On the 23rd of August, 1942, Major Fargher—an insurance inspector from Goulburn before the war—walked out onto the dry lake at Myola, near the crest of the Owen Stanley Range, and began counting what was stacked on the grass. The lake was a long flat of kunai with no trees on it, one of the only open spaces on the entire crossing. The officers in charge of the dump had been checking their stocks in a hurry and insisted nobody had warned them a brigade was coming. When Fargher finished his count, he signaled the result down to Port Moresby.
There were a few days of rations at Myola. Two days earlier, Brigadier Arnold Potts had arrived at the same clearing at the head of the 21st Brigade. Headquarters had told him food would be waiting at the end of every day’s march, with a large reserve built up at the lake. But most of the staging posts along the way had no warning he was coming, and his report afterwards said their staffs displayed little interest and gave the minimum of help.
At Myola, he found a reserve nowhere near what he expected—and nothing had come down since the 16th, although the weather had been good. On paper, the reserve existed. Port Moresby believed weeks of food for his brigade were already sitting on that grass. Somewhere between the loading lists at the coast and the lake on the mountain, most of it had gone missing, and nobody at either end could say where.
The army had held the lake for three weeks. Lieutenant Bert Kienzle, a planter who ran the native carrier lines for the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit, remembered a clearing he had seen during flights over the range. He set off on foot to find it and reached the first of two dry lake beds on the 3rd of August. From then on, Douglas cargo planes of the United States Army Air Forces came up from Port Moresby, crossed the ridges, and came in low over the kunai.
The crews and the army worked out the method over the drop zones by trial and error. They removed the doors from the side of the aircraft and stacked the cargo in the open doorway with the heaviest loads at the bottom. When the pilot flashed a signal, men wearing safety belts fastened to the inside of the fuselage put their feet against the stack and shoved it out into the air. People called them pusher-outers.
Much of what went through the door had no parachute at all. It went out wrapped in blankets or sacking and fell until it hit the ground. On the morning of the 17th, Japanese bombers caught 7-Mile Airfield outside Port Moresby with almost no warning. The field had no revetments, and the bombers and cargo planes sat parked tight together at one end of the runway.
When the fires burned out, the Dakotas that had been flying to Myola were wrecks or too badly damaged to get airborne. For most of the following week, there was never more than one plane available for the mountains. That explained the empty week after the 16th. It did not explain the weeks before it.
General Sydney Rowell, commanding New Guinea Force, confirmed everything Potts reported and ordered an investigation. It found that Port Moresby had sent the rations and that, for causes nobody could name, the crews must have dropped them somewhere other than Myola—where nobody ever found them. Dudley McCarthy, who wrote the army’s official history of the campaign with the files in front of him, came to a harder view. He thought it likely nobody ever dropped the food at all and put it down to faulty work by an inexperienced staff.
In his judgment, New Guinea Force should not have stayed ignorant of the true position for a single day. As it was, the position stayed hidden for a week, and it came out only because a brigadier went up the track to check for himself. Potts had crossed the mountains with orders to attack. Now Rowell’s orders turned his task into a defensive one, called for the worn-out 39th Battalion to come back as soon as possible to ease the feeding problem, and held his third battalion back until reserves built up at the lake.
Security of supply, Rowell wrote in his instructions, was not in sight. The brigade went into the fighting at Isurava at the end of August without the men it expected because there was no food to put in front of them, and within days it was falling back down the track it had climbed. Myola could not be held. On the night of the 4th of September, men of the 2/16th Battalion stumbled toward it in the dark.
Each soldier held the clothing or the bayonet of the man in front of him so he would not lose the way, until they had to stop and wait for daylight. At first light, they reached the lake. Parties were already destroying the dump so the Japanese would find nothing on it. The battalion ate its fill from stores scattered across the grass while the demolition went on around them, and then the men started down toward Efogi in the rain.
When the Australians came back up the track in October going the other way, they depended on what fell from the sky and on the carriers who brought it forward from wherever it landed. Every man in the 25th Brigade carried his rifle and ammunition, several days of food, half a blanket, and half a towel. Most of what they needed beyond that came out of a Douglas store. Drops began at Nauro on the 4th of October, and the losses were heavy from the first morning.
The army knew what dropping cost. Its own figures for recovering air-drop stores in Papua ran from about four-fifths at best down to about one-tenth at worst. Tinned meat packed in corn sacks burst open when it landed. Biscuits wrapped in blankets hit the ground and shattered.
Every round of rifle ammunition picked up out of the grass had to be tested by hand so it would not jam in the breech in the middle of a fight. Dropped mortar bombs went off before their time and caused so many casualties that for a period the army stopped dropping them altogether. Major General Arthur Allen, commanding the 7th Division, put the problem to Port Moresby in a signal on the 7th of October. The dropping program, he said, was causing him the gravest concern.
What had come down in its first two days was less than half of what his men needed just to keep going, with nothing over for a reserve. On the 11th, a message reached him from General Blamey. It told Allen he had received the stores he asked for, that there appeared to be plenty available, and that his advance was much too slow. Allen answered the next day that his reserves had not been adequate at any point up to the 11th, and that the country was much tougher than any previous theater and could not be understood until it was seen.
At the end of October, Blamey signaled that Allen had served long enough in the forward area. General George Vasey would arrive at Myola by air on the morning of the 28th and take command. Allen replied that the situation was improving every day and that he would have preferred to stay until his troops went out as well. Vasey flew in, and on the 29th, Allen left for Port Moresby.
