Along the Coast

The long arm of U.S. land-based air power reached farther west and north from New Guinea toward the Japanese island defenses. Army and Navy commands in the Pacific were working more closely together than they ever had before.

MacArthur's sweep west along the New Guinea coast, spearheaded and backed by the greatest concentration of naval power he had ever had, had given the U.S. new airfields 500 miles closer to the enemy's inner positions. From the three big airdromes at Hollandia (on which U.S. engineers worked this week), U.S. long-range bombers can now reach the southern tip of the Philippines (although with minimum loads), can also bite heavily into the Jap chain from the onetime Dutch naval base at Amboina, up through the Pacific arc to Guam.

Land-based airmen no longer claimed that each Jap base would fall as soon as they had a chance to give it a good pounding. But they did know that land-based power was in a better position than ever to do its geared-in job, along with carrier forces and amphibious troops.

Meeting without Sparks. The drive along the New Guinea coast had taken a lot of good staff work. Months before, the South Pacific command of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey had been wiped out by the converging forces of MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz. Army and Navy scuttlebutt had been that sparks would fly when the General and Admiral Nimitz came to ironing out the question of who would do what and who would command what.

The scuttlebutt had been wrong. The commands got closely together on plans last February when MacArthur's top staffers, headed by his Chief, self-effacing Lieut. General Richard K. Sutherland, went north to Pearl Harbor to meet with the Navy people. Late in March, frosty-haired Chester Nimitz went down to New Guinea for a huddle with MacArthur.

Result of these conferences was that MacArthur got all the Navy help he needed for the Hollandia assault, that stories of bickering between Army and Navy began to fade, even from the scuttlebutt.

This week, with a fine collection of staging points for troops, harbors for naval craft and fields for aircraft strung along New Guinea's coast, MacArthur set his bombers at pounding westward, beyond the big island's tip, at the Jap base at Timor. Like other air assaults all the way north to the Kurils, it was only a succession of tentative jabs. But the jabs would be followed, somewhere along the Japs' defensive arc, by a heavy blow. The Pacific was being set for another great assault.

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