Task Force

In Manila Harbor, the Japs aboard Fort Drum, the 335-foot "concrete battleship" built on the rocks of El Fraile Island, refused to surrender. Warships knocked the twin-gunned turrets out of action, but bombs & shells bounced off the fort's 18-foot-thick topside and the Japs greeted all comers with small-arms fire. Then Vice Admiral Daniel E. Barbey of the Seventh Amphibious Force and Major General William C. Chase of the 38th Division got up the war's oddest naval task force and sent it out to reduce the fort. TIME Correspondent William Gray, who went along reported:

An LSM (Landing Ships, Medium) came alongside Fort Drum pirate fashion. While scow-like LCVPs pushed to hold it against the concrete portside, soldiers raced across a wooden ramp, dropped like a Roman drawbridge from the LSM's superstructure to the fort's topside. The Japs had time for only a few shots; they wounded a sailor in the neck, a soldier in the hand and nicked the brow of the task force's dashing commander, Colonel Robert H. Soule. Then, while the soldiers covered all ports, the LCM pumped 1,800 gallons of gasoline and oil into the vents; engineers packed 85 pounds of TNT in one leaky vent, 600 pounds in another.

The little eight-landing-craft task force then withdrew and waited for the time fuses to work. The 85-pound charge went off like a popgun. It was disappointing. Then the "battleship" really erupted. A flat piece of steel, blew up like wastepaper in a column of grey smoke. Concrete chunks showered the water for hundreds of yards around. From a hole on top, reinforcing steel pieces stuck up like pitchfork prongs. Smoke poured out of everywhere--from the sallyports, vents, turrets. If the concussion didn't kill the Japs, Colonel Soule (promoted to brigadier general the next day) was sure they were baked or suffocated. Proudly his task force waddled back to Corregidor.

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