Elizabeth M. Norman (17 page)

Crewmen stretched a narrow wooden beam from the hull to the dock, and a few of the nurses, dizzy with malaria, nearly pitched headlong into the bay as they negotiated the tenuous plank. Finally, with everyone on deck, the captain reversed engines and turned toward Corregidor.

Just then the bombers came back.

They blew the dock into a shower of splinters and turned on the boat.

The captain started to zigzag, veering wildly in one direction, then the other, hoping to make himself a more difficult target. Nesbit, convinced they would be hit, told her women to remove their shoes, lead weights in the water. One bomb exploded off the port side, another off starboard, sending up geysers of water that soaked the deck. The skipper kept up his zigzagging, and, with the decks awash, the women began to slip about and grab for one another.

Slightly apart from all this sat Anna Williams, curiously calm, working on her fingertips with a nail file.

“My God, Anna,” one of the women said, “what’s the matter with you?”

“I said, ‘Well, what can we do?’ ” Williams remembered. “There wasn’t anything else to do and I wasn’t going to sit there and moan.”
³⁰

A while later the skipper approached the landing dock on Corregidor. “Willy-nilly we piled off that blessed motor launch onto the shaky dock and made for the hillside,” Denny Williams, a civilian nurse, said.
³¹

A monkey nipped at their heels as they ran for Malinta Tunnel.

Inside, some of the early arrivees were astonished that Nesbit and the latecomers were able to escape. “Oh gee! I thought you were dead,” someone told Leona Gastinger.
³²

About one o’clock Nesbit took a roll call. Each of the eighty-eight women who had been in her charge at Hospital #2 answered in a loud, clear voice. Somehow, some way, everyone—including the old and the ill—had escaped to Corregidor.

General Wainwright was delighted to see them. Years later in a memoir,
he recalled the happy moment. They were a scruffy lot, he remembered, covered in road dust and grime, weak with fever and chills and still wide-eyed from their getaway across the bay.

You may talk all you want of the pioneer women who went across the plains of early America and helped found our great nation.… But never forget the American girls who fought on Bataan and later on Corregidor.… Theirs had been a life of conveniences and even luxury. But their hearts were the same hearts as those of the women of early America. Their names must always be hallowed when we speak of American heroes. The memory of their coming ashore on Corregidor that early morning of April 9, dirty, disheveled, some of them wounded from the hospital bombings—and every last one of them with her chin up in the air—is a memory that can never be erased.
³³

A
FTER ROLL CALL
and a meal, the women tumbled onto cots, two to each, and feet to face fell asleep.

Meanwhile, behind them Bataan was falling.

President Roosevelt radioed a message to General Wainwright: “My purpose is to leave to your best judgment any decisions affecting the Bataan garrison.… You should be assured of complete freedom of action and of my full confidence in the wisdom of whatever decision you may be forced to make.”
³⁴

From Corregidor Wainwright answered: “I have done all that could be done to hold Bataan, but starved men without air and with adequate field artillery support cannot endure.…”
³⁵

So General King surrendered the peninsula and a terrible silence descended over it. To some of the refugees across the bay on Corregidor, the quiet was more unsettling than the estimated 907 tons of explosives the enemy had dropped on them during the siege.

Now the only messages coming across the water were from flashlights blinking Morse code signals for distress from Bataan’s tree lines. Dot-dot-dot … dash-dash-dash … dot-dot-dot—over and over again.

From Australia General MacArthur announced that he was naming his new headquarters there “Bataan,” the better to preserve the memory of the command he had abandoned. Politicians pledged to reconquer the islands soon, and on the Voice of Freedom, a radio announcer read a dramatic tribute: “Bataan has fallen, but the spirit that made it stand—a beacon to all the liberty-loving people of the world—cannot fail.”
³⁶

The surrender made front-page headlines around the world:
BATAAN, WORSE BLOW
TO AN AMERICAN ARMY
,
The New York Times
announced.

