FIRE-BOMBS USED

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 20958, 4 December 1942, Page 3

FIRE-BOMBS USED

BURNING ENEMY OUT

BUNA STRONG-POINTS

JAP. LOSSES BY DISEASE

SYDNEY, Dec. 3

In Papua efforts are being made to smoke and burn the Japanese out of the most stubborn of their Buna beach-head positions. Allied aircraft dropped incendiary bombs to start fires in the coastal jungle. These are reported to have taken a good hold. Fierce fighting continues at the four main centres of enemy resistance —the air landing strip slightly west of Cape Endaidare, the mam Buna aii strip, Sananander Point and Gona mission. All are within range of Allied artillery and some within tl. range of our concentrated mortar fire. When the Australians fighting around Gona cleared the enemy from another section of the beach to the southeast large stocks of medical and other supplies were captured. Japanese casualties in the fight for the beach were substantial. Enemy survivors of the fight attempted to escape the Australians by swimming out to a wreck offshore. This was apparently a planned move as the swimmers wore lifebelts. Our machine-gunners, however, anticipated the plan and, lying on the beach, picked off the Japanese as they; endeavoured to reach their haven.

The supposedly jungle-proof Japanese troops have proved more vulnerable to tropical diseases than the Australians and Americans, according to Mr. Noel Monks, the London Daily Mail war correspondent who passed through New York en route from the south-west Pacific to North Africa. “Because of their unhygienic ways, there are more casualties among thej Japanese from tropical diseases than from war. There have been no greater physical hardships in this war than in New Guinea. What' tore my heart was to see the way our boys were living like savages on their jungle airfields. They even began to look like savages.” Mr. Monks said that insufficient notice had been taken of General Blarney's soldierly genius. ' ;