World: THE PACIFIC REVISITED

After one and a half years’ absence from the Pacific War Theater, Gilbert Cant, TIME military writer, has just completed an air tour of the chief Pacific bases. These are his impressions of the vast U.S. build-up since 1943:

The Pacific is no longer the same ocean. Its blueness and its vastness remain, but all else is changed since that hazy, calm September dawn in 1943 when the new Hellcat fighters flew against Marcus Island from the new Essex-and Independence-class carriers in their first combat mission.

It is not only that millions of square miles and scores of islands have passed from enemy control to Allied control. It is not only that the battle line has been advanced from the backyard of Honolulu to the frontyard of Tokyo. Even familiar places and bases have changed to an extent that leaves the returning correspondent openmouthed with unbelief. Not only have they grown; their function has changed.

Growing Pearl. Pearl Harbor, which could not even be identified as the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet when those first new carriers returned from their strike at Marcus, is now freely advertised as the rear headquarters of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’ command. Pearl Harbor is still growing; the land area surrounding it is still being covered with new hundreds of acres of warehouses, shops and all the other impedimenta of a rear base.

It is the same with all the other military installations on Oahu. At Barbers Point, ten miles west of Pearl Harbor, the naval air station has an aircraft-engine reconditioning plant on the conveyor-line principle. It is like many another such plant on the mainland, but it is the first and only one in the Pacific. Detroit technology has been transplanted and flourishes amid the pineapple, sugar and coconut plantations.

At Wheeler Field, in the center of Oahu, there are more Liberator heavy bombers withdrawn from combat, either to be cannibalized for parts or “pickled” for future disposition, than there were in combat in the entire Central and South Pacific commands two years ago.

Westward from Hawaii lie the islands which the Japanese had 30 years to prepare for defense: Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Majuro and Palau. Those glittering prizes of yesteryear have their garrisons, their installations and their functions, but they are no longer in the forefront of the new Pacific war.

Arrived at Guam, or Tinian or Saipan, U.S. aircraft land on airfields such as the Japanese could not even conceive, much less construct, while they were there.

Maps Outdated. For security reasons, the extent and nature of the harbor installations at Guam can be indicated only in the broadest terms. This much can be said: the Japanese left Port Apra much as they found it, with berths for only half a dozen oceangoing ships at most. Six months after the marines landed on either side of it, Port Apra was swallowed up in a harbor development unrivaled in the Pacific. The old charts are worse than useless today; even the topographic maps must be changed, for an island has been leveled to provide fill.

But for sheer, concentrated fury of construction, there is nothing like Iwo. When the Japanese held it, they put in almost 20,000 combat troops and only 3,000 or 4,000 construction workers. With U.S. forces holding it, Iwo still has combat troops, but they are inconspicuous. They are lost in the legions of builders: the Navy’s Construction Battalions (Seabees) who will fight, if need be, for what they build, and the Army’s aviation engineers. Nowhere in the world has so much construction machinery been turned loose in so tiny a compass.

Major Way Stations. The Philippines, notably Luzon, have land masses which were marked, even before Bataan and Corregidor fell, as inevitable staging areas for armies about to descend upon Japan. Yet the U.S. command had only the most tenuous contact with the Philippines two years ago, by submarine or occasional U.S. aircraft landing on a secret strip on Mindanao.

Today, the liberation of the Philippines is nearing completion. Manila Bay itself will take years to clear, but Liberty ships and big refrigerator ships already can tie up alongside the piers which the Japanese tried in vain to destroy; tens of thousands of tons are unloaded daily. Other tens of thousands still must go ashore over the beaches. But it gets ashore, to the men who need it.

And these men are different from those who were fighting the Japanese in the jungles of New Georgia and New Guinea two years ago. More than 50% of the names and serial numbers are different, because of replacements. But even where the names and serial numbers are the same, the men have changed. Outfits which were green as grass in the Solomons and New Guinea have now been hardened and heartened by victories. They have cohesion, esprit de corps and battlewise leadership.

Allied Victory. If U.S. forces have come a long way in two years, so have their Allies in the war against Japan—Australians, New Zealanders and men from the United Kingdom, half way round the world. The Royal Navy has, in its Pacific Fleet under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, a force sufficient to take on the entire surviving Japanese fleet and destroy it.

Whatever may lie ahead, in two years Allied forces (and especially U.S. forces) have fought and won one of the greatest wars in history through the Pacific islands. It is a different war from here on, in a different ocean, with new ships, new weapons and new men.