LESSON IN JUNGLE FIGHTING

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 153, 25 March 1944, Page 7

LESSON IN JUNGLE FIGHTING

Japanese Trounced (Received March 24, 9 p.m.) SUVA, March 24. In the early days of the Pacific war there grew up a legend that the Japanese soldier was supreme as a jungle fighter. Any American who has seen action in the Solomons will tell yon that this supremacy is now a thing of the past. There are Allied troops serving under Admiral Halsey who have forgotten more about bush warfare than the Japanese ever knew. They are*Pacific islanders and, though numerically they form an insignificant fraction of the powerful armies nowdeployed round the crumbling Japanese bastions in this area, their contribution to the successive victories won by the American and New Zealand forces has been of first importance.. On Guadalcanal Solomon Island scouts acted as the spear-points of many American patrols and in New Georgia elusive commandos from Tonga and 1’ iji ran up a formidable tally of Japanese victims. Now-troops of a Fiji infantry regiment are repeating on a more impressive scale the remarkable exploits of the commandos. These Fijians recently trounced one of Emperor Hirohito’s crack marine battalions in a two-day action which the American commanding general desenoeu as a minor tactical classic. Pointers For Enemy.

When the Japanese attempted to surround the Fijians, who were greatly outnumbered, the latter decided that they would have to withdraw, hut they also decided to stay long enough to give the Japanese a few pointers in the art ot jungle fighting. For two days they resisted enemy attacks on their outpost positions and killed, at a conservative estimate. 120 Japanese. This figure includes only those seen to fall under fire from automatic weapons. There must have been scores more wiped out by hand grenades, which the Fijians use. with exceptional skill. The only rijian casualty was one man slightly wounded. At tlie end of the second day’s hghting the Fijians calmly disengaged and ’disappeared without trace.” Long alter they were safely behind the .American lines, the Japanese were still painstakingly continuing ponderous outflanking operations against the abandoned positions. "We gave them a damn good hilling and then left them to think it over, was the way the Fijian commander summed up the action.