JF Ptak Science Books Post 566
Several years ago I purchased part of an archive of David Katcher*, who was the founding editor of the journal Physics Today. Before that, several years before that, in 1945, David Katcher was Lt. Katcher, serving as a correspondent/writer in the public relations office of the U.S. Army Headquarters of the Western Pacific (GHQ USAFPAC). There's a 6-inch stack of paper here with what seems to be his (and associated) mimeographed offprints of the daily grind of running the PR department of the Army in the Philippines, which, taken as a whole, is pretty interesting, showing the concerns and trials of the Army in reestablishing the government and infrastructure of the country. Some of the individual reports/publications are stand-alone, straight-up fabulously interesting things, and so far as I can determine, have not been published anywhere else. These two examples are both related to the subduing of the last remnants of the Japanese Army still fighting in the dense nether lands of northern Luzon, the Philippines, fighting after the surrender had been made (14 August 1945) and signed (formally, on the USS Missouri, 2 September) , fighting after the war had ended.
There's much more than can be written about fighting after peace treaties ending wars--I know that the Germans were running around in Africa following WWI--but that's a very big story, and not for here.
DOCUMENT 1 (Issued 28 September 1945)
The first document relates the extraordinary story of Col. Russell W. Volckmann who from 1942 led a force of thousands of guerrillas against the Japanese and who, by September 1945, led a force of 20,000 in routing the last elements of the Japanese army. (The entire text of his memoir written in 1954 as We Remained Behind: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines can be found here.)
(see Continued Reading section, below, for the rest of this document)
DOCUMENT 2 (Issued 25 September 1945)
This short document relates the story of the capture of the last of the Japanese forces in Luzon, including the capture of some 40,000 troops, including General Yamashita ("The Tiger of Malaya") and soon-to-be-executed war criminal and beast of Manila.
I'll let the documents speak for themselves.
(Read more, below)
*from the Washington Post, 2 June 2002, the following obituary of David Katcher:
"David Katcher, 87, who retired in 1979 as special assistant in science and technology to the undersecretary of state for security assistance, science and technology, died of cancer May 31 at his Chevy Chase home.
Mr. Katcher was also senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology policy during the Carter administration. He was the 1947 founding editor of Physics Today monthly magazine, published by the American Physics Association, and he edited the journal for four years.
He had been an editor at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory before World War II and later executive secretary of a theoretical physics division of the Institute for Defense Analysis."
DOCUMENT 2, continued
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