Tears in the Darkness (11 page)

Ill-trained troops are often ill-led troops as well, and on Bataan, American officers, not Filipinos, ruled the field. They set the order of battle, staffed headquarters, controlled communications and supply. They led the Philippine Scouts and served as advisers and sometimes more in the Philippine Army. Some Americans were able men, clearheaded practitioners of the profession of arms, but the officer corps on Bataan was also filled with men who either were not ready for battle or were simply afraid of it.

Many of the junior officers and sergeants seemed to know nothing of the basics of fighting—how to set up a defense line, prepare a position to receive an attack, clear fields of fire. And some senior majors and colonels weren't much better. Enervated by age or illness, or just plain frozen with fear, several were caught cowering in their command posts. Colonel George S. Clark, commander of the 57th Infantry, a regiment of the elite Philippine Scouts, had a long record of solid service and an unusual rapport with his men. Then the bombs started falling, and Clark had a frightening revelation: air power leaves infantry exposed. For him, no hole was deep enough now, no bunker safe. And as the weeks passed,
the colonel's dread deepened. He became convinced that Japanese pilots had been given one mission: Kill Clark! Any sound overhead sent the colonel running for cover. After a week or so of shelling and bombing, his men found him sitting in his bunker with a blanket over his head, trembling at the sound of the guns.
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BEN STEELE
was tired and hungry but happy to be heading south, ahead of the sound of the guns. For a while the white Plymouth convertible had moved along at a good clip. Then south of San Fernando so many trucks and cars and refugees were on the road the Plymouth often sat idling or just inched along.

Sitting in front next to the driver, the squadron commander, Captain Jack Kelly, sometimes slipped into sleep. In the back Ben sat silently next to Q.P., occasionally catching his pal's eye. Where were they going? he wondered. And what were they going to do when they got there?

Soon the convertible turned southeast, and through breaks in the trees Ben Steele could see water—Manila Bay, he guessed—then he smelled the scent of the sea.

They were headed due south now along the coast, passing through one town after another—Abucay, Pilar, Orion, Limay. Between the towns were long stretches of dirt road flanked by fishponds and rice paddies and groves of mango trees and banana plants. Always to the left, beyond the ponds and paddies, was the blue of the bay, and to the right, to the west, a line of foothills fronting a phalanx of dark green mountains.

In the late afternoon they turned off the road and into a makeshift compound crowded with trucks, equipment, supplies, and men scattered in the bushes beneath the trees—the bivouac for their unit, the 7th Matériel Squadron.

“Okay, boys,” said Kelly, “this is it, Bataan.”

From where they stood Ben could see the bay to his left and front, and he reckoned that this place, this place called Bataan, was “some sort of neck.” And now the captain was explaining how headquarters planned to close off the top of the neck, miles back up the road where they had come from. The army was going to dig in there and form a “front line,” he said.

Ben Steele imagined infantry in trenches, hunkered down waiting for the enemy. And taking into account the length of the ride from where he imagined that front line was set to where he was now standing,
he calculated he was far enough south to be safe, at least for the moment, and he wondered when they would get something to eat.

The field mess was serving rice and salmon flakes from cans. Rice and fish on Christmas? Back home his mother would be serving up turkey and potatoes, greens and biscuits and—

“I need two men for guard,” the captain was saying, two men to stand by the road and keep the locals from wandering into the area.

The new guys, naturally, pulled the duty. Standing their post, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore watched the boat traffic shuttle between a small pier on the shore just below them and the island fortress of Corregidor two miles out in the bay. Japanese pilots had been preying on the boats, and Captain Kelly, knowing that a pilot's aim was often askew, had advised the two sentries to dig a slit trench, a deep one. And just as they finished, sure enough, enemy aircraft appeared overhead, a couple of Zeros.

The first came in low, strafing the dock—Ben and Q.P. could see the boards jump as the rounds slammed into them—then a small bomber appeared, banked into a dive, and let its load go.

The missile made a strange sound, Ben Steele thought, “like the air was frying on top of you.” They flattened themselves in the bottom of their trench, then came an immense
whomp!
and a painful ripping in their ears.

The bomb had exploded ten feet in front of their trench, collapsing the end of it and showering them with dirt and rocks. They coughed and spat and blinked and shook their heads.

“You should see the look on your face,” Q.P. said.

“Yeah? You should see the look on yours,” Ben Steele came back.

In the days that followed they stood sentry often, lolling around in the rear under the trees when they were off duty. Then one night, toward the end of that first week, two trucks rolled into the compound, and everyone was ordered to queue up at the tailgates.

“All right, fellas,” said a sergeant in charge, “grab a rifle and at least four bandoliers of ammunition. You're goin' to the front.”

The front? What the hell was he talking about? They were Air Corps, rear echelon, bunch of mechanics, fuelers, dispatchers, and clerks, not foot soldiers.

“Hey!” someone shouted, “I don't know nothin' 'bout infantry fightin'!”

“Well, son,” the sergeant said, “you're going to learn.”

THE JAPANESE
took Manila, the capital, in twelve days. All that was left was to mop up the hinterlands.

Japan's generals were modern men, products of a military system that took its shape from the West, particularly the Prussians, and high on every officer candidate's reading list was the West's bible of belligerency,
On War
by Carl von Clausewitz.

The Prussian soldier-scholar refused to reduce a complex subject to simple maxims, but on two points, Clausewitz was clear: “the acts,” as he called them, that were vital to victory were the seizure of the enemy's capital and the destruction of the enemy's army.

