The Jap Moves Down

The Jap Moves Down

Cebu, fairest and wealthiest island of the lovely Visayan Sea, lay helpless before the clutch of the Jap. For days the city of Cebu, second largest in the Philippines (pop. 142,912), had been all but deserted. The two movie houses were still showing outdated U.S. films; a few customers still tapped the dwindling supply of beer and whiskey in the Vienna Bar.

Cebu, 360 miles southeast of Manila, knew what was coming when the Jap finished up on Bataan. Last week, sure enough, the Jap came to Cebu.

For days Cebu's people had taken to the hills every time a ship appeared in the roadstead. After each false, alarm, lean, grey, Lieut. Colonel Howard J. Edmands and his little denim-clad Filipino M.P.s tramped back from the dock areas through the street, jaunty and unafraid with their rifles and their single machine gun. The remains of Cebu's population quieted down, and waited.

Periodically there were mild panics in the Cebu Leprosarium, and once several hundred of the patients escaped and fled to the hills. They knew that the Japs shoot lepers without mercy. Tall, typically Irish Father Francis O'Donnell, their pastor, followed them, assured them that the Lord protects the afflicted, got them to go back to the Leprosarium, where three nuns tend them.

When the Jap struck Cebu, he struck with overwhelming force. One day ten transports and five warships stood off the harbor where the rusty bones of sunken ships thrust above the blue water, and the skeletons of destroyed oil installations lay dead against the background of waving palms.

The Jap began to land men along the coast, probably about 12,000. From one of the coves a U.S. Navy PT boat whirled out, roaring like an infuriated bull, slashed into the convoy, sent a torpedo fairly into the side of a Jap second-class cruiser. She was sinking when the PT whirled away.

From their hill positions, Cebu's militia, commanded by genial, unflustered Colonel Irvine C. Scudder, whisked off to beach positions, pecked at the Jap. Somewhere the little M.P.s in their rumpled blue uniforms were fighting him too. But Cebu, only 20 miles wide, vulnerable in every spot to fire from the ships, never had a chance. The Jap was in the Visayan Sea.

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