VAST WAR MACHINE IN PACIFIC

Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 7, 3 October 1944, Page 5

VAST WAR MACHINE IN PACIFIC

Moving Into High Gear

NEW YORK, October 1. “The stage is rapidly being cleared for big events in the near future,” says the “Christian Science Monitor’s” correspondent, Gordon Walker, writing from somewhere in the Pacific. “The earlier Pacific campaigns will seem small compared to these military ventures, which are likely to set the whole Pacific ablaze.

“A year ago I watched the preparations for various campaigns in the Solomons and New Guinea* The task force commanders would assemble a mere handful of invasion craft, perhaps one or two divisions of troops, and barely sufficient aircraft to meet the minimum requirements.

“The familiar shoestring on which the war out here was rim sometimes was stretched so thin it looked like a silk thread. That shoestring has now grown to be a steel cable.

’l'lie South-west Pacific headquarters staff now talks in terms of hundreds of invasion craft, tens of thousands of troops, numbers of aircraft comparable to the big Allied strikes against Germany before the invasion. Touring various South-west Pacific bases one sees thousands of motorized vehicles where there used to be hundreds, harbours often so choked with various types of craft it is almost impossible to move among them, dozens of new airstrips so clogged with •aircraft it is not uncommon for a single field to land and scud off planes daily at the rate of one every two or three minutes.

“The one or two tanks which used to waddle in single file through the jungle have now given way to dozens advancing abreast. Within the past few weeks the Pacific war has shifted into high gear. It will not be long before it assumes an importance and significance second to none.”