The fact that Roosevelt choreographed MacArthur’s departure because he valued his “military genius,” as Roosevelt’s doctor Ross McIntire described it, was little known either in the Philippines or in the United States. But once Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Medal of Honor on March 25, MacArthur’s legendary stature was secure.
“His utter disregard of personal danger under heavy fire and aerial bombardment, his calm judgment in each crisis, inspired his troops, galvanized the spirit of resistance of the Filipino people, and confirmed the faith of the American people in their armed forces,” the citation concluded. The citation was written by Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. But it was based largely on Sutherland’s copy, and in all likelihood burnished with MacArthur’s gift for self-promotion, though lacking the general’s signature grandiloquence.
MacArthur was made a hero in spite of what one historian has called “the greatest twin U.S. military disasters in history.” General Brereton took the blame for the destruction of the Far East Air Force. Admiral Hart—who resigned on February 13 as the ABDA naval commander—was criticized for the inaction of the Asiatic Fleet. Yet control of the skies was lost as a result of MacArthur’s inaction. Marshall was indefatigable in his attempts to cover up for MacArthur despite MacArthur’s failure to defend the Philippines, though “the assumption,” as Air Corps chief General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold remarked, had always been that the Japanese “would hit the Philippines first.” In the absence of military victories, as Roosevelt was keenly aware, what America needed most was hope.
Streets, bridges, buildings, parks, flowers, and baby boys were named in honor of the great man. There was a dance named the MacArthur Glide. The National Father’s Day Committee judged him the “Number One Father for 1942.” The Blackfoot Indians of Montana even saw fit to adopt him as Mo-Kahki-Peta, or Chief Wise Eagle. Naturally there was a movie about MacArthur, America’s First Soldier.
Several weeks earlier, in a display of distinctly unheroic behavior, MacArthur had recommended to the War Department that citations be given to all units on Bataan and Corregidor—except the navy and marines. What better way to offend Corregidor’s defenders? Rear Admiral Rockwell suggested that perhaps this was an oversight. Sutherland assured him it was not. The marines and the navy, MacArthur felt, had had their moment of glory in World War I. The leathernecks shot back in verse:Mine eyes have seen MacArthur
With a Bible on his knee,
He is pounding out communiques
For guys like you and me,
And while possibly a rumor now,
Someday ’twill be a fact,
That the Lord will hear a deep voice
Say, “Move over God, it’s Mac.”
Indeed, of the 142 communiqués issued from Corregidor between December 8, 1941, and March 11, 1942, one name was paramount: MacArthur.
In the meantime, without consulting MacArthur, the War Department promoted Wainwright to lieutenant general in charge of the newly designated U.S. Forces in the Philippines (USFIP), which included the remains of the naval forces in the Philippine Islands. Wainwright appointed Major General Edward P. King, Jr., commander of Luzon Force and turned over to him his old headquarters—a trailer parked just north of Mariveles. “Skinny” Wainwright was enormously popular with his men and regularly visited the front on Bataan, often in the line of fire. On assuming his new command on Corregidor, he rectified MacArthur’s slight by giving credit where credit was due: to the marines as well as to the navy.
Lieutenant General Homma was well aware of the change in command. On March 19 hundreds of beer cans trailing red and white streamers were air-dropped over Bataan and Corregidor carrying the message:Your Excellency,
We have the honor to address you in accordance with the humanitarian
principle of Bushidō, the code of the Japanese warrior. . . .
You have already fought to the best of your ability. What dishonor is there in avoiding needless bloodshed? What disgrace is there in following the defenders of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Netherlands East Indies in the acceptance of honorable defeat?
Your duty has been performed. Accept our sincere advice and save the lives of those officers and men under your command. The International Law will be strictly adhered to by the Imperial Japanese Forces and your Excellency and those under your command will be treated accordingly.
If a reply to this advisory is not received from Your Excellency through special messenger by noon, March 22, 1942, we shall consider ourselves at liberty to take any action whatsoever.
Wainwright did not take the liberty of replying.
