MacArthur spent just one day on Bataan. At II Corps headquarters he stood with a gathering of staff officers and made a promise: their sorry lot, he said, would soon change. The battle for Bataan had captured the country’s “imagination” and help was on the way, a convoy of men and planes “by way of Australia.” When that help arrived, he told the officers, they would win back control of the air, retake lost ground, perhaps go so far as to launch a counterattack. And with that subterfuge still fresh on his lips, the general boarded a navy patrol boat at Mariveles harbor and returned to his underground office on the Rock.30
Twice the War Department had warned MacArthur that supplies being stockpiled in Australia likely would never reach him. “Previous losses in capital ships [at Pearl Harbor] have seriously reduced the capacity of the Navy to [provide Far East] convoys,” General George Marshall, army chief of staff, cabled the Philippines. And to make sure MacArthur got his meaning, Marshall added a coda, the kind of thing a chief says to a commander he must leave to fight a lost cause. “Every day of time you gain is vital.”31
Meanwhile on Bataan, hungry men were still scanning the skies and staring out to sea, convinced that their countrymen would never abandon them. Then, on Washington’s Birthday, February 23, 1942, the president of the United States, sitting before a microphone at the White House, delivered one of his Fireside Chats on war, and after listening to him on shortwave radios in their tanks and foxholes, many of the men on Bataan—the loyal sons of New York and Nebraska, Maine and Montana, Alabama and Illinois—began to wonder whether patriotism was a virtue or merely the faith of a fool.
The president said Japanese forces had surrounded the Philippines, and that “complete encirclement” had prevented America from sending the garrison “substantial reinforcement.” The United States, he went on, was in for a long fight, and to attain its “objective”—the destruction of both Germany and Japan—America would have to begin operations “in areas other than the Philippines.” That had been the strategy from the beginning, the president said, “and nothing that has occurred in the last two months has caused us to change.”32
So now they knew.
They were on their own. And they were expendable.
MOST OF THEM, that is. For weeks the president, the secretary of war, and the army chief of staff had been talking about getting MacArthur out, effecting an escape to prevent the propaganda coup that would come from the capture of a four-star general (the army’s highest-ranking officer), especially this particular four-star general.
In less than two months of war, MacArthur had become so popular with the American people, they were naming babies, buildings, flowers (the MacArthur narcissus), dances (the MacArthur glide), parks, streets, and schools after him.
The newspapers painted him a hero: “the most articulate, great general in our history,” “the greatest soldier since Grant,” “hero of the battle for the Philippines whose courage and determination against overwhelming odds have already enshrined him in the hearts of all Americans.” The popular columnist Bob Considine praised the general’s “spirit-lifting, pulse-quickening, heartwarming communiqués.”33
The communiqués were a labor of self-love, MacArthur’s war work. He left siegecraft and the oversight of the army to his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, and busied himself writing his own actualities. Practiced in politics and publicity from his years in Washington, he sat at his desk in Lateral Number Three and either composed, edited, or approved every press communiqué issued from Corregidor. Anything “favorable to General MacArthur” got his initials; anything not was rewritten or redacted. And all to one standard—“their effect on the MacArthur legend.”34
His gilded name was usually the only name that appeared in the communiqués, not the young Filipino privates or American corporals, not the 91st Philippine Division or the 4th Marine Regiment or any of the other proud bands of fighting men that served under him.
General MacArthur and his troops in the Bataan peninsula . . .
General MacArthur’s small air force . . .
General MacArthur launched a heavy counterattack . . .
When those communiqués landed on the desks of newspaper editors and rewrite men, they framed their stories to feature the man most mentioned. Thus it was “MacArthur’s planes” and “MacArthur’s guns,” “MacArthur’s lines” and “MacArthur’s men.” Frequently the stories flanked a front-page portrait of the general looking tall and “tight-lipped.” Bataan was an epic of survival—the story of a last stand, the Alamo of the Pacific—and it required an epic hero, Douglas MacArthur.35
He planned to die in battle, or so he said. In a cable to Marshall on January 23, he vowed “to fight it [out] to complete destruction.” He reckoned he’d be destroyed “in a bombing raid or by artillery fire” but thought for a moment of seeking his finish “in a final charge.” Whatever the end, he expected it to be “brutal and bloody.” Radio Tokyo wanted his capture and imagined him hanging from a scaffold near the Imperial Palace. Perhaps MacArthur imagined the same thing. One day in January he summoned his aide Sidney Huff and asked him to find some bullets for a small Derringer, a keepsake from his father. When Huff returned, MacArthur loaded the tiny twin-barrel handgun and slipped it back into his pocket. “They will never take me alive, Sid,” he said.36
For weeks Washington had been suggesting he leave, but he either ignored or rejected their entreaties. He was determined to “share the fate of the garrison,” he told them. At last, on February 22, Roosevelt ordered him out. To his aides and staff MacArthur made a great show of protest: After huddling at length with his wife and Sutherland, he told his top officers he was going to resign his commission and “join . . . the Bataan defense force as a simple volunteer”—the general in a foxhole with the malnourished malaria-ridden men he had all but ignored in seventy-seven days of combat. His aides argued that he had been given a direct order, an official change of assignment, by his commander in chief. He had to obey, they said, or face a court-martial. He should go, go to Australia immediately and lead a rescue force back to the Philippines.
