Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1943. NO AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 November 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1943. NO AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS.

AS the latest, addition to an extending series of events in the South and South-West Pacific—events in which New Zealand troops are playing a gallant part—the landing oi an American force on the west central coast of Bougainville Island, the last and largest Japanese stronghold in the Solomons, stands out as impressive evidence of the initiative held by the Allies and the enterprise and dash with which it is being turned to account.

In a good deal of recent comment on Allied victories in the islands campaign, rather too much has been made of the contention that it is still a long way to Tokio. On a number o grounds it may very reasonably be considered that the defeats inflicted on the Japanese in New Guinea, by the arduous, valiant and long-continued efforts of Australian and American forces, and in other Pacific areas, in naval and air battles and in. many island campaigns from the American landing on Guadalcanal onwards, represent important strides in the development of a major strategic scheme.

Much of the Allied progress in the islands to date has been achieved slowly and with difficulty, by limited forces, in campaigning of a particularly arduous and trying kind. A stage has been reached, however, at which the vital enemy base of Rabaul, at the northern end of New Britain, is menaced closely from New Guinea, on the west and the Solomons in the east. Obviously, too, the threat to Rabaul is also a threat to the enemy base at Truk. Good headway has been and is being made in a drive by stages through the island arc into the open ocean approaches to the Philippines and the Japanese homeland. In a report not long ago to a conference in the United States, Lieutenant-Colonel F. S. Wildman, planning assistant to the American Army Air Force, said in part: —

Japan schemed ,her war carefully and well . . . fortifying every obstacle which would delay and perhaps exhaust us, and in particular creating defences aimed to stifle our mounting aerial power. We, are determined not to go along with this kind of warfaie, convinced that effective means can be developed to accelerate the employment of our vast aerial supremacy against the Japanese main-land—-thereby hastening the advance of all arms.

To date the effective methods of which Colonel Wildman spoke have nowhere been developed with better’results and promise than in the South and South-West Pacific. This appears not only in the considerable advance that has been made towards a break through into the ocean spaces to the north, but in the losses the Japanese have suffered in attempting to stem that advance.

Any idea that the attacks on the island arc from the East Indies to the Solomons are of secondary importance is made, indeed, quite untenable by the desperate but unavailing efforts the Japanese have made to maintain that arc intact and the heavy losses, particularly of ships find aircraft, they have incurred and continue to incur. It was reported a day or two ago that in the last four months, the Japanese in the South-West Pacific have lost 2292 aircraft definitely destroyed and that the number of enemy planes destroyed in October—775 —was half as great again as that for any of the preceding three months. At the same time, while the enemy over and over again has evaded a decisive naval action, his losses of war, auxiliary and merchant shipping also are mounting apace. Precisely what place a drive from the South and South-West Pacific is assigned in the ultimate Allied plans for major offensive action against Japan lias yet to appear. Account has to be taken of the operations against South-Eastern Asia to be controlled by Admiral Lord Mountbatten, and the role assigned to the enlarged and strengthened American Fleet—a mighty “battering ram of steel and men and planes”—may be still more important. ' The position at present, however, in the area in which Allied operations are being directed by General MacArthur and Admiral Halsey is that the enemy is being subjected to attacks which he cannot hope to counter, or even to check, otherwise than by the employment of immensely powerful naval, air and land forces.

General MacArthur is explicitly challenging the enemy to this full-powered effort and as yet the challenge has not been met. If the reason is that the enemy feels that he cannot afford to employ in defence of his last foothold in the Solomons, and of Rabaul, naval, air and other forces he will need even more vitally, before long in areas further north, so much the better reasons appear for believing that in the South and South-West Pacific a vital contribution is being made to his ultimate and decisive defeat.