Pacific Cross-Roads

Lonely Canton Is. Serves a Wartime Purpose

By Harold Cooper

ANTON ISLAND, at a point almost half-way between Honolulu and Noumea, was selected, in the thirties, by Pan American Airways as a stop over and re-fuelling station for their

giant flying-boats. The following

article describes Canton as it is to day, when it has become a sort of wartime cross-roads.

SEEN from the air, the island of Canton is a mere wisp of sand, protruding insecurely from a huge waste • of ocean, which seems ready to gulp it back to oblivion at any moment. One decent sized wave, you think, would wash it out of existence forever.

As you circle closer to the island, you notice that it consists in effect of nothing more than a gleaming white coral road, fringed here and there by the mildest smudge of vegetation; and you are dis tracted by the foolish thought that prob ably the Seabees came out, with a fleet of amphibious bulldozers, and built this road from scratch in the middle of the ocean, first laying a foundation for it under the tumbling waves.

For, apart from the road, which at one point widens into a runway, Canton is nothing at all. Looking down on it, one of my companions remarked with sombre but understandable pessimism: “If this thing holds together until the end of the war we shall be lucky.”

Once your plane has made its non chalantly perfect landing and you stare out of the windows to see what Canton looks like from ground level, you are amazed to find that it has grown, in the last half-minute or so of your descent, from a spindle of sand into a spacious platform of close-knit coral, big enough, you decide at a rough computation, to accommodate every C 47 in the Pacific.

As the plane trundles obediently along behind a self-important little jeep, across whose backside is painted, in bullying yellow letters, the command FOLLOW, endless fathoms of runway seem to slip past, until, when at last you bump and back gently to a standstill, you feel you

are at least a twopenny bus ride away from the point where you touched down. rE world you step into as you leave the plane is like Death Valley, made incongruously habitable for the benefit of the passing tourist.

Acres of parched coral surround you, and the only sign of life, apart from the peak-capped NCO in the jeep, is a soli tary coconut palm, dowdy and stunted, with fronds which look as though they have been on a starvation diet for years.

Later, when you are driven round the giant, 27-mile horseshoe to your billet in the super-modern hotel on the other side lagccn entrance, you notice with a thrill that there are, in fact, a few square yards of' vegetation, which perhaps your driver will point out to you as “Canton’s tiger reserve.”

But your general impression continues to be that you have heen cast ashore on a desert island which, for some in explicable reason, is being developed into a nohday resort. That impression grows when you discover that the most precious commodity on Canton is fresh water, whicn is about as plentiful as Scotch whisky in the stores of wartime Suva.

But you find you are eligible for the daily ration of beer—cold beer, too—and that is a great comfort.

Despite its remoteness, Canton manages to keep up with the times remarkaoly well, mainiy for the reason that all its north-bound transients arrive out of the future instead of the past. They leave for Canton on one day and reach it the day before, so that they are able to tell the inquisitive Cantonese (if that is how they describe themselves) exactly what has been happening to-morrow. And, at this stage of the war, to-morrow’s tidings' are almost invariably glad.

ONE other attraction of Canton is the fact that you meet all the bes ; t people there; by which I mean that Generals and Admirals (to say nothing of Prime Ministers, War and Navy Secre taries and Heads of Extremely Important Missions) pass through this bustling air

junction at the rate of—well, the exact statistics are a military secret, but the boys of the ground staff have become so blase that if the latest distinguished arrival doesn’t wear at least two stars, they probably won’t so much as inquire about his identity.

From all directions and for all manner of purposes and in varying degrees of haste, these Brass Hats come hurrying to Canton. You see them in the mess, gratefully gulping down a cup of ex cellent American coffee, and you wonder vaguely where they will be two days or two weeks or two months from now. In command of an Army Corps in New Guinea? Conferring with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in Ceylon? Dining with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking?

YOU also fall to ruminating on the undeniably global nature of this war.

Between 1914 and 1918, a General who had paid a personal visit to the Italian front was regarded, on his return to London, as a much-travelled individual.

But in 1944 the Brass Hats girdle the globe, flying through the air with aston ishing ease, and dropping down for the odd conference at all sorts of remote and unexpected places. Walk into the mess any night at Canton, and ask that Major- General over there why he looks so tired.

He will tell you wanly that so many days ago he was in Cairo and that, after the first ten thousand miles, he really begins to fteel the strain.

Canton is little more than a “bouncing point” for these aerial cannonballs, some thing with which they can conveniently collide in order to gather impetus for their next whirl through the heavens.

Imagine a giant standing at the side of a mighty pond and skimming pebbles across it in a game of ducks and drakes. Trans pacific flying is like that. The pebbles are the transport planes and, wherever they momentarily touch the water before ricocheting back into full career, there is a Canton to cushion their fall, replenish their greedy-tanks and send them whizz ing safely on their way.