Soon the convertible turned southeast, and through breaks in the trees Ben Steele could see water—Manila Bay, he guessed—then he smelled the scent of the sea.
They were headed due south now along the coast, passing through one town after another—Abucay, Pilar, Orion, Limay. Between the towns were long stretches of dirt road flanked by fishponds and rice paddies and groves of mango trees and banana plants. Always to the left, beyond the ponds and paddies, was the blue of the bay, and to the right, to the west, a line of foothills fronting a phalanx of dark green mountains.
In the late afternoon they turned off the road and into a makeshift compound crowded with trucks, equipment, supplies, and men scattered in the bushes beneath the trees—the bivouac for their unit, the 7th Matériel Squadron.
“Okay, boys,” said Kelly, “this is it, Bataan.”
From where they stood Ben could see the bay to his left and front, and he reckoned that this place, this place called Bataan, was “some sort of neck.” And now the captain was explaining how headquarters planned to close off the top of the neck, miles back up the road where they had come from. The army was going to dig in there and form a “front line,” he said.
Ben Steele imagined infantry in trenches, hunkered down waiting for the enemy. And taking into account the length of the ride from where he imagined that front line was set to where he was now standing, he calculated he was far enough south to be safe, at least for the moment, and he wondered when they would get something to eat.
The field mess was serving rice and salmon flakes from cans. Rice and fish on Christmas? Back home his mother would be serving up turkey and potatoes, greens and biscuits and—
“I need two men for guard,” the captain was saying, two men to stand by the road and keep the locals from wandering into the area.
The new guys, naturally, pulled the duty. Standing their post, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore watched the boat traffic shuttle between a small pier on the shore just below them and the island fortress of Corregidor two miles out in the bay. Japanese pilots had been preying on the boats, and Captain Kelly, knowing that a pilot’s aim was often askew, had advised the two sentries to dig a slit trench, a deep one. And just as they finished, sure enough, enemy aircraft appeared overhead, a couple of Zeros.
The first came in low, strafing the dock—Ben and Q.P. could see the boards jump as the rounds slammed into them—then a small bomber appeared, banked into a dive, and let its load go.
The missile made a strange sound, Ben Steele thought, “like the air was frying on top of you.” They flattened themselves in the bottom of their trench, then came an immense whomp! and a painful ripping in their ears.
The bomb had exploded ten feet in front of their trench, collapsing the end of it and showering them with dirt and rocks. They coughed and spat and blinked and shook their heads.
“You should see the look on your face,” Q.P. said.
“Yeah? You should see the look on yours,” Ben Steele came back.
In the days that followed they stood sentry often, lolling around in the rear under the trees when they were off duty. Then one night, toward the end of that first week, two trucks rolled into the compound, and everyone was ordered to queue up at the tailgates.
“All right, fellas,” said a sergeant in charge, “grab a rifle and at least four bandoliers of ammunition. You’re goin’ to the front.”
The front? What the hell was he talking about? They were Air Corps, rear echelon, bunch of mechanics, fuelers, dispatchers, and clerks, not foot soldiers.
“Hey!” someone shouted, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout infantry fightin’!”
“Well, son,” the sergeant said, “you’re going to learn.”
THE JAPANESE took Manila, the capital, in twelve days. All that was left was to mop up the hinterlands.
Japan’s generals were modern men, products of a military system that took its shape from the West, particularly the Prussians, and high on every officer candidate’s reading list was the West’s bible of belligerency, On War by Carl von Clausewitz.
The Prussian soldier-scholar refused to reduce a complex subject to simple maxims, but on two points, Clausewitz was clear: “the acts,” as he called them, that were vital to victory were the seizure of the enemy’s capital and the destruction of the enemy’s army.
