FOUL JUNGLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 November 1943, Page 3

FOUL JUNGLE

SETTING OF BOUGAINVILLE BATTLE AMERICANS FIGHTING IN VILE CONDITIONS. WORSE THAN GUADALCANAL. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) NEW YORK, November 15. “The battle for Bougainville is being fought under perhaps the worst conditions American troops have encountered anywhere,” says Frank Tremaine, war correspondent for the United Press of America in the northern Solomons. “Veterans of the initial Solomons landings says that the Japanese opposition is tougher and lighting and living conditions worse than on Guadalcanal.”

lie adds: "1 have not had a single dry moment since I landed. The ground is a spongy mess where it is not turned into a veritable quagmire by the churning wheels of trucks and jeeps. Marines fought for several days in water ankle deep or deeper. Stretcherbearers frequently have to wade waistdeep in muddy water. The jungle stinks with a dead, musty odour which is even worse in the forward area, where slaughtered Japanese lie unburied."

Mr Tremaine tells how a handful of marines and hospital attendante on the island were organised into a fighting unit and repulsed an eight-hour attack by Japanese against an American field hospital while doc-tore crouching behind hastily-constructed sandbag defences operated on 30 dangerously wounded marines. The doctors refused to move the patients for fear that some would die unless operated on quickly.