In mid-November 1942, the only thing of military value in the village of Kokoda was a patch of flat grass long enough to land an aircraft. Australian troops had retaken the position on November 2, and soon after, a small group of Japanese soldiers—the first of their army captured alive in the mountains—sat waiting under guard to be flown south to a hospital in Port Moresby. Photographs from the morning show men so debilitated that the guards standing over them appear almost ceremonial. Reaching that patch of grass had taken four months of argument, and the dispute revolved around a single assumption held by both armies: the Owen Stanley Range decided everything.
A man could cross it carrying only what a man carries, and that limited everything else. The Japanese had learned this lesson at full price. Their force crossed the range from the north in August and September with what soldiers and pack animals could haul, and returned starving. They abandoned guns along the track, ate their animals, and by the time they reached the north coast were burying men who had died of hunger within days of their own supply dumps.
Those dumps sat on beaches that could only be supplied from the sea, because the mountains at their back were never a road. The beachheads at Buna, Gona, and Sanananda rested on an assumption that had already been tested and held: anyone coming at them would arrive the same way the Japanese had arrived, on foot, hungry, with only what a tired man could still carry uphill. Artillery was a coastal matter. Machinery was no matter at all, since every machine in Papua stood on the far side of 6,000 feet of mountain and mud.
Allied staff had been hunting for a way around that arithmetic since mid-year. On July 17, a check sheet went through headquarters in Port Moresby suggesting that a field be developed at Wanigela mission on the eastern Papuan coast, 65 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 put down quickly in country nobody had mapped.
Sverdrup discussed the idea at Abau with Cecil Abel, a missionary who owned a nearby plantation and knew the territory beyond the divide intimately. Abel told commanders in Moresby that a landing ground could be made near Fasari in the upper valley of the Musa River, and that from Fasari troops could walk to Buna over flat country. The scheme was approved. On October 6, Australians were flown from Milne Bay into Wanigela, and under their direction, local Papuans began cutting grass and readying the strip.
The first airfield work on the far side of the Owen Stanleys was done by hand by Papuans, with Australian soldiers pointing at the ground. Sverdrup left Abau on October 14 with 185 Papuan carriers and five white men, including a flight lieutenant who had spent most of his life in New Guinea and knew local chiefs personally. Before setting out, he stocked tobacco, calico, knives, garden seeds, and trade goods—the only currency in those mountains and the only way to hire thousands of pairs of hands. He reached Fasarai on the afternoon of October 18 and found that Abel had already burned the site.
A cargo plane landed there two days later on ground that had been a field of grass the week before. Sverdrup then went north along jungle trails with the flight lieutenant, leaving an Australian officer with the Papuans to finish the job. Near the villages of Imbesa and Kanjaki, they found two more level sites under kunai grass standing 8 to 12 feet high. Word went out that there was tobacco in it, and whole villages came in.
Sverdrup organized the villagers into competing teams, and the workforce grew into the thousands. In his log, he noted that the Musomen won hands down, got an extra half stick of tobacco each, and damn near killed themselves earning it. The stores ran out before the grass did. Sverdrup sent frantic signals to Moresby for more, and on October 24 the answer arrived as a bomber over Kanjaki with its bay doors open, raining rice and corned beef into the clearing.
The tins split on impact, and nothing more was cut that day. The strip at Pongani was still unbuilt. On October 28, he brought several hundred more men to that coastal village, where 50 American engineers had been sitting and making little headway. Working 12 hours a day in heat that had already driven some soldiers to throw away their tools, the Papuans and engineers finished the Pongani strip in two and a half days.
By the end of the month, aircraft could land at Pongani, Kanjaki, and 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 set the finding down flat: if strips had to be built by hand in that country, the only answer was local labor competently led. He was right, and being right created the next problem.
Everything achieved north of the range had been achieved with axes, saws, machetes, shovels, and human backs. Engineers who marched over the mountains carried those tools on their shoulders, clearing trail for the infantry behind them, bridging streams that crossed the track every half mile, building rafts, and at some crossings having Papuans paddle soldiers over in dugout canoes. When one American battalion tried to walk from Wanigela to Buna, it got 15 miles before the Musa River stopped it. When engineers rafted the infantry across, they found trails on the other bank under 7 feet of water.
The entire force had to turn around, follow the river to its mouth, and go up the coast in small boats. The engineer units 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 November 16, 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 1:00 in the afternoon, Japanese machine gunners opened up on the coastal column and hit nothing. At 7:00 in the evening, dive bombers came, and the men on the track went into a scramble, 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 named Karu organized a lifeboat crew and pulled survivors from 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, 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 handed to the attackers were Australian, drawn at 1 inch to 4 miles, a scale 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 8 miles behind the fighting, stopped being a convenience and became the campaign. On November 20, a platoon of American engineers reached it with 22 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, 50 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. Australians a few miles up the track at Gona and on the Sanananda Road heard the results land. But a gun comes apart at joints the manufacturer built into it—that was different from what came next. On November 25, 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, 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 is 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. And 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 ammunition and 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 piece of sound reasoning had allowed for a welding set.
The last piece of the story 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 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.