I DARE SAY —
What-if-ers
By Florence Fisher Parry
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Perkins: Spielers still ‘at old stand’ in Hyde Park
Speakers have wide variety of themes
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Simms: Fall of Manila gives America big problem
Filipinos must get food, clothing
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
WASHINGTON – Manila’s fall marks the beginning of probable the most difficult – because it is the most delicate – phase of our 46 years of association with the Philippine Islands.
Before leaving Washington to join Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the grand entree into his capital, President Sergio Osmena told me something of the conditions in the archipelago.
The plight of the Filipinos is pitiful. The invaders treated them harshly. The farmers were systematically robbed of almost everything they raised, leaving next to nothing which could be sold to the city dwellers.
This meant gnawing hunger if not actual starvation in the towns, also the diseases which malnutrition leads to.
Japs live off country
Unlike Americans, the Japs live off the country. They even steal clothing, selling at black market prices such civilian articles as the soldiers could not use themselves. They often destroy quite wantonly what they can’t take away.
As a result, the Filipinos generally are undernourished, plagued with all kinds of sickness, and pretty much in rags. They are in great need of almost everything – food, clothing, drugs.
U.S. faces problem
The United States now faces a tremendous psychological problem in the Philippines. The people have been treated so cruelly by the Japs for so long that the masses are looking to the Americans for immediate assistance every description. Adequate aid, of course, may be difficult, if not impossible, to provide – at least in the immediate future. Yet unless it is forthcoming the effect is bound to be bad.
European experience shows what to expect. As, one by one, Europe’s occupied countries were liberated, the inhabitants seemed to expect things to change for the better and at once. Overnight they hoped the things of which they had been deprived for so long would reappear. When they didn’t, there was disillusionment. The sick and the starving are seldom reasonable, especially when encountered en masse.
Cites Europe
Europe has shown that mere liberation is not enough. The hungry want food. The ragged want clothes. The ailing want medicine. The homeless want houses and the jobless and penniless want work and security. There is feverish impatience and when relief isn’t forthcoming there is national unrest.
The gist of all this is that while there is undoubtedly a limit to what we can do in the Philippines, it is imperative that we do everything we possibly can. The Filipinos are especially our wards. We are in honor bound to do our best by them – not only for their sake but for our own. For, half the population of the globe, all the yellow and brown races scattered throughout Asia, have their eyes on us. Our prestige is still at stake.
Reporter, wife are near, yet far apart for 3 years
Freed from Manila prison, correspondent goes four blocks to find Mrs. Weissblatt
By Frank Weissblatt, United Press staff writer
BILIBID PRISON, Manila – The arrival of the 37th Infantry Division broke down the walls which for three years had separated me from my wife, who was only four blocks away in the heart of Manila.
We were reunited last night. Although we had been interned so near to each other, our only communication during the three seemingly endless years had been an official card every three months, except for occasional messages delivered by the underground.
Our separation was occasioned, by my status as a war correspondent. The Japs considered me a war prisoner and confined me to Bilibid Prison instead of Santo Tomas where other civilians and their wives were confined. After the 37th Infantry brought about our rescue I went to Santo Tomas where I found my wife.
Keeps prisoner records
In the darkened university halls last night and today I told wives, friends and relatives of prisoners held by the Japs the news of their loved ones at Bilibid, Formosa, Japan and Manchuria which I had compiled while at Bilibid.
Bilibid was a focal point for prisoner movement and I talked to men passing through in the daytime and wrote my record secretly at night, hiding the papers.
We kept our hopes alive on the news of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s island-to-island progress back to Luzon.
The most difficult time of all was during the last few weeks when we knew Gen. MacArthur was on Luzon but had only wild rumors on his progress down the plain.
Hear rifle butts
The food shortage was growing acute, but strength came back to us all when the sound of soldiers’ rifle butts against the wooden shutters on our barred windows gave us the first sign that Americans were in Manila.
One rifle butt knocked a small rectangle of wood from a window. A hand and an unwashed, unmistakably American face appeared in the opening.
The hand held a rifle and nervously fingered the trigger. Just in time its owner recognized us as fellow-Americans.
“How in hell do you get in there?” he shouted.
‘Glad to see you’
“How do you get out of here?” replied a prisoner, jokingly. “We’ve been trying to find that out for three years.”
Hardly a minute later, the soldiers were inside the wall and we were free. We told them the Japs, had pulled out Sunday afternoon.
There were tears of gratitude in our eyes, but the only words we could find to say were: “Glad to see you!”
