From US Battlefields
p. 36 · Read in the full issue
Removal Of 4,000
Bodies
From US Battlefields On Guadalcanal
From Our Own Correspondent
Honiara, Oct. 26,
17K>R the past three months, personnel from the American War Graves’
Registration Unit have been search ing old battlefields on Guadalcanal for bodies of approximately 400 missing American troops. Working on informa tion collected during and since the war, and collated at Army headquarters in Washington, they have so far found 18 bodies.
Early in November, 1.500 Americans— many of them civilian Filipinos will reach Guadalcanal to begin the colossal task of dis-interring and moving, to Hawaii, the 4,000 bodies buried in the American war cemetery at Lunga.
What This Victory Meant
rIS fact alone the loss of 4,000 Americans on Guadalcanal should bring home to residents of South Pacific countries the character of the Battle of the Solomon Islands, fought in August-November, 1942.
Australia is inclined to regard the Japanese defeat on top of the Owen Stan ley Range, in Papua as the turning point in the Jap invasion of the South Pacific.
That event was important; but, actually, the Japanese plan was smashed when the United States, at such colossal effort and heavy cost, destroyed the Jap spear-head in Guadalcanal, and thus exposed the whole of Japan’s south-eastern flank to the growing power of the American sea and air forces. It was a victory gained at heavy cost it had to be, because Japan threw into her attack, from Rabaul south-eastwards, through the Solomons, everything she had but it saved Eastern Australia, New Zealand and Fiji from invasion, and put the Japs on the defensive.
Mr. Tommy Zoffmann, well-known identity of the Morobe district, New Guinea, is at present in Sydney on a visit.