JF Ptak Science Books 2689
Several years ago I purchased part of the papers 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), and seems to have worked closely with the U.S. Commissioner to the Philippines, Paul V. McNutt. There was a 6-inch stack of paper here of 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 f interesting things, and so far as I can determine, have not been published anywhere else. The item I'm about to describe is one of those stand-alones.
This two-page document seems to have been the draft for a press release on re-starting the formerly Japanese occupied San Miguel Brewery in Manila. (I don't need to say very much about how tremendously devastated Manila was after MacArthur came back and reclaimed the city, as I think that this is generally understood and a given. It was enormous amount of loss of life to Philippine civilians, with estimates of those killed in Japanese massacres at 100,000+, plus battle casualties, and of course a tremendous amount of destruction laid to the once-beautiful Manila that went along with that.) Putting the city back together again after the end of the war was obviously essential, and the movement with the brewery was evidently very quick. The brewery evidently suffered minor destruction (I suspect in the final fight as the Japanese occupied and ran the brewery during the war) and although the structures were lined with explosives, “the Japs forgot to blow the mines”.
There were a million things to do in Manila in 1945, and the resurrection of the San Miguel Brewery was one small part of that. It is interesting to see this internal U.S. Army document to see how this was refitting was being transacted.
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