Near the crest of the hill they paused for a moment to catch a breath and check on the sergeant.
Brown was bleeding badly.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m done for.”
“We’re going to help you as far as we can,” Ben Steele said.
By the time they reached the top, the sergeant was unconscious, and the litter bearers set him down. Maybe he was breathing, maybe not—in the chaos they couldn’t tell. Ben Steele found a canteen and nestled it in Brown’s hand. Then, without ceremony, he turned away and hurried up the slope after the others.
In the smoke behind him he could hear the voices of other wounded, men they’d left behind.
“Help!”
“Help me . . . please!”
“Don’t leave me!”
Ben Steele thought, “That might be me after a while.”
Below in the draw between the two hills, he could see the enemy beginning to advance up the slope to where he’d left the sergeant and the other wounded.
“Whaah!” the Japanese yelled. “Whaah!”
Soon all he could hear was the sound of his own hurried footfalls.
At dusk in the company of a few dozen other stragglers, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore emerged from the bush onto the Old National Road.
Now and then the big guns and pit mortars on Corregidor fired salvos at the Japanese positions, and the flashes from their muzzles lit up the bay and the sky and illuminated the press of soldiers and refugees crowding the road ahead of the advancing Japanese.
The soldiers in particular were a sorry sight, uniforms torn and filthy, listless and lost in the flow, a few carrying their rifles, but most without a weapon, save a bolo attached to a string and slung over a shoulder, all moving south, away from the sounds of a battle that seemed to be catching up to them.
At the turnoff to Lamao, Ben Steele and Q. P. Devore considered leaving the road to search for food and sanctuary, but as they started down a dirt track to the town, a Filipino emerged from the shadows.
“The Japs, they are already in there,” he said, gesturing toward Lamao.
The only safe place seemed to be the bush and jungle so the two men slipped back into the undergrowth with Q.P. in the lead.
“Where you going?” Ben said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“Yeah?” Q.P. said.
“Yeah. You go that way and you’re going right back toward the Japs. You better follow me.”
Soon they stumbled into a stream that was shallow and rocky and crowded with more stragglers, men busy dipping their canteens.
“We better fill up,” Ben Steele said.
They worked quickly in the gloaming, then without warning there was the clank of tank treads and the report of small arms, and the men in the creek ran helter-skelter for the trees.
If a commander of military forces of the United States surrenders unnecessarily and shamefully or in violation of orders from higher authority, he is liable to trial and punishment.
—United States Army Field Manual21
By midday April 8, Ned King had made up his mind. The line along the Alangan had broken and the small groups of men still able to fight were putting up minimal resistance. His army was in flight, and the Japanese were now within a few miles of one of the large field hospitals.
King summoned his field commanders, his generals.
“There are six thousand sick and wounded in the hospital ahead of us,” he began. “There are [twenty-six thousand] civilians [in the way too]. Only twenty-five percent of our men are on their feet. I should send a [white] flag across tomorrow morning at daylight. I’ll so notify Corregidor” and General Wainwright.
Then he gave them orders to destroy all their equipment and weapons, but spare all buses, cars, trucks, and gasoline to ferry the sick and wounded to prison camp.
“Is there anything else any of you can think of?” he asked.
He looked each man square in the face, paused, then, as if he was thinking out loud, he said, “My career is over.”
“Is there any possibility of any help?” one of the generals asked.
“None whatsoever,” King said.22
Runners returning from the field reported that the Old National Road was jammed with bedraggled soldiers and terrified refugees, “a mass of sheep” straggling south. A half hour later King called his chief of staff and his operations officer into conference.23
Assemble the headquarters staff, he told them.
At midnight, surrounded by his department heads and aides, he made the inevitable official.
I did not ask you here to get your opinion or advice. I do not want any one of you saddled with any part of the responsibility for the ignominious decision I feel forced to make. I have not communicated with General Wainwright [directly] because I do not want him to be compelled to assume any part of the responsibility. I am sending forward a flag of truce at daybreak to ask for terms of surrender. I feel that further resistance would only uselessly waste human life. Already [one of] our hospital[s], which is filled to capacity and directly in the line of hostile approach is within range of enemy light artillery. We have no further means of organized resistance.
They had known, of course, that the end was at hand, but hearing their commander say it, looking into those dark, empathetic eyes, the news, as one of them put it, “hit with an awful bang and a terrible wallop,” for each of them “had hoped against hope for a better end.” And several had tears coursing down their cheeks as they walked out into the night to perform their final duties.
Two junior officers had volunteered to find the Japanese lines and deliver the general’s proffer of surrender and his request to meet with General Homma to discuss terms. The others, meanwhile, issued orders to all units to destroy anything of military value. Field officers now told their men that in the morning, they were going to lay down their arms.24
The senior ordnance officer, determined to keep Bataan’s stores of dynamite and ammunition from the enemy, fired his fuses right away and the tip of the peninsula convulsed with explosions as the magazines, ammunition dumps, and ordnance warehouses began to blow up, one after the other. Soon shells were shooting skyward, filling the black cope of night with ribbons and medallions of color, fireworks at war. At first the men marveled at the pyrotechnics, the Fourth of July come early, then as the detonations crept closer, flak began to fall on the compound, and the final blasts stripped leaves from the trees and flattened the tar-paper-and-bamboo buildings in the command post.
