Without providing further details, KGEI said yesterday that Yamashita replaced Homma. Around here, legends are growing like mushrooms around the USAFFE and MacArthur. Before leaving, Homma was supposed to have written MacArthur, pleading for his surrender to avoid useless bloodshed. "I am only 20 miles from you," he supposedly wrote.

"It will be the longest 20 miles you ever saw," replied Mac.

Yamashita, knowing and having studied and developed a friendship with Mac, also wrote a letter saying that Mac had already done a "great job," and that "miracles are not expected of mere human beings." He pleaded for Mac's "surrender with complete honor" after his "magnificent stand," because "his position was now truly hopeless." He warned it wouldn't be easy to stop the offensive once it started. "After all, I captured Singapore and I know what-is-what in Bataan."

MacArthur supposedly answered in a similar vein, thanking Yamashita for his "good wishes and kind generosity," but regretting his inability to be able to oblige an "old comrade in arms.... And as for Singapore: remember, I wasn't in Singapore."

The telling of the above story never fails to send the spirits of a listener soaring to new heights. Even now new legends are springing up about Japanese dying right and left in Bataan without ever seeing an American or Filipino face. Now comes an insider report from a "relative" of a Japanese officer's querida [darling]. Yesterday the officer told her he was leaving for the front on the 15th, and if he should fail to reappear by the 22nd, she shouldn't expect him back — ever. Of 70 original officers that went to fight in Bataan, he said, only 7 were still alive.

Heard no foreign news today until I caught a late night snippet from KGEI reporting the Aussies sank several Japanese ships at New Guinea.