“Wind ’em up,” Bulkeley said, making a circular motion in the air with his hand. “Cast off.”
The trio of twelve-cylinder Packard engines was fired up, and the seventy-seven-foot craft, released from the pier, glided out to sea.
It was eight p.m. by now, and PT-41 rendezvoused with her three sister craft, who had picked up passengers and supplies at other locations, including the navy’s head man in the Philippines, Rear Adm. Francis W. Rockwell, who was riding with Kelly on the 34 boat.
The little flotilla picked up a minesweeper, which guided them safely through an American-laid minefield and, avoiding a Japanese destroyer and cruiser said to be in the area, cleared the bay and zoomed out to sea.
Standing in the cockpit beside Bulkeley, MacArthur watched Bataan and Corregidor fade into the darkness. Off in the distance, red and orange flashes illuminated the night sky, accompanied by the fading rumble of artillery, marking the battle lines.
“Before I left, I told General Wainwright that if I get through to Australia, I’ll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can,” MacArthur said, as much to himself as to Bulkeley. “And as God is my witness, I will.”
The seeds of Japanese militarism and expansionism, which by 1942 would give them control of one-sixth of the world’s surface, began almost from the time Adm. Matthew Perry hoisted anchor and sailed out of Tokyo Bay in 1854, after having opened Japan to Western trade. Within ten years, the old Shogun rule had been abolished and Emperor Mutsuhito established the Meiji Restoration, which embraced Western technology.
In 1878 the military high command was placed outside of parliamentary control, allowing it to function independently of the emperor. Casting their eyes away from the home islands for expansion and the procurement of needed natural resources, Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on China in 1895 and captured Korea.
In 1904, the Japanese got caught up in a war with Czarist Russia, which culminated in 1905 with the Nipponese navy dealing the Russian fleet a crushing loss at the Battle of Tsushima. By the time of World War I, the Japanese, thanks to an alliance with Great Britain, signed in 1902, took over German possessions in the Pacific, keeping many after the conflict as “mandates.”
By 1921 Japan was looking again at China, with plans to monopolize trade. This put Japan in conflict with America’s “open-door” trade policy, and led to the Washington Naval Treaty, or Five-Power Treaty, limiting the size and number of warships in the American, British, Japanese, French, and Italian navies, with Japan, France, and Italy allowed less than the other two powers. Japan signed the so-called 5-5-3 Treaty, even though it permitted them just 300,000 tons of naval ships, as opposed to the 500,000 tons granted to both England and America, but soon was looking for ways to get around it.
In 1931, citing a series of supposed acts of aggression by China, Japanese forces overran all of Manchuria, annexed it, and created a puppet state called Manchukuo.
Their thirst for conquest still unsated, in 1937 Nippon’s military leaders demanded the right to send men across the Lugou Bridge connecting the Japanese-held Fengtai province, south of Beijing, to Chinese territory across the Yongding River.
Dubbed the Marco Polo Bridge after the famous early European explorer who once crossed the ancient span, the Japanese wished to cross it now to search for a deserter. Whether this Japanese deserter actually existed or was concocted by the Japanese as a pretext for invasion, or whether an actual solider was kidnapped by local Communist Chinese to create an incident between Japan and the government of Chiang Kai-shek, remains unknown.
Chinese officials, as expected, refused. The result was that on July 8, Japanese artillery began shelling the Chinese side of the bridge, followed by an attack by the soldiers of Nippon. The resulting Sino-Japanese War would last until Japan’s ultimate surrender in 1945.
It wasn’t just China that recoiled at Japanese aggression. A year before the Marco Polo Bridge incident, 1936, western Europe, Russia, and America grew alarmed when the Japanese signed their Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, agreeing not to interfere if the Nazis got into a war with the Soviet Union. And a year later, President Roosevelt, concerned over the treaty with Germany as well as the atrocities and mass murders reportedly committed by Japanese troops in China, called for a quarantine of Japanese assets in America.
International tensions were cranked up another notch a few months later when Japanese planes sank the gunboat USS Panay on December 13, 1937, while it was escorting American oil tankers on the Yangtze River. Japan apologized and paid reparations. But the next year, Japan slammed closed America’s open-door trade policy and set up what would soon be called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a supposed cooperation among Asian nations, which, not surprisingly, the Japanese would control.
