Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  That morning an urgent call came into Malinta from the Radio Intercept Tunnel out at Monkey Point. The aid station had forty casualties but only a Chief Pharmacist’s Mate and a Pharmacist’s Mate 3rd Class to tend them. Could regimental headquarters send over a medical officer? Hayes gave Murray, the junior medical officer, his orders.

  Murray knew where the fighting was. Monkey Point had been taken by the Japanese at 0100. The Radio Intercept Tunnel was well behind enemy lines.

  “I can’t go through Japanese lines, sir,” Murray said.

  “That’s an order,” Hayes admonished.

  Murray could have obeyed, and he should have obeyed as an officer of the U.S. Navy. But it would have been suicide to do so.

  “I’ll go see Major Schaeffer,” he replied, and he did.

  “Sir,” he addressed Major Schaeffer, “I have an order to take an ambulance out to the Radio Intercept Tunnel. Is the road clear?”

  Schaeffer could hardly believe his ears.

  “What the hell do you think we were trying to do out there?” Schaeffer barked. “The road’s cut. It’s impossible to get through.”

  Murray went back to Hayes and related his exchange with Schaeffer. Hayes was adamant.

  The commander’s firmness only strengthened the young lieutenant’s resolve.

  “Who issued this order?” he dared to ask.

  “Colonel Cooper,” Hayes replied, though he was unaccustomed to answering to a man nearly twenty years his junior.

  “Then I’ll go see Colonel Cooper,” Murray declared.

  When Murray found Colonel Cooper, chief surgeon, U.S. Forces in the Philippines, he described the situation.

  Cooper spoke to him as if he were teaching a child how to cross the street. “Look,” he said pointing to the air warning alarm. “See that light over there? That light is red, which means you can’t go out of the tunnel. When that light changes to green, you can go.”

  This is the blind leading the blind, Murray thought. Since the fall of Bataan, he had been bivouacked in Government Ravine with the Headquarters and Service Company, who regularly got the shit shelled out of them. He’d never seen Hayes outside Malinta Tunnel. Cooper hadn’t shown much of his face, either—Berley and Nardini could attest to that. Didn’t they understand what was happening? The Regimental Reserve was in shreds. There wasn’t going to be an all-clear.

  The marines were helpless. There were no antitank guns on the Rock—they’d all been destroyed when Bataan fell. Their automatic weapons fire pinged off of armored carapaces glinting in the sunlight as Japanese tanks began to wipe out pockets of resistance. The 1st and 4th Battalions fell back to the shell-blasted trenches of their final defense line in front of Malinta. Enemy artillery fire from Bataan redoubled. The line couldn’t hold. The Japanese slipped through both flanks and made a pincerlike movement for the tunnel itself.

  By 1000 Wainwright had reached his decision. “It was the terror that is vested in a tank that was the deciding factor,” he later wrote. “I thought of the havoc that even one of these could wreak if it nosed into the tunnel, where lay our helpless wounded and their brave nurses.”

  Between April 29 and May 6, more than 200,000 rounds of Japanese artillery had been fired at Corregidor. Six to eight hundred men lay dead; 1,000 more were wounded. Most of the officers in the Headquarters and Service Company had been killed, and the Inshore Patrol had virtually been wiped out.

  The toll on the Japanese was even higher. Two-thirds of their landing barges had been sunk, and half of the men in them had drowned. Hayes estimated that 4,000 Japanese had died during the invasion.

  Soon the Rock began sending its final dispatches.

  From the Radio Intercept Tunnel, Captain Kenneth M. Hoeffel, commandant of the 16th Naval District, proclaimed: “One hundred and seventy-three officers and twenty-three hundred and seventeen men of the Navy reaffirm their loyalty and devotion to country, families and friends.” The transmission was picked up by the radioman on the Spearfish, still on its journey to Australia with the last evacuees from Corregidor.

  The Rock’s defenders were given another message: “EXECUTE PON-TIAC,” the code phrase for surrender. At 1040 Major General Moore issued orders to destroy matériel in excess of .80 caliber and disable all other artillery equipment. Firing pins were pulled from rifles and tossed into the water. Top secret maps, files, and records were shredded. In Lateral No. 3 Colonel Vance and his assistants were busily cutting up more than two million Philippine pesos with shears.

  Out at Wheeler Point the 2nd Battalion was frustrated by not having an opportunity to engage the Japanese. Fred Berley insisted on keeping his .45 service revolver and his Springfield rifle just in case.

