Then they began to see something strange, something that seemed to be floating beneath the giant Vs: small strips of silver glinting in the sun like tiny pieces of tin foil, “sparkles,” Ben Steele thought. And all at once, they knew—bombs. Suddenly the air raid klaxon began its urgent warnings: Eah—Eah—Eah—
“Japanese!” Ben Steele heard someone yell. “Take cover!”
At roughly 12:15 p.m., the first of some forty-two tons of incendiary and fragmentation bombs started to fall toward the field. Some of the men simply stood there and stared, transfixed by the Vs and the silver sparkles falling from the sky.31
Then the base erupted. A line of explosions advanced across the field, then another line, and another. Each bomb held roughly a hundred pounds of explosive in its warhead, enough TNT to bring down a building, blow up an airplane, blast a hole in a runway twelve feet wide, and turn a flesh-and-blood human being into a spray of red. The men on the south side of the field watched the explosions approach—five hundred yards, three hundred, one hundred . . . a burst of blinding white, a sharp, painful crack! followed by an enormous rip, a tearing of the air, then, finally, a deep shudder in the ground, the earth set atremble.
A bomb blast is lethal science, fluid mechanics meant to maim. First, the shock wave, a surge of air that hits a man like a wall of wind, hits him so hard his cerebrum starts to shake concussively in his skull, swelling at first, then hemorrhaging, rivulets of blood running from his nose and ears, vomit from his mouth. An instant after the shock wave passes, the atmosphere turns hot and dense, high pressure sucking the low pressure from every recess around it, from a man’s lungs and ears and eye sockets, leaving him gasping for breath and fighting the feeling his pupils are being pulled from their sockets. Finally, fluid mechanics turns to terminal ballistics as the blast blows apart the bomb’s casing, sending hundreds of jagged fragments—pieces of white-hot shrapnel, some no bigger than a pebble, others as big as a brick—slicing into anything in their path.
Q. P. Devore was hit right away.
He had spent the morning sorting armory supplies and at mess call had met his friend Ben Steele for lunch. He ate quickly that afternoon; the fellas in the control tower had invited him up for a look, so he climbed the stairs to the cupola on top of the first hangar to chew the fat with the operations boys and take in the view. All at once a voice came over an intercom: “Enemy bombers overhead.” Devore laughed. Another false alarm. “Hey fellas, I’m going to step out on the stairs for a look,” he said, and he began to descend from the cupola, down the stairs that hugged the outside of the hangar. When he heard the drone of engines, he stopped and looked up. He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the loudest noise he’d ever heard, and just like that, his world went blank.
When he came to, he was on the ground, lying among a litter of empty gasoline drums at the bottom of the stairs. His body ached, his head was thick and heavy. And he kept hearing a voice, faint at first, as if it were far away.
“Help . . . help.”
As his head cleared, the voice grew louder.
“Help me! Please! Somebody help me!”
Devore rolled over and saw a man he knew, a lieutenant from his unit. He blinked and looked again. The man was wobbling, struggling to stand, to get up on the one leg he had left.
A truck stopped nearby and the driver rushed over to the two men. “Let’s get this officer to the hospital at Stotsenberg,” he said, and Devore helped him load the lieutenant in the pickup, then jumped in the back.
At Stotsenberg hospital the wounded from Clark Field were everywhere, filling the wards, the halls, the concrete porch in back. When Q. P. Devore arrived with the mangled lieutenant, orderlies were putting men on blankets on the front lawn, and a nurse pressed Devore into service as a litter bearer, unloading truckloads of hobbled, bleeding, unconscious men. He hefted and hauled, stretcher after stretcher, until a nurse stopped him and said, “Hey, what’s the story with you?”
“I’m okay,” Devore said.
“Really? Take a look.”
His coveralls were soaked with blood and riddled with tiny holes. “Oh,” he thought, “I didn’t even feel it.”
