Alvin C. Poweleit, an army doctor from Newport, Kentucky, assigned to a tank battalion marshaling to move north toward the gulf at the first sign of an invasion, noticed that the daily bombings were beginning to “change the personalities” of some of the men. “For example,” he wrote in his diary,
Lieutenant Rue seemed absolutely listless, and Lieutenant E. Gibson lost all confidence in himself . . . Captain Sorenson had been a very fine man, capable and intelligent, until the war started, then he became despondent. Then when Company C was called into action, he fainted and went all to pieces . . . [Another officer] was drunk all the time. One day he asked me if the Army would release him if he shot himself in the leg. I told him it would be better if he shot himself in the head.17
On December 18 at his headquarters at One Calle Victoria, MacArthur received a report that eighty Japanese troop transports were headed toward the Philippines. Two days later the Japanese force was sighted forty miles north of Lingayen Gulf. The next day headquarters warned all commanders that an invasion was imminent.
Along the shoreline of the gulf, the men dug in. Their written orders were still the same—meet the enemy on the beaches. But here and there along the coast, officers from headquarters, inspecting the units dug in above the beach, began to whisper a word heretofore unheard by the men waiting at the water’s edge: “withdrawal.”
Withdrawal? “We must die in our tracks,” Colonel Richard C. Mallonée reminded the officer from headquarters.
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” the officer said.18
The shoreline of Lingayen Gulf was shaped like a fishhook and ran for more than a hundred miles. To defend the entire country MacArthur had divided his command into three forces and his men were spread thin. At Lingayen Gulf he stationed troops at the most logical landing spots, above the widest beaches and at the gaps that led through the mountains to the central plain.
In the early morning dark of December 22, the Japanese launched their landing barges. Most of the invaders came ashore without having to fire a shot. They landed at unguarded strips of sand and immediately prepared to move inland. Only at the beach at Bauang did the two armies clash. Fire from Filipino machine guns riddled the waves of Japanese caught in the roiling surf, and soon the beach at Bauang was littered with bodies. But in preparing their position, the defenders there had buried their ammunition in the sand and it wasn’t long before their guns started to jam and they were forced to withdraw.
By midmorning the Japanese had thousands of men on Philippine soil and were beginning their push toward the central plain. At HQ MacArthur ordered reinforcements forward to try to block the enemy’s advance.
Colonel Mallonée, an adviser to the Philippine Army, was waiting with his artillery unit just south of the battle line when “an alarming number of stragglers” from the fighting along the gulf began to wander into his compound, each telling the colonel the same story:
Always the story-teller was subjected to terrible mortar fire; always he continued bravely to fire his [weapon]; always his officers ran away—or if the teller was an officer, his superior officers ran first . . . always he was suddenly astonished to realize he was absolutely alone, all others having run away or been killed. Then and only then, with the tanks a few feet away, had he flung himself to one side where . . . Here the story has two variations. First he was captured but escaped that night; second, he hid until night, when he returned to our lines . . . The stragglers were very tired, they sought their companions, they were very hungry, and, sir, could they be transferred to the Motor Transport Corps and drive a truck?19
Some Filipino units stood and fought until they ran out of ammunition or until the Japanese brought up tanks, but many, especially those who had been used as cannon fodder, first at Lingayen Gulf and then at defensive positions on the central plain, were betrayed by their inexperience and fled. Of the 28,000 men under his command in northern Luzon, Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s commander in the area, estimated that only 10 percent of his force—3,000 men at most—had been trained to fight.20
But it was not just a lack of training that betrayed the young Filipino reservists; it was their allegiance to their overseers, their faith in the great and powerful country they thought was protecting them. Filipino soldiers expected the American Air Corps to control the skies above the battlefield. Instead, the Japanese were “constantly overhead, destroying the morale” of the raw reservists who, according to an American colonel commanding them, “innocently and trustingly expected” the Army Air Corps “to show up at any time.” When the Americans failed to appear, Filipino “hope gave way to despair,” and the frightened reservists fell back before the columns of attacking Japanese.21
As the Imperial Army began its push down the central plain, General Wainwright sent parts of two American units into the fight, the 26th Cavalry (Philippine Scouts, part of the U.S. Army) and a contingent of tanks, reservists from Minnesota, Illinois, and Kentucky who had been recently federalized and rushed to the islands.
