Tears in the Darkness (8 page)

Across the years a succession of admirals and generals in Washington
and Manila wrote and rewrote a war plan, code-named Orange, that tried to anticipate Japan's ambitions and America's answer. With almost every revision of Orange, and there were many, military planners reached the same conclusion: the islands would fall and the garrison would be captured or slaughtered. Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick, a respected strategist who had served in the Philippines, believed that if war came, America should abandon the islands, bide its time, build up its fleet, then return in strength to retake what it had lost. But to sacrifice territory without a fight, and to give up America's only major naval base in the western Pacific, was to risk the opprobrium of the other Western powers. All of which left American commanders in the Philippines in a tactical quandary: How was the army to defend the indefensible, and how could commanders convince their men to hold out for help when those commanders knew well that help would never come?
¹¹

In the decades before World War II, the top American officers in the Philippines talked about two strategies: an “active defense” of meeting the invaders at the water's edge, and a “defense in depth,” which called for an orderly withdrawal down Luzon's central plain to the mountainous peninsula of Bataan whose east shore faced Manila Bay. There, in a last stand, the army would be able to deny the enemy the use of the bay and Manila harbor and would try to hold out for six months until the Pacific Fleet arrived to save them.
¹²

Both stratagems were fictions, fictions because the generals who conceived them and the colonels in charge of translating them into action knew that the garrison would be outmanned and outgunned, constantly under siege and cut off from home. “Active defense” and “defense in depth” were euphemisms, military bunkum for what was really going to happen—the defeat, or annihilation, of the garrison.
¹³

 

MACARTHUR
had his own plan.

By 1940 Congress, now inured to the cries of the isolationists, voted for a military draft and for funds to rebuild the army and navy. It takes time, however, to retool factories and manufacture the matériel of war, time to stockpile armaments and mobilize men. That winter and spring the armed services were still understrength, and military planners wanted America to stay out of the war “as long as possible,” long enough, at least, to get the country's factories going and enlist and train
hundreds of thousands of men. At length Washington settled on a strategy to buy that time, a strategy that worried more about Europe than the Pacific. Germany seemed ready to reduce the British Isles and occupy all of Europe, so for the moment Washington decided to put “Europe First,” as the plan was nicknamed. America would concentrate what resources it had on its Atlantic defenses; it would bolster the English and try to bluff the Japanese, long enough at least to let America build its stockpiles and prepare for a two-ocean war.
¹⁴

Ignoring the shortages and the political realities back home, MacArthur in February 1941 sent the War Department a proposal to defend the entire archipelago, all seventy-one hundred islands. His plan called for his air force to bomb and shell invading ships as they approached the beaches, then, as soon as the invaders set foot on Philippine soil, his ground forces would attack and cast the invaders back into the sea. The stalwarts manning the beaches were to come from the ranks of the Philippine Commonwealth Army, an army that had never taken the field.

Although the War Department knew the truth—a former commander of the American Garrison in the islands had reported “the realities” of MacArthur's force “in precise and unflattering terms”—the rosy reports the general was sending to Washington were the only good news coming out of the Far East that winter and spring. And as the Japanese marched across East Asia and into the southern latitudes, any “good” news was welcome. Hope, not cold reason, ruled the halls of government during those anxious days of 1941.
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In July, President Roosevelt called the Philippine Army into active service, then he made the general commander of all American forces in the Far East. In August, MacArthur assured the War Department that his plan for the defense of the Philippines was nearing completion. And in October, he reported that he would soon have a force of 200,000 men, all of which led Washington to believe that their man in Manila was “ready for any eventuality.”