Like the strategists in Washington, the Japanese high command had been writing war plans for decades, and since 1919 those plans had called for the capture of Manila. The Japanese had also assumed that their enemy would try to fall back to Bataan, a natural redoubt obvious to any soldier who could read a map, but that assumption did not change their aim. With every new battle plan, Japanese strategists said essentially the same thing: they would take Manila first, then move quickly to destroy the American Army before it could withdraw to defensive positions on the peninsula. The problem was, the strategy called for one army to accomplish two missions at the same time.14
FOR MONTHS Lieutenant General Masami Maeda, Homma’s chief of staff, had been trying to persuade his colleagues to change their plan of campaign, but no one, not the bakuto, the ambitious young planners on the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo, or his colleagues at 14th Army headquarters, would listen to him. And now Maeda was shuttling between the various field headquarters on Luzon, trying to convince divisional commanders headed for Manila to change their battle plans and intercept the retreating enemy troops headed for Bataan.
Maeda knew the islands well. In 1925 as a young subaltern, he had been sent to the Philippines as a spy and returned to Tokyo convinced that if war came to the islands, the defenders “would avoid a decisive battle . . . abandon Manila and withdraw to Bataan” for a “holding-out action.” Fifteen years later, summoned to General Headquarters in Tokyo for a planning session on the eve of the invasion, he tried to convince those gathered around a large map of the islands that the enemy would surely hole up on the peninsula and engage the Imperial Army in a long and costly siege.
What was their main objective? he asked. To capture Manila? Or teki ni katsu, destroy the enemy? Bataan, he continued, gave the Americans what Clausewitz called the “benefit of terrain”; the peninsula was filled with precipitous gulches and gullies, difficult foothills and mountain ridges, and these natural “obstacles” would slow an attacking army and expose it to counterattack. Moreover, the enemy had likely dug thousands of trenches, bunkers, and foxholes, he said, turning the peninsula into a lethal labyrinth. If they did not catch the enemy on the central plain and destroy him before he slipped away to the thick jungles of Bataan, then “the power of the 14th army will not be enough.”15
The men at Imperial Headquarters were political men, and in the army political men are careful not to challenge the prevailing opinion. Someone high up had decided that the “early” capture of Manila was going to be the 14th Army’s “primary objective,” so the majors and colonels standing around the map that day in November 1941 insisted, all evidence to the contrary, that Manila was the “central core” of American military strength. Take it, they argued, and the islands would fall. Let the Americajin withdraw to a narrow peninsula; they would be “easily bottled up and destroyed.” Bataan? Kudaranái hanashí ni jikán o tsubusú—Why waste time talking about something so insignificant?16
ON JANUARY 2, 1942, less than two weeks after they had come ashore at Lingayen Gulf and Lamon Bay, the lead elements of the 14th Imperial Japanese Army strolled into the city of Manila.
A week earlier, to save “the Pearl of the Orient” from destruction, Douglas MacArthur had declared Manila an open city and quickly withdrawn his forces. Sixty miles north of the city at his headquarters in Cabanatuan, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, the 14th Army commander, was elated. That night, in the quiet of his quarters, he sat down to write in his diary.
“My wife, my children,” he began, addressing the entry, as he often did, to his family, “we captured the enemy’s capital twelve days after landing. Be happy for us. Celebrate for us!”17
The fall of Manila was indeed a great victory, a political victory. The day after the Japanese flag was raised in Manila, The New York Times opined, “This country now drinks the unaccustomed and bitter draught of defeat, [and] no reassuring explanations can ease the blow.” But, as Masami Maeda had feared, the 14th Army had let the real prize slip away.18
By December 31, a Wednesday, most of the Filipino-American force had made its way onto the Bataan peninsula, and Homma and his staff knew for sure that their strategy (Tokyo’s strategy, really) had been a mistake.
“We had the opportunity to pound them,” Lieutenant General Yuichi Tsuchihashi, the outspoken commander of the 48th Division, told Homma. “And instead [we] allowed them to flee. So this is what it means to miss a big prize.”19
“ALL RIGHT, FELLAS,” the sergeant said, motioning for the men to climb into a large truck waiting to take them up the road. “You’re goin’ to the front.”
