Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama Gen had ordered Homma to conquer the Philippines by the end of January, a mere fifty days. The plan was aggressive and necessarily so: the war in China was bleeding the Japanese Army of troops. The 65th Brigade was to plow down the Bataan peninsula in two columns, on the east and west coasts, then make a final push toward Mariveles. As the 14th Army operation order read, the objective was simple: “annihilation of the enemy.”13
The Japanese, boasted Tōjō, had conquered Hong Kong in eighteen days, Manila in twenty-six, and Singapore (“the greatest disaster and capitulation in British history,” lamented Churchill) in seventy. With the invasion of Borneo, they won access to rich oil fields; in Kuching, Malaya, to petroleum; in Ipoh, to tin and rubber. “Japan is no longer a have-not nation,” crowed the Japanese Planning Agency. To celebrate their victories, the Japanese held lantern parades in Tōkyō, drunk with joy. But twice in one week, on January 13 and January 20, the emperor pressed Sugiyama to accelerate the offensive in Luzon. And here was Homma, mired in the backwater of Bataan.
His intelligence officer had underestimated enemy troop and matériel strength, the 65th Brigade was untrained, and the American and Filipino forces had proven far more resilient than anticipated. Homma’s idea of a seaborne assault on Longoskawayan to make an end run on Mariveles was a disaster. Japanese aircraft, supporting the second landing, couldn’t even find the 57th Infantry on the ground. Air-dropped supplies often fell into the hands of American and Filipino troops.
While Major Kimura saw the destruction of an entire battalion at Longoskawayan as a “glorious death,” simple arithmetic told a different tale. Fourteenth Army losses would mount to 2,700 dead and more than 4,000 wounded. On February 13 Homma pulled his forces back to blocking positions and regrouped. The poet-general appealed to Imperial General Headquarters in Tōkyō for replacements and reinforcements. Only then could he launch a final offensive on Bataan. An unsettling lull fell over the front as Homma—and the Fil-American forces anticipating his next move—waited.
In early February 1942 Washington decided to evacuate MacArthur from Corregidor to Australia. Quezon was so dispirited that on February 8 he sent a blistering letter to Roosevelt via Army Chief of Staff George Marshall.
My people entered the war with the confidence that the United States would bring such assistance to us as would make it possible to sustain the conflict with some chance of success. All our soldiers in the field were animated by the belief that help would be forthcoming. This help has not and evidently will not be realized. Our people have suffered death, misery, devastation. After two months of war not the slightest assistance has been forthcoming from the United States. Aid and succour have been dispatched to other warring nations such as England, Ireland, Australia, the N.E.I. and perhaps others, but not only has nothing come here, but apparently no effort has been made to bring anything here. The American Fleet and the British Fleet, the two most powerful navies in the world, have apparently adopted an attitude which precludes any effort to reach these islands with assistance.
As a result, while enjoying security itself, the United States has in effect condemned the sixteen millions of Filipinos to practical destruction in order to effect a certain delay. You have promised redemption, but what we need is immediate assistance and protection. We are concerned with what is to transpire during the next few months and years as well as with our ultimate destiny. There is not the slightest doubt in our minds that victory will rest with the United States, but the question before us now is: Shall we further sacrifice our country and our people in a hopeless fight? I voice the unanimous opinion of my War Cabinet and I am sure the unanimous opinion of all Filipinos that under the circumstances we should take steps to preserve the Philippines and the Filipinos from further destruction.
Quezon proposed that the Philippines be granted their independence immediately so the islands could be declared neutral, American and Japanese forces could be withdrawn, and the Philippine Army could be disbanded. He would, he said, make the same offer to the Japanese publicly if the United States accepted his proposition.
In an accompanying letter, MacArthur wrote that High Commissioner Sayre approved of Quezon’s idea; then he gave his own assessment of the situation:The troops have sustained practically 50% casualties from their original strength. Divisions are reduced to the size of regiments, regiments to battalions, battalions to companies. Some units have entirely disappeared. The men have been in constant action and are badly battle worn. Their spirit is good but they are capable now of nothing but fighting in place in a fixed position. All our supplies are scant and the command has been on half rations for the past month. . . .