THE SURRENDER PARTY set out around 9:00 a.m. on April 9 in two jeeps, each with half a bedsheet (white ensigns of surrender) flying from a bamboo pole attached to the side of the windshield. In the first jeep rode the operations officer, Colonel James V. Collier, and one of the junior officers who had found the Japanese lines and returned to guide the surrender party. Behind them in the second vehicle with two of his aides and wearing his last clean uniform was Ned King.
As the jeeps turned onto the Old National Road, a flight of five Japanese fighters swooped down and started strafing them. The Americans jumped for cover, the planes rolled out of sight, and the jeeps resumed their journey, but the respite was only temporary. The planes were soon back, and for more than an hour the Japanese pilots played cat and mouse with the men in the jeeps, a game that left the general and his aides constantly scrambling for cover.
Hunkered down under fire like that, a soldier’s mind either shuts down or seeks distraction. Lying in the yellow dust by the side of the Old National Road that morning, Ned King turned to history. On the same day in 1865, April 9, General Robert E. Lee, one of Ned King’s military heroes, surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. “There is nothing left for me to do,” Lee told his staff, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousands deaths.”
Now another son of the Old South, remembering that famous phrase, raised himself from the dirt of Bataan a
nd went forward to give up his army.25
THE SURRENDER PARTY had been traveling for two hours now, and they guessed they were well beyond what was left of their front lines. As they rounded a bend in the Old National Road just south of the Lamao River bridge, a platoon of Japanese infantry, bayonets drawn, jumped out in front of them on both sides of the road.
One of the soldiers stepped forward and signaled them to stop. Close behind was an officer.
Lieutenant Ryotaro Nishimura, commander of the Fifth Company, 9th Infantry, 16th Division, had learned a number of lessons since landing at Lingayen Gulf, foremost: An officer should always double-check his target before he orders his men to shoot.
Three times in three months he had been ready to fire on some distant target, a cloud of dust or some figures in a tree line, only to discover that the quarry was really another unit of hohei.
Now moving fast across Bataan, the vanguards of the various attack wings kept bumping into one another, so Ryotaro Nishimura was trying to be especially careful. More than once in the last few days he had worried about killing his own men.
By April 9 his battalion had reached the Old National Road. Another division had secured the road up to Lamao River bridge. There they had established a command post in three small buildings fronted by a flagpole in a small parklike compound, an agricultural station just off the main road. Ryotaro Nishimura’s company had been ordered to proceed beyond the command post, cross the Lamao River bridge, and scout the next section of highway south.
Almost as soon as they crossed the bridge into no-man’s-land the point man spotted a cloud of dust beyond a bend, and Nishimura halted his company, formed two columns on either side of the road, and moved his machine guns up front, just in case.
The dust came closer—perhaps a tank, he thought—then closer still.
The lieutenant raised his monocular to his eye, ready to order his machine gunners to open fire, then the cloud stopped, the dust cleared, and the lieutenant spotted two small vehicles, American jeeps, one flying a large white flag.
The point man signaled the jeeps to stop and the occupants started to disembark.
One of them, Ryotaro Nishimura noticed, a man much older than the others, had on a clean uniform. This man must be a very high-ranking officer, Nishimura thought. He looked at his face—he’d never seen an American before and could not read his expression—then he shouted the only two words of English he knew.
“Come here! Come here!”
The Americans were wearing sidearms, and Nishimura watched carefully to make sure they kept their hands still. He wanted to speak to the officer in charge and gave the group a thumbs-up with his right hand, a gesture the Japanese used to recognize someone in authority.
At length he made them understand they should follow him, and he turned around and led them back across the bridge to the command post where some staff officers and a translator took over.
Curious, the lieutenant lingered nearby, trying to eavesdrop on the proceedings, but he could catch only snatches of what was being said, and later, after the Americans were escorted away, he spoke to the translator.
“What was his rank, the one with the clean uniform. Who is he?”
“It is General King,” the translator said.
“And did the Americans surrender or not?”
“Hai” the translator said, “they surrendered.”26
COLONEL MOTOO NAKAYAMA, senior operations officer of the 14th Army, had no intention of talking terms with Ned King.
He would talk only to General Wainwright, he told King, and only about the surrender of all the forces in the islands, not just the Luzon Force, the 76,000 men left on Bataan.
Ned King tried to explain his position—he commanded only the troops on the peninsula, he said, not the forces left on Corregidor or in the southern Philippine Islands—and then pressed his terms: he wanted an armistice, wanted his staff to help arrange the stand-down, most of all wanted to be able to truck his tired and sick men to prison rather than have them march there.
