A Bubble Bursts

With his ancestors' 700-year-old samurai sword buckled at the side of his faded, patched uniform, fierce, bullet-headed General Tomoyuki Yamashita came trudging out of northern Luzon's Caraballo Mountains.

Whisked to Baguio, Yamashita formally surrendered to Lieut. General Jonathan M. Wainwright, ordered the 40,000 Japanese troops in the Philippines to give up.

Asked if he would commit harakiri, Yamashita grinned and shook his close-cropped head: "Hara-kiri? No, no harakiri." A U.S. soldier who had helped establish contact with Japan's ferocious "Tiger of Malaya" conferred on him a new nick name: "The Gopher of Luzon."

Another Japanese general, surrendering in the central Philippines, defiantly quoted a medieval Japanese slogan: "Shall I die, I shall live again -- and again seven times to fight again -- swears the warrior."

Elsewhere in the Pacific and Asia the Japanese were giving up, in large garrisons and small pockets.

P: In Manchuria and elsewhere Russian forces bagged more than a half million Japanese troops. Soviet troops completed their occupation of the fog-bound Kuril Islands. In Moscow Stalin said the Kurils and the southern half of Sakhalin island would again become Russian territory.

P: Truk, Japan's Pacific naval bastion, and the heavily fortified Palau Islands gave up. So did Japanese garrisons on Pagan and Rota in the Marianas. The catch was estimated at 100,000.

P:Chinese Central Government troops swept into Canton, Shanghai, Ichang, Nanking. In Nanking their first act was to pay their respects to the memory of Sun Yat-sen at his mausoleum. All Japanese forces in China were to be surrendered within the week.

P: Australians had arranged for the sur render of surviving Japanese troops in New Guinea, New Ireland, New Britain and the Solomons -- a bag of approximately 86,000.

P: British naval landing parties went ashore in Hong Kong. First, however, it had been necessary to bomb suicide craft in the harbor.

P: In Indo-China the Japanese were ready to quit, but the French expected trouble from Japanese-incited natives. The British, with negotiations completed for the surrender of Singapore's city and fortress, feared the same sort of difficulty.

P: The British were sweeping mines from Malacca Strait, preparing for the occupation of the Netherlands East Indies.

At its peak the Japanese tide of conquest had covered approximately one-tenth of the globe, encompassed 400 million of the world's two billion population. Japan's Greater East Asia bubble had burst.

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