Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Armed with bayonet-tipped rifles and brandishing swords, the Japanese goaded, prodded, slapped, pushed, and horse-whipped their quarry on the grueling sixty-five-mile march from Mariveles to San Fernando. Troops from Luzon Force captured inland trickled down trails to swell the rising tide of men. Artesian wells ran close to the coastal road, but “you didn’t dare stop to get water,” said Sergeant Charles Cook of the 27th Bombardment Group. “They’d bayonet you if you tried.” Major Bert Bank went five days without being allowed any water at all and subsisted on a single rice ball “about the size of a fifty-cent piece.”

  The Japanese looted personal items, stole what remained of C-rations, and lifted canteens. One captive who refused to relinquish his ring had his entire finger lopped off with it. Men chewed sugarcane, gnawed raw turnips, and to slake their thirst they sucked moisture out of banana leaves. Stragglers were clubbed, shot, or eviscerated. Those who could still stand were forced to bury their ailing buddies alive. “If you fell,” said Staff Sergeant Harold Feiner of the 17th Ordnance Company, Provisional Tank Group, “bingo, you were dead.”

  The roadside was strewn with corpses, some of them headless, some of them castrated with their genitals shoved into their mouths. When Filipino civilians in Lubao began tossing rice, candy, casava cakes, and cigarettes to the weary procession, “the Jap guards went into a frenzy,” said Captain Dyess, “slugging, beating, and jabbing bayonets indiscriminately.” At night the men were cooped up in barbed-wire enclosures, warehouses, and cockfight pits. Dysentery ran rampant, but the Japanese refused to let the Americans dig latrines. There was little sympathy for the sick and wounded.

  The Japanese would be roused to murderous rage whenever the impulse seized them. In a ravine near the Pantingan River, Filipino officers and noncoms from the 91st, 71st, and 2nd Regular Divisions were rounded up, bound with phone wire, tied together, and then forced to listen to a speech through an interpreter: “Dear friends, pardon us. If you surrendered early, we will not kill you. But we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us. If you have any last wish before we kill you, just tell us.” The Japanese drew their swords and bayonets, and for the next two hours slaughtered 300 to 400 Filipinos from behind.

  Those who survived the march to San Fernando were gathered into groups of 115 and packed into steel boxcars for the sweltering twenty-five-mile trip by narrow-gauge railway to Capas. From there they trudged another eight miles west to O’Donnell, where they were confined as “captives.” It was a designation, asserted camp commandant Captain Tsuneyoshi Yoshio, that was beneath even the dignity of prisoners of war.

  Between 5,000 and 10,000 Filipinos perished on the journey to O’Donnell. Up to 1,100 American lives were lost on the way. In total, more Fil-Americans died on the march from Mariveles than during the entire defense of Bataan. Homma’s men made a sham of bushidō. The principles of kōdō, so loftily expressed in the Senjinkun as “valour tempered by benevolence,” lay trampled on the battlefield of Bataan.

  Imperious, victorious, the Japanese would prove to the Americans their superiority as a race, and demonstrate to the Filipinos, whom they were allegedly liberating, their indomitability as a power.

  12

  “I go to meet the Japanese commander”

  THEY ESCAPED the fall of Bataan by just hours. Weary but relieved, Murray and John walked into Malinta Tunnel to receive their orders from Regimental Surgeon Thomas Hirst Hayes. The remaining eighty-eight army nurses from Hospital No. 2, “every last one of them with her chin up in the air,” said Wainwright, reached the Rock later that morning. They had fled Bataan only to land in the center of a bull’s-eye.

  Corregidor struck them as a wonder. The Malinta Tunnel hospital had electric lights, running water, clean sheets, and white-enameled bedside tables. There was food, medicine, showers, flush latrines, and an operating room with sterilizers. Connected to the northeast end of Malinta, the main hospital tunnel had fourteen laterals, about eight feet wide and with arched ceilings ten feet high. These served as wards for “Surgical,”13 “Respiratory,” “Dental,” and “Dispensary,” as well as a mess area and separate sleeping quarters for doctors and nurses. Thin metal partitions draped in sheets were all that separated the laterals from the steady flow of tunnel traffic. Several small radios were tuned to KGEI in San Francisco and to the Voice of Freedom, broadcast from a makeshift studio nearby.

