Fifteen airstrips. Not one, not three, not even five - fifteen. On a flat stretch of coastal plain inland from Buna, American engineers and their Australian counterparts carved an aviation city out of the New Guinea jungle between late 1942 and early 1943, and when they left three years later, they abandoned over a thousand aircraft where they sat. The oil palms have reclaimed most of what the Seabees built. But the runways themselves still refuse to grow anything. The compacted earth and bitumen are too thoroughly packed, too finally finished. Seventy years on, you can still trace the scars from the air.
It started with a flight over flat ground. On 11 July 1942, a Royal Australian Air Force Catalina flying boat tracked low over the Dobodura plain, carrying six officers - three Australian, three American, including a single US Army engineer whose job it was to imagine what could be built down there. The Allies needed a northern airfield on New Guinea's coast in case Lae and Salamaua fell to Japanese advances. Two days earlier, the reconnaissance had been approved. Now, looking down at the expanse of grassy lowland behind the beachhead at Buna, the engineer saw what he needed: ground that was already level, already drained, already nearly a runway. The decision came quickly. Dobodura would be developed.
What rose from that plain over the next eighteen months has no easy equivalent elsewhere in the Pacific War. The United States Army Air Forces, working with Australian units, built fifteen separate landing grounds at Dobodura. Some were named for individuals, such as Kenney Airfield, honoring Fifth Air Force commander General George Kenney. Others were simply numbered, from Dobodura No. 1 through No. 15, or given local names - Raways, Horanda, Borio, Embi. The complex housed B-17s, B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells, B-26 Marauders, A-20 Havocs, P-38 Lightnings, P-40 Warhawks, P-47 Thunderbolts, and P-61 Black Widow night fighters. Bomb groups and fighter groups rotated through. Troop carriers staged from here. At peak operations, this was among the largest Allied airbases in the Southwest Pacific - a concrete, canvas, and corrugated-iron metropolis dropped into a landscape that, a year earlier, had been oil palm, kunai grass, and the scattered houses of the Orokaiva people.
The airmen who lived and died out of Dobodura flew missions that, by 1943 standards, bordered on routine horror. Low-level strafing runs against Japanese shipping. Skip-bombing of troop convoys. Ground attacks against positions at Lae, Rabaul, and the Bismarck Sea. The 3rd Bombardment Group lived here for nine months. The 49th Fighter Group, flying P-40s and then P-38s, stayed even longer. At Borio Airfield, a compound of US Army nurses served alongside the ground personnel - women who moved through the same humidity, the same malaria, the same drenching monsoon rain as the pilots they patched up when the planes came limping home. The distances were unforgiving. The weather was sometimes worse than the enemy. And the jungle, always, was waiting on the edge of the clearings.
When the war moved north in 1944 and 1945, Dobodura was left behind as quickly as it had been built. Fourteen of the fifteen airfields were abandoned. Only Kenney Airfield, No. 7, kept flying, and it does so today as Girua Airport, serving the nearby town of Popondetta. The aircraft that remained - over a thousand of them, ranging from wrecked bombers to parked-and-forgotten fighters - were mostly scrapped through the late 1940s and early 1950s for the aluminum. What survives is stranger: by the 1990s, the Oil Palm Industries Corporation had converted most of the old airfield land into plantations, lending money to local growers. The palms grow in neat rows now across what were once dispersal areas and taxiways. But the runways themselves remain bare - the compacted earth and bitumen too thoroughly compressed for roots to penetrate. Satellite imagery still shows fifteen pale scars against the green.
For the Orokaiva people who lived on this plain before 1942 and still live here now, the complex left a different kind of legacy - one that includes the war dead of both sides, the wrecks still hidden in the bush, and the scars in the landscape. For aviation historians and Pacific War researchers, Dobodura remains a puzzle worth walking. Which squadron flew from which strip? The records are often unclear. Red Dirt Research, Pacific Wrecks, and the World War II Database have spent years piecing together what happened where. For pilots overflying the area today, the lines are still visible from cruising altitude on a clear day - geometric ghosts in the palm plantations, a memory pressed so firmly into the ground that not even the oil palm can overwrite it.
Located at 8.78°S, 148.34°E on the northern coastal plain of Papua New Guinea, inland from Buna. Visible from cruising altitude as a pattern of pale linear scars in the oil palm plantations. Girua Airport (formerly Kenney Airfield, Dobodura No. 7) remains active today at 8.80°S, 148.31°E (ICAO: AYGR), serving Popondetta. Nearest major airport is Jacksons International at Port Moresby (AYPY) about 200nm southwest, or Nadzab Airport (AYNZ) at Lae, roughly 150nm northwest. Recommended viewing altitude 6,000-10,000 feet to see the full extent of the airfield complex pattern. Weather is tropical and often cloudy; morning and late afternoon offer the clearest views.