Creeping Advance

Along a 2,000-mile front of islands and ocean in the south and southwest Pacific, the Allies crept closer towards Japan's muscular inner perimeter of defense. Towards the Gilberts, the northern Solomons, western New Guinea--outposts where Japan is fighting to hold off that advance--Allied forces announced some progress last week.

The Gilberts. Marines sneaked into Nanumea, which lies only 500 miles southwest of Japan's Gilbert Islands bases. Their landing was unopposed, put U.S. troops close in under the flank of Japan's long eastern sea frontier.

The Solomons. Allied air and naval forces exercised full control of "The Slot," the 300-mile water invasion route down the middle of the Solomon Islands cluster. U.S. and Jap fleets have slugged it out in The Slot for a year and a half. Last week the Japs could not even use its waters safely for a getaway. Apparently hoping to evacuate troops stranded in Kolombangara (TIME, Aug. 30), they tried to run The Slot with barges. U.S. planes, destroyers and PT boats destroyed nearly 150 of them in a month, patrolled The Slot virtually unchallenged.

New Guinea. Finschhaven was the third Jap base on the Huon Gulf to succumb to General Douglas MacArthur's relentless drive. Salamaua had fallen in 75 days, Lae in twelve, Finschhaven in ten. The crack Australian 9th Division knocked out the Jap's last pillboxes with hand grenades and swarmed over their stronghold. Few Japs were taken prisoners. Some fled into the jungle with hard-bitten Diggers on their heels. The Japs fought fiercely but, according to the men of the 9th, not as formidably as the Germans. The 9th ("Morshead's Marines") should know. They helped crack Rommel's line at El Alamein.

Simultaneously other Australians struck across the mountains to envelop the enemy from Finschhaven to Madang 200 miles beyond. Jap troops on the whole Huon Peninsula were pocketed. Despite talk of new Jap planes (see p. 20), MacArthur held complete and vitally effective command of the air. It was a climax to MacArthur's New Guinea campaign, which according to Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, had been fought with "pinchpenny precise planning." The margin of success was always so small that MacArthur could never "afford to be wrong."

Next Stage? Poised within striking distance of important Jap bases at three points, Allied forces made preparations this week for the next stage. In the Gilberts it would come when Admiral Chester Nimitz was sure that the Navy had the power for a decisive blow. In New Guinea MacArthur was pointing for Madang.

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