"Flying Bures"

How "Faith, Hope and Charity"

Guarded Fiji Shores

By Harold Cooper

THE citizens of Suva, as they take their Sunday afternoon stroll along the beaches near the capital, pause to stare reverently at the dismantled car cases of three ancient aircraft.

They* are the engineless, wingless re mains of a flight of Short “Singapores” which, for many months in the early stages of the war with Japan, formed Fiji’s only air force.

The three veterans came lumbering down from the north after seeing brief service in Malaya and the East Indies.

Compared with modern Catalinas and Sunderlands, they looked like a hang over from some previous war, but their New Zealand crews swore by them, and the people of Suva soon came to regard them as protecting angels, affectionately bestowing on them the inevitable names Faith, Hope and Charity.

Servicemen here christened them the “flying bures” —bures being the thatched huts in which Fijians live. For months this archaic but sturdy trio carried out tireless patrols over the limited area which their range would enable them to cover and, had communiques been issued from Suva in those days, each one would have ended with the thankful phrase, “All our Singapores returned safely.”

The copious flow of American equip ment has now transformed Fiji, in com mon with all' other South Pacific bases, into a humming hive of modern aircraft of all kinds; and Faith, Hope and Charity now provide spare parts and scrap metal for patching the wounds of more up-to-date machines. But neither they, nor the gallant band of New Zealanders who “kept them flying” in fair weather and foul when the safety of the Colony largely hung on their

vigilance, will be forgotten.