By May 4 the situation on Corregidor was dire. Thunderous artillery issued from Bataan. Planes dive-bombed the East Sector, while Topside was still under fire. The Air Warning lines were severed, and the Inshore Patrol was immobilized. Fifteen invasion barges were spotted being towed from north to south in the early afternoon, but they were out of range of Corregidor’s guns.
“With morale at present level,” Wainwright wrote in a secret message to Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, “I estimate that we have something less than an even chance to beat off an assault.”
The Japanese directed their fire at mobile guns, searchlights, and the area between North and Cavalry Points on the northeast shore. In a ferocious assault that began at 1500, shells rained down on the Rock with such frequency that “it sounded,” said Murray, “like one continuous explosion.” Scattered artillery fire continued throughout the evening, and searchlights were on the alert, but the only one to reach Corregidor’s shores that night was a Filipino civilian in a fishing boat. He carried a simple message from Philippine intelligence on Bataan:Expect enemy landing on the night of 5/6 May.
A Philippine Army officer in Manila radioed Wainwright that “extensive landing maneuvers” had just been practiced near Cavite, and “thousands of bamboo ladders” were being made to scale the cliffs of Corregidor. Antitank barricades were improvised in Malinta Tunnel from concrete pillars attached to the trolley rails.
On the morning of May 5, Colonel Howard, commander of the 4th Marines, called a conference of his senior officers to consider the probability of an assault. Sergeant Edward D. Dennis, the only enlisted man present, had studied Japanese tactics in China and cautioned that the Japanese favored nighttime landings one hour before the moon was at its height. The Japanese had timed the invasions of Singapore and Hong Kong for moonrise, and on the night of May 5 moonrise was at midnight. Colonel Howard decided to stick to the regiment’s orders and let the men sleep until an hour before dawn. “Damn that full moon,” Major General Moore exclaimed. “They’ll probably come tonight.”
Some of the Rock’s defenders, George noted, had already abandoned their positions.
5th May Tuesday 1942. For two days we have been under heavy concentrated artillery fire and 2 or 3 X a day 5 diver bombers work us over. I hate to say it but the morale is about the lowest it ever has been and a fairly large number of men have refused to stay in their positions. Can’t very well blame them when they practically have their guns blown out of their hands.Artillery barrage in certain areas makes it suicide to even stay there. . . .When I say that I mean 5 to 15 shells in air all the time. . . .Well to sum [sic] the situation.
Things don’t look very pleasant. Guns out, morale gone, positions not manned, unrestricted air activity, water hard to obtain and one meal a day.
In one extraordinary twenty-four-hour period an estimated 16,000 shells fell over Corregidor, an island of 1,732 acres only slightly larger than New York City’s Central Park. Most of the shells were 150mm caliber, and many of them were fired from gun emplacements around Hospital No. 2 on Bataan. The Japanese were using 6,000 American and Filipino patients as human shields.
At 1447 the Rock recorded its 300th air raid. By early evening the Japanese opened up with a withering attack on the fortified islands and a furious concentration on James Ravine, the North Shore, and the 1st Battalion sector. Beach defense guns were blown apart, searchlights were shattered, and land mines erupted. Fort Drum and Fort Frank lobbed 14-inch shells onto enemy boat concentrations off Cabcaben. By 2100 the marines had manned what was left of Corregidor’s beach defenses.
It was a grueling day but by 2200 enemy fire had quieted down. George had just stepped out of his aid station to make his bed for the night when he saw a brace of Japanese motor boats off the North Shore and a hail of tracer machine gun fire. Enemy artillery made it impossible to stay outside. A barrage of shells fell at the mouth of Malinta Tunnel and the entrance to the hospital lateral.
Wainwright was lounging in his Lateral No. 10 quarters when he sat up from his chair and said to Brigadier General Beebe: “I don’t like the sound of that, Lew.”
Nighttime artillery attacks were unusual because the Japanese couldn’t check for accuracy and didn’t like to waste their ammunition.
Wainwright listened for a few minutes before leaving to confer with Moore and added: “I’m afraid we’re in for it.”
The intent of the attack was clear: keep the reinforcements in and the casualties out. The invasion of Corregidor was on.
At 2230 a message went out to the beach defenses commander: “Prepare for probable landing attack.”
