Nurse's Escape

Hid From Japs in Solomons

From Our Own Correspondent

Noumea. Jan. 14.

ESCAPE in a canoe, in which one of the natives was so nervous, when passing a Japanese base, that he shook the whole boat, was one of the recent adventures of Miss Merle Farland. of Auckland. She was a nurse attached to the Methodist Mission, in the Solo mons, and was the only nurse still on a Japanese-occupied island during the last nine months. She got back to safety here, a mere slip of a girl, sick with malaria, and weighing not more than 90 lb.

Since May last, Miss Farland had been on the qui vive all the time, dodging the Japs. She spent 18 months in all in the Group, nursing in a number of hospi tals, mainly on Vella Lavella and New Georgia.

Her narrowest escape was that referred to above, when she and nine native paddlers were trying to get round the Japanese base. They suddenly heard a large ship coming in, and then a smaller one, which turned out to be a barge going backwards and forwards with sup plies and personnel. They hid at the mouth of a river for two hours, hoping the Japs would not come in and find them.

Miss Farland was three weeks on the island before she was rescued. “I saw the Japs many times, but they didn’t see me,” she said. “When I heard the barge coming and we made for shelter. I was not terribly frightened, because I thought we could get away into the bush quickly, and I had had a good deal of experience of getting around in the bush.”

She said that when canoeing past another Jap base, she lay down flat in the bottom of the canoe. Peeping over the edge of the boat, she could see the Japs running up and down on shore, pointing at them. Evidently they were anxious to come out and investigate, but she knew they had no boats in the day time, although the Jap landing boats came in at night.

When she was at another Methodist mission hospital, further north, the Jap planes used to come down so low that the Japs could see in through the win dows “I could see their heads myself as they flew by,” Miss Farland said, “al though I used to hide from their view because, if thev had seen a white woman, they would probably have come along to investigate.

“I watched the American bombing of another island. We could see the anti aircraft fire and the smoke left by the US bombers after their dives, when we saw them sween up again. The Japs finally abandoned their base. But they used to patrol the area, and one day a des troyer came in so close that I could see the people on deck. However, she pulled out without sending anybody to look us up.”

It was reported from Cairo on January 5 that Lady Tedder was killed in an air crash while returning from a tour of wel fare centres and hospitals in Cyrenaica.

Lady Tedder was the wife of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who formerly was in the Colonial Service, and served in Fiji as a cadet before leaving the Colony to serve in the last war.