When war came seven weeks later, MacArthur had under arms only half the number of men he'd promised. His army consisted of squadrons of unproven B-17 bombers and their green ground crews, a small garrison of guzzling Sundowners (as American troops in the tropics were sometimes called), 12,000 Filipino Scouts, and 80,000 Philippine Army
reservists in tennis shoes and coconut-husk helmets. To these men, on the eve of war, Douglas MacArthur issued the following order:

“The enemy will be met at the beaches . . . [which] will be held at all costs . . . There will be no withdrawal.”
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LUZON,
Japan's primary target in the archipelago, was the largest of the Philippine islands, a roughly rectangular tract of land (like the shaft of a boot) 460 miles long and 140 miles wide at its extremes. The coastline ran for 2,242 miles, but only a handful of the hundreds of bights and inlets were big enough to accommodate an armada of troopships. The site most suited to an invasion, the largest anchorage with the longest landing beaches, strips of sand big enough to accept waves of soldiers and supplies coming ashore, was Lingayen Gulf on Luzon's west coast. The beach there was like a threshold; once the invaders had crossed the sand and debouched the defiles between the mountains, they would be standing at the gateway to a wide central plain that ran southeast between ranges of mountains 120 miles down the center of the island to Manila, the political heart of the country. The central plain was wide enough for ground troops to maneuver, and it had two paved highways, a number of side roads and trails, and miles and miles of railroad track. It was also a direct route to Manila Bay, one of the most perfectly formed harbors in the Far East. The central plain, in short, was an inviting pathway for an invading army, and its gateway was Lingayen Gulf.

By mid-December, Japanese aircraft had destroyed MacArthur's Far East Air Force, and after a devastating air raid on the U.S. navy yard at Cavite, home of the Asiatic Fleet, Admiral Thomas Hart sallied most of his ships south to the Malay Barrier, leaving behind only a handful of torpedo boats and submarines. Japanese planes, meanwhile, continued their attacks on American airfields and bases. And everyone on the island of Luzon was on tenterhooks waiting for the invading army to arrive.

The boozy belligerence and barroom burlesques of late November—“Let the Little Yellow Bastards come, we'll knock the living shit out of them!”—gave way to a frame of mind as dark as the banks of clouds that crept in low off the South China Sea and swallowed the tops of the mountains.

Alvin C. Poweleit, an army doctor from Newport, Kentucky, assigned to a tank battalion marshaling to move north toward the gulf at
the first sign of an invasion, noticed that the daily bombings were beginning to “change the personalities” of some of the men. “For example,” he wrote in his diary,

 

Lieutenant Rue seemed absolutely listless, and Lieutenant E. Gibson lost all confidence in himself . . . Captain Sorenson had been a very fine man, capable and intelligent, until the war started, then he became despondent. Then when Company C was called into action, he fainted and went all to pieces . . . [Another officer] was drunk all the time. One day he asked me if the Army would release him if he shot himself in the leg. I told him it would be better if he shot himself in the head.
¹⁷

 

On December 18 at his headquarters at One Calle Victoria, MacArthur received a report that eighty Japanese troop transports were headed toward the Philippines. Two days later the Japanese force was sighted forty miles north of Lingayen Gulf. The next day headquarters warned all commanders that an invasion was imminent.

Along the shoreline of the gulf, the men dug in. Their written orders were still the same—meet the enemy on the beaches. But here and there along the coast, officers from headquarters, inspecting the units dug in above the beach, began to whisper a word heretofore unheard by the men waiting at the water's edge: “withdrawal.”

Withdrawal? “We must die in our tracks,” Colonel Richard C. Mallonée reminded the officer from headquarters.

“Don't believe everything you hear,” the officer said.
¹⁸

The shoreline of Lingayen Gulf was shaped like a fishhook and ran for more than a hundred miles. To defend the entire country MacArthur had divided his command into three forces and his men were spread thin. At Lingayen Gulf he stationed troops at the most logical landing spots, above the widest beaches and at the gaps that led through the mountains to the central plain.

