America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

Nimitz silent on reported Iwo landing

Says bombardment continues third day

map.021845.up
Action in the Pacific included capture of most of Corregidor Island by Gen. MacArthur’s forces. Tokyo reported an American landing on Iwo Island, but Adm. Nimitz said merely that Iwo was being bombarded for the third day. Meanwhile, U.S. carrier planes carried their raid on Tokyo into a second day. U.S. troops served a surrender ultimatum to Jap troops holed up in Manila. Bataan Peninsula was captured by a combined U.S. landing at Mariveles and advances down the coasts.

PACIFIC FLEET HQ, Guam (UP) – Adm. Chester W. Nimitz announced today that a powerful American battle fleet had carried the bombardment of Iwo Island into a third day.

Tokyo claimed U.S. troops had begun invading that “doorstep” island to Japan, 750 miles south of the Nipponese capital.

U.S. ship damaged

A bulletin issued at 10:30 a.m. (7:30 p.m. Saturday ET) reported that one ship in a task force of Adm. Raymond A. Spruance’s U.S. Fifth Fleet had been damaged by “intense” Jap fire from Iwo, which was being blasted by naval artillery shells or airplane bombs for the 74th consecutive day.

Carrier planes of the attacking force strafed the Bonin Islands of Chichi and Haha north of Iwo, damaging 23 grounded planes and exploding an ammunition barge Friday. Warship anti-aircraft batteries shot down two Jap planes attacking the warship armada in what was the first announced enemy attempt to strike back.

A Berlin broadcast said that Jap headquarters in Tokyo announced that U.S. troops had invaded the Bonin Islands early Saturday. Berlin claimed the Japs damaged two U.S. troop transports and repulsed those landings.

The Bonins comprise 27 major islands, the northernmost of which lies 580 miles south of Tokyo.

Claim attempts repulsed

Tokyo claimed the Americans had attempted to land on the southeastern coast of Iwo at 10:30 a.m. Japanese Time Saturday (9:30 p.m. Friday ET), but were repulsed. Ten minutes later, another force battled ashore at a point two miles to the northeast, the enemy said, without adding at that time any claim to having repulsed it.

A later Tokyo broadcast warned Japan that the situation “warrants us no optimism” because U.S. warships were still massed offshore and “persistently watching for an opportunity to make a landing.”

‘Glorious victory’

The broadcast said the Jap garrison had scored a “glorious victory” in that “not a single enemy has been permitted to land on Iwo Jima yet,” but said “it is apparent that the enemy still has a reinforcement convoy behind him.”

None of Tokyo’s claims were confirmed by Adm. Nimitz although from the scope of the three-day operation it appeared momentous developments were at hand in the Battle of the Pacific.

Adm. Nimitz’s bulletin did not say whether attacks by some 1,200 carrier planes on the Tokyo-Yokohama area of Tokyo were continuing into the third day.

Further reports ‘unavailable’

“Further reports on the attacks on Tokyo by aircraft – are unavailable,” Adm. Nimitz said.

But Tokyo reported that the carrier planes attacked Japan for six hours yesterday – second day of the attack. A high officer here said a radio silence which had blacked out details of the Tokyo assault was “beautiful,” meaning that as long as the Japs did not attack the carriers and escorting warships the American commanders would not break silence.

Indicating the ferocity of the attacks, however, Tokyo admitted it lost 61 planes over the homeland and claimed to have downed or damaged 250 U.S. planes.

Battleships and cruisers

Of the assaults on Iwo, Adm. Nimitz said: “Bombardment of Iwo Jima in the Volcano Islands by battleships and cruisers of the Pacific Fleet is continuing.”

He announced that carrier planes, and Army heavy Liberator bombers had joined the attack Friday, going down through intense anti-aircraft fire to deliver their assaults.

The reported landing on Iwo – which lies about the same distance from Tokyo as Bermuda from Washington – would be the first American invasion of the Japanese homeland. The eight-square-mile island in the Volcano group is part of the Tokyo administrative district.

4,197-mile march

Tokyo said the Americans climaxing a 4,197-mile march from Pearl Harbor via Guam and Saipan, smashed into Iwo at two points along a two-mile front.

Covered by bombardment from a fleet of 30 battleships, cruisers and lesser craft, the Americans first tried to land on Futatsune Beach, at the southeastern tip of Iwo, Tokyo said.

“Garrison troops promptly counterattacked and completely smashed the enemy attempt,” Tokyo said.

All U.S. troops withdrew to their transports, Tokyo claimed, but 10 minutes later more invasion craft ground ashore at Kamiyama Beach, two miles northeast of Futatsune.

