Death-Dance in Pastrana

 Via 4Branch

Editor’s note: The following comprises Chapter 8 of Children of Yesterday, by Jan Valtin (published 1946).

(Continued from Chapter 7: The Mainit River Bridge)

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“This action in the Philippines is the decisive battle in which we cannot withdraw even a single step, for we have burned our bridges behind us…. It is a great decisive battle on which the life of the Greater East Asia war depends, for it decides whether we lose our sea routes to southern regions.”

(Radio Tokyo on the Battle of Leyte)
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Day or night, in the tent of the Division Intelligence near Palo, work never ceased. The coding and decoding machines ticked without cessation. Enemy messages were snatched from the ether. Enemy documents found or captured, from a soldier’s paybook to a colonel’s diary, were subjected to thorough analysis. The stream of people summoned for questioning never ended: prisoners of war, guerillas, itinerant tradesmen, missionaries. Photographs were pieced together and translated into maps. A tight-lipped sergeant burned with care each scrap of waste paper spewed out by Intelligence. When the sorting was done, a picture resulted upon which the disposition and the missions of the combat teams were decided.

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