TIME IS EFFACING BATTLE SCARS ON GUADALCANAR

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 301, 20 December 1943, Page 2

TIME IS EFFACING BATTLE SCARS ON GUADALCANAR

TETERE BEACH (Guadalcanar). IX7HILE new battlefields are made " ' up north in the Solomons Islands the scars of conflict on Guadalcanar and Tulagi, a year after the first fierce fighting, are being slowly but surely effaced.

Recently I found two pilots in shorts and shoes chasing butterflies with a net over the vineentangled trenches and dugouts of the Bloody Ridge battlefield.

Vines and heavy underbrush are reclaiming the dugouts, the roofs of which are falling in and their protective sandbags rotting in the jungle dampness. Crumbling American and Japanese equipment lies discarded on the ground with mouldygreen shells and broken ammunition boxes.

Discarded shoes, both Jap. and American, cover a portion of the battlefield, mute evidence of nights when fighters slipped out of their shoes to slip through the jungles as in French and Indian warfare days.

In one of the better preserved foxholes the correspondent found tucked away a dopy of a magazine for November, 1942, swollen to many times its normal size by dampness, and part of a Freeport, 111., newspaper for the same month. Down in the very bottom of the valley were old Jap. helmets and fatigue hats, now homes for lizards and insects. Grim Reminders At the scene of the battle of the Tenaru River, the sandspit with rotting tank obstacles of coconut logs is still there, but purple thistles cover the ground on both banks of the river. The dugouts and foxholes are partially caved in and on the east side an Army commissary refuse dump has obliterated much of the battleground. Wrecked barges, trucks and boats are rusting away in the Pacific salt spray, grim reminders of the blood shed on the beaches during Marine landings in America's first offensive of the war. Souvenir-hunting marines, sailors and soldiers visit the wrecked vehicles frequently just as they comb the battlefields on their day off. Offshore in the surf one barge motor is still legible with the sign "Weapons for Victory."

Twenty-two miles across Scalark and Lengo channels is the little island of Tulagi, which resembles a motion picture set —slightly. battered, it's true —with its picturesque native-thatched dock buildings, palm trees, orchids and red hibiscus, set off by the red clay soil and black rocks of the cliffs. But for the war scars, it is faintly reminiscent of Avalon, Santa Catalina.

The first war reminder to greet the eye in beautiful Tulagi Harbour is the large sign, American billboard type, in simple black and white, reading: "Admiral Halsey Says Kill Japs. Kill More Japs. You Will Help Kill the Little Yellow So-and-so's if You Do Your Job Well." The sign is on a rocky cliff high above Government and Sturgis docks.

Gliding into anchorage at Tulagi the ship passes Sing and Song islands, two small islands named by the 150 Chinese who had a Chinatown on the outskirts of Tulagi, a British settlement, before the Japs invaded. No Chinese are left. Only one main building remains.

Gavutu and Tanambogo both look like scarred , wastelands sticking out of the water across from Tulagi. About all that is left of them are coconut stumps sticking bleakly into the sky. The Isle of Palms nearby has only a few standing palms.

Gavutu and Tanambogo are connected by an unused causeway. On thp former was once a beautiful South Seas plantation headquarters. Former British overseers said Gavutu was a virtual "tropical fairyland."

A soap firm controlling 20,000 acres of copra plantations and employing 8000 natives on 21 plantations and paddocks scattered through this district of hundreds of islands-, had its headquarters there and maintained a hospital, offices, homes and clubs for 33 white employees, both men and women.

Nearby Macambo Island, which still has its pretty red-roofed houses and palm trees, was the headquarters of another huge firm, Burns, Philp, Limited, of Australia. It has suffered less from the war.

On Tulagi, seat of the British Resident Commissioner, who governed the British Solomons under a District Commissioner at Suva, Fiji, the cricket field has given way to Navy and Marine camps, and the nine-hole golf course to camp sites and an open-air picture show. :;

A rambling eight-room English hotel is perched on a hillside above the harbour. When the armed forces took over from the Japs only two mementos of peaceful days remained—an English cooking range and an old-fashioned framed picture of a ship named the Belama, which hangs in the dining room. The Japs built a shrine with pure brass roof .and expertly joined timbers on the hillside above the hotel and it still stands. The Marines hang laundry there on rainy days. Buried Treasure Several months ago Marines were surprised to find a shorts-clad Australian calmly digging away back of the hotel. He unearthed a quantity of silverware and other valuables, explaining that he had been overseer for a soap firm and had buried the silverware when the Japs invaded. Most of the caves used by the Japs for defence emplacements, which seem to run all through the soft rock cliffs "of the island, have been sealed up.

Except for the scarred trees and scrap piles of Jap, American and Australian equipment along the quay, there is little outward evidence remaining of the Jap occupation. The War, however, still strikes heavily on Guadajcanar and Tulagi, which are-subject to constant air raids on the military installations.

A truck left by the Japanese is used by Marines and sailors for water hauling. An American car, also a relic of Jap occupation, has been converted into a carry-all. Another Jap relic is a motor cycle which has been in almost constant use since the Americans took over. The' machine last changed hands when a Soabee acquired it in a trade with a Marine sergeant.

The old motor cycle chug-chugs the three miles around the island coastline and darts through the 100foot deep pass which seems to cleave the hilly island in two. The pass was made by the British before the war to do away with the rough climb to the other shore of the mountainous isle.

Old barbed-wire entanglements out in the surf on the beaches erected by the Japanese to stop the American attack, still stand on portions of the Island.—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.