Conduct Under Fire Read online

  A terrific concussion shook the structure, seeming to lift it right off the ground. Dust and debris blasted through the window. A palm tree rocketed up and plunged down into a crater. The din was earsplitting as bombs fell, buildings imploded, and ground defenses answered back.

  The paint locker withstood the hit, but the brig was in flames. The earth vibrated from explosions. The power plant was ablaze, reducing water pressure to a trickle and rendering the firefighting equipment useless. Rear Admiral Francis W. Rockwell, commandant of the 16th Naval District, called Manila for help, worried that the fires would reach the ammunition dump.

  Waves of Japanese bombers flew over Cavite with impunity, completely out of reach of the antiaircraft fire. With power-train fuses, the 3-inch guns had a vertical range of 17,000 feet and a horizontal reach of 6,000 yards. But Japanese fighters could fly up to 27,000 feet, and bombers as high as 26,000 feet. The ship and shore batteries fired anyway.

  Out at Battery C, Corpsman Ernie Irvin watched an American P-40 pancake down into mud. Two PBYs—Catalina flying boats—took off from Sangley Point, luring a dive bomber from an enemy squadron over Nichols Field. Battery A opened fire, and the plane went screaming into Manila Bay, the only kill of the 1st Separate Battalion at Cavite.

  A bomb rattled down into the engine-room hatch of the Sealion; another blew apart its conning tower, which slammed into the conning tower of the Seadragon, instantly decapitating the engineering officer. Inflammable liquid from the Sealion splashed onto the Bittern, setting her deck on fire. Shrapnel and incendiary bombs splattered Central Wharf. One bomb slammed into the Peary and shattered its foremast, killing eight of her crew. Erickson, whose first name, Hjalmer, means “one who loves the sea,” was blown into the bay and emerged with a chunk of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder.

  Out of fright, Filipinos ran from cover during the bombing and were shredded by shrapnel. Some were having lunch just outside the main gate of the Navy Yard. The wounded straggled to the porch of the Navy Yard dispensary, only to be decimated when it received a direct hit. Body parts hung from fences. One woman had her clothes blown off. Another civilian ran terror-stricken with his right pants leg shorn away, exposing bone from his midcalf to his buttocks. You could see the tendons and muscles as clearly as an illustration in Gray’s Anatomy, but strangely enough there didn’t seem to be any blood. Private Ted “Willie” Williams, a marine who worked in the Air Warning Service in Batangas, was driving a truck toward the bridge that separated Cavite from the barrio of Caridad when he stopped to pick him up. The injured man opened his mouth as if about to say something and then died before Williams’s eyes.

  Over at the garage near Fort San Felipe, a sailor ran with a baby drenched in blood calling “Medic! Medic!” One corpsman took the baby, while another promptly gave the sailor an injection. “Not me,” he shouted, “the baby, you fool!” He was completely unaware that his left arm had been severed at the shoulder. The ground was strewn with dead and wounded. One headless corpse remained with collar and necktie perfectly intact.

  Casualties began to pour into the paint locker. A Filipino workman’s hand was dangling from his wrist; Fred amputated it instantly. But someone had forgotten fuel for the kerosene lamps, so the doctors and corpsmen worked in darkness, the wounds of their patients—burns, lacerations, fractures, and the cyanotic pallor of shock—illumined by the eerie glow of flashlight. The heat from the fires soon forced the men outside, where the sky was black with smoke.

  High winds fanned the flames in the yard. Marines formed firefighting brigades with buckets of water, while Filipino fire companies tried to prevent the ammunition depot from igniting. Civilians combed neighborhood drugstores for medicine and gauze. The docks were lined with wounded. Murray helped evacuate patients to Cañacao by truck; then he and Lambert joined Fred down at Guadalupe Pier, commandeered a launch, and ferried more casualties over to the hospital. On the way they saw two marines sitting on a raft in the middle of the bay, strapped to two warheads they had salvaged from the torpedo warehouse. Murray couldn’t believe what he was seeing. They were laughing and waving like ghouls in a Bosch painting, as if the carnage in Cavite were nothing but a bad dream.

