The Free Lance-Star (July 6, 1944)
Enemy on Saipan make final stand
Nimitz: We’re moving westward rapidly as possible
USPACFLT HQ, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (AP) –
Impending slaughter of Japanese, massed body to body for a last-ditch stand on Saipan, and the swift seizure of a second enemy airfield 800 miles southeast of the Philippines added emphasis today to a highly significant prediction by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz.
“What we learn on Saipan we will use in assault on other Japanese positions,” he said at a press conference in which he pointed out that Saipan’s larger land mass afforded valuable lessons of future operations.
The admiral assured:
We are moving westward across the Pacific as rapidly as we can. And we continued to view the future with confidence.
Howard Handleman, representing the combined Allied press, reported today from aboard a flagship off Saipan that thousands of Japs, squeezed into the northeastern eighth of the island, awaited the inevitable.
He said:
The Japs, resigned to death and defeat, lay body to body in caves and pillboxes for a final, frantic gesture against Americans they know they can’t halt.
Massed with them were many of the island’s 25,000 Japanese civilians, whose role in the bloody showdown was a source of conjecture.
At Noemfoor in Dutch New Guinea’s Geelvink Bay, where Southwest Pacific ground forces are 1,000 miles closer to the Philippines than they were a year ago, the capture of Kornasoren Airfield was announced today by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Paratroops, dropped in force on two successive days, helped win it on the Fourth of July. On Sunday, 6th Army troops opened the invasion of Noemfoor, investing Kamiri Airfield in the first hours. Kornasoren’s advantage over Kamiri is that it can be enlarged into a heavy bomber base from which the Philippines can be pounded.