Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1945. AIR WAR ON JAPAN.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 65, Issue 197, 2 June 1945, Page 2

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1945. AIR WAR ON JAPAN.

Ever since the earliest American conquests in the South-west Pacific, when .the Japanese were ignominiously thrown back from their island strongholds, the people to whom the threat of invasion was at that time very real have looked forward to the day when Japan itself would feel something of the power of the United Nations, hor a long time that hope was not capable of fulfilment, because the Japanese iliad taken in their stride the few bases held by the United States. But that great country, with her almost unlimited resources of manpower and material, was soon able to reach the stage where she was not merely able to remove entirely the danger which threatened Australia, and New Zealand, but in a comparatively short period her naval and military forces swept through the Pacific neutralising and destroying large numbers of enemy forces and recapturing vital points which were rapidly converted into springboards lor further onslaughts. Many months have passed since General James Doolittle led the first force of Fortresses against Japan, but that was only a foretaste of what was to come. In the early stages of the onslaught on the Japanese mainland carrier task forces had to be employed, and the success which was attached to this method was necessarily limited Now, however, with bases available much nearer their objective, the Allied forces for British units have now .‘begun to make -their presence felt in the Pacific — kare able to intensify their blows. Just as strategic 'bombing in the West played a large part, on the admission of the German leaders themselves, in bringing about the* downfall of the Nazi regime, so will this form of warfare have a most important bearing on the struggle in the Far East. Bombing of the Japanese mainland, when intensified by the transfer £o the East of British and American air fleets which have been operating in Europe, may bring about an industrial, social and even military crisis at a much earlier date than has hitherto been expected. There is, of course, a major difference between the strategy of the war in the East and that of Europe —• namely, that the Japanese are entrenched, millions strong, on the Asiatic mainland. The armies there are drawing supplies in substantial part from Manchukuo and China herself, just as the invaders of Malaya and the East Indies, and the resistance groups in Borneo, New Guinea and the Pacific Islands are either fighting, or are prepared to fight, campaigns which to some extent could continue independently. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the source of sustained Japanese power everywhere, both material and moral, lies in the Imperial islands. The Japanese navy depends upon the bases and workshops in Japan proper; the main munition works and heavy industries are there. It is the headquarters and the nervecentre. Its disruption on the scale foreshadowed 'by Germany s ordeal might well bring about the collapse of Japan’s nation-ally-organised struggle more swiftly than anybody, up to the present, has dared to hope.