Mud in Their Eyes

The war on Leyte was sunk in a porridge of mud, and its sinking was obscured by a steam of confusion.

The mud was spread over the battlefield by 24 inches of rainfall in 30 days (far worse than usual, even for Leyte) and was kneaded day & night by the treads of tractors and tanks, the wheels of trucks and cars, the tramp of a quarter of a million feet.

The confusion steamed up from the communiques. They reported positions captured a second time without ever having admitted that the enemy had moved back in after the first capture; they reported positions taken twice, without explaining that faulty maps had caused mistakes in the identification of peaks and ridges.

As the rain drenched clothes and cigarets, and the mud stalled traffic, the G.I.s cursed the engineers. The engineers were too busy to curse back. Under sodden skies by day, under arc lights by night, soaked night & day, with mud in their hair and eyes, the engineers worked on two main jobs: roads and airfields.

Work and Win. Before they finished an airstrip, planes began to land on it, chewing up the runway. By the time steel mats were laid, there were enough planes to draw the bombs of Jap nuisance raiders. So the nearer the work came to completion, the more there was to do. It was the same with the roads; as soon as they were opened to traffic, the traffic cut them up.

Said General MacArthur's tall, lean, sandy-mustached chief engineer, Brigadier General Leif John ("Jack") Sverdrup: "It's marvelous country to raise rice, but damn poor country to raise airfields." Sverdrup had once built an airfield on New Guinea in six days, five hours, 10 minutes. That was impossible on Leyte. But his ingenious engineers cut corners where they could. One airstrip was complete except for 120 feet, under water. They got a plane to race its props and blow off the water, dried the ground with a flamethrower, then hastily put down a hard surface.

Sink or Swim. In the viscous gumbo, fighting was reduced to patrol actions. Off Leyte's western shore, Japanese reinforcement convoys appeared and were attacked by fighter bombers from Sverdrup's new strips. Some were burned and some were sunk. Thousands of Japanese troops on their way to reinforce the stubborn, holdout garrison at Ormoc died. How many thousands, no man knew, although the communiques offered guesstimates in bold round numbers.

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