Stanley and Livingstone –
‘Weissblatt, United Press,’ interned reporter says
Liberated newsman’s leg knit at 30-degree angle after being broken by Jap bullet
By H. D. Quigg, United Press staff writer
**BILIBID PRISON, Manila (Feb. 5, delayed) – Our names aren’t Stanley and Dr. Livingstone, but for a while it seemed as though they should have been.
It happened in Bilibid Prison, that ancient jail in which the Japs have confined 800 Allied war prisoners and 550 civilians for nearly three years.
I was just bedding down for the night on the concrete floor of the prison with an assault battalion of the 37th Infantry Division when someone said there were some American prisoners who just had been freed on the other side of the wall.
‘Weissblatt, United Press’
The night was pitch black. but I felt my way around the wall and along a corridor toward a hum of excited voices.
Suddenly I sensed rather than felt or saw someone beside me. I stuck out my hand, even as did Stanley in darkest Africa those many years ago.
“I’m Quigg, United Press”
The Dr. Livingstone of Bilibid Prison grasped my hand fervently.
“Weissblatt, United Press,” he replied.
And thus I met Franz Weissblatt, 46, who covered the Jap invasion and American retreat from Lingayen Gulf to Bataan for United Press readers three years ago.
He was captured January 7, 1942, the sole survivor of a unit of 15 men from the famed 26th Cavalry Division. The other Americans had been killed when the unit was ambushed by the Japs.
Mr. Weissblatt was sitting in a scout car when a Jap rifle bullet hit him in the leg, breaking the bone. He was knocked to the bottom of the car. Then a mortar burst directly over the car, leaving him unconscious.
Pulled to ground
When he regained consciousness at daybreak, he saw Jap troops crawling forward. He raised his head over the side of the car.
The Japs gave a whoop and pulled him onto the ground, impacting the leg fracture. They forced him to strip and crawl 50 yards to a Jap command post.
After 35 days of traveling around to various Jap headquarters, Mr. Weissblatt was taken to a Jap naval hospital in Manila, where his leg knit at a 30-degree angle without being reset.
He went to various camps on crutches and finally arrived at this former federal prison, where he has been more than 2½ years.
That was “Weissblatt, United Press.”
Mr. Weissblatt’s wife was found doing nurse’s duty at the Santo Tomas internment camp. She had been at Bataan and Corregidor and for over two years has handled the diet for internment camps, feeding several hundred small children and trying to keep them nourished out of a small variety of available foods.
‘Angels of Bataan, Corregidor’ freed
Army nurses found at Manila camp
By Frank Hewlett, United Press staff writer
SANTO TOMAS PRISON CAMP, Manila (Feb. 4, delayed) – The long ordeal of the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor,” the U.S. Army nurses who cared for American and Filipino wounded in the black days of Jap invasion, is ended at last and all are accounted for.
U.S. troops who liberated this civilian internment camp found them. For all their reasons to celebrate, they would not pause in their newly-found work of mercy. Instead, they kept on the job, caring for the wounded in the fight to free Manila.
Penicillin new to them
By way of rejoicing, they reveled in again having clean bandages and an abundance of drugs, brought to them by cavalry units, to work with.
Imprisoned in these islands since early 1942, they knew nothing of penicillin. They thought soldiers were joking when they promised that a large American hospital unit would arrive within a few hours, and their work would be ended.
Two of those happily working tonight survived Jap bombings on Bataan. They were Rose Marie Hogan, of Chattanooga, Oklahoma, and Rita Palmer of Hampton, New Hampshire.
Tried to escape
Some of the nurses freed at Santo Tomas were taken there after unsuccessful attempts to escape.
About 100 Army nurses were caught in the Philippines when the war began, and every effort was made to evacuate them when it became clear that all was lost. Only two groups reached freedom, one by submarine, another by Navy flying boat.
A third group got as far as Mindanao Island before their flying boat was disabled. Many months later, they were brought to the Santo Tomas camp, where they joined other nurses in caring for the sick.
MacArthur seeks big role in final defeat of Japan
General considers job in Southwest Pacific done and he’s ready for another assignment
By William b. Dickinson, United Press staff writer
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Kobe raided again by lone Superfortresses
Japs report B-29 follow-up to big raid
WASHINGTON (UP) – Lone Superfortresses bombed the big Jap port of Kobe twice early today, Radio Tokyo said, in a follow-up to Sunday’s heavy raid.
Two other B-29s flew over Kobe at 11:30 p.m. JST, the broadcast said, but it did not indicate whether they, too, dropped bombs.
A dispatch from XXI Bomber Command headquarters at Guam said reconnaissance photographs showed one important industrial plant had been “substantially destroyed” by fire in Sunday’s raid.
