4:00 in the morning on the 28th of January, 1943, a knoll above the village of Wandumi in the Bulolo Valley of New Guinea, Captain Wilford Sherlock of A Company, 2/6 Australian Infantry Battalion, stood in the dark and could hear something he did not yet understand. He could hear movement in the kunai grass below him.
It was not a patrol. It was not a probing platoon. It was an entire Japanese infantry regiment moving in column less than 200 yd from his front line. And Sherlock had 70 men. The track he was sitting on ran straight to the Wau airfield 3 mi behind him. If those Japanese got past his company, there was nothing between them and the runway except open ground and a thin perimeter held by exhausted commandos who had been raiding Japanese positions in the jungle for 10 months and had not seen a fresh battalion in all that time.
Sherlock did not know that yet. He thought he was facing a patrol. He was about to learn otherwise. This is the story of the 7 days that decided whether the Allies kept New Guinea or lost it. Cut to the Wau airstrip itself. 8 hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Marlin Fleay was standing at the edge of the gravel runway with a field telephone pressed to his ear and a wireless operator beside him trying to raise Port Moresby through the static. The valley was clouded in.
The peaks of the Owen Stanley Range to the south were buried in cumulus all the way down to the tree line. And the cumulus was thick enough that no aircraft from Port Moresby could cross it without flying blind into a mountain. Fleay had spent the morning listening to a battle 11 km east of him over a crackling field telephone and the field telephone had just gone dead.
He turned to his staff officer, “Get me anything you can get me.” he said. “Anything that can land here. Now.” His staff officer asked, “Which aircraft?” Fleay said, “All of them.” The Wau airstrip was 3,600 ft long, ran uphill at a gradient of 10°, and was made of compacted river gravel scraped flat by gold miners in the 1930s.
The top of the strip was 300 ft higher than the bottom. You could see the slope with the naked eye. You did not land at Wau the way you landed anywhere else. You committed to the approach at the bottom of the valley, dropped through the cloud, lined up two ridges of jungle, and held your power on all the way to the top because if you cut the throttle, you would not have enough air speed to flare, and you would dig the nose wheel in and cartwheel.
There was no go-around. The mountain at the top of the strip ended the runway in a wall of green that came up to meet you whether you were ready or not. You committed or you crashed. This was the field Flay was asking the United States Army Air Forces to land on. It was the only field he had. Cut back to Wandumi.
By 8:00 in the morning on the 28th, Sherlock’s men were taking machine-gun fire from three directions. The Japanese had not just bumped into them. The Japanese had walked over a hidden trail from Mubo, a trail the Australians did not even know existed, and they had come up behind Sherlock’s expected line of approach.
They had outflanked him before the first shot was fired. Now, they were trying to roll over him. Sherlock had attached to his company a platoon from the 2/5 Australian Independent Company, commandos, bearded, jungle-thin, hard-eyed men who had been ambushing Japanese patrols around Mubo and Salamaua for months. They knew this country.
The infantry did not. The commandos took the flanks of Sherlock’s position and held them. A young lieutenant named Ted St. John commanded a platoon on the highest part of the knoll. The Japanese hit him first. Hundreds of them. They came up the slope through the kunai grass in waves, and St.
John’s Bren gunners cut them down in rows. And then more came. The slope below St. John’s position filled with Japanese bodies. The bodies did not stop the Japanese. They kept coming. By midday, St. John’s platoon had been pushed off the high ground. Sherlock looked at the knoll. He looked at his own position. He looked at the airfield 3 mi behind him.
He said five words, “2/6 Battalion, fix bayonets.” Cut to a C-47 Skytrain of the 317th Troop Carrier Group climbing out of Ward’s Drome at Port Moresby and turning northeast toward the wall of cloud that hid the Owen Stanley Range. The pilot’s name does not matter for this telling because there were dozens of them, and they all flew the same mission, and several of them did not come back.
The aircraft was new. The pilot had landed it in Australia less than 2 weeks earlier. He had never flown into war in his life. He had no chart of the valley. He had a verbal briefing, and a hand-drawn sketch, and a radio frequency that did not work above 6,000 ft because the mountains blocked the signal.
