RABAUL JAPS LAID PLANES DEEP UNDERGROUND

Chronicle (Levin), 18 January 1947, Page 4

RABAUL JAPS LAID PLANES DEEP UNDERGROUND

Every day more and more evidence is being revealed of the extraordinary intensive prepara-: tions that the Japanese undertook for their projeeted invasion of Australia, says the Sydney Sun. A vast underground hospital dug out oi fehe hills in the Rabaul area of New Britain is among the latest discoveries that have been made. , Details of the hospital, which consisted of nearly seven miles of shafts and tunnelling, constructed in three tiers, have been given by Lieutenant-Commander C. G. Crott, M.B.E., and Lieutenant-Comman-der M. S. Batterham, both of the Royal Australian Navy. They recently returned from New_ Britain where, in charge of parties of R.A.N. ratings, they have heen engaged in the- dangerous and arduous task of rendering harmless mines and depth charges off New Britain and adjacent islands, and delousina- huge quantities of tor-

pedoes, underwater mmes, deptn charges, shells and other ammunition stored in vast tunnels and caves in isolated portions of the mountain jungle. The Japanese began the building of the hospital, in which doctors, nurses and wounded officers and men were to live a troglodyte existence, by driving a long tunnel about 12ft. high, into the sheer L'ace of a mountain. Off this they drove other- tunnels at warious angles. These formed" the ton; storey of the structure. Some of ihe walls and roofs were lined with three-ply wood and others with steel. All were lighted by electricity generated from a self-contained power plant. At intervals along the tunnels, shafts had been sunk and. off these, tunnels that compnsed the two lower storeys had been dug out. , ,, The work must have mvoived the use of an incredible amount of labour and machinery, for every yard of earth had to be carried from the excavations up the shafts and along the other tunnels and. out through the main entrance. There was not one stairway in the place. Communication between one floor and an'other was by stretchers and ropes. The person wishing to reach a higher or a lower floor lay on a stretcher and was raised or let down by ropes. In the middle of a tunnel on the bottom floor a deep well had been sunk to provide water for the hospital. The patients were to have been "stacked" in two rows, one above the other. on both sides of each tunnel. Wide brackets had been fixed to the walls to support the long unbroken bamboo ledges on which patients were to . have laid, side by side in long rows, one tier above the other. Lieutenant - Commander Croft and Lieutenant-Commander Batterham were amazed at the throughness gnd efficiency with which the Japanese had planned ar.d completed their work. They both remarked, however, oil the fact that although many Japanese soldiers must have lost limbs as a result of direct war injury or surgical operation, they themselves had seen only. one at all the different' places they had been in the Pacific during and since the war. On sev'eral occasions, LieutenantCommander Croft asked Japanese: "What do you do with your limbless men?" and each time he received the reply: "No savee" Whether any sinister inference may be

— . . — ■ drawn from that he does not know. The optimism felt by the Japanese about the possi'oility of invading and .holding Australia. was shown by the discovery in tunnels in another part of New Britain, of thousands upon thousands of cases of plate and window glass, lathes, generating plants and other kinds of machinery, concrete mixers,.and even telephone systems. A Japanese officer told Lieutenant-Com-mander Batterham that all this material was to be used in the preiiminary rcccnstruction of the capital cities of the Commonwealth, after his Emperor's forces had captured it.