First Installments

Japan paid dearly last week for the failure of its troops on Iwo Jima. Over Nippon's home islands, flying protection for Superfortresses, roared fast PSI Mustang fighter planes from Iwo's fields, 760 miles away. In the greatest air battle ever to rage in Japanese skies, they helped send 173 enemy planes spinning down, raising Japan's week-end air loss to a calamitous 600-plus.

Jap planes came to the Superfortresses as they droned in on their fixed bomb-run courses over the Mitsubishi engine plant at Nagoya and the Musashino-Nakajima factory in a Tokyo suburb. The big planes met them with a hail of fire, shot down 136. The remaining 37 fell to the Mustangs, which had to chase their prey. Five U.S. bombers and two fighters were lost.

This was hopeless fighting for Japan. On factory walls, crumbling under the blast of 500-pound demolition bombs, they could almost read what was happening to them everywhere. Step by step General Douglas MacArthur was wresting away the Philippines. Last week his men moved south to Sanga Sanga and Bongao islands, only 30 miles from Britain's oil-rich Borneo, the island that was to have stoked Japan's factories. Bit by bit, their stolen empire was falling to ruins.

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