World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Shrinking Perimeter

The Jap, short of available aircraft, edged back nervously before mounting Allied air power in the Pacific.

In New Guinea Allied bombers ranged beyond Salamaua, to which Jap soldiers still clung, to hit at the Jap supply route which winds through the jungles and along the shore. They smacked faraway Wewak, where the route begins, sank three 7,000-ton freighters in the harbor there, set a fourth transport and a destroyer ablaze. They smashed Jap headquarters at Lae with 84 tons of bombs.

In the Solomons, where air attacks have increased in weight and intensity since Major General Nathan F. Twining took tactical command of Army, Navy and Marine Corps planes, heavy blows fell on Bougainville and on the stranded Jap garrison on Kólombangara.

In slow retreat, the Japs withdrew their air reinforcements from the airfields at Wewak to the safer refuge of Hollandia, 600 miles from the New Guinea front. At week’s end, under air cover and a heavy naval bombardment, seaborne Australian troops made an end run around both Salamaua and Lae, staged a large-scale amphibious landing above Lae to cut off both Jap bases from their overland supply.

U.S. paratroops boxed them in by landing in their rear. From Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel Island, east of Vella Lavella, the Japs evacuated a long-held seaplane base—the third position they had abandoned in less than a month.* Though the heart of Japan’s defense was still untouched and intact, the fatty outer layer was shrinking.

*The others: Kiska, Bairoko Harbor.