In the early morning dark of December 22, the Japanese launched their landing barges. Most of the invaders came ashore without having to fire a shot. They landed at unguarded strips of sand and immediately prepared to move inland. Only at the beach at Bauang did the two armies clash. Fire from Filipino machine guns riddled the waves of Japanese caught in the roiling surf, and soon the beach at Bauang was littered
with bodies. But in preparing their position, the defenders there had buried their ammunition in the sand and it wasn't long before their guns started to jam and they were forced to withdraw.

By midmorning the Japanese had thousands of men on Philippine soil and were beginning their push toward the central plain. At HQ MacArthur ordered reinforcements forward to try to block the enemy's advance.

Colonel Mallonée, an adviser to the Philippine Army, was waiting with his artillery unit just south of the battle line when “an alarming number of stragglers” from the fighting along the gulf began to wander into his compound, each telling the colonel the same story:

 

Always the story-teller was subjected to terrible mortar fire; always he continued bravely to fire his [weapon]; always his officers ran away—or if the teller was an officer, his superior officers ran first . . . always he was suddenly astonished to realize he was absolutely alone, all others having run away or been killed. Then and only then, with the tanks a few feet away, had he flung himself to one side where . . . Here the story has two variations. First he was captured but escaped that night; second, he hid until night, when he returned to our lines . . . The stragglers were very tired, they sought their companions, they were very hungry, and, sir, could they be transferred to the Motor Transport Corps and drive a truck?
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Some Filipino units stood and fought until they ran out of ammunition or until the Japanese brought up tanks, but many, especially those who had been used as cannon fodder, first at Lingayen Gulf and then at defensive positions on the central plain, were betrayed by their inexperience and fled. Of the 28,000 men under his command in northern Luzon, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur's commander in the area, estimated that only 10 percent of his force—3,000 men at most—had been trained to fight.
²⁰

But it was not just a lack of training that betrayed the young Filipino reservists; it was their allegiance to their overseers, their faith in the great and powerful country they thought was protecting them. Filipino soldiers expected the American Air Corps to control the skies above the battlefield. Instead, the Japanese were “constantly overhead, destroying the morale” of the raw reservists who, according to an American colonel commanding them, “innocently and trustingly expected” the Army Air
Corps “to show up at any time.” When the Americans failed to appear, Filipino “hope gave way to despair,” and the frightened reservists fell back before the columns of attacking Japanese.
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As the Imperial Army began its push down the central plain, General Wainwright sent parts of two American units into the fight, the 26th Cavalry (Philippine Scouts, part of the U.S. Army) and a contingent of tanks, reservists from Minnesota, Illinois, and Kentucky who had been recently federalized and rushed to the islands.

The Scouts, astonishingly, were on horseback, one of the last mounted cavalry units in the U.S. Army. In an age of airplanes and armored vehicles, soldiers on horseback were either an absurd anachronism or the beau ideal of bravery.

Bill Gentry from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, was with the American tank crews assigned to support the cavalry, and he watched open-mouthed as the horsemen moved their mounts into a position to attack the enemy tanks on the other side of a river. Gentry and his crew tried to convince the cavalry officer to hold his men and horses back. “Let us go over there, we can do something with our tanks,” they said. “You can't do anything with those horses and sabres.” But the cavalryman refused to listen. “Get your damn tanks out of the way,” he said. “They are scaring my horses.” Then, as Gentry watched, the Japanese started “tearing” the American and Filipino horsemen “apart” with their tank cannon and automatic weapons.
²²

When the slaughter was over, the Americans ordered their tanks forward to engage the Japanese, but someone somewhere had bungled the refueling. Only five of the dozens of tanks available to attack that day had enough gas to ride into battle and fight, five tanks against perhaps an entire column of enemy armor and an advance of thousands of foot soldiers.

Lieutenant Ben Morin of Maywood, Illinois, the commander of the five tanks, Second Platoon, B Company, 192nd Tank Battalion, positioned his command tank ahead of the others to set the example. He knew his men were afraid and nothing he could say would allay their doubts or lessen their dread, but at least he could take the lead, give them someone to follow.