WAR IN PACIFIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 80, 2 October 1944, Page 5

WAR IN PACIFIC

BIG EVENTS COMING

GROWTH OF ALLIED POWER

(By .Telenraph—Press Association—Copyright.) Rec. 9.30 a.m. 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. 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,-' per-, haps one or two divisions of troops, a and barely sufficient aircraft-to meet the minimum requirements. ,"The familiar shoestring on which' the war out here was run sometimes was stretched so thin it looked like a silk thread. That shoestring has now grown to-be a steel cable. "The 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 motorised vehicles where there used '- to be hundreds, harbours often sochoked with various types of craft it is almost impossible to move among them dozens of new airstrips so clogged with aircraft itis not uncomS ffr ,a sinl le field to land and send off planes daily at the fate" of one every two or three minutes. ■> . ■ ♦« The*> °ne. or 'two tanks which used, Sn^!d^ le m smgle file through the' jungle have now given way to' dozens advancing abreast. Within the past few weeks the Pacific war has shifted h^™ 1?? Sear- Xt will not be long before it assumes an importance and significance second to none.-" 5 i