The Scouts, astonishingly, were on horseback, one of the last mounted cavalry units in the U.S. Army. In an age of airplanes and armored vehicles, soldiers on horseback were either an absurd anachronism or the beau ideal of bravery.
Bill Gentry from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, was with the American tank crews assigned to support the cavalry, and he watched open-mouthed as the horsemen moved their mounts into a position to attack the enemy tanks on the other side of a river. Gentry and his crew tried to convince the cavalry officer to hold his men and horses back. “Let us go over there, we can do something with our tanks,” they said. “You can’t do anything with those horses and sabres.” But the cavalryman refused to listen. “Get your damn tanks out of the way,” he said. “They are scaring my horses.” Then, as Gentry watched, the Japanese started “tearing” the American and Filipino horsemen “apart” with their tank cannon and automatic weapons.22
When the slaughter was over, the Americans ordered their tanks forward to engage the Japanese, but someone somewhere had bungled the refueling. Only five of the dozens of tanks available to attack that day had enough gas to ride into battle and fight, five tanks against perhaps an entire column of enemy armor and an advance of thousands of foot soldiers.
Lieutenant Ben Morin of Maywood, Illinois, the commander of the five tanks, Second Platoon, B Company, 192nd Tank Battalion, positioned his command tank ahead of the others to set the example. He knew his men were afraid and nothing he could say would allay their doubts or lessen their dread, but at least he could take the lead, give them someone to follow.
Morin seemed young for such an assignment, only twenty-one years old, but he had spent four years in the National Guard and knew tanks and tank tactics. He also knew his men; tankers generally were a tight-knit crew, specialists working together in close quarters. Most of all Ben Morin was a religious man, the son of Roman Catholics, and his faith steadied him.
Sometime after 1:00 p.m., the five tanks of the 2nd Platoon moved up Route 3, close to the town of Agoo, a short distance from the shores of Lingayen Gulf. The Americans rode to battle in M3 “light” tanks, thinly armored vehicles with a small single-shot cannon and an air-cooled machine gun, a cranky and sometimes unreliable weapon. The M3’s turret was tall, giving the vehicle a high profile, an easy and inviting target, and its armor was thin and presented a flat instead of an angled surface to deflect incoming rounds.
Morin’s platoon rolled forward unprotected. The Philippine infantry had fled south, and American units were regrouping or engaging other enemy spearheads. Morin looked on his mission as a kind of “last-ditch effort” to stem the Japanese advance onto the central plain—five tanks against a battalion, perhaps even a regiment of the enemy.
“We have to hold them, drive them out, drive them back or destroy them,” the lieutenant told his men.
The column moved slowly down the road. Agoo was just ahead, a mile or so. The sun was shining and a breeze was blowing in f
rom the gulf. Tanks and men moved forward in a miasma of road dust, exhaust fumes, and fear. Then all at once the enemy found them.
Shells slammed into the American column and “ripped through” the tanks “like a knife through butter.” In the fusillade, Morin’s lead tank lost its front hatch, exposing the men inside to rifle and machine-gun fire.23
Morin jumped down from his turret and tried to refit the hatch, but now the tank was ablaze, engulfed in searing flames and choking black smoke. Morin ordered his men to dismount and, hoping for rescue, looked anxiously over his shoulder for the rest of the column.
The other tanks had also been hit and had turned and were starting to withdraw. No way to reach them now. Morin and his crew were alone on the road. And in an instant the enemy was upon them.
