CHINA AS BASE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25134, 27 January 1943, Page 3

CHINA AS BASE

DIRECT ATTACK ON JAPAN

LESSONS OF PACIFIC WAR (N.Z.P.A. Special Aust. Correspondent) SYDNEY, Jan. 26.

“The Papuan campaign has shown clearly that the island-hopping offensive is the costliest, slowest, and least effective way of getting at the Japanese,” declares the Sydney Telegraph in an editorial to-day. “We have not yet begun to win the Pacific war, and will not do so until we combine against the Japanese powerful forces based on China and the Aleutian Islands and considerably better equipped and larger land, air, and sea forces based on Australia.

“Three factors combined to prolong the Allied Papuan offensive into a four months’ campaign,” the Telegraph adds. “First, there was the Diind, fanatical tenacity of the Japanese, who held on to strong-points long after resistance was demonstrated to be futile. Secondly, there was the wastage of soldiers through tropical disease, which caused more damage than the enemy. The third factor delaying Allied success was lack of naval forces—warships and transports. “The menace of disease is the most serious factor to contend with in the island-hopping offensive against Japan. For every man put out of action by a Japanese bullet, two would fall out with jungle ailments, and these losses would be continuing right up to Formosa.”

The British Labour peer and naval expert, Lord Strabolgi, writing in Reynolds’s News, says a direct attack on Japan through China as the only practical way of finishing off the Japanese. "This is the strategy the Allies are bound to adopt sooner or later,” he adds. “The protracted fighting both in the Solomons and New Guinea should warn us against our oft-proclaimed intention of reconquering the many groups of Japanese-held islands between Australia and the China Sea. It would be too bloody a business altogether.” Meanwhile ffom Washington come suggestions that the American forces are likely soon to invade Mur.da, in New Georgia, the possession of which area would give the Americans complete aerial superiority, ensuring domination of the Solomons and contributing largely towards the complete security of New Zealand and northeastern Australia.

A correspondent of the New York Herald-Tribune says: . “Intensive bombing attacks on Munda raise justifiable hopes that this enemy base is being softened up for early invasion by the American forces, who are rapidly completing the destruction of tne Japanese on Guadalcanar. Aitnough American navy officials have declined to comment, they admit that iVlunda, 180 miles mirth- west of the Henderson airfield, is the logical objective for the extension of the Allied offensive."