The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1945)
1,000 U.S. bombers rip Berlin
Flying Fortresses hammer Nazi government and army office buildings
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Fall of city imminent –
Two U.S. divisions speed down highways to Manila
One force closes on town only 17½ miles north of Philippines capital
BULLETIN
GEN. MACARTHUR’S LUZON HQ, Philippines – Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a visit to his frontline troops battling toward Manila, said today he believed that U.S. forces would reach the Philippines capital tomorrow.
A front dispatch said the Japs have started demolition fires in Manila.
GEN. MACARTHUR’S LUZON HQ, Philippines (UP) – Vanguards of two U.S. divisions today sped down parallel highways less than 20 miles north of Manila.
Liberation of the Philippines capital appeared imminent.
Japan’s three-year reign of terror and starvation in Manila was entering its last hours just 26 days after the landing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s liberating army on the shores of Lingayen Gulf, 110 miles to the north.
Caught off balance by the multiple American attacks and with their main forces pinned down impotently in the northern hills around Baguio, the Japs apparently had little or nothing to oppose the armored columns sweeping down on the capital.
Mett light resistance
Motorized outriders of the U.S. 37th Infantry and 1st Cavalry Divisions were meeting only scattered resistance in their parallel advance through the northern approaches to Manila, and there was every prospect that their battle flags would be raised over the city before the close of the weekend.
Official headquarters reports, admittedly lagging more than 36 hours behind the event, said the 37th Infantry Division had finally worked out of the swampy bottleneck at Calumpit and pushed on more than five miles down Highway 3 to the Malolos area, 17½ miles north of Manila, by Thursday night.
A few miles to the east, veteran troops of the 1st Cavalry Division were pushing down Highway 5 below Sabang, 23 miles north of Manila, after a breakneck 57-mile advance in 24 hours.
Capture Cabanatuan
The 1st Cavalry Division, entering the Battle of Luzon for the first time Wednesday night, struck eastward along the Manila north road from Guimba and then south into Highway 5.
Cabanatuan, Santa Rosa and Gapan all fell in swift succession, completely severing communications between the Jap forces in north and south Luzon. Strong armored patrols raced 24 miles past Gapan to reach Sabang by nightfall Thursday.
The stiffest Jap resistance was met at the Pampanga River crossings just above Cabanatuan, where some 300 enemy troops supported by light tanks put up a short, sharp battle that ended in their destruction almost to a man. U.S. losses in the fight were described officially as small.
The Manila-bound Yanks pushed past Cabanatuan without entering the prison camp six miles to the northeast from which 510 American and Allied captives were rescued last Tuesday.
The advance on Manila shook the puppet Philippines government into a frantic appeal for more planes, tanks and guns to bolster Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita’s forces on Luzon.
Field dispatches said the terrific impetus attained by the 1st Cavalry Division was expected to carry them into Manila before the 37th Infantry Division, which had been hampered by the difficult terrain around Calumpit.
There were still no reports of Jap destruction inside Manila, and it was believed that only a relatively few key objectives – such as the Pasig River bridges, supply dumps and military installations – would be blown up before the enemy abandoned the capital.
Headquarters said plans are already being made for Gen. MacArthur and other high American officers to enter the city as soon as possible after its capture.
Far to the north, troops of the U.S. Sixth Army’s First Corps, who have borne the hardest fighting of the Luzon campaign, secured the Americans’ east flank between San Nicolas and Natividad, 27 miles inland from Lingayen Gulf and about the same distance south of Baguio.
Block road
Nine miles below Natividad, the Americans threw a block across Highway 8 just south of Umingan and launched an attack on sizeable Jap forces dug in on the outskirts of the town.
Meanwhile, elements of the newly-landed U.S. Eighth Army advanced six miles across the base of Bataan Peninsula east of Olongapo Thursday and were approaching Dinalupihan, where they were expected to effect a juncture with Sixth Army forces moving down from Highway 3.
Other Eighth Army units south of Manila were reported approaching Caylungon, 37 airline miles below the capital, after pushing nine miles inland from their invasion beachhead at Nasugbu Bay. Nasugbu town and Wawa, just to the north, were captured along with a nearby airfield, and headquarters said the Americans were meeting only light, sporadic resistance in their drive on Manila.