That seemed to convince him. “We’ll go in the dark of the moon,” he decided, and an hour after sunset on March 11, 1942 MacArthur, Jean, young Arthur and the boy’s Amah, or Chinese nursemaid, and seventeen members of the headquarters staff boarded four patrol torpedo boats for a dash to the southern island of Mindanao where they would wait for a B-17 from Port Darwin to fly them south to safety.
Gathered at the dock on Corregidor to say good-bye were several officers of high rank, among them General Wainwright, MacArthur’s choice as the new commander in the Philippines. MacArthur had conferred with Wainwright the day before and explained why he was leaving. Now he went through it all again—his plan to marshal the forces in Australia and rush back for a rescue, his reluctance to quit his command and desire to stay with his men, the president’s unambiguous order to leave. Wainwright told him again that he understood. “He was going because he was a soldier, and a soldier obeys orders from his commander regardless of his own emotions, ambitions, hopes.”37
And that was true, as far as it went. Orders, indeed, were orders, the incontestable “Word,” and obedience was an officer’s obligation, the base metal in the chain of command. To disobey a direct order was to violate the first rule of army life and undermine the orthodoxy of the profession. But there was another law (more an article of faith, really) that superseded the army’s established codes and catechisms, a law as old as battle itself, the law of constancy: A soldier never leaves another soldier behind.
Combat is a countinghouse of killing and dying, and its cold math makes men feel worthless, worthless and alone. The loneliness never passes—it accrues with each corpse a man encounters along the way—but the first time a soldier stops under fire to tend another man’s wound or haul him to safety, he begins to feel he is not so unimportant, so small, after all. Even in the cruel accounting of the battlefield, he has value. He is a comra
de.
Comradeship is a kind of bargain men make with one another—a soldier never leaves another soldier behind—and that promise applies to every echelon. A private in the ranks keeps faith with his betters by trusting in their ability to command, and an officer repays that trust and shows his fidelity by sharing the fate of his men, standing with them on the deck of a sinking ship or digging in with a doomed garrison.
On the dock at Corregidor, the sun had set and the sky was becoming as black as the surface of the water. MacArthur made sure his wife and son were safely aboard the first boat. He stopped for a moment and looked up at Corregidor’s heights and listened to the report of its big guns firing against the mainland, then he approached the small group of high-ranking officers waiting nearby.
“I shall return,” Huff heard him tell Wainwright and the others. Then he boarded the boat, and the men on the dock turned back to face the enemy.38
BY THE END OF MARCH, Ben Steele and his comrades in the 7th Matériel Squadron were subsisting on rice—steamed rice, rice porridge, rice mush, rice soup. A few times a week the quartermaster would send up thirteen cans of salmon flakes and nine cans of condensed milk, but when the allotment was spread among 360 men, it provided just a teaspoon of fish and a splash of milk in each mess kit, scarcely enough to give their gruel some taste.
“This grub is pathetic,” Ben Steele thought, “just pathetic.”
For a while the boys searched for forage and game, rooting in local vegetable patches for turnips or camotes or roaming the countryside to shag papaya, guava, mangoes, cashews. Sometimes a man would bag a monkey or a big snake, or sometimes a patrol would spot some “big game,” a stray carabao or swaybacked horse that somehow had escaped the quartermaster’s roundup, and when that happened the patrol would carefully note the animal’s location then rush back to their lines with the news, and the lieutenant would send for Ben Steele.
A man did not have to be a Montana marksman to bring down a big critter like a water buffalo or some old spindle-legged pony, but he had to be able to slaughter and dress the carcass quickly in the dark in the middle of no-man’s-land with an enemy patrol possibly lurking, and Ben Steele was good at such work. One shot and the animal was down, then he was on it with his knife.
He slit the hind legs first, cutting the hide from the hooves up the hocks to the thighs, then along the flanks to the shoulders and chest, then up the neck to the throatlatch. When the skin was fully scored, he yanked it off the carcass, then slit the belly open, pulled out the guts, debrided the muscles around the joints, and hacked at the half-dressed carcass with a hand ax until he had cleaved it into quarters. Forty-five minutes start to finish. By sunup the patrol would be back on the line and the meat would be in the squadron’s cooking pots.
In some of the other units, men were doing business on the black market, sneaking off to meet smugglers from Manila who crossed the bay in bancas loaded with sugar, eggs, and Filipino cigarettes, but this source of supply was unpredictable. Japanese launches mounted with machine guns plied Manila Bay, sometimes catching the bootleggers on the open water in sight of land. Days later when customers showed up to shop, they would find the food runners washed up on the sand, their bloated bodies mauled by Japanese bullets and the bites of voracious bay crabs.
When the rice ran short, Ben Steele and his squadron mates harvested palay from the paddies and threshed it themselves, but the yield was so small they were still hungry all the time. The hunger was worst at night when they were on watch, alone.
