f h • .VEMESDA Y AY ^ \Sk GOOD EVENING EVERYBODY; !i t4 In the small hours of this morning, the telephone rang in a Washington home, and it awoke a Colonel in the United States Army, him momentous A A news. He jumpedout of bed, climbed into his uniform. and rushed over to the War Department. 5^ got the full details of that ominous message, summoned his secretary ^ and dictated a communique. Then he walked into the ^ press room of the War Department, just before dawn, | where three reporters were waiting. He handed them a paper and uttered just two ^ In such laconic fashion, p£.clt*d=3ci*3«pi«Cfc +hP momentous tidings that we have all been came tne moraeui^^'^ i expecting but .hich nevprthel,ss««=fflW^ shook. j LEAD . 2 aad stIfnn 11^ mu |ii fiyrr nn €&rrpri'' After XH a truly epic fight, after a resistance that President Roosevelt called »’the living symbol of our war aims and the guarantee of r victory", Corregidor ha^ fallen. Lieutenant General’ Wainwright’s last communique had told how the island bastion’s twelve inch naval guns had kept firing at the enmy to to the end. A That end had been in sight ever since the message that came off the wire barely twenty-four hour ago, the messa'ge that storm troops A. XxixKxigkttr-y'STirggg?^ had /I landing i on the of Corregidor. Late this afternoon the Navy added its bit to that tragic denoument. Among the men captured by the Japare a hundred and ^'7 ,EAD seventy-five officers and two thousand one hundred men of the Navy; seventy officers and one thousand, five A Tf^ hundred men of the marine corps. Just before the tiny island fortress had td surrender, Captain Kenneth Hoeffel, Commander of the navy forces there, joined his officers and men in sending a last message of loyalty, devotion and good cheer to their country, H their families and their friends. The Navy also reports that five small naval vessels went to the bottom in that bay. A mine sweeper and a river gunboat had been sunk by enemy gunfire from ^ Batan/ another mine sweeper destroyed by bombers^ 3 -^till another mine sweeper and another rive^gunboat, damaged by cannon fire^ were destroyed by our own naval force^ —we'dri—afl s"raadtt "Cth^ v^iroit ^when the surrender became inevitable. The story of Corregidor is the story of Batan LEAD - 4 all over again. First and foremost, lack of aircraft. The twelve inch naval guns of the fortress replied to the Japanese artillery, as we have heard, until shortly before the end. But by that time Yamashita had stationed^^^if$» batteries in new positions on the mountain heights of Batan overlooking the island fortress. V/ithout aircraft it was impossible for our .. 'A gunners to .nteii^ those new positions, thiat enabled the Japanese batteries to wear down the defenders and soften up all resistance. <rv\r-z i But what finally licked^iiPW was exhaustion plus hunger. With insufficient food for days, decimated by sickness, worn out from lack of sleep and months of vigilance, «me= 3 w» lacked the sheer physical strength A A to resist the on-coming storm of enemy shock troops. Those concealed batteries that Yamishita had stationed on the heights of Batan, did the work I LEAD - 5 that five niontht of artillery bo.nbardment and bombing air raids had failed to achieve. The Japanese nine point, four inch batteries notonly inflicted enormous loss of life on our forces but destroyed installations, wiped out barbed wire entanglements and blew away machine gun neats. The final bombardment must have been just about as withering as any in military annals. Then with most of Corregidor^s installations destroyed, the Japanese climbed into steel barges after dark and swarmed across the three miles of water separating Corregidor from Batan. Having no machine gun nests to face, Yamashita*s shock troops established a beachhead and our half starved, exhausted men had not the strength to drive them out. And so all the other forst in Manila Bay were captured with from ten to twelve thousand more prisoners LEAD - b some three thousand civilians who had taken refuge on the island. a total of probably more than forty-two thousand Americans and Filipinos^captured the Japanese. Pt^=:4»=ros5:±b-t:ir=tlia^ ^he number may be ' A less; but for no cheering reasori. Lieutenant-General 9 Wainwright in the last few days reported that casualties had been very heavy So falls Corregidor, forty-four years almost to the day after Dewey's victory on the same It was five forty-one in the morning of April Thirtiett, Eighteen Ninety-Eight, that Dewey gave that celebrated command to the captain of his flagship OLYMPIA:- "You may fire when you are ready Gridley!" It was less than two hours later when he took his ships out of action to give his men time for breakfast. And by that time the two largest Spanish men-o-war had burst LEAD . 