HOW TO BEAT THE JAP

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 12 January 1944, Page 6

HOW TO BEAT THE JAP

WE ARE LEARNING BY EXPERIENCE

NEW WEAPONS TRIED AT FINSHHAFEN

Alter nearly three months ol hard slogging the Japanese have been thoroughly beaten in the Finshhafen area, and what is left of their forces are treading a long and bitter trail northward (writes Geoffrey Hutton, "Argus” War Correspondent, who has just returned from New Guinea.) There were times when the operation, came uncomfortably close to the danger line, but the Japanese never gained a big enough lead in the battle of supplies to make good their inferiority in the battle of men and metal. Finshhafen, Satelberg, and Wareo are not the end of the Huon Peninsula, although' they may well prove to have been the main enemy stronghold. In front of our infantry there still lies a great mass of tangled mountains jutting out towards New Britain, and beyond it the long, untouched coastline of North-Eastern New Guinea. The victories of Lac and Finshhafen must be seen in perspective—a perspective which includes the long, long road stretching from New Guinea to Tokio, which we have hardly begun to tread. The size and intensity of the Japanese effort were certainly a surprise. Finshhafen was assaulted by part of the troops which had walked into the much publicised Japanese base of Lae with such surprising ease a few days before. Like the push inland up the Markham and Ramu Valieys, it was intended to exploit the collapse of the main Japanese bases at Lae and Salamaua. The old German settlement was never more than a staging point for these two bases. It had good harbours —Dreger, Schneider. Langemak Bay, and Finshhafen—but it was a small settlement with no serviceable airfield and very lltle room between the hills and the sea for building roads and camp, sites. It was a transit point on a route which no longer led anywhere. LESSONS OF LAE Why did the Japanese choose to make their main stand there after they had evacuated Lae with no more than a rearguard action? The lessons of Lae, like those of Kiska and Vila, seem to be that the only way to force the Japanese into a withdrawal from a forward base without the wasteful and arduous business of ferreting them from their holes i T i the ground is to by-pass and isolate the base by sea, land, and air. At Lae the Japanese supply lines were cut before the assault. At Finshhafen they were squeezed but they were not completely severed. Even after the Australian landing at Scarlet Beach, six miles north .of Finshhafen, it was still possible for the Japanese to slip in reinforcements and supplies to their troops. They could be run in by barge to a dozen different supply points along the coast of the peninsula and then carried by track to Satelberg, which overlooked our beachhead like the grandstand at Flemington. What happened proves that the Japanese did so. Having decided to cut their losses and get out of Lae befoi-e it was too late, they selected Finshhafen as the first point where they could make a stand against the leapfrogging assaults of our amphibious force. The Australians beat them to the draw, smashed their hastily dug beach defences, and drove them from their strongpoints protecting Finshhafen before they could strengthen their positions. But the landing force was not large enough to pull the same trick on the dominating position of Satelberg. In a race for reinforcements and supplies the -Japanese got home the first blow against our beachhead, and it was a long and arduous job to drive them back and blast them off the mountain top. OVERNIGHT WITHDRAWALS This was an interesting demonstration of Japanese defensive tactics. They did not simply dig in and wait for us; they counterattacked persistently, using infiltration through the thick gullies and massed assaults on our strongpoints. If they had been ready a few days earlier and had attacked Scarlet Beach in real strength before we had won alternative harbours at Finshhafen and Langemak Bay our one beachhead would have been very dangerous. These counterattacks continued right up to the time that our infantry climbed over the crest of Satelberg, and even afterwards. In the purely defensive fighting the Japanese, as usual, stuck their heads down and held on to each position until our forward parties had got to grips with them. Then, with monotonous regularity, they evaporated overnight. Every position, including Finshhafen and Satelberg, was abandoned overnight after the Australian infantry had forced its way through the covering field of fire and gained a foothold in the Japanese foxholes. The defensive technique of the Japanese seems to be based on hanging on as long as possible, but not sacrificing the defending force when its position becomes hopeless. It is a very much modified form of fanaticism. Tine most immediate reason why the Japanese were beaten at Finshhafen, as they were at so many other places from Milne Bay onwards, is the tremendous man-to-man superiority of our infantry. The force which made the amphibious landings in the rear of Lae and Finshhafen was only a few months out from the desert, and its jungle training had been done solely in Australia. But from the first it was clearly superior to the enemy, and after three months’ fighting it is one of the finest jungle armies in the world. OUR CONFIDENT INFANTRY Basically, this force was the product of standard British infantry training. It was an elite force ol’ seasoned troops, masters of their weapons and experienced in the use of cover. It was the infantry who finally threw the Japanese from all their carefully dug burrows in this operation, and so far no alternative has been found. But our experiments have at last proved that it is not necessary to fight our jungle wars like Red Indians; the huge technical advances of modern warfare can be of some use in support of them. I have asked a score of infantrymen what were their most useful weapons, and nearly every one has placed his autocratic —an Owen in this case—first on the list. The Bren ranks second because of its range and its ability to chop through light scrub, kunai gra3S, and bamboo. Next comes the hand grenade for close work and for "doing over" weapon pits. The rifle is better in open country, where range of fire is more important than speed on the draw. ARTILLERY IN THE JUNGLE But the distinctive success of the Finshhafen campaign, as opposed to earlier jungle battles, is the success of the standard infantry supports the artillery and the tanks. The Japanese have made little use of cither of

