1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Yet before water could become the surrender-forcing issue, Homma’s people launched their attack. On May 4, the Japanese ratcheted up their bombardment yet again, which even those on the Rock believed was impossible. Before that day was out some sixteen thousand shells had landed on Corregidor with such intensity that the explosions seemed almost a continuous roar. Many were concerned that the tunnel itself, shaking as in an earthquake, would collapse and kill them all.† During the afternoon observers reported seeing a number of Japanese landing barges along the Bataan coast. As a result of the stupendous bombardment during the past several days, morale had plummeted and “men were living on nerve alone.”

  The atmosphere in the tunnel was described as “morgue-like gloom,” and a captain wrote of “a feeling of doom, mingled with wonder.” Even Wainwright’s resolve was wavering; he reported by cable to Marshall in Washington that the “situation here is fast becoming desperate. I estimate that we have something less than an even chance to beat off an assault.” On second thought, “wavering resolve” might be too strong an expression; more likely he was just being realistic.10 In a later message to the president, Wainwright told him, “There is a limit to human endurance, and that limit has long since been past [sic].”

  The night of May 4, following yet another exceptional barrage, the Japanese launched two thousand men in assault boats and barges to finish off Corregidor. This was to be only the first wave of a continuous ferrying operation until they had superiority over the Americans. But the Japanese had not taken into account the strong currents that rushed between the Rock and the tip of Bataan and they landed more than a mile away from their intended destination at the thin tip of Corregidor’s tail and, as luck had it, right into the positions of the First Marine Battalion, which mowed them down with ferocious machine-gun fire and sank or damaged most of the barges and boats. Of the original two thousand, only six hundred Japanese survived to crawl across the beaches.

  As it turned out that was enough. With communications yet again cut by artillery fire, conflicting and erroneous reports came in about other Japanese landings. Fierce firefights ensued; foxholes and trenches were overrun and artillery batteries and machine-gun positions were taken. Before the sun rose Japanese tanks could be heard moving off the beaches toward the American lines. There was no shortage of heroism that night, or the next morning, either. Of the 15,000 U.S. forces on Corregidor, only 3,600 were trained combat troops; the rest were a grab bag of command and support personnel, doctors and nurses, cooks and bottle washers, communications and finance people, engineer troops and civilians left over from the Philippine government. To make it all the more difficult, those 3,600 had to protect nearly six miles of beaches, not knowing where the Japanese would actually land.

  All through the night beneath a brilliant tropic moon there was confused and desperate fighting as the Japanese slowly clawed their way up the heights toward the Malinta Tunnel. It was a battle of small arms: rifles, bayonets, knives, rocks, even fists and choking hands. Against the tanks, the Americans had only improvised Molotov cocktails—bottles filled with gasoline or oil and lit with a paper or cloth fuse.

  As dawn broke on May 5, 1942, more Japanese were seen to be arriving on the landing barges, but their forward progress toward the tunnel had been stopped at a lesser eminence called Water Tank Hill. There, as the heat rose, men on both sides fought and died in a bloodthirsty battle that lasted all morning, but the Japanese still had not broken through. While General Homma paced nervously at his command post at the tip of Bataan and worried that his assault would end in failure, up in the tunnel Wain-wright made a fateful decision.

  Concerned that a breakthrough would expose the thousands of badly wounded soldiers in the tunnel to a Japanese massacre and aware that, even if the water situation had not been critical, there was no way they could hold out against the now quarter-million-man Japanese army in the Philippines, which could land its troops at will, he decided on a course of action that was as repugnant to him as it was sensible. He would surrender.

  “Tell the Nips we’ll cease firing at noon,” Wainwright informed his commanders. As the news spread through the tunnel many men burst into tears and the radio operator who had faithfully kept up communications with Washington through the Pacific network tapped out his home address in Brooklyn, then signed off with his final message: “Tell Mother how you heard from me.”

  The men fought right up until the end. Major William “Wild Bill” Massello’s last remaining twelve-inch mortar was now manned by an assortment of motorpool personnel, cooks, and clerks after one regular gun crew after another had been killed or wounded. The gun pit had become a shambles of blown-up or collapsed concrete, torn bodies, and burning ammunition cases. Still they kept on firing the twenty-five-year-old piece, raining destruction on the Japanese invasion forces. Major Massello himself remained in the gun pit, directing fire; at one point, after hearing a rumor of the impending surrender, he ordered the telephone to be ripped from the wall so as not to receive such a detestable order.

  Determined to fight it out, Massello kept up a steady fire until he, too, was put out of commission with an arm almost severed and a leg split completely open by a Japanese shell. Nevertheless, he remained to direct the action from a stretcher until the weapon’s breechblock froze and it fell silent. “The old mortar had finally quit on us,” Massello remembered, “but it had lasted long enough to be the last big gun on Corregidor to fire on the enemy.”11

  At noon, an American colonel and his aide, accompanied by a bugler, went out from the tunnel through the fierce Japanese shellfire to the big flagpole on the parade ground and, while the bugler played taps, hauled down Old Glory and ran up a white bedsheet. Soon white flags began appearing all over the island, but the Japanese ignored this universal signal of surrender and continued their shelling with unabated fury. After more than an hour of this, Wainwright sent out two officers to find the Japanese commander and ask for a truce. When they found him, the Japanese stated that only Wainwright himself was acceptable to conduct the surrender. It was past two in the afternoon when Wainwright finally reached the Japanese command post; he was treated rudely by the Japanese colonel who received him but was soon ferried off Corregidor to Bataan for a meeting with General Homma.

