Australians hold the Kokoda Track and turn back Japan's advance on Port Moresby
A jungle fighting retreat over the Owen Stanley Range becomes Australia's defining WWII campaign
Quick facts
- Location
- Owen Stanley Range, Papua New Guinea
- Dates
- July 21 to November 16, 1942
- Japanese commander
- Major General Tomitaro Horii
- Australian deaths
- About 625 killed, 1,600 wounded
- Result
- Japanese advance stopped; track retaken by Australian forces
What happened
Japan's South Seas Detachment under Major General Tomitaro Horii landed near Gona and Buna on Papua's north coast on July 21, 1942, intending to cross the Owen Stanley Range on the Kokoda Track and seize Port Moresby, cutting the supply line between Australia and the United States. Australian militia and later Australian Imperial Force troops fought a fighting withdrawal along the single-file jungle track, trading ground for time against a numerically superior Japanese force in some of the harshest terrain of the war, mud, disease, and near-vertical ridgelines. The Japanese reached Ioribaiwa Ridge, about 25 miles from Port Moresby, by mid-September before the loss of Japanese troops at Guadalcanal forced a diversion of resources and a Japanese withdrawal. Australian forces retook Kokoda village on November 2 and cleared the track by November 16.
Why it matters
Kokoda stopped the only serious Japanese attempt to take Port Moresby by land, protecting the staging base the Allies needed for the later New Guinea and Philippines campaigns, and it remains, for Australia, one of the war's most symbolically important campaigns precisely because it was fought defending Australian territory itself. Roughly 625 Australians died on the track and more than 1,600 were wounded, with sickness casualties exceeding 4,000.
How we know
The Australian War Memorial's collection and encyclopedia entries document the campaign timeline and casualty figures from official unit war diaries.
Sources
- Australian War Memorial. Kokoda · Reputable sourceawm.gov.au · The domain "awm.gov.au" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Australian War Memorial. Kokoda Trail Campaign · Reputable sourceawm.gov.au · The domain "awm.gov.au" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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