Conduct Under Fire Page 11

  Beecher knew it would be suicide to concentrate the marines in wooden barracks at the Section Base, so with the exception of a small guard, they hid in the hills behind Mariveles. The navy employed hundreds of Filipino workers, among whom were numerous fifth columnists. When lumber came in by the shipload, they would step up onto wooden pallets and proclaim the virtues of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Daitōa Kyōeiken), as Japan euphemistically called its military campaign to dominate Asia. The marine guard would just as quickly arrest the rabble-rousers and turn them over to the mayor of Mariveles, who was happy to help prosecute them.

  By late 1941 war preparations at the Section Base reached a feverish pitch as the marines in Mariveles Harbor unloaded mounds of materials from Olongapo, Manila, and Cavite, including the furniture, iron bunks, and personal effects they had brought over from Shanghai. The days were long—ten to twelve hours, even on Sunday.

  After hours there was little reward for all of their hard work except hitting Guzman’s bar for a round of drinks, a game of duck pins, or billiards in the backroom. Or you might visit one of the swali shacks that seemed to spring up out of the ground like mushrooms after rain. As darkness fell, you could hear the sound of the jungle goblins back in the marine barracks—the lizards scurrying about on the canvas rooftops, the spiders the size of your fist fleeing into rolled-up tent flaps at the glare of a flashlight. The windows were screened, and the men slept under bed nets, or “mosquito bars.” Which was a good thing, because it was at night, during the dry season between 2200 and 0300, that Anopheles minimus—“tiger mosquitoes,” the troops called them—was most active in its search for human prey.

  5

  Exodus

  RUMORS SPREAD like wildfire in Manila. The Americans had sunk the Japanese aircraft carriers that had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor! A thousand Japanese troops had stepped ashore at the mouth of the Pasig River! Germans wearing American uniforms had landed at Legaspi! A mirror tied to a tree at Clark Field had guided Japanese bombers to their target! A secret radio transmitter operated by a Japanese-American couple had been discovered at Cavite!

  The truth was even stranger. President Quezon’s gardener and masseur both turned out to be officers of the Imperial Japanese Army. One marine remembered sitting in Fuji’s Bar, across the plaza in Cavite, on the night before Pearl Harbor, listening to the nickelodeon play Kate Smith’s “God Bless America.” Nurses at Sternberg reported missing menstrual cycles. Medical officers “suffered from nervous tension with anorexia (poor appetite), nausea and diarrhea,” according to Sternberg’s chief of medicine, Colonel James O. Gillespie. A patient at Cañacao was operated on and pronounced dead; when he arrived at the morgue door, he sat up and asked: “What ward are you taking me to?” A statement issued by Admiral Hart’s office reported, erroneously, that all Cavite Navy Yard medical personnel had been killed when the dispensary was hit.

  Manila was bombed regularly between noon and 0100. “You could set your watch” by the raids, said Captain John Wilkes, commander of Submarine Squadron 20. “We even advanced the lunch hour to eleven so we could eat before we dived into slit trenches.”

  But on the morning of December 19 George Ferguson and the men at his aid station on Cañacao Boulevard heard another rumor: reports of decreased activity “all over” the Philippines. Around noon he and Lieutenant ( j.g.) Bernard W. Cohen, a navy doctor from Cañacao Hospital, ventured inside the triangle formed by the three radio towers at Sangley Point. Then, like clockwork, an air alarm sounded, followed by a flutter of bombs. A radio tower was knocked out instantly, the rear of a house was blasted to pieces, the power station received a direct hit, and 55-gallon drums of aviation gasoline burst into flames. The roar of the fires drowned out the sound of planes and exploding bombs, one of which tore a hole in the road eighteen feet deep and twenty-three feet wide. The two doctors scurried like rats looking for shelter. They ran into a building that shook like a tambourine, with furniture dancing to its beat. George bolted out a side door after the first wave of planes passed and felt something hit him. His left knee was bleeding, and his right knee was knocked out laterally at a 45-degree angle. He hobbled down to a bomb shelter, where dozens of casualties began to stumble in. As best he could, he helped evacuate the wounded to Cañacao Hospital three blocks away, and from there they were ferried to Manila. A second alert sounded, and the two doctors ducked into the crawl space beneath the hospital. The hospital was supposed to be earthquake proof, but it heaved and groaned under the strain of bombs until it looked as if the overhead beams would cave in at any moment. When the all-clear sounded, there were thirteen dead—twelve of them marines—and forty wounded. Some had been incinerated in the fires. George suffered a small shrapnel wound in his left knee and a sprained right knee. It was nothing to worry about, he told himself, maybe a couple of torn ligaments.

