Conduct Under Fire Page 16
The next day the Scouts, supported by Corregidor’s 12-inch mortars, succeeded in regaining Longoskawayan Point. Even the minesweeper USS Quail joined the action, firing point-blank at Japanese soldiers from 1,300 yards offshore. Then the naval battalion’s armored launches moved into position again for mopping-up operations. Three hundred Japanese infantrymen were killed; another 600 died at Quinauan Point. An entire battalion, General Homma rued, was “lost without a trace.” Combined losses for the naval battalion and the Philippine Scouts were 22 dead, and 53 wounded.
Three days later a Japanese flotilla of twelve barges attempted another landing to reinforce the beachhead at Quinauan Point. They were welcomed by a large-scale, coordinated attack from land, air, and sea. The 26th Cavalry mobilized to forestall a landing at Caibobo Point, and Battery D of the 88th Field Artillery and Battery E of the 301st lit into the Japanese. The army called in the last four P-40s in the Far East Air Force to bomb and strafe landing craft, while Bulkeley tore up the coast with two PT boats that nailed two barges.
His landing force reduced by half, Major Kimura Mitsuo’s 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, scurried ashore instead to the north of Quinauan Point, between Anyasin and Salaiim Points. But after twelve days of bloody fighting the Philippine Scouts forced hundreds of Japanese back to the edge of Quinauan Point. It was a fifty-to-sixty-foot drop to the sea. Then the Americans and Filipinos saw something that was as mesmerizing as it was sickening.
“Scores of Japs,” as Captain William E. Dyess of the 21st Pursuit Squadron described it, ripped off their uniforms and leaped, shrieking, to the beach below. Machine gun fire raked the sand and surf for anything that moved, until the waves of the South China Sea were “stained with blood.” One Filipino gunner “shrieked with laughter” whenever he scored a hit from the precipice above.
Other Japanese soldiers hid in the caves and crevices of the cliffs. Wainwright ordered a “proffer of honorable surrender,” but the Japanese replied by firing on the troops who made the offer. MacArthur’s headquarters had even provided a sound truck and two nisei—Richard Sakakida and Arthur Komori, both of whom had worked in counterintelligence in Manila—to make an appeal, but the response was the same. The Scouts themselves were hardly eager to take captives. When they reclaimed their own dead, they found bodies mutilated beyond recognition; others had clearly been tortured to death. Instead of having a sobering effect on American and Filipino troops, the grisly evidence only excited feelings of revenge.
“The old rules of war began to undergo a swift change in me,” Wainwright admitted. “What had at first seemed a barbarous thought in the back of my mind now became less unsavory. I thought of General U. S. Grant’s land mine at Petersburg and made up my mind.”
Wainwright arranged for a small gunboat to shell the caves, and when that failed to dislodge the enemy, he sent in a platoon from the 71st Engineer Battalion of the Philippine Army to lower into them time-fused, 50-pound boxes of dynamite. But the tactic backfired, killing a Scout engineer. So the engineers lobbed dynamite grenades into a cave where fifty Japanese soldiers had retreated and “blew the place to pieces.” Finally, white sheets were lowered over the cliffs to mark remaining Japanese positions, and Goodall’s little armored fleet was given the signal to open fire. But after ten minutes of shelling, the “Mickey Mouse battleships” were dive-bombed by four Japanese planes. The navy gunners continued to blast away in spite of the 100-pound fragmentation bombs bursting around them, until one of their boats was hit. Three crew members were killed, and four were wounded, including Goodall himself. Goodall ordered the two remaining boats ashore, where the sailors improvised stretchers and evacuated the wounded on the West Road to Mariveles.
With the annihilation of Kimura’s 1st Battalion, the Battle of the Points was over.
While the Battle of the Points was being waged on Bataan’s west coast, the Battle of the Pockets, as it came to be known, raged along the reserve battle line. Now the main line of resistance, it stretched from Orion in the east to Bagac in the west.
