4 January 1943

It is the beginning of the end for the Japanese South Seas Force in the Kokoda Campaign. Gona and Buna are now in Allied hands and the remaining Japanese are fighting for their lives in and around Sanananda village between the two.

The Allies have pushed the Japanese along the Sanananda Track, killing around 1600 enemy as they cramped them into a small perimeter around the village.

The attackers face appalling conditions, fighting through pestilential swamps often submerged in the persistent torrential rain and filled with the rotting and flyblown bodies of the enemy dead. Many of the starving Japanese defenders resort to eating their dead.