Qualla: Wards Airfield

Wards Airfield: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kumuni Avenue in Waigani looks like any other arterial road in Port Moresby - embassies on one side, ministries on the other, the Chinese Embassy presiding over a busy intersection. Drive it slowly and you can feel the road is unusually flat and straight. That is because it was the main runway of Wards Airfield, and in 1943 it was the busiest aerodrome in the entire Southern Hemisphere. C-47 Skytrains stacked over this strip by the hundred. B-24 Liberators took off fully fueled for strikes on Japanese positions north of the Owen Stanley Range. None of that is visible now. Almost all of it is still there.

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Wards Airfield: A Colonel Who Never Saw the Strip

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The airfield was named for Lieutenant Colonel K. H. Ward of the Australian Army, who helped plan its construction. He did not live to see it operate. On 27 August 1942, while the strip was still being graded, Ward was killed at Isurava on the Kokoda Track - a ridge where Australi...

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Wards Airfield: The Pace of 1943

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 54th Troop Carrier Wing made its headquarters at Wards from May 1943 to April 1944. Through the strip moved the 317th, 374th, and 375th Troop Carrier Groups - names that mean little now, but meant a chain of C-47 Skytrains ferrying men, ammunition, and evacuated wounded acros...

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Wards Airfield: The Insignia on the Hill

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From December 1942 into January 1943, General George Kenney's V Fighter Command set up headquarters on a ridge behind the airfield. Soldiers poured concrete for a small compound - offices, steps, a garden path up the hill. In the concrete they drew a large Fifth Air Force insigni...

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Wards Airfield: A Scrap Dealer, the 1950s

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the war ended in September 1945, the airfield closed within months. The revetments - earthen bunkers that had sheltered B-24s from air attack - were bulldozed flat. A scrap dealer took over the site and began melting aluminum from wrecked aircraft for resale. For years, loca...

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