On January 26 Colonel Yoshioka Yorimasa’s 1,000-man force from the 3rd Battalion, 20th Infantry, blew a hole through the 1st Regular Division of the II Corps position. I Corps troops bottled Yoshioka’s men into two defense perimeters—Big Pocket at Tuol and Little Pocket at Cotar—and after two weeks of fierce fighting, Scouts, Philippine Army troops, and tanks from Company A, 192nd Tank Battalion squeezed out the enemy positions.
A similar attack against I Corps succeeded and enabled the Japanese to establish “pockets” of resistance. Once the Japanese dug in, “we had to go up and practically breathe” in their faces, Wainwright remarked. The fighting was “fantastically improbable,” as junior officers rode atop tank hoods and tossed grenades into foxholes. When the return fire was too hot, bow-hunting Igorot tribesmen and head-hunting Negritos from Brigadier General William E. Brougher’s 11th Division volunteered to take their place and directed tank drivers by banging on one steel side or another with a wooden club. By February 17 the main line of resistance had been restored. “There was so much killing,” remarked U.S. Army doctor Captain Ralph Emerson Hibbs, that “the jungle stank with the odor of the dead.”
Between the Battle of the Points and the Battle of the Pockets, an entire Japanese regiment—Colonel Yoshioka’s 20th Infantry—was decimated. As Lieutenant Malcolm M. Champlin, a former FBI agent from Baltimore and naval aide to Wainwright on Bataan, coolly described it: “When surrounded and asked by loudspeaker, both in Japanese and English, to surrender, the answer was ‘—You, Yank. Come and get us.’ We did.”
A mile away from Longoskawayan, the navy doctors in Mariveles experienced the Battle of the Points through the flesh-and-blood evidence of it. Shrapnel had not only ripped through Chick Mensching’s leg, the doctors discovered, it had also perforated his pack, his shoulder, and it had lodged in his spine.
It was early in the morning when Mensching woke from surgery. More casualties had arrived. A Filipino woman was brought in dead, impaled by a fence post during another bombing raid on Mariveles. Mensching stayed in the tunnel hospital for three days until he was evacuated by ambulance to Hospital No. 1. He had developed gas gangrene caused by Clostridium welchii, an anaerobic bacterium that—like anthrax—lies dormant in the soil. The bacteria thrive in deep lacerations and puncture wounds where torn tissue prevents exposure to air.
“If you’re going to cut my leg off, let me die,” he told a surgeon who approached him with a bandage shears.
The field hospitals were plagued by gas gangrene. The bacteria penetrate muscle, where enzymes gorge on blood and tissue and create gas bubbles that cause limbs to swell up quickly. The swelling causes blood clots, cuts off circulation, and emits a nauseatingly sweet smell. At that stage, absent bacillus antitoxin, there was only one known cure: amputation. But Lieutenant Colonel Frank Adamo of Hospital No. 1 discovered that the bacteria could be killed by making an incision in the infected muscles longitudinally, debriding the dead tissue, cleansing the area with hydrogen peroxide, and leaving the wound open to the air.
“I’m just here to cut your bandages,” the doctor replied. The hospital would treat his wounds, but they couldn’t hold him against his will. By early February Mensching was back at Battery C, where Ernie Irvin saw him through to recovery.
The ragtag naval battalion had succeeded in thwarting a vastly superior Japanese force behind the lines. Army machine gun nests and light naval guns were now in place to deter further landings. Their job done, Bridget’s men were detached from Bataan and sent to Corregidor to reinforce the 4th Marines’ beach defense.
The navy doctors experienced only the consequences of the battle. They could clean and disinfect wounds, suture lacerations, set fractured bones, remove shrapnel, and relieve pain with morphine, but the logic they operated by was deductive by necessity. They had little time to take medical histories; frequently casualties were in shock, and shock, whether pre- or postoperative, was a major cause of death. They treated e
ffects without fully understanding causes, injuries without knowing the circumstances that had led to them. Did a shrapnel wound come from enemy or friendly fire? Was a bullet wound the result of holding the line or scattering in retreat? If they found shards of porcelain, they knew, as Duke Clement did firsthand, that they were from Nambu machine guns, which took porcelain bullets. But removed from the front, the navy doctors fought a different kind of war, one in a continuous present where the only constant was a steady influx of injuries and an increasing incidence of disease.
