God grant you may soon reap the fruits of victory.
Wainwright replied:
The officers and enlisted men on Corregidor deeply appreciate the sentiments expressed in your message. In our efforts to contribute to the common cause of freedom for which the Philippine and American troops are now fighting we are inspired and encouraged by the historic stand which has been made by the gallant defenders of Malta.
With God’s help, both our peoples shall soon join hands across the seas in celebrating the return of freedom to the democratic nations of the world.
God’s help was more like Job’s luck.
The morning of April 29 was warm and clear, a beautiful dawn for Emperor Hirohito’s forty-first birthday. The Japanese celebrated by launching a massive assault against Corregidor waged by Colonel Inoue’s 4th Field Artillery Regiment and Colonel Koike’s 22nd Field Artillery Regiment. “While the enemy artillery is being annihilated,” read the 14th Army Operations orders, “vital installments shall be burned and destroyed. Enemy camp sites will be unexpectedly harrassed and terrorized, paralyzing the enemy.”
At 0730 three dive bombers struck Malinta Hill, “the anchor of beach defense” at the eastern end of the island. Artillery gunners on Bataan blasted Bottomside, Peeping Tom checked their aim, and the festivities began. Both the North and South Docks were hit, both portals of Malinta Tunnel were shelled, and Middleside Barracks was bombed. Two ammunition dumps near Topside exploded, fires burned fiercely in the stockade, and plumes of smoke snaked thousands of feet into the air. The tunnels quivered; sandbags were set on fire. Trees burst into smoldering embers, while tents and clothing crumpled like autumn leaves.
Andrews brought in two casualties to George’s aid station. Another man with an abdominal shrapnel wound had to be evacuated to the Malinta Tunnel hospital. Meanwhile Pharmacist’s Mate Bansley and Lieutenant (j.g.) William L. Strangman of the Dental Corps retrieved an injury from Engineer Point.
The bombers came in waves, at 0730, 0755, 0923, and 0957. Artillery mauled Malinta Hill, 10,000 shells rained down on Corregidor, coming so quickly they sounded like machine gun fire. Numerous batteries responded—on enemy guns, observation towers, Cabcaben Road, truck columns on the Cavite shoreline—but it was difficult to gauge their effectiveness due to the breakdown in communications. George kept notes during much of the barrage:Another intensive bombardment started at approx 10 AM and is continuing now. . . . Dive bombers still worrying hell out of all hands. So far we haven’t had very many casualties and how [sic] my fingers crossed. Well the rest of this day should be interesting to say nothing about exciting.
It was both. Cheney and James Ravines were soon under fire, and later that afternoon eight bombers ripped into the head of Ramsey Ravine, one load fell on the parapet of Battery Way, and a refrain was played for Middleside. By day’s end 106 tons had been dropped on Corregidor in eighty-three sorties. One hundred 240mm shells were concentrated on Battery Way alone. The Japanese knocked out several of Battery Geary’s mortars, blasted three 75mm beach defense guns that faced Bataan off of Malinta Hill, and destroyed a four-barrelled 1.1-inch pom-pom gun. When a 240mm shell hurtled down a nearby ventilation shaft, igniting a generator gas tank, fire swept through a searchlight tunnel incinerating the platoon commander and four of his men. Happy birthday, indeed.
Morale had taken a beating on the Rock. Japanese bombers flying between 25,000 and 30,000 feet were out of range of the antiaircraft guns, artillery men suffered shell shock, and all some could do was “duck down in their gunpits,” as Lieutenant Colonel E. L. Barr of Battery M put it. The problem for the defenders was that many of Corregidor’s guns couldn’t bear north. Fort Drum fired over Murray’s aid station, and a Philippine Scout battery piped in from Barrio San José, but to little effect.
The roar of the Rock turned into a distressing diminuendo as observation stations were hit, plotting rooms were damaged, and power plants were knocked out. Seventy-five-millimeter beach defense guns stayed out of the action for fear of disclosing their positions before a landing. The fact that many of Corregidor’s guns weren’t firing back made the troops even more jittery.