these weapons in jungle fighting, and in our first battles the mountains imposed the same restriction on us. But at Finshhafen we were able to maintain a day and night battery of the enemy’s positions with our 25-pound-ers, moving the new "babies” forward and hitting from long-range with the heavies. Every Japanese strongpoint was smothered with shells before an infantry attack —sometimes from as far as 4 or 5 miles away. The cumulative effect of this shelling on Japanese morale was tremendous, and the aggregate casualties must have been considerable. The masterstroke was the appearance of the Matildas with our infantry after the guns had finished their shoot on the first Satelberg defences. These solid and powerful reinforcements proved almost invulnerable to the improvised Japanese anti-tank weapons, and in the whole action not one was destroyed. The tank can never be used as cavalry in the jungle—it is strictly an infantry support weapon, a powerful steel pillbox which can be called up to deal at close range with obstinate Japanese machine-gun pits. The tanks got to within 400 yards of the top of Satelberg, and they have since done jobs in the northward push along the coast. In the Satelberg attack they probably halved the time of the action and they probably halved our casualties. These weapons cannot be used everywhere in the jungle, but the Lae and Finshhafen operations have shown that they can be used in many places which seemed closed to them. With the more mobile though less accurate weapons of air attack by divebombers and straferbombers they have given the infantry by far the greatest support they have yet received in the New Guinea campaigns. ENGINEERS’ ACHIEVEMENT They could not have operated on such a large scale if the engineers had not been working at the same pitch. Bulldozers and boxgirders have made possible this extension of the use of heavy equipment as a substitute for irreplaceable flesh and blood. Entirely new possibilities are being opened up in this fighting which faced us with such a thorny set of new problems. Aerial spotting for the artillery and reconnaissance for the infantry, track strafing, concentrated and harassing artillery fire, and tank action have all been developed to a degree which seemed impossible a year ago. They were set in motion by our first amphibious operation and the first paratroop landing in this theatre. The first experiments of the Buna-Gona campaign have borne fruit quickly. All these developments have been noted by British and American observers, and they will not be overlooked in campaigns to come. Large areas of Burma, N.E.1., and the Philippines are akin to New Guinea, and it is in these areas that many of the battles of the next year or two years will be fought. hfew Guinea has been a laboratory for the trial and modification of our technique of fighting in a strange climate and a strange country. We have developed and readjusted our ideas on supply, battle tactics, medical services, equipment, clothing, sleeping kit, training, food, weapons—and on the enemy. We have learned more and proved more in three months on the Huon Peninsula than we could in years of peace. By trial and error we are learning how to beat the Japanese as quickly and as economically as we humanly can. Finshhafen is going to help a lot.