Last year I bought a book by Peter Phelps, “The Bulldog Track”, describing how in 1942 his grandfather and his fellow miners were ordered by the military to evacuate Bulolo by taking the Bulldog Track. In this book, statistics were given of the length and height of the track in the Foreword, but they did not agree with the narrative which included Kudjeru and other villages on the track. These villages were not on the road 11 Platoon walked. My curiosity was aroused, and I began an internet search and re-read Dudley McCarthy’s official history “South-West Pacific Area – The First Year”.
Internet searches of Bulldog Road will lead you to believe the track and the road are the same. They are not. Had 11 Platoon not walked the road in 1967, I too would have believed they were. In a closer re-reading of McCarthy’s history, I found a map of the Track on page 51 in addition to the map of the Road on page 579 that I had found earlier. The track from Bulldog to Middle Camp (map page 51) is clearly different as it does not completely follow the Eloa River. (In my narrative I describe seeing a local in native dress below where we were resting. He would have been on the track.) The road past Centre Camp (map page 579) sees the road go west over the mountains whilst the track goes north to Kudjeru. The railway is not referred to in McCarthy’s history and the road is not referred to in its index. This may be the reason why the track and road are considered the same.
The Bulldog Track
McCarthy describes, prior to 1942, a primitive track between Bulldog and Kudjeru that was established in 1931-2 by district patrol officers seeking Kukukukus who had murdered a white prospector and some of his native bearers. This track connected up to where the native Biangai clans had established trading tracks between villages north-west to Wau. These clans did not trade with Kukukukus who were not traders but robbed and killed other villagers. When Peter Phelps’ grandfather Tom’s party reached Bulldog, they found the gold mine had been “abandoned supposedly in 1931”.
The war time Bulldog Track was created in 1942 by Army surveyors seeking a route to evacuate expatriates from Lae and the Wau area after the Japanese landed at Lae and the Wau airstrip could not be used. The surveyors began on 9th of February to blaze the track to Bulldog from Kudjeru and the evacuation began on 7th March led by ANGUA officers. All the evacuees reached Port Moresby.
This track was extensively used in 1942 to resupply and reinforce the Kanga Force stationed in Wau however it was only suitable for foot traffic due to a section of steep mountains between Kudjeru and the Eloa River valley. Peter Ryan’s book “Fear Drive My Feet” (first published in 1959) provides a description of how it was used.
“There were no transport aircraft to fly in material from Port Moresby or Australia. Stores therefore had to be carried round the south coast from Port Moresby to the mouth of the Lakekamu River by steamer. There they were transported to pinnaces and moved up the Lakekamu to Terapo, where they were transferred into whaleboats and canoes for a two-day journey upriver to Bulldog. At Bulldog all stores were made into fifty pound ‘boy loads’ and sent off to Wau on the backs of carriers, nearly seven days’ walk over mountains heart-breaking in their height and steepness. To reach our troops in Lae forward area another four days’ carry was needed.”
The Army built staging camps along the Lakekamu River and the Bulldog Track and, by September, 40 carrier loads per day were delivering supplies to Wau until January 1943 when the airfield at Wau came back into use. McCarthy’s map page 51 shows 7 walking times between staging camps on the track between Bulldog and Wau totalling 34 hours and the canoe travel on the Lakekamu River as taking 2 – 4 days.
The Bulldog Road
In 1943, when the track could not keep up with the increased demand for supplies, Army Engineers built both the road for motor vehicle use and the railway at a barge unloading place on the Kunimaipa River that flowed into the Lakekamu River. The road generally followed the Eloa River Valley to the foot of the mountains. At the foot of the mountains a major diversion occurred when a gorge in the river valley on the track was considered by the Army engineers as a barrier too difficult to overcome. Near this point the road left the Eloa River Valley and went west over the mountain range. The road was built wide enough for two lanes for vehicles. To facilitate loading and unloading of materials and equipment, railway was built from Grimm’s Point across a swamp to a place east of Bulldog.
