George used a cave for shelter. At night he slept outside on a canvas cot. Some of the island’s creatures were curious enough to visit.
15th Feb. Sunday
Woke up other day and small lizard in bed and me [sic]. Cat mewing during night rqd. rock before he withdrew. Must have been a British cat.Animal about 2½ feet high and light skin approached the bed and slight movement on my part scared him away. Rat makes nightly trip across bough of tree overhead and is outlined clearly by the moon.That covers the nightly escapades of local animals. Monkeys, deer, gecko, multi-colored birds and flies complete the picture.
Two miles of additional tunnels would be blasted, shoveled, scooped, and scraped out of the Rock. Most men were grateful for the cover they provided. The problem was that some came to depend on it, whether there was an air raid or not.
Many officers, including Colonel Wibb E. Cooper, chief surgeon, USAFFE, wouldn’t come out of Malinta Tunnel even when there was an all-clear. The syndrome became known as “tunnelitis,” and those who suffered from it were denigrated as “tunnel rats.” The generals, joked the gunners of the seacoast and antiaircraft batteries, deserved the “DTS Medal” for “Distinguished Tunnel Service.” In spite of its humorous name, tunnelitis combined symptoms of agoraphobia and, for those who had been exposed to bombardment, shell shock.
Fred had a particularly bad case of it. After the December 29 bombing of Middleside barracks, the 2nd Battalion moved into James Ravine, on the northwestern coast of Corregidor. Headquarters was located in a bombproof dugout, and the aid station was in a tight space near the entrance. There was no room for hospitalization, so those requiring medical care were treated in bivouac areas. Fred had become so jittery that he ran for cover at the sound of a truck engine revving up, and during one air raid he was promptly chewed out by Colonel Anderson.
“Walk! Don’t run!” Anderson shouted at him.
Fred couldn’t help himself. It was the damnedest thing. The tunnel seemed to beckon to him. But he quickly got over his tunnelitis once he joined E Company out at Wheeler Point, on the southwestern side of the island. The area was wooded, it was a steep drop to the sea, and 200 yards down South Road was a spring that gushed water, which the men used as a shower. Fred was in charge of the battalion sub-aid station. Away from the siren call of the tunnel, he now felt safe. He ventured freely outside and during air raids simply jumped into a foxhole. A tunnel protected you physically, but if you relied on it psychologically, he now understood, it could exacerbate your fears to an almost paralyzing degree.
Next to Wheeler Point was Battery Monja, consisting of two 155mm guns—one of them dug into the cliffside. They were operated by the Philippine Scouts, and Fred built latrines off to the side of their little camp, sanitizing them by setting them afire with ammunition. Once a week he drove to Malinta Tunnel to report to Hayes and stock up on medical supplies. But he never saw the regimental surgeon himself outside the tunnel.
On February 17 several hundred men from the crew of the Canopus, the Cavite Naval Ammunition Depot, Battery A, and the Philippine Army and Air Corps—many of whom had fought in the Battle of the Points—were detached from duty on Bataan and transferred to Corregidor. One Filipino doctor by the name of Gomez and two corpsmen manned an auxiliary aid station in the 1st Battalion sector. A graduate of the Philippine School of Medicine in Manila, Gomez told George about a mysterious fever on Bataan that seemed to respond to quinine and aspirin. The disease, of course, was malaria, but there were others who suffered from enigmatic fevers that defied diagnosis.
George estimated that 35 percent of the new arrivals from Bataan developed malaria regardless of quinine prophylaxis and some 50 percent of them were ill with acute gastroenteritis. He suspected bacillary dysentery, which is transmitted by flies in contact with human feces, and implemented a rigid sanitary program in an attempt to control it. But the dysentery patients were released too early from the Malinta Tunnel Hospital, and the malaria patients were denied admission altogether. Just as malaria seemed under control, an epidemic of follicular tonsillitis broke out, and then George himself was struck with amoebic dysentery.