Journalists blamed the defeat—the most costly wartime loss in a single battle in American military history—on the overwhelming Japanese army and on hunger, fatigue and disease. Many of the publications at home listed the units that had been captured or were missing in action, but the numbers and the details of the defeat were initially withheld, more for morale than national security. The Japanese, of course, trumpeted their triumph. The Domei News Agency in Tokyo announced that sixty thousand Filipino and American troops had begged for a halt in the hostilities. (Officially, Washington later listed over 78,000 American and Filipino troops as surrendering to the Japanese.)

The number of captives surprised the Imperial Army. General Homma’s staff miscalculated not only the number of prisoners—they expected no more than 25,000—but their physical condition as well. Japanese commanders had planned to march their allied captives some nineteen miles to a staging point where trucks and trains would be waiting to take them to prison camps. Now, with more men than they could handle, the Japanese forced the enervated Americans and Filipinos to walk three times that distance, walk under the blazing sun.

The Japanese guards stripped the prisoners of canteens, food, rings, wristwatches, personal papers and anything else they wanted. Then they divided the huge mass of men into groups and herded them on their way.

Somewhere along this walk, an evil reality took hold. The Japanese guards began to shoot anyone who dropped behind or fainted. If an American officer protested the treatment, as many did, they were lashed to trees and beheaded or eviscerated. Other men were bayoneted or beaten with rifle butts, shovels, bamboo canes, golf clubs and fists. Anyone who tried to rest or take a drink was executed or bludgeoned unconscious. The ditches along Bataan’s main road soon became filled with headless and emaciated corpses—mile after bloody mile.

The exact figures have been lost to time, but likely some 72,000 men started the trek, and, in the end, only some 54,000 men reached the camps. Thousands more died in their first sixty days of captivity. After the war the allies calculated that less than half of the friendly forces that surrendered on April 9, 1942, lived to see home again.
³⁷
And the long walk from the battlefield that killed so many became a metaphor for wartime depravity—the Bataan Death March.

•   •   •

A
T THE SAME
time Homma’s victorious troops were herding the Battling Bastards of Bataan into what was soon to become their death march, other Japanese units marched into Hospital #1 and Hospital #2 and captured the 8,800 sick and wounded men the nurses had left behind.

The surrender at Hospital #1 took place at 1:35
P.M
. on April 9 when Colonel Duckworth handed over his command to Major General Matsuii, the field commander of the Imperial Japanese Army forces. Matsuii immediately went to the prison ward to check on the wounded Japanese captured by the Americans during the battle. When he discovered how well they had been treated, he seemed pleased and allowed Duckworth and his staff to continue their work.

“We had 1,800 helpless casualties to treat and feed,” wrote Dr. Al Weinstein, a surgeon at Hospital #1. “We were [also] afraid that if we were found by isolated bands of Nips trying to escape through the jungle we would be knocked off. Where reason and duty were wedded so harmoniously it was not difficult to make a decision. We stayed.”
³⁸

Six weeks later, the Japanese high command ordered the hospital cleared. The Filipinos were allowed simply to wander home. The American wounded and the American doctors and staff were sent to prison camps.

The surrender at Hospital #2 was less formal. Around 5:00
P.M
. on April 9, a group of Japanese infantrymen wandered into the central hospital looking for potable water. A few hours later two Japanese officers and twenty more enlisted men arrived. The officers summoned Colonel Gillespie and told him that all personnel had to remain within the hospital area and that anyone seen outside it would be shot.

The next morning, guards ordered all 5,600 Filipino patients at Hospital #2 set free. Wrapped in blankets and hobbling on crutches, they trudged down the dirt path leading from the hospital to the East Road. When they reached the road they discovered masses of men marching north, guarded by Japanese soldiers. Some of the wounded filtered south, some into the jungle, but many stayed on the road, unknowingly joining the Death March.

The 1,400 American wounded and the 280 officers and enlisted men at Hospital #2 settled back to wait. In the weeks that followed, Japanese troops from time to time would stop by to loot the patients of watches, rings, sunglasses and food, especially fruit juices. Japanese mechanics stripped the generators and appropriated all motor vehicles.

