Conduct Under Fire Page 6

  On May 1, 1898, just minutes after midnight, Commodore Dewey slipped into Manila Bay on the flagship USS Olympia to locate and engage the Spanish squadron. The Baltimore, Raleigh, Petrel, Concord, and Boston followed at a distance of 400 yards between ships. A tropical haze hung over the water in the early morning hours, but at 5:40 A.M. the enemy was spotted within 5,000 yards, just off Sangley Point. Dewey casually ordered his captain: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.”

  Eleven out of twelve warships in the Spanish battle line were sunk in just seven hours. Spain, which began colonial rule under Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565, suddenly lost the first Asian country appropriated by the West. The United States not only won its first important naval battle since the War of 1812, it made its first territorial conquest overseas. With Spain’s defeat, Cuba was granted independence, while Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines became U.S. possessions.

  America gained one of the finest natural harbors in the Pacific, but it had not won the support of the Filipino people. Dewey unofficially supported insurgent operations against the Spanish in the Philippines, allowed Aguinaldo to take up quarters in Cavite, and even provided him with arms. Washington took a harder line. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo assumed control of Luzon and declared Filipino independence on June 12, 1898. He called for a constitutional convention, which drafted the first democratic constitution in Asia—only to have his plans undermined when Spain, which had surrendered its garrison in Manila to the United States, granted the United States sovereignty over the Philippines for a $20 million payment.

  A reluctant imperialist, President McKinley had sampled the mood of the American public and declared that the Filipino people were “unfit for self-government.” But McKinley was an ardent Christian who wanted to prove “that the mission of the United States” was one of “benevolent assimilation.” At the time, Major General Elwell Stephen Otis commanded American troops in Luzon. In a draft proclamation McKinley cabled to Otis on December 26, 1898, before the Senate had ratified the Treaty of Paris, the president proposed annexation of the archipelago.

  To Aguinaldo this meant war, and he rallied 30,000 troops against his new enemy. But once again the United States fired the first shot, this time to quell the so-called insurrection, which escalated into the full-blown Philippine-American War. It was a bloody, gruesome conflict. The Americans tortured their Filipino captives by forcing water down their throats and pouncing on their stomachs to elicit confessions. The Filipinos buried American prisoners of war alive and sprinkled trails of sugar toward their mouths so they could be devoured by ants. The Americans razed to the ground entire villages of men, women, and children, and it appears that they shot wounded prisoners.

  Savagery was easy to justify against an enemy seen as subhuman. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written in 1899 in response to the war, immortalized Western perceptions of Asians as “fluttered folk and wild . . . sullen peoples, half devil and half child.”

  Brigadier General Jacob Smith adopted that view with a vengeance in one of the most brutal campaigns waged by Americans in the Philippines. To retaliate for a surprise Filipino attack on the seventy-four-man garrison of Company C, 9th U.S. Infantry, at Balangiga on September 28, 1901, Smith allegedly ordered Major Littleton W. T. Waller to “kill and burn,” to turn the island of Samar into “a howling wilderness.” The objective was to eradicate guerrilla forces led by Vicente Lukban. No Filipino over ten years of age was to be spared. By year-end, more than 750 insurrectos had been captured or killed, and more than 1,600 homes were destroyed.

  The “war of insurrection” outraged many Americans. At its peak, the United States committed 71,528 troops—nearly three-quarters of its army—to the distant archipelago. Filipinos were hired to assist in the battle against Aguinaldo’s forces and then formed into the Philippine Scouts. By February 1901 the Philippine Scouts were an official unit of the U.S. Army.

  That same month Mark Twain excoriated American imperialism in an essay that appeared in the New York Sun entitled “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” “There must be two Americas,” Twain thundered. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”

  Aguinaldo was captured in 1901, the insurrection was declared over in 1902, though resistance continued for years. Dead were 20,000 Filipino soldiers and an estimated 200,000 civilians. With the U.S. victory, the forces of civilization had won over “the black chaos of savagery and barbarism,” proclaimed President Theodore Roosevelt.

