Kokoda Track

             New Guinea was the location of some very important battles in WW2 by the Australian Army to fight back the invasion of the Japanese Army.
             The main burden of the fight to force the Japanese to retreat over the Owen Stanley Ranges was left to the Australian Army.
             If the Japanese successfully crossed the mountain range and had successfully invaded Port Moresby they were only a very short distance away from Australia. The Allied Forces had to defeat them before this could happen. This job was placed in the hands of the Australian Army, and the story of the Kokoda Track was now in action.
             The Japanese had decided to invade Port Moresby with a fleet of ships, as Port Moresby if captured made Australia significantly easy to invade. This invasion was turned back by the Battle of the Coral Sea. As the Japanese first invasion of Port Moresby did not go through, the Japanese sent a fleet of 1,800 men to the Buna-Gona area on July 21, 1942, to determine whether or not the Kokoda Track was of any value to attack Port Moresby.
             Major-General Tomitaro Horii's troops were confronted with hardly any opposition from the Australian Maroubra Force (400 hundred men from the 39th Battalion and members of the Papuan Infantry) and in only one week the Japanese had captured the Kokoda Village. In Rabaul, the commander of the Japanese XVII Army, Lieutenant-General Harukichi Hyakutake, astounded by how quick and easily his troops had advanced he ordered Horii to make an attack on Port Moresby.
             Re-grouping at Kokoda, Horii's troops quickly grew to an astounding amount of 10,000 front-line troops, despite Allied air attacks. Aware of this quick increase by the Japanese Army, the Allies made certain changes in command. On August 12, Lieutenant-General Sydney F. Rowell replaced Major-General B. M. Morris as commander of all Australian and U.S. land forces in New Guinea. The Maroubra Force, aware that the Japanese were going to attack, set u
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Kokoda Track . (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 15:10, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/62091.html