ATTACK IN FORCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 December 1943, Page 3

ATTACK IN FORCE

ON JAPANESE CONCENTRIC DEFENCES MAY OPEN AT ANY MOMENT GREAT & COSTLY EFFORTS IN PROSPECT (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.15 a.m.) RUGBY, December 2. The significance of the historic North African Three Power conference is reflected in the generous space in print and pictures devoted to it in all the national newspapers. Two lines of thought predominate. One is that the United Nations plan for the future of Eastern Asia has supplied an effective counter to the much-advertised Japanese “new order” for this area. The other is that,, with the conference an accomplished fact, military experts are already discussing ways and means of setting in motion the “series of prolonged operations” which the conference statement warned would be necessary to force Japan to unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, agency despatches point to an early beginning of what may well be the bloodiest campaign on- this the longest of the world's battlefronts in the Pacific. One such despatch, from Pacific headquarters, says: “Hundreds of islands form concentric rings of defences for the Japan-ese-occupied Philippines and the East Indies and around the perimeter of these rings is gathering the greatest naval concentration in history—in addition to hundreds of thousands of Allied troops —all awaiting the order to attack at any moment.”

MOST GRATIFYING UNEQUIVOCAL ALLIED DECISIONS. DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER'S COMMENT. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. Commenting on the announcement that the leaders of the United States of America, China and Britain had met and agreed upon future military operations against Japan, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Nash, said yesterday that this would be greeted with the utmost enthusiasm by the peoples of the Pacific. “The unequivocal terms of the communique,” he said, “emphasising as they do that there is to be no bargaining with Japan, and that occupied territories are to be restored, should be a source of very real strength to the United Nations’ cause and of renewed confidence and hope to the peoples now under the heel of the Japanese.

“It is most gratifying that China, through the person of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, should take its due place in the councils of the great Powers now that plans are being laid to direct the whole weight _of Allied strength upon the Pacific, in order to effect the utter defeat of Japan. “The statement that the three great Powers do not covet the territories in the Pacific which are to be taken from the Japanese contains nothing new and nothing which they have not emphasised again and again, but it is good to have the point made manifestly clear that the United Nations are not interested in territorial expansion and that those territories which have been so flagrantly seized by the Japanese will -be restored.”