CHRISTMAS

Grey River Argus, 9 January 1943, Page 5

CHRISTMAS

On Guadakanar Island (Official War Correspondent. N.Z.E.F.) GUADALCANAR. Dec. 24. “Silent night, holy night. “All is calm, all is bright . . . ” / The words and the music drifted across the fighter strip through the cool of the evening, with the deep, harmonious beauty that all soldiers seem able to draw from a sacred song. But Christmas Eve had been an ugly day for the Japs—22 Zeros destroyed on and above their new field at Munda Point,. New Georgia Island —and now we stood with the fighter pilots and heard how it was done. There was a Marine Corps ■ major

named Donald Yost, a 31-year-old graduate of Princeton University, who had become an ace overnight, with six Zeros to his credit in two successive days’ combat. Yesterday, in his first battle, he found himself alone in his Grumman Wildcat, alone among half a dozen Zeros, wjieelmg 2000 feet above . their own runway. He didn’t mean to be there alone, and there was only one thing to do, tight his way out of the mess. “They should have got me, but they were terrible shots,’’ he said. They merely creased his wing, but he sent two down in flames. This morning he was again flying his stubby little fighter into the thick of things over Munda Point. Marine dive-bombers and their escorts —Yost and his Wildcat fighters—screamed down on to the Japanese airfield while Bell Aircobras of the United States Army stayed on guard above. In a few minutes of fierce battle 22 Zeios had been sent crashing m flames and smoke or destroyed on the ground. Of the 22, Yost shot four out of the sky, the rest of the section of four accounted for six, the Aircobras downed four more, and the dive-bombers destroyed the 'remainder before they could leave the field. Different in dress, different in speech, the fighter pilots of Guadalcanal’ aie still much the same as the young men New Zealand breeds for aeiial combat. They live the same four-miles-a-minute lives, and the same clear, hard light is in their eyes. We are lucky to have them lighting for us here in cur own front line—and grateful to-day for their Christmas gift to us of 22 wrecked Zeros. “They looked up and saw a star “Shining in the east, beyond them far ...”

The carols haunted us as we went on through the coconut groves in the deepening dusk. The nightwas warm and softly lit by a full moon just rising. The singing grew louder. and we saw. candles flickering and coloured lights twinkling, It was a tiny chapel, hung with tinsel and greenery, and the hundreds of men clustered about it were singing then hearts out.

It was no Guadalcanal’ any more. For a brief minute, like a sponge rubbing off a slate, the singing clear? ed away al consciousness of war, all memory of heat and blood and violence. “How strange it is,” we mused to the padre, “that five minutes ago we were listening to fighter pilots telling us how they killed Japs today, and that at this minute men are lying in the front line six miles away, waiting for more Japs to come out and be killed. And now—all this.”

The padre smiled. “It seems a’ paradox, but it’s simply solved. ‘All this’ is just what we are fighting for. Christmas and its carols give us a preview of home and peace and freedom. the things we mean to have and to hold.”

That is why to-morrov, Christmas Day, there will be turkey and cranberry sauce and mince pie for the men of Guadalcanal’; there will be a Santa Claus in tight red breeches and cottonwool whiskers riding about with a truck load of cirol singers; there will be church services in mess halls and under the open sky. And that is why to-morrow, Christmas Day, ■ there will be Japanese crf.uqhed in their foxholes and hiding in the jungles from the spatter of our machine-guns and the steel hail of our bombs, That explains the. thunder we hear now, from Guadalcanal airfield, the thunder that drowns, the soft notes of the carol singers, the thunder of the giant planes warming up for a mission of death.

“While fields, and floods, “Rocks, hills and plains “Repeat the sounding joy.”