By mid-November 1942, the village of Kokoda, perched on a shelf of high ground in Papua New Guinea’s Owen Stanley Range, held only one thing an army wanted: a patch of flat grass long enough for an aircraft to land. The Australians had retaken the village on the 2nd of November. Soon after, a small group of Japanese soldiers, the first of their army captured alive in those mountains, sat and lay on the edge of that strip under Australian guard. One was stretched out on a litter.
They were so far gone that the guards standing over them looked almost ceremonial in a photograph now held by the Australian War Memorial. They were waiting to be flown south to a hospital in Port Moresby. Arranging for aircraft to land there had taken four months of argument, and the argument rested on a single belief shared by both armies: the Owen Stanley Range decided everything. A man could cross it carrying what a man carries, and that was all that could be moved.
The Japanese had proved this at full cost. Their force had come over the range from the north in August and September with what soldiers and pack animals could haul, and it had come back starving. They left guns behind on the track. They ate the animals.
By the time they reached the north coast again, they were burying men who had died of hunger within a few days’ walk of their own supply dumps. Those dumps sat on beaches that could only be supplied by sea, because the mountains at their back were not a road and never would be. The beachheads at Buna, Gona, and Sanananda rested on an assumption that had held firm: whoever came at them would arrive on foot, hungry, carrying rifles and grenades and whatever a tired man could still lift uphill. Artillery was a coastal matter.
Machinery was no matter at all, since every machine in Papua stood on the far side of thousands of feet of mountain and mud. The Allies had been hunting for a way around that arithmetic since the middle of the year. A check sheet went through headquarters in Port Moresby on the 17th of July suggesting that a field be developed at Wanigela mission on the eastern Papuan coast, sixty-five miles from Buna, so that men and supplies could be ferried in by air instead of walked over the divide. It sat for weeks.
An American engineer officer named Leif Sverdrup spent those weeks on foot in the northern foothills and came back convinced that fields could be built quickly in country nobody had ever mapped. He discussed it at Abau with Cecil Abel, a missionary who owned a nearby plantation and knew the territory beyond the divide intimately. Abel told the commanders in Moresby that a landing ground could be made near Fasari in the upper valley of the Musa River, and from there troops could walk to Buna over flat country. The scheme was approved.
On the 6th of October, Australians were flown from Milne Bay into Wanigela. Under their direction, local Papuans began cutting grass and preparing the strip. The first airfield work on the far side of the Owen Stanleys was done by hand, with Papuans doing the labor and Australian soldiers pointing at the ground and saying where. Sverdrup left Abau on the 14th of October with 185 Papuan carriers and five white men, one of them a flight lieutenant who had spent most of his life in New Guinea and knew the local chiefs personally.
Before setting out, Sverdrup stocked up on tobacco, calico, knives, garden seeds, and other trade goods, because there was no other currency in those mountains and no other way to hire thousands of hands. He reached Fasari on the afternoon of the 18th and found that Abel had already burned the site over. Cargo planes put down there two days later on ground that had been a field of grass the week before. Sverdrup and the flight lieutenant then went north along jungle trails, leaving an Australian officer among the Papuans to finish the job.
Near the villages of Imbesa and Kanjaki, they found two more level sites under kunai grass standing eight to twelve feet high. Word went out that there was tobacco in it. Whole villages came in. Sverdrup set the villagers against one another as teams, and the workforce ran into the thousands.
In his log, he noted that one team won decisively, got an extra half stick of tobacco each, and nearly killed themselves earning it. The stores ran out before the grass did. He sent frantic requests back to Moresby for more, and the answer arrived on the 24th of October when a bomber flew over Kanjaki with its bay doors open, raining rice and corned beef into the clearing. The tins split when they landed.
Nothing more was cut that day. The strip at Pongani was still unbuilt. On the 28th, Sverdrup brought several hundred more men to that coastal village, where fifty American engineers had been sitting and making little headway. Working twelve hours a day in heat that had already driven some soldiers to throw away their tools to lighten their loads, the Papuans and the engineers finished the Pongani strip in two and a half days.
By the end of the month, aircraft could land there, at Kanjaki, and at Abel’s Landing. Sverdrup was proud enough of what he called his Papuan Aviation Battalion to dare anyone anywhere to beat it. In his written summary, he stated the finding plainly: if strips had to be built by hand in that country, the only answer was local labor competently led. Being right created the next problem.
Everything achieved north of the range had been achieved with axes, saws, machetes, shovels, and human backs. The engineers who marched in over the mountains carried those tools on their shoulders to clear trail for the infantry behind them, bridging streams that crossed the track every half mile, building rafts, and at some crossings having Papuans paddle the soldiers over in dugout canoes hauled along a rope stretched bank to bank. When one American battalion tried to walk from Wanigela to Buna, it got fifteen miles before the Musa River stopped it. When engineers rafted the infantry across, they found the trails on the other bank lying under seven feet of water.
The whole force had to turn around, follow the river to its mouth, and go up the coast in small boats. The engineer units themselves owned almost nothing. A colonel arriving to take charge in Eastern Papua found that a few hand tools, some coils of rope, and an assault boat or two made up practically the entire stock of engineer equipment for the campaign. A hand-cut strip in kunai grass will take a cargo plane in fine weather, but it will not carry a bomber, survive a wet fortnight, or turn itself into a base.
