All about the Kokoda Track Campaign in WWII

At the start of World War II in Europe in September 1939, Australia, as part of the British Commonwealth of Nations, made its military ready to join the fight, much the same as it had for World War I in 1914. Also, as in World War I, the Australian military combined forces with their neighbor and fellow Commonwealth member, New Zealand, to form the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), with their soldiers called ANZACs. The World War One ANZACs gained a hard-won reputation as some of the best soldiers among all the British forces, with the associated heavy losses.
The surprise and speed of the Japanese conquests found Australia with most of its military fighting in North Africa against Rommel’s Afrika Corps. When the Japanese landed on the north shore of New Guinea, a large, mountainous island just north of Australia, the island continent nation of Australia was now under direct threat.

On February 19th, 1942, 242 Japanese aircraft attacked the north Australian port town of Darwin, in two separate raids, destroying infrastructure, ships and two military airfields.

It soon fell to hastily assembled and poorly trained and equipped Australian militia forces, many of them teenagers, to prevent the Japanese from taking the south coast of New Guinea. They were sent up to Kokoda, a strategic mountain pass and trail system through the Owen Stanley Range in central New Guinea. The stage was set for what became known as the Kokoda Track Campaign, a series of desperate battles in the high tropical jungle, where constant rain, disease, and lack of supplies were almost a greater threat to both forces than each other.