Asia-Pacific

Guadalcanal's Deadly WWII Battlefields: Solomon Islands' Bomb Problem

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By Justin Wu/Bryn Thomas

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Eighty years after some of World War II’s fiercest battles, unexploded bombs still endanger communities across the Solomon Islands. The HALO Trust and local authorities are racing to clear tens of thousands of hidden explosives that continue to claim lives and threaten daily life.

Clearing Mines in the Solomon Islands

 

REPORTER: 

For over 80 years, generations of Solomon Islanders have lived with the deadly legacy of World War II.

 

I was at my house, it was a Sunday afternoon. I was just sitting with my daughter and a few of my in-laws, and then we heard the explosion. And everyone was like, oh what is this? We felt the aftershock. And everyone was a bit confused at that time because it's been 80 years, and this explosion, it just happened out of nowhere. And then a few minutes later we heard police, and then not long after that we heard the news that had aired. And it was really scary at that time because it's really close to where I live, and I have my kids there.

 

REPORTER: 

During the war, the Solomon Islands—particularly Guadalcanal—were a key battleground between the Japanese Empire and the United States.

 

Today remnants from the fighting in the form of thousands of unexploded bombs are still being found, sometimes by farmers, other times by children.

 

Buried beneath homes, in school playgrounds, and in vegetable gardens. But the most are in old battlegrounds.

 

So this is a very well-known battlefield in the Guadalcanal campaign. The Battle of Bloody Ridge or also called Edsunds Ridge.

 

In 1942 this ridge saw intense fighting between the US Marine Corps and Japanese imperial troops, so vicious it devolved into hand to hand combat. Today, its lush windswept slopes are saturated with unexploded ordinance or UXO.

 

This whole site is of course saturated, so it's very expensive for us to clear. We have cleared a boundary where we put the fence up, and that's the famous hill. So three months ago we cleared that, and it was a lot of UXO. 16,000 small arms caliber bullet unfired, just laying around. And then there were 53 hand grenades, rifle grenades, just laying around the rim where people walk around all the time.

 

REPORTER: 

But bombs are found across the country, not just in its battlefields. Bernadette Miller Wale and her friends played with them as children, intentionally detonating what they called “backyard fireworks”.

 

Today, she works with the HALO Trust, a UK charity that clears landmines and unexploded bombs worldwide, and teaches communities how to stay safe.

 

Bernadette Miller Wale: 

I think before working for HALO, I think I was just the same as everyone else. Like you'd see items, you'd touch it, move it. You weren't really aware of the dangers that it poses to us. So that's why when I started working with Halo and we did risk educations, we tell people to like, okay, if you see items, wherever you find it, do not touch it, do not go near it, report it. We encourage people to report it to the police.

 

REPORTER: 

HALO Trust is working with communities to map UXO hot spots in red. If they find, then remove a bomb, they cover it with a yellow sticker.

 

The red areas are where Halo has already done our mapping exercise. So we've been out in those communities. We've taught local people about the risk of items, and when we've seen items and they've pointed them out, we have taken the coordinates of those. That forms evidence points, which then helps. Behind me, the dots are showing points of ordinance that have then been, the police have responded, and the police have either removed them or destroyed them on site, depending on the risk posed.

 

REPORTER: 

Although HALO’s operation in the Solomon Islands is small, it’s helped destroy around 50,000 unexploded bombs over the past 15 years.

 

Their maps show it’s hard to go even a hundred meters without finding one — meaning they’ve likely only scratched the surface.

 

Here, everybody knows someone that has been affected. They've either found something in their back garden, their children have, or they know somebody that was injured, or someone who sadly died as a result of an item exploding. You hear of cooking, for example. Cooking on the ground is a common practice, and then if items are underneath the ground, people are unaware, and then they cook, and the heat aggravates the item and it explodes. We hear examples recently in the last few years of people who've lost their lives with this example.

 

REPORTER: 

Long after US and Japanese forces fought one of World War Two’s fiercest campaigns, Solomon Islanders are still finding bombs in their homes and on their idyllic coastal slopes. Eighty years later, their own battle against the remnants of that conflict is proving to be an uphill fight.

 

Justin Wu and Bryn Thomas for TaiwanPlus.