He took Neyland’s teachings and a football nickname—“Shifty”—
with him when he reported to Marine basic school in Philadelphia in August 1937. For Shofner and the Corps, it was love at first salute. With his syrupy Southern voice, powerful parade ground timbre, and chameleon personality—he could be caustically abrasive or irresistibly glib—he possessed a natural command presence. His uncanny ability to motivate was his greatest strength. Whether his modus operandi was fear or encouragement, cajolery or coercion, Shofner knew how to get the job done. And the job now facing him looked to be the most challenging task of his life.
The whirr of the bombers’ radial engines receded into the distance and Shofner emerged, brushing off dirt, to survey the damage. One of the bombs had struck the supposedly bombproof Middleside Barracks, a hit that wounded some Marines in the galley. Nurses darted through the film of smoke and dust. As best as he could hear through the shouts and wailing of wounded, they needed a doctor. Shofner ordered a dentist, the closest thing to a medic within his reach, to assist with the injured.
“Suddenly,” Shofner would say, “I had the feeling this would be a
long war.”
If ever there was a perfect place for a desperate last stand, it was the Bataan Peninsula. Twenty-five miles in length, and spanning at its widest twenty miles from the South China Sea to the upper reaches of Manila Bay, Bataan was a spine of ancient volcanic rock dominated by two colossal peaks—Mount Natib and Mount Bataan. A southern extension of the Zambales Mountains, the thumb-shaped isthmus was carpeted by virgin jungle and studded with giant coconut palms, mahogany, narra, camagong, and mayapis trees festooned with creeping vines. A menagerie of monkeys, lawin, mynah birds, and wild carabao, lizards, pythons, and boars lived in the undergrowth. On the saw-toothed west coast, rocky promontories and forbidding cliff walls painted with the fiery orange and red blooms of talisay trees and hanging pandanus fronted the South China Sea. Most of the inhabitants of Bataan lived on the eastern coastal plain, in the clusters of bamboo, thatched nipa, and clapboard houses
lining the paved all-weather East Road, which hugged the shores of
Manila Bay.
It was into these hostile environs that nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops retreated during the final, humiliating days of 1941 and the first, uncertain hours of 1942. They came from all corners of Luzon, from Lingayen, from the Agno River, from the foothills of Mount Banahao, from Manila. They dribbled down the tributaries of rural roads and footpaths, eventually merging into the swollen cataracts of men, animals, and machines flooding National Highways 3, 5, 7, and, finally, 110. Sluggishly, they crossed the Pampanga River on the Calumpit Bridge, filtered through San Fernando and struggled into Bataan through the bottleneck of Layac Junction. The stink of burning rubber, infected flesh, and gunpowder, mixed with fragrant frangipani, wafted through the humid air. Fat black flies buzzed over corpses, animal carcasses, and empty ration tins, the detritus of an army under constant attack. The sounds of screeching brakes, backfiring engines, clanging metal canteens, and leather and rubber soles crushing pavement mingled with the unintelligible bits of English, Spanish, Tagalog, Visayan and Ilocano conversations, arguments, and orders. For days, the narrow roads to Bataan were clotted with trucks, staff cars, jeeps, ambulances, tanks, carts and civilian buses. Following closely behind, a handful of USAFFE tanks, infantry, ack-ack gunners, and cavalrymen—the latter armed with pistols and soda bottles filled with gasoline—gallantly held off the Japanese while engineers dynamited bridges.
Despite the lack of road signs, military police, and air cover, the plodding exodus was a chaotic success, a “small Dunkirk,” one Air Corps pilot called it. Much of MacArthur’s army had been able to slip into Bataan intact, carrying with it large stores of ammunition, mostly World War I surplus ordnance, but ammunition nonetheless. The exigencies of the hastily ordered retreat and the tangled bureaucracy of the Filipino government, however, had ensured that stores of clothing, medicine, fuel, and, most important, food were left behind. The abandonment of 5,000 tons of rice at the Government Rice Central warehouse, in Luzon’s Nueva Ecija Province, enough to feed USAFFE troops for at least one year, was one glaring example. As per MacArthur’s original defense strategy, most of the supply depots and reserves had been set up near the beaches, and were now deep inside Japanese-held territory after their landing of December 22. MacArthur had also ordered that Corregidor be stocked first with enough supplies to last the 10,000-man garrison for six months. By the time the door to the Bataan Peninsula was barred, only a few thousand tons of foodstuffs would be secured there.