  As if to atone for a war they initiated, the Americans began building a nation. They constructed roads and bridges, dug dams and artesian wells. They engineered sanitation and sewage systems, eradicated smallpox, introduced a five-day work week, and instituted American-style public school education with English as the language of instruction. The city’s most illustrious buildings were intended to evoke the neoclassical ideal that inspired Daniel Burnham’s architecture in Washington, D.C. The Army-Navy Club was erected in 1909, the Manila Hotel in 1912, and both were designed by Burnham’s student William Parsons. William Howard Taft, the first civil governor of the Philippines, commissioned Burnham himself to design the summer capital at Baguio in the style of an Adirondack great camp, nestled in northern Luzon among verdant forests and cooled by mountain breezes.

  By then relations between Americans and “our little brown brothers,”33 as Taft dubbed them, were warm, though gross economic inequities persisted and America monopolized imports into the Philippines. The Filipinos accepted American institutions and benefited from their “can do” optimism and expertise. In 1935 the United States granted the Philippines “internal autonomy,” and Manuel L. Quezon, who had fought as a nationalist guerrilla during the “insurrection” and surrendered to Major General Arthur MacArthur in 1900, became the first president of the commonwealth. As called for by the Tydings-McDuffie Act, the Philippines would achieve independence in 1946.

  In the spring of 1934 Quezon approached MacArthur’s son, Douglas, with the idea of becoming his national defense adviser. Douglas MacArthur had seen three tours of duty in the Philippines and was chief of staff of the U.S. Army. He had genuine affection for the mercurial Quezon. His enjoyment of the Filipino people, he said, exerted “a grip that has never relaxed.” Nothing if not confident, he assured Quezon that under his guidance the Philippines would be able to defend itself by the time it gained independence. Roosevelt and Secretary of War George H. Dern approved the appointment, which MacArthur saw as a “fitting end” to his military career.

  But the primary role of the Philippine Army, according to the U.S. Army’s War Plans Division, was not defense but the suppression of armed insurrection. Due to the lack of resources, it “would be wholly ineffective, in itself, to protect the Philippine Islands against Japan.” For that the Philippines would have to depend on the United States. It was a fact that caused Quezon, whose “first duty” was to the Filipino citizenry, great ambivalence in his personal relations with MacArthur and toward America’s war strategy in the Philippines.

  Since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the United States had regarded Japan as its only potential enemy in the Pacific. As early as 1906 Leonard Wood, who became governor general of the Philippines, predicted a Japanese attack on Hawaii as well as the Philippines. Manila was some 5,000 miles from Honolulu, but a mere 1,800 from Tōkyō, and Manila Bay was coveted as one of the most desirable natural harbors in the East.

  Strategists argued that the Philippine Division, the primary U.S. Army unit in the islands (consisting of the Philippine Scouts and one American regiment), was no match for the Japanese. U.S. Army War College studies predicted that Manila could be held for only a few months in the event of a Japanese attack. Others argued that Manila Bay had no strategic significance since the Pacific Fleet couldn’t possibly arrive in time to relieve the defenders. At best, the defense of the area
would be part of a sacrificial delaying action.

  In its war plans the Joint Army and Navy Board had assigned Japan the color orange, and the United States the color blue. The strategy to defeat Japan was referred to as War Plan Orange and called for the retreat of 43,000 troops to the Bataan peninsula in an attempt to stave off the enemy, hold Corregidor, and thereby protect Manila Bay. At the first shot the main components of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet were to withdraw behind the Malay barrier and engage Japanese shipping while awaiting the Pacific Fleet’s westward advance from Pearl Harbor. But in spite of numerous revisions to the plan, the latest being War Plan Orange-3, the same conclusion emerged: the Philippines could not be defended. The Philippines relied on the United States for its defense, yet the United States had long written it off as indefensible. Europe, Roosevelt decided in January 1940, came first.

  General MacArthur, however, considered WPO-3 defeatist. On July 27, 1941, he was named commander of the newly formed U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), which comprised 31,000 U.S. Army troops and 120,000 officers and enlisted men in the Philippine Army. The next month WPO-3 blossomed into the Rainbow Plan, which gave precedence to the war against Germany over the war in the Pacific theater. MacArthur nonetheless insisted that the Philippines could be defended. The “citadel type defense” of Manila Bay, envisioned in the Orange and Rainbow Plans, had to be changed to an all-out defense of the archipelago. A fleet of motor torpedo boats and the addition of B-17 bombers could protect the coast of Luzon, MacArthur claimed. The newly mobilized Philippine Army would make enemy infiltration “practically impossible” because it would hold the beaches “at all costs.”