Japan stunned the Western world in 1940 when it signed the Tripartite Pact, allying itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Roosevelt responded by slapping an embargo on Japanese exports.
Seeing the Western powers, led by America, as a threat to their overseas program of expansion, the Japanese high command concocted an elaborate series of plans to strike at America, Great Britain, and the Dutch, in one bold swoop, starting with the biggest perceived threat, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, now anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
From December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier planes roared in over Oahu, through April 1942, the war had been a succession of Japanese triumphs and Allied humiliations. The world watched in stunned silence as the Western powers, complacent in the belief of their military prowess, were thrown into headlong retreat on a front stretching for thousands of miles from the central Pacific to the East Indies and on into Southeast Asia. Before the Allies could regroup and stand firm, the rising-sun flag would flutter over more than a million square miles.
Within days of Pearl Harbor, Guam, some fifteen hundred miles east of Manila and a stop for the lumbering Pan American Clippers that linked America to the Orient, was gone. The island’s tiny garrison of 427 marines and 247 native troops, inadequately armed with World War I weapons, were gobbled up by 5,400 Japanese marines.
Wake Island, another Pan Am stop located twenty-three hundred air miles west of Hawaii, was bombed just hours after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japanese planes based on Kwajalein, 650 miles to the south. The 447 marines and 75 army signal corps and navy men, along with the help of some of the 1,200 civilian workers whom the war had stranded on the atoll, where they had been working on roads and an airstrip, valiantly fought off the Japanese for two weeks as America watched proudly from afar. But it was a doomed defense, and the island fell two days before Christmas.
The British fared no better.
Hong Kong, Britain’s China bastion, fell on Christmas Day.
On the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked, December 7 (December 8 west of the international date line), thousands of Japanese of the 25th Army commanded by Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita swarmed ashore on the Malay Peninsula at Singora, Pattani, and Kota Bharu, and began rolling south toward the fortress city of Singapore, Britain’s crown jewel in Asia. The British had discounted the idea of a land attack, hence most of the city’s formidable big guns faced the sea, as if mocking Singapore’s defenders.
The British sent their two most powerful ships in all of Asia, the thirty-two-thousand-ton battle cruiser HMS Repulse and thirty-five-thousand-ton battleship HMS Prince of Wales, out to challenge the invasion. Foolishly, the ships had no air cover, and on December 10, a swarm of Japanese planes sent both to the bottom, along with the new commander in chief of Britain’s Far Eastern Fleet, Adm. Sir Tom Phillips, giving proof again, as if proof was needed after Pearl Harbor, of the vulnerability of unprotected capital ships to modern airpower.
Meanwhile, on land, British and colonial troops pulled together hastily and sent to stop the land attack were easily smashed, and the Japanese were soon shouting a victorious “Banzai” just across the narrow isthmus from Singapore, which they now pummeled with artillery.
On
February 8, the Japanese opened a thunderous bombardment and crossed the isthmus. A week later, on February 15, Lt. Gen. A. E. Percival surrendered the battered city and its garrison.
As the Union Jack was lowered at Singapore, the Japanese began advancing on the resource-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. On February 14, seven hundred of the emperor’s paratroopers descended on Palembang in Sumatra.
On the high seas, Japanese ships beat up on a combined Allied naval force of five cruisers—one American, one Australian, one British, and two Dutch—plus two Dutch and four U.S. destroyers, all under the command of Dutch Rear Adm. Karel Doorman. In a running series of clashes collectively known as the Battle of the Java Sea, which was complicated by the fact that Doorman could not speak English, forcing all of his orders to be translated before they could be executed, the Allied force was destroyed. Doorman was lost along with his flagship, the DeRuyter.
Two surviving cruisers, the Australian HMAS Perth and the USS Houston, which was reported sunk so many times her crew called her the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast, made a desperate run for safer waters. On February 28, they were caught and sunk in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. A few days later, on March 9, the Dutch East Indies were surrendered to the Japanese.
As bad as the war news was, the one defeat that most rankled America’s senior military commander in the Far East, Douglas MacArthur, was the loss of his beloved Philippines.