Japs attack convoy
Gen. MacArthur’s communiqué revealed that the Japs, repeating their unsuccessful Lingayen Gulf tactics, sent about 30 small boats equipped with depth charges and torpedoes against the Nasugbu invasion convoy Wednesday night. U.S. warships beat off the attack, destroying many of the enemy craft, and the convoy suffered only “minor damage,” the communiqué said.
Other U.S. naval patrols sank or severely damaged 19 enemy barges, five speedboats and a lugger in a night sweep along the northwestern coast of Luzon, and patrolling warplanes sank a Jap destroyer and damaged two others in another action farther north.
U.S. heavy bombers also dumped 109 tons of bombs on the Cavite Naval Base in Manila Bay, while another raiding force pounded enemy airfields in southern Formosa, destroying 30 grounded planes.
‘Big Three’ reported studying armistice terms for Nazis
South Russia suggested as meeting place for Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin
LONDON, England (UP) – President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin were believed studying armistice terms for Germany today at their “Big Three” conference.
There were a number of signs that the long-awaited meeting had finally begun, with the approval of terms for a defeated Reich the most urgent item on the agenda.
Though official secrecy cloaked the site of the meeting, unconfirmed reports placed it somewhere in southern Russia.
A Tokyo broadcast, however, said the three Allied leaders were “reportedly” in session in Cairo.
The Jap-controlled Singapore radio guessed the meeting was being held at a “Romanian Black Sea port.”
The European Advisory Commission was understood to have drafted armistice terms for Germany for final approval of Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill and Marshal Stalin. Washington sources said the terms were put in textual form and initialed by the commission some weeks ago.
The nature of the terms was kept secret. As in the case of Italy, they probably will not be published immediately, if at all.
While there was no indication of impending German collapse, it was believed the “Big Three” wished to be prepared in the event that the Germans decide to capitulate when the Red Army reaches Berlin.
The lightning-like Soviet drive into eastern Germany gave the armistice question precedence over pressing political problems affecting Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia.
The German press saw the meeting as a prelude to an Allied propaganda campaign to break Germany’s morale and hasten her surrender. Headlines in Berlin newspapers warned the German people against listening to surrender demands.
Adolf Hitler’s newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter carried a banner headline asserting that a “gigantic deceit is planned,” while the Nachtausgabe saw a “new big humbug maneuver” in the making.
I DARE SAY —
The moon is down
By Florence Fisher Parry
The trouble is, we’re finite; we’re only human beings. We can’t grasp this war because it’s too big. It has the greatest minds stopped, stunned, aghast. If only we would think of what is happening in human terms and not try to grasp it in its overwhelming entirety it might clarify; and, thus simplified, become a problem which we could then better solve.
Confess! Do you really understand, for example, what has been happening in Greece? Why its people could have a civil war right after their liberation? Why British troops had to be called to quell an insurrection? I did not understand it, yet I read what there was to read about it in the news.
But yesterday, in five minutes it all was clarified by a Greek. Let me tell it to you his way.
He lived in the little town and because it was a small town, everyone knew each other from way back. It was a tight little family community. When Mussolini and Hitler betrayed them and reduced their dear country to slavery, their bond tightened. They were as one against the world.
Their leader-over-all at that time had instructions where to form guerrilla groups who would retire into the hills and descend upon the Nazi-held towns and create havoc wherever they could. So, following the plans, Greek guerrillas would stealthily enter a town, kill a few Nazi officers, demolish ammunitions and flee. Immediately following, the Nazis would send in troops and round up the men and women and children of the offending town and kill them in cold blood.
Now after this had been going on for some time, the leader realized that by this slow process of defamation of Greece’s small populations, the Nazis would exterminate the people. And he said to the Allied leaders: “I do not believe that this policy will work. We are harassing the enemy at too great a cost in human lives.”
But they would not listen to him and he was replaced by another, who continued the policy of guerrilla warfare. Now one night, four guerrillas hidden in the hills around this little town crept into the village and destroyed a small bridge important to the Nazis. For this offensive the Nazis rounded up the men and women and little children at the village, packed them into the public square and slaughtered them with machine guns.