You must be prepared at any time to figure on the complete destruction of this command.
Roosevelt rejected Quezon’s proposition outright. He sympathized with the plight of the Filipino people but chided Quezon for his naïveté in believing Tōjō’s claim that Japan would respect the independence of the Philippines.
I have only to refer you to the present condition of Korea, Manchukuo, North China, Indo-China, and all other countries which have fallen under the brutal sway of the Japanese government, to point out the hollow duplicity of such an announcement. The present sufferings of the Filipino people, cruel as they may be, are infinitely less than the sufferings and permanent enslavement which will inevitably follow acceptance of Japanese promises.
In a secret radiogram of February 10 Roosevelt reminded MacArthur: “It is mandatory that there be established once and for all in the minds of all peoples complete evidence that the American determination and indomitable will to win carries on down to the last unit.” MacArthur could arrange for the capitulation of Filipino troops, if and when it was necessary. He could also facilitate the evacuation of Quezon, his family, and his War Cabinet. But the Americans could not relent “so long as there remains any possibility of resistance.” Roosevelt’s line could have been borrowed from the Senjinkun, which stated simply: “Do not give up under any circumstances.”
His imperatives were at odds with his priorities. By Washington’s Birthday the Japanese had conquered Java and Sumatra, invaded Timor, and bombed Darwin, Australia. Roosevelt used his fireside chat of February 23, 1942, to dispel rumors, shore up morale after a string of Allied military defeats, and defend his administration’s war strategy. He hailed MacArthur and his men for their defense of the Philippines, which has “magnificently exceeded the previous estimates of endurance,” but concluded after all that it would be “a hopeless operation” to send the Pacific Fleet to relieve them so long as island bases remained under Japanese control. Roosevelt dared to say what Stimson would not after the Arcadia Conferences.
Quezon put on a brave public face. “I urge every Filipino to be of good cheer, to have faith in the patriotism and valor of our soldiers in the field, but above all, to trust America,” he broadcast from Corregidor on February 28. “America is too great and too powerful to be vanquished in this conflict. I know she will not fail us.”
Privately, he excoriated American policy in a blast of Spanish invective aimed at MacArthur’s chief of intelligence (G-2), Colonel Charles A. Willoughby, who was fluent in the language:I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. . . . I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror. Where are the planes that this sinverguenza [creep] is boasting of? Qué demonio—how typically American to write in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.
While the ground war came to a halt on the front, aerial attacks continued against the rear and tested the mettle of the marines who remained in Mariveles. The Japanese bombed Battery C “six, eight, and sometimes ten times daily,” 1st Lieutenant Carter Simpson noted in his diary. One late-afternoon raid turned the area around the Section Base into a moonscape with fifteen craters thirty-five feet in diameter. It took hours to control the fires in order to protect food and ammunition. But remarkably little damage was done to m
atériel, and since the majority of the bombs fell in flat open spaces, there were relatively few injuries.
From the safety of Tunnel No. 4, the navy doctors treated marines manning Battery C and crew members of the Canopus. You could breathe easier after sundown, though no fires were allowed outside. On most nights, artillery flashes shattered the darkness. The muffled sounds of warfare were the background music to sleep.
At the same time, another war was being waged against the twin enemies of hunger and disease. When fodder ran out for the 26th Cavalry, Wainwright sacrificed his prize jumper Joseph Conrad, who became fodder for his own men. “We ate the 26th Cavalry right out of the saddle,” bragged Private Lewis Elliott of the 60th Coast Artillery. Horses along with army pack mules, pigs, and cattle from Cavite were short-term staples in a diet in which anything was fair game.
The only real chance of relief came from boats running the Japanese blockade or air shipments from Australia. On moonless evenings two 400-ton motor vessels, the Bohol II and the Kolambugan, succeeded in making two trips each through the mine fields between Corregidor and Looc Cove, south of Manila Bay. With food procured by American agents in Cavite and Batangas, they added some 1,600 tons to Bataan’s stocks. But by mid-February the voyage was too hazardous, and the operation ceased.