At dawn on the 16th of November, three battalions moved on Buna, one along the shore toward Cape Endaiadere and two inland toward a kunai plain called Dobodura. Thirty-five engineers and a pioneer platoon went with each, along with Papuan carriers. At one in the afternoon, Japanese machine gunners opened up on the coastal column and hit nothing. At seven in the evening, dive bombers came.
The men on the track scrambled, digging themselves into the ground with shovels, bayonets, mess tins, and bare hands. The aircraft had no interest in the column. They wanted the small craft standing off the beach with the heavy weapons and ammunition aboard. Every one of the luggers was hit.
Several went down at once, and the rest caught fire and blew up. An engineer colonel got a lifeboat crew together and pulled survivors out of the water while ammunition cooked off around them and burning wreckage fell into the sea. The boats went to the bottom with everything in them. The advance stopped.
Three days later, the troops went at the Japanese positions again and were cut down in front of bunkers they could not see, built months earlier out of logs, sandbags, and earth, roofed thick, linked by trenches, so thoroughly grown over that men walked past them and were shot from behind. The maps issued to the attackers were Australian, drawn at a scale of one inch to four miles, a scale meant for planning a holiday. Nobody at Buna needed telling what a field gun would have been worth that week. Dobodura, a flat plain of grass eight miles behind the fighting, stopped being a convenience and became the campaign.
On the 20th of November, a platoon of American engineers reached it with twenty-two infantrymen and a party of Papuans, clearing kunai and scrub with brush hooks, machetes, and bayonets. They had a temporary strip finished in a day. The next morning, most of them were ordered north to the fighting. Twenty-five men stayed behind to unload what was already being flown in and to stake out a cemetery.
The first hard proof went over the mountains inside a week. An artillery officer said he could take a 105 mm howitzer to pieces and fit the pieces into an airplane. A gun was set out at a field in Queensland so they could try it. Somebody in Australia had to lend them a howitzer to practice taking apart first, which tells its own story about how new all of this was.
A bomber brought the entire load to Port Moresby in one lift: gun, crew of eight, fifty rounds, toolkit, and camouflage net. The next morning, two cargo planes carried the pieces over the range to Dobodura, where the gun was reassembled and put into action. General MacArthur came down to the strip to watch it loaded. The Australians, a few miles up the track at Gona and on the Sanananda Road, heard the results of it land.
That was a gun, though. A gun comes apart at joints the manufacturer built into it. On the 25th of November, 210 men of an American Engineer General Service Regiment were flown into Dobodura. They brought part of their equipment with them, and the equipment list is the reason any of this survives in the files at all: five mowing machines, two tractors, one sheep’s-foot roller, and one grader.
None of that fits through the door of a cargo plane. All of it went anyway, because before loading, the engineers at Port Moresby had taken cutting torches to their own machinery and cut it into pieces small enough to pass through a fuselage. The halves and quarters of a tractor flew across the Owen Stanley Range in different aircraft along the same air route that had been carrying rice, corned beef, and stretcher cases a fortnight earlier. On the grass at Dobodura, welders put the pieces back together.
As soon as the machines were whole, they began cutting new strips out of the grass. That was where the last part of the shared assumption died. The range had not become any easier. The mountains stood exactly where they had stood in August when a Japanese army starved crossing them, and exactly where they had stood in October when Papuan villagers were cutting airfields with knives because nothing else existed.
What had changed was that somebody worked out that a bulldozer did not have to arrive as a bulldozer. The paper record stops short in one place. The engineer history states that the equipment was cut up with torches at Moresby and welded together again on arrival, and it lists the machines by type. It says nothing about which one was halved and which came in more pieces, or who held the torch, or how long the welding took.
General Kenney’s own account of sawing vehicle frames in two and welding them up on the far side is dated a year later and a hundred miles north in the Markham Valley. Nobody on the Australian side appears to have written down what he thought, standing in that grass, watching a welder finish a machine that had arrived in a heap. What the Australians did afterwards is on file. They went on fighting at Gona and on the Sanananda Road through December and into January, drawing their ammunition and their rations off those strips and taking casualties at a rate that makes the entire airlift look small.
Dobodura kept growing anyway. One strip became several, then a complex that the Fifth Air Force would work out of for the next two years. Fighters and bombers were operating from the north coast of Papua within weeks of a regiment flying its own tractors in as scrap metal. A few miles away, the Japanese beachhead was being fed by barge at night and eventually by submarine, and the men inside it were dying of hunger and disease in quantities their own headquarters chose not to dwell on.
Their reasoning about the mountains had been sound. Their reasoning about the sea had been sound. Neither had allowed for a welding set. The last piece of this belongs to a workshop yard rather than a battlefield.
By the end of 1943, the Fifth Air Force was building an airhead in the Markham Valley the same way, entirely by air, and somebody had remembered Dobodura. They sawed the frames of two-and-a-half-ton trucks in two, flew the halves over the mountains, and bolted and welded them together at the other end. It worked well enough that they stopped waiting to be asked. Trucks all over the theater were cut apart in advance and stacked in halves, so that anything with wheels was already airborne equipment before anyone needed it to be.
In December of that year, General Marshall flew over the new strips and looked down at two-and-a-half-ton trucks working on ground that had no road leading to it. He wanted to know how they had got there. Kenney told him they had sawed the frames in two, stuffed the pieces into the aircraft, and welded them back together after they arrived. Marshall thought it was a fine story.
Then he found out it was true, and for years afterwards, he told it at dinner.