The madness of the retreat had scarcely subsided when MacArthur learned that an estimated 26,000 civilian refugees had drained into the peninsula with the retreating troops. Faced with slow starvation or immediate defeat, MacArthur chose to give his forces a fighting chance. On January 5, 1942, in one of the first orders issued from his new headquarters located inside Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, MacArthur put all USAFFE troops on half-rations.
And so the epic fight for the Philippines, America’s first major land battle of the Second World War, began with ill-equipped American
and Filipino troops burrowed into defensive positions, their weapons loaded with suspect ammunition and their stomachs empty, waiting for the Japanese to attack and for help from the States.
CHAPTER 3
The Raid
And we were sacrificed—perhaps to gain
That little time that warded off defeat
In those first awful months of swift retreat.
With the Allies in full, humiliating retreat throughout the globe in early 1942, the defenders of the Philippines looked to be waiting a long time. German forces controlled territory from the steppes of Russia to the sands of North Africa to the icy Atlantic. The Stars and Stripes no longer flew over Guam and Wake Island, nor did the Union Jack fly over the British crown colony of Hong Kong. Singapore would fall in February; the Dutch East Indies in March. Japanese forces would close the Burma Road in April, severing the supply link to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist forces. The rays of the Rising Sun shone across the Pacific Rim, to the Solomon Islands and through the Malay Barrier. And should Australia and New Zealand crumble—Australia was virtually undefended because most of the continent’s troops were fighting in North Africa—it was feared that only Hawaii would stand between the Japanese and the United States.
The numbing disbelief and national outrage that followed Pearl Harbor gave way to mass hysteria. Japanese submarines sank merchant vessels within sight of coastal residents, fueling the invasion paranoia. One elected official, believing the West Coast to be indefensible, demanded that U.S. forces prepare defensive positions in the Rocky Mountains. The original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were removed from display and shipped to vaults at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Even the Rose Bowl football game was moved from Pasadena, California, to the perceived safety of the East Coast. By February, the situation had reached such a fever pitch that President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing thousands of West Coast Japanese, full-fledged citizens born on American soil among them, into internment camps.
The nation desperately needed heroes, and it found them in the defenders of the Philippines. America’s romantic fascination with extraordinary struggles against long odds conjured comparisons with the siege of the Alamo mission and the legendary last stand of George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. In an April panegyric, Life magazine called the battle an “American Thermopylae” and equated MacArthur’s men with the stalwart Spartans who endeavored to halt an overwhelming Persian invasion in 480 b.c. Bataan and Corregidor, names of distant places previously unheard of and locations heretofore unknown, had become in America’s darkest hour rays of hope. With each passing day, the battle assumed an almost mythical significance on the home front. Atop San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, William Winter of shortwave station KGEI beamed his “Freedom for the Philippi
nes” news program across the Pacific and dared the Japanese to attack. As the nation mobilized, screen stars, radio personalities, and athletes gave way to war celebrities, men like Lt. Alexander R. Nininger, Jr., the war’s first recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Capt. Arthur W. Wermuth, the “One-Man Army of Bataan,” whose exploits were celebrated in wire stories and comic books. Capt. Colin P. Kelly, Jr., earned instant, though posthumous, fame when, after his B-17 sank a Japanese cruiser near Lingayen Gulf, he stayed at the controls of the mortally wounded bomber so that his crew could bail out.