Ten minutes later an intense line of fire was laid down along the northeast shore below Kindley Field. The tail of the tadpole was in flames. Then Colonel Beecher received a report of a small flotilla of barges approaching the area between North Point and Infantry Point. Searchlights glared at the intruders, only to be quickly smashed by enemy artillery. Streams of phosphorous shells poured into the sky as Philippine Scouts lacerated the Japanese with 75mm guns from undisclosed positions near North Point while marines opened up with M-1916 37s and beach defense machine guns. On Kindley Field, a platoon of Mobile Battery under Lieutenant Thomas A. Hackett pumped hellfire from antiaircraft guns. The Japanese huddled at the center of their landing craft or tried desperately to swim for shore. Many of them drowned. Within minutes Satō’s badly wounded Left Flank Force narrowed in on a strip of coastline between Cavalry Point and North Point. The water was stained with blood and oil.
The stragglers who made it to the beach were corralled by terror and confusion. From the cliffs of Corregidor the defenders hurled grenades, slid twenty-five-pound fragmentation bombs, and threw rifle and small arms fire at soldiers, who dropped like Kewpie dolls. Some begged for mercy, claiming they were Filipinos, but their pleas were met with laughter and lead. It was a massacre, yet the Japanese would not be stopped. They stepped over their own dead as they had on Bataan, regrouped, countered with deadly 50mm grenade launchers, and readied for hand-to-hand combat. By 2315 what was left of the Left Flank Force of the reinforced 1st Battalion, 61st Infantry, had landed. Now they were moving inland.
Ten minutes after the 1st Battalion came ashore, ten landing craft carrying 785 men from the reinforced 2nd Battalion were swept east of North Point. Miscalculating the currents in the North Channel, boats from the 1st Sea Operation Unit found themselves directly in the crosshairs of the Rock’s defensive positions. Battery Way, which had been plastered by a counterbattery in Cabcaben, roared into action under the command of Major William Massello, Jr., and Captain Frederick A. Miller, using Battery Erie’s 100-man crew. Antiaircraft guns lowered their sights to blaze away at sea-level targets. Battery Craighill on Fort Hughes harassed the invaders with mortar fire. To a Japanese eyewitness in Cabcaben, it was “a spectacle that confounded the imagination, surpassing in grim horror anything we had ever seen before.” Marines hidden in the bluffs riveted barges with .50-caliber machine gun fire and zeroed in on the beaches as if they were “shooting ducks in a rain barrel,” said Private First Class David L. Johnson. Platoon Sergeant William “Tex” Haynes turned into a one-man, two-gun battery, spraying the enemy with .30-caliber machine gun and rifle fire until he was blown apart by a grenade. Eight out of the ten landing craft were sunk, but some Japanese had crept ashore near North Point and gained a foothold along the north edge of Kindley Field.
Shortly before midnight Colonel Howard called in his reinforcements, and Schaeffer’s Headquarters and Service Company emerged from their foxholes in Government Ravine. A tank trap protected them from artillery fire as they crossed Bottomside and filed into Malinta Tunnel, where they were handed arms and ammunition. Murray was left behind to join John and the 4th Tactical Battalion, which was still in bivouac to the west. He climbed uphill and headed over toward Geary Point as the moon rose. Alone in the dark, armed only with a service revolver, it was all too easy to mistake the rustle of bamboo for a footfall,
a passing shadow for the Japanese.
At 0020 a Marine Corps runner ran into Malinta, breathless, to report that enemy troops—“probably 600”—were now on the east end of Corregidor. A battle line was drawn across the top of a ridge beneath Water Tank Hill to prevent the Japanese from advancing on the tunnel, a mere 750 yards away.
At 0100 Joe Williams’s 4th Tactical Battalion, John and Murray among them, gingerly walked the shell-pocked South Road, their progress impeded by the bombardment of the South Dock before they hastened into Malinta. The shelling was so fierce in the 1st Battalion sector that George couldn’t make a move outside his dugout.
Well, we opened a bottle of Champagne and toasted each other [and] made a white red cross flag and sat tight. It was absolutely impossible for us to get out or people to get in.
Malinta was filled to capacity, its entrance was clogged with “tunnel rats.” The blowers were off, the heat was unbearable, and fumes from the diesel generator infused the air. The remaining nurses were instructed to destroy all records and keep gas masks and helmets at the ready.
