Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Claud Mahlon Fraleigh of the Navy Dental Corps was assisting Carey Smith in an operation when a second wave of planes came over the hospital. Smith was furious and refused to leave the OR. “Damn it,” he said, “if they get me, they’re going to get me on my duty.” Then a raft of 500-pound bombs hit the mess and the doctors’ and nurses’ quarters, and a 1,000-pound bomb crashed through the wards. “I heard myself gasping,” recalled nurse Juanita Redmond. “My eyes were being gouged out of their sockets, my whole body was swollen and torn apart by the violent pressure. This is the end, I thought.” Corrugated tin roofs flew off of buildings, bamboo sheds were blown apart, and iron beds bent “like paper matches.” Army nurse Hattie Brantley dashed into the orthopedic ward for help and found that Chaplain William Cummings had climbed onto a desk and was reciting, as blood streamed down his arm and chest from a shrapnel wound, the Lord’s Prayer.

  Ten bombs in all fell on the hospital, killing 73 men and wounding 117. Smith, Fraleigh, Bernatitus, and Brantley were all unharmed. The wounded were evacuated to Hospital No. 2. This time the Japanese didn’t bother to apologize.

  The American line had been broken, and two Philippine Army divisions were decimated. Later that day the Right Wing of the 4th Division under Colonel Satō Gempachi seized Mt. Samat and planted the Rising Sun on its summit. A desperate counterattack the next day failed, by which time another division of the Philippine Army had been routed, and the Japanese penetrated 7,000 yards south of the main line of resistance.

  American and Filipino combat troops were so weakened by malnutrition that some could barely move out of their foxholes, much less fight. Full rations were finally ordered for them on April 7, and food stores that had been transferred from Bataan to augment Corregidor’s reserves were now shipped back, but it was too late. That night, the Japanese 16th Division prepared for the final push to Mariveles. And that night Major General King returned in tears from a meeting with Lieutenant General Wainwright on Corregidor.

  “We didn’t know how in the hell Bataan held up,” said Seaman 1st Class Austen Andrews, who watched the fighting on the peninsula from the gunboat USS Oahu, out in Manila Bay. Thousands of rounds of shells fell per hour. “At night you could see the artillery duels with the tracers going back and forth. We were right even with the line and I’d never seen such fire power.”

  “The worst day was April 8,” remarked Private 1st Class Wilburn Snyder of the 3rd Battalion Medics, 31st Infantry. “The Jap bombers came over in waves. Then they’d send in the fighters to strafe us. . . . I lived through everything else, but I never felt I’d live through this.” They also dropped leaflets over Bataan that mocked: “Your U.S. convoy is due in the Philippines on April 15 but you won’t be alive to see it. Ha! Ha!”

  The fighting was vicious and losses were heavy on both sides. But rifles were useless against dive bombers. The Japanese succeeded beyond even Homma’s dreams. One line after another buckled beneath their advance—at the Mamala River, the Alangan River—until Wainwright carried out MacArthur’s order and directed King to stage “a sudden surprise attack” with maximum tank and artillery strength against the Japanese at Olongapo. King realized the order was impossible to execute. II Corps was a shambles. The U.S. 31st Infantry had been reduced to 160 men, the 26th Cavalry to 300, the 57th Infantry to 500. American and Filipino soldiers were spent, starving, and scared, and many, like the Philippine Constabulary troops east of the 31st Infantry, simply ran away. Yet MacArthur had forbidden Wainwright to capitulate “under any circumstances.”

  “Already our hospital, which is filled to capacity and directly in the line of hostile approach, is within range of enemy light artillery,” said King on the evening of April 8. “We have no further means of organized resistance.” With 75,500 men still under his command, as many as 100,000 Filipino civilians at risk, and no resources to resist, King made the “ignominious decision” to surrender. He did not bother to inform Wainwright. “Because I do not want him to be compelled,” he told his staff at midnight, “to assume any part of the responsibility.” As if nature herself were rising up in revolt, an earthquake rattled Bataan. The Radio Intercept Tunnel on Corregidor wriggled “like a snake,” said Lieutenant Commander T. C. Parker.

