DECISIVE STAGE STILL AHEAD
How the battle was progressing was not disclosed in the Allied headquarters communiqué but unofficial reports indicated that thus far the struggle had not reached a decisive stage. It marked the climax of the recent fighting, in which both sides suffered big losses in armor, and the Allied forces were temporarily, but not seriously, checked, chiefly through enemy superiority in the air.
[American combat troops, striking southeast of Tebessa, near the Algerian border, drove a Nazi armored column back toward the coast yesterday in disorderly retreat, capturing more than 100 prisoners and taking a town, it was reported from Allied headquarters in North Africa by The Associated Press. The Americans, fighting with French allies, were commanded by Colonel Edson Raff, United States parachute leader, and included infantry, mechanized and parachute troops. Apparently the same action was reported in a French communiqué, which placed it at Sidi bou Zid, about eighty miles from Tebessa.
[British warships, still so new that they are on the “secret list,” were reported from London to have joined the Mediterranean Fleet in the struggle to keep Axis reinforcements from reaching Tunisia. At the same time London announced that Allied aircraft had sunk two more Axis merchantmen off the eastern coast of Tunisia and that naval craft had sunk an Italian torpedo boat.]
A spokesman at Allied headquarters said the battlefield was strewn with wrecked Allied and Axis tanks after forty-eight hours of fierce combat.
Tonight’s Allied communiqué said the attacking forces in the neighborhood of Tebourba were consolidating their positions. In the southern sector French and Allied troops, who are seeking to wrest the port of Gabés from the enemy, captured an undetermined number of prisoners.
Allied planes kept up constant attacks on Bizerte, Gabès and Tunis. The communiqué issued in London tonight said the Bizerte docks were bombed in daylight yesterday and that both day and night raids were carried out against the Tunis air base, the landing point for enemy air-borne reinforcements of men and supplies. Allied fighter pilots made sweeps throughout the forward areas and along the coast between Tunis and Gabès.
The Berlin radio boasted that heavy German tanks and long-range guns had knocked out so many Allied tanks in the Tebourba area that activity there had “slackened considerably.” The Nazis claimed that forty United States tanks were destroyed or captured by Axis troops near Tebourba and upward of 800 prisoners taken. On the other hand, reports from British sources said 25-pounder guns were taking a heavy toll of the Germans.
Axis Fights Hard to Hold Vital Northeast Tunisia: Another fierce tank battle raged in the mountainous region southwest of Bizerte and west of Tunis, with the Germans reported to be clinging to Mateur (1), and to have definitely retaken Tebourba (2), near which the Allies were consolidating their positions. The docks at Bizerte and an airdrome at Tunis were heavily bombed. United States and French troops routed a Nazi armored column in the region of Sidibou Zid (3) and Axis patrols were routed between Gafsa and Gabes (4). Allied airmen struck hard at positions around Gabes. Off the eastern coast of Tunisia (5) at least two Axis merchantmen and an Italian torpedo boat were sunk. Several places in Sicily were raided, one British plane crashing near Augusta (6).
An Allied headquarters spokesman cautioned against overoptimism at the present stage of the fighting.
He pointed out that the German and Italian forces were as large as those of the Allies and had the advantage of shorter lines of communication from Sicily. He estimated that the Germans numbered 10,000 and the Italians 8,000 in the Tunis-Bizerte area.
DECEMBER 29, 1942
The Battle of Buna
By F. TILLMAN DURDIN
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
WITH ADVANCE UNITED STATES FORCES, in New Guinea, Dec. 5 (Delayed)—The commanding officer in the first of two peeps waved and boomed in broad American, “Good morning, boys,” as we passed between long lines of native carriers toting supplies to this front. The natives, some dressed only in breech-clouts and others in shorts or laplaps, smiled and waved back, some shouting:
“Good morning, Toboda. Good morning, sir.”