Blind rage
The surviving members of these martyred families, crazed by such useless slaughter, and themselves knowing the four guerrillas who had by their overt act, brought about this terrible tragedy, were infuriated that their rash friends in the hills should have caused such unnecessary horror, and there sprang up between the guerrillas and the martyred citizens a passionate feud. The guerrillas burned with righteous vindication of their acts. The civilians shared the opinion that Greece was committing suicide by such rash actions.
For you see, all over Greece the experience of these townspeople was being duplicated in hundreds of other villages, and an internal explosion was inevitable. But this was not taken into account in time by the Allies, who did not have enough troops in Greece after its reoccupation.
It was then that Great Britain sent its meager British troops to try to restore order; but by that time it was too late. The harm had been done; the civil war was on.
One touch of nature!
“It is only human nature,” said my Greek friend, “to strike out at the closest one at hand, when your family is struck down! Supposing I had been home when these four guerrillas blew up the little bridge in my town! Supposing those four guerrillas were neighbors, yet because of their rash act, my wife and my little children had been killed, and me not even there! How would I feel toward these four townspeople? I would be crazed, fevered, not myself! I would strike out at them in my frenzy of grief. And there would spring between us an enmity born of my sorrow, born of their fierce, unconquerable rebellion. It was a human thing to happen to the people of Greece. There was no one there to reason with them, to help them, or to awe them by a show of strength in arms.”
House to strew obstacles in George bill’s smooth path
Republicans plan amendments that will broaden objective of loan agency divorce
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Editorial: Stalin, Junkers and peace
The most important issue before the Big Three meeting is security through international organization versus security through balance of power. The United States wants the former. Russia has been acting for the latter. Britain goes along with Russia one minute, and the next yearns for better protection than her old system.
At the heart of the problem, of course, is Germany. there will be no enduring peace after Nazi defeat if German militarism can revive, as after World War I. Hence the necessity of making German demilitarization realty effective this time, and of creating healthy conditions under which the European people – including the Germans – will develop toward self-rule rather than another frustrate brand of totalitarianism.
At the Big Three meeting President Roosevelt will have two aces. One is the superior economic, financial, naval and airpower of the United States in the post-war world. The other is the willingness of the United States – including the Republicans, as represented by Sen. Vandenberg – to enter a peacetime military alliance to enforce Axis demilitarization, provided Russia and Britain will accept a genuine international organization instead of their balance of power system.
Marshal Stalin, however, also has aces. He has the biggest land power of the world in the strategic center of the Euro-Asian continents. In Eastern Europe, he has established a solid belt of puppet governments from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, with the exception of Greece – if that is an exception in the end. In Western Europe he has a separate post-war alliance with France.
Moreover, Stalin has a “Free Germany Committee” of Junker marshals and generals ready to rule the Reich after Nazi defeat, if he so decides – as he has used the Hungarian generals for his regime in that country. This would be the opposite of demilitarization; it would perpetuate the caste which always has been the heart and brain of German militarism. As long ago as Nov. 6, 1942, Stalin state publicly:
It is not our aim to destroy all military force in Germany, for every literate person will understand that this is impossible in regard to Germany, ass it is in regard to Russia, but it is also inadvisable from the point of view of the future.
Stalin’s diplomatic achievement in Europe to date is equaled only by his military success, which grows by the hour. How is Russia’s vast power to be used? We assume Stalin’s purpose is Russian security and prosperity
But we question the ability of Stalin or any other leader, no matter how powerful his nation, to obtain world peace through this sphere of influence system – much less to build a peaceful or a free Germany around the Junkers militarists. The Junkers always will find some Hitlerian demagog as a partner; and they not only will destroy world peace again, but also, if necessary, betray their Russian friends as they did in 1941. Unless, that is, the Allies this time wipe out German militarism completely along with Nazism, as they are pledged to do.
So, we hope that President Roosevelt in this meeting can persuade Stalin that an international security organization which makes the settlements and enforces them – in Germany and Eastern Europe as elsewhere – is a better bet in the long run for Russia than settlements dictated by the Kremlin and dependent on puppets. Secretary of State Hull persuaded him of that at the Moscow conference, when Stalin promised to give up his one-man settlements and his “Free Germany Committee” in favor of Big Three cooperation in a free international organization.
But this time the agreement must last.