  The stress of war was beginning to show. Blackouts in Manila were frequent. Flares mysteriously brightened the skies, causing the trigger-happy Filipino soldiery, convinced they were the handiwork of fifth columnists, to cut loose at the source. Gasoline was rationed, headlight shields were mandatory. Businesses closed down, shops were boarded up, food was hoarded, and there was a run on the banks. Traffic—whether motorized, animal-drawn, bicycle, or pedestrian—was a nightmare.

  George would have been okay, if it weren’t for that ringing in his ears and a throbbing headache. Probably a concussion, he thought. After a sandwich and coffee for dinner, he downed five aspirin and slept on the hospital porch. That night a marine shot himself through the head. “Couldn’t take it,” George noted drily in his diary.

  The next day Lieutenant Colonel John P. Adams, commander of the 1st Separate Battalion, was ordered to evacuate Cavite and position Batteries A and C around Mariveles. MacArthur formally requested command of the 4th Marines, and Admiral Hart, who considered the regiment the best available infantry in the Philippines, obliged. Henceforth Colonel Howard would report to MacArthur at USAFFE Headquarters. Excess naval personnel were to be attached to the 4th Marines, who were given the crucial role of beach defense on Corregidor. The marines and navy would continue to have their own medical support and supplies.

  The admiral and the general had never gotten along well, even though Hart had known MacArthur’s family for four decades. Sixty-four years old, the diminutive Hart had been a close friend of MacArthur’s older brother, Arthur, and was one of the few who dared to say, “Come on, Douglas. Sit down and let someone else talk.” Hart outranked MacArthur; MacArthur wanted all U.S. naval forces in the Philippines under his command. MacArthur complained to Washington about the Asiatic Fleet’s “inactivity” while the Japanese Navy demonstrated “complete freedom of action” in Philippine waters. Hart complained of MacArthur’s inability to entertain anyone else’s opinion except his own and admitted that “there has been very little get-together.”

  The Japanese didn’t merely control the seas, they controlled the skies. Enemy planes passed daily over George’s aid station. Antiaircraft fire crackled from the rear. Barge traffic on the Pasig River moved only at night. “Lord this business is nerve racking,” George wrote. “If only we could see a few of our own planes around here it would help.”

  But the Far East Air Force had few planes left. Eighteen P-40s and fifty-two A-24s were en route to Manila via Brisbane in the seven-vessel Pensacola convoy, which also carried a field artillery brigade, ground elements of the 7th Heavy Bombardment Group, ammunition, bombs, and assorted vehicles and equipment, as well as 4,600 U.S. troops. When the planes were unloaded and assembled in Australia, however, they were found to be lacking key combat equipment. So the two fastest ships—the Holbrook and the Bloemfontein—sped out of Brisbane without the longed-for air support, but with the field artillery brigade and naval supplies that MacArthur and Hart so desperately needed.

  On the morning of December 21 the submarine Stingray spotted the Japanese invasion fleet off of Lingayen Gulf. MacArthur ordered tanks to the n
orth and Brereton’s planes to the skies, then alerted beach defenders that landings were imminent. Hart sent four submarines to the Lingayen area to join the Stingray. But they failed spectacularly in their attempts to sink Japanese landing force vessels. The waters were shallow, there was no place to hide from enemy depth charges, and the Mark VI magnetic exploders, which Hart himself had helped develop back in 1929, were faulty. Torpedoes ran four feet beneath their targets and failed to detonate even when they hit them. Only S-38, commanded by Lieutenant Wreford “Moon” Chapple, made a successful kill, sinking the 5,445-ton troop transport Hayō Maru. Opposition from Brereton’s reduced air force was even less effective. To compound the problem, MacArthur had expected the Japanese to land near the mouth of the Agno River, at the southern end of Lingayen Gulf, where Fil-American forces had emplaced the muscle of their artillery. Instead, some eighty-five enemy transports bearing the bulk of the enemy invasion force headed to points north forty miles away.

