Conduct Under Fire Read online

  How fitting, then, that Fred should give John a nickname after meeting him at the Section Base dispensary. Their backgrounds and personalities—a whip-smart Chicago boy and a blue-blooded New Yorker, a career officer and a reservist—couldn’t have been more different. But there was nothing pretentious about John. He was good-natured, even-tempered, solid. Murray loved to speculate; John was more rational. Murray could be exasperating with his “on one hand, on the other hand, on the third hand” approach to a problem; John was more predictable, hence more reliable. Murray chafed at authority; John quietly accommodated it. As friends pin monikers on one another, so Fred did with John by calling him Jake. Which happened to be an abbreviation of John’s middle name, in honor of his enterprising grandfather, Jacob Bookman. He thought of John as his closest friend.

  On the night of December 28 Fred Berley went to Corregidor by barge with the 2nd Battalion. Hayes departed by ship with Bob Herthneck and Pharmacist’s Mate Jeremiah V. Crews. Early moonrise bathed the bay in a gossamer mist. Deck lights were turned off, smoking was prohibited, and voices were hushed as the vessels slowly wove their way through the minefield in North Channel. The island loomed out of the darkness, rising to a head 393 feet high at Malinta Hill and tapering down to a tail at Hooker Point, its aura of mystery enhanced by stories of its might.

  Three and a half miles long and one and a half miles at its widest, Corregidor’s diminutive size and its strategic position as the sentinel of Manila Bay had made it a prized possesion over the centuries. Chinese pirates had once occupied the Rock, as did Moros and the Dutch, but it was the Spanish who reestablished Corregidor as a fort. Their occupancy ended abruptly on May 2, 1898, when two ships from Commodore Dewey’s fleet, the Raleigh and the Baltimore, landed at Corregidor to demand its surrender before its coastal defenses fired a single shot. The island quickly passed into American hands. By November of that year it housed a convalescent hospital. Not until May 1908 did it become a U.S. garrison.

  At the request of Washington, fortification of the island was begun in 1904 by the Manila Army Engineers. Eventually twenty-three heavy rifle and mortar batteries were installed around the “head” of the tadpole. The guns were huge, in some cases weighing up to ten tons apiece. Batteries Crockett, Wheeler, and Cheney boasted 12-inch “disappearing rifles” that hid behind concrete parapets 3 feet thick during loading and had a range of 17,000 yards. Battery Way held four mammoth mortars forged by Bethlehem Steel in 1890 and sunk in concrete pits. Battery Geary had eight mortars, including the later model M-1908. As antiquated as they looked, they could fire one round per minute with a range of 14,000 yards in any direction. Batteries Smith and Hearn could be elevated 30 degrees and drop a target 29,500 yards away. Antiaircraft batteries were armed with 3-inch guns, .50-caliber machine guns, and 60-inch Sperry searchlights. The 59th Coast Artillery Regiment had a separate searchlight battery.

  The north shore of the Rock faces Bataan; the south shore is distanced from Cavite by a crescent of small satellite islands that were converted into fortresses as well. Closest to the Rock is Fort Hughes (Caballo), which brandished two 14-inch rifles at Batteries Woodruff and Gillespie, in addition to four deadly M-1912 mortars at Battery Craighill, whose range of 19,300 yards enabled them to reach either Bataan or Cavite. Next is El Fraile, known as Fort Drum, a craggy outpost that was leveled to the waterline, then rebuilt with walls 25 to 36 feet thick, and sported four casemated 6-inch guns on the sides of the hull, and two twin-gun 14-inch turrets on the bow. The 14-inch guns required shells that weighed 1,560 pounds each and 440 pounds of powder. With a little cabin, a sixty-foot fire control cage mast, and a searchlight to complete its nautical appearance, Fort Drum was known as the “concrete battleship.” Farthest away and just 500 yards from the south shore of Cavite is Carabao Island. Renamed Fort Frank, the island juts vertically from the sea, flaunting two 14-inch disappearing rifles at Batteries Greer and Crofton, and eight M-1908 mortars at Battery Koehler.