7 into flames. It was on May Seventh that telegraphed Washington that he Manila Bay and A could take the city whenever he chose. 4 ^ ___________________________ i j PH ILI PPI^L-EOLLOW^LE AD The tragic finale to the epic drama of Corregidor does^nit mean that fighting is all over The harrassing of the Japanese by A ii^ 1 guerrillas v;ill go on indefinitely; and it will be impossible for the Japanese to stop^them. It has been going on already for months, since long before the surrender of our army on Batan. Against those guerrillas, the Japanese cannot use the weapon^of starvation and exhaustion whidl^^t^fttstfl-d u'S^ in Batan and Corregidor. For irregulars can live on the country; they have the sympathy of all the Filipinos in more than seven thousand islands, an^^can get food most everywhere. To hunt down t^^ guerrillas, the Japanese would have to surround them, and that A .„„ld m.^rlnvaslon of s.voo thoooaod .nd olgUj-threo A islands which don't even have a name. iirair±s- PNILIPPINES_F0LL0W lead - 2 On Luzon, where the Japanese are strongest, guerrillas are operating out of the mountains of the interior. Led by both American and Filipino officers . ?nDWAY But we still he.'e an outpost in mid-Pa c if ic, an outpost and a stationary airplane base. The Stsrs and Stripes still flutters over Midway Island. The Navy today disclosed the fact that the stalwart marines at that pin-point on the map have stood off no fewer than five Japanese * assaults. Only recently, Midway was visited by Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific fleet. In the name of PresidentiRoosevelt, he decorated three out of four marine pilots who drdve off an attack on March Tenth and shot down a four motored enemy seaplane. The defense of Midway is another one of those t extraordinary feats of endurance and bravery that have | 2^ lightened the gloom exh cast by a shattering series of heavy blows. BURMA ^The Jape panese are cashing in on their victory in Hurray for all they are worth. Their mechanized columns are pushing into southern China, and blasting tts^ A ^v;ay to7/ard the air base of the^ American Volunteer Grou .r. at PaoshanUncle Joe Stilwell’s Chinese are resisting furiously at the frontier town of Wan-Ting, but apparently the^Japanese have detoured and are smashing ' I I ahead, leaving the T%,gl"g%!riC§' C^hinTse/in their rear. Chungking report\s that the enemy have been heavily reinforcedXwTth mech^ized units. 'A --------------- On the other hand, a dispatch from London / tells of three raids on a Japanese airport near Rangooi^ by heavy United States bombers. They sowed heavy loads / of explosives which caused huge fires and created more havoc on top of the previous raid that destroyed forty Japanese planes and a gasoline dump and damaged twenty others. One American flight leader, Lieutenant Charles .i BURMA - 2 D. Blankenson, said the fires our side had caused could be seen seventy miles from Rangoon. «ADAGAS£AR. fierce fighting v; ftn in 'Madagascar. The forces of Vichy^ France have counter-attacked the British invaders, dovrn three British airplanes, destroyed seven^tanks, and recaptur«^r several A iU-irt 1 LI h positions. Bo says a late story ^hich comes from Vichy^ . At the same time, the Petain Government admits that the British have advanced twenty miles in their attack on Diego Suarez, are being j L held at the outter defenses ‘that strong naval base. s ma^^DV The counter attack.was French gunboat. a landing party from a The British attacked at dawn, according to the Vichy account, with strong naval force^land troops and motorized units in' Courier Bay. Meanwhile cUvL^ they parachute^ L,uia of Diego Suare%. A Such is the French version of today's doings IF on that large but little Known island. The invasion was foreshadowed in several stories which revealed the fear of the British High Command that the Japanese mi^^ht iADAGASCAR - 2 attempt to seize tMH it with the conn i v Vn c e -- A Uia.A^:j-^.ai4^hBAJlLHtl^Pfl«^-vr|pff7^-rryr~|3;^ V^lliy (Inif I I L3T„ij I If it really had fallen into the hands of the Japanese it would have been a devastating blow to the United Nations, for it would have given the e n e my y a4aTyB^;=:comri'grtry control over the^^Indian Ocean. 