On the morning of April 22, 1944, two landings came ashore on the coast of New Guinea. The smaller of the two was at Aitape, carried out for a single purpose: to seize two airstrips the Japanese had built about a thousand yards from the sea. Infantry controlled both strips by 12:45 that afternoon. At one o’clock, while fighting was still underway in the hills behind them, No.
62 Wing of the Royal Australian Air Force began filling bomb craters on the northern, fighter airstrip. They worked through that night under floodlights, through the following day, and through the next night. By 9 a. m.
on April 24, roughly 48 hours after they began, the wing declared the strip ready for aircraft. At 4:30 that afternoon, 25 Kittyhawk fighters of No. 78 Wing landed on it. Two days after the invasion, the Allies had turned a Japanese airstrip into an operational Allied airfield on an island where the Japanese 18th Army was still assembling 90 miles down the coast.
There was a reason for the haste, and it had little to do with Aitape itself. The larger landing that morning had been at Hollandia, 25 miles up the coast, and Hollandia was protected by the carriers of the Fifth Fleet, which could not stay indefinitely. The airstrips at Tadji were meant to be the land-based airfield that would take over when the carriers sailed. Aitape was not the objective; it was little more than an airfield with a garrison.
At dawn, the landing was typical of its kind except that it happened where it did. The morning of the 22nd was overcast, and naval bombardment set Japanese supply dumps along the shore ablaze, so smoke hid what remained of the coastline from the coxswains. With no landmarks visible, the leading wave missed Blue Beach and dropped the 63rd Infantry Battalion at Wom Point, a village about 1,200 yards to the east. The mistake worked in their favor: Wom Point offered better ground for landing craft than anywhere else in the area and was used for the rest of the operation.
Naval fire support had been settled in advance. The plan called for strafing the beach until the leading landing craft were 300 yards out, but Brigadier Jens Doe, commander of the task force, thought that would expose his men in the boats to fire. He ordered the strafing moved. It began when the first wave was 4,500 yards from the beach and stopped when the boats were 1,200 yards out.
Five destroyers, nine fast transports, and a cargo ship bombarded the landing area; it was the first time in the theater that fast transports or cargo ships had been assigned a bombardment mission. Two submarine chasers moved ahead of the boats, firing rockets and automatic weapons during the final three minutes. No one was expecting them. The Japanese at Aitape had moved into the jungle when the naval bombardment began, and men who followed the road inland found abandoned fires and unmade beds.
The 2nd Battalion cleared the fighter airstrip by 12:45, and shortly afterward the 1st Battalion took the bomber strip without a shot fired at it. Two men of the 163rd Infantry were killed seizing the entire objective, and 13 were wounded. Three Japanese had been captured by 10 a. m.
, along with more than 50 Javanese laborers who surrendered. Allied intelligence estimated about 3,500 Japanese in the area, 1,500 of them combat troops of the 20th Division. There may not have been 1,000 men of all arms, most of them antiaircraft gunners and service personnel. A later report, dated the 25th, from the commander of the Aitape garrison unit to the 18th Army headquarters, listed his strength at 240 men and then detailed an attack plan.
By 7:30 that evening, the 59th Naval Construction Battalion and a naval landing party had unloaded every landing craft that arrived on the first day. Two cargo ships were still anchored offshore, and neither was loaded for an assault landing; both would figure in later events. What the airfield construction wing inherited was not really a runway. The Japanese had begun cutting two parallel strips out of the jungle around December 1943, surfacing them with crushed coral using labor from nearby villages.
The bomber strip ran 6,500 feet with 15 dispersal bays carved into the jungle on both sides. The fighter strip, the smaller one closer to the water, was where the Australians began work. Allied aircraft had spent months bombing both sites; on the morning of the landing itself, 11 A-20s of the 677th Bombardment Squadron dropped their loads on Tadji between 9 and 10 a. m.
These were the only Fifth Air Force aircraft to pass over Wewak that day. The entire site stood a few feet above sea level. Craters in such ground do not stay dry; they deepen until they reach the water table and then fill. All a public works unit could put back was loose soil, sand, and hope.
Bulldozers, tractors, and graders came off the beach and up the road inland, and the men filled the craters, ran the blade over them, filled them again, and compacted them in the dark under floodlights within a perimeter that was, in places, several hundred yards deep. No one stopped for the aircraft that flew overhead at night. There was never any question how urgent the operation was, and the task force commander kept pushing the work because there was no opposition to force him to stop. An Australian sergeant pilot on that first flight described what happened from the cockpit.
The strip was wide enough for one aircraft at a time. One of the Kittyhawks ahead of him hit a water-filled crater and flipped onto its back. With the remaining aircraft circling overhead and low on fuel, there was no choice but to use a bulldozer to push the wreck off the runway so the others could land. The strip was 4,000 feet long and 100 feet wide.
It could not be used without stopping until the 28th, when steel planking was laid over the worst-damaged section. What followed on that fighter strip is recorded in the U. S. Army’s official history of the campaign.
Once the fighter strip was operational, the work of No. 62 Wing was shifted to the bomber strip, where two Fifth Air Force units were already at work: the 872nd and 875th Aviation Engineer Battalions. Both were placed under the operational control of Wing Commander William Dell of the RAAF. Dell ran the work rotation.
He was also the engineer of the Persecution Task Force—that is, the senior engineering officer of a task force built around a U. S. Army infantry regiment commanded by a U. S.
Army brigadier general within a U. S. theater command. An Australian air force officer directed the engineering of that force and issued orders to two of its battalions.