Like the strategists in Washington, the Japanese high command had been writing war plans for decades, and since 1919 those plans had called for the capture of Manila. The Japanese had also assumed that their enemy would try to fall back to Bataan, a natural redoubt obvious to any soldier who could read a map, but that assumption did not change their aim. With every new battle plan, Japanese strategists said essentially the same thing: they would take Manila first, then move quickly to destroy the American Army before it could withdraw to defensive positions on the peninsula. The problem was, the strategy called for one army to accomplish two missions at the same time.
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FOR MONTHS
Lieutenant General Masami Maeda, Homma's chief of staff, had been trying to persuade his colleagues to change their plan of campaign, but no one, not the
bakuto
, the ambitious young planners on the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo, or his colleagues at 14th Army headquarters, would listen to him. And now Maeda was shuttling between the various field headquarters on Luzon, trying to convince divisional commanders headed for Manila to change their battle plans and intercept the retreating enemy troops headed for Bataan.

Maeda knew the islands well. In 1925 as a young subaltern, he had been sent to the Philippines as a spy and returned to Tokyo convinced that if war came to the islands, the defenders “would avoid a decisive battle . . . abandon Manila and withdraw to Bataan” for a “holding-out action.” Fifteen years later, summoned to General Headquarters in Tokyo for a planning session on the eve of the invasion, he tried to convince those gathered around a large map of the islands that the enemy
would surely hole up on the peninsula and engage the Imperial Army in a long and costly siege.

What was their main objective? he asked. To capture Manila? Or
teki ni katsu
, destroy the enemy? Bataan, he continued, gave the Americans what Clausewitz called the “benefit of terrain”; the peninsula was filled with precipitous gulches and gullies, difficult foothills and mountain ridges, and these natural “obstacles” would slow an attacking army and expose it to counterattack. Moreover, the enemy had likely dug thousands of trenches, bunkers, and foxholes, he said, turning the peninsula into a lethal labyrinth. If they did not catch the enemy on the central plain and destroy him before he slipped away to the thick jungles of Bataan, then “the power of the 14th army will not be enough.”
¹⁵

The men at Imperial Headquarters were political men, and in the army political men are careful not to challenge the prevailing opinion. Someone high up had decided that the “early” capture of Manila was going to be the 14th Army's “primary objective,” so the majors and colonels standing around the map that day in November 1941 insisted, all evidence to the contrary, that Manila was the “central core” of American military strength. Take it, they argued, and the islands would fall. Let the
Americajin
withdraw to a narrow peninsula; they would be “easily bottled up and destroyed.” Bataan?
Kudaranái hanashí ni jikán o tsubusú
—Why waste time talking about something so insignificant?
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ON JANUARY
2, 1942, less than two weeks after they had come ashore at Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay, the lead elements of the 14th Imperial Japanese Army strolled into the city of Manila.

A week earlier, to save “the Pearl of the Orient” from destruction, Douglas MacArthur had declared Manila an open city and quickly withdrawn his forces. Sixty miles north of the city at his headquarters in Cabanatuan, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, the 14th Army commander, was elated. That night, in the quiet of his quarters, he sat down to write in his diary.

“My wife, my children,” he began, addressing the entry, as he often did, to his family, “we captured the enemy's capital twelve days after landing. Be happy for us. Celebrate for us!”
¹⁷

The fall of Manila was indeed a great victory, a political victory. The day after the Japanese flag was raised in Manila,
The New York Times
opined, “This country now drinks the unaccustomed and bitter draught of defeat, [and] no reassuring explanations can ease the blow.” But, as Masami Maeda had feared, the 14th Army had let the real prize slip away.
¹⁸

By December 31, a Wednesday, most of the Filipino-American force had made its way onto the Bataan peninsula, and Homma and his staff knew for sure that their strategy (Tokyo's strategy, really) had been a mistake.

“We had the opportunity to pound them,” Lieutenant General Yuichi Tsuchihashi, the outspoken commander of the 48th Division, told Homma. “And instead [we] allowed them to flee. So this is what it means to miss a big prize.”
¹⁹

 

“ALL RIGHT, FELLAS,”
the sergeant said, motioning for the men to climb into a large truck waiting to take them up the road. “You're goin' to the front.”

Ben Steele eyed the rifle and the belt of ammunition he'd just been handed. He had grown up with a rifle in his hand, and the weapon made him feel better, a bit more secure. Now at least he could shoot back.

The truck joined a small convoy that headed north from Cabcaben, back up the same road Ben and Q.P. had come down a week or so earlier. In the back in the dark no one slept. Most of the men stared at the new rifles nuzzled between their knees. These guys, Ben Steele thought, “look about half scared of the damn things.”

After the American air force was destroyed at Clark Field, some 1,400 Air Corps crewmen and technicians were gathered into a “ground” regiment, the Provisional Air Corps Infantry. They were to be used as a reserve force, ready to back up the guys manning the battle line. None of these clerks and mechanics, however, knew a thing about real soldiering; they were “infantry” in name only. A corporal from a pursuit squadron, for example, thought it was “funny to be carrying a rifle.” And it was even funnier watching him learn how to shoot it. An Air Corps major guessed that most of his men “would have found [their] weapon more useful as a club.” Some, in fact, were so flummoxed the major was sure that an enemy “could have approached at his leisure, rolled a cigarette, read the morning paper, and probably finished his shaving before bothering to dispatch the perplexed American warrior before him.” Half “the Flying Infantry,” as the Air Corps boys enjoyed calling themselves, got no training whatsoever. Along with the men of
the 7th Matériel Squadron, they were simply put on trucks in the rear and told they were being driven north to a trench line.
²⁰