After the Battle of the Points, Japanese casualties were evacuated to Hospital No. 1. Major Alfred A. Weinstein was one of the army doctors who helped clean their wounds and operate on them. Then they were fed, issued linens and towels, and given “the same chow, cigarettes, and candy that our men got, no more, no less.”
One Japanese soldier with a bullet wound in his upper arm fled the operating room, “wild-eyed with terror,” as he was being strapped down for anesthesia. He was finally cornered and put to sleep. Asked why he had been so scared, an interpreter explained that “his officers have told him that the Americans torture and kill all prisoners.”
After a while the Japanese prisoners of war learned enough English to talk with the hospital staff. They loved American baseball, were wild about Babe Ruth, and insisted that the Japanese would never bomb a hospital. They were grateful for their treatment at the hands of the Americans and could not understand why the United States and Japan were fighting. Of several dozen Japanese POWs, only two died.
Ironically, their treatment as POWs appears to have been more favorable than that accorded Japanese-Americans in the hysteria that swept across the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. “It is possible to test the loyalty of American citizens of Caucasian origin,” declared California attorney general Earl Warren, “but not the loyalty of Japanese Americans.” Decades of simmering resentment had boiled over into ugly racial stereotyping. Japanese-Americans were considered potential threats to Boeing Aircraft in Washington State, to defense plants in Los Angeles, and to transportion and communications facilities. Second-generation Japanese-Americans were the most dangerous, believed Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The fact that no evidence of sabotage had been discovered in the months since Pearl Harbor was merely confirmation, argued Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, engineer of the evacuation program, “that such action will be taken.” After all, said Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, “a Jap is a Jap.” On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of all Japanese-Americans. Over the next eight months 111,999 “persons of Japanese ancestry” were forcibly relocated from California, Washington, and Oregon and placed “in the Zone of Interior in uninhabited areas where they can do no harm under guard,” as Bendetsen described it. In ten spartan relocation camps they were held for an average of 900 days, their rights subject to military edict, whereas the rights of the Japanese prisoners of war in Hospital No. 1 on Bataan were respected by the medical staff and protected under the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
Admissions to Hospitals Nos. 1 and 2 were restricted to serious surgical or medical cases, those who were expected to be out of commission for more than twenty-one days, and “all psychoses and cases requiring mental observation.” Medical evacuation procedure called for wounded soldiers to be carried or lifted by stretcher to a battalion aid station, which was typically 500 yards behind the line of combat. This was the first stage in the chain of evacuation that enabled a casualty to be transported to a hospital in the rear, if necessary. Treatment was limited to controlling hemorrhages, treating shock, applying splints, bandages, and tourniquets, closing chest wounds, and administering morphine. A mile behind each battalion aid station was a collecting station, where sometimes emergency care was given and sometimes the wounded were merely inspected. Five miles behind the collecting station was the division clearing station, where it was determined if a casualty could endure the trip to the evacuation hospital, or required emergency surgery in a field hospital, which was usually adjacent to a division clearing station.
But nothing was as usual on Bataan. At Hospital No. 1 the army used a navy doctor, Carey Smith, as its chief of surgery, and a dozen navy corpsmen from Mariveles. And for the first time in U.S. history, nurses—American and Filipino—worked just a few kilometers behind the lines. Many of them preferred wearing army men’s shoes, army men’s socks, and army men’s coveralls—size 40—which were kindly provided by the Far East Air Force boys. Ann Bernatitus, the sole navy nurse on Bataan, described the scene at Hospital No. 1: “Wounded men would be waiting in lines of stretchers for us to get to them. Some amputations—maybe a leg, maybe a little one like a finger—abdominal operations, head cases, everything. People can get hit anyplace by a bomb. You’d be amazed about how little people complain, especially soldiers, and about how much punishment a human body can take.” The most unusual patient to be admitted to Hospital No. 1 was surely a baby girl whose Chinese mother was married to an American serviceman. She was named Victoria Bataan, slept in a bamboo cradle, and was swaddled in clothes sent over by Corregidor’s quartermaster.