The only respite from enemy artillery—if respite it was—came from air raids. “During the day we lived like moles burrowing in the ground,” remarked Colonel Beecher, “and came out only at night.” Rats frequented dugouts, ants ate the rat bait, and the dugouts themselves grew moldy. Then Japanese artillery started harassing the garrison after dark. George learned subconsciously to roll out of his cot in his sleep. “I guess my life saving reflex is well developed,” he wrote in his diary. “Here’s hoping I outgrow this after the war.”
Rations left men hankering for more, water was restricted to one canteen per day, and reserve stocks in Malinta Tunnel were so low that showers had been prohibited since April 15. Bottles crashed to the floor in the hospital laterals during bombardments, and a new expression gained currency: “Pardon me, Colonel, that last Jap round bounced the phone right off my desk.” Cordite fumes seeped into the ventilation shafts, and the dust was so thick that nurses covered patients’ faces—and their own—with wet gauze. Fifty feet underground Malinta’s residents were thrown off their feet by the force of concussions.
Some men preferred to be anywhere but Malinta Tunnel. Lieutenant (j.g.) Charles B. Brook of the 4th Tactical Battalion found it so depressing, it made him think of trench warfare in World War I. During one particularly heavy artillery attack, he stepped into an ammunition storage tunnel for cover. “You’ll never get wounded in here,” cracked one old sergeant.
On April 17 Wainwright had requested a navy seaplane to replenish Corregidor’s medicine chest and to remove nurses, civilian women, and older American officers. He radioed MacArthur in Australia, who agreed to send the only two PBYs at his disposal. MacArthur asked that a staff officer, Colonel Stuart Wood, and several cryptographers be removed as well. They were joined by two Philippine Army lietuenants, one of whom was Salvador P. Lopez, author of the “Bataan Has Fallen” speech. At 2300 on the night of April 29 two Catalina flying boats landed in the mineswept waters between Corregidor and Caballo Island “like the messengers from another world that they were,” said Wainwright. The moon was full, and once medicine and mechanical fuses for the 3-inch antiaircraft ammunition were unloaded, twenty American nurses were boarded, including Lieutenant Juanita Redmond, who kissed Wainwright in gratitude before the planes departed for Lake Lanao, Mindanao, en route to Australia. They left just in time. The assault on Corregidor was about to reach new heights.
Batteries Way and Geary were impeding Homma’s progress, and he personally ordered their destruction. On May 1 enemy bombers hammered both entrances of Malinta Tunnel and sealed Battery Chicago’s fate. On May 2 the Japanese drew a bead on the Geary-Crockett locus with 240mm howitzers, right where John and Murray had aid stations. For five hellish hours Corregidor was pounded with 3,600 shells. Explosion followed explosion at the rate of twelve shells per minute or one shell every five seconds. There were enough shells to fill, Wainwright and Moore calculated, 600 trucks.
Traveling nearly at the speed of sound, they caused terrific concussions on impact. The noise on the Rock was deafening. Wainwright himself had his hearing damaged one morning. He was lighting one of MacArthur’s cigars—a Tobaccolero—after breakfast, when a 240mm shell plowed into the bulwark that protected the end of Malinta Tunnel. “My head suddenly felt as if someone had rammed a red-hot pipe through one ear and out the other.”
Pain occurs in the ear at 140 decibels. At 185 decibels, the tympanic membrane can burst, and at 200 lungs might rupture. The blast from a 240mm shell measures 200 decibels or more, a volume at which neural activity is disturbed, equilibrium is thrown off, and the body literally vibrates with the acoustic assault on the eardrum. Speech was lost in the roar of explosions, thought was impaired, and people moved as if in a state of suspended animation. The sound of artillery was an unforeseen weapon in the siege of Corregidor, disorienting a
nd debilitating, and impossible to escape from in the field.
By the late afternoon of May 2 a brisk westerly wind fanned the flames on the Rock. Shovels and wet sacks were the only extinguishers available because the fire department refused to leave Malinta Tunnel in the midst of the barrage. Many of the roads were impassable anyway because of shell and bomb craters. Even disabled guns such as Denver Battery were shelled again as pit crews huddled helplessly and the wounded awaited aid.