  The War Department agreed and in November 1941 incorporated MacArthur’s tactical ideas into the revised plan known as Rainbow 5. In a matter of weeks the granite-jawed general had managed to reverse decades of military thinking. He was convinced that the Japanese wouldn’t attempt an invasion of the Philippines until April 1942, by which time the defending forces would have increased to 200,000 men.

  Army Chief of Staff General George Catlett Marshall promised that U.S. troop strength in the Philippines would be doubled by the end of 1941. Hundreds of B-17 heavy bombers would arrive as soon as possible, vowed Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson, a former governor of the Philippines, to be followed by hundreds of pursuit planes and heavy guns in early 1942.

  It was as if the army had single-handedly declared possible what the navy had long said was improbable. As Admiral Albert Winterhalter, commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, tersely expressed his opinion in a cable to the Office of Naval Operations in 1916:BELIEVE SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE OF ALL PHILIPPINES OR ANY PART IMPRACTICABLE, PROHIBITIVE COST NEEDLESS SACRIFICE. COMMAND OF SEA ONLY PROPER SECURITY. NAVY BASES UNDEFENDED USELESS.

  By September 1941, the Cavite Navy Yard was a beehive of activity. Commands in English and conversations in Tagalog were interrupted by the sounds of hammering, welding, drilling, and riveting. Engines whined, ensigns cursed, and dock hands hurried to tie up boats or undo lines for the vessels coming and going from the horseshoe-shaped pier.

  The major port facility of the Asiatic Fleet since the autumn of 1940, the Navy Yard was built around old Fort San Felipe and occupied the eastern half of Cavite, whose name, derived from the Tagalog kawit, means “hook.” At peak capacity, some 6,000 to 8,000 Filipinos and Americans worked there day and night. Their job was to repair and arm the boats in Lieutenant John Bulkeley’s Motor Torpedo Boat (MTB) Squadron 3, as well as maintain and supply the six S-class submarines, the tenders and minesweepers, cruisers and destroyers of the Asiatic Fleet that were between patrols, escorts, or naval exercises in the southern islands.

  Machine shops, storehouses, a foundry, a radio laboratory, and a receiving station lined Guadalupe Pier. The Pillsbury and the Peary, the latter an old four-stack destroyer that was the flagship of Destroyer Division 59, were moored at Central Wharf. The submarine tender Otus docked at the head of Machina Wharf, where two fleet-type submarines, the Seadragon and the Sealion, floated next to the minesweeper Bittern. A power plant, a joiner shop, a captain’s quarters, a drafting room, and a submarine shop cornered Machina Wharf, at the tip of which was the destroyer receiving station and the dispensary.

  Seven hundred tons of ammunition were stored at the center of the Navy Yard, which was protected by three antiaircraft batteries at Sangley Point (A), Caridad (B), and Binakayan (C), and was manned by the 1st Separate Marine Battalion at Cavite. The batteries were armed with four 3-inch dual-purpose (surface or air) guns of World War I vintage with a range of 15,000 feet, supported by water-cooled .50-caliber machine guns from Battery D. The high water level of Cavite meant that slit trenches could be dug to a depth of only two to three feet. An SCR-270B mobile air warning device on loan from the army and operated by the communications unit of the 1st Separate Marine Battalion was set up at Wawa Beach near Nasugbu, in Batangas Province, a hundred miles to the south. This was radar (an acronym for “radio detection and ranging”), and it was so secret that the mechanic who worked on the generator didn’t even know what it was for. The 270B was designed for early air warning and could compute the distance and azimuth but not the altitude of an aircraft. It had a range of 196 miles, but there were only two other functioning units in the Philippines, one at Iba Field on Luzon’s west coast, and another in Ilocos Norte, near the Cape Bojeador lighthouse on the north coast. The army’s air warning system depended on primitive radar, visual surveillance, and “wooden ears” that could detect the rumble of aircraft from afar. Some were made by Native Americans in the 60th Coast Artillery Regiment on Corregidor; others were in northern Luzon. They were ingenious devices but limited in effectiveness by a range of only thirty miles and their inability to differentiate sounds.