Hailing from a proud military family—during the Civil War his father had led the Union charge up Missionary Ridge outside Chattanooga in 1863—MacArthur had graduated from West Point in 1903, ranked first in his class. After serving in the Philippines and in Japan as an aide to his father, Maj. Gen. Arthur MacArthur Jr., he rose rapidly in prestige and was promoted to captain in 1911 and attached to the General Staff in 1912.
During World War I, MacArthur commanded the 42nd Division, which he dubbed the Rainbow Division, and proved himself an able combat leader. He was wounded during the war, and afterward became superintendent at West Point. MacArthur returned to the Philippines in 1922 as military commander.
In 1935, after a stint as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, first under Herbert Hoover, then Franklin D. Roosevelt, MacArthur returned to the Philippines at the request of President Manuel L. Quezon. The island nation had just been granted semi-independence by the United States, which had taken over control from Spain after the Spanish-American War in 1898, with a promise of full independence on July 4, 1946. Quezon requested that MacArthur create and supervise a new Philippine army.
The vain MacArthur agreed, taking the title of Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, while still remaining on active duty with the U.S. Army. Demanding, and getting, a salary equal to that of Quezon—$18,000 a year—MacArthur established himself in luxury in the penthouse suite of the world-famous Manila Hotel, which waived the $1,500-a-month room rent when MacArthur was named chairman of the Manila Hotel Corporation.
That all came crashing down on December 8, 1941, Philippine time.
Even as American sailors fought the flames that raged along Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers of the 11th Imperial Air Fleet were winging toward the U.S. air base at Clark Field on Luzon.
As early as November 27, MacArthur had been warned by his superiors in Washington about the possibility of a Japanese attack. His response was an order that his thirty-five B-17 bombers be shifted from the vulnerable Clark Field south to Mindanao, out of harm’s way. But there was no rush ordered for the move, so that by December 7 only half the Flying Fortresses had been relocated.
News of the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived at MacArthur’s hotel at three thirty a.m., Manila time, and was confirmed ninety minutes later. Maj. Gen. Lewis Brereton, commander of MacArthur’s air force, wanted to launch an immediate strike on the Japanese airfields on Formosa. After waiting several hours for an answer, he was notified by MacArthur’s chief of staff, Colonel Sutherland, that he was cleared to launch a photo reconnaissance of Formosa, in preparation for an air strike the next day. As a result, his aircrews went to chow—it was now around noon—and his planes, eighteen B-17s, plus assorted fighters, mostly P-40 Tomahawks and P-39 Air Cobras, were parked and readied to be fueled.
The Japanese weren’t waiting.
Fully expecting to be met by U.S. fighters and antiaircraft fire over Clark Field, the Japanese aviators were delighted to find the skies clear and row after row of sitting ducks on the ground. Coming in at twenty-two thousand feet in several V-shaped formations, the bombers unloaded their explosives on the parked planes, while Zero fighters zoomed in for close-up kills.
Saburo Sakai, who would become Japan’s leading ace, found the situation “unbelievable” as he chopped up a B-17 with his two nose-mounted 7.7mm Type 97 machine guns. He next attacked a P-40 as it tried to take off, blasting it from the sky.
By the time the planes, with the red rising sun emblazoned on their wings and fuselages, turned north toward Formosa, they had destroyed all eighteen B-17s, along with fifty-three P-40s and thirty other aircraft. Fully one-half of MacArthur’s air force was gone within the first hours of the war, and eighty men lay dead.
On December 22, forty-three thousand Japanese soldiers of the 14th Army came ashore on the palm-lined beaches of Lingayen Gulf, 120 miles north of Manila. Seventy miles to the southeast, another force swarmed across the beaches of Lamon Bay. The Japanese commander Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma, the “Poet General,” whose love of Western movies and culture often put him at odds with Imperial Headquarters, planned to envelope the Americans and Filipinos in a massive pincer movement.
Against them, MacArthur could muster only about 25,000 to 30,000 regular troops, U.S. and Filipinos, and 100,000 raw Filipino recruits of questionable quality.
On December 23, MacArthur put into effect War Plan Orange, an antiquated design that called for the withdrawal of his forces to the Bataan Peninsula, there to hold out until help arrived from America. The plan, which MacArthur detested, abandoned Manila. However, with the United States holding Bataan and the island fortress of Corregidor, it still denied the Japanese use of Manila Bay. Unfortunately, the variable War Plan Orange did not take into account a naval disaster like Pearl Harbor.