On the 2nd of November, a patrol of the 231st Battalion walked into Kokoda and found the Japanese had been gone for two days. The village mattered for its airstrip, and the engineers reckoned planes could land after two days of work on it. On the 3rd, the drops started at 8:00 in the morning, and supplies rained onto the strip itself, interrupting the engineers who were trying to repair it. Just after midday, General Vasey raised the Australian flag outside brigade headquarters.
The next morning at about a quarter to ten, the first Douglas landed at Kokoda. Others followed through the day. Nobody had to shove anything out of the door. Rations, clothing, and medical stores came off the planes and began to build up at Kokoda.
What the loaders had put aboard on the coast that morning was what arrived. Chocolate went round to troops hungry for anything sweet. The men ate bread for the first time in many days. A dressing station opened at midday, and the planes, empty now, stood ready for the flight back over the mountains.
On the way back to the coast, they carried the wounded. The Americans flying those planes had been proving the idea for seven weeks. At first light on the 15th of September, a company of American infantry, carrying small arms and packs, climbed aboard a mixed collection of Douglas and Lockheed aircraft at Amberley Field in Queensland. At 6:00 that evening, word came back that every man was down safe in New Guinea.
General George Kenney, MacArthur’s air commander, took the news straight upstairs and asked to fly the rest of the regiment. MacArthur had already ordered it sent by ship. The loading had begun. Kenney asked for the next regiment instead and promised to have it in Port Moresby ahead of the men going by sea.
His memoir says the staff opposed him again, more forcefully this time. MacArthur let him try. The regiment Kenney asked for was in Port Moresby by the 24th of September, and the one that went by ship came in four days after it. In the first week of October, the cargo planes did it on the far side of the range.
Local people at Wanigela mission on the north coast burned off the kunai grass, and a small party of Australian engineers carved out a runway with machetes, cane knives, and bayonets. Within two days, the planes had flown an Australian battalion in. A few weeks later, Kenney wrote to General Arnold in Washington that the artillery in this theater flies. The one American battalion that crossed the mountains on foot was fed by the same kind of drops.
It set out from Kalikodobu, southeast of Port Moresby, on the 5th of October on a trail so poor that the men depended almost entirely on what came down to them from the air. There were not enough cargo parachutes. Ammunition, medical stores, and anything in bottles came down under a chute. Rations and clothing went out wrapped in sacks and blankets and wired shut with nothing to slow them.
Because there were too few trained quartermasters, men from the regimental bands helped wrap the bundles and shove them through the door. Radio messages from the trail complained that the drops were failing. Some planes let go of every bundle in a single pass and scattered the lot for miles along a mountain side nobody could reach. The crews got better at it and began tying white streamers to the packages so the men on the ground could spot them in the undergrowth.
That same month, a party of the 2/14 Battalion, cut off since Isurava at the end of August, came out of the jungle into the American camp at Kalikodobu after Captain Buckler had brought them through six weeks behind the Japanese lines. The advance also had its wounded to move. A stretcher case needed a whole team of carriers to get him back to the nearest dressing station, and a carrier on a stretcher pole was a carrier who was not bringing food forward. At Eora Creek, during the withdrawal at the end of August, the medical officers had run short of both.
Major Magarry’s account afterward describes three men with stomach and chest injuries judged unlikely to survive the night whom the post gave morphia and left behind as it moved up the hill in the dark. The next morning, two of them were dead. The third, as Magarry put it, asked whether he was to be left behind. A warrant officer named Alord got him out, and he held on for several days.
He died before he reached the road. By the start of November, the field ambulance at Myola was holding hundreds of sick and wounded men, and the advance had gone on past them toward Kokoda. Field engineers cut a strip on the lake. At the end of October, a single-engine Stinson landed on it, and through the first days of November, a few more small planes came and went, carrying a handful of patients at a time.
On the 7th of November, an American pilot, Lieutenant Ronald Neuhaus, flew in, and the official history says he greatly impressed the Australians. Why so few came out that way is where the two senior medical officers who wrote about it part company. Colonel Kingsley Norris, the 7th Division’s chief medical officer, wrote that two bombers had landed on the strip, unloaded, and taken off again without difficulty, and that one pilot called it a grand little strip. He asked why wounded men had waited at a forward post for eleven weeks and why air evacuation was never done on any real scale.
Brigadier Johnston, the senior medical officer at New Guinea Force headquarters, told it the other way. In his account, senior air force officers, among them the commander of the American Air Force in New Guinea, would not allow the attempt with the planes then on hand. Of the few suitable machines that a search across Australia turned up, a Ford trimotor and a Stinson both crash-landed at Myola. Norris called it neglect; Johnston called it a judgment.
The crashes bore out. And nothing in the files settles which of them saw the fuller picture. At Kokoda, by then, the big planes were coming in one after another. They brought dried potatoes, meat and vegetable ration, baked beans, tinned fruit, sausages, jam, butter, and sugar—after weeks in which the men had eaten tinned beef and biscuit, and whatever they could pull out of native gardens.
It was the best food of the campaign. And most of the men could not keep it down. Soldiers who ate even the small issues lay retching on the ground. At Myola, the patients who could walk walked out in the end.
For the rest, the army at last found carriers in enough numbers to take the stretchers. The last of them, with what remained of the medical unit, reached the Port Moresby area a day or two before Christmas, after about two and a half months shut in on the lake. In all, about forty sick and wounded men were flown out of the mountains.