  Admiral Hart had a distant view of Cavite from the offices of the Asiatic Fleet in the Marsman Building on the Manila waterfront. The Japanese also closely watched Navy Yard activities and reported back to Tōkyō on arms shipments and troop arrivals. Thousands of Japanese had penetrated the fabric of Filipino life, dominating the photography business, operating service stations, and working as barbers and bartenders while they spied for their government. Nearly half the Japanese nationals in Manila, American counterintelligence estimated, were Japanese military reservists. Japanese military personnel had flown photoreconaissance missions in commercial airplanes over the Philippines. They had layouts of Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor and maps of coastal artillery positions, just as the Japanese before Pearl Harbor had obtained precise maps of military facilities down to the location of every U.S. battleship, submarine, seaplane tender, and torpedo net. The U.S. Navy extensively mined Subic Bay and Manila Bay, but from the air, the Cavite Navy Yard was an enemy aviator’s dream.

  Murray reported to Lieutenant Commander Hjalmer A. Erickson, Medical Officer of the Yard in charge of the dispensary.

  “You and I have a lot in common,” said Erickson, a Seventh-Day Adventist.

  “We do?” the young lieutenant asked in surprise.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” he explained, “we observe the Sabbath just like Jews.”

  What a funny son of a bitch, Murray thought. Then again, the 16th Naval District had a reputation for funny sons of bitches. Rumor was the last commandant, Rear Admiral John M. Smeallie, had attempted seppuku by plunging a Moro dagger into his stomach and had to be invalided home. Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell took the distraught admiral’s place.

  The dispensary was a two-story wooden structure with a carpenter’s shop on one side and a print shop on the other. Examination rooms were on the ground floor. The medical officers were housed in the bachelor officers’ quarters above, which Murray shared with Erickson, Lieutenant ( j.g.) Gordon K. Lambert, and Lieutenant ( j.g.) Ferdinand V. “Fred” Berley. Erickson notwithstanding, it was a solid group of men, but it was Fred whom Murray found most interesting.

  Fred had been transferred to Cavite on A
ugust 21, 1941, after serving at the regimental hospital in Shanghai. Slightly built but tough as nails, he was a former Golden Gloves champion with a bit of swagger. But he was affable, talkative, and always ready to offer advice—the kind of guy who knew the ropes before anyone else had even seen the rigging. Wasn’t afraid to remind you of that fact, either. He loved to tell stories and often saw himself as a character in them. As if on cue, he’d narrow his eyes when the plot thickened, then open them wide in amazement as if hearing the denouement for the first time. He was disciplined, dedicated, well educated, and street smart.

  A Chicagoan by birth, he was the eldest of three brothers whose father, Guy, had emigrated from Alta Monte, Italy, in 1898. A close-knit family, the Berleys lived on Chicago’s West Side, a beautiful section of the city whose broad boulevards, open spaces, and natural attractions just beckoned to a young boy. A few blocks from where they lived was the vast Conservatory at Garfield Park, where you could see bananas, orchids, and palms growing in one of the eight exhibition halls. Walk west to lovely Columbus Park, and you could swim, play tennis, golf, explore the waterfalls, or just stroll along the streams that meandered through a meadow. Take the streetcar to the end of the line, and you’d be in the woods, which was where Fred spent much of his time as a Boy Scout, honing skills, learning how to be self-reliant and how to lead while still being part of a team.

  His father worked long hours as an engineer for the Chicago Tunnel Company in the city’s Loop. His uncle Sam encouraged the boys in sports—boxing, baseball, cycling, weightlifting. Fred bought a BB gun that he and his brother Guy used to target their kid brother, Alfred. They’d set a bull’s-eye on a pillow, set the pillow on Alfred’s rear, and then fire away. “Some fun!” as Alfred described it. But Alfred worshiped his elder brother—a talented athlete, a gifted pianist, and captain of the high school fencing team. Fred excelled at whatever he put his mind to and had a knack for bringing home girls who, on Alfred’s scorecard, were simply “knockouts.”