Yesterday

Twenty years ago this month, with the Allies gradually getting the upper hand in both the European and Pacific war theatres, the editor of “PIM” was en couraged to do a little prophesying.

In an editorial headed “Air Transport Will Open New Era in the Pacific Islands”, he predicted that, when peace returned, airlines would have schedules which would take people and goods “right across the Pacific in 70 hours’ flying”. {Qantas jet clippers now take 40i hours).

OTHER items in PIM of De cember, 1943, were:— Covered by an “air umbrella” and powerful units of the U.S. fleet, U.S. marines landed on Makin and Tarawa atolls in the Gilbert Islands on November 20. The Japanese resisted strongly at Tarawa and there was light resistance at Makin.

Next day, the Americans occupied Abemama, and bombed Japanese held Nauru and the Marshall Islands as a diversionary measure. * * * Major D. G. Kennedy, a former District Officer in the Solomons, had been awarded the Dis tinguished Service Order in recog notion of his gallant and dis distinguished service in the South- West Pacific, Between the time the Japanese landed in the Solomons and the arrival of the Americans, Major Kennedy (then a captain) and an “army” of 32 natives killed 170 Japanese and took 22 prisoners. * * * Mr. W. J. Hitchcock, Controller- General of the Australian War Damage Commission, and two assistants were visiting Papua to obtain first-hand information on war damage claims lodged with the Commission. * * * A journalist, who had recently visited the New Hebrides, said in a short article that the Con dominium Defence Force was one of the most truly “international” armies in the world. “Its Com mandant,” he said, “is a British subject, the son of an Australian father and a French mother. His second-in-command is a French national, educated in Australia and completely bilingual. The officers and NCO’s are other Britishers and Frenchmen. The troops are natives, recruited almost entirely from a cluster of tiny atolls known as the Small Islands,

which lie off the north-east coast of Malekula. The Small Islanders were chosen because of their robust health and the fact that they all speak the same language— an unusual circumstance in the New Hebrides.” * * * A Japanese ceremonial sword, which a party of Tongans and Fijians had captured in the Solomons, had been presented to Queen Salote by a New Zealander, Lieutenant Sid Heckler. Heckler and a party of Fijian and Tongan commandos worked their way through to the rear of the Japanese positions and cut a telephone line.

They then took cover and waited until a Japanese party of seven men, led by an officer, arrived to repair the broken line. The Jap anese were ambushed and wiped out. It was the officer’s sword which Heckler presented to Queen Salote. $ $ An eruption of the Tongan island of Niuafoou (Tin Can Island) had caused widespread damage to food crops and vegeta tion in September, but no loss of life. Mr. C. W. T. Johnson, the British Consul and Agent for Tonga, who visited Niuafoou soon after the eruption, reported that with the exception of the coconuts and an occasional mango tree, all the foliage on the island, even the grass, was brown and withered. * * * The death was announced in Brisbane at the age of 81 of Cap tain Oscar Svensen, a pioneer planter in the Solomons. He estab lished coconut plantations in the Solomons soon after the British protectorate was proclaimed there in 1893.