Introducing the "Hap"

To Washington last week hurried Colonel Frederick Smith, deputy chief of staff of MacArthur's Fifth Air Force, fresh from the Pacific theater with a lot of information and permission to spill some of it. This was his estimate of Jap air power there:

"The Japanese are getting set for air operations in New Guinea. They're turning Wewak into a second Rabaul, so that they now have major air concentrations in two directions from Port Moresby, both about 300 miles away. . . .

"The best Jap plane we've run into is the improved Zero, which we call the Hap. It has some armor protection for the pilot and a little more power than the Zero without sacrificing much maneuverability. But it blows up like a Zero when it's hit.

"Plane for plane and against some odds, we can take care of the Hap all right. And we can take care of the Japanese pilots. Their quality has been running down quite a bit on the average. But they're not out of first-line pilots in the South Pacific. When the Japs are on a job they think is important, they have the first team in.

"Japanese planes and pilots are inferior to ours, but there's no use kidding ourselves that we can take a steady diet of two-to-one numerical superiority in an area where our forces are so small we have practically no margin of expendability. That is our major weakness in New Guinea. Our forces are so limited that we can't risk any but missions which seem to have an ironclad guarantee of high returns and few losses."

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