By the time MacArthur evacuated Corregidor in mid-March 1942, daily rations on Bataan were one-half to one-third of those on Corregidor. In late March they were reduced from 2,000 to 1,000 calories and stripped of vitamins A, B, and C, when 1,500 calories was considered the bare minimum for subsistence. Flour ran out. Fresh or canned meat was reduced from six ounces a day to 1.22 ounces—usually corned beef—though efforts were made to provide six ounces of fresh meat every third day. Coffee, tea, sugar, and butter vanished in rapid succession.
When white rice was exhausted, the men turned to musty red rice, and when the meat ration disappeared, they hunted deer, monkey, lizard, iguana, quail, wild pig, and dog. Calesa pony, mule, horse, and carabao were the most popular items on the new menu, in that order. Monkey ranked last. Tough as tires, it felt “like eating your little brother,” said Private Alton C. Halbrook, a truck driver in the 4th Marines. They picked mangoes, bananas, coconuts, and papayas, then in desperation turned to the nami, a tuber that was poisonous unless properly prepared. They went fishing for sea bass and shark with dynamite: pack a condensed milk can with TNT, insert a blasting cap with a 3-inch fuse, ignite, and toss. They washed down their chow with water from artesian wells or from 55-gallon storage drums that tasted of gasoline, and when the supply dried up, they drank from carabao wallows, mountain pools, and streams contaminated by waste. There was a “favored” distribution list, according to Brigadier General Allen C. McBride of the Service Command Area, for those most in need. But as food grew ever more scarce, ration trucks were hijacked, dumps were raided, and the occasional shipments from Corregidor were pillaged.
Soldiers were shedding not just a few pounds but ten, twenty, even thirty pounds. They were weak and quickly tired. They suffered tachycardia and palpitations with minimal exertion. Some experienced hallucinations; others fainted on chow lines. The combat efficiency of I Corps was reduced to 45 percent and of II Corps to 20 percent. As Colonel Harry A. Skerry said of a battalion of the 71st Infantry: “From the standpoint of trained, well-fed troops . . . it was an utter nightmare.” Unless food stocks were replenished, Wainwright warned General Marshall on March 28, the men on Bataan would starve.
The lack of food was one problem. The lack of quinine, as Murray discovered early on at Hospital No. 2, was another.
When war broke out, the Philippine Department Medical Supply Depot had enough quinine sulfate for thirty days of prophylaxis, at the prescribed rate of 10 grains (.650 gram) of quinine per man each day. Standard treatment was 2 grams of quinine daily for five days, followed by .030 gram of plasmochin napthoate three times daily for five to seven days. Atabrine could be substituted for quinine, but the supply of atabrine and plasmochin was itself limited, and the dosage was imperfectly understood. Moreover, men on atabrine complained of nausea, upset stomach, and diarrhea, and to add insult to illness, their skin turned yellow. When the supply of quinine tablets was depleted, powdered quinine sulfate was administered instead. Brown, bitter, and insoluble, you had to spoon it down before you gulped your chow. The taste was so unpleasant that quinine roll calls were mandatory.
A dearth of mosquito bars and nets, combined with inadequate quinine stocks, led to an epidemic of malaria on Bataan. The disease cut a swath through the ranks of Bataan’s defenders. Filipino civilians behind the lines were “a reservoir for malaria,” noted one army colonel. Filipino B
rigadier General Vicente Lim of the valiant 41st Division, which had launched the first attack against the Japanese in Abucay, suffered from malaria and estimated that a third of his troops were dying from that disease and dysentery. “We have no medicines to give them,” he told Colonel Carlos P. Romulo, who broadcast dispatches to the Filipino people over the Voice of Freedom from Malinta Tunnel, and periodically visited Bataan.
By early March, 60 percent of the medical personnel at Hospital No. 2 were laid low with malaria, and hundreds of malarial patients sought admission each day. Ward No. 2 handled mostly malaria and dysentery cases, but the army doctor in charge of it, Captain John R. Bumgarner, was nearly incapacitated by the disease.
