Behind Japanese Lines (3 page)

Even on the day the war began I remained as carefree as ever. Early in the morning our base cannon was fired. This was a prearranged signal to indicate that war had broken out, but it still took several minutes for its significance to sink in. Through the morning hours that followed, scattered news about Pearl Harbor began to reach us. Even so, Hawaii was thousands of miles away, and I, like so many, did not
feel
any different or suddenly acquire any sense of urgency.

Our superiors, who had plainly been expecting action for some time, had told us several days before to dig foxholes; but I had attached little importance to this onerous task and had dug only nonchalantly. Though it may seem incredible to the reader, even after the war alarm all I did was dig a little more in my foxhole, knock off
for a rest and a cigarette, then fall asleep on a folding cot under a nearby tree. That was where I was when the bombs began to fall.

Warfare is not funny, but most wars do have zany interludes. In far off Washington, D.C., I've read, an American civilian, maddened by the news of Pearl Harbor, seized an axe and chopped down one of the famous cherry trees once given to the American people by the government of Japan. His action was about as constructive as a good deal that took place all around me that December morning. Several people shouted that the attacking planes were Messerschmitts, though they were in fact “Bettys” (Mitsubishi twin-engine bombers), Zero fighter planes, and other Japanese aircraft. The nearest Messerschmitts just then were about eight thousand miles away, being flown by Germans somewhere in European Russia.

One of our airmen jumped into an unmanned machine gun revetment and began to blast away at the enemy planes. This was sensible enough, and he even hit a couple; but for reasons unknown he cursed and swore wildly at the top of his lungs throughout. Conventional AA batteries blazed away at everything that flew—but all they managed to hit was one of our own Seversky P-35s. At that, they were better gunners than their brethren at Clark Field sixty miles to the north. There the AA batteries missed all the Japanese planes on December 8. Next day they fired furiously at Lt. Sam Grashio, a P-40 pilot in my outfit, but could not hit him either.
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Some individual soldiers rushed into the open and fired rifles, even sidearms, at planes overhead. While such action spoke well for their courage and martial spirit, it was about as useful as firing BB guns at elephants.

Dogfights erupted overhead in several places. I saw portions of the only one that yielded anything for our side. Lt. Jesus Villamor, a brave and skillful Filipino fighter pilot, led a flight of antiquated P-26 Boeings in a desperate attack on a squadron of Betty bombers. Though outnumbered 54 to 6, and outgunned, the P-26 pilots were not out-flown. They scattered one enemy flight and may have shot down several Bettys.

Uncertainty about this is due to the inexorable exigencies of aerial combat. Oftentimes neither pilots nor observers on the ground can be sure that a given enemy plane or a given number of them have been shot down. A plane is clearly hit; perhaps it even trails smoke; then it disappears over the horizon or into a cloud bank. Did it crash and kill all on board? Did the plane crash but pilot and crew bail out safely? Was the pilot able to fly back to one of his home bases? Did several of our planes successively shoot at a single enemy craft and
bring it down, and afterward each pilot report that he had destroyed an enemy plane? Often, after an air battle nobody knows the answers to such questions exactly. Officers, however, like to encourage those they command, and governments believe that the public needs to hear good news, so one's own pilots are usually given the benefit of any doubts and reports of victories easily become exaggerated. In this case, whatever damage he and his comrades did to the Japanese, Villamor became an instant Philippine war hero and was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross by the U.S. government.

As abruptly as it began, the Japanese attack ended. Only smoke, dust, and the smell of gunpowder lingered amid the wreckage and the American corpses. Among the survivors, pandemonium prevailed. Planes that could get off the ground were flown away to other locations. Men who were separated from their units, or simply bewildered, gravitated to this or that public building in or near Manila. Gradually our officers found some of us and got us regrouped. Though I don't remember how I got there, when my unit was regrouped I was at LaSalle College in downtown Manila. Many other GIs were there, but I cannot now recall a single name or face. From time to time, between Japanese air raids, groups of us were sent back to Nichols Field to remove anything that might be useful either to ourselves or to the enemy. From one of these jaunts I returned with a Springfield .03 rifle packed in Cosmoline, a .45 automatic pistol, and a World War I “tommy” helmet, to add to my collection of souvenirs. I didn't keep any of them long.

In an effort to save civilian lives and prevent the needless destruction of Manila, General MacArthur declared the metropolis an open city. In a response typical of their conduct throughout the war, the Japanese ignored the gesture and bombed the city freely. Soon its streets were filled with rubble of every sort, and the air hung heavy with the stench of countless human and animal corpses.