  As a result of the 1921 Washington Conference and the 1930 London Naval Treaty, fortification on Corregidor ground to a halt. But that didn’t stop three diehard army generals from initiating construction of a simple “tunnel road” under Malinta Hill, allegedly for the convenience of the small Air Corps garrison at Kindley Field. Their plan was anything but simple, and it took seven years to complete. With old mining equipment and convict labor from Bilibid Prison in Manila, a sprawling underground complex was built that included a main east-west passage 825 feet long and 50 feet wide, with some fifty lateral tunnels about 150 feet long. Nicknamed “little San Francisco” for the electric trolley line that ran through its main tube and all the way down to the water’s edge, Malinta Tunnel was a subterranean city that contained headquarters for General MacArthur and the USAFFE as well as General Moore’s Harbor Defenses, repair shops, storage facilities, and a 1,000-bed army hospital at its northeast end. The quartermaster area branched off the south end and led to four adjoining navy tunnels—Affirm, Baker, Roger, and Queen, where the 16th Naval District had its headquarters. Near Monkey Point was a separate Navy Radio Intercept Tunnel, where ten officers and fifty-one enlisted men under the command of Lieutenant Rudolph J. Fabian operated a “Purple” machine and engaged in the highly secretive work of intercepting and decrypting Japanese radio traffic. On January 30, 1940, Station CAST, as it was called, provided Roosevelt with the first military intelligence of a Japanese naval buildup in the South China Sea.

  Corregidor’s armament, while old, was still formidable. The island was defended by Americans in the 59th and 60th Coast Artillery Regiments and by Filipinos in the 91st and 92nd Coast Artillery Regiments. The army boasted that it would take 100,000 Japanese to seize “the Gibraltar of the East.” But Corregidor’s defenses were designed to repel an attack from the sea, not from the air; only two batteries were operative when war broke out; and many of the island’s guns were exposed to Bataan and Cavite.

  The island was mapped into four sectors. Topside was the northwestern plateau, high above the sea. Middleside lay beneath it. Bottomside connected the tail to the head, sloping down to the North Dock, which was reserved for the army, and the South Dock, reserved for the navy. Above South Dock rose Barrio San José, which housed the families of Filipino servicemen before hostilities broke out and was formerly the seat of Corregidor’s government during Spanish rule.

  MacArthur moved into a cottage on Topside after his wife, Jean, complained of the odor in their Lateral No. 3 quarters, emanating from the laboratory of Leland D. Bartlett of the Philippine Division’s 4th Separate Chemical Company. High Commissioner Sayre had a house near the Kindley Field airstrip. Quezon, racked with tuberculosis, preferred the openness of a large tent outside the mouth of Malinta Tunnel.

  The Post Medical Inspector greeted Hayes at North Dock and offered to put him up for the night at his quarters on Topside. A trolley took Fred Berley to Middleside barracks, where the 60th Coast Artillery was billeted along with the newly arrived 4th Marines. A massive rectangle of steel-reinforced concrete three stories high with a ground level loggia, Middleside was much vaunted for being bombproof.

  But by the light of day, Fred thought Corregidor looked more like a country club than a citadel. There was a parade ground, athletic field, golf course, and tennis court. Army officers at Fort Mills, as post headquarters was known, were dressed smartly in starched khakis, shirts, and ties. The Officers’ Mess was located just outside Malinta Tunnel on a raised wooden platform and partly tented to shield the men from the sun. At night they kicked back, drank beer at the Officers’ Club, and went to the Topside cinema for the latest feature or to San José to bet on a cockfight. When they weren’t decoding top-secret Japanese messages, the boys from the Radio Intercept Tunnel liked to drive around Corregidor in a 1930 Packard touring car. Officers even had their own designated beach, protected by a shark net on the north shore, west of Infantry Point. A historic lighthouse built by the Spanish in 1853 lent a picturesque air to this oceanic idyll, swee
tly scented with bougainvillea and hibiscus and lush with flame, frangipani, and fire trees. Corregidor was cooler than Bataan due to the gentle sea breezes—and blissfully free of mosquitoes.

  Word on Bataan was that the Rock’s 5-inch antiaircraft guns also kept enemy planes from straying any closer to the island during bombing runs to the mainland. When Fred discovered that there actually weren’t any 5-inch antiaircraft guns on Corregidor, he thought, Oh boy. It’s going to be Cavite all over again.