The sun warmed the verdant jungle, made fresh by a night of rain. The narrow peep track wound between walls of green and occasionally crossed creeks and swamps made passable by layers of fresh-cut logs.
Hearty and confident, the commanding officer stopped before each group of American soldiers along the route—engineers and service troops mostly—asked about their works, and said:
“Keep the stuff coming up, boys. I am proud of you. You are doing a wonderful job. This is a big day, you know.”
The grimy and bearded men grinned, “Thank you, sir; we’ll do our best, sir.”
BEGIN WALKING TO FRONT
The commander, his staff of unit commanders and two newspaper men dismounted from peeps as the ground petered out two miles from the front. We slogged on over the tortuous trail ankle deep in mud, pushing dangling vines and ducking under the spiny fronds of pandanus trees. Jungle birds uttered low, ironic notes in the dense canopy above us. They seemed to be saying:
“Oh, no. Oh, no—no, no, no.”
We passed a little group of men sitting in the mud putting on new pairs of shoes that had just been brought up. At advance headquarters—two tents, flanked with foxholes at the roots of two giant trees—the commanding officer conferred briefly. The American troops were to attack toward Buna village at 10 o’clock in one of the biggest assaults of the Buna front.
There was to be an intensive artillery and air bombardment preparation.
The air show started first. Through the trees we caught fleeting glimpses of B-25 bombers in threes, roaring overhead. Their bombs rustled down and shook the ground as they exploded 200 yards away in Buna village and in Buna mission a few hundred yards farther east along the coast. A Japanese anti-aircraft gun pounded away at them, its detonations making the swamplands quiver beneath us in a curious likeness to an earthquake.
Then the artillery joined in the bombardment, their shells whistling overhead in steady succession. The telephone rang. An advance observation post reported some artillery shells were falling too short and that one had just hit within thirty feet of the post. A unit commander called the artillery post and told them to open the range a hundred yards.
“I’ll go up and see for myself,” the commanding officer said. “I want those shells to be pretty close in there.”
Al Noderer of The Chicago Tribune and I followed along with several staff officers and unit commanders. The artillery had ceased hitting the Buna village sector when we reached the observation post, but it continued pounding the Mission area. The land attack had just started from the vicinity of the observation post.
BULLETS FLY IN THE JUNGLE
It was 10:30. The jungle flamed with machine-gun, rifle and tommy-gun fire. Bullets seemed to be flying from all directions through the trees around the observation post. Leaves fluttered to the ground as lead spat against the branches and whined in ricochet off into the distance. We crawled into foxholes.
Our troops had advanced only a few yards through the jungle on both sides of the trail leading to Buna village, but were already out of sight in the thick foliage. Between them and the village on the east bank were 150 yards of jungle palm trees in which the Japanese were strongly ensconced in elaborate concealed dugouts, entrenchments and foxholes.
Snipers seemed everywhere in the trees, their little explosive bullets bursting with loud cracks at the slightest impact with limbs or twigs. Their fire seemed aimless, merely designed to confuse or harass. Our bombers continued to come over and drop 500-pounders into the Buna Mission and Cape Endaiadere, farther east.
Around the observation post telephone, officers had to shout to be heard above the racket of the battle. Our troops made slow progress against the 150-yard barrier that separated them from Buna village. Hollow-eyed and unshaven, their splotchy green uniforms caked with filth from two weeks in the slime around Buna, they s
talked invisible Japanese machine-gun nests, routed out snipers they couldn’t see, hurled grenades and sprayed the jungles with tommy-gun fire.
WOUNDED CARRIED BACK
The wounded started coming back, some on litters, some afoot. Those on litters lay quietly, their lips compressed as stretcher-bearers hurried them off to dressing stations. One man’s shattered arm kept wabbling limply over the side of the stretcher, and the rear bearer would reach over and lay it back in place.
The commanding officer and three staff officers went off down the trail seeking a sniper that was harassing the observation post. The sniper threw grenades at them, but they ducked, escaped and raked his tree with tommy guns. A bullet from somewhere grazed a unit commander’s neck, causing a bright red burn.
