Qualla: Dobodura Airfield Complex

Dobodura Airfield Complex: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fifteen airstrips. Not one, not three, not even five - fifteen. On a flat stretch of coastal plain inland from Buna, American engineers and their Australian counterparts carved an aviation city out of the New Guinea jungle between late 1942 and early 1943, and when they left three years later, they abandoned over a thousand aircraft where they sat. The oil palms have reclaimed most of what the Seabees built. But the runways themselves still refuse to grow anything. The compacted earth and bitumen are too thoroughly packed, too finally finished. Seventy years on, you can still trace the scars from the air.

Dobodura Airfield Complex: The Catalina's Verdict

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It started with a flight over flat ground. On 11 July 1942, a Royal Australian Air Force Catalina flying boat tracked low over the Dobodura plain, carrying six officers - three Australian, three American, including a single US Army engineer whose job it was to imagine what could ...

Dobodura Airfield Complex: An Aviation City in the Jungle

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What rose from that plain over the next eighteen months has no easy equivalent elsewhere in the Pacific War. The United States Army Air Forces, working with Australian units, built fifteen separate landing grounds at Dobodura. Some were named for individuals, such as Kenney Airfi...

Dobodura Airfield Complex: The Crews and the Nurses

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The airmen who lived and died out of Dobodura flew missions that, by 1943 standards, bordered on routine horror. Low-level strafing runs against Japanese shipping. Skip-bombing of troop convoys. Ground attacks against positions at Lae, Rabaul, and the Bismarck Sea. The 3rd Bombar...

Dobodura Airfield Complex: A Thousand Wrecks and the Palms

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the war moved north in 1944 and 1945, Dobodura was left behind as quickly as it had been built. Fourteen of the fifteen airfields were abandoned. Only Kenney Airfield, No. 7, kept flying, and it does so today as Girua Airport, serving the nearby town of Popondetta. The aircr...

Dobodura Airfield Complex: Reading the Ground

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the Orokaiva people who lived on this plain before 1942 and still live here now, the complex left a different kind of legacy - one that includes the war dead of both sides, the wrecks still hidden in the bush, and the scars in the landscape. For aviation historians and Pacifi...