'vladagascar is an island almost as large as Great Britainy t is" unrpe' rich in minerals and agricultural proauce ittrixratxii© There are more than thirteen thousand aiies of good road^ and five hundred and thirty-four'miles of railway, M4iJ2:- There was considerable fear in Vichy today about two French cruisers which had been operating out of :,;adagascar. Since the British attack on Diego Suarez the Vichy Government has had no report from tise-a and it is not known whether their officers and crews have joined the Free French or have tried to rejoin the Vichy-Krench SQuadron in Indo-China. Accordine to dispatches from Switzerland, Dic^o Suarez is due to fall at any moment, no matter aADAGASCAR - 3 *h at V_^5>uVTnJt4a teezzitizcl;^ Government may claim. / The BBritish in X ' ■ 7v London admit that the Vichy-French forces on liadagascar 'T^e«ut»-€ , — have stiffened their resistance and that casualt ies j - sstb : X heavy.among the British, Hi it i I J RUSSIA ^ ~tc^’ from Moscow continue to of attacks ^ A n \ \ \ by the Ked Army^all along that eighteen hundred mile \ Russian front. The Soviet Government reports that it i being admirably helped by an ever-increasing flow of materials from the United States and Great Britain. The Russians claim t<«ct Hitler is taking workers out of i German factories and throwing them into the firing line without adequate military training. That story the official Soviet News‘Agency, -"W^g^Fgir /V newspaper IZVESTIA, claims that the Red Army offensive is in earnest and is going to continue with growing strength. IZVESTIA claims 4 v f ^ the German armies on the eastern front Iwu been destroyed A and that the German generals are badly put to it f^r that the replacements. aHxkhKxwxxiRx IZVESTIAcir—in^ Red army is now better equipped than ever, and becomii better eauipped than the Nazis because of the exhaustion of Hitler’s accumulation of strategic war materials, "^^^^ccording to a story from London, Nazi General vonKleist has had to throw the Spring reserves of the Germany army! into the battlelines on the Russian front. '^Nevertheless, the German radio d uuthat a Nazi attack ha^ broken y through the Fed army lines in the northwest, ^u;rih7rh1y ect Staraya Fussa, south of Leningrad. SUBMARINE An old U.S. destroyer reports today on how it shot the daylights out of a Nazi U-boat. An officer in the Third Naval District tells how he was on a twenty year old destroyer and of what happened in the middle of the first watch between two and three o’clock in the morning. "Suddenly", he says, " a lew shape loomed up ahead. The spotlight of the destroyer stabbed out and there was a U-boat, on the surface, charging her batteries. A fifty calibre machine gun sent tracer bullets at the sub, forcing many of her crew to jump overboard. The U-boat turned and fired two torpedoes, both wide | of the mark. Then came a sharp crack, a four inch i gun on our destroyer firing almost point blank. There | was a dull boom," relates that naval officer, "and a gaping hole appeared in the side of the U-boat which rolled over," and down she went to Davy Jones. ■: 1) - MANPOWEB It looks as if workers will have to be moved about the country in large numbers. Thj^^ Paul McNutt. —icaLUcrc»Chairman of the Manpower Commission, ^"^he Government will have to bring about migrations of workers on a large scale into the and centers where war machihery^^munitions are being made. The Qnited States, /I faces a supreme test. | r\ ^ More than ten and a half million more workers will have to be mobilized and made available for the factories, ten and a half millions in'addition to those now working in war industry. The armed forces of the United States will amount to four million by the end of this year. Consequently, they will have to be equipped with the ■ sexsA 7^ best and the last, word in planes, guns and ships,^^jd means a staggering problem of aiHbiiiiHgxisxRpHX X mobilizing manpower. On April First, something like nine millions ] ROBBER Seven high officials of our Government appeared before a committee of Congress to ask for a law commandeering private motor cars and tires. Price Administrator Leon Henderson says that under the existing laws he has the power to do this, but he believes it would be better if Congress passed a specific statute to authorize such requisitioning. One high official told the Senate Committee on Military Affairs that- the rubber situation is actnally S « perilous from a military standpoint. Senator Reyholds, Chairman of the Committee, announced that if we are to win this war every ounce of available rubber must be procured. One member of the Committee was more that optimistic. He said thsKs probably the requisitioning ^ \io-rwrTo cnnlp but, would not be done on ailarge scale, oui,^ 1 realize how necessary it is to necessary to make people realize ..fi ,__ vjT...- nfirticularlv tire^ tirei