Geography and Environment
Like most of the islands of the South Pacific, the Islands of the Bismarck Archipelago are of volcanic origin with steep mountain slopes, jungle and treacherous marshes, where malaria was a problem for all deployed troops. The hot, tropical climate was rarely ameliorated by the torrential rain storms and dense clouds which afflicted the region. The inhabited islands had been managed by Australia as a League of Nations Mandate before the war, and there was only a settlement of Westerners originally settled by Imperial Germany before the First World War that was centered on coconut plantations and missionary complexes.
Read more about this topic: Operation Dexterity
Famous quotes containing the words geography and, geography and/or environment:
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)