Objection" to Inquiry

Rabaul Holocaust

Mr. Ward "Has No Objection" to Inquiry

rE Australian Minister for Territories (Mr. Ward), when informing re porters in Sydney on January 26 that he wanted an official inquiry into the causes of the Singapore disaster in 1942, was. asked whether he had any objection to a similar inquiry into the Rabaul disaster of 1942. (In January, 1942, over 300 non-combatant Australian civilians were abandoned by Australian officialdom to the invading Japanese, and all except eight or nine were either mas sacred or lost on the “Montevideo Maru.”

The Minister said that he had no ob jection to an investigation Into “the Rabaul campaign, which was conducted by Australians.” Now that the war was over, he saw no reason for secrecy.

The “PIM” will be astonished, how ever, if an official inquiry is ordered into Rabaul, without very great pressure being put upon the Australian Socialist Government. The inquiry is not de manded into “the Rabaul campaign,” as suggested by the ingenuous Mr. Ward, but into the reasons why over 300 civi lians in Rabaul were abandoned by Aus tralian officialdom, when they could quite easily have been rescued by the available ships many hours before the Jap invasion fleet arrived.

Present information is that a very high-ranking Australian Brass-hat 'was responsible for the muddle which led to what was virtually a massacre —and every bureaucrat in Canberra will rally to his

protection.

Mr. Ren Henderson, of Samarai, who wns in the RAF during the war and who was wounded in the D-Day landing, arrived in Australia recently and has gone on to Papua to join his father. Mr.

Lawrence Henderson. He is a nephew of Mrs. Flo Stewart, of Wau. New Guinea.

Mr. William Robinson, who sailed his ketch “Svaap” around the world, in the ’thirties, arrived in Tahiti early in December in a little yacht called “Varua, ’

He had come from Boston, USA. Mr.

Robinson owns a property in Paea, one of the western districts of Tahiti.