A "RETREAD"

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 4, 6 January 1944, Page 7

A "RETREAD"

BOUGAINVILLE'S FAT MAN

O.C. BOUGAINVILLE, Dec. 31. The fattest man here —possibly the fattest in the U.S. forces—is Li-Col. Charles J. Mabbutt, an old war-horse whose current job is trouble-shooting for motor transportation in the combat area. He weighs 325 pounds, is 56 years old and a grandfather, but gets around all the same. A blunt, humorous fighter of the old school, Colonel Mabbutt calls himself a "retread," yet if a foxhole is large enough he can disappear into it with an alacrity that would -not disgrace a slimmer man. . His background is interesting. Rolls of flesh which he refers to as "a little excess muscle" cover a- hardy frame that won him fame as four years "crack" footballer with the College of Idaho. He conditioned Dempsey for his first Tunney first, coached boxing at the Inter-Allied Games in 1919, and was a boxing and wrestling official at five Olympic Games. In 1926 he took the Pan-American boxing team on a whirlwind tour through. South America. He owns a ranch in California. AMPHIBIOUS TRUCKING. He is touring the Solomons ■ with a civilian, E. R. M. Snyman, 34, a G.M.C. expert, who acts as his technical adviser. They specialise in amphibious trucking, and. offer suggestions on other types of army vehicles. Snyman's father was a Boer general who exiled himself from South Africa to Mexico, where his son was born in a Mexican village, but was chased out during the 1916 revolution. It is thus that Colonel Mabbutt. describes their introduction to: Bougainville: "We took off in a cargo plane, escorted by fighters. On reaching Empress Augusta Bay the fighters left us, but we kept right on going north. I guess the pilot must have been thinking about his girl. "After 20 or 30 minutes I looked out of the window at the beach, and spotted a lot of soldiers. They weren't marines, and they weren't army. It dawned on us all simultaneously that they were Japs. Well, sir, you never saw a plane do an about-face so fast. We didn't have a single gun of any description on the ship. Why the Nips didn't take a crack at us is beyond me. All we had was one .45 pistol." The party eventually got back safely to the air strip at Bougainville. Here the colonel had scarcely arrived when he had to get out of his tent at the double and hit the nearest shelter, where his humorous reminiscences kept the muddy foxhole buzzing with laughs. -