Fifty-two men held Ambush Knoll. That was the number the Australian 2/3rd Independent Company counted when the Japanese counterattacks started rolling in, and it was the same number three days and four nights later when the attacks finally stopped. The knoll controlled Bobdubi Ridge, which controlled the supply tracks to Mubo and Salamaua, which controlled, in a way no one at the time could quite see, the timing of the larger war moving up the New Guinea coast. The whole point of fighting here was to make the Japanese look at this jungle instead of somewhere else.
In late January 1943, Australian defenders had broken a Japanese thrust at the Wau airfield, turning back the last serious attempt to take Port Moresby. Brigadier Murray Moten's 17th Brigade pursued the retreating enemy into the jungles around Mubo. While the main force pushed frontally, a smaller group had other work to do. Major George Warfe's 2/3rd Independent Company — commandos trained for reconnaissance and raiding — slipped around the Japanese flank to a place called Missim, from where they began harassing operations along the Komiatum Track. They were the noise-makers, the burr under the saddle, meant to keep Lieutenant General Hidemitsu Nakano's 51st Division looking the wrong way while the rest of the Allied plan came together.
The second phase of the fighting, from late June into August 1943, gave the world a roll call of small, strange names. Australian soldiers who took the positions did the naming, and the names stuck. "Old Vickers" marked a captured Japanese machine-gun post. "Timbered Knoll" described the topography in three syllables. "The Coconuts" needed no explanation to anyone who had seen the shattered palm trunks. The inexperienced 58th/59th Infantry Battalion opened the assault in late June. The fighting that followed was hand-to-hand in places, artillery-supported in others, and almost entirely fought in terrain so broken that a company could be cut off by a hundred meters of ridgeline. Japanese reinforcements arrived piecemeal: first about 200 men from the 66th Infantry Regiment, then a battalion of the 80th hurried up from Lae.
Early in July, the 2/3rd Independent Company took Ambush Knoll. The feature controlled Bobdubi Ridge, and by holding it the Australians threatened the Japanese supply lines running to Mubo and Salamaua. That made retaking it a priority the Japanese could not set aside. Counterattacks came over three days and four nights — attacks by night, more attacks by day, the tempo deliberately chosen to break a small garrison through exhaustion alone. The platoon on the knoll numbered 52 men. They held it. Two days after that fight ended, the 2/6th Infantry stormed Komiatum Ridge with two companies after a heavy artillery preparation, and the Japanese on Mount Tambu suddenly found their own supply routes cut. The ambush had worked on a scale the men who fought it could scarcely have imagined.
On 17 August, the 2/3rd secured the junction of the Bobdubi-Salamaua Track and held it through two more days of heavy counterattacks before the Japanese withdrew. Salamaua fell on 11 September. None of this had been the actual Allied objective. The objective was Lae, 20 miles to the north, which the Allies took with a combined seaborne landing and the airborne drop at Nadzab while the Japanese were still pouring reinforcements south toward the diversion. The Battle of Bobdubi, in the end, was a piece of theatrical misdirection fought on a scale of men and weeks rather than props and minutes. The Japanese moved 5,000 to 6,000 troops into the Salamaua sector from elsewhere in New Guinea — troops who were not at Lae when the Allies arrived.
The country around Salamaua is steep, wet, and mostly uninhabited. Bobdubi Ridge, Ambush Knoll, and the tracks the Australians cut or followed have long since been reclaimed by the forest that grew them. Local villagers in the Morobe Province know the sites and will guide visitors who ask. The Australian battle honours "Bobdubi I" and "Bobdubi II" were gazetted after the war and are still carried on regimental colours in cities thousands of kilometers away. For the soldiers who fought there, names like Old Vickers and the Coconuts were never exotic. They were shorthand for home, or for where you last saw a friend.
Located near 5.50 S, 141.00 E in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea, inland from Salamaua on the Huon Gulf. The terrain is steep jungle-clad ridgeline; flying at 4,000 to 6,000 feet AGL gives context for the surrounding Salamaua-Lae theater. Nearby airports: Lae/Nadzab (LAE/AYNZ), about 40 km north, was itself seized in the airborne operation of September 1943. Port Moresby (POM/AYPY) lies across the Owen Stanley Range to the south. Morning flying is essential; orographic cloud builds rapidly over the ridges by midday.