Guardsmen

With the Bearing of Guardsmen Fijians Under Fire

JYJANY of the Fijians who fought in 1 the Solomons are enjoying well earned leave in Fiji. They have proved themselves soldiers, without peer, and in the following letter from one of their New Zealand officers, describing a recent action, and pub lished in mid-August in a New Zealand paper , they are compared to Guardsmen, for discipline and bear ing.

The Fijians, in battalion strength, were engaged in a coastal raid and ran into a solid wall of Jap machine gun fire from prepared pill-boxes and positions. As darkness drew on it was decided to evacuate the area by sea.

This is the rest of the story. rE several companies gradually broke contact and retired to the beach head, but reinforcements had to be sent to one company to help it withdraw its dead and wounded.

There was no hurry or rush. The wounded were patched up by a doctor and the worst given plasma on the beach.

These then went on board, and, at long last, an officer came out with the last man to report all in, including the re inforcements, who had one dead and eight wounded.

Then we had to get the beach-head troops in. They came in, section by sec tion, and platoon by platoon, in the same unhurried manner as their officers told them to go. The Japanese did not press his attack, as he had had a bad mauling and, I think, suspected a trap, but they pushed forward snipers and Naushu light guns, and bullets were beginning to ping

down the beach. At last every man was on board.

There were plenty of tales of gallantry to be sifted out, but to me it was not the outstanding few, but the great fact that not a man in the whole battalion flinched or failed in his duty.

Here is an outstanding case. Corporal Suka, from Cakandrove, when bringing in the wounded, was shot in the groin and thigh at short range. After a bit he called out to his platoon not to try to get him out as he was too near the enemy and could not move.

The Nadronga men called back to him to wait, and that they would never leave him, knowing that to be taken alive meant death and probably torture.

The issue was clear to Suka. His friends would not go until he was dead, and to get to him would be death to his friends. Our men saw him raise himself up on his hands in front of the Jap machine-guns and take a burst right in chest We are proud, too, of Williams, from Ra, who, to create a diversion, to get two wounded in, charged a machine-gun post on his own with his tommy-gun blaz ing, silenced the gun, but was shot down himself. The wounded he died to save were got out, thanks to his gallantry.

Apisai, from Ra, brought two wounded men in, watched their wounds being dressed for nearly 20 minutes, and only then pointed out that he himself was hit through the hip.

The whole operation showed the Fijian in an entirely new light. We knew that he was good in the open, with plenty of room in which to manoeuvre, so that he could use the cover of the bush for sur prise and ambush. But here we had them behaving like Guardsmen, on an open beach, under a hail of fire, and never a man flinched from his duty.