Japanese mortar fire started falling about, but it seemed to do little damage. The time went fast. At 11:30 a runner came back from a forward unit.
“We have reached the sea, sir,” he told the commanding officer.
Some of our troops had worked through the Japanese and reached the beach east of Buna village. The commanding officer was pleased.
“Tell the captain to hold if he possibly can,” he directed the runner. “That cuts them off from reinforcements from Buna mission.”
There was a slight lull. Young Major C. M. Beaver, whose home is in Yank-town, S. D., led Noderer and me forward to see a Japanese bivouac and defense position that we had just occupied. There was a surface dugout strongly reinforced with logs up against a wooden-floored tent. In the dugout were two dead Japanese.
The floor of the tent was littered with packs, canvas bags, medicines and canteens. We sorted through the stuff. I ran across Australian soap, pictures, and several big slabs of bomb casing with Ameriand can lettering, evidently parts of one of our bombs being kept as a souvenir.
There were lots of canned meat, rice and boxes of matches made in the Philippines. Each pack had lots of fresh, clean underwear. The area around the tent was a network of foxholes. We got a few souvenirs, returned to the observation post and half a “ration bar” for lunch.
At 1:10 the commanding officer ordered mortar fire on the palm-grove just outside Buna village preparatory to an attack through it. A sergeant was sent up a tall tree to act as an observer. He stuck to it through several explosions, but ants got in his ears, nose, pants and eyes, and he finally had to come down.
The American attack had reached a critical stage. Our men had cleaned out about half the distance to the village and seemed to be bogging down. After a conference, the commanding officer sent in a unit that he had held in reserve, to make a running attack and final bayonet charge toward the village. The men hustled up past the observation post, and the commanding officer encouraged them by slapping them on the arm as they passed.
A group ran ahead spiritedly. We could hear their cries ten minutes later as they swept toward the village, bypassing some Japanese positions and taking others out with grenades and tommyguns as they went. A high officer, the second in command, came by on a stretcher with a wound in his shoulder.
The commanding officer went forward with an aide to watch the attack. Only twenty yards ahead a sniper who had been lying doggo, probably for hours, fired, and the aide crumpled with a wound in his body. He was hurried to the rear on a stretcher. The attack carried through to the very edge of Buna village. There was savage bayonet fighting, and then the lines parted and our men dug in.
The commanding officer sent another contingent through to the village on the left. They reached a little collection of huts almost without opposition. It was now 4:30 P. M. By and large the attack had succeeded, and a big area had been cleared except for a few isolated Japanese positions, We had virtually surrounded the village and were set for the final kill.
DECEMBER 11, 1942
General Chennault Is Optimistic on China’s Prospects Of Victory
By BROOKS ATKINSON
Wireless to The New York Times.
A UNITED STATES ARMY AIR BASE in Central China, Dec. 9 (Delayed)—Although China lies at the dim end of our long lines of communication, Brig. Gen. Claire L. Chennault, commander of our China Air Task Force, retains his enthusiasm and confidence. Free China may be pinched and poor behind the Japanese blockade, but General Chennault is rich in ideas and energy.
He and his staff inhabit a headquarters building that vividly symbolizes our investment in the Chinese theatre of war. It is part of the Chinese compound, and its yellowish loft buildings are of plastered mud construction with a mud-tile roof.
Officers and enlisted men sit at un-painted pine desks, wrapped in field jackets or sheep-lined coats, while a Chinese orderly in a bulgy padded uniform keeps making the round of stoves with fresh fuel. Clogged with visitors who stand because there is no place to sit, this headquarters gives an impromptu impression of making the most of the least without grumbling.
Major General Claire Chennault in 1942.
In a small room at the end of the building General Chennault offers visitors the incomparable luxury of a striped porch chair that looks more hospitable than it is. But the general, who has had five and one-half years’ experience in fighting the Japanese with next to nothing, radiates hospitality and is the graveyard of all doubts about the war in China.