From Hospital No. 2 the nurses could see dogfights and numerous bombings. The “angels of Bataan” were essential to the hospital organization, yet doctors and nurses alike were pushed beyond endurance. Personnel fell asleep outside to the sound of cicadas and monkeys chattering in the trees, iguanas skittering, and rats scurrying in the underbrush at night.
A shortage of fuel, a shortage of woolen blankets to treat shock, and a shortage of surgical equipment in the field made evacuation an arduous journey. As a result, medical installations were improvised closer to the front and took over responsibilities typically performed in the general hospitals. Accommodations were sought wherever there was shelter, be it a massive stone church (like the one at Abucay that doubled as a regimental aid and collecting station for the 57th Combat Team of the Philippine Scouts) or a clearing station carved out of the jungle (such as the 400-bed field hospitals for the 21st and 41st Medical Battalions of the Philippine Army). The policy of forward hospitalization evolved by necessity. As Colonel Wibb E. Cooper, surgeon, U.S. Forces in the Philippines, was well aware, it was “in direct violation of all standard medical tactics.” Because if the front fell back, the forward medical installations would be overrun by enemy troops, as had happened in the Malayan campaign. For that reason the 12th Medical Battalion of the Philippine Scouts was transferred from II Corps to Luzon Force as an emergency evacuation force.
As one piece of doggerel put it, the situation was normal—all fucked up. Hence the word Snafu.
If you hear a muffled chortle
Then look close above the portal
There you’ll see the sign immortal
Snafu.
Operation maps galore
Spread by G’s upon the floor
Prove what Sherman said of war
Snafu.
Couriers dash in and out
Chiefs of Sections madly shout
Not a person now can doubt
Snafu.
When in danger fear or doubt
When the bombs fall all about
Run in circles, scream and shout
Snafu.
Japs have landed everywhere
And their planes control the air
We can only stand and blare
Snafu.
Air support we sadly lack
Day by day our lines fall back
But the troops will never crack
Snafu.
Anti-aircraft standing by
Firing way into the sky
But the Japs just fly too high
Snafu.
Slopes of Natib are tabu
Far too steep for me and you
But the hardy Japs came through
Snafu.
All day and through the night
Troops would rather
stand and fight
But they’ve seen the awful sight
Snafu.
Warning sirens ghastly wail
Like a banshee in a gale
Turns the whole damn Army pale
Snafu.
Close the gap between the corps
But the corps commander swore
Through that gap no Jap can pour
Snafu.
Rations have been cut in half
Now our bread is mixed with chaff
But we still can force a laugh
Snafu.
Hang on still another day
Help is surely on the way
So we hold the Japs at bay
Snafu.
The aid station of the 2nd Battalion had been so close to the Abucay front that army doctor Captain Ralph Emerson Hibbs could hear the cries of the Japanese after each mortar explosion. At one point Major Moffit ordered a litter team across the line, and both bearers were wounded.
Hibbs was furious. “Damn it!” he admonished Moffit. “I wish no one would order my men forward for casualties without my approval. What do you want them to do, kill the Japs, advance the line, and at the same time pick up the wounded?”
There were twenty-eight men in Hibbs’s medical detachment and, during the Abucay-Hacienda battle, a dozen or so in his aid station who were “tagging, applying tourniquets, compressing wounds to stop their bleeding, giving hypos and oral medications, washing and bandaging, fitting slings. . . . My hands were bloody all day.” There were no IVs on the front, no plasma for transfusions. Those who could walk were given field tags that were hung around their necks with a brief description of their wounds and then advised to get their asses to the rear as quickly as possible. For the nonambulatory, litters were made from bamboo poles that were tied together with vines, and then a blanket was stretched between them. A collar was fashioned at one end so the litter could be dragged by calesa pony—the Bataan Ambulance Service, the men joked—or by hand.