Word: manila
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...Fortress. It was Corregidor that the Jap wanted most. Until its 12 in. guns are silenced, until the troops are bombed out of galleries bored through solid rock in the rearing head of the tadpole, the Jap can never hope to sail his ships into Manila Bay. For south of Corregidor it is only seven miles to the other shore of the harbor's mouth...
Last week in Pravda Comrade David Iosifovich Zaslavsky, Soviet Russia's leading foreign news editorialist, snorted at the U.S. for declaring Manila an open city...
...back at the enemy's mercy. It cannot be blamed because nature gave it no horns or sting or a brave heart. What can be said about an armed man who lies on his back as soon as an enemy appears? Such people are called cowards. . . . Manila could have resisted the enemy like Leningrad, Sevastopol, Moscow and Tula. It could have withstood a siege like Tobruk. The hardships and miseries would have been compensated abundantly by the glory to the people and the exhaustion of the enemy's forces...
...quitting, won't quit-and no son-of-a-bitch is going to label him a coward and go uncalled for it. ... We have been in awe of the Russians' fortitude in ordering the earth scorched as they fell back, and we frankly said so. But . . . Manila is not Philadelphia...
Snorting editorialists aside, declaring Manila an open city was: 1) obviously a sign of U.S. weakness; 2) not by any means a sign of U.S. cowardice. General MacArthur had some perfectly good military reasons for doing so (see p. 19), but the best reason was nonmilitary...