In early 1942, the Japanese military was doing something no modern army had done before. In just 70 days, they swept through Southeast Asia and the Pacific like a tsunami, capturing territory faster than anyone thought possible. Malaya fell. Singapore surrendered with 85,000 Allied troops laying down their arms. The largest capitulation in British military history. The Dutch East Indies collapsed. Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma. One after another, the dominoes came down and caught in the middle of all of it were the

Australians. Nearly 22,000 of them became prisoners of war in the those opening months alone. Of those captured by the Japanese, only about 14,000 would survive the war. The rest would die in labor camps, on the Burma Railway, in places most people back home would never hear of. But the nightmare was just getting started. While Australian soldiers were being captured and killed across Southeast Asia, the bulk of Australia’s best fighting men were on the other side of the world. They were in North Africa

fighting Raml in the deserts of Tobrook and Elamagne. And when Prime Minister John Cirten demanded they come home to defend Australia, Winston Churchill refused. Churchill wanted those troops rerouted to Burma instead to protect British India. Curtain said no. He went against the most powerful leader in the British Empire and ordered the seventh division home. It was a decision that changed the course of the Pacific War and it marked the moment Australia stopped looking to London and started looking to Washington. In March 1942,

General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Melbourne after escaping the Philippines. He took command of the entire Southwest Pacific area. Almost a million American servicemen would eventually pass through Australia during the war. But in those early months, there was a problem. America did not have enough trained troops in the Pacific yet. The forces that were arriving had never seen jungle combat, had never fought the Japanese, and had no idea what was waiting for them. So for the first 18 months of the Pacific

War, it was the Australians who carried the fight. And no fight was more brutal than what happened on the Kakakota track. If you enjoy military history like this and want more stories that rarely get told, please consider subscribe. I cover moments like this every week. In July 1942, Japanese forces landed at Buuna and Gona on the northern coast of Papa New Guinea. Their mission was to march overland through the Owen Stanley Mountain Range and capture Port Moresby on the southern coast. If they succeeded, they would

have airfields capable of bombing northern Australia and cutting the supply line between Australia and the United States. The only thing standing between the Japanese and Port Moresby was a muddy foot trail through some of the most unforgiving terrain on Earth. The Kakakota track cut through 96 km of dense jungle across mountain passes that climbed to nearly 2,000 m through valleys choked with mud and monsoon rain. There were no roads, no vehicles. Everything, weapons, ammunition, food, wounded soldiers had to be carried by

hand. When the Japanese landed with over 4,000 troops, the Australians had roughly 420 men scattered along the track. militia soldiers, many of them teenagers, poorly equipped and undertrained. They were outnumbered 10 to1. What followed was a fighting retreat that would become one of Australia’s defining military moments. For months, the Australians fell back through the mountains, fighting at Kakakota Village, at Esarava, at Eora Creek, at Brigade Hill. They lost ground constantly, but they never broke. They

made the Japanese pay for every meter of jungle. And then something shifted. Reinforcements arrived. The veteran 7th division, the same troops Curtain had pulled back from the Middle East, moved into the fight. At the same time, the Japanese supply lines collapsed. Under the strain of the terrain they had been marching through. By late September, just 48 km from Port Moresby, the Japanese advance stalled. Then they were ordered to withdraw partly because of what was happening at Guadal Canal and partly because of what happened at

Mil Bay. The Battle of Mil Bay is one of the most significant engagements you’ve probably never heard of. In late August 1942, Japanese Marines landed at Mil Bay on the far eastern tip of Papa New Guinea. They expected to find a few hundred defenders, maybe some engineers. What they found instead were nearly 9,000 Allied troops, the vast majority of them Australian, including veteran brigades from the Seventh Division. Two squadrons of RAAF Kittyhawk fighters were based right there at the airirst

strips the Japanese had come to capture. The Japanese had brought light tanks, the same ones they had used to terrify defenders across Malaya. They launched night assaults through the swamps and the coconut plantations. The fighting was close. It was vicious. And the conditions were among the worst of the entire war. Torrential rain, kneedeep mud, malariainfested swamps. But this time, the Australians did not retreat. The RAAF destroyed Japanese landing craft and strafed enemy positions from treetop level. The veteran infantry

pushed the Marines back toward their beach head, meter by agonizing meter. Within 13 days, the Japanese evacuated. Of the 2,800 who landed, only about 1,300 made it off the island alive. It was the first time in the entire Pacific War that Japanese forces had been decisively defeated on land. Field Marshall Sir William Slim, the British commander fighting the Japanese in Burma, later credited the Australians at Mil Bay with shattering the myth of Japanese invincibility that had paralyzed Allied forces for months.

The news reached his men in Burma and gave them something they desperately needed. Proof that the Japanese could be beaten. Now, compare that to what was happening with the American forces at the same time. When MacArthur sent the US 32nd Infantry Division to attack the Japanese beach heads at Buuna on the northern coast of Papwa, the results were catastrophic. The 32nd had never seen combat. They had no jungle training. Their officers were out of their depth. Soldiers were found eating meals when they should have been on the

firing line. Instances of complete paralysis under fire were documented. MacArthur, who never visited the front lines in Papua, became furious. He summoned Lieutenant General Robert Eikberger and gave him what might be the most famous order of the Pacific War. Take Buna or don’t come back alive. Even after Eiklberger took command and shook up the leadership, the Americans struggled. It was not until Australian troops were brought in as shock troops, leading the most dangerous assaults and clearing the toughest Japanese positions

that the deadlock at Buuna finally broke. The Australian 7th Division took Gona. The Australians and Americans together eventually took Sanananda. The fighting killed approximately 1,300 Australians, 1,000 Americans, and 6,000 Japanese. The lessons were clear. The Australians had learned jungle warfare the hard way on the Kakakota track, and they had adapted. The Americans, for all their resources, were months behind on that learning curve. But the conventional forces were only part of the story. While the main army fought

