Getting On with It

General Douglas MacArthur's troops were getting on with the trying job of reclaiming the Philippines. This week 55-year-old Major General Rapp Brush's 40th Division landed on Panay, westernmost of the Visayas group. MacArthur claimed complete surprise at the beachhead, and the Yanks speedily drove to within ten miles of Iloile, Panay's big port and fifth largest Philippine city. But mountainous Panay, from which Jap aircraft menaced shipping, could be tough to clean out; the Japs may have 5,000 troops there.

On Luzon Major General Leonard F. Wing's 43rd ("Winged Victory") Division, onetime New England National Guard outfit, surged forward to smash the southern end of the "Shimbu Line" system of caves, trenches and concrete fortifications 15 miles east of Manila.

Again & again the enemy had slipped back through the American lines to hide and kill from ambush. Major General Verne D. Mudge, commanding the First Cavalry, had been wounded by a grenade while inspecting a newly captured area. Big, booming-voiced, silver-haired Major General Edwin D. Patrick, commanding the 6th Division, died in a burst of machine-gun fire as he sat in a foxhole on a ridge studying the positions of his troops.

At Batangas Bay in southwestern Luzon, General Patrick's old 158th Regimental Combat Team, now under the command of Brigadier General Hanford MacNider, smashed a Japanese attempt to bring troops in from one of the other islands. But in northern Luzon the 33rd Division, after taking a month to gain 13 miles through difficult mountain terrain, was still seven miles from Baguio. And in Mindanao, Jap artillery and electrically-controlled land mines slowed the advance beyond Zamboanga. The road ahead was steep.

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