Denver lay on an exposed ridge west of Kindley Field. This was George’s territory, but evacuation was technically a corpsman’s responsibility. He knew that any movement could draw enemy fire. A choice had to be made, a risk had to be weighed, but in the heat of the moment thought merged into action with the speed of instinct. He jumped into an ambulance—but the damn thing wouldn’t start. So he drove an Army Command car on the enfiladed North Road and brought his casualties back through the east end of Malinta because a fire had broken out in front of the hospital itself.
While Corregidor was under attack from Bataan, Fort Hughes was being shellacked from Cavite. Fort Drum and Fort Frank opened up counterbatteries in angry reply. Then at 1627 an earth-shattering explosion rocked Topside. A 240mm shell breached Battery Geary’s ammunition magazine, which held 1,600 sixty-two-pound powder charges. The impact was cataclysmic. Some men were convinced it was an earthquake, others the end of the world. Murray’s aid station quivered. He thought the entire island was going to explode. A 13-ton mortar was catapulted into the sky and landed on the golf course 150 yards away. Fred watched in awe as a six-ton fragment of reinforced concrete, “as big as your living room,” careened through the air and severed a tree trunk four feet in diameter before crashing into a ravine.
John, just a few hundred yards below Geary, rushed to the shattered battery, where Major Williams and Captain Austin C. Shofner were the first marines on the scene. The smoke was nearly impenetrable, but the shelling had stopped. The Japanese knew at once that they had scored a bull’s-eye. Fortunately Geary’s commanding officer, Captain Thomas W. Davis III, and pit officer 1st Lieutenant Harry C. Minsker had had the foresight to empty the magazines of one of the inoperative gun pits before their men were forced under cover. Of the sixty-man pit crew, six were dead, and another six were wounded. Captain Calvin E. Chunn of the 4th Battalion was one of the injured, suffering cuts and lesions “when an enemy shell exploded within a few feet of him on Geary trail,” John noted. Williams and Shofner were badly burned trying to rescue survivors. Four men remained trapped behind a concrete wall.
Murray imagined the Japanese dancing with joy. By day’s end, only one of Corregidor’s mortars—Battery Way—could counter the might of Japanese howitzers on Bataan. A garrison of approximately 12,000 men stood against an enemy force of 250,000. Ordnance repairmen couldn’t get a leg up on the damage to the Rock’s guns. Beach defense installations had been pulverized, landing areas on the north shore of Kindley Field were softened, and telephone lines were down. The casualty rate among the 1st Battalion was low, but losses among senior officers ran high.
Hundreds of men had been killed on Corregidor, hundreds more had been wounded, and thousands suffered from respiratory complaints, malaria, jaundice, and acute gastroenteritis. Some gunners experienced weakened vision from vitamin A deficiency, which they tried to remedy with boric acid and cod liver oil. With the increased patient load, Malinta Tunnel hospital expanded into three additional laterals. Among the injuries were abdominal perforations from bomb fragments and shrapnel; wounds to the feet and buttocks from men trying to protect heads and torsos as they hit the deck; and numerous fractures as well as tendon and joint injuries.
Surprisingly there were few psychiatric cases. Shelling produced more neuroses than bombing because of the element of shock, but aside from several suicides, psychotic episodes were rare. The reason, Cooper speculated, was that “there was no zone of interior to which the individual could be sent, and everyone knew that. Another factor may have been that there was no letup.” That didn’t stop malingerers from blowing off big toes or inflicting tibial and tarsal injuries in an attempt to avoid a foot soldier’s duty.
The island was warped by the force of firepower. Murray felt like a fox in the forest watching the trees disappear around him. Once so heavily wooded you could hardly see the sky, Government Ravine was now largely shorn of its vegetation. Even tropical wildlife displayed the hallmarks of fear. During one air raid, a monkey scampered into Malinta Tunnel, frightening the humans by its evident distress. Parts of the North Road had been blown into the sea. Entire cliffsides collapsed under bombardment. What had first appeared to Berley as a posh country club was leveled into a landscape of skeletal buildings and smoking ruins. The Japanese were literally grinding down the Rock.
“There was dust a foot thick” on the ground, said Sergeant Louis E. Duncan, and it was so heavy in the air that it blinded Corregidor’s spotters. Corregidor looked “more like the Mojave Desert,” added Brigadier General Lewis C. Beebe, “than a densely populated tropical island,” except that it was littered with shell fragments and debris. Almost anywhere you walked, there was a bomb crater within twenty-five yards.
