When the Pacific War came to Australia's doorstep in early 1942, the urgency of building new airfields was absolute. Works at Manbulloo were initially undertaken by the 43rd Engineer Regiment of the US Army beginning in April 1942. The Allied Works Council completed them, and the airfield was operational by 19 May 1942 — a runway of 1,981 metres, cut into the red soil of a million-hectare cattle property beside the Victoria Highway near Katherine. The speed was testament to the crisis: Japanese aircraft had bombed Darwin on 19 February 1942, and the threat of further attacks on northern Australia was real and immediate. The Northern Territory became a dispersal landscape for Allied air power — bombers and fighters spread across multiple strips to reduce vulnerability, each one a separate target rather than a single concentrated one.

The B-24 Liberators of the 529th and 531st Bombardment Squadrons — part of the 380th Bomb Group — arrived at Manbulloo in late April 1943, having just come from the United States. Their headquarters were at Fenton Airfield, further north, but the squadrons were dispersed precisely because the Territory was still receiving occasional Japanese air raids. From Manbulloo, the B-24 crews flew long missions against Japanese airfields, ground installations, shipping, and industries in the Netherlands East Indies and the Bismarck Archipelago. They dropped photoflash bombs for night reconnaissance. They dropped propaganda pamphlets. They disrupted enemy sea channels across a vast arc of the Pacific. The two squadrons flew these missions until late 1943, when both were reassigned to Long Airfield, and Manbulloo closed in 1944.

After the war, the airfield was abandoned. Today, from aerial photography, the second runway — oriented roughly north-northwest to south-southeast — is faintly visible. A few roads that may have been part of the original airfield infrastructure can be traced. No wartime buildings remain visible; no taxiways or hardstands survive. The main runway's geometry lives on as a mango grove access road, the most practical possible inheritance. The airfield's former operations centre and abattoir — physical survivors of the wartime installation — were listed on the Northern Territory Heritage Register on 12 June 2010. The property remains private, part of the million-hectare Manbulloo Station, accessible from the Victoria Highway.

There is something quintessentially Northern Territory about Manbulloo's transformation. A wartime facility repurposed first for cattle, then for mangoes; a runway that became a farm road; a heritage listing for an operations centre now surrounded by fruit trees. The landscape does not announce its history — it simply absorbs it. The Liberators that flew from this strip made attacks on targets more than a thousand kilometres away. The crews who flew those missions are long gone, as are the buildings they slept in. What remains is a faint line in the red earth and a grove of mango trees bearing fruit that is shipped to markets on three continents.