Science: Active Memorial

A newly married couple left Honolulu last week for a year's honeymoon. Mr. & Mrs. Peter J. R. Hill, who are naturalists as well as newlyweds, were going to lonely Koror Island in the Palau Archipelago. There their main job will be to turn a Japanese weather station into the first of the Pacific War Memorial's chain of scientific centers. The Hills will also set up a tide gauge for the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey. (Incidentally, they will take care of a colony of wasps from Zanzibar which, it is hoped, will check a plague of coconut-eating beetles.)

The Pacific War Memorial's organizers (chairman: Archibald B. Roosevelt) believe that the Americans who died in the Pacific war deserve a better monument than the usual buildings or pretentious statuary. When the U.S. captured the island empire of the Japanese, it took possession of a region which was almost unknown scientifically. Many of the islands have birds, animals and plants that are found nowhere else; some of them may prove useful to the rest of the world. The ocean around the islands teems with fish which might be a valuable addition to the world's food supply.

Next unit after Koror will probably be on Saipan, whose capture cost 3,040 U.S. lives. The Navy, which rules Saipan, has set aside as Memorial Reservations two areas, one a lake, the other a mountain peak still covered with virgin forest. When enough money has been raised, the Pacific War Memorial will have stations manned with scientists all over the U.S. Pacific, and a headquarters in Honolulu to organize the information that is gathered.