  When Wainwright heard of King’s decision four hours later in Malinta Tunnel from a night duty officer, he shouted, “Tell him not to do it!” But it was too late. King had already sent Colonel Everett C. Williams, white flag of truce in hand, to arrange for a meeting with Homma Masaharu. Thousands of troops on Bataan began to emerge from the jungle “like small spring freshets pouring into creeks which in turn poured into a river,” said one observer. The river was the East Road, which led to Mariveles, and it was flooded with soldiers frantically trying to flee to Corregidor.

  The hospitals on Bataan and their 8,700 sick and wounded were defenseless. General King ordered Carey Smith and Frank Adamo to Corregidor. Colonel Duckworth sent as many nurses and corpsmen as he could spare. The nurses of Hospital No. 1 boarded Pambusco buses for the agonizingly slow ride to the harbor. Trucks, jeeps, command cars, and ambulances were crammed with men who seemed aged beyond their years, haggard and dirty in the unearthly glow of forest fires that blazed wherever bombs fell. They fled from hunger, disease, and above all fear of the Japanese. They could only hope to find a way—a boat, a barge, a banca—to cross the North Channel to Corregidor.

  Mariveles was mayhem. The Japanese were convinced it was the site of Luzon Force headquarters, said aide-de-camp Major Achille C. Tisdelle, Jr., “because General King had had his engineers continually repair small buildings there for that purpose.” HQ was actually “hidden in the woods.” Mariveles paid dearly for the deception. It had been bombed daily in the last week in March and was targeted again in early April; then the Japanese initiated nighttime “nuisance raids.” Navy oil caches were hit. Telephone, power, and water lines were smashed. Antiaircraft fire was an open invitation for retribution. On April 6, ominous news from the front had reached Mariveles. Then on April 8 came word that the army’s eastern flank was retreating toward the harbor.

  Earlier that day Captain Kenneth M. Hoeffel, commandant of the 16th Naval District, informed E. L. Sackett, captain of the Canopus and commander of naval forces in the Mariveles area, that no navy or army forces would be evacuated to the Rock. Corregidor was crowded beyond capacity. But at 2230 that night Hoeffel reported that Wainwright had agreed to accept one Philippine Scout regiment and all naval forces in Mariveles to augment the 4th Marines on beach defenses. Officers and men from the Philippine Army and Philippine Army Air Corps joined the evacuation, which had to take place immediately, before Japanese tanks rolled into Mariveles and dawn’s light turned navy forces into defenseless targets for Japanese planes.

  Hoeffel ordered the “demolition of everything remaining that might be of military value to the enemy.” That included arms, provisions, personal effects, fuel, stores, ships, and more than 5,000 tons of ammunition and bombs in the ordnance depot and the three active supply points on Bataan. The Dewey dry dock was harnessed with ten 155mm projectiles, the Bittern was packed with 200 pounds of dynamite, the Canopus moved into twelve to fourteen fathoms of water, where she sank after her torpedo locker and forward magazine flood valves were opened. At 0100 on April 9 the two tunnels at the Mariveles airfield were blown; the rock crusher and its power plant went at 0300, as did Tunnels Nos. 6 and 7, which had been used by base force personnel. But Tunnels Nos. 1, 2, and 3 stowed ammunition, gasoline, diesel oil, and dynamite and were too close to the docks to be blown safely, while Tunnel No. 4 served as headquarters. They were timed for simultaneous demolition at 0415 after the evacuation of key personnel.

  John and Murray were detached from duty in Mariveles and ordered to report to Colonel Howard, commanding officer of the 4th Marines on Corregidor. “Transportation other than government is not involved in the execution of these orders and none is authorized,” the order stated. The problem was finding transportation
of any kind.

  Soldiers, civilians, and refugees swarmed toward Mariveles, desperate to escape from Bataan. Officers abandoned their units even under the threat of court-martial. Thousands more were on the way, walking, running, fleeing from their homes, their infantry positions, begging for a ride as shells from Corregidor’s artillery careened overhead. But there weren’t enough vehicles, there weren’t enough vessels, and there wasn’t enough time.

  Boys from the Philippine Army walked single file, without their guns, dejected and as ragged and aimless as hobos.

  “Where ya going, Joe?” Ernie Irvin of Battery C asked.

  “I’m go to the probince to see my companion,” one after the other said.

  They sat down on the Mariveles airstrip, where Japanese planes strafed them “like shooting fish in a barrel,” said Irvin.

