Tears in the Darkness (12 page)

The convoy carrying Ben Steele and the rest of the 7th bounced north for more than two hours, one dusty mile after another.

“Where the hell are they gonna let us out?” he wondered.

Halfway up the peninsula the trucks finally stopped.

“This is where we're going to start the line,” the sergeant said. “You guys go here,” he said, pointing to one side of the road, then gesturing to an open area on the other side, “and you guys spread out through there.”

They set up at the edge of a stand of mango trees with rice paddies in front of them. Their sector, they were told, was some two thousand yards long, part of a secondary defense line that stretched from Manila Bay, at a point south of the town of Orion, some fourteen miles west across the peninsula, to the town of Bagac on Bataan's west coast.

During the day Ben Steele and his comrades set aside their new rifles and took up the ax, the pick, and the shovel, cutting down trees, building bunkers, digging trenches—the hard labor of preparing a position for a fight. At night they climbed into their fighting holes and trenches and stared into the dark beyond the rice paddies, watching and listening for hours. The first few nights their imagination kept them awake, then the fatigue that comes from fear took hold of them, and one night on guard duty Ben Steele fell asleep.

Suddenly he felt something cold and hard poking him in the ear, then he heard the click of a trigger.

“You know what we can do to you for doing this?” said a voice above him, the voice of a lieutenant who had been checking the lines.

Ben Steele jumped up and grabbed his weapon back from the officer. The man didn't have to pull a cheap trick like that, taking his rifle and poking the muzzle in his ear. He could have just kicked him awake.

“You went to sleep on guard,” the officer said. “I can court-martial you for this.”

A battle was about to begin. They had their backs to the sea. And some of the men on watch with Ben Steele that night were so scared they were soiling themselves.

“Go ahead,” Ben Steele snapped. “Court-martial me!”

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE OLD MAN
told him, “You don't point this at anything unless you're going to shoot it.” Bud knew he meant kill it, of course. Then he handed Ben Steele his first weapon, a short-barreled twenty-two rifle. The boy was seven years old. He was taught: grip the stock firmly but not too tight, sight with both eyes open, squeeze the trigger, don't jerk it.

He learned to hunt, how to stalk a prey and finish it. He would set out traplines too (the boy could dress out anything that walked or flew, a handy skill in hard times), but out trapping or hunting, often as not he'd sit there for a while and stare at the trophy before he took aim.

Sneaking up on a pond of mallards, he'd admire their colors, the jade-green head, the chestnut breast, the snow-white wingtips. Stalking sharp-tailed grouse, he'd crouch in the rushes for long stretches listening to the birds' comic cackle. When the time came, he'd always pull the trigger, get those cottontails his mother was waiting to make into rabbit pie, but it was almost as if he wanted to let his supper show him something of the world before he bagged it.

 

HE HATED SCHOOL
, played dumb, and his mother knew it. The Old Man cursed and grumbled about his bad marks, and Gert, his sister, a couple of grades ahead, thought him so stupid she was embarrassed to call him her brother.

Bess would listen to all this and say, “Just leave him alone. He'll wake up someday and find out he doesn't know anything.”

He didn't care. He sat there in a stone building in town or in some drafty wooden school shack in the hills and stared out the window at the
shape of a certain coulee or the way the snow drifted against a fence, sat there taking note of things, though he could never say why or what for.

The best day of school was the last day of school. Final hour, closing minutes. “Have a good summer,” the teacher would say.

He thought, “I'm free.”

When his chores were done, when the work was finished, when the Old Man would finally leave him be, he could hunt, he could ride, he could roam Hawk Creek.

 

THEY HAD THE SAME STORY
, the start of the family and the start of the ranch. Maybe that's why Bud loved the place so much. Hawk Creek was where he began, where he always felt he belonged.

At a cattle roundup in 1912 the Old Man, Benjamin Cardwell Steele (tall and strong in the saddle), met Elizabeth Gertrude McCleary (a pale Irish beauty in white lace). When they got engaged, the Old Man gave up running cattle on the open range and looked for a place to settle down. He'd always liked the Bull Mountains. Those hills weren't fit for farming, but a smart rancher who applied himself could make a profit there. Plenty of sweetgrass on the benches, plenty of water in the cool clear creeks.

He settled a section on the dry fork at Hawk Creek. “Prettiest place in the Bulls,” he told Bess. And when she saw it, she knew he was right. Their vale was long and winding with a stream down the center. Sheltering the ranch front and back and running the length of the vale were ridgelines rising gentle and green.

With his brother James and a couple of hands, the Old Man set out to build a homestead. They cut trees in the hills, stripped off the bark, squared up the logs, raised the walls and the roof. A neat one-story, three-room bungalow, eighteen feet wide, forty feet long. Then came a barn and privy, storehouse, bunkhouse, icehouse, corrals, and a tack-and-equipment shed. Pretty soon there were chickens scratching in the yard and the cries of children coming from the house.

 

IN THE WINTER
the vale turned gray and white. Bud was older now, just getting up, pulling on his boots. His father wanted him out before dawn to fetch some strays, and his mother got up early too to make him breakfast for the cold work ahead.

He finished his cocoa, stamped across the frozen yard, breath steaming
ahead of him, to the barn, where he saddled and mounted his horse. He had far to go but paused in the darklight to look back at the house. Did the same thing each time he rode off early. Something about the way the smoke came out of the kitchen chimney and drifted slowly down the darkened vale.

