DIVIDED AND DEFEATED

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 145, 16 December 1942, Page 4

DIVIDED AND DEFEATED

With the fall of Buna, the Japanese hold on that part of the Papua coast is reduced to two or three small, isolated patches. When the Buna-Gona force was pushed against the sea and divided into fragments, its_ military purpose, so far as outward appearances are concerned, dwindled or disappeared. Japan, however, has some reason of her own for permitting a Papua invasion enterprise to degenerate into four or five seaside bullrings, where war-frenzied Japs make frothy j charges hither and thither,. until such j time as concentrated bombardment has ! so "softened" the bullring that it can be rushed by the surrounding enemy. ■ This has now happened to Buna.; Meanwhile the Japanese navy, at con-1 siderable cost in life, and damage, has j landed by night limited numbers of troops and supplies at two spots on the Papua coast estimated to be 13 to 25 miles distant from the still surviving Japanese "strong-points," Sanananda and Buna Mission. This further fragmentation of the Japanese Papuan forces continues to be obscure in purpose. Unless detachments dropped here and there up and down ■twenty or thirty miles of coast have some undisclosed co-operative objective, or unless the strength at a given point is sufficient to establish and hold an airfield, the "nightly labours of the Japanese navy appear to be futile. Although some military use possibly could be made of the Mambare and | Kumusi Rivers, near which the latest Japanese landings have been made, conjecture looks to Japan for something bigger than tropical river warfare or coastal bullrings. Conjecture in America sees Japan attacking Hawaii or even the American main-; land. Outward appearances suggest that Japan is already too short of ships j and air power to attempt an invasion of America, which might require a greater armada even than that which recently went to North Africa. But the people who are conjecturing in America invert the scarcity argument by imagining that the paucity of Japanese air effort in the Papua- ! Solomons area is due to ' Japan's "husbanding her shipping and aviation" for .some new offensive. The idea is that the less aeroplanes Japan is displaying, the more she has up her sleeve, and the more she is inclined to carry on in Papua isolated "bullring" parties as a "blind." That she has succeeded in camouflaging her policy may be admitted, but that she is able to implement a trans-Pacific movement is much to be doubted. Failure of Japan to drive south is a poor preparation for a greater drive east. It is difficult to believe that the Japanese policy which has led to the fall of Buna can contain within itself any new hidden move equal to providing compensation for the series of reverses which Japan has incurred, and still invites, in Papua and Guadalcanal.