  “Bataan has fallen!” announced Philippine Army Lieutenant Normando Ildefonso Reyes over the air, reading a speech written by Lieutenant Salvador P. Lopez.

  Filipino and American troops of this war-ravaged, bloodstained peninsula have laid down their arms. . . . Besieged on land and blockaded from the sea, cut off from all sources of help, these intrepid fighters have borne all that human endurance could bear. . . . But what sustained them through all these months of incessant battle was a force more than physical. It was the thought of their native land and all that is most dear to them, the thought of freedom and dignity, and pride in these most priceless of human prerogatives.

  Hospital staff numbered 100, and with the notable exceptions of Carey Smith, Ann Bernatitus, and the navy corpsmen, it was all army. By contrast, Hayes had only a team of four in Malinta Tunnel: Regimental Dentist Bob Herthneck, Pharmacist Crews, and two corpsmen. The rest of his men—doctors and corpsmen alike—were in the field. Cooperation between the army and navy medical organizations evolved out of necessity rather than goodwill, which overrode, for the most part, traditional rivalries.

  “Probably never before have two branches of the service been so intimately related,” Hayes enthused in his notes. “The Army furnished the majority of care to all services behind the lines in [sic] Corregidor; the Navy furnished the majority of care to all services in the field. Both services present and acting in both areas.” But the navy was never entirely accepted into the army fold. Hayes complained that he was denied officer accommodations even though they were available.

  Malinta was crowded to overflowing with army units. During bombing raids men slept in relays throughout the day and night on portable cots or atop packing cases. Some hid in its labyrinthine spaces to avoid reporting to any command. Morale was so low after the fall of Bataan that Wainwright, himself tormented by the loss, issued a statement affirming that Corregidor could and would be held. “If the Japanese can take the Rock,” he said, “they will find me here no matter what orders I receive.”

  Corregidor needed all the help it could get. The navy personnel, Philippine Scouts, and Constabulary forces who had been evacuated from Mariveles were pressed into a new unit called the Provisional 4th Tactical Battalion, under the command of Major Francis H. “Joe” Williams. They would augment the Regimental Reserve, which included Major Max W. Schaeffer’s Headquarters and Service Company. John Bookman was designated Battalion Surgeon of the new 4th Tactical Battalion, which was bivouacked east of Geary Point along a trail that ran to Government Ravine.

  The marine beach defense was also bolstered wherever and whenever possible. George watched the 1st Battalion grow from 700 to 1,200 after absorbing Philippine Army, Philippine Air Corps, and U.S. Army elements. Not only did his workload increase, but his responsibilities extended to army units in the East Sector as the tactical situation demanded. Murray was appointed assistant surgeon of the 1st Battalion, and George greeted his colleague with a bar of chocolate in the midst of an air raid.

  “Thanks, pal,” Murray said, on first meeting George. “When’s breakfast?”

  “That’s it,” George replied. “And dinner’s after dark because the Nips spend all day trying to blow out our galley.”

  Murray took to George at once. He liked his forthrightness, his jocular tone, and he appreciated his willingness to share. We’re hungry, we have no support, and we’re getting our asses shot off, he said in so many words. But he said it like a boy laying down the rules of the neighborhood for the new kid on the block while speaking in the gang’s code. George was almost exactly a year older than Murray, though the
ir birthdays—falling on New Year’s Day and New Year’s Eve, respectively—were merely a day apart.

  The chocolate bars came from D-rations, which were issued on Corregidor in February and formulated to compensate for a missing meal. Highly concentrated four-ounce cakes, they were supposed to be supplemented by a rice ration. First Battalion troops and attached personnel used to go to mess at the Officers’ Beach, but artillery fire forced the galley to be relocated to a blocked-off road that was defiladed from Bataan, about 200 yards from the east entrance of Malinta Tunnel. Water was hauled by truck in empty 155mm, 8-inch, and 12-inch powder cans, the lines having been shattered by hostile fire. You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t drink, you couldn’t wash your clothes because you couldn’t set them out to dry without becoming a target. The chalk V emblazoned on helmets stood for Victim, some joked, not Victory.

