Tears in the Darkness (25 page)

 

NED KING
had been shifting his line south, trying to position what was left of his east-coast units along a river, any river. He had tried to stop the enemy east of the Pantingan, then at the San Vicente. After the main line collapsed and the enemy took control of the Old National Road, he
retreated again and formed a line behind the Mamala River. Now, midday April 7, he was dropping back one more time, this time to the Alangan.

He had committed all his reserves. What was once a fighting force of eighty thousand had been reduced to twenty-five hundred “effective” men. The Japanese had turned his right flank and forced him back so many times that he had lost seven miles of battlefield in five days, roughly half the area he had started to defend. In short, he had been ordered to conduct a defense in depth, and he was running out of both depth and defenders. So he asked himself a question that generals in extremis are sometimes forced to ask—generals, that is, whose notions of courage include conscience: What military purpose would be served by further resistance?

He could kill more Japs. Make them pay for every yard of ground, bleed them right up to the beaches at Mariveles. But to what purpose? What tactical advantage? Delay the enemy victory another forty-eight or seventy-two hours? And at what cost? The Japanese juggernaut had collapsed his line, turned his flanks, routed the 32,600 men on the east side of the peninsula, and now was rolling over every ad hoc group of troopers that King's officers could marshal to put in the enemy's path. In the end—and the end was clearly at hand—the enemy would annihilate him. His command would be destroyed, slayed en masse. Where, he wondered, was the military advantage in that?

Still, he hated the idea of surrender, the stain it would leave on his family name, the ignominy history would assign him—Mazaeus at Babylon, Cornwallis at Yorktown, King at Bataan.

Good commanders, however, are sometimes forced by circumstances, or the missteps of their superiors, to define duty differently. When that moment arrives, instead of the voice of authority, they heed a different call.

His army was just about gone, Ned King's aides told him. From reports and estimates, they reckoned some twenty-two thousand men lay sick or wounded in aid stations and field hospitals. Thousands of others had apparently chucked their arms and were wandering vacant eyed through the jungle or, like refugees, were streaming south from Cabcaben down the Old National Road.

Meanwhile, at the latest defense line, the one established along the Alangan, soldiers were poking one another to keep awake and pleading
with their officers for food. When they didn't get it, many deserted, leaving parts of the line along the river unmanned.

The Japanese had been shelling the river most of the day. At two o'clock the barrage lifted and Japanese infantry appeared, then tanks. It looked like the enemy was about to break through, and if they did, their line of advance would run them right into the largest of the American field hospitals, a sprawling open-air infirmary with thousands of unarmed patients, doctors, and nurses.

Ned King had heard enough. He summoned his chief of staff, Brigadier General Arnold J. Funk, and ordered him to cross the bay to Corregidor to deliver a message to General Wainwright.

“General King has sent me here to tell you that he might have to surrender,” Funk told MacArthur's replacement.

Wainwright had read the field reports and knew the situation was desperate. Like King, he too had been considering the unthinkable, giving up. (Days earlier in his diary he had written that “if necessary,” he would surrender Corregidor.) But, at the moment, he could not countenance the capitulation of the main part of his army, the Bataan force. His standing orders—Washington's orders—were to fight to the last man.

“You go back and tell General King that he will not surrender,” Wainwright told Funk. “Tell him he will attack. Those are my orders.”

Funk tried one last time. “General, you know, of course, what the situation is over there. You know what the outcome will be.”

“I do,” Wainwright said.
²⁰

 

AT DAWN
on April 8, in their new position on a small hill south of the Alangan River, the men of the 1st Battalion of the Flying Infantry woke up exhausted and hungry. When they looked around, they noticed the remnants of a field kitchen that had packed up and fled south, and in the debris was a barrel of boiled carabao meat. It smelled rank and had a white scum on top, but the men of the 7th Matériel Squadron gave in to their hunger and started to eat. A short time later most of them, including Ben Steele, were retching.

By late morning Japanese fighter-bombers and fighter planes had found them. The bombing set the hill afire and just then Japanese infantry appeared on a knoll behind them.

“Must be a thousand of them,” Ben Steele thought.

“They're coming in waves,” Q. P. Devore said.

The Americans took aim. The first volleys sent the Japanese to ground, but the enemy soon recovered and returned fire tenfold, and the Air Corps line started to break.

Platoon Sergeant Brown, a well-liked foreman, was shot in the stomach, and Ben Steele and another man rushed to his side. They stripped off their shirts and fashioned a litter and began to haul Brown up the hill. The underbrush was on fire, and the litter bearers had to soak their handkerchiefs and tie them across their faces to wade through the flames and smoke.

Near the crest of the hill they paused for a moment to catch a breath and check on the sergeant.

Brown was bleeding badly.

“Go on,” he said. “I'm done for.”

“We're going to help you as far as we can,” Ben Steele said.

By the time they reached the top, the sergeant was unconscious, and the litter bearers set him down. Maybe he was breathing, maybe not—in the chaos they couldn't tell. Ben Steele found a canteen and nestled it in Brown's hand. Then, without ceremony, he turned away and hurried up the slope after the others.

In the smoke behind him he could hear the voices of other wounded, men they'd left behind.

“Help!”

“Help me . . . please!”

“Don't leave me!”

Ben Steele thought, “That might be me after a while.”

Below in the draw between the two hills, he could see the enemy beginning to advance up the slope to where he'd left the sergeant and the other wounded.