He flew northeast into the wall of cloud. His co-pilot watched the altimeter. His co-pilot watched for the mountain they all knew was somewhere out there in the white. The mountain was called Mount Lawson. It rose to 11,000 ft. If you flew into it, your family received a telegram that said you were missing, presumed killed.
Seven aircraft of the 317th would be lost over those mountains in the months that followed. Three would be lost in the Wau airlift alone. The pilot held his heading. He held his altitude. He held his nerve. Cut back to Wandumi mid-afternoon on the 28th. Sherlock led his bayonet charge across the knoll. The 2/6 men went in with rifles, fixed bayonets, and grenades they had been hoarding for an hour.
They cleared the high ground. They drove the Japanese off it. They held it. Then the Japanese counterattacked. Then the 2/6 held it again. By 6:00 that evening, Sherlock’s mortar ammunition had run out. His small arms ammunition was running low. The Japanese had pulled back to regroup and were now sweeping the position with heavy machine gun fire from a flanking spur.
Mortar rounds were landing on Sherlock’s perimeter at the rate of one every 40 seconds. He sent a runner back to Wau with a message. The message said, “Enemy is regimental strength. Repeat, regimental strength. Hold the strip.” That was the moment the staff at Wau understood what was coming for them. This was not a raid.
This was not a patrol. This was Major General Toru Okabe’s entire detachment of the Japanese 51st Division, around 3,000 men. And it was 3 mi from the only airfield south of the Markham Valley that the Allies still held. Cut to Port Moresby. Brigadier Murray Moten of the Australian 17th Infantry Brigade was on the telephone with Major General Stanley Savage.
He had two battalions ready to load, the 2/5 and the 2/6. He had a third, the 2/7, mustering. He had an artillery battery from the 2/1 Field Regiment loading shells into ammunition crates that would fly in the bellies of the C-47s. He had a machine gun company from the 7th Machine Gun Battalion lined up to go in specifically to defend the airfield perimeter once they got there.
He had everything. He had nowhere to send them because the weather had closed the valley. The Owen Stanley Range stretched between Port Moresby and Wau like a wall. The wall had clouds on it that touched the ground. Aircraft could not climb over the clouds because the clouds went up to 20,000 ft.
Aircraft could not fly under them because the mountains were under them. Aircraft could not fly around them because there was nothing to fly around. Either the cloud lifted or the air lift did not happen. Moten paced. His staff paced. The air crews of the 317th, sitting in the dispersal tents at Wards Drome with their flying suits already on, paced.
The cloud did not lift. Cut back to Wau Dumi after dark on the 28th. The Japanese were probing Sherlock’s position by sound. They would fire a burst into the dark and listen for the muzzle flash that came back. The 2/6 lay in their shallow weapon pits and did not fire back. They could not afford to.
They were down to the rounds in their magazines. The dark was full of the noise of dying men because the Japanese had left a great many wounded on the slope and the Japanese were not coming back for them and the Australians could not get to them. The Australians could hear them all night. Some of the wounded Japanese sang.
Some of the wounded Japanese called for their mothers. Some of the wounded Japanese held grenades against their chests and pulled the pins. Cut back to the airstrip at Wau. 5:00 in the morning on the 29th of January. Fleigh had been awake for 43 hours. He had positioned every man he had on the perimeter. The 2/5 Independent Company was on the eastern approach.
The 2/7 Independent Company was on the southern approach. The New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a militia unit of gold miners and plantation managers and pre-war coastal traders who had been in this country for 20 years, was on the high ground. Around 300 men total holding a perimeter against an enemy of 3,000.
Fleigh walked the line at first light. He did not say much. The commandos did not need much said. They knew exactly what was coming for them, and they knew the only thing they could do about it was hold the wire long enough for the C-47s to get through the weather. At 5:50 in the morning, a wireless operator at the Wau strip picked up the dispersal tower at Wards Drome. The cloud had lifted.
Cut to the first C-47 on the approach. It was 8:00 in the morning on the 29th of January. The pilot was 26 years old. He had been in New Guinea for 14 days. He came down through the gap in the cloud that everybody called the saddle, banked hard left into the Bulolo Valley, and saw the Wau strip 3 mi ahead, sloped uphill into the mountainside.
He saw something else, tracer. There was tracer fire coming up out of the kunai grass on the eastern side of the runway. Japanese machine guns. The Japanese had come down off Wandumi during the night, and they were now within 500 m of the airstrip, dug in along the ridge that overlooked the eastern threshold.
