Tonight is our last night in Leyte. We are leaving early Tuesday morning for Fort McKinley in Manila. The boys are all up to the tent listening to the radio and I felt rather restless so am here writing a little before I hit the sack. It seems very lonely around here tonight for some reason. The move is being run off beautifully for a change. We told Pedro we were leaving last week and he has been sad ever since. Tonight he asked me if I would ever return again to Leyte, and of course it is very improbable, and when I told him I didn't think so he was hurt. It is hard for them to understand everything with their limited knowledge of the world. It takes so little to make them completely happy that it seems odd sometimes to me why other people can't benefit by their lesson and be a little happier. To them Leyte is the whole world, Manila and America and Australia are just names. After the Japanese came in a took everything from them, the Americans drove out the Japs and then proceeded to give generously to the Philippinos. Pedro is a Philippino native but because we treat him as our equal he idolizes us.
The war situation is in good shape. Today the radio is blasting again about a peace rumor that swept the states again. It seems as though every time something big happens everybody starts a rumor that the war is over and it grows until somebody makes it official and then finally (this time) the president stops it with an official denying of everything. The Americans have joined forces with the Russians, cutting the entire country in two. The Russians have captured Berlin except for some fierce pockets of resistance that have to be wiped out yet. Munich is surrounded on three sides and all the big cities are under siege. Henrich Himmler came out last night and offered to surrender conditionally the Great Britain and the Allies but not to the Russians, but of course we rejected any terms of that sort. I was reading TIME magazine today and it has a good account of the condition of the country as a whole. Every city is reduced to rubble, until nothing is left. There are thousands homeless, without food or clothing. It told about the great Krupp Armament Works being reduced to nothing, carried a picture showing the remains of the gutted buildings. Herr Krupp defiantly stated that his plans were to rebuild and turn out arms once again. The allies made an official announcement that food would not be imported except to avert famine or disease and that the Germans were going to have to supply the majority of their own food. The condition in France must be about as bad in many places, so state that it will take thirty years to rebuild some of the cities. TIME also carried some reports of the terrible slaughter houses that have been overrun. Bodies have been recovered by the thousands, executed by poisoning, gassing, and other more horrible means. Many of the executed were German civilians. It is all very terrible and a person viewing the whole thing with the question in mind "What is going to become of us all?" might very well just forget about it because the problem is too great for anyone to try and figure out. Anybody would imagine that the Japanese can see the future we are planning for them and would attempt to settle for any terms which we would offer right now, just to save the lives of their men. The cities of Japan will be leveled and reduced to nothing until the Japanese people will have nothing but the good earth to live off of. It is a sad predicament but it isn't very far off. Much as I hate the war and the peoples that brought it upon us, it is hard for me to keep from feeling sorry for them because there are surely many people who had little to choose from when the present powers started shaping the mind of Japan and Germany. After military control was gained by a bunch of cutthroats there was no stopping them because anybody who tried to stop them would lose his or her head. I hope and pray that the American people are always of a high enough type to see and merit out those individuals who would get their wild dreams of taking over the government by force.
The President died April 12th at 3:35 in the afternoon, 6:35 in the morning of the 13th over here. It was a great shock to the world as a whole and coming at this time, just before the San Francisco Conference, it made everyone feel as though the bottom had been dropped out from under them for a moment. Truman took office as President of the United States within a couple of hours. The latest TIME gives a wonderful write-up about Roosevelt, his history, and what the future holds for us. Truman is a small town man from Missouri, got into politics and was given a break by Kansas City's Tom Pendergast who controlled the state. I think he will be okay. At least we are hoping so.
The San Francisco Conference is under way. They are hashing out a lot of principles, voting procedure, who has the right to veto who, and a lot of things. The Pacific War is progressing slowly now. The Philippines still give us plenty of trouble. Bagio was taken yesterday but that still leaves the whole upper half of Luzon in the hands of the Japs. It is merely a matter of time though.
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