THE RESERVE defense line was now the main defense line—thirteen miles of foxholes, bunkers, and breastworks stretching across the middle of the peninsula. The Air Corps boys (provisional infantry) had been assigned to a one-mile sector not far from the bay. At their backs was a stand of trees, in front two abandoned rice paddies, roughly a thousand yards of open ground. On moonlit nights, Ben Steele and his comrades looked out on a gray no-man’s-land of shadows and dark shapes, and on nights when there was no illumination at all, they sat and stared at a wall of black, imagining the enemy creeping along behind it.
Mostly Ben Steele fought off sleep and memories of home, especially memories that made his stomach growl. Roast pork and applesauce—that’s all he could think of, roast pork and applesauce. His mother always added extra sugar to make the sauce sweet, just the way he liked it. After his watch he would spread a blanket on the ground next to his hole and fall asleep, and his daydream would become his night dream, only more vivid, the roast sizzling as it came out of the oven, the applesauce heaped in a big bowl in the middle of the table. Then he would wake up, grab his mess kit, and join the queue for a breakfast of “gummy” gruel that “tasted like wallpaper paste.”39
Although the Japanese had pulled back during the lull, they were still firing on the American lines. Japanese dive-bombers came in the morning, Japanese artillery shells landed on them in the afternoon. One attack caught Ben Steele and another man in the open, and they flopped down in the dirt as the shells started to explode around them.
“Boy, that was close!” the other man said when the barrage lifted.
“You take that helmet off and you’ll see just how close it was,” Ben Steele said.
A piece of shrapnel had rent the top of the man’s helmet and left a flap of metal sticking straight up. He was unhurt, but the more he looked as his helmet, the more unnerved he became, and soon the medics were hauling him off to a field hospital in the rear.
In fact, all the boys were on edge. Some went around angry, railing at their country for betraying them. And some sank into self-pity and sat down and wept. Naturally, with everyone miserable, no one wanted to listen to the bellyaching of or spend a night on watch in a hole with a man so scared he could not stop sobbing. (“You’re making me nervous,” Ben Steele told one of his sniveling watch mates. “Get the hell out of here. I don’t want you around me.”) So most men kept their frustration and fear to themselves and sat sullen faced, picking the bedbugs off their blankets or intoning a bitter bit of verse penned by an unknown hand.
We’re the battling bastards of Bataan
No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.40
At the end of March, the bombing and artillery attacks increased, a sure sign the enemy was preparing a second offensive.
Now the men were filled with foreboding.
“We’re done,” Ben Steele and his comrades told one another. “Only two things can happen to us now, we’re going to be dead or we’re going to be prisoners of war.”
“And I heard the Japs don’t take no prisoners,” one man said.
* * *
WHISKEY, WAGES, AND THE KINDNESS
OF STRANGERS
ALATE SUMMER DAY in the small airless towns that sit in the valley of the Yellowstone. Down Main Street in Worden came a flatbed truck, a mound of firewood heaped high in back. Behind the wheel was Ben Steele, next to him his cousin Pat. As the truck came abreast of a block of stores it slowed down, then nosed to the curb.
They shouldn’t have stopped. They knew they shouldn’t have stopped. Ben Steele’s father had told them to drive straight through to Billings. Straight through! he had said several times.
But they’d been hot loading the truck, hot driving down from the hills, and they thought they’d be only a few minutes, a few minutes cooling off with an ice cream cone.
In the heat of the day the sidewalks were empty, the street quiet. When Ben Steele came out of the store, he smelled the whiskey right away, then he saw it—a large dark pool gathering beneath their truck.
He was atop the mound of firewood now, tossing the logs to get at the kegs of whiskey beneath. There it was, the one that had toppled over when they stopped. The keg had popped its bung and the booze was pouring into the bed of the truck and leaking so fast onto the street there was a runnel of whiskey flowing along the
curb.
“Oh God,” Ben Steele thought, “the whole damn town smells of it.”
“Get in the truck, Pat!” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”
AROUND NOON one Friday morning in March 1934, a stranger knocked on the back door of the small house the family had rented on Broadwater Avenue in Billings. The three older children, Gert and Bud and Warren, were in school. The two youngsters, Joe and Jean, were home with their parents.
The stranger was a customer come to buy a pint of whiskey. The Old Man had been bootlegging for almost two years now, making moonshine in the hills above Hawk Creek and, most recently, selling it from the back door of their rented house on Broadwater Avenue.
They were getting by, the family. The two-story cottage was crowded, but they were eating three meals a day and had a roof over their heads. In the hills, their mother reminded them, there were folks who were shivering in tents; in the city they were standing in breadlines.
The guy at the door looked legit, asked for the Old Man by name. Still, a bootlegger couldn’t be too careful. Prohibition was nearly over, the state was going into the liquor business, and word had been going around that the governor didn’t want backdoor bootleggers competing with the state’s new stores. The sheriff’s men were cracking down in every county, and one bootlegger after another was being hauled off to jail. Can’t be too careful, they told one another. In hard times the police could always find a stooge to come knocking for a pint.
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