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Show naonsn such base, . the Allied nations to - to the furtherest tr- 9 constructed a tribute to American ingenuity; to its great strength Sd will to do. To the Seabees goes the thanks for their versatile rug-gedness rug-gedness and ability to work and fight under any conditions to es- courts for basketball, tennis, hand- tall, baseball diamonds, and J fenced-in, shelter-strewn bathing beach Seven separate movies show a new feature each night! , The major obstacles are the cli- mate and diseases. Daily rains average av-erage 156 inches annually. Clothes wm dry only in the short-hved direct di-rect rays of the morning sun Moisture sogs the air so that the moon casts a rainbow at night. Malaria has been effectively controlled. con-trolled. Everyone on shore and all on ships within a miles of the beach taken an atabrme tables daily by order. Elephantiasis (swollen limbs), dysentry, cholera and a non-venereal form of syphilis syphi-lis called "yaws" are rampant in the interior. Just how many, Japs are still on the island is uncertain. Those who sought the interior and still hide in the bamboo thickets of the central mountains must feel more than a simple urge to suicide for from their vantage they can watch the whole hopeless host of the world's greatest navy. Occasionally, Occasion-ally, a Jap surrenders, but most of them wait to be flushed by patrols. pa-trols. So little is the fear of Jap interference at Manus, that ships always sway at anchor with riding rid-ing lights ablaze all night. But mostly, Manus is an arsenal planted plant-ed on the toes of Jap ambition, which has overstepped and wants to run but is held fast, swaying backwards, a setup for a left to the Philippines and a right cross-hook cross-hook to Tokyo. The Seabees have LOCAL MAN SENDS DESCRIPTION OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDS By J. M. NICHOLS, J. Six thousand miles southwest of San Francisco and 200 miles below be-low the equator, lies Manus islands, is-lands, a 30 by 14 mile jut of volcanic vol-canic rock, lush with sweating jungles, parboiled mosquitoes, and taut, grey Allied warships. Manus is the largest of the Admiralty group. It is also an important naval base. Eight grimy months ago, Manus was a lightly-held Jap base, a stepping stone and a rear guard for the greater citadel at Rabaul. The Japs landed four months after Pearl Harbor and got possession from the fistful of Australian officials who normally administered 15,000 Melanesian navies under a League of Nations mandate. Prior to the last war the islands were a German protectorate pro-tectorate . . . Manus, together with Los Negres, a second and adjacent island, looks like a whale blubbering blubber-ing across the Bismarck Sea to New Guinea. This second island, the tail of the whale, is separated from eastern Manus by a narrow slough of mangrove and sago swamps. It is also the site of Jap-built Jap-built Momote airstrip. Curving to the north and then to the west it forms, with a chain of islets and coral reefs, the huge sheltered anchorage an-chorage named Seeadler harbor; a harbor big enough to hold at one time all the ships of all the navies of all the Allied nations. The! United States took over in a brief but bloody blitz, in March last year (1941). Echoes from guerilla gunfire "ere lost in the roar of bulldozers, peeps, jeeps, and 100 , mechanical in-laws whose operators opera-tors disregarded sniper fire and nursed the equipment ashore after the first worst moments. A time when the Seabee motto "Can Do" was' most effectively proven. They brought everything they needed with them for there was little of value already on the island. The Japs lived mostly with the natives. Within a month all that remained of Nipponese occupation were a foxhole full of split-toed shoes, a battered landing barge and wooden wood-en jetty (????)! Mud ruts became be-came a hard surfaced coral-paved highway. Rows of huts like giant criss-crossed cartridge belts, were flung across the green slopes of the hills behind the beaches. The Seabees built machine shops, tire repair depots, a great mess hall, a powerful radio station, a fleet postoffice, huge warehouses, store for small wares and clothing, and a large chlorination plant to purify puri-fy their water and a reservoir to store it. They set up a base hospital hos-pital and small dispensaries, administrative ad-ministrative offices, a malaria control con-trol center and a reception center for transient personnel. Palms became be-came telephone and light poles. Recreation grounds at Manus top those of any advanced base in the Pacific. A playground for men from ships at anchor. There are |