crash had been seen by the Australian troops at Wau and a rescue mission was successfully mounted, the surviving airmen then evacuated to Port Moresby. The Australians salvaged the aircraft’s .50 calibre machine guns and added them to the defences at the Wau airstrip. The remainder of the wreck was abandoned.
It was shortly after Dau’s crash-landing that the Japanese began to martial its forces to advance on Wau. This activity placed Kanga Force in a situation that was beyond its capabilities to manage, a fact that was quickly recognised by New Guinea Force Headquarters. Orders were issued to reinforce the beleaguered force.
The AIF’s 17th Brigade, veterans of the campaigns in the Middle East and Greece, were ordered to deploy to Wau to counter the Japanese advance. Time was of the essence, so to ensure the Brigade arrived in time to affect the course of the battle, it was decided they should be deployed by air from Port Moresby directly to Wau. The Japanese had considered that an air move was an option for the Allies, but believed that such a deployment was beyond their enemy’s capability. This assessment was incorrect, but only just.
The operational aim of the Allies New Guinea Command for the air deployment was to deliver the AIF’s 17th Brigade group of infantry and artillery soldiers with their equipment and supplies into Wau, and to evacuate the wounded to Port Moresby.3 However, due to competing priorities, only fourteen C-47 Dakota transport aircraft were allocated to the 17th Brigade’s task. As the load capacity of the C-47 Dakota was about twenty-seven men with their weapons and personal equipment, or 4500 kilograms of cargo, deploying a brigade of approximately 2000 men with fourteen aircraft was a major challenge.
Using a shuttle service between Port Moresby and Wau, it took almost three weeks to achieve the deployment. The operation was affected by adverse weather conditions over the Owen Stanleys, then on reaching the Wau valley, low cloud, Japanese fighter aircraft and ground fire were all factors that affected the deployment’s schedule. A number of Allied aircraft were lost, but most successfully made the hazardous journey. As each aircraft load of 17th Brigade elements landed at Wau, they were immediately deployed in various roles against the advancing Japanese. As the battle reached its climax and Japanese troops threatened the Wau airstrip, some aircraft were obliged to unload their troops directly into the firefight.
During the defence of Wau, the Black Cat Track became an important route for the 17th Brigade’s operations. Along the track and in the areas around it, numerous acts of desperation and courage characterised the Australian operations. One notable action involved the 2/6th Battalion’s A Company, led by Captain William (Bill) Sherlock. The 2/6th was the first major 17th Brigade unit to arrive at Wau, and soon after arriving the battalion established a blocking force at the Black Cat Mine. From that position a reconnaissance patrol was sent to a point lower down the Black Cat Track known as ‘House Copper’. From that location the patrol established that Japanese troops were deviating from the Black Cat Track at House Copper, and appeared to be heading toward Wau along a previously unknown track. When this information was received at Brigade Headquarters it was assumed that the Japanese the patrol had observed was a relatively small group. Acting on this assumption, A Company of the 2/6th Battalion was tasked with finding and destroying the Japanese group.
On the morning of 28 January, a few kilometres north of Wau, A Company made contact with the Japanese. Far from being a small group, however, the Japanese were at an estimated strength of around 2258 men, and they were indeed moving toward Wau. In spite of being heavily outnumbered, A Company engaged the enemy. Under Sherlock’s inspired leadership, the Australians held the Japanese at bay for the next thirty-six hours. During the course of this action, Sherlock and many of his men were killed.4 The delay they imposed on the Japanese force enabled the remainder of 17th Brigade to land at Wau, a pivotal achievement for the Australians’ successful defence of the village.5
Other Australians were to demonstrate similar desperation and bravery during the battle. In early February 1943, Lance Corporal Leo Lasgourgues mounted a personal attack on a Japanese machine gun position, killing the crew. He then employed the weapon on its erstwhile owners before being seriously wounded and evacuated. That same month, to the south of the Black Cat Track at a place called Crystal Creek, stretcher-bearer Corporal Leslie ‘Bull’ Allen rescued a number of wounded Australians under extremely hazardous conditions.6 Both Lasgourgues and Allen were awarded the Military Medal for their bravery.
Faced with the Australians’ determined defence, and almost completely devoid of supply support, the Japanese attack on Wau lost momentum. By mid-April the Australians had achieved the tactical advantage, and attacked back along the Black Cat Track. It took a further six months of hard fighting before a combined Australian and American force was finally able to capture Salamaua, on 11 September 1943.
When the tide of war finally moved away from Wau and Salamaua, the Black Cat Track was once again forgotten by the outside world. Renamed as Skin Diwai, or ‘War Track’, the track assumed a new significance as the main link to the coast for the local communities of Waipali, Godogasul and Mubo. However, the track’s next metamorphosis would challenge the understanding of even the most imaginative of its previous users. For one thing is certain: few of them would have thought of walking the Black Cat Track for recreational pleasure.
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1 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918.
2 Jamon Halvaksz, ‘Cannibalistic Imaginaries: Mining the Natural and Social Body in Papua New Guinea’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 335–59.
3 Phillip Bradley, The Battle for Wau: New Guinea’s Frontline 1942–1943, Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 212.
4 Sherlock was awarded with a Mention in Dispatches.
5 Bradley, The Battle for Wau.
6 Five months later, Allen was to gain further recognition for courage under fire. During the advance on Salamaua in an engagement on Mount Tambu, he rescued twelve American wounded. For this action the Americans awarded him the Silver Star for courage.
Chapter 2
A happy path to disaster
When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.1
It took around sixty-two years after the end of World War II for Australians to rekindle any interest in the Black Cat Track. The genesis of this occurred during the 1980s, when Australians began to take more interest in their nation’s military history. Initially, the focus was on ANZAC Day and Gallipoli, but gradually it developed, eventually including the New Guinea campaigns of World War II.
The Kokoda Track became the main focus for many younger Australians, who felt an almost spiritual need to walk that particular track’s entire length and witness the conditions under which the campaign had been fought. Kokoda walkers became so frequent that a major tourist industry developed around them, but in the process the authenticity of many of the track’s battlefields was eroded.
The Black Cat Track, on the other hand, was infrequently visited, and as a result the battlefields along the track had remained largely untouched since 1942. At various points along the track, unexploded ordnance, weapons and equipment, not to mention skeletal remains of unknown soldiers, are in evidence. The number of local people killed or injured by the flotsam and jetsam of war is unknown, but if the stories told to lone adventurer Shredder are true, there must be a few. Shredder walked the track in 2012, and while at the village of Skin Diwai he was shown a munitions dump, where hundreds of bullets, grenades and bombs lay in the jungle where they had been left during a World War II battle. Local people told him they gathered discarded mortar bombs to throw on the fire, which made an explosion, to celebrate Christmas.2 This ‘original’ state of the battlefields, plus the reputation of the track as a particularly
