The Honorable John and Film Developing (64)

The 92nd Evacuation Hospital is once again close to the front lines.


14 March '45
Dear Folks [Beth's sister and brother-in-law, Mary X and John],
     Now I'm at a new place.  We are something like the old gambling houses (and such) of frontier days - following the crowd.  Our set of school buildings isn't as large this time, but good enough.  We aren't busy as yet, but no doubt will be.

Headquarters for the 92nd Evacuation Hospital in Agoo, Philippines

     The knife you sent me certainly takes a fine edge.  I spent about an hour on it, and it is very nearly razor sharp.  But I hope I won't have to use it on a Jap.  I did "spill" Jap blood you know - technically that is!  On our first campaign I amputated a Jap's leg.
     John, I've discovered that I can use regular 35 mm film in my camera by covering the "window" on the back and winding the film on a bare spool.  The resulting negative is 2 mm less wide, is the only difference.  My film is perforated only at intervals, and along only one side.  Buy counting "clicks" I can space the frames properly.  And the best of it is my tent mate has several hundred feet of the film!  I've started developing my own film, too.  Beth is sending me some DK20 [a high contrast film developer for black and white film].  I can use x-ray hypo [hypo sulfate, used as a fixer in film processing] .  Thanks a lot for the booklet!  It looks good.
     Love, Eugene

14 March '45
Dear Folks [Mary X and John],
     This is a continuation - I didn't get to tell you all I wanted!
     Beth may have written you that I went to see the sights in a city [Manila, but the censors wouldn't let him write that].  It was something to see large modern buildings burned and blasted to pieces.  We went thru a hotel [see post #63] where I'm certain Uncle John must have stayed at one time (or its predecessor) ["Uncle John" was the paternal uncle of Gene's brother-in-law John, the Honorable John W. Barrett, a larger-than-life diplomat and Dartmouth grad, who was the Minister to Siam under President Cleveland (when the little prince, Chulalongkorn, in The King and I was king), and a war correspondent and advisor to Admiral Dewey during the Spanish-American War in the Philippines; he later was involved in South American relations under President Theodore Roosevelt and served as the first Director-General of the Pan-American Union; he attended Beth and Gene's wedding in 1937 and died a year later].  The Japs had used it as a strong point, so you can imagine what it looked like.  I took 3 rolls of color.  Hope they turn out well.  ...

Gene on an overturned tank on the road to Manila

    Jack [the son of Mary X and John], in a box I'm sending Beth, there is a large numeral "3" on fabric from the tail of a Jap 2 motor fighter-bomber.  Also, a large thin metal plate [from an anti aircraft gun] with some ack-ack projectile plotting data on it, that I picked up along the waterfront.
     They were still gathering Jap bodies!  What a mess.  ...
     Love, Eugene

March 15, 1945  No wards assigned to me.  Little work.

March 16, 1945 
     Not busy as yet.  When the push up the coast for San Fernando starts, we will be.  Planes of all sorts go over every day.  Later we may move there.
     I'm developing my own [black and white] film now.

March 17, 1945  To Aringay, 10 km up the coast to see the sights.  The troops are 2 miles beyond.

What was happening just beyond Aringay:

YANKS WITHIN GUN RANGE OF BAGUIO, LUZON: 33rd Division Tightens Squeeze on Former Summer Capitol
     Manila, March 17 - (A.P.) - The Thirty-third division has rolled its heavy artillery to within eight miles of Baguio and can drop shells into the former Philippine commonwealth's summer capitol.
     The Thirty-third - a former Illinois national guard division - has tightened its nutcracker by pushing toward the famed mountain city from both west and south.
     Gen. Douglas MacArthur's communiqué reports that the Thirty-second division is probing the mountains from the southeast.
    ...  Installations around Baguio, Lieut. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita's headquarters, have been bombed and shelled heavily.  As yet the city has been spared.
     The advance of the Thirty-third has been slow - thirteen miles in a month - but the methodical gain has been made thru difficult mountain terrain filled with Japanese ambush parties.  The going has been made more difficult by the systematic blowing up of bridges although the 300-foot steel and concrete Aringay span was captured by a surprise night move.  ...
  

