The 50-Meter Margin: How 70 Australians Held Off a Japanese Regiment

At AM on January 28, 1943, Captain Wilford Sherlock stood on a knoll above the village of Wandumi in New Guinea’s Bulolo Valley, listening to the dark.

What he heard was not a patrol.

It was the entire Japanese 51st Division, 3,000 men strong, moving in column less than 200 yards from his front line.

Sherlock had 70 men.

Behind him, three miles of open ground led straight to the Wau airfield—the last Allied airstrip south of the Markham Valley.

He did not know it yet, but the fate of New Guinea hung on the next 36 hours.

Eight hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Fleay stood at the edge of the Wau runway, a field telephone pressed to his ear.

The valley was socked in.

Clouds buried the Owen Stanley Range all the way to the tree line.

No aircraft from Port Moresby could cross without flying blind into a mountain.

Fleay had spent the morning listening to a battle 11 kilometers east—a battle that had just gone silent.
“Get me anything you can get me,” he told his staff officer. “Anything that can land here.

Now.”
“Which aircraft?” the officer asked.
“All of them.”
The Wau strip was 3,600 feet of compacted river gravel, sloped uphill at 10 degrees, scraped flat by gold miners in the 1930s.

You did not land at Wau the way you landed anywhere else.

You committed at the bottom of the valley, dropped through cloud, lined up between two ridges of jungle, and held your power all the way to the top.

There was no go-around.

The mountain at the top ended the runway in a wall of green.

You committed or you crashed.

Back at Wandumi, by AM, Sherlock’s men were taking machine-gun fire from three directions.

The Japanese had not stumbled into them—they had come over a hidden trail from Mubo, a route the Australians did not know existed.

They had outflanked Sherlock before the first shot was fired.

Attached to Sherlock’s company was a platoon from the 2/5 Australian Independent Company—commandos, bearded and jungle-thin, who had been ambushing Japanese patrols for months.

They knew this country.

They took the flanks and held them.

A young lieutenant named Ted St.

John commanded the highest part of the knoll.

The Japanese hit him first.

Hundreds of them, coming up through the kunai grass in waves.

St.

John’s Bren gunners cut them down in rows.

More came.

The slope filled with bodies.

The bodies did not stop the Japanese.

They kept coming.

By midday, St.

John’s platoon had been pushed off the high ground.

Sherlock looked at the knoll.

He looked at his own position.

He looked at the airfield three miles behind him.

He said five words:
“2/6 Battalion, fix bayonets.”
They charged across the knoll and drove the Japanese off it.

They held it.

The Japanese counterattacked.

They held it again.

By evening, Sherlock’s mortar ammunition was gone.

Small arms ammunition was running low.

Japanese mortar rounds landed every forty seconds.

He sent a runner back to Wau with a message: “Enemy is regimental strength.

Repeat, regimental strength.

Hold the strip.”
That was the moment the staff at Wau understood: this was no raid.

This was Major General Toru Okabe’s entire detachment, and it was three miles from the only airfield the Allies still held.

At Port Moresby, Brigadier Murray Moten had two battalions ready to load—the 2/5 and 2/6—and a third mustering.

He had artillery, machine gunners, and everything else.

He had nowhere to send them.

The weather had closed the valley.

The Owen Stanley Range was a wall with clouds touching the ground.

Aircraft could not climb over, fly under, or go around.

Either the cloud lifted or the airlift did not happen.

It did not lift.

Not yet.

Back at Wandumi, after dark on the 28th, the Japanese probed Sherlock’s position by sound—firing bursts into the night and listening for the answering muzzle flash.

The 2/6 lay in their shallow pits and did not fire back.

They could not afford to.

They were down to the rounds in their magazines.

The dark was full of the noise of dying men.

The Japanese had left a great many wounded on the slope, and they were not coming back for them, and the Australians could not reach them.

Some of the wounded sang.

Some called for their mothers.

Some held grenades against their chests and pulled the pins.

At AM on the 29th, Fleay had been awake for forty-three hours.

He had positioned every man he had on the perimeter—the 2/5 Independent Company on the eastern approach, the 2/7 on the southern, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, gold miners and plantation managers who had been in this country for twenty years, on the high ground.

Around 300 men holding a perimeter against 3,000.

Fleay walked the line at first light.

He did not say much.

The commandos did not need much said.

They knew what was coming, and they knew the only thing they could do about it was hold the wire long enough for the C-47s to get through.

At AM, a wireless operator picked up the dispersal tower at Wards Drome.

The cloud had lifted.

