CRUCIAL BATTLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 October 1942, Page 3

CRUCIAL BATTLE

EXPECTED IN SOLOMONS NAVAL & LAND FORGES. PERSISTENT JAPANESE ’ REINFORCEMENT. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) SYDNEY, [October 12. American naval experts believe that the most crucial land battle in the Pacific since the fall of the Indies and Malay is shaping in the Solomon Islands. They explain that Japan's determination to reinforce her troops on Guadalcanar regardless of the losses shows-that she hopes to concentrate sufficient ground forces to march 1 down the island against the American airfield.

The United Press correspondent in Washington says that Japanese landings are taking place on the same side of the mountains where the American positions are established, and therefore the Japanese are probably considering a southward push through a seres of pincers action. Naval observers, who emphasise the importance of the south-eastern Solomons in protecting the Allied supply routes to Australia and New Zealand, do not attempt to minimise the blow to our Pacific strategic position should the Japanese push succeed. Mr Joseph Harsch, who recently was the “Christian Science Monitor’s” war correspondent in the South-west Pacific, declares that the American operatons in the Solomons were distorted during the early phases and the public was led to believe that this was a great counter-attack to sweep the Japanese back through the Indies and the Philippines. He says that reliable sources declare that the marines cannot hold out indefinitely unless they are substantially reinforced quickly. The “Sydney Morning Herald’s war correspondent, who recently visited Guadalcanar, says that large reinforcements have arrived there, considerably easing the position, which more than once in the past seven weeks has been “touch and go.”