ADVANCED BASE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 109, 10 May 1943, Page 2

ADVANCED BASE

AT GUADALCANAR

"NOT ALTOGETHER A PICNIC"

(By ROBIN MILLER) (No. V.) GUADALCANAR. Our landing on the shores of Guadalcanar must have looked impressively warlike from a distance. The big grey troop transport swung into the channel behind a screen of escorting destroyers, and had scarcely stopped moving before it lowered its fleet of, landing barges into the water and, steel-helmeted soldiers, clad in jungle green uniforms began to scramble down the cargo nets.

Trailing white foam, the barges sped to the shore. The bow ramps dropped and the men leaped on to the beach. Up to that point it was the approved conception of an assault landing, but now it petered out. The soft morning sunshine lay smilingly over the coconut palms and the dark green Jungle and the blue hills. Blue smoke from a hundred field kitchens drifted straight up through the still air. This was Guadalcanar, but this was also the month of April. The war was out of sight and hearing. It was like —

"Heck," said a private whose boots had just touched the white coral sand, "it's more like going on a darned picnic!" Life on Guadalcanar is not yet altogether a picnic, but the hand- of civilisation has caressed the island since I left here before the fighting ended in February. For the newcomers with -whom I arrived this time, the first notice boards we saw held a touch of unconscious irony. They said "No shooting." (They were meant not as a joke, however, but as a warning against the exploding of captured ammunition near inhabited areas.) Camps had taken on an air of permanence, with marked pathways and coral decorations around the wooden-floored tents. Military police were stopping traffic offenders on the greatly improved roads. Guadalcanar looked as if it was , rapidly becoming a peaceful, law-abiding community. Anti-Aircraft Guns Open Up But it was never wise to rely on first impressions of Guadalcanar. Before their first day was over the island showed the emvcomers some of its old unpredictable spirit. As I sat at an outdoor movie show feeling never more distant from the war, every anti-aircraft gun on the island seemed suddenly to. open fire. A few fly-high-by-night nuisance raiders were overhead, and we saw two of them caught in the beams of the searchlights while the guns pounded away furiously at them. From far off came the whistle and the dull thunder of a stick of bombs, but it was only the falling of fragments of our own shrapnel that made our seats at the fireworks display a little uncomfortable.

The more night bombing I see carried out by the Japanese the more am I reminded of the Italians over the Western Desert. It has the same casual, half-hearted, unsystematic characteristics that made us ignore the Italians once the novelty had worn off. Only by sheer chance does it ever seem to do any damage, and probably its real purpose is to keep the other side wide awake. So the best counter to it is to sleep right through it, which you learn to do after a while—althoug-h there is no saying that a remotely possible near miss will not get you out of bed. Between such moments of mild excitement, Guadalcanar to-day is nothing more than "an advanced base in the South Pacific." In this sector there is no front line in the accepted sense—no point of contact between surface forces —and there cannot be any until either we try to take another island from Japan or the Japanese try to take one from us.