  Then there was the word Nip. Unlike Jap, a derogatory term in use since McCauley’s With Perry was published in 1854, Nip was of recent coinage, as if an animal had just been discovered that needed a name for classification. And the species, as represented by caricatures in American military manuals and mainstream media, was subhuman. The Japanese had their own oral language before they borrowed Chinese (kanji) characters, and Nippon was the Japanese pronunciation of the character the Chinese read as Jih-pen, which they conferred upon the country of “sun-origin.” Nip became accepted jargon in the American press not in spite of its negative overtones, but because of them. “Chief Tomas picked up three Nip pilots forced down in his territory,” reported Time magazine on January 5, 1942, in the first recorded use of the word in the United States. Nip served as both noun and adjective, its truncated form resonant with meaning, as in nip in the bud, to cut something down to size or eradicate it before it takes root; nip as in “to steal” or “seize”; and nip as in the bite of an animal—a horse, say, or a donkey, dog, or monkey. Crafty, dangerous, stripped of their humanity, Nips were abstractions, easy to hate and easier to kill.

  You couldn’t escape the bombing and shelling on Corregidor, not even in Malinta Tunnel. The walls shook, the lights swayed and flickered, and particles loosened from the vaulted ceiling. The ventilating fans went off to prevent smoke from spreading into the laterals, and the air became suffocatingly close. A hush descended during the sudden blackouts, when doctors worked by flashlight. The muffled sounds of destruction conjured the darkest scenarios. You couldn’t tell day from night, dawn from dusk. You lost your perspective because you literally couldn’t see.

  George had no such problem—he saw more than he wanted to. The marines were nearly three-quarters finished digging a tunnel for his sick bay, “blasting, mucking, shoveling, and shoring” twenty-four hours a day. Scoured out of a cliff, it was only large enough to accommodate twelve patients in addition to medical personnel and equipment. The tunnel faced north, protected from the Japanese artillery massed on Cavite but shielded from Bataan only by camouflage at its entrance.

  On Murray’s first day on the Rock, two waves of bombers pounced on 1st Battalion positions from Infantry Point up to the auxiliary aid station, while Japanese artillery fired from Bataan and Cavite. “Couple casualties and air compressor hit and lot of us going to chow were caught right in middle of it,” George jotted in his diary. “We were just lucky.”

  They were, though the three earthquake tremors that shook Corregidor at 1343 on April 9, 1942, were enough to make anyone wonder how much longer their luck would hold out.

  That afternoon a column of Japanese tanks heading for Mariveles entered the compound of Hospital No. 1. At 1335 Colonel Duckworth, the commanding officer, surrendered to Major General Matsuii, field commander of the Imperial Japanese Army forces. Hospital No. 1 had 1,800 patients, 33 of whom were wounded Japanese POWs. They were confined to a separate ward and entrusted to Captain Black of the U.S. Public Health Service. Apparently one of Matsuii’s officers was related to a prisoner, but he was satisfied that the Japanese had been well cared for by the Americans. Once Hospital No. 1 was surrounded with sixteen tanks, Matsuii allowed Duckworth and his skeletal staff to resume their work.

  The surrender at Hospital No. 2 was more ominous. At 2000 two Japanese officers and twenty enlisted men summoned the ichiban, meaning “number-one man,” Colonel James O. Gillespie. After a lengthy interview they issued orders for an enforced blackout, restricted movement and use of the Real River, and claimed possession of all hospital property. “Anyone caught violating this rule will be shooted,” announced the Japanese interpreter. A guard was posted, ward doctors were issued passwords, and then the Japanese, in spite of repeated protests by the Americans to the second-ranking medical officer of the Japanese Army, Major Sekiguchi Hisashi, surrounded the hospital area with twenty-three artillery pieces. Battery personnel moved into the laundry, the mess, even three of the hospital wards. Several nights later a Filipino woman with a three-month-old baby and a three-year-old son was dragged from her bed in a tent adjacent to Ward 6 and raped repeatedly by a drunken Japanese sergeant and his cohort.

