A Japanese prisoner captured near Nauro on the
Kokoda Track in October 1942. This soldier was
suffering from starvation, like many Japanese
soldiers during the fighting on the Kokoda Track
and at the beachheads.

[AWM 026824]

There is nothing to eat. Everybody is in a weak and staggering state … Without food, having become terribly thin and emaciated, the appearance of our fellow soldiers does not bear reflection. How could the people at home understand this state of affairs, it must be seen to be believed.

[The Japanese medical officer who wrote these words in his diary on 27 November 1942 was killed near Sanananda on 30 November. According to his diary he had only arrived in New Guinea a few days earlier, on 21 November 1942. Extracts from the diary of a naval medical officer – Documents captured 3.12.42. Australian War Memorial, AWM54 411/3/12]

Both Allied and Japanese troops suffered from the difficulties of maintaining sufficient food and medical supplies in the forward area. Papuans employed to carry supplies over jungle tracks could not deliver enough to sustain all of the troops; bad weather often prevented aircraft from dropping supplies or supplies fell into the jungle and were lost; and along the coast, supply could be sunk. Men on both sides often were forced to exist on what they could scrounge.

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Translation of a captured
Japanese document taken at
Keppel Point on 5 September
1942.

[AWM 54 423/4/34]

The problem was much worse for the Japanese, whose supply systems failed almost completely. By December 1942, the Allies had succeeded in blocking supplies to the Japanese by patrolling the coastlines and sinking transport ships, and by bombing and strafing their supply dumps and supply routes. They ended up with virtually no supplies getting through.

On 17 January 1943, after discovering that the Japanese had abandoned the road-blocks they had set up on the Sanananda Track, the last area on the beachheads to fall, Australian and American troops advanced to ‘mop up’. Many remaining Japanese, exhausted and starving, were too weak to resist. The Allies came across an enemy field hospital and found a scene almost beyond belief:

… the scene was a grisly one. Sick and wounded were scattered through the area, a large number of them in the last stages of starvation. There were many unburied dead, and … 'several skeletons walking around'. There was evidence too that some of the enemy had been practising cannibalism. Even in this extremity the Japanese fought back. Twenty were killed in the hospital area resisting capture; sixty-nine others, too helpless to resist, were taken prisoner.

[Samuel Milner, Victory in Papua, Washington, 1957, p.363]