An acute infection, bacterial dysentery is triggered by shigella organisms that lodge in the lower intestine. The culprit is the parasite Entamoeba histolytica, ingested in its cyst form. Poor sanitation and overcrowding facilitate its spread. Flies are a common vector as they light on food. You may feel tired, spike a fever, be seized with sudden abdominal pain. There is an intense urge to defecate. Feces may be laced with mucus, pus, and blood, until your bowels secrete nothing but a thin stream of water. Dehydration, delirium, and, in rare cases, death may ensue. The symptoms of amoebic dysentery resemble bacillary dysentery, though the former can lead to severe blood loss and affect any organ. Most commonly it attacks the liver, causing acute peritonitis, which can be fatal. Sulfa drugs were used to control bacillary dysentery. Amoebic dysentery was treated with emetine, which the United States had sent to Japan after the Tōkyō earthquake of 1923. In the absence of drugs, men were put on a diet of rice gruel and given a combination of charcoal, magnesium sulfate, and warm tea enemas.
A constant concern for the defenders was nutrition. The 4th Marines were down to 30.49 ounces of food per day, which included 8 ounces of meat, 7 of flour, 4 of vegetables, 3 of milk, and 2 of rice. It was a veritable feast compared to rations on Bataan, but the reduced diet exacted a toll. The sick took longer to recover. Wounds required more time to heal. The symptoms of food deficiency diseases were beginning to appear.
Fred was constantly hungry. He marveled at the Filipino enlisted men who found food that he couldn’t even see. They dug up wild camotes, a kind of sweet potato, and never lacked fresh fish, which they nabbed with bamboo spears. Fred tried his hand at the new sport. He put on a pair of bamboo goggles with lenses fashioned from soda bottle glass and glued into frames with sap. Then he slipped into the South Channel, spear in hand. In contrast to the Officers’ Beach, where George went for afternoon dips, the waters here were unprotected. Fred made sure a marine accompanied him in case any sharks got curious. But his Boy Scout experience proved for naught. He didn’t catch a thing, though he was caught buck naked a couple of times during bombing raids.
The bombs bursting on Corregidor varied in size from 100 to 1,000 pounds—small antipersonnel bombs, large high explosives, and fragmentation bombs that contained just about everything except the kitchen sink: nuts, bolts, scrap metal, even pieces of concrete. The planes that delivered them, usually Mitsubishi Type 100 medium bombers codenamed “Sally,” flew out of range of Corregidor’s 3-inch guns, which could fire only up to 8,300 yards with Scovil Mark III powder train fuses at a maximum elevation of 80 degrees.
Frequently the tropical glare, the smoke, and the haze from fires prevented the sighting of aircraft until they were on their “way in” at about 45 degrees. Once Batteries Boston and Chicago obtained 2,700 rounds of mechanical fused ammunition from the Seadragon, which slipped into Corregidor’s waters on the night of February 4, gunners were able to raise their ceiling to 9,100 yards at close range and “Give ’em hell.” But 50 percent of enemy aircraft remained out of reach.
At first the Japanese pursued area bombing; then they began picking their targets. Interior portions of the island were pocked with craters. Military installations on the perimeter were still largely intact, including the power and cold-storage plant just west of the North Dock.
There was a lull in bombing activity from January 15 until March 23, but all was not quiet on the Rock. Photo Joe teased machine gunners by flying just out of reach at Battery Point, and on February 6 the Japanese began to shell the fortified islands with 155mm guns from the Kondō Detachment in Cavite Province. In mid-March the volume of the assault was turned up when 240mm howitzers from the Hayakawa Detachment joined the band.
One morning while Fred was having porridge for breakfast, a shell exploded a hundred yards from E Company. Any closer, he thought, and it would have been all over.
At night they watched firefights as the Japanese shore batteries between Sapang and Ternate, south of Manila, opened up on Forts Drum and Frank. At least when you were bombed, you could see the planes beforehand. Experienced gunners like Roly Ames could tell where the bombs would land by the sound they made falling. There was no such warning with artillery fire, Fred learned. By the time you heard the whistle of a shell, it was too late.
George was in a hot spot. The East Sector was being shelled morning and night. “I wonder what it’s like to be free of all fear of bombs, shells, invasion, lizards, ants and monkeys,” he wrote in his diary. His tone was one of childlike curiosity, as if fear were no longer an occasional occurrence, but a state of being, as natural as the weather and as all-encompassing. Yet at its heart was a new fear, one that was rarely articulated at this stage of the siege, even if it was on the minds of almost everyone in its midst: What would happen if the Japanese took the Rock?
