No Jap Stands Idle

Port Moresby, the Allied base on the south coast of New Guinea, is more than the United Nations' last pitiful foothold in the rich empire of the Indies: it is a thorn in the paw of the Jap, By repeated bombings he has tried to shake it out. Last week he committed himself to a new operation: he would pluck it out with the bayonet.

His first step was to move a landing force from his ill-selected, oft-bombed positions at Lae and Salamaua (see map), barred from Port Moresby by great mountains. He would set the force down at Buna, near the head of a mountain road, primitive but passable, that led across to Port Moresby. Thus he could get at the thorn. Once he got rid of the thorn, he could launch his attack at thinly held northern Australia or spread east through the flanking island chain as his restless, never-idle sense of movement dictated.

He picked a time for his new landing party when Douglas MacArthur's usually competent airmen were inexplicably and disastrously off their stride. The week of butterfigered fielding of what was, aeronautically, a pop fly began when the Jap raided Port Moresby. Beyond flicking fragments from his daisy-cutter bombs through the tents of two sergeants and every stitch of their clothing, he did little damage. What rocked the United Nations force was that its crack anti-aircraftsmen, who had been nipping Nip bombers consistently (see p. 44), got not a single hit. It was a rotten show.

The strange malaise took the airmen too. That afternoon a reconnaissance crew, ranging north from Port Moresby, reported two battleship off the northern coast. Another look next day showed they were two destroyers, escorting several transports. The bombers took off.

The best they could do was a 100-ft. miss on one of the destroyers with a 1,000-lb. bomb that could have broken its back. "Maybe we knocked some paint off him," reported the bomber's pilot with a sickly grin.*

Next day the bombers went out in force. It was the chance of a lifetime and they threw the works at the Jap--100,000 lbs. of bombs. Elsewhere it would have been a small show; in the Australian area it was tremendous. Marksmanship was still wretched. For the expenditure of all that destruction, only one transport was set afire. The Jap made his beach head.

On the third day the bombers sank a small transport and the work improved. But it was too late. The spring-legged, never-resting Jap had once again got where he had started out to go. Port Moresby was in greater peril than ever before.

For their failure, the air force had many an embarrassed explanation--staleness, the difficulty of hitting a moving target with flat bombing, "just one of those bad days." Few mentioned what was in everybody's mind, because it was not an explanation. Air Forces men newly arrived from the States had told the veterans in Australia what they had bitterly begun to suspect: to the folks at home Australia was only a side show.

But it would take more than a blow to morale to explain the sudden failure of good, experienced airmen. Perhaps Douglas MacArthur could get at the cause, eradicate it. Meanwhile, short of planes, short of men, short of everything but the will for an offensive, he could go back to an old, sad problem: not how to go after the Jap but how to stop him.

*Crack-of-the-week from the Maui (Hawaii) Naval Air Station: "Sighted sub, sank sampan."

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