GRIM ADVENTURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 September 1942, Page 4

GRIM ADVENTURE

AMERICAN AIRMAN’S JUNGLE TREK TORTURED BY HUNGER & INSECTS. FOUR JAPANESE KILLED. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) (Received This Day, 9.30 a.m.) NEW YORK, September 22. In a despatch from Marine Headquarters in the Solomons a United Press correspondent, Mr Robert Miller, tells the story of an American airman’s adventurous trek through a Japanese-infested jungle, eating ants and snails and killing four Japanese with a rock and a captured pistol. The airman, Lieutenant Richard Amerine, aged 23, baled out three miles off shore on August 31 and reached shore naked and unconscious. When he awoke he followed a trail through the jungle, hoping to reach the American forces. Instead, he found a sleeping Japanese “I picked up a rock half as big as my chest and bashed the Jap’s head, because I needed his shoes and pistol,” said Lieutenant Amerine. He continued his march almost mad with hunger and ate raw ants and snails. Once he unsuccessfully tried to catch a dog near a native village. “I was hungry enough to cat anything,” he said. By his sense of smell he avoided a Japanese encampment, because the Japanese, living almost exclusively on coconuts, had huge piles of rancid coconuts around their bivouacs.

“On the fifth day,” Lieutenant Amerine continued, “two Japanese discovered me. I fled into underbrush, followed by the two, who were searching every inch, eventually approaching me. When they were five yards distant. I jumped up and killed them both with my pistol, but the detonation awakened the neighbourhood and hundreds of men poured from a camp, shooting.” Lieutenant Amerine hid behind a log on which two Japanese were sitting and talking throughout the night. Immediately before dawn he realised that discovery was inevitable if the Japanese remained alive. He therefore rose quietly and “with one roundhouse swing bashed both their heads with the butt of my revolver. I must have lost my head, because I returned and hit them again to make sure.”

On the eighth day, bleeding, almost famished and covered with insect bites, Lieutenant Amerine stumbled into a Marine outpost and fainted. Doctors say he will recover soon.