Munda Visit

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nreese
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Joined: Mon Jan 19, 2009 3:14 pm

Munda Visit

Post by nreese »

I visited Munda, New Georgia, Solomon Islands in the second week of January, 2009. My wife's family is from there, so it was more of a family visit, but her grandmother lives at the Eastern end of the runway so it was a good opportunity to get out and about and check some things out. I only had the morning to spare, so I got up early to do a bit of a walkover of the Eastern end of the Munda airstrip.

On the way I checked out the Japanese Memorial which is a hundred metres or so South of the SE end of the airstrip.

There is no plaque or information on the memorial. Sad really. I'm also surprised that there is no American / NZ memorial considering the battle that occurred there. I found this photo on the Australian War Memorial website:

http://cas.awm.gov.au/photograph/090244

I walked up a path behind the memorial to the end of the airstrip and down the northern side until the bitumen for current flight operations starts. Its a big airstrip.

After breakfast my wife organised for her Uncle David to take me to "The American Dump", or "The Dump" as the locals call it. He had never been there before, despite growing up and living there. He had a general idea it was in Dunde, to the East, so we decided to walk up the road and ask people when we got to the general area. The plan was sound, and as we arrived in the general area of The Dump and asked some guys sitting out the front of a small store. Of course, they turned out to be relatives (for me, tabus, or rorotos - in-laws). It was fine with them for us to go and have a look at the dump, and one of the guys came with us and brought his young son along. The dump was only about 100m behind the store, so we'd done well with our navigation.

The first part of the dump we came across was littered with truck chasis, dump truck trays, and aircraft drop-tanks.

There were also steel water tanks, landing craft that had been cut up with oxy-torches, a tractor, remains of a Marine tank.
We then walked down the road a bit and were shown a network of cement slabs that were connected by cement roadway and originally had Quonset huts on them. I then noticed that our tour guide was wearing a dog tag. But that's the next story.
Attachments
Japanese Memorial at Munda, New Georgia
Japanese Memorial at Munda, New Georgia
munda_jap_mem.JPG (34.36 KiB) Viewed 5334 times
Aircraft drop tank in the dump at Munda
Aircraft drop tank in the dump at Munda
munda_droptank.JPG (43.46 KiB) Viewed 5333 times
Munda Airfield
Munda Airfield
munda_airfield.JPG (23.42 KiB) Viewed 5335 times

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