With Mac to Manila

Douglas MacArthur came back to Manila, Pearl of the Orient.

He came back as he had promised, through 4,000 miles--and 35 months. Far behind now lay the bitter campaign across New Guinea, the dashing leapfrog drive along the 1,500-mile north coast. Still fresh in the memory of his soldiers was the landing in force on Leyte, the swift lancing drive to Mindoro and Marinduque, the dazzling, varied attack that had baffled and finally paralyzed the Jap on Luzon.

The U.S. flag flew over Manila again and with it MacArthur had brought America. In the second great drama that had spread across the Philippine stage in three years, his cast of characters was a cross section of the U.S.--leathery professional fighters who had soldiered in the islands before, bronzed youngsters called by the draft from Midwest farms, sunburnt youngsters from factory and school.

His divisions, too, spanned the Army,

P: There was the 1st Cavalry, by number a regular outfit, in reality a division of both regulars and citizen soldiers. The division had long ago been mechanized--but it was still cavalry at heart and its' oldtimers still talked nostalgically of the stable call and of night marches to the rattle of horse accoutrements. In the 1st Division a company was still a troop, a battalion a squadron. Knife-nosed, 46-year-old Major General Verne Donald Mudge was its commander, a cavalryman since he left West Point in 1920.

P: There was the 37th Division, once Ohio National Guard, and still the "Buckeye Division" although its troops from Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and a thousand Ohio towns and hamlets now served alongside fighting men drafted from across the nation. Its commander, 52-year-old Robert Sprague Beightler, was a civilian soldier with active service on the /Mexican border and in World War I. Between wars he had been a construction engineer, had become director of Ohio's State Highway Department. Round-faced, warm-eyed General Beightler had been the first National Guard officer to lead his division into combat in this war (New Georgia, July 1943).

There was the 11th Airborne Division, an outfit new in World War II. The ist Cavalry and the 37th Infantry Divisions were the first and second to get to Manila; the paratroopers came third. Their commander: Major General Joseph M. Swing, West Pointer and onetime artilleryman. North of them, still fighting on the salients driven south and east from Lingayen Gulf and across the base of Bataan from Olongapo, were seven other divisions.

There were the 24th and 38th Divisions of Lieut. General Robert L. Eichelberger's new Eighth Army, both on the Bataan salient. The 24th, commanded by slim, handsome Major General Frederick Augustus Irving, sprang from an old square division in Hawaii. The 24th had been blooded on New Guinea and Leyte. The 38th was the "Cyclone Division" of the Indiana-Kentucky-West Virginia National Guards. Many of its officers had been businessmen; its commander was a regular, Major General Henry L. C. Jones.

North toward Lingayen Gulf lay the others, widening their holdings, cheering and envying the lucky outfits that had got to Manila. They were the 6th Division, the 25th ("Tropic Lightnings"), the 32nd (National Guardsmen from Michigan and Wisconsin), the 40th (National Guardsmen from California, Nevada, Utah and New York), and the 43rd (National Guardsmen from New England).

Forging the Trident. From the day MacArthur's first elements made their beachhead on Lingayen Gulf, the way lay straight down the central valley to Manila, and there was no doubt that MacArthur and his Sixth Army commander, Lieut. General Walter Krueger, intended to go there just as fast as they could drive. But there were other things to consider. The Jap must not be allowed to slip onto Bataan. And he must not be allowed to prolong his hold on Manila.

On Monday the 24th and 38th Divisions drove ashore between San Antonio and San Felipe. They sliced swiftly to the southeast, grabbed the old U.S. naval station at Olongapo, drove down the road to the east to block off Bataan.

The Americans struck again. Below Manila, in Batangas Province and closest to the U.S.'s lost naval base at Cavite, seaborne elements of the nth Airborne Division drove ashore two days after the landing above Olongapo. As they bored toward the city, part of their 511th Regiment dropped down from the sky ahead of the advance, took Tagaytay Ridge overlooking Manila from the south. Meanwhile the 37th Division and the cavalry, were within striking distance of the capital.

Rat Race on the Roads. The stage was set for the big third act. To play the principal role, both Buckeyes and cavalrymen drove swiftly southward. The cavalry had mechanization and thus the big advantage. While Beightler's foot-slogging Buckeyes hurried along, cleaning out nest after nest of Japs as they went, Mudge's cavalrymen piled into trucks, jeeps and half-tracks at Guimba and ripped toward Manila over Highway 5.

To the weary, sweaty 37th, this was a hell of a note. Growled General Beightler: "We've fought our way a hundred miles and we won't let those ----feather merchants beat us in."

The cavalry made it, anyhow, and it was more than their vehicles that turned the trick. At Plaridel (junction of Highways 5 and 3) the 37th piled into 500 Japs entrenched there and full of fight. It took a rousing scrap to kill 250 of them, chase off the rest. As the town was secured the cavalry drove in and rolled on. The Buckeye doughboys jeered them.

Errand of Mercy. If the Japs were set to defend Manila like Plaridel, there was trouble ahead--and the greatest danger to thousands of Allied civilians interned in Manila's prison camps. The high command was ready for that.

A task force of Mudge's troopers, under Brigadier General William Curtis Chase, swung wide into the foothills flanking Manila. At 6:35 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 3 (25 days after the landing at Lingayen), the 2nd Squadron of the historic 8th Regiment burst into the city from the east. So the 1st Cavalry Division had won the race--and not even the Buckeyes could say there was no justice in the fact: the 1st had sworn to strike a blow for their onetime brigade commander, Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, now in Jap hands. This was it.

The Rescue. The task force sped to Santo Tomas University prison camp. There the enemy held 3,700 Allied civilians, many of them women & children, in the university buildings and huts. They had to be rescued--and quickly.

The cavalrymen's romp ended at the university gates. There was brisk fighting and Chase had to send up reinforcements. The fight blazed from room to room in many buildings. Most of the internees were freed. Then the Jap commander had an idea. He held 270 of the half-starved internees, and these, he said, would be held as hostages for 65 of his men. After 34 hours Chase bought the Americans' lives. The 65 Japs were escorted from the building to the countryside and turned loose.

By this time the 37th had piled into town, cleaning out the enemy as it came. Before half the town had been secured, the nth Airborne Division drove in from the south. By then the cleanup was well under way; it would not be long before the flag fluttered over the Manila Hotel, where MacArthur and little Admiral Tommy Hart (see U.S. AT WAR), the Army & Navy commanders, had lived before the Japs struck.

Looking at what his troops had wrought, Douglas MacArthur was happy. But there was more to be done. Said he: "Japan itself is our final goal. . . Our motto becomes 'On to Tokyo.' We are ready in this veteran and proven command when called upon."

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