  “You can’t have that,” Major Bradley told him. “Put your Red Cross brassard on.”

  Fred tried to argue with him: “Look, at least I can defend myself a little bit.”

  Bradley was adamant.

  Fred hid his weapons behind a wall in his aid station tunnel, and then they waited.

  No one knew what to expect from the Japanese. A sanctuary during the siege, Malinta could become a catacomb on capitulation. The tunnel had been designed to be gas proof, but the requisite equipment hadn’t arrived in time. Leland D. Bartlett was the canary in the mineshaft. He had trained Philippine Scouts in chemical warfare and was posted as a “gas sentry” at the tunnel’s south entrance. Corpsman Ernie Irvin was terrified the Japanese would roll into Malinta with tanks and flamethrowers.

  From the depths of Malinta twenty-two-year-old Corporal Irving Strobing, an army radio operator from Brooklyn, tapped out a plaintive farewell:THEY ARE NOT NEAR YET. WE ARE WAITING FOR GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT. HOW ABOUT A CHOCOLATE SODA? . . . WE MAY HAVE TO GIVE UP BY NOON, WE DON’T KNOW YET. THEY ARE THROWING MEN AND SHELLS AT US AND WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO STAND IT. THEY HAVE BEEN SHELLING US FASTER THAN YOU CAN COUNT. . . .

  I KNOW NOW HOW A MOUSE FEELS. CAUGHT IN A TRAP WAITING FOR GUYS TO COME ALONG FINISH IT UP. GOT A TREAT. CAN PINEAPPLE. OPENING IT WITH SIGNAL CORPS KNIFE.

  MY NAME IRVING STROBING. GET THIS TO MY MOTHER. MRS. MINNIE STROBING, 605 BARBEY STREET, BROOKLYN, N.Y. THEY ARE TO GET ALONG O.K. GET IN TOUCH WITH THEM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MESSAGE. MY LOVE TO PA, JOE, SUE, MAC, GARRY, JOY, HOPE THEY BE THERE WHEN I COME HOME. TELL JOE WHEREVER HE IS TO GIVE ’EM HELL FOR US. MY LOVE TO YOU ALL. GOD BLESS YOU AND KEEP YOU. SIGN MY NAME AND TELL MOTHER HOW YOU HEARD FROM ME.

  STAND BY. . . .

  Wainwright chose midday on May 6 as the time of surrender so the Japanese would be in control of their prisoners by dark. He had heard reports of the rape and carnage that had accompanied the fall of Singapore. Brigadier General Beebe had already prepared a surrender message addressed to Lieutenant General Homma, which he broadcast in English over the Voice of Freedom four times, beginning at 1030. A nisei sergeant who had translated the text read it in Japanese, but the shelling continued unabated. Then Wainwright addressed President Roosevelt.

  With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame I report to Your Excellency that today I must arrange terms for the surrender of the fortified islands of Manila Bay. . . .

  With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander. . . .

  Goodbye, Mr. President.

  At 1200 General Wainwright ordered Colonel Bunker to lower the Stars and Stripes on Topside and run up the white flag of surrender. The guns of Corregidor were silent. As “Taps” played and the national and regimental colors burned, the Japanese dive-bombed the Rock. Colonel Bunker, Lieutenant Fulmer, Major General Moore, and Private Malone stood at attention. “My God,” said Colonel Howard, “and I had to be the first marine officer ever to surrender a regiment.”

  The Japanese continued to fire on Corregidor with artillery that encircled Hospital No. 2, even though the white flag was visible from Bataan.

  Later that afternoon Wainwright was escorted to Cabcaben aboard a Japanese tank barge, but his attempt to negoti
ate the surrender of the four fortified islands was rebuffed by Homma.

  “No surrender will be considered unless it includes all United States and Philippine troops in the Philippine Islands,” Homma snapped through his interpreter, and stalked off from the meeting.

  There were 40,000 men in the southern islands of Mindanao and the Visayas under the command of Major General William F. Sharp. Wainwright would have to assume command of the Visayan-Mindanao Force and order Sharp, “by virtue of authority vested in me by the President,” to surrender.