Four Japanese tanks trained their cannon and machine guns on the Americans now standing on the road in front of their disabled and burning machine. The lieutenant looked at the enemy guns, looked at his men, put his hands up.
In that moment he felt disgrace rather than fear. He had surrendered—in all likelihood the first American taken prisoner in the Philippines in World War II—and he could not shake a captive’s sense of shame.24
The Japanese rushed forward and forced the Americans to their knees, then they put pistols to the prisoners’ heads. Kneeling there, Ben Morin looked for mercy in the eyes of the man pointing a gun at him. Finding none, he started to pray.25
Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee . . .
BY THE END of December 22, the first day of the invasion, MacArthur’s army was fighting a tactical withdrawal, a “retreat” by any other name. He had set a skeleton army of native reservists in front of 43,000 invaders, many of them seasoned by four years of war in China. Now he was falling back, back through the divides in the mountains, back down the dusty roads and dirt trails of the central plain, back to one defensive line after another, until there was no place left to fall back to, no place but the peninsula of Bataan.
The withdrawal had been planned well in advance, a complement to the old War Plan Orange, a plan MacArthur had originally rejected. He was back-pedaling before Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Imperial Army. Now came a second enemy landing, this one at Lamon Bay in southeastern Luzon. The Lamon force was pushing north, the Lingayen force south. The general’s grand scheme to defend the entire archipelago had left him between two pincers, and each claw had the same objective: close on the capital, catch MacArthur in the middle, and crush him. A textbook trap, as old as organized warfare.
The way out of the trap was textbook as well. On December 22, as the Japanese were wading ashore, MacArthur cabled the War Department: He was outnumbered, he said (another fiction), leaving him at “an enormous tactical discrepancy.” He planned to invoke War Plan Orange and declare Manila an open city “in order to save the civilian population.” Meanwhile he would relocate his headquarters to the tiny island fortress of Corregidor at the southern tip of Bataan, then, in a classic withdrawal designed to delay the enemy long enough to allow him to regroup, pull his forces out from between the pincers (sidestepping, in effect) to a “final defensive position” on the peninsula.26
Among the thousands of troops in central Luzon preparing to withdraw south to Bataan were a handful of men at Clark Field, salvage teams and a rear-guard of Air Corps ground crews, survivors of the bombings who had volunteered to stay and keep watch—eyes peeled, ears cocked, imaginations running riot.
December 25, 1941, Clark Field, Philippines
“We’re expecting Jap parachute troops at any time,” the Captain said.
“We’re gonna evacuate Clark Field completely.”
“Parachute troops?” Q. P. Devore said to himself. “Can you imagine?”
Every night there had been a new rumor. Fifth columnists, saboteurs, now parachutists.
The captain wasn’t joking. Everyone was pulling out, he said, and he ordered Devore to pick six “volunteers” to man a rear-guard listening post at the north end of the main runway, six men in foxholes facing toward Lingayen Gulf and the distant roll of battle.
Back at the barracks, the first man Devore asked was his best friend, Ben Steele.
“A parachute drop?” Ben said. “God, what the hell could six guys do out there against a parachute drop?”
“Well, yeah,” Devore said, “it is kind of a suicide mission.”
At dark they dug foxholes at the end of the runway. The captain made sure they were settled, then climbed into a white Plymouth convertible he had commandeered.
“If you aren’t overrun, I’ll be back tomorrow to get you,” he said, then drove off.
Ben Steele thought, “God, we’re all by our lonesome out here.”
They adjusted their Lewis guns, checked their ammunition, and settled down to watch, six soldiers staring into the dark, whispering their worries. In the distance they could hear the sounds of battle, the vague report of the big guns from the gulf.
Here they were in foxholes at the edge of an empty air base, their enemy perhaps preparing to drop in on them. What man wouldn’t be anxious waiting for that?
Then the big guns fell silent, and the men stopped talking and started listening. They scanned the sky and cupped their ears to the dark. It was quiet, lonely quiet.
