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CAPTURE OF JAPANESE MILITARY PAPERS (Rec. 11 a.m.) TOKIO, Nov. 4. A tiny Japanese lifeboat bobbed for two days off South-eastern New Guinea under the watch of hidden Australian patrols in March, 1943, before grounding on Guo.danough Island, outside Milne Bay, and giving General MacArthur's military intelligence its biggest break of the war. The Australians captured the boat's occupants, a Japanese lieutenant-colonel, who handed over a suitcase containing documents including a complete roster of all the Japanese army officers and units. American intelligence,, with this information and scraps of information from other sources, built a card catalogue file of 90,000 Japanese officers and between 25,000 and 30,000 army units, some as small as platoons. The file enabled the Americans to pinpoint Japanese unit positions in the march towards Japan: General MacArthur's headquarters, in releasing the story, said the Japanese who handed over the documents was the survivor fo a ship sunk in the battle of the Bismarck Sea. He had carried the documents while adrift for six days.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ESD19451105.2.56
Bibliographic details
Evening Star, Issue 25632, 5 November 1945, Page 5
Word Count
171BREAK FOR INTELLIGENCE Evening Star, Issue 25632, 5 November 1945, Page 5
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