They could see the runway. They could see the aircraft. They could read the squadron markings on his fuselage. The pilot’s co-pilot keyed the intercom. “Skipper,” he said, “they’re shooting at us.” The pilot looked at the sloped runway. The pilot looked at the cloud closing back in behind him.
The pilot looked at the load behind him, which was 32 Australian infantrymen of the 2/6 Battalion with their rifles between their knees and their packs on their laps. The pilot said one word, “Committed.” He held the throttle forward. He held the nose down. He took the C-47 through the tracer at 140 knots, flared at the bottom of the slope, set the wheels down on the gravel, and ran the aircraft up the gradient at full power because the gradient was steep enough to slow him without brakes.
He stopped near the top. He turned the aircraft around. He left the engines running because there was no time to shut them down. The aircraft was going to be back in the air in less than 3 minutes. The 32 Australian infantrymen jumped out the side door onto the gravel. Their officer was waiting for them. He had a sketch map.
He pointed at a position on the perimeter, 600 m away, and said, “Go there. Now, fight from there.” They went. They did not eat. They did not rest. They did not orient themselves to the country. They formed up. They moved out. They went straight into the fight. That was the first C-47 cut back to Wandumi.
8:30 in the morning on the 29th, Sherlock had pulled his company back during the night to a new position above the Bulolo River, hoping to draw the Japanese into a fighting withdrawal that would buy time for the airfield. He had been reinforced by C Company of the 2/5 Battalion, who had arrived during the night.
But, the Japanese had not been slowed. The Japanese were moving past him on both flanks. Sherlock could see them moving. He could see them disappearing into the gullies to the west, heading for Wau. He understood in that moment that the airfield was about to be taken if he did not do something to slow the Japanese down. He gathered his runners.
He gave them a message for the rear. The message said, “I am attempting to break through to the airfield to reorganize the defense. Hold until I get there.” Then, Captain Wilfrid Holden Sherlock of A Company, 2/6 Australian Infantry Battalion, picked up his rifle and led a small group of men forward through the bypassing Japanese in an attempt to reach Wau.
He did not make it. He was killed somewhere on the slope between Wandumi and the Bulolo River, somewhere in the kunai grass, at some moment on the morning of the 29th of January, 1943. He was 34 years old. He had been married for less than 6 months. His body was recovered later. His widow received a telegram.
His company recovered his name as the savior of Wau because in the 36 hours Sherlock and his 70 men had held at Wandumi, the cloud over the Owen Stanley Range had lifted. The C-47s had got through and the airfield was about to fill with Australian infantry. Sherlock did not live to see it. His men did.
Cut to the airstrip, 9:00 in the morning on the 29th. The second C-47 was on final. The third was on downwind. The fourth was somewhere over the saddle dropping through cloud. The fifth was rolling at Ward’s Drome. The sixth was loading. The eighth. The pattern over the Wau strip became a continuous chain of aircraft. They came in nose to tail.
They landed under the eastern ridge. They taxied up the slope at power. They turned at the top. They dropped their troops. They turned again. They rolled down the slope using the gradient as a takeoff aid. They went back over the saddle. They reloaded at Ward’s Drome. They came back. The pilots called it the Wau shuttle.
The air crews flew it for 36 hours straight. Some of them flew six round trips in a day. Some of them did not eat. Some of them landed with bullet holes in the rudder, taxied to the dispersal, looked at the damage, said something unprintable, and took off again. Three aircraft were lost. Cut to the eastern perimeter of the airfield at 10:00 on the 29th.
The 2/5 Independent Company Commando holding the wire on the eastern approach was lying in a shallow scrape behind a fallen banyan trunk and watching through the leaves a column of Japanese infantry moving across his front at less than 400 yards. The Japanese could see the C-47s landing. The Japanese were close enough to read the squadron markings.
The Japanese were trying to bring up a heavy machine gun to a position from which they could rake the runway. The commando watched them set up the gun. The commando watched them feed the belt. The commando watched them range it on the runway threshold. The commando turned to his Bren gunner. He said, “Don’t let them fire on the strip.
