Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  He started driving a team and hay rake before his legs were long enough to brace him as he sat in the seat. He had to stand on the crossbar, straddling the center pole and lean back against the pull of the horses. A hay rake was hard enough for a man to handle, much less a boy of nine.

  Be careful, the Old Man would warn. “A team could run away with you, and you can get tangled up in those teeth.”

  He was okay. He had good balance, never lost his footing. Then one fine September day when the sun was shining and the wind was whistling in the bull pines, he was making a turn at the far end of a field and something, some rut or root, made the rake pitch.

  Going down he grabbed for the center bar, his feet dangling, then he started to lose his grip, dragging on the ground a foot ahead of the sharp tines.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” he yelled, as loud as he could.

  By the time the team stopped, his toes were only inches from the teeth. He looked around to see if anyone was watching, if anyone had seen how close he’d come.

  EVERYONE SAID the Old Man treated his oldest son more like a hired hand than a family apprentice. Bud didn’t care. When he was young, he took a certain pride in his father’s expectations. “The Old Man thinks I can do anything,” he told himself. Even later, when he came to see that he was doing a whole lot more around a ranch than anyone else his age, he never complained.

  His father was away a lot now. One business scheme after another, one card game and tumbler of whiskey, too. And his mother and Gert and his younger brother, Warren, took to saying, “Bud’s the one who’s running this place.”

  He liked that, liked the thought that his mother believed she could count on him. He was more her son than the Old Man’s, though he’d never say so.

  * * *

  THREE

  ON THE SECOND DAY of landings at Lingayen Gulf, a launch carrying Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Imperial Army, landed at a makeshift dock at Bauang. The general slowly climbed the wooden gangway, his tachi, his warrior’s sword, in his right hand and a smile on his face.

  That look of kindness in his eyes always surprised the men in the ranks, accustomed as they were to the icy truculence of their iron-pants ikans and sakans, their officers, and the dark, unforgiving ethos of the Imperial Army code. But this taish, this general, the men said, was different. He always seemed to have a gentle cast, even standing among the most ruthless-looking company.

  Homma was tall for a Japanese, nearly six feet, and his size and soft physiognomy gave him a somewhat Western cast. He had been posted to London for several years and spoke and read English well. On assignment in India he had a British girlfriend. And all of this, his sometimes Western way of thinking, his public statements about the danger of going to war with the West, his apparent empathy for his men—all of it left him suspect among certain of his peers on the Imperial General Staff, especially the war minister, Hideki Tojo, and the army chief of staff, the humorless General Gen Sugiyama.

  In the late fall of 1941, Sugiyama had summoned Homma and two other two-star generals, Tomoyuki Yamashita and Hitoshi Imamura, to his office. The Imperial General Staff had made the decision to attack Western bases in the Pacific, and it was time for Sugiyama to give Japan’s top generals their assignments: Yamashita would lead the attack on the British at Singapore and Malaya, Imamura would move against the Dutch in the East Indies, and Homma would direct the operations of the 14th Army and take the Philippines from the Americans. Then, turning to Homma, he added a caveat. Since most of the army was bogged down in China, the General Staff had committed only 200,000 troops to the campaigns in the southwest Pacific. The plan was to take territory quickly, leave a small garrison force to hold it, then move the battle units to the next fight. The General Staff, he said, had decided that Homma had just fifty days to take the Philippines; after that most of his troops would be transferred to Imamura for operations in the East Indies.

  Imamura and Yamashita accepted the “honor” of their new commands with a nod, but Homma, who had risen to the upper echelon on his keen intellect instead of blind allegiance to his betters, was disquieted, and he assaulted Sugiyama with questions.

  “This figure of fifty days, how has it been arrived at?” he began. What was the enemy’s strength—did anyone know? Who decided that two divisions would be enough to take Manila? And what genius on the General Staff thought Manila could be taken in just seven weeks?

