“WE ARE NOW ON TOP”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 206, 1 September 1943, Page 5

“WE ARE NOW ON TOP”

GEN. BLAMEY’S DECLARATION

Recci. 6 p.m. Sydney. Aug. 31. “We arp now on top—well over the crest—and are going to give the enemy all that is coming to him. You will have your share in that,” said General Blarney, to veteran A.I.F. troops when he reviewed them in New Guinea recently.

“The Japanese are not nearly so sure of themselves as they were before they tried out the mettle of the Australian troops. The Japanese bad been taught never to run; they had been taught they' were superior, but they are forgetting it. When the Americans landed on Kiska, in the Aleutians, this month, the Japanese had gone. They had learned something from Buna and Guadalcanal Near Salamaua some clays ago the Japanese ran again, this time screaming and leaving new equipment behind them.”

General Blarney said that the Japanese was not intelligent; he was inferior. No intelligent race would be foolish enough to strike at the most highly industrialised nation in the world, the United States, as the Japanese did when they attacked Pearl Harbour. The Australians had been the first to prove that a Western soldier, the product of modern civilisation, training and education, was superior to the Japanese.