As an airman who organized and led the fighting American Volunteer Group before he took over his present command, he believes he is fighting the weakest arm of the Japanese war machine and that destroying Japanese aviation is the first step toward defeating Japan. By frugally husbanding his resources and planning every action with exactitude, he has led an air force that has made an astonishing record, destroying ten or more Japanese planes for every one lost by an American. It has established air superiority wherever it has been able to operate.
Although General Chennault does not indulge personally in mathematical rationalization, he has no objection to a visitor’s estimate that, if the same ratio of success could be maintained, 500 American planes in this theater could destroy the effective Japanese air force. In his opinion, the Japanese air force is deteriorating. He does not think it now includes many pilots of more than four to six months’ experience, and, while new Japanese planes have excellent performance, the quality of the engines is deteriorating noticeably.
He estimates Japan’s ability to replace combat planes at not more than 250 a month, “which is a high estimate” he says. To his way of thinking, these facts bear directly on the job of defeating Japan.
“As everyone knows,” he said in an interview yesterday afternoon, “no army or navy can operate without an air force. China is the logical place for the Japanese air force because the Japanese must have some place from which to get at protect the China posts they have occupied. Look at the map for yourself and you will see what I mean.”
By now General Chennault is an old China hand. He not only likes the Chinese, who naturally regard him as something of a miracle man, but believes in them as soldiers.
“So far,” he points out, “they are the only soldiers who have defeated the Japanese in open battle, man for man. They have done it many times.
“Since one thing they do not lack is manpower, our function is to supply them with equipment so they can fight.”
General Chennault points out that the Chinese fought the Japanese alone for four and one-half years, while Americans were still selling war materials to the Japanese.
He has also found the Chinese wonderfully cooperative, from the common soldier to the commanding officer, and generous with whatever material they have had.
As for the assumption that the Americans came to the rescue of China, General Chennault reports the Japanese had been preparing for twenty years to attack us.
“Do you suppose that the attack on Pearl Harbor was on the spur of the moment?” he inquired. “Do you suppose the attack on the Philippines was extemporaneous?
“It took years of intelligence, work and planning to carry out those attacks with so much exact knowledge of our airdromes, e
quipment, installations and forces. We are in this war because the Japanese attacked us, as they had been planning to do deliberately for many years.”
Apart from the war, General Chennault is interested in the future of China as a market for American goods and a source of raw products. We are the only nation, he says, that is not at this moment studying China and paving the way for post-war trade.
According to General Chennault, Wendell L. Willkie got a better grasp on China in a few days than most Americans do in months and understood the fact that after the war millions of Chinese who have been seeing America’s products for the first time will want to use them and that China will be able to exchange for them silk, tungsten, certain grades of tea, tin, hog bristles and many other materials we need or can use.
Since the Chinese have high regard for Americans generally, he does not understand why the Americans are not getting organized on a large scale for a huge market that will keep our factories working.
In fact, General Chennault is a stimulating man to listen to on one’s first day in China and much warmer of heart than the feeble little charcoal stoves in his draughty headquarters.
DECEMBER 12, 1942
GUADALCANAL JOB NOW HELD MOP-UP
Vandegrift, Reviewing 4-Month Work, Says Remaining Task Is One of Consolidation
TAKES PRIDE IN HIS MEN
Points to Their 10-to-1 Killing of Enemy—A Guerrilla Saga of Marines Is Unfolded
GUADALCANAL, Dec. 7 (Delayed) (UP)—Japanese troop losses in killed have exceeded ours by more than ten to one and more than 450 enemy planes have been destroyed in the four months’ campaign on Guadalcanal, and our positions now are stronger than ever before, Major Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, Marine commander, said today. About 6,640 enemy troops have been slain. On that basis American casualties would be fewer than 700 killed.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 80