Now and then a nurse, doctor, or patient would wander over to a window or the front door and look toward Clark Field, less than two miles away. The base was burning—airplanes, hangars, huts, barracks, trucks, and fuel tanks, even the fields of cogon grass were ablaze—and giant twisters of black and gray smoke and clouds of ocher dust were rising high over the runways. Soon the sky, the great blue dome above the central plain, was dark with carbon and ash.
Then they heard gunfire from that direction, the stabbing tchat-tchat-tchat of machine guns and airplane cannon. The Japanese Zeros had come down from the clouds to rake and strafe what the bombers had left.
The attack was over in less than an hour, but all afternoon and into the evening, trucks and cars carted the casualties up the road to Stotsenberg.
The injured, when they could talk, described brimstone scenes and stygian slaughter: bombs falling in trenches, dismembering and decapitating those caught cowering there; orange fireballs of gasoline and oil rimmed with a cockscomb of thick black smoke; pilots trying to take off, shot in their seats or trapped in their flaming cockpits; an airfield that looked like an airplane junkyard, the runways and aprons littered with pieces of wings, tails, and fuselage, and the riddled wrecks of bombers and fighters still smoking. Finally, amid all, derelict corpses and other detritus of war—an arm, a leg, a helmet with holes in it.
When the Zeros came down to finish the attack, they came in low, often just thirty feet off the ground, flying through the smoke and fire left by the bombs, shooting their rounds and tracers into planes and buildings, emplacements and men. Some of the wounded swore they could see the faces of the Japanese pilots and shot at them with their rifles and sidearms, sometimes sighting on the big red circles on the Zero’s fuselage and wings, those “goddamn red meatballs” and “big fried eggs,” the hinomaru of Amaterasu, “the circle of the sun.”32
In the operating room at Stotsenberg the wounded were taken four and five at a time, laid out on wooden doors set on crates and boxes. Helen Cassiani, a surgical nurse from Bridgewater, Massachusetts, had “never seen such carnage.”
“Oh Lord!” she said to herself, “this is a madhouse.”
In truth it was more like a knacker’s yard, with stretchers of flayed flesh and splintered bone “all over the lawn, the porch, the hallways, anywhere you looked.” Outside was better than inside, where the smell of suffering—the stench of blackened flesh and the reek of green bile and vomit—collected in the still air of the corridors and wards. Most of all, the overpowering smell of blood, sweet with a hint of musk, so much that it made Cassie, as they called Helen, think of her family’s chicken farm and the way the barn smelled on days when the birds were being slaughtered.33
Some of the wounded shrieked and howled, but overall the scene was strangely quiet. Cassie noticed that most of the wounded were “shuddering from the deathly cold that comes from shock” or were so numb with morphine they kept their pain to themselves. Now and then a man with a crushed or dangling limb would summon a nurse to come close, and he would whisper a question: Was he going to lose his hand, his foot, his arm, his leg? Don’t worry, Cassie would tell them; the doctor would do what he could. In the end, of course, the doctor would amputate. There was no time, no equipment, no way to reconnect what had been torn loose and left hanging or rebuild what had been blasted into shards of bone and bloody bits of flesh. So they would shoot up the man with more morphine and clamp off the wound’s arteries and veins, and a surgeon would take a scalpel and pare down the muscle, pare it down to the bone, then the room would fill with the sound of sawing.34
Q. P. Devore had been lucky. The shrapnel had bounced off a rib instead of slicing into him. His legs had been peppered with fragments too, but looking at the litters queued up for surgery, he considered himself almost unscathed. Medics cle
aned his wounds and gave him new coveralls and, in the afternoon, sent him back to Clark Field.
He was tired and sore when he wandered into the barracks, and there, waiting for him, was his good friend Ben Steele. Each man had prepared himself for the death of the other. And now, sitting side by side in a barracks full of bullet holes, bullet holes even in the blankets, each counted himself twice lucky, once for his own sweet life, once for the life of his friend.
“And what happened to you?” Q.P. asked.
