Japanese ground crews, out of options and out of aircraft, sawed the engines off wrecked planes and stood them upright along the runway. The idea was desperate: make it look, from the air, as though intact fighters still lined the field. It did not work. By late 1944, American and Australian bombers had reduced Babo Airfield to a cratered wasteland on the southern shore of Maccluer Gulf, and no amount of improvised deception could change that. But the gesture captures something essential about this place. Babo was a dead end, the final stop on KLM's route through Dutch New Guinea before the Pacific War turned it into a battleground. And when the war arrived, it arrived with a totality that left the airfield's occupants nowhere to go. They stayed, surrounded by swamp and jungle and the wreckage of their own machines, until the emperor's surrender made staying unnecessary.
Before the bombs, before the revetments and the radar stations, Babo was simply the end of the line. The Dutch built the airfield in the late 1920s or 1930s on a low-lying stretch of swampy ground along the southern shore of Maccluer Gulf, a deep inlet that bites into the neck of the Bird's Head Peninsula. KLM used it as the final stop on their route through Dutch New Guinea, which meant that this remote, marshy clearing was, for a time, connected to Amsterdam by a chain of refueling stops that stretched halfway around the planet. It was an unlikely outpost of European aviation, a place where the ambitions of colonial air travel met the realities of equatorial geography. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War erupted in December 1941, the Royal Australian Air Force sent an engineering party to upgrade the strip for military use. The Dutch garrison of approximately 200 KNIL troops rushed to improve defenses and clear ground for a second runway. They were building against time, and time ran out.
The first Japanese attack came on December 30, 1941, just weeks after Pearl Harbor. Kawanishi H6K Mavis flying boats -- enormous, four-engined seaplanes with a wingspan wider than a B-17 -- struck the airfield and killed 3 people, wounding 14 more, including children. Three Lockheed Hudson bombers from RAAF No. 13 Squadron were dispatched to Babo to serve as improvised fighters against the flying boats, a role for which the twin-engined patrol bombers were poorly suited. It was a measure of desperation across the entire theater. On April 2, 1942, the Japanese 2nd Detachment landed at Babo and took the town. Most of the Dutch soldiers managed to escape to Australia, but the airfield now belonged to Japan. What followed was a transformation. Both the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy developed Babo into a major staging base for operations across the Vogelkop Peninsula, the Aru and Kai Islands to the south, and New Guinea to the east. A second hardtop runway was built, creating two strips of 4,530 and 2,660 feet. Naval construction crews carved out 15 bomber and 24 fighter revetments, with more under construction. For a time, Babo was a functioning hub of Japanese air power in the western Pacific.
The collapse came in stages. When American forces landed on the island of Biak in May 1944, the aerial units based at Babo were thrown into the fight. The Japanese Army's 24th Sentai lost 20 pilots and 40 aircraft in just thirty days of operations from the field. The scale of attrition was staggering -- more than one pilot and one plane per day, with no prospect of replacement. The Navy's 202nd Kokutai had been temporarily pulled from Babo to help defend Truk, the massive Japanese naval base in the Caroline Islands, but returned in June 1944 only to lose 12 more planes defending Biak before being disbanded entirely. These were not abstract losses. Each pilot who did not return from a sortie left an empty revetment and a maintenance crew with nothing to maintain. By mid-1944, the 5th Air Force's medium bombers and ground-attack aircraft had Babo within range, and the systematic destruction of the base began in earnest.
The Allied strategy for Babo was simple: destroy it from the air and move on. There was no need to land troops, no strategic reason to fight through the swamps of Maccluer Gulf to plant a flag on a ruined runway. Tons of American and Australian bombs cratered the strips. Parafrag bombs -- small fragmentation devices dropped by parachute to detonate at chest height -- shredded aircraft on the ground. The Japanese ground crews responded with what they had. They filled bomb craters with the hulks of destroyed planes. They sawed engines from wrecks and positioned them to simulate intact aircraft from the air. It was futile but determined, the work of men who understood their situation completely and chose to keep working anyway. By October 1944, Babo was neutralized. No Allied soldier ever set foot on the field to accept a surrender. The remaining Japanese garrison simply endured, isolated from resupply or rescue, occupying a demolished airfield on the edge of a swamp until the war ended in August 1945. Today, the airfield sits disused on its low-lying ground, the jungle slowly reclaiming what bombs and time have left behind.
Babo Airfield is located at approximately 2.55S, 133.42E on the southern shore of Maccluer Gulf (Teluk Berau) at the neck of the Bird's Head Peninsula in West Papua, Indonesia. The two WWII-era runways may still be partially visible from altitude, though jungle reclamation has obscured much of the site. The gulf itself is a distinctive geographic feature, a deep inlet clearly visible from higher altitudes. The nearest significant airport is Rendani Airport (WASR) at Manokwari, roughly 150 km to the east-northeast. Fly at 2,000-3,000 feet for the best perspective on the airfield's relationship to the gulf and the surrounding swamp terrain. Afternoon tropical convection is common.