Here & There

Tojo boasted: "During the last two years Japan has brought her fighting strength to such a level that she is now ready to make use of the earliest opportunity to deal the enemy troops a decisive blow and frustrate all enemy efforts." Tokyo commentators added: "The day for a large-scale Japanese campaign is drawing close." As Tojo well knew, he was talking through his hat: he had about as much chance of deciding when the big events would come as Hitler had of deciding D-day in western Europe. He could only guess where the next big blow would fall.

Last week:

P: General MacArthur's U.S. troops hopped 125 miles westward (from newly won Hollandia) along the north coast of New Guinea to capture the two Wakde Islands and the adjacent mainland base of Sarmi.

The Wakde air strip is within 700 miles -- easy land-based bomber range -- of the big Jap base of Palau, which probably must be neutralized before any invasion of the Philippines can be undertaken.

Washington speculated that MacArthur's next hop might be 700 miles to Halmahera on the Vogelkop (bird's head) that is New Guinea's western end. From Halma hera to Mindanao, southernmost Philippine island, is 400 miles.

P: Once-mighty Truk was attacked in daylight by a lone Navy search plane which bombed two supply ships in the harbor, then compounded the indignity by strafing an airfield.

P: Some 5,000 miles north of Truk, Aleutian-based Navy Ventura bombers attacked several points in the Kurile Islands. One Liberator went all the way to Shimushiri Island, only 400 miles north of Japan proper. Radio Tokyo announced this week that a U.S. carrier force had bombed Marcus Island, 1,200 miles south of Tokyo, for two days.

P: Wake Island, 1,500 miles northeast of Truk, was bombed for the 16th time since a mighty carrier task force leveled the U.S.-owned island last October at a cost of 13 planes. A testimonial to the effectiveness of the October raid : not until last week, when one bomber was shot down, had a U.S. plane since been lost over Wake.

The Lovely Island. But last week's most interesting Pacific gesture was a carrier task-force raid on Surabaya on the north coast of Java. Next to Singapore, Surabaya was the biggest non-Japanese naval base in the Far Pacific--bigger than Manila or Hong Kong.

Last week's raid on "the pearl of the Indies" was puny, as carrier raids go nowadays: less than 100 planes, hardly one Essex-class complement. But there were promising factors: 1) for the first time Naval forces from the Mountbatten, Nimitz and MacArthur commands joined together; 2) Javanese, who have been wooed incessantly by Japanese propaganda, might begin to doubt that Tojo's forces were as all-powerful as he claimed; 3) surprisingly few Jap planes rose in defense; two of these were shot down, 19 others were destroyed on the ground; at least one ship in Surabaya harbor blew up.

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