War-Glory Has Departed

From BSI And So Has Everything Else, Says Capt. Irving Johnson

AMERICAN author and skipper, Irving Johnson, thinks that the British Solomon Islands are the most back

ward and destitute islands in the Pacific at the present time.

Captain Johnson, in saying, further that shipping is almost at a standstill, copra is not being shipped and planta tions are deteriorating, is only repeating what BSI residents have been saying themselves for the past three years; but he is at least in a position to compare the Protectorate with other Pacific territories.

For the past year he has sailed the ‘Yankee II", a 96-ft. brigantine, around the Pacific, making a complete survey.

He says that there are few reminders now that BSI was one of the world’s great battlefields or that places like Tulagi, Bougainville, “Iron Bottom Bay,”

“The Slot,’’ and Savo Island fill monu mental places in the history of World War 11. “At Guadalcanal the piers are rotting and falling apart,” he says.

“Nothing will be left of them in another year. Sailing through the Solomons we saw a few hulks of Japanese and Ameri can landing craft on the beaches, but that was about all.”

Jungles have crept back over most of the wartime airfields, although some sections of Henderson Field on Guadal canal remain cleared. The sites on a few former military bases are marked by the rusted remains of trucks and are rotting and falling apart. Firearms and ammunition, still usable in waterproof packing, were found by Johnson’s party on one isolated atoll.

The “Yanks” have a place in native legends, but even those are becoming vague. Today even the bodies of Ameri can servicemen have been removed from South Pacific cemeteries.