On the swampy coast east of Kokoda, in the closing weeks of 1942 and the first days of 1943, a corduroy road of logs laid side by side across the swamp carried the wounded of the 2/7th Cavalry Regiment back from the Sanananda perimeter when no other path remained passable. That is according to the late Bob Flint of the 2/7th Cav, whose recollection in the Australian Official War History medical accounts describes a road that floated under 20 inches of monsoon rain in a single night, and yet held as the only line of evacuation for men who would otherwise have died in the field.
The Allied command, having pushed the Japanese back across the Owen Stanley Range through four months of jungle fighting, had few if any fresh troops to commit to the fortified Japanese coastal positions at Buna, Gona and Sanananda. The 2/7th Cavalry, a First World War hangover by 1942, reduced to signals and Bren-carrier reconnaissance, chained their carriers to trees at Popondetta airfield, flew in light, and walked the remaining miles to the divisional headquarters at Soputa.
Their first action came in late December 1942, at what the war diaries record as the James perimeter, where the men dug into trenches half-filled with water and were surrounded by Japanese troops who moved freely between fortifications. These were not the timber-revetted trenches of the Western Front, and the conditions sat closer to drowning than to dug-in defence.
By the first week of January 1943, the Japanese had broken north, and the perimeter held, leaving the 2/7th Cav with the work of bringing the dead and wounded back to headquarters at Soputa. Before the war, a rubber plantation had operated inland from the coast, and a corduroy road of logs laid side by side across the swampy ground had been built to serve it.
The plantation’s nuns, who taught at a nearby school, did not survive the Japanese invasion, and no record remains of what became of the European operators. The road, however, endured, almost certainly because the Japanese had used it themselves; it was that road the 2/7th Cav was sent down on the night of the deluge.
Flint described logs that floated under their feet as stretcher-bearers carried wounded men back to Soputa, the surface shifting with every step. His account is preserved in the official war histories as one of the few first-person testimonies from the medical recovery effort at Sanananda.
Without that road, access to the wounded would have taken days that men in the perimeter did not have, and one can rightly say timber saved lives in this campaign. The plantation road, built by civilian labour for the rubber trade a decade earlier, became the line of medical evacuation that held until the Americans moved up to relieve the exhausted Australian formations.
General George Vasey, commander of the 7th Division, recorded the American arrival in a single biblical reference at the close of a letter home. “The Americans, Hebrews 13:8,” Vasey wrote — the verse reading, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”
The original Vasey letter is held in the Manuscript Room of the National Library of Australia, where David Horner sourced it for his history of the New Guinea campaign, and Bob Flint’s account of the corduroy road is preserved alongside it in the Australian Official War History medical accounts — together, the documentary record of a campaign in which a plantation road of logs ran as the only practicable evacuation route through the Sanananda swamp.