  That morning, December 29, Hayes and Herthneck set up a temporary regimental medical headquarters—one field desk and a few folding canvas chairs—on the top floor of Middleside. In the early afternoon they had an appointment with the Post Medical Inspector at the old Fort Mills Station Hospital on Topside. In the meantime, they toured the island to get the lay of the land.

  Space was at a premium on Corregidor: the Rock was packed with 9,000 men, stacks of ammunition, and numerous supply dumps. At the beginning of the war the station hospital—a 200-bed facility—was transferred to the north end of Malinta Tunnel, which was already being encroached upon by the staff and families of High Commissioner Sayre and President Quezon. There was no room for a separate navy hospital, Hayes realized after conferring with Beecher. Battalion aid stations would have to move near beach positions with the marines. All surgical cases would be handled by the one tunnel hospital. Lieutenant Colonel William Riney Craig, the commanding officer, begrudgingly allowed Hayes to maintain his field desk, two chests, and chairs near the receiving lateral for marine and navy casualties. This was the lofty Office of the Regimental Surgeon, 4th Marines. Hayes had dual responsibility as medical officer of the 16th Naval District, which meant providing medical supplies and services to naval personnel on Bataan, on the fortified islands, and on ships still in the Manila Bay area.

  Shortly before noon Fred returned to Middleside after visiting his friend Bob Kelly of MTB Squadron 3, who had sped over from Bataan in a PT boat. Hayes had just concluded his meeting with Beecher and was on his way to the station hospital when an air warning alarm sounded at 1145. Within minutes forty bombers from the Japanese 5th Army’s 5th Air Group appeared overhead with nineteen fighter escorts.

  Fred strapped on his doughboy helmet and hit the deck in the same ground-floor room as Lieutenant Colonel Donald Curtis. He found himself in front of a door, exactly where he didn’t want to be. But he couldn’t move; the room was packed with 4th Marines. Hayes hurried back to Middleside, where he lay pressed up against a file cabinet. The bombers broke off into waves of nine, striking the island lengthwise with 200- and 500-pound bombs and strafing the AA batteries with machine gun fire.

  The Far East Air Force couldn’t spare a single P-40 to oppose them, but the guns at Fort Mills, Fort Hughes, and Battery C in Mariveles retaliated, expending more than 1,100 three-inch shells and blasting thirteen medium bombers out of the sky while the .50 calibers took credit for four dive bombers. Japanese pilots raised their altitude from 24,000 to 28,000 feet, which meant that by the time the batteries could reach them, the planes were so close they had already dropped their eggs. It seemed as if an entire regiment was pinned to the concrete deck.

  “They knew we were there—apparently had waited for us to get bunched before visiting us,” said Hayes. The old Fort Mills Station Hospital (which was shaped like a cross to distinguish it from Corregidor’s other structures), the Officers’ Club, and the Topside barracks were struck first. Then a 300-pound bomb scored a direct hit on Middleside a hundred feet to Fred’s left, cascading through each floor like a stone dropping in water before it blew apart the room’s walls and blasted out its doors and windows. The concussion was unbelievable. Hayes found himself clawing cement trying to disappear beneath it.

  “I wasn’t afraid,” said Private 1st Class Ernest Bales of the 2nd Battalion. “I was scared shitless.”

  During the lull ammunition boxes stored outside crackled with fire until the word went around: “Here they come again.” At 1300 the 11th Air Fleet took over from the army planes and continued the attack until 1415. At one point Hayes noticed a label on the cabinet drawer above him that read DEAD FILE. He tightened his helmet, rolled over to adjust his gun belt, and reached for the rabbit’s foot he kept attached to it, only to discover that it was gone. Fred felt as if every bomb had his name on it.

  The last group of bombers, twin-engine, twin-tail “Nells” from the Japanese Navy’s 22nd Air Flotilla, swung into Mariveles Harbor and went after the Canopus. Amazingly, only one armor-piercing bomb hit the ship, whose camouflage was offset by the white gash of a cliffside rock quarry operated by the Atlantic Gulf and Pacific Company. The bomb penetrated the deck, blew open the magazines, and threatened to detonate the tender’s ammunition. Smoke billowed from the burning vessel. Fire crews aimed hose streams down hatches. A rescue team ran belowdecks and into the engine room to extricate the wounded while Chaplain Francis Joseph McManus gave last rites to those fatally scalded by steam blasts. Fortunately a flood of water gushing from broken pipes prevented the rest of the powder from igniting. Soon the men on the Canopus put up their “Business as Usual” sign while the last submarines in the Asiatic Fleet prepared to leave Philippine waters. The Canopus would remain behind as a floating repair shop for the army and the few naval craft that remained in Manila Bay.

