Thunder From the Rock

Corregidor can and will be held. There can be no question of surrendering this mighty fortress to the enemy; it will be defended with all the resources at our command.

Thur Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright spoke last week to the men on The Rock -- the artillerymen and infantry soldiers of the regular garrison, the Marines sailormen and Army men salvaged from Bataan.

In the States as on Corregidor and its satellites (Forts Drum, Hughes and Frank), men took heart. Jonathan Wainwright was no hollow-voiced orator, to fire his people with false hopes. If he said it could be done, maybe it could. In the corridors and subterranean rooms of The Rock, the new arrivals were swiftly put to work making life tough for the Jap.

Meanwhile, all the forts were pounded unmercifully. Since Christmas week Corregidor had stood close to 200 air raids. Now it had Jap artillery, emplaced on the heights of Bataan across only two miles of water, to contend with. Bataan was a fine position for the Jap, and it made life on Corregidor, as a U.S. Army officer said, something like living on a bull's-eye.

But the Jap was on a bull's-eye, too. To The Rock's artillerymen, the roads, hills and valleys of Bataan were as familiar as the vein pattern on the backs of their hairy hands. They had the range of every position behind Mariveles. The Jap found that out as battery after battery was smashed and silenced. When he tried to move up more guns, the sharp-eyed observers on The Rock spotted his dust, called for fire, and got it. Bereft of aerial observation, which would have made things much simpler, the men on Corregidor were doing their best, and it was still good.

As long as food, ammunition and medicines held out, Corregidor and its satellites might well hold off the Jap. And now that U.S. bombers had reached up from Australia to Manila, "Skinny" Wain-wright's men could hope that light supplies, at least, might be delivered to them --especially quinine (see p. 20).

But if that were to be done, the Jap had to be kept out of U.S. operations bases in the islands to the south, where he was striving with might & main to get everything into the clutch of his stubby fingers. He had finally taken the city of Cebu (which U.S. airmen promptly fired -- see p. 20), had landed also on Panay.*

With his air strength spread thin (see p. 19) and his ground soldiers scattered from hell to breakfast over the southwest Pacific, the Jap's job was a big one-and Filipino troops were making it bigger every day by raiding him from Davao to the beachheads of Panay. If they had air-force help from Australia, they might make the job too big for the Jap to handle.

*Nameplace of the U.S. gunboat destroyed on the Yangtze by the Jap in 1937.

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