Page 136 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

Melbourne (this, I thought, was significant, for inhabitants of Victoria seemed a
bit less ‘outdoorsy’ than New South Wales residents) and was, and this was not
difficult to guess, a model. I thought it strange to find her so alone, but I realised
that Australians, too, found some of their number boorish; she actually liked to
have a door opened for her, a habit that to others marked me out as an oddball.
We enjoyed a couple of evenings together; the cruise was fulfilling its promise.

On Saturday, we anchored off Honiara, a place that I was looking forward
to visiting. It is the capital of the Solomon Islands, and in particular the largest
town (by no means a city) on Guadalcanal. On my 13th birthday my parents had
given me a requested present; Fuller’s 3-volume Decisive Battles of the Western
World (yes, I had strange predilections even when young) and in which there is
a full explication of the War in the Pacific, with particular reference to the battles
of Midway and Leyte Gulf. One of the major theatres of the naval war was Papua
New Guinea and the Coral Sea, and in particular on Guadalcanal, from where
the Japanese planned, among other things, to isolate Australia (a bizarre notion,
given Japan’s limited resources by 1943) from its Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
From August 1942 until January 1943 the Americans landed on Guadalcanal and
eventually forced the Japanese to abandon their garrison on Papua-New Guinea,
the culminating event being the battle of the Bismarck Sea, in which some twelve
of sixteen Japanese ships were sunk by US aircraft. All this had occurred in a
remote and impoverished part of the world about which I knew nothing and
wished to see something, for it was not an arena frequented by cruise ships, or
in fact by any ships at all. But what I could see was instructive, one easily being
able to envision how difficult control of the area would be without substantial
forces, both naval and aerial (I had absorbed enough history to wonder what
weird mind-set characterised Japan’s thinking about attacking the United States
at all. One comparison alone tells all of the facts that one needs to know; during
the war Japan produced or converted from other hulls eighteen aircraft carriers,
but in that same period the US produced 124 carriers of all types. Even the United
Kingdom produced over forty). It was instructive to sail through these waters in
which so much natural perfection was witness to so much pointless violence and
waste; underneath these tropical waters lay tens of thousands of tons of wartime
waste, ships, planes, and guns, and thousands of people who in the ordinary
course would have been citizens of the world. But still we fight!

The perspective of the futility of the Pacific war was somehow brought into
further focus by our final port, Suva, on Vitilevu, Fiji. This island paradise lies
some 1,000 miles to the east of the Solomons, yet going there barely brought us
into the orbit of the Pacific; the conquest of the Fijian archipelago was, even at the
height of its military successes, well beyond Japan’s military capabilities. Hubris
does not cover it; pride or overconfidence are not tautologies for stupidity.

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