Remembering WW2 in the Pacific
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 11 September 2005 22:37:28
Recently there was some media coverage of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the (WWII) war in the Pacific.
It got me digging through our photos drawer. (My families' life collection of photos are not in albums, but loose and in envelopes and a shoe box in a dresser drawer). This drawer is a real jumbled mess of memories, as over the years the kids have been through the photos and shuffled them up many times. It's sort of exciting, as you don't know which decade the next photo you turn up will be from.
Anyway, the reason I started looking through the photos was because of an experience I had in the early 1970's. I was fortunate to spend six months on a geological mapping job in the Solomon Islands. In those days the geological map of the main island of Guadalcanal had the whole eastern half of the island as void i.e. just white. It was too dangerous to go there because of the huge amounts of unexploded, and very unstable, bombs, grenades etc. in the jungle, so geological mapping was out of the question. I recall going to a beach which the locals called red beach, or blood beach, I can't exactly remember, but it was named so because of the huge amount of blood spilt when a landing of American soldiers was met by a vicious Japanese counter-attack. What I saw was a typical Solomon Islands scene, beautiful tropical beach, white coral sands, aqua water, luscious green jungle growth right to the edge of the sand but on closer inspection...the plants along the beach were intermingled with hundreds of rusting landing craft. These tracked vehicles had been used only once and left there to rot some thirty years earlier.
It was an eerie scene, I could hardly imagine what had gone on there.
I took several photos but this is the only one remaining..actually taken from inside one of the vehicles...
I have my moments of questioning the current American policies, but I also know that many of my parents generation thought that Australia was saved from the Japanese invasion by American intervention. If those American soldiers had not sacrificed their lives on that beautiful beach and many other places in the Pacific campaign, maybe we would've had a much different 60th anniversary today.