Landing On

Rendova

The American Armada's Attack

HTHE following account of how the American forces approached and landed on Rendova Island, as a prelimin ary to their capture of Munda, in New Georgia, BSI, was written for the “PIM” by Mr. Leslie F. Gill. Mr. Gill is a Solo mon Islands planter, whose home was on Roviana Lagoon, practically at Munda; and he joined up with the United States forces soon after the Jap invasion. rE three weeks prior to the Munda operations were an orgy of confer ences at Amphibious Force Head quarters on Guadalcanal.

Admirals Nimitz and Halsey visited, to confer with Admirals Turner and Wilkin son and their staffs—the elite of the South Pacific Services, Naval, Air, Marine and Army.

Night and day, seven days a week, the conferences went on, finalising the mul titudinous details of operations, supply, transport and ordnance. We men of the Islands—Rhoades, Rawson, Harper, Wick ham and Gill —were constantly on tap for information on anchorages, passages, reefs, beaches, jungle trails, and terrain, and we attended many of the confer ences.

At last all was finished; orders were issued, and date and hour of sailing fixed.

I was to go with the GOC and once again was to sail in the old “M ,” a veteran of many “dirty jobs,” with a long string of Jap dive-bombers to the credit of her gun crews.

I felt I was going home at last. After months of homesickness in Australia and the Pacific, I was going back to my own country—the Western Solomons —to Lam beti, my home in the lovely Roviana Lagoon of New Georgia; and thereafter I hoped to see my places and native friends on Gizo, Vella Lavella, Rendova and Kolobangara, It was to be a kinglike and majestic home-coming—escorted by an Army in a procession of great transports, a fleet of warships, and a cloud of planes. I was quietly elated, happy and serene. The long heart-ache, anxiety, and struggle to get back were over. I was going home. rpHE great ships and their escort left JL Guadalcanal on a golden afternoon.

Savo and Cape Esperance were abeam in their rugged grandeur as we moved through a steel-blue sea of oil into the sunset. The sun was dying in glory among the western clouds. Lovely islands lit by the evening glow floated on the indigo flood. The troops, in their massed thousands, muted and worshipping, drank of the glory of the evening—and thought their thoughts—Home, Loved Ones, To morrow. Night fell.

Battened down in the dimly-lit trans port, the hours were oppressive and long.

Armed, helmeted men in fantastically spangled jungle suits looked Dantesque in the half light as they sprawled on the floors or stood, or sat in groups around the tables. Those who could, slept—on chairs, tables or floors.

But most of us spent the night awake, slumped in chairs, or drinking coffee or iced water —and talking.

Tension and strain pervaded the ship.

Had our leaving been signalled to the enemy? Did he know, or guess, our des tination? Would we be intercepted and

attacked by planes or submarines? Or the Tokio Express? Or all of them?

DAWN came in a blanket of rain which screened us from the enemy. Our experienced eyes noted the loom of Tetipari and Rendova Islands to port, and New Georgia to starboard, with Roviana Lagoon dead ahead. We knew we were in Blanche Channel and approaching The Landing. Ugeli passed on our port, and Rendova Plantation and its screen of harbour islets slid into view.

The transports slowed and stopped. We had arrived. The rain poured steadily, limiting visibility to a few hundred yards, for which we were grateful.

The towering hulls of the transports came alive with organised activity.

Magically, the sea swarmed with landing crait dropped from the ships. Troops in jungle suits, armed, and laden with equipment, swarmed over the gunwales and dropped crablike down the nets into the plunging landing barges, far below. rAT slippery, dizzy, dangerous descent down the cliff-sided liners into the crazy, leaping boats daunted some of the heavily-laden men, but they were carried along, willy-nilly, by their swarm ing mates behind.

Everyone went via the nets—general and staff, war correspondents, officers and men. Everyone wanted to “get to hell out of there before the Japs came over.”

The troops ached to get safely ashore and dug in—while the ships frenziedly discharged their cargoes of men and munitions and guns in order not to be caught like sitting ducks in restricted waters by enemy planes.

Anxiously, in the background, cruised the destroyers, guarding their unwieldy flock. Overhead roared the fighter cover.

Blanche Channel was a rash of land ing boats roaring in long lines away from the vomiting transports. Everywhere could be seen lines of racing barges, crowded with troops, converging on the Rendova Harbour entrance, between two of the islets. Once inside, they fanned out to their assigned beaches.

WE of the “M ” were spewed ashore over the landing flap of our barge and ran into the precincts of a battle going on about 100 yards away.

One hundred and twenty Japs were resisting our Baracuda raiding party, sent to clear the beach-head.

A merry machine-gun and small arms battle was being waged in the planta tion as we landed. Two hours sufficed to wipe out the Jap resistance.

A couple of hours after landing, our transports finished discharging and pulled out for home.

Then the Jap planes came. We had no foxholes, so we just flattened out any where. I was unlucky to drop into an ants’ nest as the planes screamed over.

The ants gave me such hell that I chanced the shrapnel and plunged away to a better location.

But the Japs were not after us that time. Their meat was our fleet of now empty transports and destroyers. A fierce air-battle raged over this fleet. The transports and fighters filled the air with everything they had. They fought fero ciously, and so did the Japs, till they were driven off with heavy losses. We lost but one ship—our faithful old “M .” A brave ship, which died gallantly, fighting like a tiger.

Mrs. V. R. Cleary, of Suva, Fiji, died in the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in Suva, on March 25.

Mr, E. H. Pritchard, who recently arrived in Fiji from New Zealand, has been appointed temporary Crown Counsel for the Colony.