ENCIRCLEMENT IN THE PACIFIC

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25589, 17 July 1944, Page 4

ENCIRCLEMENT IN THE PACIFIC

The steady and sustained successes which are being recorded by the Allies in the Pacific, under United States direction and impetus, have produced in this theatre changes that can only be described as astounding. Little more than two years have passed since the Japanese, having in part immobilised the United States Pacific Fleet and destroyed the major British units, H.M.S. Prince of Wales and Repulse, in the South-west Pacific at that time, overran New Guinea and all the territories to the north-west, and pressed as far 'as the Solomon Islands. The first of the retaliatory measures taken by the Allies were painfully small in scope, and mainly defensive. Apart from the loss in ships sunk or crippled in the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Americans had suffered heavily in the desperate encounters with the Japanese in the Straits of Macassar, during the enemy occupation of the Netherlands Indies, and in the Java Sea, where, on February 27, a combined United States, British, and Dutch fleet suffered severely. The Battle of the Coral Sea, in May, was the first encouraging naval and air engagement in the war in the Pacific, and the first occasion on which the Japanese were turned from their further purpose. In the illumination of knowledge since gained, the Battle of the Coral Sea is also seen as a turning point in another sense. It established that just as the. Japanese were assisted to their startling victory over Prince of Wales and Repulse through the lack by the British capital ships of an air escort, so the heavy use of air-power against the Japanese Fleet in the Coral Sea laid it open to staggering assault. In the four days of action which comprised that battle practically all the attacks were carried out by aircraft, mainly by land-based planes. Thenceforward air attack has played a fast-increas-ing part in the war on Japan. The number of aircraft carriers possessed by the United States at that time was almost negligible, after fairly heavy losses; it is now considerably more than fifty. The number pf strategic island bases —of fixed and unsinkable aircraft carriers—then held by the Allies was nil; they now are poised on a score of air and naval bases leading out of New Guinea towards the Indies and the Philippines, and into the heart of

the Central Pacific defence system of the enemy. The concentration of Japanese forces in North-eastern New Guinea, which General MacArthur’s official statement records as the prelude to battle, merely emphasises the extent of the Japanese reverses in recent months. These elements of the enemy’s Eighteenth Army which are said to be preparing to attempt a break-through in the Wewak area are lost and beaten. Even if they succeeded in fighting their way to the west, their path would be through a territory as rough as any in the world, of vast distances, and to -all practical purposes without any form of communication with the Axis. The loss of Saipan, at the other extreme of the offensive arc that is being tightened around Japan’s Pacific bases, brings the Super-Fortresses and other great United States bombers within constant calling distance of Japan’s main islands. Besides its flyingrange proximity to Japan, Saipan offers to the Americans excellent harbourages and the extensive areas lacking in the coral atolls to the south for the building up of any size of air force circumstances may dictate. Its strategic importance to the Allies requires no addfed emphasis when the New York Times declares that the loss of Pearl Harbour would not be as seiious for the United States.