Word: baptismal
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Toronto Starman Frederick Griffin reported that "a more terrible baptism [of fire] no new troops ever took, or took more splendidly." The Algonquin's commander said: "They were just as good as any reinforcements we have...
From halfway across the world in the Philippines comes a veteran who got his Pacific baptism by fire at Angaur, then landed with MacArthur on Leyte -Battlefronts Writer John Walker. And from this same exploding front comes another TIME correspondent - who covered 30,000 miles of ocean in five months, was on 17 Navy vessels, eyewitnessed the first raid on Manila and the carrier strikes at Palau and Morotai. His name is Bill Gray...
Springtime in Darwin. Picking up fugitive flyers from Bataan and Java, including the early-famed Buzz Wagner, the Eighth and Ninth squadrons followed the Seventh northward, reaching Darwin bases in time for the big Japanese raid on April 25. In that first real baptism of fire, the Forty-niners bagged 24 Jap bombers and nine fighters without suffering a single loss. By Aug. 1, six months after arriving in Australia, they had run their score to 60, had lost only three pilots. On Aug. 12 they received a Presidential unit citation, then plunged into the battle for New Guinea...
...wards, men with legs scarred by vein surgery and men with tantalum plates in their skulls read books on diesel engines, cattle raising, soil conservation. (They cheerfully show their wounds to anyone willing to look.) In the recreation hall, some of the wounded watch the Army training film Baptism of Fire and hear the day's war news. A man in the occupational-therapy department is absorbed in making a set of four-leaf-clover buttons of clay...
...combat soldiers have felt it-the nerve-racking, soul-shaking wave of fear that comes with the first real baptism of fire-but few have been able to describe it. One of the best descriptions was recorded this week by Captain Bruce Bliven Jr., in his father's New Republic...