"If We Had a Little More"

On Australia's northern perimeter of islands the Japanese had to take more than they dished out last week. Allied bombs ripped ships and men in the harbors of New Guinea and New Britain. Bombs tore runways, wrecked hangars and aircraft on invasion airdromes of New Guinea and Timor. Said a spokesman in Melbourne: "We are trying to keep the Japanese from stabilizing their position. . . . If we had a little more equipment, we could do it."

With what they had, U.S. and Australian airmen strove to smash, scatter and delay the assembling Japanese convoys and air fleets before they could gather their full strength for assault. A Navy communique from Washington reported a great victory by U.S. and Australian naval airmen (who probably flew PBY patrol bombers). Two heavy cruisers were sunk, and the attacking airmen thought, with varying degrees of certainty, that they had also sunk a light cruiser, three destroyers, five troop-jammed transports, a gunboat and a minesweeper. They damaged a fourth cruiser, a fourth destroyer, six transports, an aircraft tender and a gunboat.* In a later attack on New Britain, U.S. Army bombers thought that they sank another Jap cruiser, damaged still another. U.S. and Australian airmen destroyed 12 Jap planes on an airdrome at Lae, shot another from the air.

Jap bombs hit New Guinea's Port Moresby, ahead of advancing jungle troops. (see p. 19) Toward the east, along the line the Japs might follow toward New Zealand or eastern Australia, more bombs struck Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. Jap scouts hovered over Australia's northeastern tip and the islands of the Torres Strait. U.S. P-40s based at Darwin met attacking bombers and fighters, knocked several from the sky. Jap warships were reported here & there on the approaches to Australia, but either the reports were mistaken or the Japs were feinting, feeling for Allied naval weakness.

The Jap losses in these actions neither equaled the Allied losses in the Battle of Java (TIME, March 23) nor hurt the enemy as much as the disaster in the Java sea had hurt the United Nations. But the Japanese in these and previous Pacific combats had lost probably 15 to 20% of their cruisers. If their invasion clock had not been turned back, it had been thrown off Tokyo time.

* In the heat, height and hurry of air attack, airmen can seldom tell precisely what they have accomplished. Only the Japs know exactly what they lost in the attack.

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