By then one part of Satō’s 1st Battalion had cut across the tail of Corregidor to seize Monkey Point on the southeast shore. The other part was heading west toward Malinta Hill. Within half an hour the Japanese had reached the high ground of Denver Battery, which gave them a commanding position over the approach to the beaches and stood 1,000 yards from the tunnel entrance. They were advancing to the water tanks when they ran into a furious counterattack led by Marine Captain Noel O. Castle of Company D. Castle was killed in the action, but his men had momentarily pushed the Japanese back. Marines who gathered from various companies to keep the enemy in check were rushed by soldiers screaming “Banzai! Banzai!” before they again forced a retreat.
At 0200 the two companies of Schaeffer’s Headquarters and Service Company began moving out of Malinta to stage a counterattack against Denver Battery. Lieutenant Hogaboom’s Company P was in the lead and ravaged by enemy machine gun fire coming from the base of one of the stone water towers on Water Tank Hill. By the time Company O left, flares were rising over the Japanese position, the signal for an artillery attack from Bataan. Company commander Captain Robert Chambers, Jr., and Quartermaster Clerk Frank W. Ferguson scrambled into bomb craters for shelter. When Schaeffer arrived on the scene, he organized scattered elements of the Regimental Reserve into isolated counterattacks. But they were unable to uproot the Japanese from their positions in Denver Battery.
From the army hospital the doctors knew how quickly the situation was deteriorating from the hundreds of wounded who streamed into Malinta, on foot, on litters, filling the laterals to overflowing. They knew it as surely as Wainwright did when MacArthur reinstated War Plan Orange-3 on Bataan. There was one difference: there would be no retreat this time. Corregidor was the last stand.
At 0400 General Wainwright received a radiogram from President Roosevelt:YOU AND YOUR DEVOTED FOLLOWERS HAVE BECOME THE LIVING SYMBOLS OF OUR WAR AIMS AND THE GUARANTEE OF VICTORY.
At 0430 Colonel Howard played his final hand and ordered the 4th Tactical Battalion to reinforce the 1st Battalion. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions remained in place in the Middle and West Sectors in the event of further landings. Infantry was coopted from the 59th Coast Artillery, antiaircraft artillerymen, and any navy men from the intercept tunnel without specific assignments. Corregidor’s last remaining reinforcements consisted of 500 marines, sailors, and soldiers “untrained in infantry tactics,” remarked Colonel Beecher, “but brave and determined.” Williams led his men in platoon column from Malinta, but before the last of them had even made it out of the tunnel, they were decimated by enemy fire. Many of them were “wiped out,” Wainwright said, “in front of our eyes.”
In the chaos of the night, the Japanese infiltrated marine positions, while some Americans found themselves behind enemy lines. The fighting was brutal, the battle lines at times no more than fifteen to twenty yards apart. Contact among battalions, companies, and platoons was sporadic at best. Runners were the only means of communication.
“Joe, what in the hell did you bring me?” Schaeffer asked once Williams caught up with him.
“I have my whole battalion here,” Williams replied, “or what’s left of them. Where is your unit? And what position do you want my battalion in?”
Schaeffer was unnerved. “Joe, I don’t know! . . . I don’t know where in hell my noncoms are. I think they’re all dead!”
“Dammit now, you relax. I’ll take over this situation,” Williams responded.
At 0600 Williams ordered a counterattack to regain ground around Denver Battery. Forward elements of the Japanese were less than 500 yards from the east entrance of Malinta. Williams was “a tiger,” a welterweight boxing champion who seemed absolutely fearless.
But Japanese resistance was formidable. Schaeffer was pinned down in his position by machine gun fire and nearly hysterical from a grenade blast that he thought had blinded him. Williams had him evacuated to the Malinta Tunnel Hospital, where Murray examined him. There was no damage to his eyes. Schaeffer had panicked, that was all. He would be okay if he could only calm down.
The machine gun nest at the base of one of the water tanks was thwarting the marine advance. Two old leathernecks, Sergeant Major Thomas F. Sweeney and Quartermaster Sergeant John H. Haskins, improvised a relay offense. Sweeney clambered to the top of the old stone tank to lob grenades below while Haskins resupplied him. Fearless and efficient, the two marines eradicated the sniper, but Haskins was killed while laddering up, and Sweeney was fatally wounded soon after taking out another machine gun.