The official history records this in a single sentence, in the tone of a man describing the weather. Nobody ever documented it, and nobody ever would have. This arrangement was not a courtesy. It was the way the Southwest Pacific Area had been managed since 1942, when the engineering shortage became so severe that the theater stopped sorting construction units by nationality and placed many of them under a single chief engineer at headquarters.
Australian construction units built airfields on the Queensland mainland so American battalions could be sent to New Guinea. On the same beach at Aitape, the two nationalities worked side by side. Australians built a bridge over Wanangan Creek while Americans built one over the Nigia River on the eastern flank. Until both bridges were complete, American engineers operated ferries across the larger streams.
One figure in Australian newspapers does not match the American records. On April 26, the Warwick Daily News reported that a construction unit had made the fighter airstrip ready in 42 hours, and that the job, which it described as almost like building a new strip, had been finished 24 hours ahead of schedule. The official history of the campaign, however, says the wing worked for roughly 48 hours and that the strip was never finished early at all; it had been hoped it would be ready one day after the landing, but the ground made that impossible. Both accounts describe the same men doing the same work on the same beach.
Nothing was published to settle which clock either side was reading, or whether the newspaper counted from the moment the infantry took the strip while the historian counted from the moment the bulldozers started. A third strip was the one nobody mentioned. On the 23rd, the 1st Battalion advanced west and captured Tadji West, still unfinished, within an hour. On the way, a tank of the 603rd Tank Company crossed a Japanese bridge over Ana Creek.
That same morning, two rifle companies went to the islands offshore, Tumleo and Salio, and secured them by 2 p. m. against light resistance. Ali Island, the largest, was occupied two days later without opposition.
Then the rain came. On May 2, every creek in the area flooded, washing out much of the bridging, wrecking ferry stations, and pulling back to road work the men who were supposed to be building airfields. The rain continued through the month, and road repair consumed the working hours of engineers sent there to build runways. The bomber strip was the bigger of the two, the more important one in the long run, but it needed far more maintenance than the fighter strip, which had been built only for Japanese fighters and never designed to carry heavy loads.
The bomber strip had to take transport planes and then twin-engine bombers on ground that received the same rain as every other part of the ocean. Work on it continued while the roads fell apart and men were pulled away to fix them. The strip did not receive fighters or transports until May 27, five weeks after the landing, and bombers only in early July. The real cost of turning a Japanese airfield into an Allied base was measured in those weeks.
The cargo ships came back on the night of May 27. One Japanese aircraft, coming from a field in western New Guinea that Allied intelligence never located, managed to slip past the four radars watching the beachhead by coming over the Torricelli Mountains, and dropped a bomb on one of them. The ship had discharged 65 percent of her cargo. The undamaged vessel towed her to Finschhafen, then returned to Aitape to finish unloading.
Albert Noble, the naval officer commanding the assault group, later wrote that her loss was felt for months afterward. Squadron records show what the 48-hour landing accomplished. An advance detachment of the Australian headquarters responsible for air operations came ashore on the first day, and it was that detachment that called the 25 Kittyhawks on April 24. From then on, three squadrons flew support sorties from Tadji for the infantry defending the perimeter and for the much larger force at Hollandia, whose captured airstrips were still being repaired with few light aircraft and whatever Japanese equipment could be made to work.
Hollandia’s Cyclops strip was declared operational on April 28, four days after Tadji, and the first transport landed there the next day. During May, aircraft flying from Tadji flew more than 6,600 sorties and dropped roughly 57 tons of bombs between the Tairi and Wewak areas. Between June 7 and July 6, two Beaufort squadrons alone flew 495 sorties and dropped about 325 tons. When the Japanese cut inland roads and began ambushing supply parties, Beauforts from Tadji and C-47s of the Fifth Air Force from Nadzab and Hollandia airdropped food and ammunition to American troops along the Driniumor River.
American PT boats based at Aitape patrolled the coast by day while Australian aircraft flew overhead, spotting for naval guns and coastal guns. Control of the strip changed hands more than once during these events. No. 78 Wing left at the end of May; between May 25 and June 9, the only combat unit at Tadji was the 110th Reconnaissance Squadron of the Fifth Air Force.
On June 9 an Australian Beaufort squadron arrived, followed by two more on June 15, and on June 22 the headquarters that had been running air operations there closed down and handed the mission to another Australian wing. The men who did all this did not seem to find it remarkable. There is another file in this matter, and it is the reason any of the above can be told. When the U.
S. Army set out to write its official account of the Aitape landing after the war, its historian could not determine from his own army’s papers who opened the Tadji airstrip, or when. The footnote shows the source of his information. He wrote to Lieutenant Arthur Davies, the officer in charge of the war history section at RAAF headquarters.
On March 8, 1948, Davies replied, and his account of Tadji’s opening appears in that same chapter, based on two further letters from him, one dated April 2 and the other May 8 of the same year. So the U. S. Army’s history of an American operation credits an Australian flight lieutenant, who answered its letter four years later, with the story of who built the runway.
The fighter strip did not last long. On July 12, 1944, two and a half months after 25 Kittyhawks landed on it, it was declared unserviceable and fit only for emergency landings. The task force engineer’s report gives the reason plainly: a suitable drainage system could not be provided at that location, and never could be. The men who opened it within 48 hours had done so on ground that would never really work as an airstrip.
Even so, the work was worth it, and both facts appear in the same paragraph of the same report. No one ever published the construction wings’ paperwork on those two days. What survives is a newspaper article counting 42 hours, an official history counting most of 48, and a set of letters from 1948 that nobody has printed either.