In the southern Philippines the quartermaster depot in Cebu City had huge stores of food, clothing, medicine, and gasoline to support Brigadier General William F. Sharp’s Visayan-Mindanao Force. Additonal supplies were culled from surrounding provinces. The 1,000-ton Legaspi made two runs to Corregidor before it was shelled by the Japanese and abandoned. The Prinscesa succeeded in delivering 700 tons of food, and Elcano 1,100 tons. But after ten ships were sunk by the Japanese or scuttled by their crews at an estimated loss of 7,000 tons of food and supplies, blockade-running to Corregidor came to an end.
Air deliveries were made from Australia to Mindanao and the Visayas, not Luzon. Medical supply officer Colonel George S. Littell and Major John D. Blair combed Melbourne and Sydney for quantities of quinine, morphine, anesthesia, and vitamins to be sent to the islands, but their resources were strained after ten air shipments. Colonel Percy J. Carroll of the newly formed Office of the Chief Surgeon was furious when he learned that pilots encountering mechanical difficulties would rather dump their medical supplies than sacrifice cartons of cigarettes. Except for a few additional shipments via submarine, Bataan and Corregidor were effectively sealed off from the rest of the world.
UP correspondent Frank Hewlett summed up the mood of the men on Bataan in a few lines that served as their unofficial anthem:We’re the battling bastards of Bataan,
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.
Bob Kelly had a tentative date with his girlfriend, Peggy, an army nurse in the Malinta Tunnel hospital, for March 15. She was going to call him on the eleventh on the Signal Corps field telephone around 0600 for confirmation. But her hours had been changed, and she couldn’t reach him until 1430.
The fifteenth was out, he told her.
Would the sixteenth be any better? she asked.
Couldn’t make it on the sixteenth either, he said.
“Nothing would be any better,” he added.
And then he said goodbye.
She asked where he was going, but he couldn’t tell her.
She asked if he was coming back, and he couldn’t tell her that, either.
She knew, then, that it really was goodbye and said, quietly, “But it’s been awfully nice, hasn’t it?”
That evening, under the cloak of darkness, MacArthur, his staff, family, and their Chinese amah, Ah Cheu, were spirited away from Corregidor. Four boats from MTB Squadron 3 made up the little flotilla, led by Lieutenant John Bulkeley in PT-41. Bob Kelly’s PT-34 brought up the rear. Their swashbuckling manner and audacious assaults on the Japanese had earned the approbation of even MacArthur. “My pirates,” he called them. The retinue included fifteen army and two navy officers, among them Sutherland, Marshall, and Rockwell, whose position as Commandant of the 16th Naval District was assumed by the commander of the Inshore Patrol, Captain Kenneth M. Hoeffel. General Tōjō, the cook’s pet monkey, kept little Arthur MacArthur company.
It was a white-knuckle journey down Mindoro Strait. Waves fifteen to twenty feet high crashed over the decks, reefs lurked in waters unfamiliar to the crew, and the Japanese preyed on the coast by air, land, and sea, searching for signs of enemy infiltration. MacArthur was violently seasick, his wife, Jean, was ill, and the cold salt spray left them chilled to the bone.
Asked by a sailor if he wanted to be helped belowdecks, one ailing general draped over a torpedo tube on Kelly’s boat moaned: “Let me die.”
When Rockwell saw Kelly sighting with his fingers as they passed an island, he inquired:“Don’t you have a pelorus?”
Kelly didn’t; neither did Bulkeley.
“How in hell do you navigate?” Rockwell demanded.
“By guess and by God, sir,” the handsome lieutenant replied with a smile.
Finally, after thirty-five hours of battling the elements and playing cat-and-mouse with the Japanese, MTB Squadron 3 arrived safely at Cagayan de Oro, on the north coast of Mindanao. MacArthur was so grateful, he awarded the officers and crew the Silver Star “for gallantry and fortitude in the face of heavy odds.”
Brigadier General William F. Sharp accompanied the entourage to Del Monte Field, but there were no planes available for the next leg of the journey. When a decrepit B-17 finally showed up, MacArthur refused to fly in it. Four days later the general and his party took two B-17s to Darwin, Australia. But since Darwin was being bombed, they landed forty miles to the south at Batchelor Field. They’d barely touched down when a report came in of Japanese planes heading their way, so they hastily departed for Alice Springs aboard a C-47 transport. The next day, March 18, the MacArthurs embarked on a train bound for Adelaide, where the general was greeted at the station by reporters hankering for a headline:The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through, and I shall return.
