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In some of the shacks there was ammunition — rifle and pistol clips careless men had left behind. These popped everywhere. In one shack a store of tracer bullets went up in the air, casting white, blue and red arching pencils like Roman candles over all the hills.
It was almost dawn when we came to blow the fighter strip. There was grey over the hills and we were eating the last bacon & eggs at the table. Demolition bombs hammered the air above, beyond, all about us with their concussion. Sometimes the blast would be infinitesimal, other times it would catch and rock you.
I found Casey and Tex together, as I had always known them, packing in their room. There were six bottles of whiskey left and we took them along. Casey stuffed a useless pillow into his baggage. "My wife gave me that." he said. "I'll be damned if I leave it for the Japs." We all got into a car and drove down to the B25. Casey was pilot, Tex crouched behind him. We were off.
"I'm going to write a book about this campaign,'" Casey had told me once. "I'm going to call it Fire and Fall Back.' "
Our Defeat. We do not know here whether the Chinese can hold Kweilin or not. They are going to fight and thousands of them are going to die along the river, at barricades, in streets. Though Chinese will die, this is our campaign and in equal proportion our defeat. Here in this campaign the Japanese have combined a whole sheaf of objectives — a supply route safe from submarines; destruction of China's best troops; a political blow at Chungking which will rock the regime to its foundations. But these were secondary considerations. What they wanted most of all was to get us: to get the nest of planes that had accounted for more than half a million tons of Japanese shipping, had killed Japs by the thousands.
We are not going to let them hold Kweilin, even if they take it. But now in this place and hour of defeat we know that this campaign has tacked six months on to the U.S. war against Japan. They raided us at this base last night and we dozed in slit trenches. Somebody mentioned the fact that today the Navy landed in Palau. A captain stopped to chat with me this morning. I asked him whether he'd heard the news about Palau. "Palau is swell." he said, "But, God, they've got to hurry — they've got to hurry."