” The Bren gunner did not. He emptied a magazine into the machine gun crew at 400 yd through the leaves. And the Japanese gun did not fire on the strip. And the C-47s kept coming in. That was one moment. There were hundreds of moments like it on that perimeter that day. Cut to Major General Toru Okabe, somewhere on the eastern ridge above Wau at midday on the 29th.
Okabe was a careful officer. He was 48 years old. He had spent his career in the infantry. He had been given an objective, the Wau airfield, and he had been given a force of 3,000 men to take it. And he had walked them over the worst country in the Pacific to get them within sight of the runway.
And he had done it in less than 3 weeks. He was now within 500 m of his objective. He looked down through his field glasses at the Wau strip. He saw aircraft landing. He saw aircraft taking off. He saw aircraft on final, aircraft on downwind, aircraft taxiing, aircraft turning, aircraft loading, aircraft unloading, aircraft running up to power.
He saw, in the time it took him to count, 16 aircraft in the air over the valley. He understood, in that moment, what was happening. He understood that the airfield he had been told he would seize before reinforcements could reach it was, in fact, being reinforced in front of his eyes faster than he could attack it.
He gave the order for the major assault to be brought forward. He would attack the strip the next morning before dawn with everything he had. Cut back to the airstrip mid-afternoon on the 29th. The 2/7 Battalion was now landing. The 2/7 had not been in the original plan. The 2/7 had been mustered at Port Moresby in a rush, given 2 hours to draw weapons and ammunition, and put on the aircraft.
Their commanding officer had not slept. Their company commanders had not been briefed. Their men did not know where they were going until they saw the slope of the Wau strip coming up under the windows of the C-47, and somebody at the back of the cabin said, “That’s it. That’s the place.” The 2/7 disembarked under fire.
They formed up at the side of the runway. A staff officer pointed them at the southern perimeter. They moved out. They moved out walking because there was no road. They moved out in fighting order because there was no time to do anything else. They went into the line beside the 2/5 Independent Company at a position called Crystal Creek, and they were in contact with the enemy within 40 minutes of stepping off the aircraft.
57C, 47 loads landed that day. By nightfall on the 29th, Fleay had something close to a battalion of fresh infantry on the perimeter, plus his original commandos, plus plus the gunners of the 2/1 Field Regiment who had landed with their 25-pounders broken down into the cabins of the C-47s, and were now reassembling them at the edge of the strip in the failing light.
He had what he needed to fight Okabe’s pre-dawn attack. He did not know it was coming. Okabe did not warn him. Cut to 4:30 in the morning on the 30th of January. The Japanese assault began with a mortar barrage on the eastern perimeter. It was not a probing barrage. It was a full divisional bombardment. The mortars fired for 12 minutes.
They put rounds onto every position the Japanese had identified from the ridge during the previous day’s observation. They put rounds onto the runway. They put rounds onto the dispersal area where the C-47s had been parked overnight. Then the infantry came. They came in three columns. They came across the kunai grass at the run.
They came firing on the move, screaming with bayonets fixed. The first column hit the 2/5 Independent Company on the eastern wire. The second column hit the 2/7 Battalion at Crystal Creek. The third column came up the center and was met by the 2/6 Battalion who had been holding the high ground in the middle of the perimeter for less than 18 hours.
The Japanese got within 50 m of the runway. They were stopped there. They were stopped by a line of Australian infantry firing rifles and Bren guns at point-blank range across the threshold of the easternmost C-47 dispersal pad. They were stopped by the gunners of the 2/1 Field Regiment who depressed their 25-pounders almost to the horizontal and fired high explosive shells over open sights into the Japanese assault columns at 400 m.
They were stopped by 2/5 Commandos who had not slept in 3 days and who were down to the magazines on their belts. They were stopped at 50 m. They did not get any closer. Cut to a C-47 on final approach to Wau at 6:00 in the morning on the 30th in the middle of the Japanese assault. The pilot could see the muzzle flashes from the perimeter through the gloom.
He could see the tracer crossing over the runway. He could see on the eastern side of the strip what looked like a wave of Japanese infantry being driven back into the kunai grass by a line of men in slouch hats. He came down through the cloud at 140 kn, banked into the valley, lined up between the ridges, and put the wheels on the gravel while small arms fire ripped holes through the fabric of his rudder.
