PACIFIC WAR

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVI, Issue 23013, 3 October 1944, Page 5

PACIFIC WAR

Shifted Into High Gear Big- Events Predicted By Telegraph—N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright NEW YORK, Oct. 1. “The stage is rapidly being cleared for big events in the near future,” states Gordon Walker, correspondent of the “Christian Science Monitor,” who is somewhere in the Pacific. “The earlier Pacific campaigns will seem small compared with these military ventures, which are likely to set the whole Pacific ablaze. “A year ago I watched the preparations for the various campaigns in the Solomons and New Guinea. The task force commanders would assemble a mere handful of invasion craft, perhaps one or two divisions of troops, and barely sufficient aircraft to meet the minimum requirements. The familiar shoestring on which the war out here was run was sometimes stretched so thin that it looked like a silk thread. That shoestring has now grown to be a steel cable. The South-west Pacific Headquarters staff now talks in terms of hundreds of invasion craft, tens of thousands of troops, and numbers of aircraft comparable with the big Allied strikes at Germany before the invasion. Mass of Equipment “Touring the various South-west Pacific bases, one sees thousands of motorised vehicles where formerly there were hundreds. Harbours are often so choked with various types of invasion craft that it is almost impossible to move among them. Dozens of new airstrips are so clogged with aircraft that it is not uncommon for a single field to land and send off aeroplanes daily at the rate of one every two or three minutes. The one or two tanks which used to waddle in single file through the jungle have now given way to dozens advancing abreast. “Within the last few weeks the Pacific war has shifted into high gear. It will not be long before it assumes an importance arid significance second to none.”