Keep 'Em Falling

To destroy the last tough remnant of U.S. resistance in the Philippines the Jap was willing to pay dearly. So last week, the sixth of the Battle of Luzon, he lashed fiercely at General Douglas MacArthur's tough little Army. MacArthur's men, holed up in the mountain-wild Bataan peninsula with an anchor below on the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay, gave better than they received.

The enemy banged hardest at MacArthur's right flank, apparently to grab a toehold on the highway leading south on Bataan's east shore. He was hurled back with heavy losses. Meanwhile he stabbed tentatively through the mountains on the west shore, and near week's end he reported landing seaborne forces on Subic Bay. If he was telling the truth nothing immediately came of it. Douglas MacArthur was able to report that "enemy pressure ... in the Bataan peninsula has lessened."

No one thought that the Jap had quit. No one thought seriously that MacArthur's men were to be evacuated, or that they would get help. But while the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East were on their feet the fight would go on, blackly determined in action, flecked with the fine gold of good American humor when it got a breathing spell.

In all except the front-line areas, the worst nuisance and the most pregnant occasion for levity were intermittent bombings by the Jap. "Keep 'em falling" became the anti-aircraft gunner's slogan. Melville Jacoby. TIME correspondent on Corregidor, reported that the Jap was losing one out of every seven planes to fire from the ground.

"On regular bombing days," he wrote, "you get a few minutes' warning from a loud-sounding siren, or from the ring of steel, or from men beating pots & pans. Sometimes we sense planes coming before the alarm sounds. Then a shout echoes from dugout to dugout: 'Tojo's coming.'

"On the ground everyone except the gun crews takes cover, but everybody watches the sky. Everyone is keyed to the first noise of the bombs ripping through the bright clear sky. They sound like tearing sheets or crackling fire. Then it's time to duck. As you duck you think of what the soldiers say: 'Don't be worried about the bomb that's labeled with your name. The ones to worry about are the ones labeled To Whom it May Concern.'

"The sound of exploding anti-aircraft shells is music to soldiers' eafs. They say they'd rather hear it than Tommy Dorsey's band. USAFFE headquarters issues a daily news bulletin which features 'Today's Scoreboard,' telling the number of planes shot down to date."

At week's end, Douglas MacArthur reported to Washington that six weeks of hard fighting had made veterans of his U.S. soldiers and Filipinos: "Their training in the difficult school of actual combat and their battle experience have steadied them and developed their initiative and resourcefulness."

MacArthur's Army was winning medals, from infantry to the Quartermaster Corps, from artillery gunners to medical personnel. There was no monopoly by branch on spectacular heroism.

An extreme example was the deed of petite, Manila-bred Filipino Nurse Rebecca Salvacion, who had to take cover in a shallow trench when her station was bombed. Other nurses were evacuated in ambulances. Somehow Nurse Salvacion was left behind. So, too, was a U.S. Marine, wounded in the throat by a bomb fragment and calling for help from a nearby trench. Rebecca Salvacion crawled from her trench, made it to a building, summoned an Army doctor, Captain Benjamin Kysor of Oswego, N.Y., to help.

The Marine was lugged under cover. There, while bombs rocked the building. Captain Kysor removed the fragment and coolly dressed the wound. The Marine was carried downstairs. Dr. Kysor remained behind. A few minutes later the Jap registered a direct hit on the hospital and Dr. Kysor died.

Correspondent Jacoby reported that hospital corpsmen continually drove their ambulances through fire, evacuating wounded. He named as outstanding examples Captain Ralph L. Rowland of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Technical Sergeant Frederick W. Guth of Whitmore, Calif.; Corporal Ernest W. Crunkleton of Everton, Ark. Last week the ambulance of Driver Calvin E. Latham of Woodland. Calif, was pocked by 24 machine-gun bullets, one of which had tattered the leg of his slacks.

The ambulance was still running.

On the last U.S.-held slice of Luzon it was everybody's war. Army cooks strove to put out the best of food, robbed each other blind. In lulls, barbers calmly cut soldiers' hair. In one comprehensive job, a barber cut the hair of seven Marines by letters so that when they stood together the pattern of the cuts spelled VICTORY.

The Filipinos showed amazing loyalty. One soldier orderly, left behind in the evacuation of Manila, gathered his officer's laundry up, set off through the Japanese lines. He was stopped many times, he reported, and was interviewed by Japanese officers speaking both English and Tagalog. He finally turned up in the U.S. ranks on the peninsula.

By night an enterprising few U.S. soldiers worked hard at an odd project: they went diving, trying to salvage the cargo of a capsized barge rumored to have had whiskey aboard. No one tried to stop them. Douglas MacArthur knew that his men were good men as long as they could relax in their off hours, as long as they wisecracked about bombs and the hand of death above them.

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