WAR IN QUAGMIRE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 272, 17 November 1943, Page 5

WAR IN QUAGMIRE

BOUGAINVILLE BATTLE Recd. 6 p.m. New York, Nov. 15. “The battle for Bougainville is being fought under pernaps the worst conditions that American troops have encountered anywhere,” writes Frank Tremaine, war correspondent for the United Press in the northern Solomons. “Veterans of the initial Solomons landings say that the Japanese opposition is tougher and that fighting and living conditions are worse than on Guadalcanal'.”

He adds: “I 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 which was ankle deep or deeper. Stretcher-bearers frequently have to wade waist-deep in muddy water. The jungie stinks with a dead, musky odour which is even worse in the forward area, where slaughtered Japanese lie unburied.”

Mr. Tremaine tells how a handful of marines and hospital attendants on the island were organised into a fighting unit and repulsed an eighthour attack by Japanese against an American field hospital while doctors, 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.