His co-pilot looked at him. His co-pilot did not say anything. There was nothing useful to say. The aircraft taxied up the slope. The aircraft turned at the top. The aircraft dropped a company of the 2/7 Battalion straight into the line. The aircraft turned again. The aircraft ran down the slope.
The aircraft was airborne and gone before the company it had delivered had finished crossing the runway. 3 minutes on the ground. 32 more men in the fight. Cut back to the perimeter. 8:00 in the morning on the 30th. The Japanese had pulled back. The first major assault had broken on the line. Broken at 50 m from the runway.
Broken at the moment Okabe had needed it to succeed. He had committed his best troops in the dawn attack. They had not got through. They were now lying in the kunai grass in front of the wire. The wounded calling out and the dead being picked over by jungle birds. Okabe regrouped.
He prepared a second assault for that afternoon. Cut to Major George Warfe of the 2/3 Australian Independent Company. Flying northeast from Port Moresby at 9:00 in the morning on the 31st of January in a C-47 of the 317th. Warfe was 30 years old. He had come up through the 2/6 Battalion at Bardia. He had been described by one of his own officers as a king cobra coiled to strike.
He had been given command of the 2/3 in September of 1942. And he had spent 4 months training it to a standard that he considered acceptable. Which was a standard most other units considered impossible. He was now bringing it to Wau. The 2/3 was the third independent company to join Kanga Force. With the 2/5 and the 2/7 already on the perimeter, the addition of the 2/3 would give Flay the equivalent of a commando battalion.
300 more men. 300 jungle hardened Tommy gun and knife men who had been training for exactly this kind of fighting for over a year. Warfe’s C-47 came over the saddle at 10:00 in the morning. The pilot turned into the Bulolo Valley. Warfy looked down at the airstrip. He saw what he had been told was a perimeter under siege.
He saw something else, too. He saw aircraft. Dozens of them stacked in the holding pattern, lined up on the runway, taxiing into and out of the dispersal. He saw an entire airlift in motion. He had never seen anything like it. Nobody had. The Wau airlift between the 29th of January and the 1st of February would deliver 194 aircraft loads of troops, ammunition, and equipment.
35 aircraft made 71 trips on the 31st alone. 40 aircraft made 53 trips on the 1st of February. By the time the airlift wound down, Kanga Force had grown from 300 men to over 3,000. It was the largest airlift in Australian Army history up to that date. It was, in Pacific terms, the airlift that saved New Guinea.
The C-47s flew under fire for the first 36 hours of it, and not one of them turned back. Cut to the perimeter, mid-afternoon on the 31st. The 2/3 Independent Company was now in the line. The 2/3 went into the eastern sector beside the 2/5 on the slope facing the ridge from which O’kabe had launched his pre-dawn attack the previous day.
The 2/3 did not dig in conventionally. The 2/3 dug in the way commandos dug in, which meant they put their positions in the gullies and in the dead ground and on the back slopes. And they put their forward observation posts up in the trees, and they waited for the Japanese to come at them again. The Japanese came at them at 6:00 in the afternoon.
The Japanese came in column up the gully that ran below the 2/3 position. The 2/3 let them come in. The 2/3 let them come all the way in, deep into the gully between the dead ground walls where they could not see the men above them. Then the 2/3 opened fire from three sides at 20 m. The Japanese column did not get out of the gully. Cut to the eastern ridge at dusk on the 31st.
Okabe’s staff officer brought him the casualty figures from the day. The numbers were bad. The Japanese had lost over 600 men in the two assaults of the previous 48 hours. They had lost their forward mortar ammunition. They had lost three of their machine gun teams. They had lost the platoon that had been ambushed in the gully. They had not seriously dented the Australian perimeter at any point.
Okabe stood on the ridge. He looked down at the airstrip. He saw, even in the failing light, more aircraft coming in. He understood in that moment that he was going to lose this battle. He did not know it yet. He would not give the withdrawal order for another 4 days. He would order one more major assault on the 3rd of February.
And that assault would break against the 2/7 battalion at Crystal Creek and the 2/3 independent company on the eastern wire. And it would break the way the first assaults had broken. He would lose another 400 men. He would commit his reserves. They would not get through either. But on the evening of the 31st of January, watching the airstrip from the ridge above Wau, Major General Toru Okabe of the Imperial Japanese Army understood what was coming.