  By December 22, 43,110 men from Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu’s 14th Army and Lieutenant General Tsuchibashi Yichi’s 48th Division had landed in rough seas along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Lingayen Gulf coast virtually uncontested. Of them, 34,856 were actually ground troops. Their only opposition came from a Filipino battalion of the 11th Division near Bauang that, in spite of its brave defense, could do little to prevent the Japanese from establishing a beachhead. Homma would make Bauang his 14th Army Headquarters, by which time his troops were swarming down into central Luzon. Many infantrymen of the 48th Division rode bicycles. Manila was only 100 miles to the south.

  “The enemy has landed scattered elements along the shores of Lingayen Gulf,” MacArthur trumpeted over local radio in Manila on the evening of December 22. “My gallant divisions are holding ground and denying the foe the sacred soil of the Philippines. We have inflicted heavy casualties on his troops, and nowhere is his bridgehead secure. Tomorrow we will drive him into the sea.”

  Lingayen wasn’t MacArthur’s only problem. The next night, as if in answer to an idle boast, 7,000 troops mostly from Lieutenant General Morioka Susumu’s 16th Division, began coming ashore at Lamon Bay, 200 miles to the southeast. The area was defended by the 1st Regular Division and the 51st Division of the Philippine Army, but resistance soon turned into a rout as forces fell out of position. A rope was now coiled around Manila’s neck.

  Homma’s troops had been ashore at Lingayen for forty hours before MacArthur, on the evening of December 23, finally reverted to War Plan Orange-3. The rationale was that standing off the Japanese in the north would enable Major General Albert M. Jones’s South Luzon Force to circumvent Manila and ease through the bottleneck of San Fernando by January 8 while Major General George M. Parker prepared Bataan’s defenses. Engineers would dynamite the two bridges south of San Fernando at Calumpit that enabled Highway 3 and the main line of the Manila Railroad to cross the 500-foot-wide Pampanga River, thereby slamming the door shut in the face of the Japanese. Then North Luzon Force, under the command of Major General Jonathan Wainwright, would retreat to Bataan.

  Wainwright took the news hard. The Philippine Scouts of the 26th Cavalry could fight valiantly, but the Philippine Army was a sorry spectacle. The 11th Division scattered after the Japanese made it to shore, as did two regiments of the 71st Division, when Homma’s troops attacked them four miles south of the Baguio junction. MacArthur’s forces to the northeast were completely cut off. His much-vaunted beach defense was in tatters. Admiral Hart was moving his headquarters to Java. General Brereton was secretly retreating to Australia. Wainwright knew it meant “the last ditch.”

  The Japanese had made a mockery of MacArthur’s vow to defend Luzon’s coastline “at all costs.” Weeks had been lost when vital elements of WPO-3 could already have been in place. Now, at the eleventh hour, MacArthur was forced into a devil’s bargain by trading a failed military strategy for one that would knowingly sacrifice the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor.

  Back in Washington, the Arcadia Conference began, which established the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, composed of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and the British Chiefs of Staff to advise Roosevelt and Churchill on a coordinated military strategy. The Americans proposed British General Archibald Wavell as supreme commander of the combined American-British-Dutch-Australian command (ABDA) in the Southwest Pacific. Admiral Hart became Wavell’s naval commander. But in a study submitted at the conference, U.S. Army planners concluded “with ruthless severity and some overstatement,” thought Secretary of War Stimson, that the Philippines could not be reinforced. MacArthur’s hope for an offensive from Australia to Mindanao was judged “an entirely unjustifiable diversion of forces from the principal theater—the Atlantic.”

  “Everybody knows the chances are against our getting relief to him,” Stimson admitted in his diary, “but there is no use saying so beforehand.”

  Masses of men and matériel began to fall back along five defensive positions from the Aguilar-Urdaneta line (south of Lingayen Gulf ) to the Bamban-Sibul Springs line just north of Mt. Arayat. This was no textbook retreat, like those of McDowell’s army in the Battle of Bull Run and General Lee at Gettysburg. It was a delaying action, and the Philippine Scouts fought for every inch of ground. Important tank and artillery movements rolled out at night to avoid the threat of enemy air attacks. The North Luzon engineers followed the retreating columns, demolishing bridges once they had crossed them. But a single act of the Japanese—bombing the bridges at Calumpit, thirty miles north of Manila—could bring the South Luzon Force withdrawal to a grinding halt. Homma, however, misread the migration, believing it to consist of scattered elements of the Philippine Army. So as the Japanese closed in on Manila, the Fil-American exodus continued into Bataan.

