HONIARA, Solomon Islands — In an overgrown field not far from where American Marines stormed ashore on Guadalcanal, Bruce Klahr strolls through the wrecks of old amphibious tractors like a kid in a candy store.
This is what he has come halfway around the world to see on his vacation, the wrecks and remnants of the Second World War.
And it doesn't get much better than this - piles of live ammunition, sunken warships and a welter of airplane crash sites.
A retired exporter from Boulder, Colo., Klahr, 47, fancies himself the world's most widely traveled war tourist, having visited battlefields in 102 countries, from Normandy to Corregidor, from a bridge too far in Holland to the bridge on the River Kwai in Thailand.
Klahr is a hopeless World War II junkie, drawn, like hundreds of others, to the Pacific by what could well be the world's most intriguing collection of war relics, strewn in the jungles and sunk in the seas of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
Some junkies are like Danny Kennedy, a dive shop operator who got hooked almost by accident and now probably knows as much as anyone on Earth about where PT-109 went down in the far western Solomons.
Others, like Maclaren Hiari in Papua New Guinea, consider themselves historians. Hiari is crusading to have his government relinquish the "swamp ghost," a historic American B-17E bomber so well preserved in kunai grass and mire that there was still coffee in cockpit thermoses when it was discovered.
Many more are entrepreneurs, like Patrick Murphy, an aircraft mechanic from
Kentucky who is trying to salvage Japanese Zeroes from an overgrown airfield in the Solomons, where more than 100 vintage warplanes are now parked in dense jungle.
"I guess you call it a big boy's toy shop," said Murphy, 46, who estimates that 2,000 airplanes remain from the war in the Solomons, crashed or abandoned.
Any one of them, restored and in flying condition, he said, could fetch well over $1 million from wealthy airplane enthusiasts in the United States.
Most Americans probably couldn't locate Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands on a map. But the two archipelago nations formed a critical southeasterly corridor in the Pacific for the Japanese in their drive to take Australia in 1942.