its way across New Guinea, a different kind of Australian soldier was waging a shadow war across the Pacific. On the island of Teeour, about 270 men of the two second independent company found themselves behind enemy lines after the Japanese invaded in February 1942. The rest of Australia’s forces on the island were killed or captured. The men of the two second independent company were listed as listed as missing presumed dead. They were very much alive. Cut off from all communication with Australia,

these commandos retreated into the mountains of Portuguese te-our and began waging a guerilla campaign that would last almost a year. They ambushed Japanese patrols. They destroyed supply depots. They made the Japanese so paranoid that the occupation force eventually swelled to more than 9,000 troops, over nine battalions, all tied down by fewer than 400 Australians. And the way they reconnected with home is one of the great stories of the war. A signalman named Max Loveless built a radio transmitter out of scraps, parts

cannibalized from broken equipment and pieces stolen on night raids into enemy territory. He assembled it on the back of a 4gallon kerosene tin. They nicknamed it Winnie the War winner after Churchill. In April 1942, Winnie crackled to life and Darwin picked up the signal. The two second independent company was alive fighting and needed supplies. The Royal Australian Navy began running supply ships to Teeour, dodging Japanese patrols in some of the most dangerous waters in the Pacific. Prime Minister Curtain himself

highlighted the importance of these men, noting that while the spotlight was on New Guinea, the guerilla fighters on Teeour were tying down Japanese forces that could have made a devastating difference on the co track. And then there was Z special unit. If the two second independent company on t-our wrote the playbook for Australian guerilla warfare, Z special unit turned it into an art form. Formed in 1942 under the services reconnaissance department, Z special unit conducted 81 covert operations across the southwest

Pacific. They parachuted behind Japanese lines in Borneo. They were inserted by submarine into the Dutch East Indies. They raised guerilla armies from indigenous populations and trained them to fight the Japanese. Their most famous operation was Jwick. In September 1943, 14 commandos, mostly Australian with a few British members, sailed nearly 4,000 km from Western Australia to the doorstep of Japanese occupied Singapore. They traveled in a captured Japanese fishing boat called the crate, disguised

as local fishermen. When they reached Singapore’s waters, six men paddled folding canoes into Keell Harbor under cover of darkness and attached limpit mines to Japanese merchant ships. The mines detonated. Several ships were sunk or badly damaged. All 14 commandos escaped without a single casualty and sailed the crate all the way back to Australia. The Japanese were so stunned they refused to believe an external military force could have pulled it off. Instead, they blamed the local population. Hundreds of Chinese and

Malay civilians were arrested, tortured, and many were executed in what became known as the double tenth incident. The allies never claimed responsibility during the war to protect the secret. In Borneo, Operation Semut saw Australian operatives parachute into Sarowak behind Japanese lines and negotiate alliances with indigenous DIAK communities. These negotiations required diplomacy, cultural sensitivity, and no small amount of the local rice wine called Boro. The DAK warriors became a formidable guerilla force ambushing

Japanese patrols and gathering intelligence that proved critical to the larger Australian campaign in Borneo, a campaign that involved 75,000 Australian troops, but is barely remembered today. By 1943, the tide in the Pacific had turned. And one of the biggest reasons it turned was that the Australians had done something nobody else in the Allied forces had managed to do. They had fought the Japanese in the jungle on their terms in the worst conditions imaginable and won. The Australian army established a jungle warfare training

center at Kungra in Queensland by the end of 1942 directly because of the lessons learned on the Kakakota track. Every soldier headed for the front passed through Kungra where they learned jungle survival, close quarters combat, and the patrolling techniques that had been forged in the mountains of Papa New Guinea. These lessons did not just benefit the Australians. The techniques and doctrines developed from Kota, Milbay, and Te-our were studied and adopted across the theater. The experience of the 32nd division at Buna

showed exactly what happened when troops went into the jungle without this training. General Douglas MacArthur, who had initially criticized the Australians and praised his own forces, quietly began relying on Australian expertise for the hardest fights. Admiral William Hollyy, commanding US naval forces in the South Pacific, credited the Australian coast watchers with saving Guadal Canal. and Guadal Canal, he said, saved the Pacific. These were the men of M Special unit, plantation managers, government officials, and military

personnel who stayed behind on Pacific islands after the Japanese invasion, watching enemy movements and radioing intelligence back to Allied command, often at the cost of their lives. By mid 1944, as more American troops and resources flooded into the into the theater, the Australians were gradually shifted to secondary fronts. MacArthur wanted American troops to lead the drive toward the Philippines, which had always been his personal priority. The Australians continued fighting in New Guinea, in Bugganville, in Borneo, but

the spotlight moved on. That is part of why this story is not told as often as it should be. Nearly 1 million Australians served during the Second World War from a country of just 7 million people. That is roughly 10% of the entire population in uniform. They fought across North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific. They inflicted on the Japanese their first defeat on land. They waged guerilla campaigns that tied down forces 10 times their size. They paddled canoes into enemy harbors and came home alive. The

next time someone talks about the Pacific War and only mentions the Americans and the Marines, remember the Australians on the Cota track fighting their way through mud and malaria with ammunition running low and no reinforcements in sight. Remember the commandos on building radios out of kerosene tins and refusing to surrender. remember 14 men in a fishing boat called the crate, sailing into the most fortified harbor in Southeast Asia with limpit mines and folding canoes. Some of us may forget that of all the allies, it

was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the Japanese army. If you’re finding this kind of military history valuable, hit subscribe. I cover the untold stories of warfare every week.