Townsville, Queensland ~ Australia 1942 ~ 1945

During World War II Townsville becoame a Garrison City with approximately 100,000 United States Servicemen based in the district, and as a staging point into the Pacific Theatre. General Douglas Macarthur used Townsville as a strategic base from which many servicemen are trained.         US Base Section-2, as it became known, was the North Queensland component of the United States Army Services of Supply Organisation. The Australian Mercantile Land & Finance Building at 32 Denham Street became its headquarters and was tasked with the dual responsibilities of constructing airfields and establishing the base.        The Allied Works Council (AWC) had been established in late February 1942 and in Queensland the Main Roads became the constructing authority.

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        It impressed all types of mechanical equipment in North Queensland for the purposes of building roads, airstrips and defence works. Between 1942 and 1945 the corridor between the road and the railway line from Townsville to Charters Towers became one of the largest concentrations of airfields, repair facilities, stores and ammunition depots, fuel storage areas and port operations in the South West Pacific.

        Troops poured into Townsville daily. Hitherto unheard of military units opened for business. On 15 June 1942 the US 360th Quartermaster Bakery Section started operations and, with an output of some 5000 loaves daily, supplied all bread to the US Army. Just west of the city, the Remount Depot at Rocky Springs obtained and trained horses for pack work in New Guinea, where vehicle transport in many cases was impossible because of mountainous or swampy terrain.

        Both Australian and American divisions streamed through Townsville. The new transient population saw Townsville as the first and last chance to get rip-roaring drunk. Prostitution was rife. The incidence of venereal disease soared. Condom outlets were always lit by blue lights so that they could be found during blackouts. GIs soon dubbed Townsville ‘the hottest, dirtiest, lousiest, toughest and most overcrowded troop town this side of Louisiana.

        The stoic citizens remaining in US Base Section 2 endured wartime deprivations including constant road and air blockades; ‘brownouts’ which masked out vehicle headlights then total blackout conditions; severe shortages and rationing of food items; a scarcity of water, petrol, clothes and ice which was so critical to their primitive refrigeration systems; and were forced to comply with movement restrictions in or out of the garrison city.

        It was difficult to realise that Townsville, this sleepy, sprawling, overgrown country town of 35,000 people at the beginning of 1942 had experienced 5000 voluntary evacuees, won the fight to retain a further 10,000 which the Army sought to deport because of their desperate need for housing, and was to achieve a population of 120,000 (75 percent of which were service personnel) by mid 1943. (Interestingly, it took Townsville some 50 years to return to these numbers.)

Edited from, Townsville Australia , The Rocks Guesthouse Queensland, www.the rocksguesthouse.com, Front-Line Townsville 1942, by Arthur Burke, anzacday.org.au