A SAMOAN INCIDENT

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXII, Issue 99, 26 March 1942, Page 6

A SAMOAN INCIDENT

A narrative in which is described as a thrilling and desperate adventure in Samoan waters comes from Dr. P. R, Skinner, who was a junior house surgeon at Palmerston North Hospital for about two years just prior to the outbreak of thp war.

Shortly after the Japanese entered the war (states the letter) a launch manned by ten men, including Dr. Skinner, put out from Samoa in response to distress signals supposed to have been received from an Allied aeroplane. When the launch was 100 miles out to sea it was suddenly _ attacked by a Japanese bomber plane. There was a savage onslaught of machine-gun lire, to escape which all of the occupants of tho launch dived into the stja and were forced to continue diving and surfacing to save themselves. The attack ceased, pre. sumably on the Japam'so assumption that the crow had been wiped out, but nnracuously not a man had been injured, life launch was burning, . the hull being badly holed, and the engine damaged. After a desperate struggle the tiro was extinguished and order was restored sufficiently to enable tho launch to make a perilous return voyage in two days, llic intensity of the attack may be imagined from the fact that personal belongings such as clothing left on tho launch «erc riddled bv bullets. . , "When all the circumstances associated with the incident were received there was left the conviction that the supposed distress signals were in reality a trap designed by an unscrupulous enemy.