Return To A Battleground

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 13

Return To A Battleground

! Specially written for “The Press’- by

KATHLEEN HANCOCK

’ said the big American, shouldering his movie camera. “It sure is a lot more comfortable than when I was here last.” Guadalcanal’s beach shimmered in the hot sun. The cameraman was Thayer Soule, of Rochester, New York, near the end of a sentimental journey to photograph the route taken by the Ist U.S. Marine Division across the Pacific in 1942.

Twenty-four years ago, the American had waded up that same beach, a green young photographic officer, getting his first taste of active service. “When I came here yesterday,” he said, “just for a few minutes I had total recall, I could hear the Japanese ’planes. But you know, what I remember most about that campaign was the sparkle on the water, and the clouds of yellow butterflies.”

He laughed. “There were a lot of lurid stories sent home about conditions here,” he said. “Of course, we were just kids —we’d never been away from home before and it all seemed pretty terrible then.”

The Solomons were almost the end of the road for Soule. After New Guinea he would be heading home to edit his film, and begin his yearly lecture tour of North America. His usual programme was three months abroad with a camera, six months’ lecturing, and three months off. Unmarked Trained by Burton Holmes, pioneer travel-lecturer, Soule is a Harvard graduate in Romance languages, geography and public speaking. He is well equipped for his profession. On Guadalcanal he was looking for the actual sites of the hard fought battles he’d been involved in during this phase of the Pacific war. He was surprised to find no markers, and so was I. After all the battle for Guadalcanal was a decisive one—it marked the war’s turning point, and

halted the Japanese advance towards Fiji, Australia and New Zealand.

Alligator Creek and Bloody Ridge were high on Soule’s list.

At the moment he stood on the beach at the mouth of the Lunga river. The same sea sparkled and the same clouds of tiny yellow butterflies settled in clusters in the dusty undergrowth between the coconut palms. In the river a Gilbertese woman stood up to her armpits in the slow-moving current. A cake of soap sat on her mop of curly black hair, and she busied herself with her washing. She seemed indifferent to the menace of the crocodiles and sharks that lurk in the river mouths of these steamy islands. It was all rather different from the Solomons of 1942. Reunion Later that day I had a rendezvous with Soule and Father Jim Wall, a missionary priest, war-time member of the Royal Australian Air Force, and Naval Legislative Councillor. It had been quite a reunion between the American and the New Zealand priest. At the end of his first evening in Father Wall’s house in Honiara, the former marine said: “You know. I’ve got the strangest feeling I’ve been in this house before.” He was puzzled, because Honiara did not exist until after the war.

“Well you have been here before,” said the priest. “This is the house you used to visit me in at Tulagi during the war. We had it taken to bits and re-erected here.”

Father Wall’s 30 years in the Solomons and his service in the forces have left him with a happy disregard for his personal safety. That afternoon, driving a battered

jeep, he charged through long grass and scrub in the coastal area aptly named “Hell’s Point” Ominous notices were tacked to coconut palms. It seemed that the odd unexploded bomb was still very much alive. Certain sections were fenced off with barbed wire, but I was seized with a feeling of unease about the rest of the countryside as well. Only that morning I had seen a jumbo-sized bomb lying innocently in a roadside field nearby. “I can’t see,” cried Father Wall. “Will someone stand on the back and tell we where I’m going.” The jeep lurched along through the elephant grass, into ditches and out, bumping and rocking among the scattered palm trees. Helmet In Sand Eventually it came to a standstill and we debouched on to a beach near the mouth of a small river. “This is it,” said Soule. “Alligator Creek.” He picked a shattered marine helmet out of the sand. Father Wall took a photograph of Soule and the helmet and 1 took one of them both. “We held about three or four miles of coast here,” said Soule, “with the enemy behind and in control of the sea.” The little yellow butterflies flitted among the scrub. “It sure was hot and dusty then,” he said. This was an understated American, quite a novelty. Our next objective was Bloody Ridge, the scene of a major attack by the Japanese. We bumped along mere hints of old military roads. Now and then the car burst out of the grass on to the remnants of an airstrip. At a concrete gun emplacement Soule got out and began to hike up a steep slope. I lost sight of him, but a bit later I could see a white speck on top of the ridge. Arms waved energetically- He had found the site of what has been called the strongest single action of the hardfought battle for Guadalcanal —a bitter hand-to-hand struggle lasting for days and nights on end. When he came back, he was jubilant. He had tracked down the sites of all the major engagements in a campaign that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific.

“I just wanted to see it all as is it today,” he said. “You know, the United States Government offered to put all the road on Guadalcanal in order again as a friendly gesture, but the British turned it down. Funny, isn’t it? But I reckon there should be markers."