PACIFIC NOTEBOOK

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 77, 1 June 1943, Page 6

PACIFIC NOTEBOOK

By Robin Wilier Guadalcanal. Our landing on the shores of Guadalcanal must have, looked im--warlike from a distance. The big grey troop transport swung into the channel behind a screen of escorting d est rove kk, and had scarcely stopped moving before it lowered its fleet of landing barges into the water and steel-helmeted soldiers clad in jungle green uniforms began to scramble down to the cargo nets. Trailing white foam, the barges sped to the shore. The bow ramps; dropped and the men leaped on to the beach. Up to that point it Avas the approved conception of an assault landing, but now it petered out. The. soft morning .sunshine lay smilingly over the coconut pa!ins ond the dark green jungle and the blue hills. Blue smoke from a hundred field kitchens drifted straight up through the still air. This was Guadalcanal, but this was also the month of April. The war was out of sight and heari/ng. ft was like—

"Heck," said a private whose boots had just touched the white coral sand, "it's more like going to a darned picnic!" Life on Guadalcanal is not yet altogether a picnic, but the hand of civilisation has caressed the island since I left here before the fighting ended in February. For the newcomers with whom I arrived this time, the first notice boards: wc saw held a touch of unconscious irony. They said "No shooting.' (Thej r were meant not as a joke, however, but as a warning against the exploding of captured ammunition near inhabited areas). Camps had taken on an air of permanence, with marked pathways and coral decorations around the wooden-floored tents. Military police were stopping traffic offenders on the greatly improved roads. Guadalcanal looked as if it was rapidly becoming a peaceful law-abiding community. But. it was never wise to rely on first impressions of Guadalcanal. Before their first daj r was over, the island showed the newcomers some ol its old unpredictable As I sat at an outdoor movie show, feeling never more distant from the svar, every anti-aircraft, gun on the island seemed suddenly to open fire. A few fly-high-by-night nuisance raiders were overhead, and we saw two of them caught in the beams of the searchlights while the guns pounded away furiously at them. From far off came the whistle and the dull thunder of a stick of bombs, but it was the falling of fragments of our own shrapnel that made our scats at the fireworks display a little uncomfortable.

Between such moments oL' mild excitement, Guadalcanal to-day is nothing more than "an advanced base in the South Pacific." In this sector there is no front line in the accepted sense—no point of contact between surface forces —and there cannot, be any until either we try to take another island from Japan or the Japanese try to take one from us.