From the Potato Letters--70 years ago: Great Uncle Frank writing to Uncle Walter, ...I am a poor hand to write. I never can think of any news.... I was glad to hear from you and to hear you are alright. I know you would like to be home... an maby it wont be so long till you can be just make the best of it you can and when you do get home you will have lots to think back over as long as you live. i know the trips I took when I was a boy. I still like to think back over them. Uncle Frank farmed West of Buckner--out in the vicinity of Winfrey Road. Maby is the most frequently misspelled word in the letters. Maby there was a teacher at Academy School who spelt it that way. Meanwhile, in the Solomon Islands of the South West Pacific, 70 years ago today, Uncle Willis was landing on Bougainville with the Marines. After Pearl Harbor, the Navy realized that air power had come to dominate the battleship as a force on the oceans. Establishing airfields on islands (and preventing the Japanese from operating in the air) became the key element of the Island hopping strategy. Forward airfields denied the enemy the use of the air and sea space around Allied forces on the islands. By interdicting enemy supply routes, land based planes isolated bypassed Japanese forces and left them unable to mount resistance behind advancing U. S. forces. Patrol flights were a key to obtaining intelligence about enemy movements. The Japanese were building an air field on Bougainville which was at the opposite end of the Solomon Island chain from Guadalcanal. It was one of their last outposts threatening the supply lines to Australia and MacArthur with land based airplanes. As landings went in the Pacific Theater, it was not heavily defended and resistance was light--that said, resistance on Bougainville continued until just days before Japan surrendered nearly two years later. There were no easy invasions against the Japanese.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Nov 2013 13:32:14 +0000
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