  Ammunition dumps in the hills were ignited, fuel was torched, and army trucks were set on fire or pushed into Manila Bay. The ground shook from heavy detonations as combat battalions destroyed their equipment. Batteries disabled their antiaircraft guns. Soldiers smashed their rifles with sledgehammers.

  Throughout the night Battery Hearn fired from Corregidor to delay the enemy advance southward toward Mariveles. Colored flares etched crazy patterns on the sky, as white-hot metal from exploding shells streamed down like shooting stars. “You could have read a newspaper by the lurid glare,” said Captain Dyess.

  The nurses from Hospital No. 1 bunched together at the dock as Japanese artillery retaliated. Behind them the nurses of Hospital No. 2 were trapped in a riptide of traffic that seemed to be moving in several directions at once and then went slack when an ammunition dump was blown along the East Road. Men hurried to the waterfront, carrying whatever arms, food, and fuel they could salvage from the storage tunnels.

  Murray hurried down to the wharf with four patients under his care. John scrambled to find passage. They missed the Manapla, which departed from the base force dock at 0345 with 175 passengers, but squeezed on board the San Felipe, which left ten minutes later with 225 passengers. Others were not so lucky. They jumped into tugs or onto barges, bancas, or makeshift rafts; or like Karl “Otis” King and his buddy Isaac C. Williams of the 4th Marines, they swam across the shark-infested bay. Juanita Redmond watched “sick at heart” as several were killed in the water by artillery fire.

  Meanwhile Seaman 1st Class John Kidd had been sent on the navy detail that was ordered to seal the entrance of the ammunition storage tunnel midway between the Section Base perimeter and Sisiman Cove. The dynamite was unstable. Nitroglycerine oozed over their hands as they gingerly set down boxes of explosives in a pile for fuse placement. They rolled the fuse out from the tunnel entrance—and found that it reached only halfway down the slope to their motor launch. They lit the fuse and bolted. The intention was to cave in the mouth of the tunnel, but the blast detonated the dynamite in the rear, causing an earth-shattering explosion. A burst of orange flame enveloped the mountain. The concussion knocked the men flat. Carey Smith was on his way to Mariveles from Little Baguio when the detonation blew him out of his car. The mountainside trembled, triggering a landslide and disgorging boulders the size of small houses.

  Huge rocks were hurled half a mile out into the harbor, sinking small craft, killing four men, injuring nine others, and scattering body parts—including a human head—an extraordinary distance through the air. A motor launch and a motor boat from the Canopus were struck, and one of them sank instantly. Murray and John watched from the deck of the San Felipe as it slowly threaded its way toward Corregidor through waters laced with minefields.

  Bataan looked as if it had erupted. It was an apocalyptic end, and the strange thing, Murray thought, was that it was beautiful. He was far enough away to see it abstractly—the exploding shells, the bursting bombs, the multicolored flares, the sky streaked with white-hot metal, the fire on the mountain—far enough to realize that another part of his life had gone up in flames.

  At 0500 on April 9 John and Murray arrived safely at Corregidor’s North Dock. A few hours later the Japanese threw down the welcome mat and greeted them with an air raid. Three more bombing attacks would follow while Topside came under artillery fire from Cavite. The officers and crew of the USS Luzon, were forced to abandon ship in South Bay and take up positions at Battery Gillespie on Fort Hughes. George’s friend, Medical Officer Lieutenant Alfred Littlefield Smith was among them. By then the Americans on Bataan had already raised the white flag of surrender.

  At 0900 Major General King was escorted by the Japanese to the experimental farm station at Lamao, where he was met by Colonel Nakayama Motoo, Homma’s senior operations officer. Nakayama was taken aback that it was King, not the commander of U.S. Forces in the Philippines, who was offering to formally surrender, but King told him he was unable to communicate with Wainwright. Nakayama would not even look at King, who sat across from him at a long table.

  “My forces are no longer fighting units. I want to stop further bloodshed,” said King.

  “Surrender must be unconditional,” insisted Nakayama.

  “Will our troops be well treated?”

  “We are not barbarians,” Nakayama replied.

