The landings at Sansapor and its offshore islands -- Middleburg and nearby Amsterdam Island -- were part of Operation Typhoon, one of General Douglas MacArthur's final leapfrog moves along the New Guinea coast. The operation was designed to bypass Japanese strongholds and seize airfield sites that could extend Allied air cover westward toward the Philippines. Major General Franklin C. Sibert commanded the ground forces, but the real objective was the ground itself: flat, buildable terrain close enough to the front to matter. The entire operation was remarkably bloodless. Total Allied casualties from July 30 through August 31 were 14 killed, 35 wounded, and 9 injured. Japanese losses were estimated at 385 killed and 215 captured. It was not the kind of battle that makes headlines, but it was the kind that wins campaigns.

American engineers moved fast. The first runway -- a 5,400-foot fighter strip -- became operational on August 17, 1944, barely three weeks after the initial landing. A second runway followed on September 3, starting at 6,000 feet and quickly lengthened to 7,500. On a jungle island with no existing infrastructure, this was construction at wartime speed, driven by the knowledge that every day without operational runways was a day the Japanese still controlled the air approaches to the Philippines. The airfield was also known as Klenso Airfield or Toem Airfield, names that reflected the local geography rather than the island itself. Within days of the first runway opening, aircraft were arriving.

Two squadrons defined Middleburg's war. The 419th Night Fighter Squadron arrived on August 21, flying P-61 Black Widows -- the first American aircraft purpose-built for night combat. Twin-engine, twin-boom, painted flat black, the P-61 carried onboard radar and a crew of three: pilot, radar operator, and gunner. From Middleburg, they flew nocturnal patrols over the Vogelkop coast and surrounding waters, hunting Japanese aircraft that tried to move under cover of darkness. The 419th scored its first aerial victory on August 5, 1944, just before relocating to the island. Alongside the night fighters, the 67th Fighter Squadron of the 347th Fighter Group operated P-38 Lightnings from August 15 through February 1945. The twin-engine Lightning had the range to reach targets that shorter-legged fighters could not, and from Middleburg, that range now covered Japanese positions that had previously been untouchable. B-25 Mitchells based on Biak, hundreds of miles to the east, used Middleburg as a staging base, refueling before pressing bombing runs into northern Celebes.

The war moved on. MacArthur's forces reached the Philippines, and the island airstrips that had made the advance possible lost their reason for being. Middleburg Airfield was abandoned after the Japanese surrender, and the jungle began its patient reclamation. Today, the island has almost entirely returned to its natural state. The runways that P-61s and P-38s once taxied along are buried under decades of tropical growth. No control tower remains. No hangars, no fuel dumps, no revetments. The Su Island group sits quiet off the Vogelkop coast, visited occasionally by fishermen from Sansapor. What happened here in 1944 lasted less than a year, but it helped end a war. The forest, characteristically, has no opinion on the matter.