SOLOMONS FINALE

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 61, 10 September 1945, Page 5

SOLOMONS FINALE

GRIM-FACED COMMANDER

SIGNS

SYDNEY, September 9,

Before a blaze of lights and clicking movie cameras, the grim-faced Lieu-tenant-General Masetane Kanda, commander of the Japanese in Bougainville, signed seven copies of the surrender instrument at Torokina yesterday, thus ending the war in the Solomons. Vice-Admiral Samejima, the Japanese naval commander, also signed. Lieutenant-General Kanda, frail and weak, sat poker-faced while the commander of the Australian 2nd Corps, Lieutenant-General Savige. read out the surrender terms. Kanda wiped his brow with a Hand that seemed paralysed. More than once in the last three months he had been bombed out of his headquarters by New Zealand planes. Rabaul, once the administrative capital of New Britain, has ceased to exist for all practical purposes. The wreckage that remains was described by Captain B. Morris, Royal Australian Navy, the officer in charge of New Britain. He made a shore inspection in a Japanese staff car on Friday after Australian vessels had swept Simpson's Harbour.

• "What used to be the town area is overgrown with jungle 20 to 30 feet high." he said. "Not one building is standing, unless you include one or two shanties resembling dogs' kennels that the Japs have built. The wharves are completely demolished and the whole foreshore is littered with wreckage, from large steamers to little boats. Practically the whole population of Japanese and natives had gone underground against the bombing and lived in miles and miles of tunnels."