The enemy claimed that in Friday’s bombardment of Iwo and Saturday’s pre-invasion shelling. Jap shore batteries and warplanes sank an American battleship, two cruisers and two unidentified ships, and damaged three landing ships and shot down 10 planes. The Japanese said the attacking fleet included five battleships and six cruisers.

Iwo, 717 miles north of Saipan, lies 675 miles from Honshu. It is the largest of the Volcano group and 48th island in a chain of 48 which extend southward from Tokyo – all stepping-stones on the road to the Jap capital, third largest city in the world.

Has large airfields

The island has three large airfields and its capture would give the U.S. Army Air Force a base from which to send fighters in escort of B-29 Superfortresses launched on a campaign to blast the industrial heart from the Jap war machine.

Superfortresses taking off from Iwo would cut approximately 1,500 miles from their present flights from the Marianas, enabling them to carry more bombs.

Tokyo said the Kanto area – the metropolitan district of Tokyo and Yokohama – was attacked for six hours by U.S. carrier planes starting at 7 a.m. Saturday.

The Japs reported great air battle southwest of Tokyo.

Tokyo said Friday’s attackers, which dropped approximately 1,000 tons of bombs, concentrated on points deep inland but that the Saturday attacks were mostly around Tokyo and Yokohama. One enemy broadcast reported 600 planes over Japan at one time.

Ultimatum to surrender given to Japs in Manila

Saturday, February 17, 1945

MANILA, Philippines (UP) – Maj. Gen. Oscar W. Griswold, commander of U.S. forces in Manila, today called on Jap troops holding the Intramuros District of South Manila to surrender.

The general asked the enemy to capitulate or permit the evacuation of civilians “in the true spirit of the Bushido and the code of the Samurai.”

Bushido is the name given the unwritten law supposedly governing the conduct of Jap nobles. The Samurai are Jap warriors.

‘Defeat inevitable’

The ultimatum was first sent by public address system and by radio at 3 p.m. Friday and was sent again Saturday morning. The Japs are believed to have received it. But there was some confusion in establishing radio contact with the enemy and the result was doubtful.

The message said:

Your situation is hopeless and your defeat is inevitable.

I offer you honorable surrender. If you decide to accept, raise a large Filipino flag over the Red Cross flag now flying, and send an unarmed emissary with a white flag to our lines. This must be done within four hours, or I am coming it.

In event you do not accept my offer, I exhort you that in the true spirit of the Bushido and the code of the Samurai, you permit all civilians to evacuate the Intramuros by the Victoria Gate without delay, in order that no innocent blood be shed.

The Jap radio replied, but finding a common code proved difficult and the enemy reply was not intelligible.

This morning, the Japs ran up a Red Cross flag, but it was uncertain what this meant.

Ready to blast Japs

U.S. artillerymen, meanwhile, are preparing to blast out the Japs, and are awaiting a final enemy reply before they open fire.

Jap demolitions and American shellfire have wrecked large areas within the Intramuros. West of the city, Manila’s Pier Seven, which was able to care simultaneously for five ocean liners in peacetime, has been damaged severely.

West Wall bases flanked by Canadian breakthrough

Allies cut highway between Goch, Calcar – Nazis may be forced back seven miles

Draft deferment procedure revised

War agencies will certify names

U.S. merchant ship sunk in North Atlantic

Saturday, February 17, 1945

WASHINGTON (UP) – The Navy announced today that the Steel Traveler, a medium-sized U.S. merchant ship, was sunk by enemy action in the North Atlantic in mid-December.

All but a few crew members were rescued by a French destroyer a half hour after their ship was sunk.

Ernie leaves Marianas –
Pyle believed in on Tokyo raids as first taste of war in Pacific

Preview of Jap POWs makes him creepy

Ernie Pyle has left the Marianas on his long trip to the Pacific front and last reports from him indicated that he is now aboard an American aircraft carrier – probably participating in one of the great naval actions now going in the Pacific.

“Covering this Pacific war is, for me, going to be like learning to live in a new city,” Ernie cabled from Honolulu. “The methods of war, the attitude toward it, the homesickness, the distances, the climate – everything is different from what we have known as the European War.”

Famous as the correspondent who has best pictured G.I. Joe in the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, Italy and France, Ernie finds the Pacific war an experience so new that he is constantly amazed.

And because he is a greenhorn in the Pacific, he has started to reveal the little details of that vast conflict which impress him and which will picture it to American readers as it has not been pictured before.

From Honolulu, Ernie’s first stop on his assignment with the Navy, he cabled:

Distance is the main thing. I don’t mean distance from America so much, for our war in Europe is a long way from home too. I mean distances after you get right on the battlefield.