  Forty minutes later, when the bombing was finally over, Ernie Irvin jumped into a banca—an outrigger canoe—to see if the pilot in the P-40 was okay and found him bawling like a baby. He was out of gas, he said. He had seen one of his buddies blown up when he took off from Nichols Field, he explained. But there were no holes in his plane, he had plenty of ammo, and his guns weren’t jammed. It’s his story that’s full of holes, Irvin thought.

  At 1600 the cry went out: “The admiral says clear the yard!” Trucks couldn’t keep up with the number of dead being transported from Cavite to the temporary morgue. The hospital’s front lawn was covered with bodies. The boat landing behind it was pooled with blood. Inside, Cañacao was overflowing with hundreds of wounded. The lights were out, the elevator had died, patients lined the stairwells. After first aid was administered, civilians were transferred to local Filipino hospitals around Cavite, or to Philippine General in Manila. Some casualties were evacuated onto the Maryanne, J. Marsman’s diesel yacht, and disembarked at the Army-Navy Club, where ambulances and buses were waiting to take patients and personnel to Sternberg. Lieutenant Commander James D. Boone ran beside a patient’s stretcher to finish amputating a leg before he reached the evacuation boat.

  The medical officer of the Otus burst into tears when he saw Berley. “Fred,” he said, “I thought you had been killed.” Berley had been right to challenge Lambert—changing the location of the main battle aid station had saved their lives. But one corpsman, Durward Allen Laney, who was assigned to Lieutenant ( j.g.) Robert G. Herthneck of the Dental Corps, somehow hadn’t gotten the message. Laney was killed instantly when the dispensary took a direct hit. Five corpsmen attached to Cañacao were missing and believed dead.

  Murray was assigned to the receiving and shock wards at Cañacao. Fred helped triage the wounded. They cleaned and dressed lacerations, applied splints, injected morphine sulphate when necessary, and administered tetanus antitoxin.

  The operating rooms on the top floor were working full blast under generator light. The mangled bodies of men, women, and children were “brought up to us and dumped like piles of human offal,” said the chief of surgery, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hirst Hayes, “all guts and brains and bones.”

  Fred asked Hayes if he could be of further assistance. They could use an extra hand, Hayes replied. Fred slipped on a surgical gown and, with Lieutenant Commander Carey Miller Smith, assistant chief of surgery, operated until the early hours of the morning.

  In less than twelve hours, 285 patients passed through Smith’s OR. The casualties were gruesome—severed limbs, facial lacerations, disfiguring burns, bodies ripped by shrapnel. Fred was soaked to the skin in blood, and the nurses could only rinse his gown and bring it back to him wet before he bloodied himself again. He slept in the crawl space under Cañacao as fires stole darkness from the night.

  Some 300 bombs had fallen on Cavite, an area of just 50 acres. The Sealion was crippled; the Seadragon and Bittern were damaged; 233 Mark 14 torpedoes that carried 500-pound warheads were lost. Five hundred people were killed, including the first five U.S. submariners to die in the war; 400 more were wounded. The Navy Yard was ravaged, perforated by so many craters that from the air it looked as if Cavite itself should have sunk. Only Dreamland and the Marine Corps barracks were left standing.

  MacArthur’s wife, Jean, and their small son, Arthur, saw the inferno from the terrace of their sixth-floor apartment in the Manila Hotel. Admiral Hart, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I, watched helplessly from the rooftop of the Marsman Building. The naval base was inoperable. The remnants of the Asiatic Fleet would steam south, with the exception of the submarines, the tender Canopus, some PBYs, and Bulkeley’s MTB Squadron 3.

  In the coda of destruction you could hear the lowing of cows and
the howling of dogs deserted by their fleeing masters. Hundreds of canines feasted on human corpses before cannibalizing their own kind. The smell of scorched flesh, decaying bodies, and dead animals lingered in the air.

  Murray and Gordon Lambert spent the night at the Caridad School Yard. In the morning they picked up Fred and headed for Manila. Cavite was still burning, and the Naval Ammunition Depot was expected to blow at any minute. Cañacao was marked with a white cross and escaped the bombing unscathed, but the radio towers made a natural next target. All patients had been evacuated to Manila, where naval personnel were divided into four surgical teams and assigned to the annexes in Colonel Carroll’s Manila Hospital Center. Each team had a dentist to assist in facial wounds.