He could see it landing. He could see it forming up. He could see it walking out into the line. It was not stopping. Cut back to the airstrip. 6:00 in the evening on the 31st, Brigadier Murray Moten landed at Wau. He stepped off the side door of his C-47, walked across the gravel to a small group of officers standing at the edge of the runway, and took command of the brigade level operation.
Flay remained the Kanga Force commander on paper, but with three battalions on the ground, the operational lead had now shifted to Moughton. At 43, Brigadier Murray Moughton had already been a soldier for half his life. The First World War had taken him in as a young officer. The years between had built him into the kind of brigadier who took the 17th in 1941 and never had to raise his voice to keep it.
He looked around the perimeter. He looked at the men in it. He said one sentence, “We will counterattack.” Cut to the perimeter. Dawn on the 1st of February. The Australians attacked. Not everywhere. Not yet. But in selected sectors where Moughton had identified Japanese forward positions that could be taken without breaking the perimeter.
Companies of the 2/6 and 2/7 battalions, supported by 2/3 independent company patrols, went forward through the kunai grass and rolled over the Japanese front line. They took prisoners. They took ground. They took, for the first time in the battle, the initiative. The Japanese pulled back from the ridges immediately above the airstrip.
They pulled back to the spurs overlooking the Black Cat Track. They began to send messages through their wireless that the Wau attack was no longer viable. Cut to a C-47 pilot on his sixth round trip of the day on the 1st of February. On final approach to Wau at 4:00 in the afternoon. He had flown four trips on the 29th, five on the 31st, six already that day.
He had not slept in the last 72 hours longer than three hours at a stretch. He was running on coffee and amphetamine tablets and the willingness of his co-pilot to fly half of every leg while he rested against the bulkhead. He came over the saddle. He came down into the Bulolo Valley. He came over the threshold of the Wau strip at 140 knots.
He noticed something different. There was no tracer. There was no machine gun fire from the eastern ridge. There was no mortar. There was, for the first time in 3 days only the sound of his own engines and the steady rush of the gravel under his wheels as he taxied up the slope. He looked at his co-pilot. He did not have to say anything.
His co-pilot nodded. The C-47s had won. Cut to the airstrip a week later on the 7th of February 1943. The Japanese had withdrawn from the immediate front of the airfield on the 4th and were now retreating toward Mubo, the way they had come, harried by 2/3 independent company patrols all the way back along the Black Cat Track.
The Wau strip was quiet. Aircraft still landed and took off, but they did so under no fire. The cloud over the Owen Stanley Range came and went the way cloud always did in New Guinea. The pilots no longer paid it any particular attention. A young pilot of the 317th, who had been at Wau for only 4 days and had missed the worst of the airlift, brought his C-47 over the saddle in clear weather, dropped into the Bulolo Valley and lined up on the slope.
He landed without urgency. He taxied to the dispersal at his own pace. He shut the engines down for the first time in many days because nobody was telling him to keep them running. He stepped out of the side door onto the gravel and lit a cigarette. He stood in the early sun and looked across the airstrip.
The kunai grass on the eastern side was flattened in great brown patches where men had moved through it for days. There were broken weapons in the grass. There were Japanese helmets. There were spent cartridge cases. There were, in places he could not quite see from where he stood, the still unrecovered dead of Akemi’s two major assaults.
The kunai grass was empty of living men. The eastern ridge was empty of Japanese. The airstrip ran uphill into the mountainside, sloped at 10°, 3,600 ft long, gravel scraped flat in the 1930s by gold miners who had never imagined what it would be used for. A second C-47 came over the saddle behind him. He did not turn to look at it.
He smoked his cigarette. He thought about how he would never forget this place. He never did. Captain Wilford Sherlock of the 2/6 Battalion did not live to see the airlift succeed. His body was recovered from the slope above the Bulolo River after the battle and was buried with full military honors. His widow, Elaine, received his mention in dispatches some months later.
His name is recorded at the Australian War Memorial as one of the men who stand at Wandumi on the 28th and 29th of January, 1943, held the Japanese advance long enough for the C-47s to get through. He is sometimes called the savior of Wau. He would not have liked the phrase. He was a 34-year-old company commander who held a knoll for 36 hours with 70 men against an entire Japanese regiment because he understood what was behind him and he understood that if he did not
hold, the airfield would fall before reinforcements could land. He held. He died. The airfield did not fall. Lieutenant Colonel Norman Marlin Fleay handed command of the Wau garrison over to Brigadier Murray Moten on the 1st of February and resumed his role as Kanga Force Commander in a reduced capacity.