For the whole western Pacific is our battlefield now, and whereas distances in Europe are hundreds of miles at most, out here they are thousands. And there’s nothing in between but water.

You can be on an island battlefield, and the next thing behind you is a thousand miles away. One soldier told me the worst sinking feeling he ever had was when they had landed on an island and were fighting, and on the morning of D-3 he looked out to sea and it was completely empty. Our entire convoy had unloaded and left for more, and boy, did it leave you with a lonesome and deserted feeling.

Hundreds of people daily travel the 3,500 miles between Pearl Harbor and the Marianas, Ernie wrote, “as casually as you’d go to work in the morning.”

The days are warm and on our established island bases the food is good and the mail service is fast and there’s little danger from the enemy and the days go by in their endless sameness and they drive you nuts. They sometimes call it going “pineapple crazy.”

Our high rate of returning mental cases is discussed frankly in the island and service newspapers. A man doesn’t have to be under fire in the front lines finally to have more than he can take without breaking.

And another adjustment I’ll have to make is the attitude toward the enemy. In Europe, we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people.

But out here I’ve already gathered the feeling that the Japanese are looked upon as something unhuman and squirmy – like some people feel about cockroaches or mice.

I’ve seen one group of Japanese prisoners in a wire-fenced courtyard, and they were wrestling and laughing and talking just as humanly as anybody. And yet they gave me a creepy feeling, and I felt in need of a mental bath after looking at them.

In the Marianas, from whence he later flew to join the aircraft carrier, Ernie cabled that “we are far, far away from everything that was home or seemed like home.”

He wrote:

The Pacific names are all new to me too, all except the outstanding ones. For those fighting one war do not pay much attention to the other war. Each one thinks his war is the worst and the most important war. And unquestionably it is.

We came to the Marianas by airplane from Honolulu. The weather was perfect, and yet so long and grinding was the journey that it eventually became a blur, and at the end I could not even remember what day we had left Honolulu, although actually it was only the day before.

We came in the same kind of plane that brought us from California – a huge four-motored Douglas transport, flown by the Naval Air Transport Service.

Our first step was at Johnston Island, four hours out from Honolulu. As it came into view, I was shocked at how tiny it is. It is hardly bigger than a few airplane carriers lashed together, and it hasn’t got a tree on it.

Yet it has been developed into an airfield that will take the biggest planes, and several hundred Americans live and work there.

From Johnston Island another long hop, this time at night, and then Ernie wrote:

Suddenly there were lights smack underneath us, lights of what seemed a good-sized little town, and then at last we were on the ground in an unbelievably hustling airport, teeming with men and planes and lights. The place was Kwajalein.

That’s not hard to pronounce if you don’t try too hard. Just say “Kwa-juh-leen.” It’s in the Marshall Islands. There, during last March and April, American soldiers and Marines killed 10,000 Japanese, and opened our island stepping-stone path straight across the mid-Pacific.

Even today our Seabees can’t dig a trench for a sewer pipe without digging up dead Japanese. But even so the island is transformed, as we so rapidly transform all our islands that are destroyed in the taking. It is a great air base now.

Ernie Pyle is fortunately participating in the Navy’s greatest Pacific actions. His dispatches from the aircraft carrier to which he is now attached will appear in The Pittsburgh Press daily. Watch for tomorrow’s Pyle story.

South Dakota bans closed shop


Conservation plan urged by Ickes

War-inflated payrolls here start to drop

Peak was reached last summer
By Dale McFeatters, Press business editor

Methodists to oppose compulsory drill

Forced into marriage, naval lieutenant says

Commanding officer’s wife threatened him with court-martial, pilot charges

Washington believes –
Nazi home front collapsing, but army will fight longer

Civil government breaks down – ration system fails – half of coal supply lost

Army’s draft of job-quitters faces fight in Senate

4-Fs inducted under work-or-fight order will be sent to camps in Illinois

Miss Perkins asks labor unit control

Reorganization urged by her


New world labor group is approved

AFL is invited to become member

U.S. soldier is sought in British girl’s death

Poll: Public backs Big Three’s main issues

Surrender of Axis demanded by people
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion


Polish socialist backs Big Three

Crimean decision called ‘victory’
By Leigh White

George bill vote cheers Democrats

Tight squeeze scored without aid of GOP
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer

First veteran gets G.I. business loan

He plans to deal in wholesale meat


First WAC to get G.I. loan seeks clear title to house

Petrillo wins radio fight

Germans shell patrols in Italy

Eighth Army repels Nazi thrusts


Clark predicts Nazi withdrawal

By the United Press

12 die, 15 missing in Tacoma fire

Four-story apartment hit by flames