WAR OF ATTRITION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 August 1943, Page 4

WAR OF ATTRITION

TELLING HEAVILY AGAINST JAPANESE AIR AND SEA LOSSES > IN SOLOMONS AREA. 22 ENEMY WARSHIPS SUNK SINCE END OF JUNE. (Special Australian Correspondent.) (Received This Day, 11.50 a.m.) SYDNEY, This Day. The capture of Munda means that the United States forces are now in a position to drive the Japanese from the Solomons by the end of the year. —This view is expressed by Mr Joseph Driscoll, “New York Herald-Tribune” correspondent at South Pacific Headquarters. He adds that the Allied drive must, be accompanied by a greatly increased flow of planes and war materials.

“This will be necessary,” he says, “because the Japanese are expected to make a last ditch stand on Bougainville Island, in the Northern Solomons, and at Rabaul, on the New Britain front.”

Commenting on the “doleful” American comment that at the present rate of advance it will take the Allies many yours even to wrest her newly-won possessions from Japan, the “Sydney Morning Herald” today says editorially that the capture of outlying bases in “the hard way” is an inescapable necessity. Although Rabaul may eventually have to be taken in a similar fashion, the difficulties and sacrifices involved are not without compensations, which eventually should assist to make the Allied task less formidable, with each forward bound. The continuation of slow, attritional warfare in the islands is. involving Japan in a crippling expenditure of aircraft, merchant vessels and warships. In the past five weeks, the Japanese lost 22 warships in the Central Solomons—four cruisers, 17 destroyers, and a 9,000 ton seaplane tender. Five additional enemy destroyers were probably sunk and six more damaged. The only Allied ships reported sunk in the same period have been a cruiser and two destroyers.

The Japanese task force of a cruiser 'and three destroyers wiped out on Friday night was the fifth “Tokio Express” which has been intercepted by the Allied air or naval forces since the New Georgia offensive beagn on June 30. The failure of their power barges to run our Central Solomons blockade probably led the Japanese to renew their attempts' to supply their forward bases with fast naval craft. Vila, on Kolombangara Island, which is believed to have been the warships’ objective, is the sole remaining enemy strongpoint in the Central Solomons.