“After lunch I went on back to the hangar area,” Ben said. “Bunch of us were walkin’ about fifty yards from a trench when we hear this high drone, and we look up. They dropped so damn many bombs the sides of the trenches were caving in, you know? Then the fighters came in, just coming in right out of the smoke. Hell, I was shooting at them with my forty-five. Really, right at point-blank range.”35
The conversation carried them outside, over to the wreckage of the hangar and control tower stairs where Q.P. had been hit. Ben told Q.P. that after the attack he had run to the tower to look for him, but all he found was a jumble of gasoline drums under the stairs, and—he reached into his pocket—this wristwatch, which he held out to show him.
Q.P. looked, looked again.
“Hey, that’s mine!” he said. “That’s my watch. I didn’t even know I’d lost it.”
The two stood there, looking around them. The base was a wasteland of debris and burning junk. Gone were most of the barracks, offices, hangars, repair shops, fuel and ammo dumps, chow halls, and the base communications shack. In the gray half-light of evening, the two runways had so many craters that the field looked like a moonscape. Seventeen of the nineteen B-17 bombers and most of the American pursuit planes had been destroyed or heavily damaged. MacArthur’s Far East Air Force was now a line of wrecks smoldering in the sun.
“They really demolished this place,” Ben Steele said. “They got everything.”
The graves registration unit was still busy past sundown collecting the dead. More than 250 men had been wounded and some 100 killed, roughly 10 percent of the force manning the base.36
Many had fought well—pilots taxiing down the runway under fire, antiaircraft crews staying at their guns as fighter planes bore down on them, soldiers rushing into burning buildings to save buddies or retrieve valuable gear—but surprise strikes deep. And a large number of men, green privates bewildered by the bombs and veteran corporals and sergeants who had left their courage in a warm bed or in a bottle, were finished. At dark they simply abandoned their posts and fled into the woods and hills and barrios.37
The barracks were almost empty, just Ben Steele, Q.P., and a few others. Where the hell had everyone gone? they wondered. One of the officers said that sentries along the shoreline had spotted “troop transports” up north in the South China Sea, “an invasion force.” Invasion? How were they going to stop an invasion now, without an air force? Another man was sure he could hear the sound of tanks in the distance, but whose tanks?
Q.P. was in rough shape. He told Ben he was so sore he could barely stand. Most of all, his nerves were shot; he was sure the barracks would be hit again and he wanted to get out of there.
“That bombing put the fear of God in me,” Q.P. whispered to his friend. “I’m afraid.”
Ben Steele helped his buddy outside and across the airfield and into the relative safety of the woods. He bedded him down on a rush of cogon grass, and for two nights he ferried food to him and kept him company until he was ready to fall asleep.
* * *
GOING TO GROUND
BEN STEELE was five years old the first time he fell off a horse.
Happened over at the Gilberts’, neighbors a few hills away who raised racers. Grover Gilbert had put him on a retired plug named Old Pardner. “You just grab ahold of the horn and hang on, Bud,” Gilbert said, but as soon as that horse stepped onto the hardpan oval it took off, pitching the child into the bunchgrass and dirt. He was too young to remember the spill, but he heard about it often enough.
His father had been a cowboy, among the last to ride the open range, so it was only natural that the Old Man would take the measure of his oldest son by the boy’s ability to keep his seat.
At their ranch at Hawk Creek, the Old Man put him on a frisky cow pony, a mare named Squaw. In the afternoons—he was six or seven years old now—father and son would saddle up, cross a meadow, and climb into the hills.
Their second, maybe third time out, Squaw caught a hoof on broken ground, and Bud went flying.
The Old Man stopped his horse, looked down, shook his head.
“Horse stumbles and you fall off? You’re a helluva of cowboy!”
Then he dismounted, brushed the boy off, and hoisted him back into the saddle.
For a while Ben Steele was about half afraid of that animal, but he never spoke of his fear lest the Old Man leave him home and ride the hills without him.
