World War II provides some indicators that the disease is endemic to undeveloped areas in all of Oceania in the Pacific theater, although war records frequently lack definitive diagnoses, and many records of "high fever" evacuations were also likely to be other tropical illnesses. In the chapter entitled "The Green War", General MacArthur's biographer William Manchester identifies that the disease was one of a number of debilitating afflictions affecting both sides on New Guinea in the running bloody Kokoda battles over extremely harsh terrains under intense hardships— fought during a six-month span all along the Kokoda Track in 1942–43, and mentions that to be hospital-evacuated, Allied soldiers (who cycled forces) had to run a fever of , and that sickness casualties outnumbered weapons-inflicted casualties 5:1. Similarly, the illness was a casualty producer in all the jungle fighting of the land battles of the New Guinea campaign and the Guadalcanal campaign. Where the Allies had bases, they could remove and cut back vegetation, or use DDT as a prophylaxis area barrier treatment, so mite- and tick-induced sickness rates in forces off the front lines were diminished.