Word: buna
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From the banks of the wide, swiftly flowing Gerua River in north Papua I can overlook the four fronts of the battle for Buna. But the only visible signs are two flat-topped pillars of smoke rising, one from Buna and one from Gona, and the Flying Fortresses weaving across the top of Buna through sooty puffs of ack-ack fire which are ragged now from repeated bombing. There is nothing else to see but the cloud-spattered tropic sky above the vast bowl of sun-drenched, emerald-green jungle, which is interspersed with patches of yellow, man-high kunai...
...Cape Endaiadere, at Gona, at Buna Mission, on the flanks of the Buna airstrip, on the track from Soputa to Cape Sanananda, everywhere the enemy has picked his own positions. He has established concrete gun-pits and dug grenade-proof, mortar-proof nests beneath the roots of the giant jungle trees. He has put keeneyed snipers in hundreds of treetops. He has mown down the grass and jungles to give lanes of sweeping fire to his guns. From such positions companies can hold up battalions, and battalions can resist divisions...
...also probably more prisoners than MacArthur's forces had captured in the entire campaign to blast the Japs out of New Guinea. There last week General MacArthur's Australian and American ground forces moved forward toward the Buna beachhead, yard by yard: the Australians killed 150 Japs in charging one gun position, lost 66 of their own men. The Japanese defenders held an area of only four by ten miles, occupying a position roughly corresponding to that of the U.S. Marines during the worst of Guadalcanal. From concrete strongholds and jungle-covered machine-gun nests the Japs fought...
Butadiene Polymers. The most useful of these units is butadiene, a liquid closely related to butane, hence easily made from natural gas, petroleum refinery vapors or (less easily) from alcohol. Buna, butyl, Ameripol and Perbunan are all based on butadiene...
When butadiene is polymerized with styrene the result is Buna-S, developed in Germany but since improved by Standard Oil (of N.J.). Styrene itself has no relation whatever to natural rubber. It is made from benzene, principally by the Dow and Monsanto companies, and gives an excellent crystal-clear plastic when polymerized by itself. Combined with butadiene in Buna-S, the product is high in tensile strength and resistant to abrasion. In some tests it has proved distinctly superior to natural rubber in wearing qualities. (Some Buna-S truck tires have lasted over 50,000 miles.) The Baruch plan calls...