Guess

Another great battle was coming in the south Pacific. The United Nations had reports that a Jap task force was assembling in the Marshall Islands, a round 2,500 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, 2,100 from Australia's northern tip. From there the Jap could hit at the U.S.-Australia supply line, at the islands (close to that route) east of Australia, or even at Pearl Harbor itself. From there also he could sweep down and join the New Guinea-New Britain forces in an assault on Australia.

Faced with these dispositions, Douglas MacArthur in Australia, Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, and all the other Allied leaders from San Francisco to Calcutta, had a tough decision to make. They had to guess what shell the pea was under.

Meanwhile the inscrutable foe sat in the golden seat. The offensive was still in his hand. He gave a fine exhibition of hiding it by much ado over a wide area. His planes roared as far east as the new U.S. base on New Caledonia, were routed by fighters. His bombers whammed alternately at Port Moresby and north Australian ports. U.S. and Australian pilots whacked right back, destroying the Jap's planes wholesale, as many as 30 at one clip.

But the Jap came back with more. He poured in still more planes from the place where the shot-up planes came from. His resiliency worried Allied strategists as much as his multifariousness.

Toward week's end his planes scouted the east coast of Australia, in which he had never seemed to be interested after years of exploration there by pearl fishermen and other characters in the service of the Jap Navy. At Townsville on the east coast, two Jap planes were picked up one day by U.S. anti-aircraftsmen. They were at 30,000 feet and they were away before pursuit could get up and after them. Australia looked harder at its own defenses on that side. If the Jap once got past the minefields between the mainland and 1,260-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, eastern Australia would be an inviting place for him to land.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.