  Sugiyama was simmering, and Yamashita and Imamura sat there stunned. Homma had violated the conventions of Imperial command—the unconditional acceptance of authority and orders. Worse, he seemed to question the competence of the Imperial General Staff, insinuating that the invasion had been poorly planned. And to speak so boldly, to be so pointed and direct, violated the strict etiquette that governed Japanese relations. Homma’s questions and implications had embarrassed the chief of staff, and the haji, the shame, of this made Yamashita and Imamura most uncomfortable.

  To allow everyone to save face, the two men convinced Homma that Sugiyama’s target date was more a request than a directive. Homma would push his men to take Manila and destroy the enemy in fifty days; he would fight hard and he would fight well, and no one, they said, could ask more of him than that.1

  In private, however, Homma was still troubled. He believed that Japan could not win a war with America and Britain, but he knew that to hold such misgivings, to begin a dangerous enterprise in such deep doubt, would be to put the men under him in great jeopardy. He had to quiet his concerns, he told his wife, Fujiko, in a letter he wrote from his headquarters on Formosa a week before the war. “This war is not one that is fought against any old enemy, and I don’t think it will be easily won.”2

  Homma’s command ship, the Teikai Maru, arrived on the early morning of December 22. “The ship sails along the northwestern coast,” Homma wrote in his diary. “The sky is clear and the stars appear as if they are falling down.” The first wave launched at 2:00 a.m. In his command post aboard ship, Homma waited and waited for word from the beach.3

  The landing craft had been forced to negotiate a rough surf; many had been swamped and beached in the deep, wet sand, and the salt water had short-circuited their radios. Meanwhile, on deck the next wave of assault troops waited for the boats to return and carry them to the beach.

  The delay worried everyone, especially the commanding general. “If we [are] counterattacked, we [are] almost helpless,” Homma thought.

  Then the weather calmed a bit, the task force shifted its anchorage, and the next wave of infantry on deck checked their weapons and tightened their straps and made ready to head for shore.4

  THE JAPANESE WORD for infantry is hohei, literally “step-soldiers” or “soldiers who walk.” And no modern army walked as far as the Japanese.

  “A drop of gas is as precious as a drop of blood,” the men were told. So they marched everywhere, often thirty-five miles at a stretch and under seventy pounds of equipment, ammunition, gear, and gun parts. They marched in the rain and under the boiling sun, marched for hours without a break on empty stomachs or short rations (“a half-pound of rice and some blackish potatoes” or tuna flakes). They had marched their way across the cold sweeps of Manchuria and barren flats of China, and from the end of December 1941 to the beginning of January 1942, every infantry or garrison unit that landed at Lingayen Gulf marched down the hot, dusty hardpan of Luzon’s central plain. They didn’t need trucks, they prided themselves. They could reach their objectives walking, “seventy-five centimeters” (one step) at a time.5

  They felt all that walking, though. Their shoes were rough hobnailed half boots tight in the toes, hard on the heels, abrasive across the instep. And the socks were worse. Thin and heelless, they never lasted more than two days. Tasuku Yamanari, a farm boy from Hiroshima, had so many blisters—blisters on top of blisters—he wore several pairs of socks at once and at night dripped candle wax on them to “make it smoother in the shoes.” Kozo Watanabe, son of a civil servant f
rom Matsuyama, was more fortunate. In a storehouse along the way he stumbled upon some American socks, padded and three times as thick as the ones he’d been issued. Six-day socks, he calculated, strong enough to carry him all the way down the central plain.

  When the men in Yoshiaki Nagai’s unit set off on the march south, they were so happy to be ashore that many looked forward to walking. At least the roads weren’t pitching and rolling under their feet.

  Nagai had grown up on a mountain farm near Toyo City on Shikoku, tending his father’s horses, and when he was drafted the army made him an equerry and hostler. His job was to lead a packhorse loaded with machine-gun parts and ammunition. The sun was baking the central plain, and Nagai, weak from seasickness, soon began to stumble.

  “Not to drop out—that’s the important thing,” he reminded himself. “I must not drop. I don’t care whether I die or stay alive. I must not drop out.”

  The veterans in the unit, the senior privates and leathery corporals and sergeants, thought the young conscript a milksop and scolded him.

