ON GUADALCANAR

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 32348, 18 October 1943, Page 8

ON GUADALCANAR

IMPRESSIVE LANDING “MORE LIKE ON A PICNIC ” CORRESPONDENT’S DESCRIPTION guadalcanar. Our landing on the shores of Guadalcanal- must have looked impressively warlike from a distance. The big grej troop transport swung into the channel behind a screen of escorting destroyers. and had scarcely stopped moving before it lowered its fleet of landing barges into the water and steelhelmeted soldiers, Had in jungle green uniforms, began to scramble down to cargo nets. Trailing white foam, the barges sped to the shore. The bow ramps dropped and the men leaped on to the beach. Up to ' that, point it wa? the approved conception of an assault landing, but now’ it petered out. The soft morning sunshine lay smilingly over the coconut, palms and the dark gi’een jungle and the. blue hills. Blue smoke from a hundred field kitchens drifted straight up through the still air. This was Guadalcanal’, but this was also the month of April. The war was out of sight and hearing. “Heck’’' said a private, whose boots had just touched the white coral sand, “it's more like going on a darned

picnic!” Life on Guadalcanal- is not yet altogether a picnic, but the hand of civilisation has caressed the. island since I left here before the fighting ended in February. For the newcomers with whom I arrived this time, the first notice boards we saw held a touch of unconscious irony. They said, “No shooting.” (They were meant hot as a joke, however, but as a warning against the exploding of captured ammunition near inhabited areas). y Camps had taken on an air of permanence. with marked pathways and coral decorations around the woodenfloored tents. Military police were stopping traffic offenders on the gieatly improved roads. Guadalcanal- looked as if it was rapidly becoming a peaceful, law-abiding community. But it was never wise to reply on first impressions of Guadalcanal-. Before their first day was over. the island showed the newcomers some of its old unpredictable spirit.. As I sat at an outdoor movie show, feeling

never more distant from the wai, every anti-aircraft gun on the island seemed suddenly to open fire. A few fiy-high-by-night nuisance raiders were overhead, and -we saw two of them caught in the beams of the searchlights while the guns pounded away furiously at them. From far off came the whistle and the dull thunder of a stick of bombs, but it was only the falling of fragments of our own shrapnel that made our seats at the fireworks display a little uncomfortable. * The more night-bombing I see carried out by the Japanese, the more am I reminded of the Italians over the Western Desert. It has the same casmil. half-hearted, unsystematic characteristics that made us ignore the Italians once the novelty -wore off. Only by sheer chance does it. ever seem do any damage, .and probably its real purpose is to keep the other side awake. So the best counter to it is to sleep right through it, which you learn to do after a while —although there is no saying that a remotely ; possible near miss will not get you out I of bed. | Between such moments of mild exi citement. Guadalcanal- to-day is nothing more than “an advanced base in the South'l’a ci fie.” In this sector there is no front line in the accepted sense —no point of contact between surface i f( )reeS '—mid there cannot be any until either we try to take another island ! from Japan or the Japanese try lo I take one from us.