Biked to town with Maurice and stumbled into a military parade. We counted everything: 16 small and 16 featherweight tanks, 30 staff cars and 800 trucks — 600 of them new Mercedes Benz and 50 three-year-old Fords. The trucks carried 11,000 soldiers, 100 pieces of artillery including 10 heavy guns, 50 machine guns, and a whole engineer’s division with the Burgos School boats. Last came 35 motorcyclists and 1,500 cyclists, one of which fell on the sidewalk and set the otherwise silent spectators a-laughing. (Tomorrow the Japanese will announce that we cheered!) Oh, I did see four members of the German Club sig-heil a few trucks and grunt a couple of times.

Radio said Bataan was at an “extremely critical stage.” A few days ago, a Japanese naval intelligence civilian with an office opposite Dad’s in the Crystal Arcade told him Quezon and Sayre would be prisoners in Manila within a week, meaning Corregidor would fall by then. Returning via Dewey Boulevard, we stopped to view Corregidor and the mountains of Bataan floating over the horizon, so near yet so far. Hard to believe the blood being shed there.

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