Look to the Bridges! (53)

     The war was far from over, but the Americans could take pride in what their engineers could accomplish.  Here is an article from an unidentified newspaper that was in Gene's scrapbook:

WRECKED BRIDGES TELL STORY OF JAP FAILURE IN PHILIPPINES:

American Engineers Did More in 26 Days to Repair War Damage on Luzon

Than Nips Accomplished in Three Years

     Central Plains Command Post, Luzon - (A.P.) - You need do no more than follow the American troops down this rich valley from Lingayen to Manila to see why Japan has muffed her chance at empire.

Modified Rand McNally map showing locations mentioned in the article

     When the Fourteenth corps troops made their blitz to the capital they ran into all sorts of blasted bridges.  But at least half of the big bridges - the ones that gave the greatest trouble - hadn't been blown by the Japanese at all.  They were the unrepaired remnants of bridges the Americans blasted in their withdrawal in 1941.  The Japanese had never repaired them although they were the economic arteries of one of the richest areas captured by Nippon.

     In the main, the Japanese replaced them with flimsy makeshift spans reachable only via tortuous detours scarcely able to support heavy traffic and almost every one a constant bottleneck.  At Bambam, for example, the parallel railroad and highway trestles had been dropped into the river.  I saw them first from the air and remarked to the pilot "the Japs did a good job on those two."

     But when I passed thru Bambam [Bambang?] with the troops later I saw my error.  The steel wire reinforcing that hung from the jagged, broken concrete blocks was black with old rust.  The Japanese didn't perform that artistic job of demolition at all - we did back in 1941.  Two big spans - linking rich Tarlac and Pangasinan and the northern provinces to Manila's ship piers via railroad and road - hadn't been repaired in three years.  Down between them on the river's surface was their solution, a one-way small piling treadway on a pontoon.  They didn't get around to blowing that one up but even so our engineers had to strengthen it before the big stuff could move across.

     When we looked that area over, Maj. Reginald Jackson ... used the words of the major league baseball scout after watching a raw lefthander "Japan as an empire builder is several seasons away."

     My retort was that after she has been pushed all the way thru this current meat grinder she'll be a hundred seasons away.

     I backtracked the troops after reaching Manila and I can tell you this - that after twenty-six days, the supply men and engineers of the Fourteenth corps of the United States army had better bridges between Lingayen and Manila than the Japanese had after three years.

     The bridges were only part of the answer.

     Between Calumpit and Malolos, the national road - the Lincoln highway of Luzon - contains a five-or six-mile segment that was not hard surfaced.  You ought to ride that stretch in a jeep after three years of Japanese maintenance.  We drove over it never more than ten miles an hour.  I was so bounced and bumped that the canteen in my belt was bent.

     These were physical evidences that a would-be empire builder had sliced himself off a chunk that his protuberant incisors couldn't even nibble at.

     The greater answer was in the eyes of the people.

     There was the old shop keeper at Balintawak on the outskirts of Manila who dashed up to the jeep of Maj. Gen. Robert S. Beightler, Thirty-seventh division commander, with an armful of cold beer.

     He saw the two stars on our jeep, jumped up and down, waved his arms and yelled, "Welcome, welcome.  No more Japs.  No more of those _____ Japs."

     Again he waved his arms and hunted for stronger words.

     "Hallelujah," I suggested.

     "Hallelujah, Hallelujah.  No more _____ Japs."

     There - it occurred to me - was an Asiatic small businessman, perhaps representative of the business core of Asia, celebrating with American oaths the end of Japan's program of "Asia for the Asiatics." [The Japanese had declared that they would be the protector of the Orient.]

     The bitterness, the utter hatred they had wrought among these people in three years was, when you thought it over, far more eloquent testimonial to their failure than the bridges they didn't rebuild.