NAURU ISLAND

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 68, 30 April 1943, Page 4

NAURU ISLAND

THE first indication of the effective Japanese occupation of Nauru Island was conveyed recently ill a United States communique reporting an attack on the island by American aircraft. When Japan entered the war and quickly penetrated as far as Rabaul and the Gilbert Islands, on either side of Nauru, and gained effective command of all the surrounding waters, New Zealand and Australia were denied access to Nauru's phosphates, on which their farming industry Avas largely dependent. On December 7, 1940. a German raider shelled the island and smashed the elaborate prosphate loading equipment, so that shipment? were greatly curtailed. Exactly a year later, on the day of the Pearl Harbour attack, Japanese aircraft bombed Nauru. To occupy Nauru was in keeping with Japan's policy of strengthening her own supply system and damaging that of the United Nations. Japan needed prosphates and was well aware that New Zealand and Australia have depended heavily on Nauru for them. But the United States communique reporting the attack names an aircraft runway among the targets lyt. This may mean no more than that the Japanese have made provision to communicate with the island and to defend it; but an airfield at Nauru would be a very useful link in the chain of enemy air bases screening the Japanese-occupied territories of the northwestern Pacific. Nauru, used as a base for reconnaissance, bomber, and torpedo aircraft, effectively blocks one of the gaps in that screen, which runs in a great arc from Marcus Island, through Wake, the Marshalls, the Gilberts, the northern Solomons, and Rabaul to New Guinea. Japanese possession of this air screen is the main obstacle in the way of penetration by American naval forces into the seas now dominated by Japan.