  “Baka,” idiot, they yelled. Could he do nothing right?

  He walked next to his animal, at the nose, and with every step he felt the weight of his overstuffed pack pulling backward and down. After two or three days walking, days of sweating horseflesh and choking brown dust, he began to swoon. He tried to play out more of the reins, and he dropped back several steps from the horse’s head to its front flanks, where he could grab on to the gun trolley strapped to the horse’s back. After a while this handhold was all that kept him from falling, but he could never quite keep in step with the horse, and the animal jerked him along in a kind of jig, mile after mile.

  “Look at Nagai,” one of the veterans guffawed. “He’s dancing!”6

  MACARTHUR’S MEN had been back-pedaling for days, retreating from the pincers pursuing them—a whole army on the run. Now with the invaders at their backs, the withdrawing Filipino and American columns, one coming up from the south, the other down from the central plain, converged on San Fernando, a junction of motorways and compass points northwest of Manila and the approach to the Bataan peninsula. There the columns merged into a single line of retreat that snaked its way south down the Old National Road toward Bataan, where the defenders planned to stop their running, dig in, and make a last stand.

  The line of retreat stretched out of sight, from San Fernando southwest to Guagua, then southwest again to Lubao and onward to Layac Junction, the first major road crossing in Bataan on the Old National Road. Day and night for days on end the ceaseless regress clogged the road. To those watching from the barrios along the way, it must have seemed a procession without beginning or end, a cavalcade of vehicles large and small mingling with mobs of ragtag troops and refugees bent under bundles bulging with all they could carry.7

  It was a dusty column. This was the start of the dry season, and the relentless tramping of feet and churning of tires and metal track on the dirt-and-gravel road sent up scuds of dust that hung in the air and formed an ocher cloud the length of the peninsula.

  It was a noisy column, too. Civilian vehicles of every sort and size (taxis from Manila; sagging buses from the provinces; sedans, coupes, and convertibles by the score; even horse-drawn calesas and carabao carts) joined the queue of lumbering army trucks and ten-ton wreckers, tanks, half-tracks, and scout and command cars that bounced and rattled their way along the washboard road and across the potholes, axles clanking, gears grinding, engines aroar.

  In between each cluster of vehicles came columns of weary troops, the dull thud of a thousand footfalls. They were dragging, these Filipino and American soldiers who had fallen back before the Japanese, first at the beaches, then on the long central plain, dragging along with the sheepish look of beaten men. “Keep moving!” their officers urged them. “Close it up!” But their pace never quickened. A lieutenant with an American tank battalion came upon a division of Philippine infantry by the side of the road “sound asleep from absolute exhaustion.” A “pitiful” lot, the lieutenant thought. “They were all dirty, they hadn’t eaten for many meals, and every single soul in that whole column was dead to the world.”8

  Some of the Filipino divisions had marched more than a hundred miles, marched so far so fast across rough roads and razor grass that their army-issue rubber-soled shoes had started to shred. When General Wainwright noticed his soldiers unshod, he told the quartermaster to issue new footwear, but, as the general discovered, the average Filipino had a foot “as broad as a bear’s paw,” and the American issue was too narrow. So most of the Filipinos “threw away what was left of their sneakers, tied the army shoes together by the strings, slung them over their rifles or packs, and walked into Bataan barefooted.”9

  By the end of the first week in January, the Old National Road leading from San Fernando to Bataan was as derelict as a garbage dump. The fields and drainage ditches that flanked the road were littered with the detritus of an army on the run: shoes, clothing, packs, empty ration cans, dead animals, broken-down cars and wrecked trucks, even wayward cannon.

  The Japanese had pushed the defenders back, then back again. Now making their way south, the men on the run could hear the sounds of battle close behind them. And as they passed over the bridges that spanned the rivers and streams in northern Bataan, they sometimes saw wooden boxes piled at the ends by each anchorage. Most of the boxes were camouflaged with branches, but it was easy to see through the leaves and read what was stenciled on top in large red letters: DYNAMITE—DUPONT.10

  THE FILIPINOS and Americans who came down the road from San Fernando and settled into foxholes on Bataan formed a force of 80,000 that was organized in a classic order of battle: two corps, one to defend the east half of the peninsula, the other the west, each divided into divisions, the divisions into regiments, regiments into battalions. But to call the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor an “army” is to give that levée en masse a shape and character it simply did not have.

