City of Death

Kindly, seamy-faced Major General Oscar W. Griswold, commander of the U.S. Sixth Army's XIV Corps, stood in somber triumph last week on a field of horror. After 20 days of battle, Manila's smoking ruins were his.

Around the General stretched ten square miles of devastation, gutted office buildings, wrecked churches, a huge junkpile of crumpled tin. roofs. And stinking in the rubble were the bodies of at least 12,000 Japanese, merged in death's sickly odor with the bodies of thousands of Filipinos. The end came in fiery drama.

Up from the south drove Major General Verne D. Mudge's ist Cavalry troopers, battering their way through the modern-style apartment houses of the fashionable Ermita district. They fought their way up through the balconied Manila Hotel from the first floor to the penthouse where General Douglas MacArthur once lived.

Down from the north drove Major General Robert S. Beightler's 37th Infantry Division, to capture and lose the three-storied City Hall four times before finally taking it for good. In the battered stone Post Office they fought the Japanese into the pitch-dark basement and finished them off with Tommy guns, mortars and grenades, setting flares ricocheting around the walls for a few moments of light.

The battle surged to the towering, 40-ft.-thick brown walls of Intramuros, the 16th-Century inner city. An observer who watched the first shells drive home growled: "Christ, 755 just bounce off that wall." Beightler mustered h's guns. In one hour, in the greatest land barrage of the Pacific war, 10,000 shells smashed into the wall and the city just beyond. Slowly the masonry crumbled and American troops forced their way in.

Later, TIME Correspondent William Gray went in, poked about, saw this aftermath of battle: "A Filipino woman, carried past on a stretcher, muttered: 'I am so pleased.' Two Chinese boys came carrying a litter with four small boys on it. One, maybe two years old, with stick-like brown arms and legs and glazed eyes that stared, was dead, or dying.

"In the courtyard of a convent stood a white statue of the Virgin. A few yards beyond, in the convent basement where faggots were stored, the body of a woman in a blue dress lay twisted on the ground."

Leaving forces to reduce the last few Japanese strong points, Major General Griswold's troops turned east from Manila, reached the hill villages of San Isidro and Montalban.

South of Manila, 11th Division paratroopers and amphibious forces struck suddenly for the prison camp at Los Banos, 25 miles behind the Japanese lines. They caught the darkly sinister commandant, Lieut. Konishi, lining up his charges for morning roll call. They killed the lieutenant and his 243 guards, rescued 2,146 sick and starving civilian internees.

Off southern Luzon Americal Division jungle fighters, veterans of Guadalcanal and Bougainville, seized Capul and Biru, two tiny, strategically important islands dominating San Bernardino Strait, shortest shipping route to the U.S.

Corregidor fortress rocked and shook as the Japanese, sealed off in underground passages, blew themselves and their stores to obliteration.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.