  Wainwright felt he had no choice. When he returned to Corregidor that evening he found that the Japanese had surrounded the east entrance of Malinta, and they commanded the area from the west entrance to Morrison Hill and beyond. Another complement of enemy troops had arrived at Bottomside that afternoon, and by nightfall an attack was being planned against Topside. The blood of the entire garrison would be on his hands, his aide, Major Thomas Dooley, cautioned. Wainwright proceeded to Barrio San José, where Colonel Satō Gempachi, commander of the Corregidor invasion force, had his headquarters. Just before midnight, “a tremendous artillery bombardment” showered the west end of the island. At 2400, Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright tendered the unconditional surrender of all troops in the islands. The Philippines had fallen.

  The men on Corregidor were stunned. Surrender was something most had never expected, few had ever witnessed, and none had ever prepared for. Was it true the Japanese didn’t take prisoners? Did they kill their captives the same way the Japanese had killed themselves at Longoskawayan Point for fear of being captured?

  George Ferguson sat down and wept at the news, he was “just so disappointed in the good old U.S.A.” Fred Berley, tough as nails, fought back tears. John Bookman wondered what could possibly come next, while Murray Glusman felt relief—relief that the bombing and shelling, after twenty-seven days, had finally ceased.

  13

  Limbo

  TIRED, HUNGRY, DEMORALIZED, and defeated, the men on Corregidor became symbols of fearlessness and fortitude, loyalty and endurance. If Bataan was “a minor epic in the sweeping panorama of world tragedy,” Hanson W. Baldwin eloquently remarked in The New York Times on April 10, 1942, Corregidor stood as a shining affirmation of the nation’s “unconquerable soul.” Undersecretary of War Robert P. Patterson compared the “gallant effort” of the 8,000 Americans and nearly 5,000 Filipinos to the defense of Charleston in the Revolutionary War.

  But to their parents, they were not symbols, they were sons; to their wives, they were husbands; to their girlfriends, they were lovers; to their sisters, they were brothers; and they were missing.

  MAY 8, 1942

  MR. LEWIS GLUSMAN

  167 RIDGE STREET

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  THE NAVY DEPARTMENT EXCEEDINGLY REGRETS TO ADVISE YOU THAT ACCORDING TO THE RECORDS OF THIS DEPARTMENT YOUR SON LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE MURRAY GLUSMAN UNITED STATES NAVAL RESERVE WAS PERFORMING HIS DUTY IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY IN THE MANILA BAY AREA WHEN THAT STATION CAPITULATED X HE WILL BE CARRIED ON THE RECORDS OF THE NAVY DEPARTMENT AS MISSING PENDING FURTHER INFORMATION X NO REPORT OF HIS DEATH OR INJURY HAS BEEN RECEIVED AND HE MAY BE A PRISONER OF WAR X IT WILL PROBABLY BE SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE DEFINITE OFFICIAL INFORMATION CAN BE EXPECTED CONCERNING HIS STATUS X SINCERE SYMPATHY IS EXTENDED TO YOU IN YOUR ANXIETY AND YOU ARE ASSURED THAT ANY REPORT RECEIVED WILL BE COMMUNICATED TO YOU PROMPTLY X

  REAR ADMIRAL RANDALL JACOBS

  CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF NAVIGATION

  The identical cable was sent to Samuel and Olga Bookman, Guy and Victoria Berley, George and Mary Ferguson, and to Lucy Ferguson with one exception: “husband” was substituted for “son.”

  The men were all part of the navy’s fourth casualty list, which covered the period from April 16 to May 10, 1942. To rub salt in the wound, the War Department asked the public to refrain from requesting further information. “To comply” with such requests, Undersecretary of War Patterson explained, “is humanly impossible at a time when military communications are strained to the utmost.”

  The press couldn’t resist an opportunity to pander to sentiment and national pride. The New York Post staged a photograph of Murray Glusman’s family for a maudlin article that began: “They died or are missing, these New York boys, in the line of duty.” The New York Journal-American ran a snapshot of John Bookman smiling in his navy whites. Fred Berley’s dashing photograph appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune, while George Ferguson’s story was featured in the local newspaper in Evanston, Illinois.

  By then the idea of sacrifice in the name of patriotism was taking root in American soil. On April 27, 1942, Roosevelt introduced an economic initiative to raise revenues and conserve materials through bond sales, increased taxation, wage and price controls, and food and fuel rationing. If American soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines were willing to fight for their country, the president explained in a fireside chat, another kind of sacrifice—of money and material goods—would have to be made on the home front. The dividend would be victory, a theme cleverly exploited by Secretary of Treasury Henry Morganthau, Jr., in his war bond drives and the 5 percent “Victory Tax” surcharge. Americans warmly embraced the notion of giving up something to safeguard their freedom.