Yet no stars gleamed as bright as those pinned to the collar of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. His élan, his corncob pipe, and his carefully cultivated intrepid persona seemed heaven-sent to a nation praying for a martial messiah. Figuratively welcomed back from his self-imposed Philippine exile, he was feted and honored in absentia across the country. Streets in large cities and small towns bore his name, as did infants. A cottage industry of MacArthur buttons, songs, and books capitalized on the general’s burgeoning celebrity. But defeating the Japanese in the Philippines would prove to be an impossible challenge.
MacArthur’s troops wondered where the convoys they had been promised were. Buoyed by messages from Washington that suggested aid was forthcoming, MacArthur had reassured them that they had not been forgotten: “Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops
and hundreds of planes are being dispatched,” read a grandiloquent January communiqué. “It is imperative that our troops hold until these reinforcements arrive…. It is a question now of courage and of determination…. If we fight, we will win; if we retreat, we will be destroyed.” And so the defenders dutifully scanned the horizon for the ships. FDR had cabled President Quezon in December and assured him “that every vessel available is bearing … the strength that will eventually crush the enemy and liberate your native land.” But in the wake of the Japanese attack on the Philippines, Washington concluded that it could not reinforce the
islands.
With the German and Italian declarations of war, the United States had found itself at war with three nations, yet having been attacked by and engaged in hostilities with only one of the belligerents. America’s ill-prepared military—budget cuts and isolationist sentiments during the Depression had decimated the armed forces—precluded simultaneous offensive action against all three enemies. (As of November 1, 1938, only ten months before Germany’s invasion of Poland, the United States ranked nineteenth globally in the size of its total air and land forces, just behind Portugal and slightly ahead of neutral Switzerland.) According to Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Britain’s senior military liaison in Washington, the United States was “more unready for war than it is possible to imagine … the whole military organization belongs to the days of George Washington.”
At the end of the three-week Arcadia Conference in Washington in mid-January, the United States and Britain concluded that Nazi Germany posed the greater threat to the Allies. Anglo-American strategists believed that should Soviet Russia be knocked out of the war, Germany would then have inexhaustible resources with which to invade the British Isles and perhaps even march on Central Asia to link up with Japanese forces. A strategic defense would therefore be maintained in the Pacific until Germany was defeated.
In his fireside chat with Americans on the night of February 23, Roosevelt intimated that the Philippines campaign would be abandoned: “We knew that to obtain our objective, many varieties of operations would be necessary in areas other than the Philippines.” But word never reached the men fighting there. The cables transmitted to the Philippines were purposely enigmatic. Early in the fighting, MacArthur received messages informing him that relief shipments were being dispatched. He was not told, however, that the convoys were not intended for the Philippines. The misleading statements, which compounded in the ensuing weeks, stemmed from strategic and political necessity. The messages were designed to keep the Fil-American forces fighting—fighting long enough to save Australia and to save face. In the Far East, where shame was a cultural bedrock, a pull-out from the Philippines would further damage the remnants of American prestige and the morale of the peoples of the Far East who looked to the United States as their liberator from the Japanese yoke. It would also damage the sagging spirits of the American people. The Philippines defenders had to be kept fighting at all costs. “There are times,” Henry Stimson would write in his diary, “when men have
to die.”
As mechanics on Bataan scrounged spare parts, five brand-new planes were earmarked for Cuba. Wounded men suffered in Malinta Tunnel while bureaucrats debated a requistion to send 500 railroad picks to Nigeria because of the African nation’s “strategic importance.” In March, exports to the Soviet Union more than doubled—aid to the communist nation would total $346 million by May. Conversely, as the forces on Bataan were being starved into submission, not a single ship cleared for the Philippines, though FDR insisted that the Navy was “following an intensive and well-planned campaign which will result in positive assistance to the defense of the Philippine Islands.” There was no such campaign.