The following day, May 3, Wainwright reported to MacArthur: “Situation here is fast becoming desperate. . . . The island is practically denuded of vegetation and trees leaving no cover and all structures are leveled to the ground. Communications and utilities are almost impossible of maintenance. Casualties since April 9 approximate 600.”
By now, several thousand Filipino laborers had crowded into Malinta Tunnel. “They relieved themselves where they stood,” dropped their trash around them, and refused to leave, according MacArthur’s finance officer, Colonel John R. “Jack” Vance. Sometimes the dead lay on stretchers in the hospital laterals “awaiting a lull in the bombardment for burial.”
Conditions in the field, George noted in his diary, were far worse.
3rd May 1942 Sunday.
It is now 1100 and artillery has pounded in constantly for 4 hours. One heavy bombing raid and here we sit in our hole dirty, unshaven, trying to subdue peristaltic wave and urinating in a gasoline tin. . . . I would like to have a recorder here to send this all back for re-broadcast to U.S. defense workers, pacifists, Army, Navy and Marine Commanders, Congressmen, etc. Corregidor still stands but who can claim any credit especially since no attack has been made on any of the fortified islands directly. Bombers and artillery will not take an island even if every man was killed. So here we are wondering just what the hell is in the Japanese mind and more important the American mind.
What was in the Japanese mind was a carefully planned two-pronged attack beginning with the East Sector, which was held by the 1st Battalion, 4th Marines. On the first night 2,400 men from Colonel Satō Gempachi’s 61st Infantry Regiment—the Left Flank Force—would initiate the invasion by landing on the tail of the tadpole and capturing Kindley Field. They would be reinforced by infantry from the 23rd Independent Engineer Battalion and the 1st Battalion of the 4th Engineer Regiment and tanks from the 7th Tank Regiment. An arsenal of firepower would come courtesy of the 1st Company, Independent Mortar Battalion, the 51st Mountain Gun Regiment, and the 3rd Mortar Battalion. Lieutenant General Kitajima Kishio’s 14th Army artillery was charged with knocking out Corregidor’s big guns and enemy ships in the bay, while the 16th Division would execute a feint attack against El Fraile and Carabao Islands.
The next night the Right Flank Force would land in the West Sector of Corregidor between Morrison and Battery Points, then converge with the Left Flank Force to seize Topside. Led by the 4th Division’s Major General Taniguchi Kureo, it consisted of the 37th Infantry, a battalion of the 8th Infantry, and an element of the 7th Tank Regiment. “The vital points of enemy positions will be overwhelmingly crushed,” read the 14th Army orders, “and the enemy troops especially the ones concealed in wooded areas will be exterminated. The final attack support will be as vigorous as the opening fire.”
At 21
30 on the night of May 3, the Spearfish paid a last visit to Corregidor. The submarine slipped past a Japanese minesweeper and destroyer, then surfaced outside the South Channel minefield. She winked her conning tower light, and a small boat approached from the Rock, but its twenty-five passengers took skipper Jim Dempsey by surprise. Thirteen of them were women—army nurses, an officer’s wife, and the sole navy nurse on Corregidor, Ann Bernatitus. Twelve officers followed, including Commander E. L. Sackett of the Canopus and Wainwright’s ailing assistant chief of staff (G-3), Colonel Pete Irwin. Footlockers full of records, rosters, and the last outgoing mail were hoisted on board. By 2230 the Spearfish was 200 feet under the sea, stealing its way toward Fremantle, Australia. Fifty-four army and twenty-six Filipino nurses remained behind.
Prior to her departure, Ann Bernatitus asked Ernie Irvin, who had been pulled off beach defense in Government Ravine to work in the Malinta Tunnel hospital, if he wanted to write a letter to his mother back in Louisiana. She’d mail it for him from Australia.
“No,” said Irvin, a kid who came from a broken Cajun family and had helped support his mom since he was twelve. “It might give her false hope.”
He had seen what the Japanese had done in China. “They chopped off more heads than you could shake a stick at.” He figured they’d wipe out the Americans on Corregidor and then rumble on to their next rampage.
“Why don’t you just go and eat a frozen Milky Way and think of me when you eat it?” he said in farewell.
Conduct Under Fire Page 25