11Platoon found the start of the road about 400 m east of Bulldog and ruins of Army camps near here and on the north bank of the Kunimaipa River at the village of Okavai where the railway started. This was the not the Grimm Point shown on my map. The railway itself had begun to sink into the sago swamps in 1944.
Information obtained from websites
Pre-War gold mining at Wau
Alluvial gold was found near Wau in 1922 and a rush occurred in 1926 when rich alluvial gold was found at Edie Creek. Within six months there were 500 expats working on the field winning up to 250 ounces of gold a day. In 1936 underground mining operations commenced at Edie Creek and ceased in 1941 with over 250,000 ounces of gold being recovered. The tailing dumps from this mine were the ones my host Sandy mentioned about the natives’ specking activities. The finding of large pieces of gold in the tailings in 1967 indicates how rich the Edie Creek deposit was. The alluvial gold at Wau and Bulolo were mined by the use of dredges.
War-time Wau
Wau was a strategically important town during WW11 as Japanese forces had occupied Lae some 80km to the north-east. At both Wau and Bulolo gold miners had established airstrips where they flew in sections of heavy mining equipment, carted it to their mine sites by mules and then reassembled the equipment. These towns and airstrips were bombed by the Japanese on 21 January 1942, two days prior to their landings and capture of Lae.
In April 1942 Kanga Force was formed to defend Wau and to harass the Japanese at Lae and Wau. Commandos were flown into Wau in May and/or trekked overland along the Bulldog Track. In June they began raiding the Japanese on the coastal town of Salamaua accessing it by the Black Cat mine track. As Kanga Force grew, resupply along the Bulldog Track became more difficult. The Japanese ceased attacking Wau in February 1943 and began their retreat back to Salamaua.
The Pacific Wrecks website has greater details of the road and the “Bulldog Trail railway (tram line)”. The following is extracted from the information provided.
In July 1942 a patrol from 1st Independent Company began a survey of the track from Kudjeru south to Bulldog to seek a possible route for “development into a road.”. Captain Fox, a pre-War surveyor, was a member of this patrol. In August Fox was accompanied by Captain Eccleston in continuing the survey and concluded, “The best route followed the approximate course of the Eloa River.” Both Fox and Eccleston had features on the road named after them.
The decision to make the road was made in November 1942 and it was to be used as the main supply and reinforcement route for a planned land assault on the Japanese at Lae. In January 1943 Army engineers were assigned the task of surveying a route for the Bulldog Road. A team led by Lt Col Reinhold, the chief engineer, commenced the survey from the Bulldog Camp walking north-east to Kudjeru. They found a gorge in the Eloa River which formed a “barrier that had to be seen to be believed” that prevented the road from following the Bulldog Track north of the Centre Camp and concluded it would be better to connect the track up to the Wau – Edie Creek road from Central Camp to Fox’s Saddle. A survey team led by Eccleston was sent out from Edie Creek to seek a route over the Ekuti Dividing Range (McCarthy gives a better description of this survey and states that Reinhold followed a water race from Edie Creek to the Hidden Valley.) Eccleston’s Saddle (shown on McCarthy’s page 579 map) is the high point of the road at “an elevation of 9,514 feet or 2900 metres”.
Construction of the road took nine months and was completed in September 1943. “In total the project took nine months of construction and roughly1038 Australian engineers and 1825 Papuan labourers supported by 524 Papuan carriers to build the road.” It also tells of Kukukukus raiding camp areas to steal axes, knives and explosives. 17 Bridges were built during the road’s construction, and it had a length of 114 kilometres and was up to 8 metres wide. The road was not used after February 1944.
On the Pacific Wrecks website, I found my first reference to the railway.
