#Flashback Friday: The Exchange in New Guinea During World War II

Sometimes #FlashbackFriday goes down a rabbit hole, and that usually starts with something simple. Such as this week’s entry, which takes off from a note in the ExchangeAssoc Flickr that the first post exchange in New Guinea opened on May 18, 1942—82 years ago this week—in Port Moresby, which is about 350 miles from the northeastern tip of Australia.

New Guinea was one of many South Pacific locations where the Army Exchange Service opened PXs to support U.S. troops in World War II. New Guinea was also the site of fierce—and not much talked-about—combat that lasted more than a year. And the Port Moresby PX was just part of the Exchange support.

“The campaign on New Guinea is all but forgotten except by those who served there,” according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. “Battles with names like Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima overshadow it. Yet Allied operations in New Guinea were essential to the U.S. Navy’s drive across the Central Pacific and to the U.S. Army’s liberation of the Philippine Islands from Japanese occupation.”

The island was an Australian territory at the beginning of 1942, when the Japanese conducted an air raid on Port Moresby on Feb. 3. According to an Article on the Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs Anzac Portal, Australian civilian government in New Guinea ceased on Feb. 15 and the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) took over. Port Moresby was transformed into a large Allied base with five operational aerodromes, fuel and logistical supply dumps, base hospitals and administrative buildings. The base was beset by continual air raids by the Japanese.

On March 31, the American 8th Bombardment Squadron arrived, with A-24 bombers, supported for two weeks in May by six P-39 Airacobras of the American 36th Pursuit Squadron. Despite the U.S. aid, the Australians suffered heavy losses of planes and pilots during the first few months of 1942.

The Battle of the Coral Sea, which was fought mostly in the waters south-east of Papua in early May, diverted a Japanese naval attack against Port Moresby and removed the immediate threat.

It was about this time, according to the book “One Hundred Years of Service: A History of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service,” as well as an Exchange “history reader” on Flickr, that the first PX was set up on New Guinea. Neither source has much additional material on the Port Moresby PX, other than the above photo from the National Archives, which depicts a private from the Transportation Corps checking stock.

But combat in New Guinea didn’t stop at Port Moresby, and as fighting expanded, so did the Exchange’s support for Warfighters.

Although allies successfully held Port Moresby, by May 1942 the Japanese had established themselves in the arc of islands north and east of New Guinea as well as in the region around Lae and Madang on the north coast mainland Australia.

Fighting continued throughout 1942. More than 13,000 Japanese died, as well as 8,500 allied troops, more than half of them Australians. That was just in combat: allied forces reported 27,000 cases of malaria by January 1943, and troops also struggled with high temperatures and exhaustion. The island’s mountainous terrain made the fighting even more difficult.

Fighting intensified at the beginning of 1943 and continued through the end of 1944. The allies scored a key victory in September 1943, when they recaptured Lae, a port city on the northeast part of the island, from the Japanese, A few days earlier, they had recaptured Salamaua, another port about 25 miles south of Lae—but their objective at Salamaua was to divert Japanese attention from their prime objective, recapturing Lae.

This is where the Exchange comes back into the picture. One week after Lae was recaptured, according to a July 1970 Exchange Post article that looked back on Exchange activity worldwide during World War II, “A Douglas transport landed at a captured air strip, loaded to the struts with chocolate bars. When commando barges landed, they carried crates of Exchange items. The PX came with the invasion.”

The Exchange provided machines that dispensed cold drinks to about 70 military units, providing some relief in the torrid jungle environment. “Soldiers would stand in line for an hour to get a cold drink,” the story said. “When a GI finished filling his canteen cup, he would dash to the end of the line and drink while waiting for a refill.”

In a 1944 photo, patients and nurses of the 54th General Hospital line up at a PX in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, for soft drinks.

The PXs were usually tents—or huts made from packing boxes. Back in Port Moresby, the Army Exchange Service even set up a beauty shop for American nurses and Red Cross volunteers. Reservations had to be made a month in advance.

Although most of the PXs in New Guinea and the South Pacific closed shortly after World War II, the Exchange still operates stores in American Samoa and on Kwajalein Atoll. Since 2016, the Exchange has participated in a joint venture with the Marine Corps Exchange— Marines provide the staff, and the Exchange provides the merchandise—at Robertson Barracks, on the northern coast of Australia, about 1,100 miles from Port Moresby.

Sources: Exchange Post archives, Anzac Portal, Australian War Memorial, U.S. Army Center of Military History