On the way to Melbourne MacArthur was joined by Brigadier General Richard J. Marshall, USAFFE deputy chief of staff, who advised him of Australia’s combat strength: 25,364 Americans, none of whom were infantrymen; no tanks; fewer than 250 combat-ready aircraft; and only one remaining regular division of the Australian Army, whose forces were sapped by campaigns in the Middle East. In other words, there were 7,000 trained Australians to defend an entire continent. MacArthur was stunned by the news. “God have mercy on us!” he exclaimed.
Before he left Corregidor, MacArthur wanted Wainwright “to make it known throughout all elements of your command that I’m leaving over my repeated protests.” Wainwright assured him he would. While most understood “what the score was” and realized the disastrous effect that MacArthur’s capture would have had on morale, morale was shaken nonetheless. Humor was the antidote. Songs and snipes, jokes and jibes were already in circulation.
One lyric was composed by Lieutenant Henry G. Lee to the melody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies ashaking on the Rock
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock
Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.
Dugout Doug’s not timid, he’s just cautious, not afraid
He’s protecting carefully the stars that Franklin made
Four-star generals are rare as good food on Bataan
And his troops go starving on.
We’ve fought the war the hard way since they said the fight was on
All the way from Li
ngayen to the hills of old Bataan
And we’ll continue fighting after Dugout Doug is gone
And still go starving on.
Then there was the story about a soldier on Bataan who boasted to his new acquaintance, “I’ve been in General MacArthur’s mess,” which earned a Groucho Marx retort, “I was in a mess with him also.”
For one regiment on Bataan, MacArthur’s name was literally in the can. “I am going to the latrine,” the men said whenever nature called, “but I shall return.”
The open disdain extended from the lowliest private up through the officers’ ranks. Nailed to a tree at Army Headquarters on Bataan was a calendar showing a quaint sailing ship in a languid breeze, below which was scribbled: “We told you so. Help is on the way.”
Murray and John never saw MacArthur on Bataan. Fred and George never saw him on Corregidor. One day in February 1942 Seaman 1st Class Darwin F. “John” Kidd, who had worked as Admiral Hart’s assistant in the Marsman Building in Manila, was leaving the south end of Malinta Tunnel and heading for the Radio Intercept Tunnel when an air raid alarm went off. He was walking around the sandbags at the exit when a rather tall individual came tearing in, knocked him over, didn’t slow down, and didn’t look back.
“Watch where you’re going!” Kidd shouted.
A colonel helped him to his feet.
“Who in the hell was that son of a bitch?” Kidd sputtered.
“You don’t know who that was?” the kindly colonel asked.
“Absolutely not,” maintained Kidd.
“That’s General MacArthur.”
Private 1st Class Richard T. Winter of the 59th Coast Artillery maintained that Lee’s ditty was a far cry from the truth. On one occasion Winter watched MacArthur walk out of Malinta Tunnel, pack his corncob pipe with tobacco, and light up in the middle of a bombing raid. On another occasion Captain Roland G. “Roly” Ames of Corregidor’s Battery Chicago saw MacArthur refuse to take cover. AP correspondent Clark Lee claimed that during the December 29 raid on Corregidor MacArthur was “standing in front of his house . . . even when the bombs hit near him, and the planes came low and close.” He had, after all, proven his valor during World War I as commander of the 84th Brigade in the Aisne-Marne offensive, which won him his second Croix de Guerre and the title Commander of France’s Legion of Honor. But to the men on Bataan there was more bluster to MacArthur than bravery; more grandstanding than greatness; hence the sobriquet “Dugout Doug.” That perception was reinforced by MacArthur’s nighttime escape to Australia, and it certainly wasn’t lost on the Japanese, who proclaimed in the Japan Times and Advertiser in Tōkyō that MacArthur had “fled from his post.”
Conduct Under Fire Page 18