10 March 1942. Here we sit and listen to daily taunting by William Winter [of KGEI, San Francisco] and others. All being directed at Japan and flaunting their failure in PI. Hell! If they so desired they could shoot 200,000 troops in here and finish our proud chortling.
That was just what the Japanese wanted, and on March 24 they resumed the bombing of Corregidor in seven air raids over fourteen hours. For the first time heavy bombers were deployed and nighttime raids were inaugurated. Planes swept in over the island from the southeast, targeting Kindley Field, Middleside, and Topside. Battery Chicago was slapped twice, the No. 1 gun of Battery Wheeler was knocked out, an ammunition dump on Morrison Hill exploded, the cold-storage plant was disabled, and the house that Wainwright had inherited from MacArthur and just vacated for the security of Malinta Tunnel was destroyed. It was “the largest air raid so far carried in the Philippines,” the Japanese boasted in the press. In the last week of March alone, Corregidor weathered sixty-four high-altitude aerial attacks.
One day Wainwright visited Battery Monja, and the Japanese welcomed him with an air raid. Wainwright, his aide, Fred Berley, and others took refuge in the plotting room of the battery’s casemate. Walking stick in hand, Wainwright kept on talking about the great camouflage those “yellow-bellied bastards” had. Then, all at once, he turned to his aide and said, “Let’s go.”
“Well, general,” his aide said, “the All-Clear hasn’t sounded yet.”
“I don’t give a damn,” the general replied. “Let’s go.”
And off they went.
The batteries on Corregidor had radios, and the men would gather around them at 1800 to listen to the world news. Battery M made a point of telephoning the news to men in the field to dispel the wild rumors that circulated. William Winter’s claims on KGEI had a dispiriting effect on the Rock’s defenders, who knew of the Japanese victories in Malaya, Singapore, Java, Sumatra, and Burma.
When Winter goaded the Japanese from the safety of his San Francisco studio, “I dare you to bomb Corregidor!” one 4th Marine responded: “I wish I had that SOB in my foxhole.”
March 30 saw an unexpected morale booster on Corregidor, as George recorded in his diary.
31 March 1942. Six days of intense bombing and shelling and few deaths and fewer injuries. Japanese have lost about 10 planes and 50 men and have done no damage to Corregidor.Yesterday afternoon was extremely exciting and rejuvenating.Two motored silver Jap Bombers came over at about 5 p. m. & were fired on by AA Bat “Denver.” Both were hit and one had wing blown off. It was a most beautiful sight to see it spin into a 90 degree dive and plunge into the bay about 300 yds. from USS Mindanao. . . .The other plane exploded in mid-air and there was nothing left but a few fluttering pieces. Bombs were dropped in bay and hit nothing.The whole island gave vent to a chorus of cheers and yells and I am now hoarse.
For a brief shining moment, Homma’s ultimatum seemed like an idle boast. Fred was among those who cheered. But he remembered what Lieutenant Commander William E. “Pete” Ferrall, skipper of the Seadragon, had said when he arrived on the Rock on February 4: no fleet could possibly come to the aid of the embattled garrison. The Seadragon left the following day with the navy’s code-breaking equipment—the Red and Purple machines—and the CAST staff. A hundred bags of outgoing mail were also taken on board, among them George’s letter to Lucy and Fred’s note to his parents. There was no incoming mail.
The men on Corregidor may have been more fortunate than those on Bataan, but most of them had come to the same conclusion as Fred Berley: this war was going to last a helluva lot longer than six months.
11
“We are not barbarians”
COMBAT IS A SPARK for creative expression. Wars show men and women in extreme situations, forced to make instantaneous life-and-death decisions with consequences that ultimately define character. The defenders of Bataan would boast no aesthetic achievement comparable to Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But they had their own scribes and scribblers, bards and balladeers. They kept diaries and journals, composed songs and penned doggerel, and jotted thoughts on notepads, in composition books, or like John Bookman, in ledgers sawn in half. Their artists were Private Benjamin Charles Steele, an aircraft dispatcher attached to the 19th Bomb Group, and Lieutenant Colonel Eugene C. Jacobs of the Army Medical Corps. Their poets were Captain Calvin Ellsworth Chunn of the 45th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, and Lieutenant Henry G. Lee of the 31st Infantry, Philippine Division, whose eloquent words in “Fighting On” touched the hearts of Fil-American forces on the front in the hours before the final assault:I see no gleam of victory alluring
No chance of splendid booty or of gain
If I endure—I must go on enduring.