  The road to Manila was clogged with civilians bound for the hills. Whatever was left of their homes they stuffed onto carabao carts and into caretelas, strapped to packhorses and bicycles, baby carriages and wheelbarrows, or simply carried on their backs. Bloodied and dirty, the doctors received a change of clothes at the army supply depot and joined the Estado Mayor annex, where patients were being treated by the former Cañacao staff.

  Hayes took one look at the junior medical officers and realized that they had little idea of what lay ahead. They were young, smart, enthusiastic, and altogether lacking in field experience. He hoped there would be enough time for some basic training “before too much was expected of them.”

  That evening Fleet Surgeon Lowman came to Estado Mayor with his driver and took Fred to the Army-Navy Club, where Ernie and Rose Necker were waiting. Lowman told him that Lieutenant Commander Ernest Marion Wade, the acting regimental surgeon, had requested that Berley rejoin the 4th Marines in Olongapo. If Fred didn’t want to go, Wade would choose someone else. Fred was happy to oblige, but when he returned to Estado Mayor, he found Hayes in a fury. Berley’s orders had come in. Where the hell had he been?

  “With Captain Lowman, sir,” Fred replied.

  Hayes simmered down, but thereafter Fred thought, This is no friend of mine.

  The Cañacao staff was on the move again. Erickson had made arrangements to establish a new naval hospital at Philippine Union College, a Seventh-Day Adventist school seven miles outside Manila in Balintawak. Why? To become some haven for refugees? Hayes resented the fact that the navy’s prewar plan had been abandoned. The district medical officer, Captain Davis, was supposed to turn command of Cañacao’s staff over to his executive, and that should have been Hayes. But it hadn’t happened that way. Instead, circumstance and personal preferences had determined directives. Davis seemed more interested in sitting out the war “in the country,” Hayes bristled, than coordinating activities with the army, to which the navy was attached for tactical purposes.

  As a result, doctors were dispatched around Manila like ambulances racing to the latest emergency. Murray was sent to the annex at Holy Ghost Convent and College. Fred was transferred to Olongapo after the Japanese bombed the naval station and destroyed a fleet of PBYs at their moorings. George remained behind to help set up an aid station at the end of Cañacao Boulevard on Radio Road. There they could treat the antiaircraft batteries that had moved into the hospital and radio area, a 2,000-strong contingent of the Philippine Army and remnants of the 16th Naval District.

  In the meantime the Provisional Military Police and detachments from the Filipino Fleet Reserve began to bury the dead at the Cavite Navy Yard. George, Lieutenant Commander R. C. Strong, and three corpsmen were on hand to help identify bodies.

  It was a grisly task. Corpses were bloated beyond recognition. Eyeballs had exploded in sockets from the heat. Brain matter oozed out from fractured skulls. The stench was overpowering. Some men were sick; others wore gas masks. They drank liquor freely. Commander Strong wept. Of the 167 bodies he disposed of, George could identify only seven. They cremated a few by dousing them with kerosene; bomb craters became tombs for the rest. Laney’s remains were never found. There was no chaplain present to recite from Genesis 3:19, “You are dust and unto dust you will return,” only Commander Strong to offer a few words of solace before the makeshift graves were filled with dirt.

  In two days the Japanese had eviscerated the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Hawaii base, crippled the Far East Air Force, scattered the Asiatic Fleet, and destroyed its base of operations. They had landed at Aparri on the north coast of Luzon and reconnoitered around Lingayen Gulf.

  In two days the navy doctors witnessed death on a scale they couldn’t possibly have imagined, realized how close they themselves had come to dying, and been sobered by the role chance played in their survival. Laney’s fate could just as easily have been their own.

  They were left with nothing except the clothes on their backs. Murray’s camera equipment, Fred’s memorabilia, their tuxedoes and bow ties, their sharkskin jackets, their medical texts and black bags, the signs of their accomplishments and potential, all were destroyed. Home was a memory now, without any artifact, just as the pictures Murray had taken in the Philippines, the furniture Fred had brought over from Shanghai, and the mementos of their lives in the Pacific had literally gone up in smoke.

  They saw, finally, how quickly identities could be erased, how tenuous was the thread between existence and annihilation. Cavite, as Marine Corps Private James L. Kent put it, was a “red sunset.”