Indeed, the man who had introduced cinchona to the Philippines, Colonel Arthur Fischer, was himself recovering from malaria on Bataan. A hundred thousand kilograms of bark were available in Mindanao, and Wainwright arranged to have Fischer flown there to gear up an extraction project. But Japanese forces prevented Fischer from carrying out the plan. He was evacuated to Australia with seeds in hand to establish plantations in South America, where the cinchona tree had originally been discovered in the mid-seventeenth century.
“It is my candid and conservative opinion,” wrote Colonel Cooper on March 10, 1942, “that if we do not secure a sufficient supply of quinine for our troops from front to rear . . . all other supplies we may get with the exception of rations, will be of little or no value.” Finally, one million tablets of quinine arrived by air from the medical depot in Cebu, but it was too little and too late.
By late March hospital admissions on Bataan for malaria cases climbed to 1,000 cases per day. The disease had taken root, and though its symptoms might go into remission, without proper treatment they were bound to recur. Chick Mensching, wounded at Longoskawayan Point, suffered an astounding thirty-eight bouts of benign tertian malaria. What was needed to treat the most serious cases—cerebral malaria foremost among them—was quinine dihydrochloride and distilled water for intravenous injection.
Compounding the malaria problem were the enteric diseases that resulted from drinking unboiled water, bathing downstream, and inadequately cleaned mess gear. This was a particular problem for native Filipinos, who had only recently been introduced to single bore-hole toilets. Impetigo, hookworm, ringworm, roundworm, and scabies were also common. Bluebottle flies swarmed over straddle trenches—and food. The men ate with one hand while waving away flies with the other. Cross-infections were inevitable.
Sanitary conditions at the Filipino refugee camps were even worse, remarked Lieutenant Walter H. Waterous of Hospital No. 2, “the most deplorable I have ever seen and the death rate in them was appalling.” One camp was one and a half miles below the Real River from Hospital No. 2; another was on the other side of Mariveles. A separate medical facility was established in a ravine north of the Mariveles airstrip by the surgeon of the Philippine Army. Called the Philippine Army General Hospital, it was staffed entirely by Filipinos and treated Filipino refugees and Philippine Army personnel with the most rudimentary equipment and supplies.
Soon the two general hospitals groaned under a patient load of 7,000, more than three times their combined capacity. “Patients are being admitted in droves, all medical cases,” wrote Ruth Straub, one of five army nurses transferred from Corregidor to help relieve the workload at Hospital No. 2. “Had to clear another section of the jungle for beds. Casualties of the day’s bombing are still coming in, and the operating room staff has been called back to work.”
Film ran out for the sole X-ray machine on Bataan at Hospital No. 1. Lister bags were a scarcity; chlorine stocks were drained. Gauze, bandages, and cotton were in short supply. Infected plasma led to hepatitis, and the lack of blood, said John Bumgarner, meant that “officers and enlisted men were constantly being canvassed to find more donors, and some of the staff gave two to three units in a relatively short period of time.” When the bacillus antitoxin for gas gangrene was exhausted, the number of amputations mounted in spite of Adamo’s innovative treatment. “Time and a good vascular surgeon could have saved many extremities,” admitted Bumgarner.
The sick lay in army cots out in the open. Only the most serious cases had the benefit of tents or half-shelters.The scene looked like a Civil War battlefield, except that overhead was a canopy of acacia, bamboo, and mahagony trees.
The men faced their plight bravely. There were few behavioral disturbances among them. Hospital No. 2 had a separate ward for psychiatric observation, but the number of cases, given the constant exposure to daily bombing and shelling, was surprisingly small. There was no place to retreat, nowhere to hide.
On March 25 Colonel Gillespie of Hospital No. 2 was invited on an inspection tour of Philippine Army General Hospital. He knew the area well from the time he had served as surgeon of the USAFFE Advance Echelon on Signal Hill, and he was uncomfortable with how easily Japanese planes swooped in from the sea, flew parallel to the road, and targeted the antiaircraft battery. He politely declined. The day of the visit, the hospital was bombed, and Colonel Victoriano Luna, its commanding officer, was killed.
