Background of news –
U.S.-Mexican water treaty
By Bertram Benedict
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Dictionaries to eliminate name-calling terms
John C. Winston Co. will abandon words of questionnaire usage
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – No sooner have the B-29 formations disappeared to the north on their long flight to Japan, than single planes begin coming back in.
These are called “aborts,” which is short for “abortives.” It is a much-used word around a bomber base.
The “aborts” come straggling back all day, hours apart. They are planes that had something happen to them which forbade them continuing on the long dangerous trip. Sometimes it happens immediately after takeoff. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until they are almost there.
The first “abort” had a bomb bay door come open, and couldn’t get it closed. The second had part of the cowl flap come unfastened, and a mechanic undoubtedly caught hell for that. A third had a prop run away when he lost an engine.
My friend Maj. Walter Todd of Ogden, Utah, “aborted” on the mission I watched take off. He blew a cylinder head clear off.
He was within sight of Japan when it happened, and he beat the others back home by only half an hour. He flew 13½ hours that day, and didn’t even get credit for a mission. That’s the way it goes.
‘Clock’ progress
Those left on the field will look idly at their watches as the long day wears on, mentally clocking the progress of their comrades.
“They’re about sighting the mainland now,” you’ll hear somebody say.
“They should be over the target by now. I’ll bet they’re catching hell,” comes a little later from somebody.
By late afternoon you look at your watch and know that by now, for good or bad, it is over with. You know they’re far enough off the coast that the last Jap fighter has turned for home, and left our men along with the night and the awful returning distance, and their troubles.
Our planes bomb in formation, and stick together until they’ve left the Japanese coast, and then they break up and each man comes home on his own.
It’s almost spooky the way they can fly through the dark night, up there above all that ocean, for more than six hours, and all arrive here at these little islands almost within a few minutes of each other.
By late afternoon we’ve begun to get radio messages from the returning planes. A flight leader will radio how the weather was, and if anybody went down over the target. It isn’t a complete picture, but we begin to patch together a general idea. We lost planes that day. Some went down over the target. Some just disappeared, and the other boys never knew where they went. Some fought as long as they could to keep crippled planes going, and then had to “ditch” in the ocean.
‘Miraculous’ return
And one tenacious planeload miraculously got back when it wasn’t in the cards for them at all. They had been hit over the target, had to drop down and back alone, and the Jap fighters went for him, as they do for any cripple.
Five fighters just butchered him, and there was nothing our boys could do about it. And yet he kept coming. How, nobody knows. Two of the crew were badly wounded. The horizontal stabilizers were shot away. The plane was riddled with holes. The pilot could control his plane only by using the motors.
Every half hour or so he would radio his fellow planes “am in right spiral and going out of control.” But he would get control again, and fly for an hour so, and then radio again that he was spiraling out of control.
But somehow, he made it home. He had to land without controls. He did wonderfully, but he didn’t quite pull it off.
The plane hit at the end of the runway. The engines came hurtling out, on fire. The wings flew off and the great fuselage broke in two and went careening across the ground. And yet every man came out if alive, even the wounded ones.
Two other crippled planes cracked up that night too, on landing. It was not until late at night that the final tally was made, of known lost, and of missing.
But hardly was the last returning bomber down until a lone plane took off into the night and headed northward, to be in the area by dawn where the “ditchings” were reported. And the others, after their excited stories were told, fell wearily into bed.
Stretcher-bearers walk upright through heavy Jap shellfire
Wounded reporter knows only fear when told he will live – rain impedes Iwo evacuation
By Keith Wheeler, North American Newspaper Alliance
Last of a series.
176TH ARMY STATION HOSPITAL, Saipan (Feb. 26, delayed) – I don’t know exactly when I began to believe I had a chance to live, but anyway when I did, it made a coward of me.
Probably it was when Lt. Cmdr. Howard S. Eccleston, the regimental surgeon on Iwo, succeeded in keeping a clamp on the artery the Jap bullet had severed in my throat. He pressed a dressing down on the oozing wound and, his face bent intently over me, counted my pulse while someone else I couldn’t see drove a needle into my arm and started plasma pouring into me.
I was still conscious and my mind was clear. It occurred to me dimly that I had a chance.
So long as I had thought I was dying, I was unafraid. Now gradually fear and nervousness grew in me.
Had pitied wounded men
I always had pitied wounded men who stared at their doctors with terrible intentness, asking whether they would live. And I always had thought if I were wounded, I wouldn’t ask – knowing that if it were a near thing one way or the other, the doctor would try to make it easy for me.
But anxious hope and resolution don’t mix. My right eye was drowned in blood but I stared at him with the other and croaked through my blood-filled throat, demanding what chance I had.
“You’re going to be all right now,” he said. It was what I wanted him to say, of course, but I didn’t really believe him. Nor fully disbelieve him either. I wished I hadn’t asked.
Starts to rain
“If you had to get hit, you couldn’t pick a better spot than this – five feet from the two best docs in the division,” Maj. John R. Jones’ voice said above me.
I lay and watched the clear amber level of the plasma going down in the jar somebody was holding above me, and I heard Maj. Jones telephoning for stretcher bearers. It began to rain and somebody folded a poncho around me and held a flap of it over my face.
And the earth still trembled and sand dribbled down the sides of the hole with the cadenced thudding of Jap shells.
Carried gently
I was feverishly impatient by the time the stretcher-bearers came, but I don’t really thing they took long. They lifted me out of the hole, holding my body gently all along its length, put me down on the stretcher and wrapped the poncho around me. The rain was heavier now, dismal and cold.
It was 500 yards to the beach through sand so soft and pitted with shell holes that it was practically a wading job all the way. The stretcher-bearers made it in three stages, stopping twice to change hands.
As we neared the beach, the shelling grew heavier and closer and by the time I saw the blackened prow of a wrecked Jap looming above me, we were moving through a roaring hell of sound.
Waits for boat
Upright, helpless, burdened by my inert weight, the stretcher-bearers trudged through the storm-like fury. A shell exploded so near that my upward-staring eyes saw the top of its plume of smoke and dirt.
Near the water’s edge, the shelling was so intense that we had to wait 20 minutes for a boat to come in. Cold and wet and sick, and by now nearly indifferent, I lay and listened to the shells, wondering whether I would lose now, having come so far.
While the shells crashed all around us, the stretcher-bearers lay close on either side of me, using their bodies to build a human foxhole for mine. They were strangers also; I’ll never know their names and if I did, there’s nothing I could do to thank them. It’s more than likely they’re dead or wounded by now.
The boat came at last and got out again safely through the barrage.
Poll: Waste paper collection shows lag
Fewer families reported saving
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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did he accidentally write ‘abouts’ instead of ‘aborts’ in the third paragraph?
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No, that was a goof on my end. Just fixed it 
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