IMPRESSIONS OF PACIFIC WAR

Southland Times, Issue 25641, 7 April 1945, Page 5

IMPRESSIONS OF PACIFIC WAR

Bitter And Exacting Campaign

(Special Correspondent, N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 7 p.m.) BRITISH FLEET H.Q., March 5.

As every sailor, soldier and airman, knows full well, there is only one way —and one way only—of coming to comprehend exactly what war means to them. That is to be in it. And no matter how extensively or how faithfully the present war has been reported and photographed, or how bitter has been its exactions, there must always be a gap in civilians understanding of it which cannot be filled.

For me, this has been one of the deepest impressions made upon me since I came into the Pacific. I thought I knew something of the achievements, strivings, frustrations, hardships and miseries of the men who go to war, but I already realize how little I knew. I do not think it possible to give a complete picture of any war or even any single battle, because, in addition to the things which are visible, there are a host of just as important things which are hidden intangible for most the part, carried in the souls, hearts and minds of the men who do the fighting. IMPLACABLE WARFARE The people of New Zealand should have a fair idea of the more physical characteristics of the war in the Pacific, but actually they can have no more idea. They know how almost immeasurably vast are the waters of the Pacific and how gigantic are the distances between one country and another. They have been told often enough, too, of the heat, the mud and diseases, the stenches and the implacability of jungle warfare. They have also seen a minute fragment of the overall power which has been brought to bear against the Japanese. They have watched General Douglas MacArthur, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Admiral William E. Halsey, Admiral R. L. Spruance and a million and more unnamed Americans, Australians and New Zealanders advance with chessboard precision from one springboard to another in the drive on Tokyo. But, while all these and other things are a part of the picture, they are so far short of the whole that it is to be doubted if the rest will, or can ever be blocked in in the minds of those who have been there. For instance, from New Zealand I had already travelled more than 6000 miles by air in about two weeks before I began to catch up with war. I flew over areas and landed in some where there is still fighting, but the real horizon. seemed always to be away out in front. And as for the infamous jungle green hells of New Guinea and the equatorial isles of alleged enchantment and humidity, the stench from the slush and rotting jungle, the foaming green seas with sharks fins showing quite often, just beyond the breakers, and the terrible, potential vindictiveness of land and sea creatures for the castaway sailor, or the lost flier, or the missing soldier—as for all these things they also are only a part of it. There is a horrible string of diseases to grip the unwary or unfortunate, footrot, dengue, ringworm and a dozen more. COLOSSAL SCALE In addition to these things there are the power and effort on an indescribably colossal scale needed to wage sea and land warfare over enormous distances, compared with which the Western Front is only a tram ride from England. And most times the fighting is in terrible country and often in frightening weather. I do not know how to describe this effort. Maybe the quickest way is to say that wherever I have been in the last few weeks men swarm like ants, hundreds of thousands of human ants, creating, maintaining, supplying and fighting; turning islands topsy turvy; bringing the furious energy of their own ways of living to the languor and easy slothfulness of the tropics and smothering them all with the dust of a thousand bulldozers. They are making airfields, building roads, improving harbours—and thundering over them in an unceasing stream of aircraft, rumbling across them in tanks, trucks, jeeps, cars and even buses—making great camps where before green palm trees leaned and gaudy birds and butterflies were the only things which flew. These men are piling mountains of litter, munitions and supplies in hundreds of dumps, constructing bridges and reclaiming the sea, running air transport services like commercial lines, eating terrific quantities of food —most of it from cans—standing in queues for meals, for mail, for cigarettes and for practically everything else, living in tents, in thatched huts, in iron huts, wooden huts, and on the ground under mosquito nets. And all of them are longing for home all the time, but all the time they are doing their job in a way which is unutterably magnificent.