In Washington –
Work-or-else sidetracked in Senate
New Rooseveltian demands expected
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U.S. ammunition ship sunk by Japs – all on board killed
Navy also announces loss of salvage craft, mistakenly hit by U.S. submarine
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4,215 Jap dead on Corregidor
Manila Bay opened to Allied shipping
MANILA, Philippines (UP) – Virtually complete conquest of Corregidor opened Manila’s great bay today for Allied shipping and a steady stream of supplies to U.S. troops on Luzon.
A Tokyo broadcast, recorded by FCC, said that approximately 3,000 U.S. troops landed on Palawan Island, westernmost of the Philippines, Wednesday morning, Japanese Time.
The enemy report did not indicate where the invasion was made on Palawan, which stretches from Mindoro in the Philippines to Borneo in the Dutch East Indies. The 275-mile-long island is 750 miles due east of the French Indochina.
U.S. paratroopers and infantrymen practically annihilated the entire enemy garrison on Corregidor, killing Japs at a rate of more than 30-to-1.
Find 4,215 bodies
A communiqué said 4,215 Jap bodies have already been counted and many hundreds of others were killed or buried alive in Corregidor’s tunnels or died attempting to escape from the island. The American casualties were 136 killed, 531 wounded and eight missing in the 12-day battle.
While wrecked docks and shore facilities will prevent full-scale use of Manila’s port, the communiqué said one Allied cargo ship, loaded with supplies, already had entered the harbor.
U.S. troops, in the meantime, continues to fan out east of Manila and far to the north of the capital.
Fierce fighting broke out along the Kobayashi line, east of Manila, where the 1st Cavalry Division encountered severe Jap resistance at Antipolo.
Blast Palawan port
On the northern front, 32nd Division troops pushed north along the Villa Verde trail toward Balete Pass road, leading into the Cagayan Valley.
Other U.S. forces also continued their advance beyond Carranglan, 14 miles south of Balete Pass road and 80 miles north of Manila.
The communiqué disclosed that Boston and Thunderbolt dive bombers made a strong attack Monday on Puerto Princesa, principal port on Palawan Island in the Western Philippines.
Liberator bombers again raided rail installations on Formosa and enemy shipping off shore.
Seven Jap merchant ships were sunk or damaged by U.S. bombers in sweeps from Formosa to French Indochina.
400 die daily of starvation in Rotterdam
Hungry children roaming streets
By L. S. B. Shapiro, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Hope, pain and patience are heritage of wounded
Shot through throat, jaw by Jap on Iwo, Keith Wheeler writes from Saipan hospital
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Keith Wheeler, severely wounded on Iwo, is now writing from the base hospital on Saipan. This is the first of a series.
AT AN ARMY STATION HOSPITAL, Saipan (Feb. 25, delayed) – It is now five days since I was wounded by a Jap bullet on the beach at Iwo Jima.
When I was first hit, I thought I was killed and I accepted my death without much inner protest. Sometime late in the first hour, I began to hope that I would survive. The hope has progressed gradually, until now I am convinced my eventful recovery is a reasonable certainty.
In these 120 hours since the bullet smashed through my throat and jaw, I have run the usual course of experiences of those wounded in battle. Twice men of great courage who were strangers to me saved my life at great risk of their own.
Becomes pincushion
My wounds have been dressed and probed and x-rayed and I have become a pincushion for needles carrying morphine, Novocain, penicillin, whole human blood, plasma, and probably several other specifics I did not feel at the time.
Now, at the end of five days, my crushed lower jaw has been hemstitched to the upper in a rigid embroidery of stainless-steel wire and rubber bands. The enormous swelling that once had my neck and head a great shapeless, julpy balloon has gone down by half. The surgeon’s next job is to dig some stray bone splinters out of my flesh and to force one triangular chunk of bone into an approximate plumb with what used to be my jawline.
Thereafter I will settle down to a minimum of two months of eating only such liquids as I can suck through by clenched teeth and restraining my conversation to grunts. It may need much longer than that.
Because I am still relieved to be alive, because I still am physically strong and mentally interested and because I am not yet as hungry as I expect to become, I approach this prospect still with a certain cheerfulness. But I doubt if it lasts long.
I am truly and humbly convinced that the fact and circumstances of my wound are important to very few people. As they are the experiences of an individual, they are worth far less than I intend to write about them.
