Hitting Huggins’ Roadblock: Confronting the Challenge of Recovering the Missing from a World War II Battlefield in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The complexity of accounting for missing in action personnel is highly dependent on the past—and present—context of the loss. In late 1942, during the Battle of Buna-Gona in New Guinea, United States forces established a roadblock behind forward Japanese positions in an attempt to cut off their supplies. While it would hold for weeks and eventually be named for Captain Meredith M. Huggins (3rd Battalion, 126th Infantry Regiment), the roadblock was exposed and spawned a bitter, drawn-out fight that was exacerbated by a inhospitable environment, inadequate weapons, starvation, and disease and resulted in as many as 67 missing in action Americans following WWII. Today, the difficulty of recovering those lost at Huggins’ presents an interrelated set of cultural, historical, scientific, and logistical challenges. This poster presents a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach being forged by DPAA alongside stakeholder groups include local communities in Oro Province and organizations such as the University of Papua New Guinea, the Papua New Guinea government, and the Australian Unrecovered War Casualties—Army. Like the nature of battlefield engagements themselves, the resolution of battlefield-associated cases—such those at Huggins’—requires a steady effort that can be sustained for as long as it is warranted.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• A Multidimensional Mission: Crossing Conflicts, Synthesizing Sites, and Adapting Approaches to Find Missing Personnel

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24340