In the shadow of Oahu's bomb-pocked Schofield Barracks, where the first casualties of the Pacific war were buried nearly five years ago, service chaplains last week intoned the funeral service every 30 minutes for 48 hours. The flag-draped wooden caskets which they committed to the ground held the remains of 570 U.S. servicemen who had once been buried in temporary cemeteries in New Zealand, Samoa and the Fijis.
For most of them it was only a temporary halt in the restless, interminable march of the U.S. war dead, ordered by congressional action last May (TIME, May 27). In October the services...