* * *
TWO
December 8, 1941, 11:00 a.m., Takao Harbor, Formosa,
aboard the troopship Yae Maru
LIEUTENANT RYOTARO NISHIMURA, commander of the Fifth Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 14th Army Group, was belowdecks with his men staging for the invasion of the Philippines when he heard the news over the ship’s loudspeakers: “Today, December 8, before dawn, the Imperial Army and Navy entered into a state of war with American and British forces.”
So the hour was at hand. Soon now he would sail with the 14th Army, one of four Japanese armies to sally forth that December fortnight—200,000 troops on their way to drive the British, Dutch, and Americans from the archipelagoes and island groups of the southwest Pacific.
Reflecting on this, Ryotaro Nishimura’s first thoughts were the same as those of all Japanese soldiers. He thought of death.
“I will do whatever I am ordered,” he told himself.
Then, like every man-at-arms approaching a battle, he turned back for a moment to glance at the life he was so ready to leave, his life at home in Fushimi: the willows on Nishihama Street in front of his father’s store, the barge boats plying the canals, the flowers in the rushes along the Uji River.1
AT SEA, clear sky, calm waters. The men of the Fifth Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry were on deck, sitting in a semicircle around their commander. They were anxious, these young conscripts, Kyoto boys, the sons of farmers and shopkeepers, most of them. They knew that two weeks hence, December 22, they would be going into battle. And they would be led in this great and dangerous task by a new commander, a young lieutenant they had met only a fortnight before.
Ryotaro Nishimura was standing in front of them now, speaking just loud enough to be heard, almost a whisper above the wind.
He did not want to raise his voice. In his early years in the army he had served as a training officer, and he had learned a little something of how men thought and what men felt. As the invasion force approached its staging area, Ryotaro Nishimura knew that the boys gathered around him on desk were homesick and afraid.
He had called the company together, he told them, so they could look north, toward Japan.
“This is your farewell, farewell to your home country, to your family.” So look toward Japan, he said, and say good-bye. “Once you head into battle, you must cut your feeling for your family and town or you will not be able to fight.”
A subaltern practicing basic psychology on his men, trying to harden their hearts before the bitter work of battle, part of the catechism of any army. But this particular young lieutenant’s allocution was also uniquely Japanese, for it invoked the ancient code of the warrior, the old tomo pledge. Kaerimi wa seji! Kaerimi wa seji!
Never will I look back!
Never will I look back!
“If you have regrets, some worry about your family or home or countryside,” Nishimura continued, “then, as the saying goes, ushiro gami o hikareru”—your head will be pulled back—“and you cannot concentrate on the things that are to come, the things
you have to face. Cut everything now so that you can move forward.”
The men listened respectfully to their new company commander, listened as they would listen to a father, their “army father,” and they knew he was right—regret was as lethal as an enemy bullet or bayonet—but they could not stop themselves from thinking of home, and neither could the man lecturing them.
He thought of his family: his mother, younger brother, and father and their home on Kasho Machi by the Hori River in the busy Kyoto suburb of Fushimi.
As a boy he had loved the bustle of the place, the noisy commerce of the streets, the chin-chin of the trolley bells, the gatakoto-gatakoto-gatakoto of the locomotives on the tracks.
At a local college of commerce, Ryotaro Nishimura had prepared himself to enter the family lumber business. Then in 1932, around his twentieth birthday, the government sent him a draft notice. His mother thought him too weak for the army, but his father, who revered the Throne and believed Japan a nation with a divine destiny, was proud his oldest son had been called to serve the emperor.
Commissioned an officer, he was assigned to the reserves near his home, then in 1936 he was called to full-time duty, fought in China the following year, rotated home, and in the fall of 1941 was ordered to report to the 9th Infantry. By the second week in December he was on his way with his men aboard a ship in the South China Sea, part of a flotilla staging for an invasion of the Philippine Islands.
On the early morning of December 22, eighty-five transports carrying 36,000 troops from the 14th Army’s invasion force dropped anchor in the waters of Lingayen Gulf off the main Philippine island of Luzon, preparing for a predawn attack. On the Yae Maru, Ryotaro Nishimura went among his men checking their equipment and quizzing them on the order of battle.2
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