General Douglas MacArthur revealed a new line up for the balance of his Philippine campaign. To Lieut. General Walter Krueger's Sixth Army fell the entire task of mopping up Luzon. Lieut. General Robert L. Eichelberger's Eighth Army will clean up the other Philippine islands.
Promptly Eichelberger's 41st Division landed on Mindanao, most southerly island in the archipelago, and second largest (36,906 sq.mi.). The attack achieved tactical surprise, striking at Zamboanga on the southern tip of the westernmost peninsula of the deeply indented island.
Moro Metropolis. The area had no communication, except by sea, with the rest of Mindanao, and for military purposes might as well have been another island. Zamboanga (pop. 132,000) is the principal city of the Moros, warlike Mohammedans who have wrested large parts of Mindanao from the Japanese, and penned the enemy in the cities. In Zamboanga, both the squalor and picturesqueness of the Orient are present in unusual degree, with Moro men in fez or turban coming from their villages to trade, accompanied by their trousered women, clanking with bizarre jewelry. In song, it is famed as the place where the monkeys have no tails.
At week's end, after air and sea bombardment, infantrymen of the 41st — veterans of New Guinea, under a tested commander, Major General Jens A. Doe—landed outside the city's defenses, captured four villages and quickly drove toward Zamboanga and its airfields. No doubt they faced the usual tough campaign of cleaning the Japs out of the coastal strip and the jungled interior, although the enemy was described as having "fled to the hills in disorder." But soon there would be more airfields from which Allied aircraft could close the Celebes and Sulu Seas to Jap shipping.