Doctors begged their Japanese captors for more food. Their patients,
they said, were suffering. Most men had lost an average of twenty-five pounds. Open wounds were not healing, broken bones not mending. The Japanese, of course, ignored these entreaties. Instead, calculating that the enemy would not fire on its own wounded, they ringed the hospital with twenty-three artillery pieces. “It was obvious that the Japanese intended to use the hospital as a shield against answering fire from American guns (on Corregidor),” the judge advocate general’s office wrote in a postwar report.
³⁹

On April 22, about 3:00
A.M.
, several stray allied shells from Corregidor fell between Ward 14 and Mess Hall 3, killing five Americans and wounding twelve. A few days later, a large shell fell in Ward 5 but luckily did not explode.

The Japanese guards kept to themselves, then one night some of the Imperial troops reverted to type. Ethyle Mae Taft Mercado, an American from Bicknell, Utah, had been left on Bataan when the other women were evacuated. The wife of a Filipino, Mercado had settled at Mariveles in 1936 and had helped her husband, a local entrepreneur, operate a bar, a laundry and a taxi service. When the fighting broke out her husband sent his twenty-seven-year-old wife and two children to a civilian refugee camp inland. The small family was supposed to be evacuated with the nurses to Corregidor, but by the time Ethyle Mae and her children reached Hospital #2, the women were gone, so the doctors settled the family in a tent and, with everyone else, the Mercados waited to surrender to the Japanese.

Around 8:00
P.M
. on April 10, one day after the surrender, an American officer at Hospital #2, recuperating from a bullet wound in his lung, heard a woman screaming in the tent next to him. In the darkness he propped himself up and saw an American medic quickly approach the tent, only to be sharply turned away by a sentry wielding a rifle and bayonet. The cries continued for a while, then stopped. In the morning, Ethyle Mae Mercado stumbled into the officer’s tent, bruised and weeping. She’d been raped, she said, at least five times, all through the night. After that the doctors moved her into their quarters to protect her.
⁴⁰

A few weeks later the Japanese disbanded Hospital #2 as well. Mrs. Mercado went to a civilian internment camp, the men and doctors to the various wretched prisons that would claim the lives of so many soldiers. In his last official report Colonel Duckworth wrote: “Many of us turned our backs, with mixed emotions, on Hospital No. 2 forever. That this small group in less than 3½ months had built and operated hospital facilities for 16,000 patients is, we believe, a truly remarkable record.”
⁴¹

Chapter 8

Corregidor—the Last Stand

O
NLY “THE
R
OCK”
was left.

A heavily fortified outpost guarding the entrance to Manila Bay, Corregidor, a drop of land shaped uncannily like a tadpole floating on the water, was defended by heavy mortars, short- and long-range artillery pieces and antiaircraft batteries. With the fall of Bataan there were now some twelve thousand allied personnel on the tiny island—battalions of American and Filipino combat troops, various support units, a large group of dispossessed sailors and roughly a thousand U.S. Marines, along with some Philippine government officials and their families, a handful of American dependents and a few war correspondents.

From the top of its head to the tip of its narrow tail, the tadpole island was some three and a half miles long and, at its widest point on the head, a mile and a half wide. The soldiers who manned the big guns and the Marines who stood vigil along the beach defenses lived in dugouts and burrows and bunkers. Almost everyone else, some ten thousand people, holed up in a complex of well-designed concrete tunnels deep underneath the hard rock of Malinta Hill.

The Malinta Tunnel complex, organized into a series of narrow corridors, or catacombs, called “laterals,” was like a small, cramped city with sections for administration, supply, mess, ordinance and a thousand-bed hospital staffed at first by the few dozen nurses originally stationed at Corregidor’s post hospital above ground and, later, by the nurses evacuated from Bataan and some civilian volunteers. The gray concrete tunnel complex had been built secretly many years before and had its own power and water supply.