The first C-47 came down through the gap in the cloud that everybody called the saddle, banked hard left into the Bulolo Valley, and saw the Wau strip three miles ahead, sloped uphill into the mountainside.

The pilot was twenty-six years old.

He had been in New Guinea for fourteen days.

He saw something else.

Tracer.

Japanese machine guns, dug in along the ridge that overlooked the eastern threshold—close enough to read the squadron markings on his fuselage.

The co-pilot keyed the intercom. “Skipper, they’re shooting at us.”
The pilot looked at the sloped runway.

He looked at the cloud closing behind him.

He looked at the thirty-two Australian infantrymen behind him with their rifles between their knees.

He said one word:
“Committed.”
He took the C-47 through the tracer at 140 knots, flared at the bottom of the slope, set the wheels on the gravel, and ran the aircraft up the gradient at full power.

He stopped near the top, turned around, and kept the engines running.

The aircraft would be back in the air in less than three minutes.

The infantry jumped out the side door.

An officer with a sketch map pointed at a position on the perimeter 600 meters away. “Go there.

Now, fight from there.” They went.

They did not eat.

They did not rest.

They formed up and walked straight into the fight.

That was the first C-47.

By , Sherlock had pulled his company back above the Bulolo River, reinforced during the night by C Company of the 2/5.

But the Japanese had not been slowed.

They were moving past him on both flanks, disappearing into the gullies to the west, heading for Wau.

He understood in that moment that the airfield would be taken if he did not do something.

He gathered his runners. “I am attempting to break through to the airfield to reorganize the defense.

Hold until I get there.”
Then Captain Wilford Sherlock picked up his rifle and led a small group forward through the bypassing Japanese.

He did not make it.

He was killed somewhere on the slope between Wandumi and the Bulolo River, somewhere in the kunai grass, on the morning of the 29th of January, 1943.

He was thirty-four years old.

He had been married less than six months.

His company recovered his name as the savior of Wau, because in the thirty-six hours Sherlock and his seventy men had held at Wandumi, the cloud had lifted, and the airfield was about to fill with Australian infantry.

Sherlock did not live to see it.

His men did.

At AM, the second C-47 was on final.

The third was on downwind.

The fourth was somewhere over the saddle dropping through cloud.

The fifth was rolling at Wards Drome.

The sixth was loading.

The pattern over the Wau strip became a continuous chain of aircraft—nose to tail, landing under the eastern ridge, taxiing up the slope at power, turning at the top, dropping troops, turning again, rolling down the slope using the gradient as a takeoff aid, going back over the saddle, reloading, and returning.

The pilots called it the Wau shuttle.

The air crews flew it for thirty-six hours straight.

Some flew six round trips in a day.

Some did not eat.

Some landed with bullet holes in the rudder, taxied to dispersal, looked at the damage, said something unprintable, and took off again.

Three aircraft were lost.

On the eastern perimeter at 10:00 AM, the 2/5 Independent Company commando holding the wire lay in a shallow scrape behind a fallen banyan trunk, watching through the leaves a column of Japanese infantry moving across his front at less than 400 yards.

The Japanese could see the C-47s landing.

They were trying to bring up a heavy machine gun to rake the runway.

The commando watched them set up the gun, feed the belt, range it on the runway threshold.

He turned to his Bren gunner. “Don’t let them fire on the strip.” The Bren gunner emptied a magazine into the machine gun crew at 400 yards through the leaves.

The Japanese gun did not fire on the strip.

And the C-47s kept coming in.

That was one moment.

There were hundreds like it on that perimeter that day.

At midday, Major General Toru Okabe stood on the eastern ridge above Wau, field glasses in hand.

He was a careful officer, forty-eight years old, a career infantryman who had walked his 3,000 men over the worst country in the Pacific to get within sight of the runway in less than three weeks.

He looked down at the strip.

He saw aircraft landing, taking off, on final, on downwind, taxiing, turning, loading, unloading, running up to power.

In the time it took him to count, he saw sixteen aircraft in the air over the valley.

He understood what was happening: the airfield he had been told he would seize before reinforcements could reach it was being reinforced in front of his eyes faster than he could attack it.

He gave the order for the major assault to be brought forward.

He would attack the strip the next morning before dawn with everything he had.

By mid-afternoon, the 2/7 Battalion was landing.

They had been mustered at Port Moresby in a rush, given two hours to draw weapons and ammunition, and put on the aircraft.

Their commanding officer had not slept.

Their company commanders had not been briefed.

Their men did not know where they were going until they saw the slope of the Wau strip coming up under the windows of the C-47, and somebody at the back of the cabin said, “That’s it.