Ben Steele eyed the rifle and the belt of ammunition he’d just been handed. He had grown up with a rifle in his hand, and the weapon made him feel better, a bit more secure. Now at least he could shoot back.
The truck joined a small convoy that headed north from Cabcaben, back up the same road Ben and Q.P. had come down a week or so earlier. In the back in the dark no one slept. Most of the men stared at the new rifles nuzzled between their knees. These guys, Ben Steele thought, “look about half scared of the damn things.”
After the American air force was destroyed at Clark Field, some 1,400 Air Corps crewmen and technicians were gathered into a “ground” regiment, the Provisional Air Corps Infantry. They were to be used as a reserve force, ready to back up the guys manning the battle line. None of these clerks and mechanics, however, knew a thing about real soldiering; they were “infantry” in name only. A corporal from a pursuit squadron, for example, thought it was “funny to be carrying a rifle.” And it was even funnier watching him learn how to shoot it. An Air Corps major guessed that most of his men “would have found [their] weapon more useful as a club.” Some, in fact, were so flummoxed the major was sure that an enemy “could have approached at his leisure, rolled a cigarette, read the morning paper, and probably finished his shaving before bothering to dispatch the perplexed American warrior before him.” Half “the Flying Infantry,” as the Air Corps boys enjoyed calling themselves, got no training whatsoever. Along with the men of the 7th Matériel Squadron, they were simply put on trucks in the rear and told they were being driven north to a trench line.20
The convoy carrying Ben Steele and the rest of the 7th bounced north for more than two hours, one dusty mile after another.
“Where the hell are they gonna let us out?” he wondered.
Halfway up the peninsula the trucks finally stopped.
“This is where we’re going to start the line,” the sergeant said. “You guys go here,” he said, pointing to one side of the road, then gesturing to an open area on the other side, “and you guys spread out through there.”
They set up at the edge of a stand of mango trees with rice paddies in front of them. Their sector, they were told, was some two thousand yards long, part of a secondary defense line that stretched from Manila Bay, at a point south of the town of Orion, some fourteen miles west across the peninsula, to the town of Bagac on Bataan’s west coast.
During the day Ben Steele and his comrades set aside their new rifles and took up the ax, the pick, and the shovel, cutting down trees, building bunkers, digging trenches—the hard labor of preparing a position for a fight. At night they climbed into their fighting holes and trenches and stared into the dark beyond the rice paddies, watching and listening for hours. The first few nights their imagination kept them awake, then the fatigue that comes from fear took hold of them, and one night on guard duty Ben Steele fell asleep.
Suddenly he felt something cold and hard poking him in the ear, then he heard the click of a trigger.
“You know what we can do to you for doing this?” said a voice above him, the voice of a lieutenant who had been checking the lines.
Ben Steele jumped up and grabbed his weapon back from the officer. The man didn’t have to pull a cheap trick like that, taking his rifle and poking the muzzle in his ear. He could have just kicked him awake.
“You went to sleep on guard,” the officer said. “I can court-martial you for this.”
A battle was about to begin. They had their backs to the sea. And some of the men on watch with Ben Steele that night were so scared they were soiling themselves.
“Go ahead,” Ben Steele snapped. “Court-martial me!”
* * *
HAWK CREEK
THE OLD MAN told him, “You don’t point this at anything unless you’re going to shoot it.” Bud knew he meant kill it, of course. Then he handed Ben Steele his first weapon, a short-barreled twenty-two rifle. The boy was seven years old. He was taught: grip the stock firmly but not too tight, sight with both eyes open, squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it.
He learned to hunt, how to stalk a prey and finish it. He would set out traplines too (the boy could dress out anything that walked or flew, a handy skill in hard times), but out trapping or hunting, often as not he’d sit there for a while and stare at the trophy before he took aim.
Sneaking up on a pond of mallards, he’d admire their colors, the jade-green head, the chestnut breast, the snow-white wingtips. Stalking sharp-tailed grouse, he’d crouch in the rushes for long stretches listening to the birds’ comic cackle. When the time came, he’d always pull the trigger, get those cottontails his mother was waiting to make into rabbit pie, but it was almost as if he wanted to let his supper show him something of the world before he bagged it.