  But what did it mean—“missing”? It was seeing someone in your mind and not being able to hold him. It was looking at a photograph and wondering if that person was dead or alive. It was talking out loud, only to be answered by silence. It was reading the last letter you’d received over and over again. What it meant was not knowing, a state of uncertainty that was in some ways more difficult to accept than death itself, because you couldn’t go forward, you could only gaze back. You were in limbo.

  George’s last correspondence with Lucy was postmarked April 8, 1942, the day before Bataan fell, and revealed not a hint of trouble:

  Dearest Lucy: Here is the third in the series and three months have elapsed since my last birthday. Eating pretty well and still going strong but would surely like to be going back to meet you in that city called San Francisco. Perhaps it will be sooner than we expect. . . .

  Still hear KGEI and the commentator William Winter every evening at 6 PM and it all sounds pretty good especially the part where WW says “And you shall have planes, tanks, guns.” Well we are waiting; more than that the men are fighting and doing a damn good job of it too. . . .

  Give my regards to your folks and help them in any way you care to. It would be interesting to know what the Red Cross has got you all doing to help out. I read an article somewhere that the school teachers had been requested to donate a few hours of their time to the cause. And Please [sic] remember I love you with all my heart and have hopes of a very pleasant future.

  And then by hand he added the word “Soon” at the end of his typewritten letter, forgetting to close it with a period.

  For those on the home front, the lack of specific information concerning the missing was compounded by the lack of reliable news on the war in the Pacific. Reports were often inaccurate, contradictory, or out of date. H. Ford Wilkins’s front-page New York Times article on December 9, 1941, about the bombing of Manila caused alarm for anyone with relatives in the Philippine capital, but the next day the headline claimed “LUZON INVASION ‘IN HAND’ OUR FORCES SAY.” A subhead reported

  “Cavite Pounded From Air,” but the article devoted not even a full sentence to the destruction of the Navy Yard. “Fires were seen at the Cavite naval base and at Nichols Field,” Wilkins wrote, as if he were relying on secondhand sources and hadn’t witnessed them himself.

  The wire services provided some of the best reporting—Clark Lee’s dispatches for AP, Frank Hewlett’s for UP, and Curtis Hindson’s for Reuters. Twenty-four-year-old John Hersey cabled dispatches from Bataan to Time. Carl Mydans sent back gripping photographs in black and white, as did newlywed Melville Jacoby, who with his wife, Annalee, filed stories for Time as well as Life. But whether their stories appear
ed in glossy magazines or daily newspapers, you wouldn’t learn much about the navy men on Bataan from any reporter in the Philippines.

  In fact, one could glean more about the destruction of the Cavite Navy Yard from Japanese communiqués posted in The New York Times than from the paper of record itself—until, that is, Bataan fell, and the Times ran a story on April 11 under the headline “NAVY ROLE A HEROIC CHAPTER”:Washington, April 10—Sailors and marines played an important part in the gallant defense of Bataan Peninsula, but most of their accomplishments have been secret up to now because of the lack of facilities to communicate their story to the Navy Department.

  Their accomplishments were secret because the Navy Department had apparently chosen to keep them that way. News of the attack on the Asiatic Fleet just two days after Pearl Harbor had been more than the public—and the navy—could bear. Families, friends, and loved ones didn’t officially learn of the destruction of the Cavite Navy Yard until four months after the event. Even then it was difficult for anyone to comprehend the extent of the carnage until Melville Jacoby’s harrowing photographic record appeared in Life magazine on April 13, 1942. In the meantime people depended on what the available sources could print, but the sources themselves were drying up.

  Two days after Manila was declared an “open city,” the offices of the Manila Herald were bombed by the Japanese. Carl and Shelley Mydans were captured on January 2, 1942, and confined to the civilian internment camp established by the Japanese in the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomás. H. Ford Wilkins, city editor of the Manila Daily Bulletin, A.V.H. Hartendorp, editor of Philippine Magazine, and D. T. Boguslav of the Manila Tribune (which became the occupation newspaper) were also taken captive. When Clark Lee heard the rumor that KZRH radio announcer Don Bell, whose real name was C. Beliel, had been caught by the Japanese in Manila, tortured, and killed, he decided to leave Corregidor with the Jacobys aboard the Princesa de Cebu on February 22. Carlos Romulo, who headed the Voice of Freedom, left Corregidor a day before the men on Bataan lost theirs, though the broadcasts continued without him.