At dawn the Japanese who were holed up in Battery Denver suspected that Frank Ferguson and Corporal Alvin E. Stewart of the 803rd Engineers were leading an outflanking maneuver. Satō’s men had anticipated the move and began retreating toward the rear. The Americans opened fire, picking off twenty enemy soldiers before Ferguson was shot twice in the face.
Unbeknownst to Williams, another enemy flotilla had approached Bottomside at 0440. Batteries Way and Stockade fired on the landing craft and were joined by Fort Drum, which had been pounding the Cabcaben docks on Bataan. Barges were blown apart, and small boats capsized. Half the landing craft were sunk. A curtain of smoke hung over the wreckage. The Americans were convinced that they had thwarted a third assault. “My God,” Lieutenant General Homma exclaimed when he learned of the unexpected reverses, “I have failed miserably on the assault.” The Americans were mistaken, but so was Homma Masaharu.
The counterattacks were heroic. Williams fought valiantly “everywhere along the line, organizing and directing our attack, always in the thick of it, seeming to bear a charmed life,” said Navy Lieutenant Charles B. Brook. While Williams hit Denver Battery from the east, 1st Lieutenant Mason F. Chronister led a platoon of volunteers from the Radio Intercept Tunnel and the 60th Coast Artillery from the west. Then they ran into Japanese reinforcements from the newly arrived 3rd Battalion, 61st Infantry.
At daybreak, the Japanese Army Air Service resumed the bombing of Corregidor and artillery attacks intensified, but the lines below Water Tank Hill were too tightly drawn for fire to bear down on them. The Japanese themselves were so low on ammunition that they fought bayonet to bayonet to hold on to Denver Battery. The tide was turning. The Japanese set up a mortar battery on North Point and a machine gun on Cavalry Point, but after heavy fighting, Williams’s men succeeded in silencing both. The path seemed clear for the remnants of the 4th Battalion to hook up with the remnants of the 1st.
Then Lieutenant Otis E. Saalman of the 4th Battalion staff saw a terrifying sight: two Japanese Chi Ha tanks and one M3 Stuart tank captured on Bataan had just landed on Corregidor and were clawing up from the beach.
Casualties on Corregidor had mounted steadily, but there were few corpsmen in the field. The 1,000-yard run from the mouth of Malinta to the Denver Battery line had turned into a graveyard. Infantrymen volunteered as litter bearers, some of them quickly realizing that it w
as safer to spend a little time in the hospital lateral than to remain on the front. Murray was sympathetic, but it meant soldiers were abandoning their posts.
The wounds resulted not simply from bombings or artillery fire but from light machine guns, rifles, and grenades. Entry wounds tended to be smaller than exit wounds. Bullet wounds were cleaner than shell fragments. Small arms fire had an effect similar to high-explosive fragments. Shell bursts at close range caused massive tissue destruction that could shred the intestine, detach the liver, spleen, or kidney from the peritoneal cavity, and cause instant death. The destructive force of the firepower exceeded anything the army and navy doctors had ever seen in civilian surgery.
Lieutenant Brook had often wondered what it would be like to wage battle with a bayonet. When he heard the word “Charge!” at the base of Calvary Hill, he found himself cursing, screaming at the Japanese until he “felt a small explosion.” His leg was shattered, and he knew at once, “I’m going home.” An army officer tied a tourniquet around his leg, and Brook was “lugged” to the hospital on a piece of sheet metal. Bystanders looked on in horror at his wound. The chaplain told him he’d be taken straight to the operating room, and the limb was amputated without anesthesia. He could feel the cold of the steel knife as it cut through his leg.
Captain Chunn of the 4th Battalion replaced Lieutenant Bethel B. Otter after Otter was killed trying to destroy an enemy nest near the water towers. Chunn had already been wounded when Battery Geary took a direct hit on May 2, but now he was wounded again while charging the Japanese as they were trying to emplace a 75mm mountain gun.
One soldier Murray saw in the OR had a basal skull fracture from being shot in the head. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” he pleaded. But he was dying, and you tried to put his words out of your mind because they spoke just as easily for you. There was nothing to be done except hope that he passed away peacefully and painlessly. He died before Murray’s eyes.
Conduct Under Fire Page 26
