The Japanese built the airfield under a roof of living palm trees. In November 1942, construction crews wired the tops of the palms together, forming a green canopy that hid the bulldozers clearing earth beneath. Allied reconnaissance flights over Munda Point saw only jungle. The trick worked for weeks. Only when the trunks were finally cut away to clear the approach did aerial photographs reveal the crushed coral strip that had been growing, invisibly, 150 miles northwest of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. By then the single 1,094-foot runway was nearly complete.
The deception fooled the cameras but not the coastwatchers. Danny Kennedy, a Solomon Islander living at Munda, had already seen the barge traffic and the crushed coral piles. He radioed the British Solomon Islands Defence Force in Honiara. From across the Blanche Channel on Rendova, another watcher named D.C. Horton kept eyes on the growing strip. By the time the Japanese opened the runway on 17 December 1942, the Allies already knew exactly what they were building. The airfield that was supposed to be a secret became one of the most heavily bombed patches of coral in the Solomons, pounded from the air for months before anyone set foot on its beach.
Munda was the reason the New Georgia campaign existed. Everything else - the landings on Rendova on 30 June 1943, the Drive on Munda Point, the grinding jungle fighting through July - was arranged around taking this runway. The Japanese counterattack in mid-July nearly stopped the American advance cold. It took the XIV Corps until 5 August to seize the high ground around the field after some of the most brutal close-quarters fighting in the Pacific. Nine days later, on 14 August 1943, Major Robert Owens of VMF-215 landed an F4U Corsair on the captured coral. A P-40 Warhawk from the 44th Fighter Squadron followed, and then a J2F Duck carrying Marine Brigadier General Francis P. Mulcahy. The runway the Japanese had hidden under palm fronds was now an American base.
Once they held it, the Americans transformed it. Seabees from the 47th and 63rd Naval Construction Battalions lengthened the strip, widened it, built taxiways and revetments. Within months, Munda was the busiest Allied airstrip in the Solomons. The roll call of squadrons that flew from it reads like a tour of Pacific war aviation: Marine Corps F4U Corsair squadrons VMF-213, VMF-214, VMF-215, VMF-221; Navy Hellcat squadrons VF-33 and VF-38; SBD Dauntlesses, TBF Avengers, PV-1 Venturas. The 5th and 307th Bombardment Groups of the Army Air Forces rotated through in early 1944. From Munda, pilots flew to bomb Bougainville and Rabaul, pushing the war steadily northward while the jungle began creeping back across the fringes of the field.
When the war moved on, the airstrip stayed. It became a modest commercial field, handling regional flights to Honiara and the outer provinces while Bibilo Hill and Kokengolo sprouted thick second growth that obscured the old battle lines. For seventy years it sat that way - a working airport in the shadow of a buried war. Then in 2015, New Zealand funded a major upgrade to turn Munda into an international airport. Before they could lengthen the strip, crews had to pull decades of unexploded ordnance out of the ground, rusted fragments of the bombs that both sides had dropped there. The runway was literally purged of its own history before it could be extended.
A new international terminal opened in 2023. The economic logic is precise: flights from Brisbane to Honiara once had to carry enough fuel to turn back to Australia, because Honiara was the only viable field for long-haul aircraft in the whole country. Now Munda serves as the alternate. That calculation - fuel loads, reserves, diversion airports - seems a long way from palm trees wired together to hide a runway. But the runway is the same piece of coral in the same stretch of jungle, and the geography that made it valuable in 1942 still makes it valuable today. It lies near the center of everything, in the middle of the island chain, which is why both the Japanese Empire and the New Zealand government wanted a place to land.
Munda International Airport (ICAO: AGGM, IATA: MUA) sits at 8.33 S, 157.26 E on the western coast of New Georgia. Field elevation is near sea level, with a single paved runway aligned roughly east-west. Approach from the water for best views of the old Japanese strip cut through coconut groves, with Kokengolo Hill and Bibilo Hill visible inland. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000-4,000 feet for historical context; the field is about 150 nm northwest of Honiara International (AGGH). Tropical weather patterns common.