World Battlefronts: Davao-Kuo No More

Husky, 54-year-old Major General Roscoe B. Woodruff's 24th Division troops stormed into Davao, capital of Mindanao and last large Philippine city in Japanese hands, after one of the toughest marches in Pacific annals—more than 140 miles in 17 days from the Parang landing beach. They found most of the Japanese army gone, the elaborate defenses abandoned. All the wicked-looking pillboxes had faced seaward—the wrong way.

Gone, too, were Davao's 18,000 leading citizens, the smiling Japs who had come to this town long before Dec. 7, 1941, acquired 75% of its wealth, made it a "little Tokyo" in the Philippines and plastered big Tokyo with posters urging other Japs to settle there. Suspicious Manilans called it "Davao-kuo"—a somber reference to the process by which the Japs had moved into Manchuria, then renamed it Manchukuo.

Why the civilians had left Davao was not clear. Perhaps they sincerely dreaded American vengeance, perhaps their own troops drove them away. But the troops, it was clear, had left a few units behind for house-to-house fighting, then retreated to the hills to rat-fight from caves and ridges, in conformance with standard Japanese tactics.

U.S. infantrymen went after them with some new ideas. On Luzon they had discovered that the 90-mm. antiaircraft gun, with its high muzzle velocity and flat trajectory, makes an excellent cave-closing weapon. When the gun is brought into position, its accurate sights permit gunners to draw a sniper's bead on cave mouths thousands of yards away. In twelve days two guns closed over 100 caves on Balete Pass; one cave later yielded 23 Japs, dead of suffocation.