'Towpath' was a US unrealised plan by General Douglas MacArthur’s South-West Pacific Area command to seize the western end of New Britain using Major General Julian C. Smith’s 2^nd Marine Division and Major General Harold E. Barrowclough’s New Zealand 3^rd Division (December 1943).

The strategic and operational rationale for the undertaking, as planned, was the capture of the area on which airfields could be constructed to allow the shorter-range bombing of the Japanese base areas in and around Rabaul at the north-eastern end of New Britain and Kavieng at the north-western end of New Ireland.