“If they come,” Q.P. said to himself, “will I fight or will I give up?”
Sitting next to him Ben Steele was thinking the same thing. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I guess I’ll do what I have to.”
They watched, they waited. The black night seemed to get blacker, then, at long last, gray. Soon morning was upon them, indigo, then light blue. The sun hung like a silken disk above Mount Arayat.
Just before noon, a white Plymouth convertible came roaring across the dirt runways, trailing a rooster tail of brown dust. The car skidded to a stop in front of the foxholes. The driver’s-side door swung open.
“Get in!” the captain shouted. “We’re goin’.”
The sound of the big guns was back now, louder than the day before. The men tossed their weapons into the car, then tumbled in after them, and the convertible was out of sight before the dust had settled down again.
* * *
MORE LIKE A HIRED HAND
MONTANA’S BULL MOUNTAINS are more badlands than alpine peaks, a cluster of hills and rises running east and west along the lower Musselshell River. From a distance the rises look like mounds of earth abandoned on the edge of the state’s eastern plains.
In the summer the terraces and benches in the Bulls are covered with sweetgrass, but in the winter when the Alberta clippers bear down from the north, the plains and the Bulls turn into a bleak, snow-swept wasteland.
The meadowlarks and mourning doves are gone now, and the sharp-tailed grouse have left their sage-and-bunchgrass nests to winter among the cottonwoods and pines. Hungry coyotes howl through the arctic night, and in the early morning the frost- and snow-covered ground around the ranch house at Hawk Creek is covered with their tracks.
THE WIND WAS PUSHING against the windows of the big room in the main house, and Ben Steele lay there on his cot in the cold and dark, waiting. Any minute now the Old Man would yell from the bedroom for him to get up and light the potbelly stove.
He pulled the comforter over his head, grabbed it against his chest.
“Bud?”
He lay very still.
“You hear me, Bud?”
He poked his face out now but kept his eyes shut tight against the cold.
“Damn it, Bud!”
Off came the covers, noisily, so his father could hear.
At least he’d remembered to cut kindling the night before. Nothing worse than standing out in the vale of Hawk Creek in the frozen dark cleaving off strips of wood while an unseen audience watched from the hills.
He pulled on his moccasins and shuffled, shivering, to the woodbox.
HE GOT SO HE LIKED THE COLD, or so he would say. What he really liked was
learning to stand it. Showing the Old Man.
“It’s really cold today, Dad,” he used to say at breakfast, as the Old Man handed out the day’s work assignments.
“Cold?” the Old Man would come back. “God, I used to sleep in the snow with nothin’ but a slab of bacon.”
Maybe. But Bud hated it, the snow and bite of the wind. The Old Man would take him out to round up strays and he’d come back damn near froze to death. Next day, out they’d go again.
He’d say, “My feet are cold, Dad,” and the Old Man would tell him, “Get off your horse and walk, that’ll warm you up,” but the cold went right through his overshoes, and he felt like he was tramping on frozen stumps.
“Stamp ’em,” the Old Man said, but that only made the stumps hurt more.
Then one day, maybe he was ten or eleven, he stopped feeling the cold, or he just stopped complaining about it.
HE WORKED. He worked all the time. Started when he was eight, early even for a boy ranch-raised.
Whenever Bess would say, “That’s no job for a kid,” the Old Man would come back with, “He has to learn, he has to learn how.”
The Old Man might give him some pointers, if the chore involved the kind of work the Old Man liked—roping, shooting a rifle, working a wild horse. Range work, cowhand work. Most everything else, often as not the Old Man would issue instructions and leave him to figure the rest for himself.
Before he could reach their withers, the boy learned to hitch workhorses without help. He’d lead the large animals into a bronc stall, climb the rails, and drop the heavy collar on them upside down so he could reach the buckle later to fasten it. Lot of bother for a kid.
Tears in the Darkness Page 6