Word: manila
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...Manila Bay was still unbeautiful. West of the tragic wreck that was Manila, sunken Japanese ships still littered the bay's muddy floor, many thrusting gaunt masts and rusted superstructures out of the water. But Manila Bay had come back to life: last week plump Liberty ships tied up to the scaly hulks, rode at anchor or nestled at waterfront berths. Their cargoes moved on shuttling Army ducks and landing craft, in rumbling trucks. The world's worst-cluttered harbor was back in business, handling more tonnage than before...
...taken four months of prodigious labor by bald, burly Commodore William Aloysius Sullivan, the Navy's chief of salvage, and the thousand-odd officers & men of his Manila-Subic Harbor Clearance Group. In clearing approach channels, the slips and the Pasig River (where wrecks lay three deep in spots) they had fished up more than 400 Jap craft, large & small. A few they had beached for salvage; many they had refloated with big air bubbles pumped into the holds, to be hauled away bottoms-up and sunk again...
...Sullivan's beaver-busy wreckers worked to clear the inner harbor, so ships could maneuver inside Manila's sea wall. After that they would move on, to tidy some other grisly graveyard. Danger was their business - Sullivan had picked some of his veterans out of the New York fire department. He had trained all his officers and 150 of his men to be divers, at the Pier 88 salvage school and in the dank holds of the capsized Normandie three years ago. Their graduate work had been done in the choked harbors of Casablanca and Oran, at Salerno...
...Manila, where U.S. Navy carrier planes set an all-time mark for destruction, they went to work while Japs still spat bullets from behind grass-grown earth works on dead ships. Flamethrowers disposed of the Japs; then Sullivan's men methodically disposed of the snips. Sixty salvagers, half of them divers, had formed the first team, clearing 45 "sugar Charlies," (small Jap freighters) from Slip 2 in the north harbor, so LCTs could land ammunition and food. Soon 20 teams swarmed over the harbor's hulks...
...graduated from the MARCH OF TIME'S School for Combat Photographers sent us after the battle for Hill 660 on Cape Gloucester (scribbled all around the Rising Sun are good wishes from the friends of the Jap who wore it wrapped around his waist -"Happy going to Manila" and "On to Washington")-And there is the Nazi flag inscribed (rather shakily) in Photographer George Rodger's hand...