EARLIER LANDINGS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 4, 5 July 1943, Page 5

EARLIER LANDINGS

SCOUTS ON NEW GEORGIA

(Special P.A.. Correspondent.) Ttec. 12.30 p.m. -: "SYDNEY, July 5. It is revealed that a week before the American invasion of ihe Japaneseoccupied Solomons, reconnaissance parties went ashore to gather information for the subsequent landings. An Australian .war correspondent who accompanied a unit which landed on New Georgia tells how the party went ashore from an old destroyer at night within a few hundred yards of the enemy encampments. The sound of the surf muffled the noise of their landing craft, and the clouds concealed the dash of the camouflaged troops across the beaches and into the jungle. Before the big invasion these men figuratively thumb-printed the entire JNew Georgia group, writes the correspondent. Some of the American navy's most accomplished salt-water men charted new reefs and channels, rechecking and correcting the inaccurate existing charts. . One man of the reconnaissance force crept up to Munda, where he saw the Japanese riding bikes and working on the bomb-blasted airfield. ' The'same correspondent says that the" progress of the . present Solomons operations is likely to provide an index by .which" the length of the war against Japan' can be gauged. Warning that bitter fighting must be expected in difficult country, he adds that in the final analysis the battle for' New Georgia, like that for Guadalcanal, will ■be one of supply. For this the Americans are infinitely stronger in troops, ships, and planes than when Guadalcanal was attacked —but the Japanese have had a full six months to build up powerful defences. OTHER OPERATIONS. The naval side of the operations on Woodlark Island and the" Tobriand Islands were carried through by the United States Seventh Fleet, under the command of Vice-Admiral Arthur Carpender. The land troops were commanded by Lieut-General Walter Kreuger, who was in the field in New Guinea. The use of small landing craft to move a considerable body of heavily-armed troops and much material across 150 miles of open sea is an achievement conjuring up new possibilities in the prosecution of a limited island warfare against the Japanese. It involves an immense saving of larger and more vulnerable transports. .One: handicap, is the weakening effect' of sea sickness -.from the5: passage in bobbing little craft:just at.the.time when the troops require all their strength, to land.