Nakayama would not listen. If King did not have the authority to surrender all the troops in the islands, Nakayama said, the Japanese did not want to deal with the general. He could surrender his Bataan force to the division commander at Lamao, if that’s what he wanted, but there would be no negotiations, no terms.
“Will you treat the prisoners well?” Ned King asked.
“We are not barbarians,” Nakayama’s interpreter said.
“Then I will agree to the unconditional surrender,” Ned King said.
No American general had ever surrendered such a force, 76,000 men, an entire army.
He put his pistol on the table—they had asked for his sword but he’d long ago left it in Manila—then he sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and folded his hands in front of him.
He had done his duty, the right thing for the right reason, as he saw it, but Ned King took no comfort in that stance. He had been a professional soldier for thirty-four years, and he could not shake the sense of shame that was beginning to settle on him.27
Q. P. DEVORE had lost his friend, Ben Steele. When they scattered at the stream, he had gone one way and Ben the other.
Now, at midmorning on April 9, he found himself atop a high hill among a large group of stragglers, strangers every one of them. Maybe Ben Steele had been captured, he thought, maybe Ben Steele was dead.
“I’m in this alone now,” he thought.
A lieutenant in the group suggested they form a perimeter and build a fire to cook some rice, but just as they were starting to forage for wood, a dark apparition emerged from the tree line waving a white flag.
In broken English the Japanese officer called for the senior American. The lieutenant went forward to speak with him, then returned to the huddle of men.
“Jap officer says they’ve got us surrounded,” he said. “They are going to give us a chance to surrender or fight on. I don’t know what to do . . . Only thing I can think of is to take a vote.”
Far below on the flats of the coastal plain, the cane fields and rice paddies were silent. Even the big guns on Corregidor had stopped firing.
“Maybe it’s all over,” one of the men said. And if that was true, what was the point of putting up a fight? If they gave themselves up, the enemy might feed them. This Jap officer seemed friendly enough.
“Okay,” the lieutenant told the Japanese officer. “We voted, we’ll surrender.”
“Lay down your arms and pile your ammunition,” the officer ordered, then he gave a whistle and, instantly, dozens of Imperial soldiers, more apparitions, came rushing out of the jungle.
“What the hell is gonna happen to me now?” Q. P. Devore asked himself.
The enemy soldiers stood the Americans in a line, made them raise their hands over their heads, and started to rifle their packs and pockets for valuables. A Japanese captain standing nearby noticed that one of the looters had tossed aside a string of rosary beads, and he picked them up and offered them to the next American in line—Q. P. Devore.
“I’m not Catholic,” Q.P. said. “I don’t use rosaries.”
The officer offered again, this time at pistol point.
BEN STEELE had been running all night and when he could run no more he dropped to the ground and went to sleep.
When he awoke on the morning of April 9 he was among a small group of men on an old ammunition trail somewhere in the foothills of Mount Mariveles.
He looked around for Q.P.—he assumed his friend had been with him through the night—but saw only a handful of strangers, boys from different units, and, checking one more time, reckoned his buddy had disappeared or was dead.
He was too numb with fatigue to feel any sense of loss. He had been running for days, days of bombing and shelling and small arms fire, running to the rear, always to the rear, living on handfuls of rice and rotten carabao, living on empty. Now he had stopped running, stopped thinking, too. He looked neither forward nor back. He was breat
hing—that was his existence. He had his rifle, he had his helmet, he had his life.
All at once up the trail the group heard the sound of tanks, and the handful of men—there were no more than ten of them—dropped to their bellies in a small depression at the side of the trail.
The clanking got louder and louder. Then from the trees the tanks came into view, two of them, no—four, six, ten in a column, and with infantry.
The Americans took aim with their rifles and fired. Spitballs against steel.
The tanks returned the fire and the Americans flattened themselves in their hollow. The tanks clanked forward, stopped, advanced again. They were very close now, close enough to lower their cannon and fire directly into the hole where the Americans lay.
At that point—point-blank—some of the stragglers decided they’d had enough, and one of them draped a white undershirt over the muzzle of his rifle and held it up to the enemy. The others, meanwhile, began to remove the bolts from their rifles and toss them into the jungle, then, slowly, they rose to their feet and put their hands above their heads.
The hatch of the first tank popped open and a Japanese soldier emerged, carrying a machine gun. He climbed to the ground, settled himself behind the gun, and trained his sights on the Americans.
“This is it,” Ben Steele thought. “It won’t be long now.”
He had always imagined he’d be afraid at this moment, but he felt nothing. That was the strange part of it. No terror, no sadness, no dread. He was tired, too tired to tremble. If he lived, fine, and if he didn’t—
“It won’t be long,” he kept telling himself.
He hoped for a bullet in the heart or the head. Maybe it would hurt, maybe not. Either way, he thought, “I’m not going to suffer very long.”
He wondered about heaven. His mother believed in an immortal soul. His mother—he could see her face in his mind’s eye and was glad she could not see him, see this miserable son of hers standing with his hands raised above his head, waiting.
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