REMAINING TROOPS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 136, 11 June 1945, Page 5

REMAINING TROOPS

SERIOUSLY COMPRESSED

NEW YORK, June 10. "The American troops are compressing the surviving Japanese on Okinawa so tightly into the south-west tip of the island that they may explode in a Banzai charge," said MajorGeneral Hodge to the correspondent of the "New York Herald Tribune" on Okinawa. Major-General Hodge .added: "We have them pressed back so far that they have no room to manoeuvre.. My impression is that they will explode. If they do, that will wind it up." In a confident mood after flying

over the remaining enemy territory, General Hodge said that there was a * 100-foot sheer cliff at the ocean edge, i"lf the Japanese want to end it all by committing suicide, that is a good jumping-off place," he said. The correspondent of the United Press says that American infantrymen, driving into a hail of machine-gun fire and routing the enemy with hand grenades and bayonets, have cracked the outer defence rhig of the cliffstudded Jaejudake plateau, where the last big pocket of the Japanese on Okinawa are fighting to the death.