  Homma had anticipated capturing 40,000 men, not 75,500. Filipinos accounted for roughly 64,000 of them, Americans for 11,500. Japan’s Dōmei News Service gloated that the Americans and Filipinos had “begged for a halt in hostilities after six days of fierce Japanese assault.” Indeed, the fall of Bataan marked the single greatest military defeat in U.S. history. But Lieutenant Colonel Harold K. Johnson of the 57th Infantry Regiment saw a different reason for it. “It wasn’t the enemy that licked us; it was disease and absence of food that really licked us.” The magnitude of the capitulation and the condition of their captives took even the conquerors by surprise.

  In late March Homma had approved a two-phase plan for the removal of Fil-American prisoners from Bataan. Colonel Takatsu Toshimitsu was to assemble all prisoners in Balanga, the capital of Bataan Province, nineteen miles away from Mariveles. Because that leg of the journey was expected to take a day or less, no provisions were made for food or water. Transportation officer Major General Kawane Yoshikata would lead the second stage north to San Fernando and all the way to Camp O’Donnell in central Luzon. “Rest areas, sanitary facilities, water stations, kitchens, food stores, and other supply depots were to be stationed at short intervals along the route,” wrote Richard Mallonée. “Hospitals were to be set up in Balanga, Lubao, and, if one arrived from Japan in time, at Orani.”

  But the Japanese were caught short in their preparations because they projected the surrender of Fil-American forces in a month, not a week; they underestimated their number by two-thirds; and they failed to take into account the debilitated condition of their captives. Kawane had only 200 trucks at his disposal for 64,000 Filipinos, 11,500 Americans, 6,000 civilian employees, and as many as 26,000 refugees. Thousands upon thousands of men were sick, hungry, and exhausted. Many of them were too weak to walk and had no food or water left to drink. They were “patients rather than prisoners,” remarked the former Luzon Force surgeon Colonel Harold W. Glattley. Homma claimed that Colonel Nakayama had said nothing about the health of the American and Filipino soldiers after his meeting with Major General King. “I thought it was no worse than our own troops,” he maintained.

  “There were far more Americans and Filipinos than we estimated,” admitted Hitome Junsuke, a propaganda officer whose unit in Manila prepared the leaflets that were dropped over Bataan. “And we weren’t prepared for them in any way.”33

  By the afternoon of April 9, Japanese soldiers were converging upon Mariveles on horses, on bicycles, and on foot, in tanks, staff cars, and trucks—Fords, Chevrolets, and GMCs, to the astonishment of the Americans. It was fiendishly hot. The scene made Sergeant Ralph Levenberg of the 17th Pursuit Squadron think of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Privates were mixed in with officers, artillerymen with infantry, the U.S. Army with the Philippine
Scouts—“just a jumbled mass of humanity,” said Captain Mark Wohlfeld of the 27th Bombardment Group. Only later, at Limay and Orion, were Filipinos separated from Americans, and civilians from military, in groups of one hundred and columns of four. Colonel Ernest B. Miller “marveled at how it was possible even to have stood up for one week” against the well-oiled Japanese war machine he saw amassed on Bataan.

  One division staff officer phoned Colonel Imai Takeo of the 141st Infantry with the order to “kill all prisoners and those offering to surrender.” Imai refused to comply unless he saw the written command from Army Headquarters. The order was never produced, and in the meantime Imai proceeded to set more than a thousand prisoners free.

  But other Japanese officers were shown an order, supposedly bearing Homma’s seal but apparently forged by Colonel Tsuji Masanobu and his friends. Tsuji had been specially sent from Singapore—where he helped instigate the slaughter of 5,000 Chinese—to hasten the fall of Bataan. The captives should be executed, he argued, the Americans as Caucasian colonialists and the Filipinos for betraying their Asian brothers.

  The killings began in Mariveles, where the Japanese used twenty-five Filipino soldiers for bayonet practice. The East Road would be stained with blood, littered with bodies—bloated, blackened, crawling with maggots and green flies. Private Blair Robinett of Company C, 803rd Engineers watched a Japanese soldier toss one American, “uneasy on his feet,” into the path of an oncoming tank column. One after another the tanks rolled over the corpse, until there was nothing left except the shadow of a uniform pressed into the dust. “Now we knew,” said Robinett, “if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.” Ted Williams had watched in horror as Americans in the 192nd Tank Company did the same thing to the Japanese—except their victims had been soldiers on bicycles, not captives on foot.