  The Filipinos, for example (68,000), served in three different forces: the Philippine Army, the Philippine Constabulary—a militia and police force in one—and the Philippine Scouts. The Americans (12,000) came from the old garrison and the newly arrived units of conscripts, enlistees, and National Guard troops.

  A third of the force had been trained as rear echelon: cooks, clerks, mechanics, radiomen, drivers, engineers, carpenters, medics, storekeepers, and so on (as well as planeless pilots, shipless sailors, civilian volunteers)—in short, supernumeraries so unfamiliar with the profession of arms most had never shouldered a weapon.

  The majority of the foot soldiers, the infantry, came from the Philippine Army, and most Americans on Bataan thought “the P.A.” a paper army. As the battle lines were forming, Captain Thomas Dooley, General Wainwright’s aide-de-camp, noted in his field diary, “These Filipinos start running when the first shot is fired . . . It is generally accepted that all P.A. units will not fight, but flee to the hills and change to civilian clothes when a fight begins.” Thousands of Filipino fledglings had indeed been routed during the withdrawal from the central plain to Bataan (Wainwright guessed that some 12,000 had run away), but thousands of others in their tennis shoes and coconut-husk helmets had stayed in their fighting holes until they ran out of ammunition or, when grim came to grim, until the Japanese overran them.11

  As for the Americans, save a handful of holdovers from World War I, none of the line troops (infantry, artillery, armor) had ever faced an enemy in battle. The only unit of American foot soldiers was the 31st Infantry, a scant sixteen hundred men, part of the Manila garrison. On parade and on guard, the 31st was a model regiment, something of a legend in the service—its tailored uniforms precisely pressed, its ranks and files always plumb line perfect. Off display, however, these military mannequins did their best to keep from sweating their khakis. In the days before the war, the regiment held its field exercises in the cool of the morning, literally lolling under the palms, then after lunch they repaired to the bar
racks for a siesta.12

  Ill-trained troops are often ill-led troops as well, and on Bataan, American officers, not Filipinos, ruled the field. They set the order of battle, staffed headquarters, controlled communications and supply. They led the Philippine Scouts and served as advisers and sometimes more in the Philippine Army. Some Americans were able men, clearheaded practitioners of the profession of arms, but the officer corps on Bataan was also filled with men who either were not ready for battle or were simply afraid of it.

  Many of the junior officers and sergeants seemed to know nothing of the basics of fighting—how to set up a defense line, prepare a position to receive an attack, clear fields of fire. And some senior majors and colonels weren’t much better. Enervated by age or illness, or just plain frozen with fear, several were caught cowering in their command posts. Colonel George S. Clark, commander of the 57th Infantry, a regiment of the elite Philippine Scouts, had a long record of solid service and an unusual rapport with his men. Then the bombs started falling, and Clark had a frightening revelation: air power leaves infantry exposed. For him, no hole was deep enough now, no bunker safe. And as the weeks passed, the colonel’s dread deepened. He became convinced that Japanese pilots had been given one mission: Kill Clark! Any sound overhead sent the colonel running for cover. After a week or so of shelling and bombing, his men found him sitting in his bunker with a blanket over his head, trembling at the sound of the guns.13

  BEN STEELE was tired and hungry but happy to be heading south, ahead of the sound of the guns. For a while the white Plymouth convertible had moved along at a good clip. Then south of San Fernando so many trucks and cars and refugees were on the road the Plymouth often sat idling or just inched along.

  Sitting in front next to the driver, the squadron commander, Captain Jack Kelly, sometimes slipped into sleep. In the back Ben sat silently next to Q.P., occasionally catching his pal’s eye. Where were they going? he wondered. And what were they going to do when they got there?