JAPANESE SNIPERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 September 1942, Page 4

JAPANESE SNIPERS

PRACTICES IN SOLOMONS ISLANDS BEER AND CANDY CAPTURED. PRISONERS EXPECT TO BE SHOT. The excellence of the Japanese as jungle fighters was emphasised yesterday by a New Zealander. Mr F. N. Kirton, who was recently in the Solomons as chief radio officer of a ship which took supplies to the American forces. He said marines had told him how Japanese snipers tied themselves into the tops of trees and shot unwary patrols. If their fire was returned they would often as not pretend to have been hit, slump forward, wait until the marines’ attention was directed elsewhere, and then start firing again. Or they might let the patrol come up under the trees and drop hand-grenades on them. It was always difficult to tell whether a tree-top sniper was dead. Marines said the Japanese in general might not be good rifle shots, but theie was no doubt about the accuracy of their snipers. At night some of these were constantly crawling up on marine positions, but they had not been able to do much damage.

While he was there, said Mr Kirton, the Japanese, who had retreated. to the hills of Guadalacanar, were making no attempt to fight, and parties which were being landed made the quickest time they could to join those already in the hills. It was obviously the enemy s intention to build up an internal force by small accretions against the day of trying to regain the airfield.

He had been told that there were some Japanese women in the hills with the enemy soldiers. One was said to have come into the open one day and to have advanced toward a marine patrol. Suddenly there was an explosion and she disappeared. It was thought that she had been armed with handgrenades and had made a mistake when attempting to remove the pin of one surreptitiously. In addition to almost daily air attacks, which caused amazingly little damage and resulted in far more enemy planes than American ones being lost, the marines were constantly sending out fighting patrols beyond their forward positions,. and every night those on duty had to be alert against enemy landing attempts. There was also regular shelling at night by submarines or other enemy vessels, which were able to use the cover of the mulitude of islands in the group to make their approach, but Mr Kirton found the marines’ confident of their ability to hold the recaptured islands. Mr Kirton said that among the booty taken by the marines after driving the Japanese back into the hills were quantities of such things as Japanese cigarettes, candy and canned-beer. When he was there the marines were being allowed to taste their booty. Trucks and motor-cars which the Japanese had abandoned without having time to destroy them all seemed to Mr Kirton to be American types built in Japan. All had the left-hand drive. Japanese prisoners had been described to him as including many who were extremely humble. All expected to be shot. Some dribbled down almost daily from the hills and gave themselves up. Their usual practice was to cast away their arms and say on surrendering that they belonged to work and construction units which had also been on the island.