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helpful book is on preventive medicine: Communicable Disease: Malaria, edited by Ebbe Curtis Hoff. There are seven other volumes in this sub-series that deal with medical problems other than malaria. I also used a book published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., in its United States Army in World War II series. It is coauthored by Mary Ellen Condon-Rall, titled The Medical Department: Medical Service in the War Against Japan. Chapter IV deals with jungle warfare. Three more publications were of enormous help. They are Condon-Rall’s “Allied Cooperation in Malaria Prevention and Control: The World War II Southwest Pacific Experience” (Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 46, October 1991, pp. 493-513), her “Malaria in the Southwest Pacific in World War II” (in Roy M. MacLeod, editor, The University of Sydney, Australia, Science and the Pacific War, Science and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-1945, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 2000), and her “The Army’s War against Malaria: Collaboration in Drug Research during World War II” (Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1, fall 1994, pp. 129-143).

Milner and Ham describe in detail the intelligence reports that said Japan was planning to invade New Guinea.

The early days of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) and Major General Basil Morris’ dismissal of the possibility of a Japanese overland invasion, and the subsequent invasion, are found in Alan Powell’s wonderful book The Third Force.

An especially gruesome piece of history is the story of Miss May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, two young Anglican sisters assigned to the Gona Mission, who fled the Yokoyama Advance Force on July 21, 1942. When hundreds of Japanese troops slid down ropes onto barges to be transported through the puzzle of reefs to shore, Hayman and Parkinson plunged deep into the jungle with only a compass. Father James Benson, who ran the mission at Gona, led them. For months he had urged the sisters to leave Papua along with the rest of the white population that had evacuated, but they had refused. “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” Father Benson prayed as they fled the Japanese.

Benson, Hayman, and Parkinson eluded the Japanese advance troops of the Tsukamoto Battalion until a native collaborator named Emboge from the Orokaivan people betrayed them near the village of Doboduru. The two sisters were taken to a plantation near the village of Buna, not far from the Japanese landing site, and were bayoneted to death. Mavis Parkinson was the first to go. A Japanese soldier forced her into an embrace. When she struggled to free herself, he dug his bayonet deep into her side. May Hayman, who held a towel over her eyes, was bayoneted in the throat as she listened to her friend die.

Emboge and his accomplices were later arrested and hanged.

“What else could we do?” Emboge pleaded. “The kiawa [white men] treated us badly before the war and they deserted the people when the Japanese landed at Buna.”

A sympathetic ANGAU officer witnessed the hanging. “I lay awake most of the night,” he wrote, “listening to the drums beating, and the wailing of the mourners…. I had seen death in various forms during the preceding twelve months, but nothing affected me as much as the hanging…. Perhaps it was the courage they displayed when the time came for them to die. Be that as it may, the punishment meted out to them was in accordance with their own tribal code of ‘an eye for an eye.’”

Arthur Duna’s quote is found in John Dadeno Waiko’s book, PNG: A History of Our Time. Duna’s account of the invasion is substantiated by a number of interviews that I conducted in Buna in 2005 and 2006. More information on the Japanese invasion can be found in Waiko’s “Damp Soil My Bed; Rotten Log My Pillow: A Villager’s Experience of the Japanese Invasion.”

Regarding the invasion from the Japanese perspective, I relied on a number of sources: Nankai Shitai, War Book of the 144th Regiment; Lost Troops; Southern Cross, and also a collection of ATIS documents at the National