  Simultaneous with the retreat of troops was the army’s medical evacuation of Manila. Sternberg was deactivated in three phases. The first cadre of medical officers and nurses left Manila on December 22. Their destination was Limay, Bataan, where Hospital No. 1 was established east of the barrio as a frontline surgical facility near the Abucay-Hacienda line. The 1,000-bed hospital had been anticipated by WPO-3. Its components were already in storage at Camp Limay, a battalion post where a quartermaster depot stored food and gasoline for the defense reserve. Colonel James “Ducky” Duckworth was commanding officer. Lieutenant Commander Carey M. Smith of Cañacao Hospital was chief of surgery, assisted by navy nurse Ann Bernatitus.

  But to call it a hospital is like calling a hut a hotel. Hospital No. 1 was a primitive facility in the wilds of Bataan. The structures were wood-framed, open to the elements, and roofed with nipa-thatch. Only the convalescent ward, medical supply, and storehouses were protected overhead—with galvanized steel. There was one X-ray machine, and pressure-cookers heated by Bunsen burners were used as sterilizers.

  A second echelon departed on December 24 to install General Hospital No. 2, a convalescent facility in the rear at Kilometer 162.5 on the road from Manila. Colonel James O. Gillespie was commanding officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Schwartz was surgeon. Situated on the south bank of the Real River, 1.25 miles west of Cabcaben, Hospital No. 2 was outfitted by the Engineer Corps with its own water-purification plant, equipment from the annex at Estado Major, provisions that the quartermaster was able to scrounge up in Manila, and small shipments from Cebu and Iloilo.

  The medical supply depot was a mere half-mile away, but the speed of the evacuation, the confusion, and the congestion meant that crucial equipment was abandoned, looted, or lost. The irony is that some ninety regimental dispensaries were en route to the Philippines when war broke out.

  The final group from Sternberg included 450 patients who were transported aboard the Don Estaban to Corregidor, where they were transferred to the army hospital in Malinta Tunnel. Colonel Carroll escorted the handicapped and severely wounded to Port Darwin, Australia, on the Mactan, an interisland ferry whose passengers included the last army nurse to leave Manila, Floramund Fellmuth. The eleven navy
nurses from Cañacao were unaccountably left behind.

  Meanwhile the evacuation of Olongapo was under way. Hayes, designated regimental surgeon of the 4th Marines, quickly assembled his team from navy medical staff. Hayes named Marion Wade battalion surgeon of Colonel “Red” Anderson’s 2nd Battalion, while Wade relied on Lieutenant Benjamin Bruce Langdon and Fred Berley for support. After Olongapo was bombed, the station hospital was abandoned for a field unit buried so deep in the bamboo jungle that at midday it was shrouded in gloom. Hayes was determined to remove as much medical equipment as was possible from Olongapo and incorporate its medical personnel into the Navy Section Base.

  Fred wasn’t worried. On December 23, 1941, he wrote his parents:Dear Folks: It looks as tho the war is going to delay my coming home for a while—but I don’t think it will be too big a delay.

  I am well & happy and shall do my best to continue to stay that way—so don’t worry—please.We are fighting for a most just cause and I am more than glad to be doing my small bit.

  My love to all.

  Your son,

  F.V. Berley

  U. S. 4th Marines, P.I.

  No big deal. The war wouldn’t last six months.

  The new medical detachment of the 4th Marines was nearly complete once George Ferguson joined John Bookman in Mariveles.

  But back in Quezon City, Murray Glusman was told to remain at Holy Ghost Convent and College as part of a skeleton force to await the Japanese in Manila. He felt as if the axis of the world had just shifted, yet somehow he was expected to stay in place.

  The flaws in the army’s prewar plan for the Manila Hospital Center were now all too apparent. Valuable time, effort, and equipment had been wasted as medical teams hopscotched the city. With the Japanese advancing rapidly from Lingayen in the north and Lanon Bay in the southeast, the concept of stable warfare was no longer valid. Enemy strategy was determining daily movements in a situation where there was a conspicuous gap in the chain of command. The battle lines on Bataan had already been drawn. So what was the point of keeping navy personnel and equipment in Manila? Murray wondered. Shouldn’t the medical staff be where they could be of some help?