Moderate success
The raid at a whole was considered only “moderately successful,” however, the Bomber Command said. Though 34 fires were left burning in Kobe, all had been put out by the time reconnaissance photographs were taken 24 hours later.
Twelve fires were kindled around the Mitsubishi heavy industries plant alone, but damage was not substantial, the pictures revealed.
“This again emphasizes the fact that the popular conception of Japanese cities as huge fire traps is not correct,” a Guam dispatch said.
Balikpapan raided
Radio Tokyo also said that more than 20 U.S. planes carried out two raids on Balikpapan, oil center on Borneo, yesterday.
Another Tokyo broadcast said Munitions Minister Shigeru Yoshida had acknowledge in the Jap House of Peers that U.S. Superfortress raids had caused “some damage” to Jap aircraft factories.
Editorial: The enemy we face
Manila has fallen and the fall of Berlin seems imminent.
But these signal victories do not mean the end of the war. They do not even mean we are near the war’s end.
While we are feeling jubilant about the way the wars in the Pacific and Germany are going, let us pull up and go back a few days to another Page One story.
We mean the story about the rescue of 510 Allied prisoners who were cooped up by the Japanese in Luzon Island horror camps.
Not the story of the rescue, which was dramatic and heroic, but the subsequent truth which resulted from that rescue – the grim tales told by the rescued. The eyewitness stories of how the Japs executed American and Filipino prisoners for trivial or imaginary offenses. How hundreds, and perhaps thousands, died of neglect in these so-called prison camps. How the prisoners were beaten and subjected to dozens of sadistic, barbaric cruelties by their Jap custodians. Of the rotten food they were given. How they were starved. How the Japs laughed at their misery.
We are up against a fiendish enemy in the Pacific. No reasonable American mind possibly can understand the degraded and excessively savage mind of the Jap. But we must try to understand it. If we are to win that war, we must not wince in the slightest. It will be a desperate, barbaric war until the last Jap is killed or driven into cringing surrender.
And while we are wising up to the insanely savage Jap, let’s not forget the Nazi. While the Nazi may possess more finesse and may pretend more respect for the international rules of warfare, he also is a hopeless barbarian. We cannot relent with him, either in the vigor with which we prosecute the war or in the terms of his surrender, any more than we can soften up for the Jap.
Our enemies are vicious, last-ditch fighters. They will stop at nothing. Neither dare we.
Editorial: Time to tell the Germans
German morale is the growing question mark as the Red armies sweep on toward Berlin, as Anglo-American planes bomb the panicky capital and Gen. Eisenhower moves through the Siegfried Line. That morale must be much less affected by propaganda and counter-propaganda than by the actual chaos and carnage which the German people see and feel. And yet propaganda does continue to play a part. At least Herr Goebbels, who has been more consistently successful than Hitler or the generals, is shouting louder than ever.
He is harping on two strings. One is German pride. He says: Remember how the Russians held out at Leningrad and Moscow (Stalingrad is passed over as too painful for reminders), how the Poles took it at Warsaw, how Londoners refused to crack under the blitz and planned to fight on elsewhere if their capital fell. Then he asks: Will Germans, the superior race, weaken when inferior Russians, Poles and Britons stood firm? That’s a good line. It may stiffen some sagging German spines.
Goebbels’ second line is the appeal to German fear of Allied retaliation. He says: If Germany surrenders, she will be destroyed. This is alsopotent. The Germans know the bestial record of their armies in conquered lands, they see the foreign slave labor which has been brought into Germany, they know they have earned the hatred and revenge of the world.
Because there is much truth in the situation which Goebbels is now exploiting with an evil twist, it is not easy for the Allies to counter his propaganda. They cannot deny that there is hatred of Germans among those who have survived the barbarism of German occupation. Nor do the Allies wish to sugarcoat the truth that the settlement terms will be hard, that everything necessary will be done by the victors to prevent another revival of German power of conquest.
But we think the Allies, within the realm of honesty and reason, could be more effective in counter-propaganda. They can emphasize, more than they have done, the official statements of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin that unconditional surrender means destruction of Nazism and German aggressive power, but not of the German people. The sooner there is a joint Big Three declaration of that kind the better.
Moreover, the Big Three ultimatum should stress that the danger of destruction of the German people would not be created but removed by an armistice. They should be told that Hitler’s plan to continue the war means national suicide, that German cities will be wiped out at a rate hitherto undreamed, that millions upon millions of Germans will die needlessly. In sober truth Germany today is facing destruction – not because the Allies will it; but because the German people, who started the war under Nazi orders, go on making war under Nazi orders.