It is one of the paradoxes of our history that the battle for New Guinea between 1942 and 1945 – so much harder but so much more successful than Gallipoli – is so little studied or understood. It has made such a relatively shallow impression on our national consciousness, compared with Australia’s 1915 expedition to Turkey. The New Guinea campaign was, if not unique, certainly one of the most extraordinary conducted by any belligerents during World War II because, as Alan Powell notes, it ‘relied upon the muscle and sinew and bushcraft of the local people for success’.
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