 

 

 

 

 

A
S BATTLEGROUNDS GO
, Bataan was more brutal than most. A thick thumb of land thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, the peninsula of Bataan lay between Manila Bay and the South China Sea. Down its center ran a line of mountains, broken only by a wide defile from one coast to the other along the peninsula's belt line. Hugging the east coast of the peninsula, the flatland by the bay, was Bataan's main thoroughfare, the Old National Road.

The road was only two lanes, but it was a good road, dirt and gravel, half of it, then blacktop the rest of the way. The road began at Mariveles, the tip of the peninsula, and ran north hard by the bay forty-one miles to Hermosa. From Hermosa the road angled west for a bit, then turned northeast through Pampanga Province to the town of San Fernando, a junction with road and rail connections leading north up Luzon's long central plain.

Most of Bataan's major towns straddled the Old National Road. Between them were scores of barrios, and between the barrios were uninhabited tracts of jungle and lowland, a checkerboard of rice paddies, fishponds, bamboo thickets, cane breaks, and wastes of cogon grass. Sometimes the fields along the road were framed by clumps of banana plants or groves of palms and mango trees. And sometimes the flatland simply stopped at a wall of green, a dense tropical forest the men called “the jungle.”

In places the thick jungle foliage screened the wind and blocked the sun, leaving the air damp and the light dim. Here beneath the canopy among giant ground ferns and tangles of liana hanging like thick cables from huge hardwoods lived wild pigs and monkeys, bent-toed geckos
and fruit bats, buzzards and babblers, fantails and fishers, the wolf snake, the pit viper, the common cobra.

The humidity never dropped below 75 percent, even in the dry season, and with the temperature often over a hundred degrees, the jungle and wooded hills leading to the mountains felt like the inside of a hot-house. The air was still and suffocating. And always there was the smell of rot, the incessant decay of the tropics.

The mold and rot drew flies, ferocious flies that swarmed and bit like bees. And the leeches, spiders, mites, and mosquitoes were even more ravenous, spreading malaria (endemic on Bataan), dengue (breakbone) fever, filariasis, typhus, and scabies.

Although the dense vegetation favored the defenders, hiding their positions and hindering the enemy's movement, neither side could call that ground friendly. Nature was neutral in the battle for Bataan; its war plan called for misery on both sides.
¹

 

BEHIND THE SCENES
, the staff of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Army Philippine invasion force, had been arguing for days, divided over “the problem of Bataan.”

One group of officers warned their commander that he would be facing an enemy army of at least 50,000 men well entrenched in tricky terrain and determined to resist. Reliable intelligence, however, indicated they were low on rations, so instead of sending troops against them, why not just blockade the peninsula and starve the enemy into surrender?

Another group of officers wanted to attack. Relying on initial reports from the field, they were convinced that the enemy troops now holed up in front of them were little more than a mob, a rabble, “the remnants of a defeated army,” 30,000 men at the most. The campaign for the Philippines was almost over, they insisted. A bit of mopping up, “nothing more than simply sweeping out the remaining enemy from the area.” Attack, they urged the general, “annihilate” them.
²

As the two groups wrangled, a telegram arrived from Tokyo: “Send a report on how you expect to proceed with the Bataan operations. The information is needed to make a report to the Throne.”
³

The meaning was clear: the Imperial General Staff expected Homma to attack the Americans and Filipinos, not lay back and starve them into submission, and they wanted a quick victory so the emperor would have the honor of announcing the end of the Philippine campaign along
with Japan's other lightning victories in the southwest Pacific. The emperor occupied a powerful place in the heart and imagination of every Nipponjin. By law he was the supreme military commander, leader of the Imperial Army and Navy, and although he issued no orders and left the business of war to the Imperial General Staff, every man in uniform thought of the emperor as his military chief, his warrior champion. The soldiers pledged their lives to him, fought to honor his name, and there was no honor in waiting for a hungry enemy to give up.

The 14th Army, Homma assured Tokyo, was about to teach the Americans a lesson in “sheer brute force.”
⁴

 

EARLIER
, Homma had gotten some bad news. His immediate superiors at Southern Army Headquarters had told him that the war in the southwest Pacific was going so well, they planned to attack Java ahead of schedule, and as part of the new plan they were taking one of Homma's best units, the 48th Division, and moving it south. In effect the general was going to lose almost half his command, his most experienced soldiers at that, along with much of his air force. The move would leave him shorthanded and heavily outnumbered, but there was nothing he could do or say in protest. “It is a bit too early to divert these troops, but it cannot be helped,” he wrote in his diary. “It is absolutely forbidden to complain and whine about the situation.”
⁵

The new orders forced Homma to reshuffle his order of battle and take the 65th Brigade, a rear-echelon unit that had just arrived for mop-up and garrison duty, and press them into service as an attacking force. Code-named the Summer Brigade, the 65th was composed of older soldiers and fresh conscripts trained for police and peacekeeping chores. It was so lightly armed that half the men did not have rifles. By any measure, even that of its commander, Lieutenant General Akira Nara, “The organization was absolutely unfit for combat.”
⁶

Nara and his 65th Brigade had set sail from Formosa a week after the invasion force, and by the time their convoy arrived at Lingayen Gulf, Manila had fallen. Now, waiting anxiously for Nara on the beach as his men came ashore, was a high-ranking officer from Homma's headquarters.
⁷

The officer explained the situation: the 48th Division was being transferred to the Dutch East Indies, and Homma needed Nara's brigade to replace the 48th in the order of battle. Homma “knew he was asking a
lot” of a unit neither trained nor equipped for combat, the aide said, but the commanding general wanted the brigade to march south to the border of Bataan immediately and “mop up” what was left of the enemy.
⁸