  An estimated sixty tons of bombs were unleashed on Corregidor that day. Barrio San José, the cinema at Topside, a navy gasoline storage dump at the tail of the island, and the reservoir at Middleside—all were hit. The electric trolley line was destroyed, and almost every wooden structure was burned to the ground. Two of the five fatalities at Battery Boston “were blown clear into the trees,” Chaplain John K. Borneman discovered. The Post Medical Inspector, whom Hayes and Herthneck had hoped to see, was killed instantly at the old station hospital. The raid left Fred shaking like a leaf.

  The real target, as far as Lieutenant General Homma was concerned, was the “center of the American Far Eastern Army Command.” Homma’s attack was brazen, but his losses were high. In spite of his claim that Corregidor’s batteries had been silenced, not one gun was permanently damaged, and most of the concrete structures remained intact.

  Back in Mariveles, after treating casualties from the Canopus, Bernard Cohen gave George a shot of whiskey from a bottle he claimed the Japanese had dropped by mistake. “Well the Lord knows they are dropping everything they’ve got so it’s not improbable that it did fall in his lap,” George joked. “Glad it wasn’t a bomb.”

  Like everyone else George had heard the rumors of the Pensacola convoy, “due in very soon,” he believed. But the Japanese had already established bases in Borneo, and the ships that had set sail from Brisbane on December 28—the Holbrook and the Bloemfontein—couldn’t possibly breach the enemy blockade. The supply line between Australia and the Philippines was severed. The longed-for reinforcements that had seemed to be just on the horizon disappeared beneath it. Nevertheless, Roosevelt assured MacArthur: “I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be redeemed. . . . The entire resources in men and materials of the United States must stand behind that pledge.”

  On the morning of January 2, George landed on the Rock with remnants of the 1st Separate Battalion, newly designated the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Back on Bataan, Murray and Bernard Cohen took over the Cabulog River valley battalion aid station, which was close to a medical supply dump, reasonably well equipped, and able to accommodate up to thirty-five patients. The river flowed nearby, and the sounds of the bats and birds were oddly comforting at night.

  The aid station was located over the hill from the Mariveles barrio and close to Battery C, which was fast gaining a reputation for its number of kills: “Death Valley,” Corpsman Ernie Irvin dubbed it. But success was a double-edged sword. The Japanese were determined to silence the battery instead. In their Radio Manila broadcasts they referred to the area as “Mariveles Fortress.” That day enemy planes returned for an encore.


  There was a strange, muffled sound to the bombs that fell on Mariveles. The soil in southern Bataan is particularly loamy, and many bombs plunged several feet below ground before their fuses ignited. The resulting explosions were almost vertical, like geysers. This inhibited dispersion and helped protect man-made structures—to an extent.

  The Japanese zeroed in on the barrio. Battery C roared into action, showering the aid station with shrapnel. Glusman and Cohen ran outside for cover, where they had their first lessons in field medicine. They treated casualties wherever they were out of the line of fire, be it a foxhole or a riverbed. They even performed an amputation in a ditch. With the abandonment of the Section Base dispensary and Cohen’s sickbay at the old Quarantine Station, they were overwhelmed with wounded. The line of evacuation ran up the East Road to Hospital No. 2, just below Limay. Most cases could be removed within twenty-four hours, but ambulances were frequently strafed and easy targets for bombers.

  The Japanese had destroyed the dispensaries at the Cavite Navy Yard, Olongapo, the Navy Section Base in Mariveles, and the old station hospital on Corregidor. Murray was beginning to feel as if he were being followed, as if a bull’s-eye shadowed his every move, as if their aid station would be next. You couldn’t help but be jittery—flinching at the sound of a jeep or truck backfiring, glancing over your shoulder or up at the sky, straining to hear the sound of approaching planes or the thunder of bombs in the distance. As one of the first American doctors in World War II to work behind the marines in action, he learned a chapter of navy medicine that was just being written. In the field, doctors and corpsmen were targets just like doughboys and leathernecks. There was one difference: they were defenseless.

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  Opening Salvos