ENEMY WOUNDED FIGHT ON

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 100, 22 January 1943, Page 5

ENEMY WOUNDED FIGHT ON

Macabre Japanese Hospital SANANANDA DRAMA (By Telegraph.—Press Assn. —Copyright.) (Special Australian Correspondent.) (Received January 21, 10.25 p.m.). SYDNEY, January 21. Before evacuating the field hospital in Sanananda the Japanese hid grenade booby traps under the bodies of their own dead. Tlie firing pins had been removed so that the grenades would explode when the corpses covering them were moved. Seriously-ill patients who were left in the hospital had knives as well as grenades with which to fight, and some of the Japanese lay amid the rotting dead waiting for a chance to shoot United States troops who captured the hospital. “I would never have believed that such things were possible," declared an American major. “I still find it hard to believe they are true.” “This hospital seemed designed to kill patients rather than cure them,” writes the Sydney “Sun” War correspondent. “It has illustrated again the animale.sque fatalism of the Japanese. The wards are ramshackle shelters, and the convalescents lived in tiny cubicles protected from the torrential tropical rains only by flimsy banana leaves.”

Good progress in the mopping-up operations is reported in General MacArthur’s communique today. The two main pockets of enemy resistance are on either side, Sanananda Point anil here Australians are attacking while an inland pocket in being stormed by Americans. Tho Japanese are fighting from stoutly constructed dug-outs and pillboxes, and the volume of their fire and their fighting tenacity indicate that at least some of the strongpoints still have adequate supplies. Positions Crumbling. Nevertheless, tlie extermination of these forces is being accomplished rapidly, according to the headquarters spokesman today. Ceaseless attacks are crumpling the Japanese positions. The rapid Allied gains during the past few days have made it impossible to. calculate the number of enemy dead, which is estimated by war correspondents at several hundreds. Scores of enemy refugees from the shattered defences are repotted to be hiding in tlie jungles and swamps, and most. of them are badly undernourished and illequipped. but with their insatiable lust . for killing tliyy might easily become dangerous bamlsi A close watch is being kept over all food dumps, and many Japanese have been killed in such areas. The largest' enemy party so far reported numbers about 40. Allied patrols are hunting down these remnants. Recently enemy barges at night landed rice fol* the starving garrison at Sanananda Point. Two of the barges are believed to have put supplies ashore, and the others were driven off. At least three barges were sunk. Allied artillery fire also destroyed all except a few bags of the landed rice.