Each man had a look in his eyes as if he had been through hell. An official photographer took the portraits of survivors, some wounded, at Shaggy Ridge after a vicious encounter during the campaign in the Markham and Ramu Valleys. Hell, for them, had been the Finisterre Range. The name meant ‘the ends of the earth’, and few outsiders had entered this isolated region before the war. Although the operations in the Markham and Ramu Valleys is perhaps the least prominent or well known of the campaigns fought by the 7th Australian Division during the course of the Second World War, it featured one of the most successful commando operations of the war, as well as prolonged, bitter, close-knit fighting to capture a razorback known as Shaggy Ridge. For those who fought there, the Finisterres would never be forgotten. For some veterans of earlier campaigns in North Africa, the Middle East and Papua, it would be the Finisterres that they regarded as the toughest or the lowest point of their war.

With the successful liberation of Lae on 16 September 1943, Allied attention focused on the recapture of the entire Huon Peninsula. In unison with the planned 9th Australian Division advance along the coastline to Finschhafen and eventually Sio, the 7th Division was ordered to advance inland from Nadzab up the Markham and Ramu Valleys to Bogadjim. This would complete a pincer movement on the Japanese forces on the peninsula. It was therefore the main task of the 7th Division, in accordance with General Blamey's instructions, to prevent any Japanese encroachment down the Markham Valley and thereby protect the Allied airfields and radar installations that were to be established in the area following the advance. The campaign was planned in three successive operations: the capture of the airstrip at Kaiapit, followed by the one at Dumpu, before the final battle for Shaggy Ridge and seizure of Kankiryo Saddle in the Finisterre Range.