He had spent 10 months building a guerrilla force of three independent companies and a militia of pre-war gold miners and plantation managers and that force, in the end, was the force that bought the time for the 17th Brigade to land. Fleay’s name is less well remembered than it should be. He was the officer at the airfield on the morning of the 28th listening to a field telephone go dead who picked up the wireless and asked Port Moresby for every aircraft they had.
He got them. Brigadier Murray Moten commanded the 17th Brigade through the rest of the Salamaua campaign. He was a calm professional who never raised his voice and never let the situation become emotional. He never did say much about Wau. He did not have to. Major General Toru Okabe ordered the withdrawal of his detachment from Wau on the 4th of February, 1943.
He retreated along the Black Cat Track to Mubo having lost more than half his force in killed and wounded. He had not taken the airfield. He would not get another chance. The Japanese 51st Division, of which his detachment had been part, would be torn apart at the Battle of the Bismarck Sea less than a month later when an Allied air strike sank seven of the eight transports carrying its reinforcements to Lae.
The Japanese never recovered the initiative in New Guinea. The Wau airfield, which they had come within 50 m of taking, would be the high water mark of their advance. Major George Warfe of the 2/3 Australian Independent Company would lead his commandos through the Salamaua campaign over the next 8 months.
The 2/3 would be credited with killing 969 Japanese during that campaign and would suffer 65 killed and 119 wounded. By the end of the Wau Salamaua operation, only 34 men of the original 2/3 who had flown into Wau on the 31st of January were still on the company roll. The rest had been killed, wounded, or evacuated.
The 317th Troop Carrier Group, who had been in Australia for less than 2 weeks when the Wau airlift began, would receive the Distinguished Unit Citation of the United States Army Air Forces for their operations between the 30th of January and the 1st of February, 1943. They would become known throughout the Pacific Theater as the Jungle Skippers for their habit of skimming their C-47s through the mountain gaps and down the river valleys of New Guinea to deliver troops to forward strips that nobody else would
land on. They lost three aircraft over the war valley in the first three days of the airlift. They lost more later. They never refused a mission. The 2/5, 2/6, and 2/7 battalions of the 17th Brigade would fight their way north from Wau through the Salamaua campaign for the next 8 months. They would take Mubo.
They would take Komiatum. They would, in September of 1943, take Salamaua itself in conjunction with the landings at Lae. They would, by the end of the year, push the Japanese off the entire Huon Peninsula and open the door to the Allied advance up the New Guinea coast. All of it began at Wau.
All of it began on a knoll above Wandumi on the 28th of January when 70 men of A Company, 2/6 Battalion, fixed bayonets and charged a Japanese regiment to hold a track for 36 hours. All of it ran through a gravel airstrip sloped at 10° scraped flat by gold miners into which the C-47s of the 317th committed at 140 knots with bullet holes in their rudders and no go round.
All of it ended at 50 m from a runway where a line of Australian infantry and commandos stopped Major General Toru Okabe’s pre-dawn assault at point-blank range in the kunai grass. 50 m. That was the margin. 50 m of empty ground between Okabe and the airfield, between the Japanese advance and the collapse of the Allied position in southeastern New Guinea, between the future and the past.
The Australians held the 50 m. They held the wire. They held the strip. They held the line. And on a quiet morning a week later in the early sun, a young American pilot stood next to his C-47 at the edge of the Wau runway, smoked a cigarette, looked across the empty kunai grass on the eastern side of the strip, and tried to understand what had happened there.
He never quite did. None of them did. But, the airfield was still there. The men were still on the perimeter. The aircraft was still landing. And somewhere on the slope between Wandumi and the Bulolo River, in the long grass that had grown back over the events of the 29th of January, the body of Captain Wilfred Holden Sherlock lay in the ground he had given up his life to hold while the war moved on past him, north toward Salamaua, north toward Lae, north toward the end of a campaign that, at 4:00 in the morning on the 28th of January, 1943,
with 70 men on a knoll above a track he did not know was the only thing standing between an entire Japanese regiment and the Wewak airfield, he had begun.