HE HATED SCHOOL, played dumb, and his mother knew it. The Old Man cursed and grumbled about his bad marks, and Gert, his sister, a couple of grades ahead, thought him so stupid she was embarrassed to call him her brother.
Bess would listen to all this and say, “Just leave him alone. He’ll wake up someday and find out he doesn’t know anything.”
He didn’t care. He sat there in a stone building in town or in some drafty wooden school shack in the hills and stared out the window at the shape of a certain coulee or the way the snow drifted against a fence, sat there taking note of things, though he could never say why or what for.
The best day of school was the last day of school. Final hour, closing minutes. “Have a good summer,” the teacher would say.
He thought, “I’m free.”
When his chores were done, when the work was finished, when the Old Man would finally leave him be, he could hunt, he could ride, he could roam Hawk Creek.
THEY HAD THE SAME STORY, the start of the family and the start of the ranch. Maybe that’s why Bud loved the place so much. Hawk Creek was where he began, where he always felt he belonged.
At a cattle roundup in 1912 the Old Man, Benjamin Cardwell Steele (tall and strong in the saddle), met Elizabeth Gertrude McCleary (a pale Irish beauty in white lace). When they got engaged, the Old Man gave up running cattle on the open range and looked for a place to settle down. He’d always liked the Bull Mountains. Those hills weren’t fit for farming, but a smart rancher who applied himself could make a profit there. Plenty of sweetgrass on the benches, plenty of water in the cool clear creeks.
He settled a section on the dry fork at Hawk Creek. “Prettiest place in the Bulls,” he told Bess. And when she saw it, she knew he was right. Their vale was long and winding with a stream down the center. Sheltering the ranch front and back and running the length of the vale were ridgelines rising gentle and green.
With his brother James and a couple of hands, the Old Man set out to build a homestead. They cut trees in the hills, stripped off the bark, squared up the logs, raised the walls and the roof. A neat one-story, three-room bungalow, eighteen feet wide, forty feet long. Then came a barn and privy, storehouse, bunkhouse, icehouse, corrals, and a tack-and-equipment shed. Pretty soon there were chickens scratching in the ya
rd and the cries of children coming from the house.
IN THE WINTER the vale turned gray and white. Bud was older now, just getting up, pulling on his boots. His father wanted him out before dawn to fetch some strays, and his mother got up early too to make him breakfast for the cold work ahead.
He finished his cocoa, stamped across the frozen yard, breath steaming ahead of him, to the barn, where he saddled and mounted his horse. He had far to go but paused in the darklight to look back at the house. Did the same thing each time he rode off early. Something about the way the smoke came out of the kitchen chimney and drifted slowly down the darkened vale.
* * *
FOUR
AS BATTLEGROUNDS GO, Bataan was more brutal than most. A thick thumb of land thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, the peninsula of Bataan lay between Manila Bay and the South China Sea. Down its center ran a line of mountains, broken only by a wide defile from one coast to the other along the peninsula’s belt line. Hugging the east coast of the peninsula, the flatland by the bay, was Bataan’s main thoroughfare, the Old National Road.
The road was only two lanes, but it was a good road, dirt and gravel, half of it, then blacktop the rest of the way. The road began at Mariveles, the tip of the peninsula, and ran north hard by the bay forty-one miles to Hermosa. From Hermosa the road angled west for a bit, then turned northeast through Pampanga Province to the town of San Fernando, a junction with road and rail connections leading north up Luzon’s long central plain.
Most of Bataan’s major towns straddled the Old National Road. Between them were scores of barrios, and between the barrios were uninhabited tracts of jungle and lowland, a checkerboard of rice paddies, fishponds, bamboo thickets, cane breaks, and wastes of cogon grass. Sometimes the fields along the road were framed by clumps of banana plants or groves of palms and mango trees. And sometimes the flatland simply stopped at a wall of green, a dense tropical forest the men called “the jungle.”
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