Perhaps the biggest blow delivered by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor was a psychological one. On Christmas Day 1941, the new commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Chester Nimitz, arrived on Oahu to find morale at “rock bottom” and members of his new staff taking sedatives. The shock of the December 7 attack had even turned some senior officers’ hair white. Despite the fact that its flotilla of aircraft carriers had escaped the attack unscathed and shore installations in Hawaii were relatively unharmed, a crisis of confidence had led the Pacific Fleet to assume a triangular defensive posture from the Aleutian Islands to Hawaii and down into the Panama Canal Zone.
Because of the decision to put Europe first, as “American war supplies were speeded” around the globe, revealed the Chicago Tribune in a 1944 exposé, the Philippines “virtually became a forgotten theater
of war.”
A vociferous campaign for a greater effort in the Pacific reached its apex between late January and April. Segments of the press and members of Congress blasted both the Roosevelt administration and the War Department for the perceived inability to aid MacArthur. In January, Senator James E. Murray, a liberal Montana Democrat, was unhappy to learn that a convoy had recently landed in Northern Ireland, commenting that “it would seem to me that if the expedition had been sent across the Pacific, it would have been much better.” Ohio Republican senator Robert A. Taft concurred: “I am sincerely hopeful that someone is thinking of getting assistance to the forces fighting in the Far East.”
That someone was an obscure, chain-smoking Army brigadier general who months earlier had been misidentified in a newspaper caption as “Lt. Col. D. D. Ersenbeing.” Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had summoned General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former MacArthur aide, to Washington for the purpose of resupplying the Philippines. The two men met on December 14, 1941, in the War Department offices at the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. Eisenhower realized the hopeless situation, but argued that “we must do everything for [the Fil-American forces] that is humanly possible.”
“I agree with you,” replied Marshall. “Do your best to save them.”
Eisenhower’s first major assignment of the war was, in his own words, “a problem that defied solution.” Submarines brought in some supplies, but trepid Navy brass thwarted plans to use aircraft carriers to ferry planes to Bataan. A blockade-running scheme was a dismal failure. Eisenhower grew discouraged, noting in January 1942, “I’ve been insisting that the Far East is critical—and no sideshows should be undertaken until air and ground there are in satisfactory state.” Instead, the Army was undertaking other strategic operations. Within a few weeks, Eisenhower would skyrocket through the Army command hierarchy and soon be immersed in these other plans.
Initially, it seemed as though the Fil-American defenders needed little aid. One Japanese general described the
retreat of USAFFE troops into Bataan as a “cat entering a sack,” but the events of January and February proved the defenders’ resolve. The Filipino troops who had fled the battlefields of Luzon in December had become, in one officer’s estimation, “battle-hardened, vicious, disease-ridden, jungle-fighting experts.” Pilots, bluejackets, clerks, and cooks were turned into infantry. The once maligned “dogfaces” of the 31st Infantry Regiment—American soldiers would not call themselves “GIs” or be popularly referred to as such until later in the war—were proving themselves to be USAFFE’s backbone. So high was their morale that after learning that a Japanese submarine had shelled a refinery near Santa Barbara, California, some considered sending a radiogram: “Hold out for thirty days and WE will send you reinforcements.” They took immense pride in what Lt. Henry Lee called “Our war—our own little rat trap, the hopeless defense of Bataan, a rear guard with no main body, but a thorn in the flesh of Japan.”
A thorn indeed. When General Homma attempted to land 2,500 troops on Bataan’s western coast in an effort to break the stalemate in late January—the crucial struggle known as the Battle of the Points—he was repulsed by Philippine Scouts and an improvised army of airmen, sailors, and engineers. An attempt to break through the II Corps sector in eastern Bataan resulted in another Japanese setback the Battle of Trail 2. And even when Homma’s troops managed to puncture USAFFE’s lines, they were quickly isolated and destroyed in the Battle of the Pockets. The defenders’ efforts would save Australia from invasion and perhaps Hawaii, but they would not be able to save themselves. Shamefully behind schedule, Homma would request reinforcements. As the Japanese prepared for a campaign-deciding offensive in April, an unnerving lull swept over the war-torn Philippines.
Escape from Davao Page 4