There were 600 wounded on my hospital ship alone. There were thousands more on others nearby. Every hour on the beach adds to the harvest of pain and disfigurement. There are far too many of us for any one of us to unique.
‘Some of us die’
Some of us lose arms or legs or eyes and some of us die. Some are paralyzed and some few are crazy when it’s over. Some of us may return to duty in a few days. Some of us never will be whole again. But the road to health is long and dark through pain.
Each of us is different, but all of us are alike. We are the wounded. If I write overmuch about the wounded me, it is because I know most about my own wound. When I write about me, I am in some sense writing about us all. About the fear and courage, stink and misery, discouragement and hope and disappointment, pain and patience that are the heritage of all of us who are the wounded.
Compromise mapped on guaranteeing of land frontiers
Proposal for delay drafted by U.S.
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Simms: Senators show their usefulness
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – The B-29 is unquestionably a wonderful airplane. Outside of the famous old Douglas DC-3 workhorse, I’ve never heard pilots so unanimous in their praise of an airplane.
I took my first ride in one the other day. No, I didn’t go on a mission to Japan. We’ve been through all that before. I don’t believe in people going on missions unless they have to. And as before, the pilots here all agreed with me.
But I went along on a little practice bombing trip of an hour and a half. The pilot was Maj. Gerald Robinson, who lives in our hut. His wife, incidentally, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the very same street as our White House.
I sat on a box between the pilots, both on the takeoff and for the landing, and as much as I’ve flown, that was still a thrill. These islands are all relatively small, and you’re no sooner off the ground than you’re out over water, and that feels funny.
Odd sensation
If the air is a little rough, it gives you a very odd sensation sitting way up there in the nose. For the B-29 is so big that, instead of bumping or dropping, the nose has a “willowy” motion, sort of like sitting out on the end of a green mb when it’s swaying around.
The B-29 carries a crew of 11. Some of them sit up in the cockpit and the compartment just behind it. Some others sit in a compartment near the tail. The tail gunner sits all alone, way back there in the lonely tail turret.
The body of the B-29 is so taken up with gas tanks and bomb racks that there’s normally no way to get from front to rear compartments. So, the manufacturers solved that by building a tunnel into the plane, right along the rooftop.
The tunnel is round, just big enough to crawl in on your hands and knees, and is padded with blue cloth. It’s more than 30 feet long, and the crew members crawl back and forth through it all the time.
On missions, some of the crew get back in this tunnel and sleep for an hour or so. But a lot of them can’t stand to do that. I’ve heard combat crewmen bring up the subject a half dozen times. They say they get claustrophobia in the tunnel.
A fellow does get sleepy on a 14-hour mission. Most of the pilots take naps in their seats. One pilot I know turned the plane over to his co-pilot and went back to the tunnel for “a little nap,” and didn’t return for six hours, just before they hit the coast of Japan. They laughingly say he goes to sleep before he gets his wheels up.
The B-29 is a very stable plane and hardly anybody ever gets sick even in rough weather. The boys smoke in the plane, and the mess hall gives them a small lunch of sandwiches and oranges and cookies to eat on the way.
Wear regular clothes
The crewmen wear their regular clothes on missions, usually coveralls. They don’t have to wear heavy fleece-lined clothes and all that bulky gear. because the cabin is heated. They do slip on their heavy steel “flak vests” as they approach the target.
They don’t have to wear oxygen masks except when they’re over the target, for the cabin is scaled and “pressurized” – simulating a constant altitude of 8,000 feet.
Once in a great while one of the plexiglass “blisters” where the gunners sit will blow out from the strong pressure inside, and then everybody better grab his oxygen mask in an awful hurry. The crew always wears the oxygen mask over the target, for a shell through the plane “depressurizes” the cabin instantly, and they’d pass out.
The boys speak frequently of the unbelievably high winds they hit at high altitudes over Japan. It’s nothing unusual to have a 150-mile-an-hour wind, and my nephew, Jack Bales, said that one day his plane hit a wind of 250 miles an hour.
Another thing that puzzles and amuses the boys is that often they’ll pick up news on their radios, when still only halfway home, that their bombing mission has been announced in Washington. Thus, all the world knows about it, but they’ve still got a thousand miles of ocean to cross before it’s finished. Science, she is wonderful.