The withdrawal began, as lines of trucks and troops moved along the dust-choked roads leading to Bataan. On Christmas Day, Maj. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, commander of the Northern Luzon Force, established a defensive line on the Agno River, but the Japanese 48th Division, with tanks and artillery, cracked it quickly. The withdrawal continued.
The prolonged battle that followed was brave, but the result was never in doubt. Without supplies and reinforcements from America, the Philippines were doomed. And no help was coming. MacArthur knew this, and mentioned it to Bulkeley on March 11. He also told Bulkeley that FDR had ordered him to Australia and for Bulkeley to prepare his boats for the trip. MacArthur had been urged to go by submarine, but he opted for Bulkeley, the one naval commander he knew and trusted.
“When do you want to shove off, sir?” Bulkeley had asked.
“I haven’t decided yet,” MacArthur replied, refusing to be pinned down.
“I need to prepare the boats for the long trip to Mindanao,” the young officer insisted.
“Just get them ready, Buck,” he was told. “I’ll give you the word.”
* * *
Now the word had been given, prompted by the news that General Yamashita, known now as the Tiger of Malaya after his conquest of Singapore, was en route to Luzon with reinforcements.
The flotilla’s destination, two days’ sailing, was Mindanao, the large, southernmost island of the Philippine archipelago. President Quezon, his vice president, Sergio Osmena, and the cabinet had already reached Mindanao, boarding a B-17 at the Del Monte pineapple plantation for a flight to Australia. MacArthur would rendezvous with a B-17 at the same place, provided he managed to elude the Japanese.
That night, while skimming across the Sibuyan Sea heading for their firs
t stop in the Cuyo Island group, the boats became separated. Kelly’s 34 boat was the first to arrive, gliding into a secluded cove as the sky purpled with the hint of the coming dawn. Dropping anchor in water so crystalline clear that the coral bottom was plainly visible, Kelly sent a man to shore with semaphore flags to watch for the others.
Within half an hour, the squadron was reassembled in the cove. As the sailors scanned the sky and the sea for any sign of pursuit, Jean MacArthur and Loh Chui spent the day relaxing in wicker chairs on the forward deck of the 41 boat, while the anguished general paced incessantly. Taking in his surroundings, Bulkeley noted the pristine white sandy beach marred only by four empty huts, probably used seasonally by men who came to the place to gather coconuts. A stray dog trotted along the shore. Bulkeley then turned and watched young Arthur, the general’s only child, playing with General Tojo, the squadron’s monkey mascot.
“This is a beautiful beach, General,” he told MacArthur. “I’d love to let the boy go ashore and enjoy the sand, but if we’re spotted, we’ll have to get out of here fast.”
MacArthur puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, also watching his son, and said, “I understand, Buck. He’ll have plenty of time to play when we reach Darwin.”
According to the plan, MacArthur was to rendezvous with a submarine here, and continue the trip underwater. He was torn with indecision, between taking the obviously safer but slower route by sub or continuing on the surface with the skipper he trusted.
“We’ll be in more open sea,” Bulkeley told him. “The ride will be rougher.”
MacArthur looked to Admiral Rockwell, who had joined him on the 41 boat to plan the rest of the journey.
“I’m a navy man, but I’ve never been able to confine myself in the cramped quarters of a submarine, especially under the water,” Rockwell said. “I’m staying with the squadron.”
MacArthur mulled it over, then concurred.
As darkness approached, the little convoy was getting ready to strike out on the last leg of the voyage. It was decided that the 32 boat was unable to continue. During the previous night, separated and alone, Lieutenant Schumacker had mistaken Bulkeley’s boat, coming up from behind, for a Japanese craft, and dumped his spare fuel drums in order to speed up his escape. He now did not have the gas needed to make it to Mindanao. Bulkeley told him to await the submarine and get fuel from it, then head for Iloilo on Panay for repairs and refueling and to later rejoin the squadron. The remaining three boats headed off. (Schumacker, instead, had the sub sink his boat and take him to Australia.)
Shadows In the Jungle Page 4