  4

  Invisible Enemies

  IN THE DENSELY FOLIATED FOOTHILLS of southern Bataan, Lieutenant ( j.g.) John Jacob Bookman stalked a silent enemy. Small and elusive, it haunted the streams that flowed down the mountains of the peninsula’s interior. It looked harmless enough, but it carried a parasite that made men tremble with cold, then rage with hellishly high fevers, until the cycle of violent chills and drenching sweats began all over again. Left untreated, the parasite could weaken the body’s immune system and induce lethargy, delirium, coma, and finally, death. Anopheles minimus flavirostris was its name, a small, speckled mosquito that can ingest more blood than its own body weight, and it was the primary vector in the Philippines for Plasmodium falciparum, the most lethal cause of human malaria.

  The parasite is introduced into the bloodstream by the female mosquito as she feeds on a human host. Then it becomes motile, migrates to the liver, divides into merozoites, and breaks through the cell membrane. In just seven days a few dozen malaria sporozoites can spawn tens of thousands of merozoites that surge into the bloodstream before the immune system has time to respond. In another week, when telltale symptoms begin to appear, the single-celled protozoa will have established a colony that numbers in the trillions, and those colonies can bring armies of men to their knees.

  Malaria flourished in the swamps around Rome and ravaged German troops who tried, in the tenth and twelfth centuries, to conquer “The Queen of the World.” The disease played a decisive role in the Siege of Mantua in 1796-97. During the American War Between the States it annually infected more than 50 percent of the Caucasian troops and 80 percent of the Negro soldiers in northern armies. In the first year of the Spanish-American War, malaria accounted for 90,461 hospital admissions, and in Macedonia in 1918 it afflicted nearly 100,000 French and more than 25,000 British troops. In the 1930s it was estimated that there were between one and two million cases of malaria in the Philippines “at all times.”

  Bataan’s lowland rivers, its freshwater streams with undercut ledges, and its shady banks where one bathed, washed, and cooked were the ideal habitat for Anopheles minimus. The natives could vouch for it. On the flat eastern coastal plain, infection rates in the villages reached 50 percent or more.

  Armed with Patrick Manson’s Tropical Diseases, the nineteenth-century “Manual of the Diseases of the Warm Climates,” John wondered why military strategists hadn’t addressed the threat posed by malaria before. After all, War Plan Orange-3 had called for the withdrawal of 43,000 troops to Bataan as a delaying defensive action until naval reinforcements could arrive from the United States.

  But how could Bataan be defended if the defenders themselves were
laid low by disease? How could you fight two enemies at once? MacArthur himself had contracted malaria in 1904, when he supervised a survey of the military reservation at Mariveles. Didn’t anyone in the army understand the extent of the malaria problem on Bataan?

  The question surprised no one more than John Bookman himself, an Upper East Sider whose ambition was to practice internal medicine in New York City, not parasitology in the Philippines. He couldn’t have been more out of place in this torrid tropical wilderness. But as foreign as it was to him, he managed to make a home out of it.

  Tall and slender, with a hawkish nose and light blue eyes, John had a self-effacing demeanor that could be seen as an attempt to dissociate himself from an illustrious family history, or as a ploy to be remarkable by his very unremarkableness.

  He grew up in a five-story building that his father, Samuel, had purchased at 48 East 82nd Street, between Park and Madison Avenues. The family of five had a staff of seven: a governess, nurse, cook, waitress, laundress, chambermaid, and chauffeur.

  Samuel was a biochemist whose father, Jacob Bookman, had emigrated from Germany to America in 1841. Jacob had settled in Selma, Alabama, worked in textiles, and then made a fortune in real estate. He moved to New York City, sold properties to Andrew Carnegie, and became a member of Temple Emanu-El, the first Reform Jewish congregation in New York City, founded in 1845. Samuel managed his father’s estate and also worked at Mount Sinai, where he established the first biochemistry laboratory in an American hospital. In 1917 he founded a clinic for diseases of metabolism, mainly diabetes. One of his pupils was Bela Schick, who invented the diphtheria immunity test that bears his name. Another colleague was Burrill B. Crohn, who described the intestinal infection known as Crohn’s disease. Yet another was Arthur Koplik, who identified the blotchy red, white, and blue spots on the lining of the cheek that mark the beginning of measles.