Soggy Pockets

As the rainy season added its wet misery to the Philippine fighting, two U.S. armies and their guerrilla allies clumped doggedly through the mud, compressing the Japanese into soggy pockets. Inside these pockets the Japanese continued to resist as well as any army can without help of sea or air power.

On Luzon, Americans and guerrillas captured the Ipo dam, 25 miles northeast of Manila, and prepared to restore one-third of the capital's water supply. In the north, U.S. troops entered Balete Pass, gateway to the fertile valley where a major Japanese force was holding out.

On Mindanao, southernmost Philippine island, U.S. troops captured the Valencia airstrips in the center of the island, and made them ready for fighters of the Thirteenth Air Force. But in southern Mindanao, Americans had one of the hardest actions of the campaign. Cabled TIME Correspondent William Gray:

It is a tangled, vicious fight marked by constant Jap infiltration behind our lines, by Jap ambushes and night raids. Americans had to fight even to reach the 24th Division cemetery, now well behind the front lines, so they could bury the dead. Said one officer: "The woods are full of Japs. You go through them, and they close in right behind you." The country is heavily brushed flats broken by precipitous hills honeycombed with Jap installations. On Hill 550, a long ridge from which sheer knobs jut at intervals, one knob held 30 pillboxes and gun positions.

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