Wewak

It's just been so poorly led, to be honest.

And when I go out and I went to go and see some place in Malpric or Wewak or Kimiang or wherever it is, and I turn up there and I say to the guys, okay, what have you got? And I'd look at them and they'd have no PPE or very little.

Look at their boots.

They wouldn't have them.

It's also for the people with the backup supplying with ammunition and goods and everything else for the war effort.

And I refer back to our RAAF that saved Australia up in New Guinea in May 1945 when they defeated them at Wewak and the other place.

And now they're going

to try and destroy all this.

And the majority of the planes were built here, the Beaufort bombers, the Beaufort fires, the Wirraways, the boomerangs, the Teddy Orks and everything else.

Even women worked on machines and the lathes, making components for the motors and everything else.

And they're the ones that found the Japs working under camouflage up at Wewak.

They had to try and beat them at the Kokoda Trail.

And he ended up getting a pilot license so that he could fly to remote areas of the island and bring sick people back to get care.

He built hospitals and schools and they called him the Flying Bishop of Wewak.

Just an amazing story and little dribs and drabs that came as we were growing up and then got to know more about his life as I got older.

And so I think that put a spark of something else, something else that was possible.

His parents were missionaries to India for 20 years.

And then my dad was born in Papua New Guinea in a place called Wewak in the middle of the jungle.

And my grandpa would go off for like months at a time with no internet or phone to like crocodile infested swamps to villages that had never heard of Jesus.

Get out of here.

You

haven't lived till you've been to Wewak and the Sepik River.

Okay.

Wewak.

That's getting out there, Graeme.

I'm pretty confident I won't get there, Paul.

Neil Kirby flew with the 348th Fighter Group under MacArthur's command in the Southwest Pacific.

In October of 1943, Kirby and a small flight encountered a large formation of Japanese aircraft over Wewak in New Guinea.

He shot down six enemy aircraft in that single engagement.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor.