NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 7, 9 January 1942, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

PACIFIC ZONE

TRANSFERRED BASES

> The official announcement that Vice-Admiral Lay ton has Jeft Singapore to reorganise the British Eastern Fleet so that the Allies may gain supremacy in the Far East as soon as possible follows a report, a few days ago, that General Wavell will make his Pacific headquarters in Java. The shifting of the .naval headquarters is due, no doubt, to the increasing risk of depending upon Singapore as a principal naval base, for that purpose cannot be safely served by* a port which is in danger of heavy bombing, or which can be closely approached by powerful naval forces. Both. these conditions apply to Singapore. The dominating factor in the present Pacific problem is distance. With Britain's heavy preoccupations in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the naval burden in the Pacific falls chiefly upon the United States fleet. Its problem is to get to the war zone. The normal direct route, via Hawaii and due west, appears to be impracticable for lack of fuelling bases, and it seems that it must now adopt a longer route and, Manila being out of the question, adopt a new principal base, or bases, in British or Netherlands territory. Such bases take time to establish on a scale that will enable the fleet to face a powerful enemy which has relatively short distances to cover and conveniently placed bases. The Broad Aspect. The general picture of the Pacific war zone at present is that the Japanese have supremacy in the Western Ocean from Siberia to Borneo and New Guinea, and that the Allied, pressure will be exerted upon this zone from the west: by sea from fhe Netherlands East Indies chain, and on land by the Chinese. At present the most powerful effort that can be exerted against them is that provided by China. Marshal Chiang Kai-shek has undertaken to provide Chinese forces wherever they may be required by the Allied strategy. It may be that Chinese armies will be used to good effect in Indo-China and Thailand, in direct cooperation with General Wavell's plans. In the meantime'? Chinese armies are taking very heavy toll of the Japanese jn China. Such "victories" as that^ at Changsha, a Japanese version of which is that their forces have retired after "mopping up," but which looks quite different from another point of view, must have a highly discouraging effect on Tokio. Manila's Defender. General Douglas Mac Arthur, the American commander at Manila, where he is fighting gallantly in a struggle which has all the appearance of a forlorn hope, has had a long association with the Philippines.. After Admiral Dewey's victory in Manila Bay had resulted in the ending of Spanish rule there, in 1899, General Mac Arthur's father became military governor. Incidentally, Manuel Quezon, now President of the Philippines, was among the Spanish officers whose swords were accepted; by Mac Arthur,:. The son went to the Philippines a few years later, and served there, off and on, for many years. After a distinguished and picturesque military career, he took over the command of the United States forces in the Philippines in 1935, and | aimed persistently at makiqg it a real I stronghold, which it would be prohibitively . costly to conquer. But the United States had promised the Filipinos full independence and intended to withdraw the army a few years hence, and it was only last year that it began, under the threat of Japanese attack, to strengthen its forces there, and General Mac Arthur, who had retired from the United States, army in 1937, was recalled and put in command. In the meantime he had devoted his energies, which are enormous, to the building up of a Philippine army, which under his plans was to have been highly formidable by 1946. His faith in the Filipino army is of the highest. "Cincus,"' etc. Artificial names built up of initials and scraps of words have come into very general use since the style was set in World War I by "Dora" (Defence of the Realm Act), "Bawra" (BritishAustralian Wool - Realisation Association), and a few others. Today they are a multitude, including, of course, , Nazi, Gestapo, flak, Ogpu, and many other familiar terms. The United States produced a crop of mainly unpronounceable labels for the "New Deal" organisations—N RA,WPA, CC C, and so on. Among recent contractions of the kind are the well-known O P M (Office of Production Management) and O P A C S (Office of Price Administration and Civilian • Supply). There is much to be said for these handy contractions, when they are familiar. The reported, change of the term "Cincus" (commander-in-chief, United States fleet) to "Cominch" (commander-in-chief) has introduced a group which has not hitherto entered the news here. The commander-in-chief of the Atlantic fleet is known as "Cinclant." For safe navigation through the departments in the United States a stranger needs not only a chart but an ABC guide—for which he might apply to Bunav (Bureauof Navigation).