“During the middle of 1943, to facilitate the movement of supplies, the Australians built the Bulldog Trail Railway (tram line) spanning from the barge unloading point at Grim Point (Kunimaipa) to the northeast to Bulldog. By early September 1943 the railway was abandoned due to a shortage of rails, rolling stock and difficult terrain including sink holes in the sago swamp.”
No wonder the Platoon corporals could not find it and I now wonder if my map had misspelt Grimm Point.
Quickclose.com.au
This site, dated 2001, promotes a tourist trek down the Bulldog Track [sic] from Edie Creek. It then tells of following the 1943 road. It makes two interesting comments: Firstly, the Bulldog Road that “has not been used as a walking track for 50 years” (i.e.1951). The section of the road to Edie Creek after Eccleston’s Saddle was badly eroded by landslides in 1967. Secondly, “The main track now takes a short cut (to save two days of difficult walking) down a jungle covered spur 800m almost vertically to Yanima village.” The new track is described as joining the old Bulldog Road [sic] near the Eloa River gorge and a rest spot is described as being in a steep section of this gorge. This short cut is from Fox’s Saddle where I looked back in disbelief at Central Camp a kilometre below 11 Platoon. The steep gorge was Reinhold’s “barrier that had to be seen to be believed”.
The Hidden Valley website
Gold mining is still occurring near Edie Creek. This website gives a good description of its operations and location. The Hidden Valley mine is an open-pit gold and silver operation located at elevations of 2800m to 1700m above sea level in steep mountainous and forested terrain with high annual rainfall. A map of the mine site shows it is accessed by a road from Bulolo, which runs past Edie Creek, and with the Bulldog Track (sic) emerging south of the mine. In the financial year 2021 the mine reported it had produced 4,689 kg of gold (roughly 136,000 troy ounces) and had a workforce of 2,228 contractors and employees.
I had been aware of this mine since it was discovered in the mid 1990’s with production starting in the mid 2000’s but was unsure of its location. McCarthy’s map of the Bulldog Road shows the valley 13km south of Edie Creek adjacent to Eccleston’s Saddle near where 11 Platoon had a cold and uncomfortable night’s rest.
My map (Wau SB55-14 overprint Feb 66 1:250,000 series)
One of the tasks of PIR patrols was to provide “valuable map corrections”. I hope I kept the Army intelligence cartographers busy for weeks and I am pleased to see Fish Creek and the village of Keremahaua appear on modern maps.
Writing this addendum, I had a closer look at the fine print of its edition details. It was prepared by the Army Map Service (LU), Corp of Engineers, US Army Washington D.C. in 1963 and gives a number of qualifications as to its accuracy. That Bulldog Road was shown in bold red indicating an all-weather, hard surface. Two or more lanes wide. Aerial photography in the 1960s would not have been able to identify these features and as nobody had walked it since 1951, the US Army must have plotted the route from their War-time records. I would say that Pacific Wrecks would have got its information from the same source as in July 1942 a bet was made between Major General Berryman and an American Army Air Force General as to the road’s completion date. Berryman lost.
On my map there are two features I find amusing – Mt Kumbak and Mt Kuluron. The Aussie boy in me suggests that whoever named these features was having fun. I would pronounce Mt Kumbak as Mt Come Back as this is near where we had our backs to the wall to prevent us falling 800 metres over the edge. Mt Kuluron as Mt Cooler On for it was definitely colder up there than in the valley.
John Stringfellow
March 2022
References:
Dudley McCarthy: South-West Pacific Area – The First Year: Kokoda to Wau published 1959, pages 50,51,58,578-581
Peter Phelps: The Bulldog Track published in 2018
Phillip Bradley: WAU 1942 – 1943 published as the Australian Army Campaigns Series – 6
Peter Ryan: Fear Drive My Feet reprinted 2002, page 10
Wikipedia website
The Wau, Morobe Province, PNG website
Hidden Valley website
Pacific Wrecks website
Quickclose.com.au website
Attachments (below): McCarthy’s maps page 51 (the Track) and page 579 (the Road)
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