The photograph is famous now, though Gordon Short, the man who took it in July 1943, could not have known how famous it would become. In the frame, an Australian soldier carries a wounded American down the blasted jungle slope of Mount Tambu. His name was Leslie "Bull" Allen, a stretcher bearer with the 2/5th Infantry Battalion, and on 30 July he went back twelve times into fire that had just broken an American company-level assault, picking up twelve wounded US soldiers and carrying them out alive. The United States awarded him the Silver Star. Mount Tambu itself was a series of razorback jungle ridges, the highest feature between Mubo and Salamaua, and for five weeks in the southern winter of 1943, it chewed up every frontal attack the Allies could throw at it.
By mid-July 1943, the Allies had been grinding northeast from Wau for six months. The Japanese attack on Wau had been stopped in late January, and the Australian 17th Brigade under Brigadier Murray Moten had followed the retreating enemy forward through Mubo and Lababia Ridge. Mount Tambu lay next. It was not a single peak. It was a series of steep razorback ridges covered in dense jungle, about six miles from Salamaua, and it commanded the last defensible ground the Japanese still held south of the town. Around 700 Japanese troops of the 66th Infantry Regiment held the mountain under Lieutenant Colonel Fukuzo Kimura and Major Sakai Sugiyama. Moten's orders were to pin them down. The larger operation, a seaborne landing near Lae and an airborne drop at Nadzab, was still weeks away, and the whole point of pressing Salamaua was to keep Japanese reinforcements from reaching Lae when the main blow came.
The 2/5th Infantry Battalion began the assault on 16 July 1943, pushing onto the southern slopes of Mount Tambu and holding part of them by nightfall. The Japanese response came at once. Eight separate counter-attacks rolled in through the darkness before dawn. The Australians held. They lost 39 men, 14 of them killed. The Japanese lost around 350. The cost on both sides, measured against the yard or two of ridge in question, was as bad as anything in the New Guinea campaign. Shortly afterward, Kimura's III Battalion of the 66th arrived to reinforce the position; the Japanese high command had decided Tambu had to be held. On 24 July the 2/5th tried again, this time pushing across a steep ravine toward the summit. A small group reached the top. They were driven off. The frontal approach was not going to work.
On 28 July, about 400 men from the 1st Battalion, 162nd Infantry Regiment, US troops who had landed at Nassau Bay earlier in the month, reached Mount Tambu and relieved some of the Australian forward positions. Australian mortar crews and stretcher bearers stayed in the line to support them. On 30 July the Americans tried a company-level uphill assault. It failed, and the slope below the Japanese position filled with wounded. Corporal Leslie Allen, a stretcher bearer from the Australian 2/5th, walked into the fire. He came back with one man, and went back up. Again. And again. Twelve times. When the fight paused, twelve wounded Americans were alive because one unarmed Australian had kept climbing a hill while Japanese rifles worked over the ground he was crossing. He was awarded the US Silver Star. Gordon Short's photograph of Allen carrying one of those soldiers down the slope became one of the defining images of the New Guinea fighting.
Brigadier Moten had seen enough frontal assaults. He changed his approach. The Japanese on Mount Tambu were supplied along the Komiatum Track from the north; if he could cut that track, the mountain would be surrounded rather than stormed. On 16 August 1943, the 2/6th Infantry Battalion seized the southern part of Komiatum Ridge. The 2/5th poured heavy machine-gun fire into the Japanese flanks from their established positions on Tambu. The Militia 42nd Battalion added small arms fire from Davidson Ridge to the other side. Japanese counter-attacks tried to reopen the supply line and failed. With encirclement looming and the food and ammunition stopped, the defenders pulled off Mount Tambu. The position that had survived five weeks of direct assault had been taken by maneuver in a day.
The fighting did not end at Tambu. The Allied advance on Salamaua continued through late August, with the crossing of the Francisco River and the taking of Charlie Hill in the first week of September. Then the whole strategic shape of the campaign clicked into place. Allied forces landed near Lae by sea and dropped paratroopers at Nadzab. The Japanese, understanding that Lae mattered more, pulled 5,000 to 6,000 troops away from Salamaua and shipped them north. Salamaua, empty and heavily bombed, fell on 11 September to Australian troops of the 15th and 29th Brigades after a brief rearguard action. The Salamaua-Lae campaign, of which Mount Tambu was one phase, cost the Australians 343 killed and 1,083 wounded. The Japanese suffered 8,100 casualties, 2,722 of them killed. The photograph of Leslie Allen on the slope remains. The razorback ridges are there still, under the same jungle, on the same map, about six miles from a town the Japanese abandoned.
Located at 7.15 degrees South, 147.03 degrees East, a series of razorback ridges rising above the jungle about six miles inland from Salamaua in Morobe Province. Mount Tambu is the highest feature on the route between Mubo and Salamaua. The surrounding terrain is steep, heavily vegetated, and cut by deep ravines; this is the core of the 1943 Salamaua-Lae battle country. Nearest airfield is Lae Nadzab (AYNZ), about 40 nautical miles northwest. Morning VFR operations are strongly preferred; afternoon convective activity over the Huon coast and the Owen Stanley foothills produces heavy rain and turbulence. From altitude, the razorback spine of Tambu stands out against the coastal plain as a sharp, dark green ridge running roughly parallel to the shore.