  Once on Bataan Wainwright and his party were driven a few miles north to a “dingy white house not far from the beach,” where they were given some water to drink, then made to line up in the yard for the benefit of Japanese cameramen and newsreel photographers. Presently General Homma arrived, “dramatically, in a beautiful shiny Cadillac, accompanied by three overdressed aides.” The most striking impression Wainwright and the Americans recalled was Homma’s size. “He stood nearly six feet tall and must have weighed close to two hundred pounds,” Wainwright remembered. “He stood there for a moment, giving us a look of bored contempt,” then motioned for the Americans to follow him to the porch of the house.12

  Wainwright had prepared a formal document surrendering Corregidor and its small outlying forts, but Homma angrily rejected it, telling Wainwright he must surrender all U.S. forces in the Philippine Islands. (There were some 50,000 of these, posted in islands farther south.) Wainwright replied that he no longer commanded those men, that they were under the command of General William F. Sharp on Mindanao. At this, Homma became livid and, calling Wainwright a liar, informed him that unless and until all troops were surrendered, he considered the battle still on. Wainwright knew what this meant; all those defenseless thousands on Corregidor, who by now had destroyed their own weapons, would face the same fate as had the helpless civilians of Nanking.

  Homma rose up brusquely and returned to his shiny Cadillac while Wainwright asked a Japanese colonel what they should do now. “We will take you and your party back to Corregidor and then you can do what you damn please,” the Japanese spat, and told Wainwright that if he still wanted to surrender, he must now do so to the Japanese officer commanding the troops on Corregidor. Returning to
the Rock, Wainwright was shocked to find lines of Japanese infantry blocking both entrances to the Malinta Tunnel. There was no question of escape or further fighting, and no question in Wainwright’s mind of what he must do next. He found a Japanese colonel and surrendered the entire Philippines.

  MacArthur’s reaction to Wainwright’s capitulation was both curious and strange. Even though he knew of the critical water situation and the heavy odds against Wainwright’s force, he suggested to General Marshall in a cablegram that Wainwright must have become “unbalanced” by all the strain. Coming on the same day that the Lexington was sent to the bottom of the Coral Sea, the news for the first half of 1942 was uniformly bad for the Allies, but most Americans still did not lose cheer. The newspaper and radio media in those days were quite different than they are today. What naysaying there was, was generally confined to squabbles between political parties or general grousing over conflicting rules and regulations among the many war-related federal agencies. Victories were often touted when the results were murky and defeats were turned into victories in the press or kept out of it entirely by censorship. Still it was impossible for the media to deny the losses of the Pacific islands and the Philippines, nor the strained situation in the Middle East and Mediterranean and the awful plight of the Russians, besieged at the gates of their largest cities. As well, on the American East Coast the tragedy of merchant shipping continued daily, visible from the beaches from Texas to New England. Nevertheless, Americans are an optimistic people and seemed to view the war in the way a football fan might assess the situation when his team is thirty points behind in the first quarter: there are still three more quarters left to play.

  In schools public and private across the land students recited the Pledge of Allegiance each morning and prayed for American victory, sang patriotic songs and plotted with pins on maps the battles for the Pacific islands with unpronounceable names. Many looked forward to becoming old enough to join the armed forces while some of the girls planned to become nurses, or at least to wrap Red Cross bandages or perform other useful services. Within a few years there were more than 200,000 in the various women’s service auxiliaries and many more in the Red Cross. College sports suffered dramatically as the draft and enlistments dwindled the numbers of available players. As in all bureaucracy, some colleges soon found a way to capitalize on this situation: the military services, in particular the navy, had set up officer training programs at a few universities, and standout football players from various colleges were actively recruited to participate—provided they would play sports. Thus colleges like Duke became football powerhouses during the war.

  The tempo of total war on a nationwide footing seemed to increase by the hour. Millions began planting Victory Gardens and donated to the incessant rubber and scrap-metal drives. Entire cities were transformed forever by an influx of workers in war-related industries. More than a hundred military training bases and camps were established, most of them in the South. Shipyards sprang up in every city or town with a harbor, especially along the Gulf Coast, which had never before turned out a serious oceangoing vessel.

  The shipbuilding industry nearly doubled the population of Mobile, Alabama, within a few months, to more than 100,000. This of course put impossible strains on the infrastructure: the city’s main public high school, for example, completed a decade and a half earlier to educate several thousand students, suddenly found itself with twice the planned number. There was such scant housing available that workers lived in tar-paper shacks on vacant lots or, if they were lucky enough to find a boardinghouse, shared so-called shift rooms, named for the round-the-clock work schedule.

