Curtain Raiser?

Japanese garrisons on Central Pacific islands were warned by a Domei radio commentator that a new Allied Pacific drive must be expected to coincide with the "fresh strategical move on the European front." Domei was getting warm.

As the commentator spoke, a strong task force of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz' Pacific Fleet was steaming west. Near week's end it struck: hundreds of the Navy's fighters and bombers, flying from a great force of carriers, dropped out of the skies over the Japs' vaunted unsinkable carriers in the Marianas: (from north to south) Saipan, Tinian, Guam, the eastern outposts of the Philippines.

Next day the carriers' planes returned to the attack, added twelve-mile-long Rota (between Tinian and Guam) to the rota of points bombed.

After reporting tersely that he had executed the first phases of his mission, the task-force commander lapsed into radio silence. The Japs in the Marianas had been softened up for him by Major General Willis H. Hale's heavy bombers-- their nearest bases 1,200 miles away in the captured Marshalls. Other Japs, in the Carolines to the south, had been pre-vented from interfering. Lieut. General George C. Kenney's Fifth Air Force heavies, from the Southwest Pacific, teamed with Hale's Army and Navy Liberators, had seen to that by bombing Paulau, Truk, Nauru among others.

Were the carrier-aircraft strikes at Guam merely preparatory blows, like that of Feb. 21-22? Or were they the curtain-raiser for a lightning amphibious conquest patterned after Tarawa and Kwajalein?

Comeback at Biak. Some 1400 miles south of Guam, General Douglas Mac- Arthur's last important island hop in his leapfrogging New Guinea campaign was progressing--but it was no walkover. Sixth Army infantrymen had been all but stalled in their drive along the coastal flats of Biak Island in the Schouten group, aimed at the capture of three airfields within heavy-bomber range of the Philippines. They had to fall back, call for reinforcements, amend their tactics. Last week they drove inland, outflanked the Japs, captured Mokmer airfield.

Despite their experience in the Solomons, the Japs were forced to start running "Tokyo Express" flotillas of destroyers, sometimes with cruisers, down the Spice Islands into Geelvink Bay, between the Schoutens and New Guinea's mainland. Whether they were for reinforcement or for evacuation, Allied flyers could not tell. But they attacked them anyway, sank five destroyers, routed four sections of the express. Biak got no help.

MacArthur's progress was slow, apparently sure. The Japs' luck in whatever they were trying to do was all bad.

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