FIRST BOMB OF YEAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 January 1943, Page 5

FIRST BOMB OF YEAR

DROPPED ON JAPANESE IN SOLOMONS SEEING THE NEW YEAR IN. WITH AMERICAN AIR CREW. (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) ABOARD A U.S. BOMBER, Jan. 1. The New Year is exactly one minute old, and our party is getting noisy. People are beginning to throw things about. Our guests, the Japanese, wish f that everyone would go home. But up here in the starry Solomons sky we are just starting to enjoy ourselves. Craning our necks over the side of this big Catalina patrol bomber, we clap one another on the back, yell “Happy New Year!” above the din of the motors, and even manage to make ourselves heard with a few lines of “Auld Lang Syne.” This is more fun than we thought possible, a better place to see in the New Year than Queen Street or Cathedral Square can ever be until the war’ is won. We are raiding the Japanese on their new airfield at Munda Point, New Georgia Island, 180 miles from Guadalcanal. Our first bomb, screaming down on them at one minute after midnight, is the first of the year for the enemy in the Solomons zone—and, we hope, on the entire Pacific battlefront. We feel proud of it, and it serves as our New Year resolution—the first of an avalanche of high explosives destined for the Japanese in 1943. ALL-NIGHT PARTY. The party has been going all night, and it will not be over for many hours yet. The Catalinas are keeping it alive in relays. They are the night shift in a shuttle bombing service designed to neutralise the 'Munda base and prevent it from being used against Guadalcanal. Few are the hours of daylight or darkness when the Japanese there know respite from the drone of American planes and the whistle of their bombs. The enemy ■ is losing equipment, losing time and losing sleep. The last minutes of 1942 were slipping quickly by when we arrived over Munda. In the pale starlight the airfield is a dirty white ribbon through the blackness of a coconut plantation. Our first bomb, timed almost to a split second and sped on its way by our shouts of goodwill, plummets into the night and reappears moments later in a red flash on the ground. “Happy Noo Year, Tojo!” yells a gunner at my side. BOTTLE FOR GOOD MEASURE. We circle leisurely over the field to let the effects of our gift sink in. Then, in our own good time, we cruise back and drop another one. Small antipersonnel bombs are tossed by hand through an open hatch, and someone throws out an empty bottle for good measure. To the little yellow men on the ground, its whistle will be as frightening as that of a bomb. For nearly two hours we keep making a nuisance of ourselves. The Japanese fire blindly back, and one or twice we feel the ship rock in the blast of .an anti-aircraft burst. When pur bomb racks are empty and it is time for another to take over, we head for home. Back on the ground, we find to our delight that we had unsuccessful competition for the honour of dropping the first bomb of the year. The crew of the Catalina which went over Munda two hours ahead of us had had the same idea. They prolonged their stay over the target to steal a march on us —but, now they ruefully admit that all unknowing we had slipped in and beaten them to it by a matter of minutes.