  For want of alternatives, mothers working Rosie-the-Riveter shifts after school hours often dumped their children in what had become twenty-four-hour-a-day movie theaters. The children, often bored by watching eight hours of the same movies, frequently became rowdy and vandalized the premises, causing police to become overworked as well. A Mobile County truant officer with the wonderful name of Miss Bessie Rencher* reported that on any given day at least a third of the students were absent from classes.

  With all the excitement, many young women in the forty-eight states, some barely in their teens, strayed into a life of prostitution, or at least semi-prostitution, hanging around bus stations, ports, and rail terminals; what with the millions of young servicemen with money in their pockets passing through all over the country, they earned themselves the name Victory Girls. And with the large numbers of blacks flocking into the war workforce, racial tensions heightened and often spilled over into sometimes deadly race riots. These and similar episodes were not only common but prevalent in many towns and cities across America as the nation adjusted, or at least tried to adjust, to life during wartime.

  There were, of course, some grousers—mostly die-hard anti-Semites and British-hating American Irish radicals, as well as antiwar religious sects such as Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists, who continued to question and even disparage the war aims, but they were roundly told to shut up in publications ranging from The Nation to the New York Times. Roosevelt himself pooh-poohed them as “defeatists” and suggested that they constituted a pro-Axis fifth column.

  By mid-1942 America and her allies were badly in need of a lift, and they were soon to get one. In fact, a bright new sun was rising to shine on the free world, or what was then left of it. It would certainly not shine without further peril, misery, and sorrow, but shine it would, very suddenly, near a remote speck of land in the mid—Pacific Ocean called Midway Island.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By early May 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz knew he had the tiger by the tail. The Japanese were planning something very nasty and sinister in the mid-Pacific and, though he did not know exactly when or where it was to be, Nimitz understood that the whole course of the war could hinge on the outcome. This was not good news, coming on the heels of the Pearl Harbor disaster, the annihilation of the Allied fleet in the Java Sea, the loss of the entire Philippine army, and the sinking of the Lexington and serious damaging of the Yorktown. What U.S. intelligence was able to develop was that the Japanese were mustering about two hundred warships for this operation, more than they had ever mustered thus far, and certainly far more than the United States could hope to bring against them.

  As we have seen, Commander Rochefort’s combat intelligence section at Pearl had been working round-the-clock since war broke out and had made good headway on breaking the main Japanese naval code, which could of course be changed in Tokyo at any moment and set the Americans back to square one. In fact, that was just what the Japanese had in mind, but owing to bureaucratic delays the projected change on May 1 was postponed to June 1, which would prove an incredibly fortuitous stroke of luck for the Americans.

  Wearing his trademark red smoking jacket and carpet slippers, Rochefort spent most of his days in the dank underground intelligence room amid the clatter of IBM punch-card machines and teletypes and the growl of primitive air conditioners. His army of clerks now included members of the band of the wrecked battleship California, whose musical training turned out to be extraordinarily compatible with deciphering Japanese communications. Slowly Rochefort’s team pieced things together from the seemingly unfathomable jigsaw puzzle that made up the Japanese naval code and what they began to discover was startling. Sometime in June 1942, they learned, less than a month away, Admiral Yamamoto intended to attack the American base at Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands chain off Alaska, and occupy several of the U.S. -owned islands there. At the same time, and far more importantly, the Japanese would attack and occupy Midway Island, the last remaining U.S. outpost in the western Pacific. From there they could bottle up the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, if not occupy Hawaii itself, and that, too, was part of Yamamoto’s plan.

  At least that’s the way Rochefort’s people saw it; others, including the new chief of naval operations, Admiral Ernest King, weren’t so sure and were reluctant to risk what remained of the Pacific fle
et on pure signal intelligence interpretation alone.* King, back at his desk in Washington, was actually of the opinion that the main Japanese attack would fall on Hawaii itself. But Rochefort had a plan to ferret out the truth, a trick, as it were, that would cause the Japanese to reveal once and for all their darkest secret.

  The problem with the U.S. decoding of the “when and where” was that this most precious information lay deeply embedded in a special Japanese encoding system, layers and layers of intricate cryptology wrapped so thickly that American code breakers had previously not even wanted to waste time trying to figure it out. But the beauty of Rochefort’s method lay in its stunning simplicity. He sent a top-secret cable to the commander at Midway, telling him to report back, falsely, to Pearl headquarters over the open airwaves a matter of minor housekeeping: that the fresh water distillation plant on Midway was broken. Rochefort knew from his deciphering that if his conclusions were correct, the Japanese code word for Midway would be “AF,” and if the Japanese took the bait “AF” would be confirmed. A day or so after Midway broadcast Rochefort’s trick message, U.S. radio intercepts picked up a Japanese report to Tokyo noting that “AF” was running low on fresh water.

  The excitement at Rochefort’s shop was electric, and soon it was as well in Nimitz’s Pacific fleet headquarters. When Nimitz got the news his eyes lit up with the old “blue light of battle,” and his intelligence officer remembered that at that moment his smile was “nothing less than radiant.” Now the battle would be joined; now the location and intention of the enemy fleet was known. Chester Nimitz always liked a good fight, and this was one he’d been waiting for.