“Whaah!” the Japanese yelled. “Whaah!”

Soon all he could hear was the sound of his own hurried footfalls.

At dusk in the company of a few dozen other stragglers, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore emerged from the bush onto the Old National Road.

Now and then the big guns and pit mortars on Corregidor fired salvos at the Japanese positions, and the flashes from their muzzles lit up the bay and the sky and illuminated the press of soldiers and refugees crowding the road ahead of the advancing Japanese.

The soldiers in particular were a sorry sight, uniforms torn and filthy,
listless and lost in the flow, a few carrying their rifles, but most without a weapon, save a bolo attached to a string and slung over a shoulder, all moving south, away from the sounds of a battle that seemed to be catching up to them.

At the turnoff to Lamao, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore considered leaving the road to search for food and sanctuary, but as they started down a dirt track to the town, a Filipino emerged from the shadows.

“The Japs, they are already in there,” he said, gesturing toward Lamao.

The only safe place seemed to be the bush and jungle so the two men slipped back into the undergrowth with Q.P. in the lead.

“Where you going?” Ben said.

“What do you mean?”

“You're going the wrong way.”

“Yeah?” Q.P. said.

“Yeah. You go that way and you're going right back toward the Japs. You better follow me.”

Soon they stumbled into a stream that was shallow and rocky and crowded with more stragglers, men busy dipping their canteens.

“We better fill up,” Ben Steele said.

They worked quickly in the gloaming, then without warning there was the clank of tank treads and the report of small arms, and the men in the creek ran helter-skelter for the trees.

If a commander of military forces of the United States surrenders unnecessarily and shamefully or in violation of orders from higher authority, he is liable to trial and punishment
.

—
United States Army Field Manual
²¹

 

By midday April 8, Ned King had made up his mind. The line along the Alangan had broken and the small groups of men still able to fight were putting up minimal resistance. His army was in flight, and the Japanese were now within a few miles of one of the large field hospitals.

King summoned his field commanders, his generals.

“There are six thousand sick and wounded in the hospital ahead of us,” he began. “There are [twenty-six thousand] civilians [in the way too]. Only twenty-five percent of our men are on their feet. I should send a [white] flag across tomorrow morning at daylight. I'll so notify Corregidor” and General Wainwright.

Then he gave them orders to destroy all their equipment and weapons, but spare all buses, cars, trucks, and gasoline to ferry the sick and wounded to prison camp.

“Is there anything else any of you can think of?” he asked.

He looked each man square in the face, paused, then, as if he was thinking out loud, he said, “My career is over.”

“Is there any possibility of any help?” one of the generals asked.

“None whatsoever,” King said.
²²

Runners returning from the field reported that the Old National Road was jammed with bedraggled soldiers and terrified refugees, “a mass of sheep” straggling south. A half hour later King called his chief of staff and his operations officer into conference.
²³

Assemble the headquarters staff, he told them.

At midnight, surrounded by his department heads and aides, he made the inevitable official.

 

I did not ask you here to get your opinion or advice. I do not want any one of you saddled with any part of the responsibility for the ignominious decision I feel forced to make. I have not communicated with General Wainwright [directly] because I do not want him to be compelled to assume any part of the responsibility. I am sending forward a flag of truce at daybreak to ask for terms of surrender. I feel that further resistance would only uselessly waste human life. Already [one of] our hospital[s], which is filled to capacity and directly in the line of hostile approach is within range of enemy light artillery. We have no further means of organized resistance.

 

They had known, of course, that the end was at hand, but hearing their commander say it, looking into those dark, empathetic eyes, the news, as one of them put it, “hit with an awful bang and a terrible wallop,” for each of them “had hoped against hope for a better end.” And several had tears coursing down their cheeks as they walked out into the night to perform their final duties.

Two junior officers had volunteered to find the Japanese lines and deliver the general's proffer of surrender and his request to meet with General Homma to discuss terms. The others, meanwhile, issued orders to all units to destroy anything of military value. Field officers now told their men that in the morning, they were going to lay down their arms.
²⁴

The senior ordnance officer, determined to keep Bataan's stores of dynamite and ammunition from the enemy, fired his fuses right away and the tip of the peninsula convulsed with explosions as the magazines, ammunition dumps, and ordnance warehouses began to blow up, one after the other. Soon shells were shooting skyward, filling the black cope of night with ribbons and medallions of color, fireworks at war. At first the men marveled at the pyrotechnics, the Fourth of July come early, then as the detonations crept closer, flak began to fall on the compound, and the final blasts stripped leaves from the trees and flattened the tar-paper-and-bamboo buildings in the command post.

 

THE SURRENDER PARTY
set out around 9:00 a.m. on April 9 in two jeeps, each with half a bedsheet (white ensigns of surrender) flying from a bamboo pole attached to the side of the windshield. In the first jeep rode the operations officer, Colonel James V. Collier, and one of the junior officers who had found the Japanese lines and returned to guide the surrender party. Behind them in the second vehicle with two of his aides and wearing his last clean uniform was Ned King.

As the jeeps turned onto the Old National Road, a flight of five Japanese fighters swooped down and started strafing them. The Americans jumped for cover, the planes rolled out of sight, and the jeeps resumed their journey, but the respite was only temporary. The planes were soon back, and for more than an hour the Japanese pilots played cat and mouse with the men in the jeeps, a game that left the general and his aides constantly scrambling for cover.