(See Cover)
Spanish moss drooped from the big trees in the gloomy forest; where the country was open, sluggish streams meandered through marshes. Stolid, patient Lieut. General Walter Krueger was expecting an attack. He got it. His opponent's armor knifed into the center of Krueger's positions. It looked bad for Krueger's army. But when the armor tried to exploit its advantage, Krueger capitalized on the water-broken terrain, threw in his air force and destroyed the armor. With air power and airborne infantry, he cut the foe's communications. Then he turned his cavalry loose: both hay-burners and gas-burners ripped into the enemy's rear. The battle was over. Krueger had won.
But that was not war: it was only preparation for war, as Krueger's Third Army stood off the armored thrusts of Lieut. General Ben Lear's Second in the Louisiana swamp country (September 1941). How good a preparation it had been was apparent last week. Again, Krueger was fighting in marshes and forests. But now on Luzon, main island of the Philippines, the initiative was his. The weight of armor was his. Superiority in manpower (at least locally) was his. Superiority in firepower was emphatically his. In the air and on the surrounding sea the enemy was utterly outclassed.
Only 54 miles ahead was Manila. There, in the old officers' club more than 40 years ago, a second lieutenant of engineers and a second lieutenant of infantry had first met: West Point's distinguished graduate Douglas MacArthur and Cincinnati Technical High School's Walter Krueger.
Slower & Surer. G.I.s of the Sixth Army, fighting south from Lingayen toward the captive capital of the Philippines, hoped to give Manila to MacArthur and Krueger as a joint birthday present this week. (On Jan. 26 MacArthur will be 65, Krueger 64.) But the G.I.s probably were in too much of a hurry. Methodical, plodding Krueger was in a hurry, but not too much. He did not believe in capturing territory in haste, only to lose it at the enemy's leisure. Strategically, he was out on the end of a limb—a tenuous supply line, 950 miles long, from Leyte. That was on the orders of his superior officer, MacArthur. How the Sixth Army would be supplied and maintained there was the responsibility of other men than Krueger. But within the designated area of operations how far & how fast the Sixth Army went was Krueger's responsibility.
As the Japanese continued to fade away from the south and west of his beachhead, offering major resistance only in the northeast, Krueger had good reason to be satisfied. Said he: "Of course I would have preferred to come to grips with the enemy. But you can't figure out what, when, how or why the Japanese act as they do, and I'm not worrying about it."
It was not in Krueger's nature to worry; 46 years in the army had increased, if that were possible, his innate stolidity. Worry, he once said, is a feminine trait; then he added, with one of those unexpected smiles which deepen the parenthetic lines about his mouth and the crow's-feet beside his eyes, "When the chips are down, women are usually less nervous than men."