By June 1945 the war was clearly nearing its end, but no one on Bougainville was allowed to coast. Australian II Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Stanley Savige, had taken over from the Americans the previous November with orders from General Thomas Blamey to clear the Japanese from the island without committing major forces. Intelligence had under-counted the enemy by more than half - Savige's planners expected 17,500 defenders and there were closer to 40,000. In the northern sector, the 11th Brigade was trying to push the Japanese into the narrow Bonis Peninsula and pin them there. The Ratsua front had stalled. A company-sized amphibious landing to outflank the stubborn Japanese positions looked, on paper, like a neat way to unlock the advance.

Reality arrived with the tide. The Australians landed unopposed, which should have been a warning. Troops of the Japanese 87th Naval Garrison Force were close enough to move quickly, and once they did, the small beachhead began to shrink. Without mortars, without heavy machine guns, without the supplies that were still sitting out on the grounded landing craft, the Australians dug in where they could. Ammunition ran low. Water ran low. Evacuation began on the second day, and another landing craft ran aground on the way out, leaving more men stranded. Over the next two days, rescue attempts came in under fire and went out with fewer men than the planners had hoped. In the dark, early hours of 11 June, the last survivors were finally lifted off. Twenty-seven Australians were killed or missing in the operation; sixty-nine were wounded.

Porton Plantation was not decisive in any strategic sense. The war with Japan would be over in nine weeks, regardless of what happened on this stretch of Bougainville coast. But the battle mattered to the men who fought it, and to the families who received the telegrams afterward, and to the Australian command that had to reckon with what had gone wrong. The planning had rested on poor intelligence and thin resources. The Japanese were stronger than expected; the landing craft had not been matched to the reef; the supporting fire had not been enough. Australian forces shifted the main weight of their operations to the southern sector, pushing down the coastal plain toward Buin, and the northern drive into the Bonis Peninsula was effectively shelved.

The plantation is gone now, or at least returned to the green overgrowth that takes back everything in the tropics. Porton sits on the northwestern coast of Bougainville near the village of Soraken, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a place most of the world will never visit. The jetties the company landed near no longer function as jetties. The reef that held the boats fast is still there, of course, doing what reefs do. For Australia, Porton became a case study in how late-war operations could still cost lives unnecessarily, cited in postwar debates about whether the entire Bougainville campaign - fought by militia battalions on an island the Americans had already isolated - was worth what it asked of the men sent there. The answer those debates settle on is rarely a comforting one.

Flying the Bougainville coast today, you trace a shoreline of reefs, lagoons, and second-growth jungle that looks, from altitude, much as it must have looked to a pilot in 1945. The northern tip of the island curves toward Buka across a narrow passage; the Bonis Peninsula reaches out to the northwest like a pointing finger. Somewhere along that finger, below a low cloud deck and above a fringing reef, the Battle of Porton Plantation happened and then receded into the long quiet that follows small, bitter engagements. The men who came off that beach carried the weight of it home with them, as men always do.