‘The great problem of warfare in the Pacific’, General MacArthur declared, ‘is to move forces into contact and maintain them. Victory is dependent upon solution to the logistic problem’.

Shipping

Since New Guinea is made up of islands, and the capacity of air transport was limited, troops and supplies had to travel by ship in the first instance. Due to the large distances involved, the support of a US serviceman in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) required roughly twice as many ships as it did in the European theatre of operations. To economise on shipping, US forces drew on Australian sources of supply as much as possible. In no other theatre was reciprocal aid to the United States so important.

Containerisation of shipping lay in the future so most shipments were break-bulk dry cargo. This consisted of discrete items packed in boxes, crates and bags that had to be individually handled, as opposed to bulk cargo, which refers to commodities that are loaded continuously without packaging or sorting, such as coal or wheat. This allowed ships to be unloaded with their own tackle where there were no special port facilities, but was slow and manpower intensive. Attempts to load ships efficiently tended to result in long unloading times, and urgently required goods being over-stowed with other cargo. While there was a global shortage of shipping, the real problem in the SWPA was an acute shortage of port capacity.