Now they were being asked to hold a village that almost anyone could see was not really defensible.

Around 200 Japanese from the 144th Infantry Regiment, under Captain Tetsuo Ogawa, arrived in the afternoon of 28 July. They sized up the Australian position and harassed it through the night with light mortars and a Type 92 battalion gun. The Australians had no way to answer that battalion gun. They had no mortars, no artillery, nothing heavier than machine guns, and those were limited. The main Japanese assault came at 2:30 in the morning. Owen went forward to steady his troops and was shot above the right eye, a mortal wound. Command passed to Major Watson. The defenders held long enough to inflict casualties, then withdrew south toward Deniki before the position was entirely overrun. In their haste, they left behind what Wikipedia matter-of-factly describes as "a large number of grenades, five machine guns and 1,850 rounds of rifle ammunition." The Japanese, whose own grenades had to be struck on a hard object to prime them, were delighted.

A week of reinforcement followed. Major Allan Cameron, brigade major of the 30th Brigade, took command and planned a three-pronged counterattack with roughly 430 men. Captain Noel Symington's A Company took a parallel eastern track that the Japanese had not spotted. C Company advanced down the main track and ran headlong into Hatsuo Tsukamoto's 1st Battalion, 144th Infantry Regiment, now grown to around 660 men. D Company, tasked with blocking at Pirivi, was hit from both directions by Japanese engineers. Symington made it into Kokoda village, retook it briefly, and held for almost two days waiting for the resupply and reinforcement that Cameron had promised. The promised air drop came on 12 August. By then Symington had already withdrawn through the jungle toward Isurava, and the supplies fell straight into Japanese hands. C and D Companies had long since retreated to Deniki. The village was lost again, this time for months.

The Australian accounts often centre on the Australians, but Kokoda was as much a Papuan fight. Lance Corporal Sanopa of the Papuan Infantry Battalion guided survivors south around the Japanese after the fighting at Oivi. Other Papuan soldiers fought in both engagements, and members of the Royal Papuan Constabulary stood in the line at the plateau. Local villagers knew the parallel tracks, the shortcuts, the streams that could be forded. Most of them would soon be conscripted under the Employment of Natives Order into the carrier force that became famous as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels." That name, warmly meant by the Australians who owed them their lives, also flattens what was happening: Papuans were being pulled into a war between foreign empires being fought across their gardens and hunting grounds, and their presence on the Kokoda plateau predated both armies by generations.

Judged by the scale of what followed, the Battle of Kokoda was modest. Casualties were light compared with Isurava, Brigade Hill or Oivi-Gorari. But Cameron's counterattack on 8 August surprised the Japanese enough to delay their advance on Deniki by four days, and four days mattered at a moment when the 2nd Australian Imperial Force's 21st Brigade was still racing overland from Port Moresby. The Japanese themselves later estimated that the Australian force at Kokoda had numbered 1,000 to 1,200, roughly three times its actual size. The plateau was not held, but the impression it left on the men who attacked it shaped the next three months of jungle fighting. The Australians finally walked back into Kokoda on 2 November 1942, unopposed, after the Japanese had withdrawn north ahead of Major General George Vasey's advancing 7th Division. Owen and Templeton were not there to see it.