JAP HOLD-OUTS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 146, 22 June 1945, Page 7

JAP HOLD-OUTS

WAR-PEACE IN GUAM

SINISTER ISLAND FEATURE

By JOHN LARDNER GUAM. With Chamorros buying war bonds at the Navy's bank of Guam by the seashore, with native construction workers standing about the landscape like statues in the old alleged Wpa tradition, with a seabee quonset civilisation blanketing the island and traffic moving over roads that are as good in some cases as the good ones at home, with movie shows and boxing bouts and State rallies which are very much like Elks conventions going on all over the place, Guam needs only two things from the serviceman's point of view —hot dog stands and less water between itself and San Francisco.

Well, of course, I don't mean only two things. There are several others. But we will confine ourselves to indicating that the place has become very modernised inaeed.

The passenger returning from Okinawa, a pleasanter and more scenic island in many respects if you can forget that the south end is jumping with shells, is astonished all over again at the building, upholstery, and paint job that has been done here. I thought I saw a hotel as I came up the road to the duplex quonset where the war correspondents live, though it may have been only a filling station.

Sinister Feature in Common

The quonset has a new drinking fountain since I left, and three newvarieties of poker, all wilder than antelopes, introduced by Coach Stanley Woodward, the New York football authority. He calls these games Eniwetok, Kwajalein and Ulithi, which shows you what is happening to south sea tradition.

The speed of these American*, warpeace developments like Guam is immense. It is less than a year since we landed-.>here. In eight or ten months' the combat island of the&noment, a couple of hours by the Japanese mainland, may be looking somewhat the same. You do not think so when you look at Okinawa now, but the sight of Guam convinces you. Yet all these boom islands have a sinister feature in common, and Okinawa will be no exception. It is highly representative of the war we are fighting. Back in the bush and the boondocks of Guam thousands of Japanese soldiers have been killed since we called the island secure and they are still being killed even while the Seabees plot the foundation of the first hamburger pavilion. I know one; Chamorro farmer, temporarily of the constabulary, who has accounted for 15 Japs, in the last six months alone. If we think we have seen Jap. holdouts in Guam, ■wait till we finish with Okinawa.

An Okinawa Camouflage The wild hilly country of the north in Okinawa and the cave labyrinths of the south make hiding almost a pleasure. There were roughly 70,000 Japanese troops on the island when we landed there. Thanks to their own defensive programme we were able to pin a large proportion of these, probably more than three-quarters, in a relatively small area in the south; but even for them, pinning is not exactly the right word. Most of them will be killed in pitched battle, all of them will eventually be wiped out or captured unless their country surrenders meanwhile, but quantities even in the south will be underground when Okinawa is tactically secure. In the north, where I watched the marines bushwhacking, ravines, woods and still more caves will hide them. And holdouts have a new advantage which they have not had before in the large civilian population of Okinawa, 450,000—a reluctant camouflage, but still a camouflage.

All this only postpones death or capture. But it gives an added feature, unique as far as I know in chamber of commerce records, to our salvage and development of the islands of the Pacific during the war.—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.