ROADS TO TOKYO

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 41, 18 February 1944, Page 4

ROADS TO TOKYO

TRIANGULAR ATTACK

ALEUTIANS' SPRINGBOARD

(0.C.) SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31. The Aleutian Islands furnish the shortest route to Tokyo, and will play a very important part in the march on Japan, Senator Mon C. Wallgren, Democrat of the State of Washington, predicted. Envisioning an eventual attack on Nippon—from the Aleutians, the Chinese mainland and from the South-west Pacific—Senator Wallgren estimated, however, that "a victory which will bring about the unconditional surrender of Japan will certainly take many years." "Licking the Japs is going to be a tough job," he said in an interview in Washington. "They are so scattered and have obtained control of so much ocean. It will prove a mansized job to drive through their outer defences. The Japs are an industrious tribe of people, capable of taking any amount of punishment, and filled with a fanaticism which makes them an uncommon enemy. "The American people should not be too confident of what may happen in the Paicific. They must realise that the Japs now have hundreds of millions in added manpower from seized areas. I can't work up any enthusiasm from communiques reporting that a few hundred Japs were killed somewhere in the perimeter of their defences." Senator Wallgren favours an early offensive against the Kurile Islands from the Aleutians, a distance of 750 miles, as a stepping stone to Tokyo, only 1200 from the tip of the Kuriles. The Senator asserted that this action would also relieve the pressure on the South Pacific and "permit us to reach Tokyo without touching foreign soil, including Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula ' (both Soviet territory)." As a result of the Japs having been cleaned out of the Aleutians, fear of Jap bombing raids on the West Coast have been reduced considerably, he said. "There is always the possibility of token raids on the West Coast by the Japs, but they can scarcely amount to much, because enemy carrier planes could only carry light bomb loads."