That’s the place.” They disembarked under fire, formed up at the side of the runway, and a staff officer pointed them at the southern perimeter.

They moved out walking because there was no road, in fighting order because there was no time to do anything else.

They went into the line beside the 2/5 Independent Company at a position called Crystal Creek, and they were in contact with the enemy within forty minutes of stepping off the aircraft.

Fifty-seven C-47 loads landed that day.

By nightfall, Fleay had something close to a battalion of fresh infantry on the perimeter, plus his original commandos, plus the gunners of the 2/1 Field Regiment who had landed with their 25-pounders broken down into the cabins of the C-47s and were now reassembling them at the edge of the strip in the failing light.

He had what he needed to fight Okabe’s pre-dawn attack.

He did not know it was coming.

Okabe did not warn him.

At AM on the 30th of January, the Japanese assault began with a mortar barrage on the eastern perimeter.

It was not a probing barrage.

It was a full divisional bombardment.

The mortars fired for twelve minutes, putting rounds onto every position the Japanese had identified from the ridge during the previous day’s observation—onto the runway, onto the dispersal area where the C-47s had been parked overnight.

Then the infantry came.

They came in three columns, across the kunai grass at the run, firing on the move, screaming, bayonets fixed.

The first column hit the 2/5 Independent Company on the eastern wire.

The second hit the 2/7 Battalion at Crystal Creek.

The third came up the center and was met by the 2/6 Battalion, who had been holding the high ground in the middle of the perimeter for less than eighteen hours.

The Japanese got within fifty meters of the runway.

They were stopped there.

They were stopped by a line of Australian infantry firing rifles and Bren guns at point-blank range across the threshold of the easternmost C-47 dispersal pad.

They were stopped by the gunners of the 2/1 Field Regiment who depressed their 25-pounders almost to the horizontal and fired high explosive shells over open sights into the Japanese assault columns at 400 meters.

They were stopped by 2/5 Commandos who had not slept in three days and who were down to the magazines on their belts.

They were stopped at fifty meters.

They did not get any closer.

At AM, a C-47 on final approach could see the muzzle flashes from the perimeter through the gloom, tracer crossing over the runway, and on the eastern side of the strip what looked like a wave of Japanese infantry being driven back into the kunai grass by a line of men in slouch hats.

The pilot came down through the cloud at 140 knots, banked into the valley, lined up between the ridges, and put the wheels on the gravel while small arms fire ripped holes through the fabric of his rudder.

His co-pilot looked at him and said nothing.

There was nothing useful to say.

The aircraft taxied up the slope, turned at the top, and dropped a company of the 2/7 Battalion straight into the line.

It turned again, ran down the slope, and was airborne and gone before the company it had delivered had finished crossing the runway.

Three minutes on the ground.

Thirty-two more men in the fight.

By AM, the first major assault had broken on the line—broken at fifty meters from the runway, at the moment Okabe had needed it to succeed.

He had committed his best troops in the dawn attack.

They had not got through.

They now lay in the kunai grass in front of the wire, the wounded calling out, the dead being picked over by jungle birds.Okabe regrouped and prepared a second assault for that afternoon.

But the momentum had shifted.

The Australians counterattacked at dawn on February 1, rolling over Japanese forward positions and taking the initiative for the first time.On February 3, Okabe ordered one final major assault.

It broke against the 2/7 Battalion at Crystal Creek and the 2/3 Independent Company on the eastern wire, just as the earlier attacks had broken.

He lost another 400 men.

He had not taken the airfield.

On February 4, he ordered the withdrawal.The Wau airlift delivered 194 aircraft loads of troops, ammunition, and equipment—the largest airlift in Australian Army history to that date.

The 317th Troop Carrier Group received the Distinguished Unit Citation for their operations between January 30 and February 1, 1943.

They became known as the Jungle Skippers.Captain Wilford Sherlock did not live to see the airlift succeed.

His body was recovered after the battle and buried with full military honors.

His widow, Elaine, received his mention in dispatches some months later.

He is sometimes called the savior of Wau.

He would not have liked the phrase.

He was a thirty-four-year-old company commander who held a knoll for thirty-six hours with seventy men against an entire Japanese regiment because he understood what was behind him.He held.

He died.

The airfield did not fall.And on a quiet morning a week later, a young American pilot stood next to his C-47 at the edge of the Wau runway, smoked a cigarette, looked across the empty kunai grass on the eastern side of the strip, and tried to understand what had happened there.

He never quite did.

None of them did.But the airfield was still there.

The men were still on the perimeter.

The aircraft was still landing.What do you think was the most critical moment of the Battle of Wau?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.