  The Americans had raised Red Cross guidons and white flags to protect Hospital No. 2, but the Japanese were intent on using “our wounded,” said Major Stephen M. Mellnik of Corregidor’s Coast Artillery Corps, “to make ramparts around their guns.” The Allies were now in the line of their own fire. Battery commanders on the Rock were given orders not to target the area and soon had coordinates of the hospital compound in hand. But commands were then issued to knock out any enemy guns that could be positively identified within the perimeter. On April 22 one shell overshot its target, killing five Americans and wounding fourteen.

  The day after the Japanese entered Hospital No. 2, Sekiguchi ordered the release of all Filipino doctors, dentists, and corpsmen. Those who wanted to remain behind were driven out at bayonet point. Their Filipino patients were evacuated at once, supposedly so they could go home. But many of them had recently undergone surgery for amputations, abdominal wounds, and fractures. Others were suffering from malaria, dysentery, and malnutrition. A few were completely blind; still others had bloody dressings on their wounds. Lieutenant Walter Waterous estimated some 2,000 wounded were discharged from Hospital No. 2. No transportation was provided. Weeks later, the bodies of hundreds of Filipino patients—who either died or were killed by the Japanese—were visible along the East Road. Waterous’s Filipino colleagues believed that as many as 50 percent had perished.

  Japanese soldiers who marched past the hospital in the direction of Mariveles “appeared tired, but all were in excellent physical condition,” Colonel Cooper later wrote, “and their state of nutrition and muscular development was in marked contrast to the pale and emaciated bodies of our personnel and sick.” The patients at Hospital No. 2 were suffering from edema and peripheral neuritis, and their wounds and fractures were healing slowly due to malnutrition. The Japanese were unmoved by their plight. Within forty-eight hours of their arrival, Sekiguchi’s men had looted the food stocks at Hospital No. 2, “and what remained of the medicine,” said Waterous. When the American doctors asked for an increase in sustenance, the Japanese replied that the transportation simply wasn’t available, in spite of the fact that the Japanese had no problem in providing for their troops in the hospital area from several tons of American foodstuffs they seized six and a half kilometers away. Despite repeated requests from American doctors for increased sustenance, the Japanese refused to turn over a single sack of white rice. “We got nothing,” said Colonel Gillespie, “except one issue of fly-blown fish that was discarded as unfit for human consumption.”

  In little more than a month Hospital No. 2 would be disbanded. A medical detachment and 550 patients were bused to a warehouse adjacent to Hospital No. 1 at Little Baguio, while 750 ambulatory patients and a minimal staff remained behind. “Many of us turned our backs, with mixed emotions, on Hospital No. 2 forever,” wrote Colonel Duckworth in his last official report. “That this small group in less than three and a half months had built and operated hospital facil
ities for 16,000 patients is, we believe, a truly remarkable event.”

  Murray’s stay with the 1st Battalion on Corregidor lasted exactly one day and night. On April 10 he was designated Assistant Battalion Surgeon, 4th Tactical Battalion, responsible for the 13 officers and 300 enlisted men who comprised the Headquarters and Service Company. He had one corpsman, Pharmacist’s Mate Cecil Jesse Peart, to help him. Many of the men in H&S had administrative and regimental supply responsibilities, but they were needed now as reinforcements. Before the fall of Bataan, Schaeffer had assembled them each afternoon in their bivouac area, where they were instructed in weaponry and infantry tactics.

  The area, known as Government Ravine, was on the southwest side of the island. A part of the Government Reservation, it was wedged between Battery Ramsay to the north and Batteries Geary and Crockett to the south. But it appeared only on maps of Corregidor classified as “SECRET.” The Japanese knew exactly where it was, though. Government Reservation, after all, housed the Philippine Treasury.

  The 4th Tactical Battalion was positioned to the west of H&S. By the time they began training, the Japanese had already stepped up their bombardment—which meant that the troops of the Regimental Reserve, along with the medical officers and corpsmen who tended them, spent much of each day huddled in foxholes on the trail that ran from Government Reservation to Geary Point. Lulls were used for target practice, field drills, and resupply. At night the men listened eagerly as army veterans of Bataan shared their knowledge of Japanese battle tactics. They were quick learners. They had to be.