The Decoy Doughboy

Souvenir Edition -- Printed in Czechoslovakia

May 23, 1945. -- Publishes by and for the men of the 18th Combat Team. -- First Infantry Division, U. S. Army.

Shop Talk

The following excerpts from a recent Infantry Journal are reprinted neither to scare nor amuse you. But as the veteran Sgt. Clarence Ryals of Decoy Blue put it during the Thale mass-bags of Jerries, "Some of our new men are getting off easy. I sure hope they don't expose themselves to take Japs like they're doing here to take German prisoners."

Sooo, for benefit of the men who will fight until V-J day, here is what old Timer's in the Pacific are saying of our enemy there.

"At least five battalions of the Japs of Nanking had been virtually obliterated by unceasing artillery, and dive bombing, but the fight was not yet over. The beaten Japanese could be expected, to attack again, and again, as long as there were any left. It would have been less than prudent to dismiss them as beaten simpty because they were more than half wiped out."

"On Bougainville, the tactics of the Jap officers who led the 17th Army will always be a mystery. On occasion after occasion they attacked over the same ground, often literally stepping over the bodies of their dead which had been cut to pieces in preceeding assaults. Time after time they queued up behind one of the salients, one battalion behind the other, waiting f or the breakthrough, only to have their long column almost blasted from the earth by the thousands of shells our artillery poured in on them."

Proof enough that the Jap fights until the bitter end, which should minimize "Kamerading" over there.