WAR IN PACIFIC

Waikato Times, Volume 195, Issue 22468, 2 October 1944, Page 6

WAR IN PACIFIC

3IG EVENTS COMING

AREA SOON ABLAZE

STRENGTH OF THE ALLIES

(Received Oc

2, 3.15 p.m.)

NEW YORK, Oc

“The stage is rapidly being cleared for t)ig events in the near future,” says the Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent, Gordon Walker, 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 preparations for various campaigns in the Solomons and Mew 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 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 in Germany before the invasion. “Touring various South-west Pacific bases one sees thpusands of motorised vehicles where there used to be hundreds, harbours often so choked with various types of invasion craft that it is almost impossible to move among them, and dozens of new airstrips so clogged with aircraft that it is not uncommon for a single field to land and to send off planes 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 now give way to dozens advancing abreast.

“Within the past few weeks the Pacific war has shifted into high gear and it will not be long before it assumes an importance and significance second to none.’*