Both Hospitals Nos. 1 and 2 were identified with red and white crosses, but the former was boxed in by an ammunition dump to the left, a motor pool on the right, and the 200th Coast Artillery behind it. It was too enticing a target to resist.
In the early morning hours of March 30, two Japanese twin-engine bombers locked onto the hospital compound and let loose with incendiary and demolition bombs. Army doctor Major Alfred A. Weinstein was startled from his sleep by “the roar of exploding bombs and a pungent odor of smoke.” Bleeding from a small head wound, he stumbled outside into a drainage ditch, where he felt his “chest heaving with terror.” Carey Smith was hugging the floor of Ward No. 1 when a bomb exploded between the nurses’ quarters and the OR thirty feet away. The left wing of the officers’ quarters was completely destroyed. The hospital headquarters, the Officers’ Mess, and the main operating room were shattered with fragments. Twenty-three were killed, among them two corpsmen, Private 1st Class Fred Lang and Sergeant Spielhoffer; seventy-eight were injured. That same day the Japanese broadcast an apology in English over KZRH in Manila. “We regret the unfortunate bombing of Hospital #1. It was a mistake.” Duckworth thought the bombing was accidental: Weinstein was convinced it was deliberate.
The lull in ground combat brought relief nonetheless. Hospital No. 1 managed to host two afternoon tea dances for the doctors and nurses in the Officers’ Mess, and it arranged a swimming party at Sisiman Cove, where guests watched Japanese planes bomb Corregidor. “Romances flourished with an intensity unknown in peacetime,” observed Weinstein. Three nurses were married on Bataan, in spite of military regulations forbidding it.
Captain Dyess of the Bamboo Fleet, as the remaining P-40s on Bataan were called, helped throw a party for the nurses of Hospital No. 2 in a nipa hut decorated with Japanese trophies. Over a door mounted with carabao antlers was a placard that read:THE DYSENTERY CROSS Awarded to the Quartermaster by THE MEN OF BATAAN FIELD
A piano was salvaged from a bombed-out village, canned pineapple juice and crackers were served, and soon there was dancing on the bamboo floor. “It had been so long since we had seen white women,” Dyess confessed, “we were shy and awkward.”
The self-published broadside Jungle Journal boosted spirits and kept the rumors flying with stories worthy of a stateside tabloid. There was the one about the B-19 that dropped a bomb on Mt. Fuji “and now there’s 2 inches lava [sic] all over Japan.” Another reported a tidal wave the U.S. Navy caused as it sped toward the empire.
Japanese propaganda leaflets dropped over Bataan were traded “like baseball cards,” recalled army doctor Captain Paul Ashton. “Don’t Wait to Die,” began one of them. “Feel soft against me and . . . rest your warm hand on my breast.” With their drawings of buxom beauties, platters of bountiful food, and seductive appeals for surrender, they appealed to the basest of instincts. Japanese-controlled KZRH repeate
dly aired the song, “Waiting for the Ships That Never Came In,” while Filipinos were urged in Tagalog to kill American officers and cross over to “freedom and safety.” American attempts to lure the Japanese on Bataan to lay down their arms were no less crude. “It is cherry blossom time back in your homeland. . . . You ought to be home with your families and loved ones. . . . Come and surrender . . . and your shipment back home will be guaranteed,” read one message written by the nisei Richard Sakakida.
Diversions were short-lived. The cumulative effects of disease and malnutrition had already sapped the strength—if not the will—of Fil-American forces on Bataan. The few remaining pilots in the Bamboo Fleet were issued extra rations on March 27 so they wouldn’t lose consciousness during combat missions. Some of the frontline troops were lucky enough to receive double portions of rice and flour from Corregidor for Wainwright’s last stand. As the service company commander of the 31st Infantry summed up the situation: “Hunger and disease were greater enemies than the Japanese.” They were enemies the Japanese faced, too.
Conduct Under Fire Page 19