And my reward for bearing pain—is pain.
Yet, though the thrill, the zest, the hope are gone.
Something within me keeps me fighting on.
In late February and March Japanese reinforcements streamed into the Philippines to bolster the badly beaten 65th Brigade and the 16th Division. Lieutenant General Kitano Kenzō’s 4th Division added 11,000 men from Shanghai; Major General Nagano Kameichirō’s 21st Division, another 4,000 originally intended for duty in Indo-China. The 1st Artillery Headquarters (led by Lieutenant General Kitajima Kishio) arrived from Hong Kong, and two heavy bombardment regiments flew in from Malaya. Homma’s artillery strength on Bataan was now more than doubled. He had long-range 240mm howitzers, ammunition, gas masks, food, bandages, quinine, and chlorine for water purification. The Japanese Army even had a division of prostitutes on Bataan. Derisively called “Shock Absorbers” by Fil-American troops, many of the “comfort girls” were of Korean origin.
The men and matériel were now in place for a coordinated assault against the main line of resistance. Homma’s inspiration to attack, he said, “came from a San Francisco broadcast which stated ‘this is the darkest hour since Pearl Harbor’ and indicated a lack of food and medicines.” His intelligence was correct. Three clearing stations stood in the path of his advance, forcing the 12th Medical Battalion to evacuate thousands of patients to the rear. It was “total chaos,” said Colonel Cooper. The roads were jammed, one convoy was caught in the crossfire, and the patient census of Hospitals Nos. 1 and 2 swelled to 2,700 and 6,000 respectively. Once Mt. Samat was bagged, the Japanese would crash through the Mt. Limay line and drive down the East Road, if necessary, while the west flank made its feint. Mariveles was the destination; Corregidor was the prize.
For Christians, April 3 was Good Friday. For the Japanese, it was the anniversary of the death of Emperor Jimmu, the first imperial ruler, and they honored his spirit by launching a brutal artillery assault against the most vulnerable sector of II Corps—on the extreme left—to the accompaniment of a sustained aerial bombardment. “There is no reason why this attack should not succeed,” Homma wrote in his operational diary the night before. He estimated a Japanese victory within a month.
One hundred and fifty pieces of artillery—guns, howitzers, mortars—mercilessly pounded American and Filipino positions, as Major General Mikami Kizo’s 22nd Air Brigade dropped more than sixty tons of bombs on the American line to smooth the ride for Japanese armor and infantry. Communications were cut, cane fields and bamboo copses crackled in the flames, and thick smoke and dust blanketed the battlefield. Hundreds were cremated as fires leaped over clearings to feed on the jungle beyond. Then General Nara’s tanks punched a hole through the battered 41st Division, many of whose troops fled to the rear in fright. Some 3,000 casualties staggered into Hospital No. 2 that day.
The offensive was relentless. The 41st Division withdrew, and by April 4 the Japanese had pushed the 21st Division back to a reserve line on the northwest slopes of Mt. Samat. Each advance was preceded by a barrage of artillery and air attacks, and the targets were not always troop concentrations or artillery positions.
“Every vehicle that tried to move was bombed,” said Sergeant Abie Abraham of the 31st Infantry. “Every wire-laying detail, infantry, troop, and every individual moving in the open was subject to these spot bombings.”
On the morning of Easter Sunday, a bomb landed at the entrance to Hospital No. 1, blowing up an ammunition truck passing by. The concussion hurled nurse Juanita Redmond to the floor. Corpsmen dashed out into the yard with litters, but the men in the ammunition truck had been killed instantly. The planes roared back. Nurses and corpsmen tried frantically “to cut the traction ropes so that the patients could roll out of bed if necessary, broken bones and all.” Some became hysterical and shrieked in pain; others were petrified with fright, refusing to move.
Conduct Under Fire Page 21