On December 23, 1941, I sent a commercial cablegram to my parents, wishing them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and enclosing $50. It was the last they were to hear about me until July 28, 1942, when they received a brief message from the War Department that I was missing in action. It was the last they were to hear
from
me for more than three years.

The next night all of us at LaSalle were packed into trucks, with little more than the clothes on our backs. We had barely gotten out of the city when the victorious Japanese came swarming in. All night we travelled in a convoy, arriving next morning at a sugarcane field in Pampanga province just north of Bataan Peninsula. Though I had no
idea why we had come to this particular place, I soon found out: it would make our next move, into Bataan itself, short and easy.

Though General MacArthur had attacked Philippine defense problems with his habitual intelligence and energy, he never had either the time or money necessary to repair twenty years of neglect. When the war broke, for example, he had to abandon his own half-matured plans and fall back hurriedly on Washington's old Orange Plan, which called for making a major defense effort in Bataan Peninsula, a steep, rocky tongue of tropical jungle about thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, stretching along the west side of Manila Bay. He barely succeeded. In the first days of the war the Japanese landed both along Lingayen Gulf in northern Luzon and south of Manila. In both areas the best the Americans and Filipinos could do was to undertake haphazard delaying actions long enough to allow the bulk of their troops to flee into Bataan ahead of the onrushing enemy. Moving the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron into our sugarcane field in southern Pampanga was a hastily improvised portion of this overall design.

As soon as we arrived, we began to build an airstrip. To avoid detection by the enemy the work had to be done at night. Before daybreak we would string a chicken wire roof over what had been done and stick sugarcane tops through it vertically as camouflage. Since the cane wilted rapidly, a fresh supply had to be cut every night. Meanwhile, day and night the sweat poured off us, swarms of mosquitoes tortured us without mercy, and we dreaded that the Japanese would soon find us. But they didn't. Instead, one by one our scattered “birds” came home to roost. Each returning plane was rolled under the chicken wire roof and given a maintenance check.

This was a touchy business in the best of circumstances, as I had been reminded unforgettably only a few weeks before at Nichols Field. There we had all been working steadily uncrating and assembling our planes, which then took to the air in twos and threes for their shakedown flights. More pilots die in routine flying of this sort than are ever killed in combat. Right off I had gotten one of the worst scares of my life: I thought I had killed a pilot. On each side of the runway where our planes took off, there was a row of trees, and at the end of the runway, with macabre appropriateness, loomed a cemetery. One day one of our planes had risen just above tree level. Then it sputtered, fell silent, and disappeared. The awful thought flashed into my mind that perhaps I had not checked the gas strainer. A lump rose in my throat and my body tensed as I waited for the horrible sound of the crash. Suddenly a loud roar filled the air instead. At the last
second the engine had caught, and the plane climbed gracefully into the sky. So thin is the line between life and death even in preparation for war.

Now, in the sugarcane field all our maintenance work had to be done at night in semi-darkness, because in the daytime the metal on the planes was too hot to touch. Perhaps worse, since we lacked many ordinary maintenance tools we mechanics had to ignore inspection guides and make repairs largely from memory and intuition. I never envied the pilots who had to fly planes that had been “serviced” thus. Nonetheless, our luck held, and our minuscule contingent of P-40s flew many missions from this makeshift base.

One day I was sure I was going to die. A Japanese Betty flew over our strip and was hit by our AA guns. (Our gunners had improved considerably since December 8 and now occasionally hit something.) The big bomber slipped sideways briefly, then nosed straight down, engines screaming. I would have enjoyed the sight save that the bomber seemed to be heading straight for me. I learned from later experience that a falling plane anywhere near a person always looks thus, but this was the first time around, and I was certain the Betty was going to hit me right between the eyes. I rushed madly into the sugarcane, which was fully grown. The stalks were high and tough, and they sprawled in all directions. After falling down half a dozen times I flopped flat on my face and awaited death. The rising scream of the plane's engines ended abruptly in a resounding thuuuummmmmp, accompanied by a sharp earth tremor. Pieces of the plane and pieces of its crewmen whizzed about in all directions. Slowly I began to breathe again and to recover my wits. The doomed bomber had crashed about a hundred feet from me.

Soon after this memorable experience we moved southward to Cabcaben and Bataan fields, both situated at the extreme south end of Bataan Peninsula, only three or four miles from Corregidor Island across the north entrance to Manila Bay.

The overall plan for the defense of Bataan became increasingly clear in the early months of 1942. Lines were to be established and held as long as possible. It was expected that they would be breached by the Japanese eventually, but we would then retreat to another line and the process would be repeated. In the actual event, American and Filipino troops were told that we were holding until reinforcements could arrive. Like many Americans, and nearly all Filipinos, I believed this until the very end of the campaign. I simply could not imagine that our government would just leave us there to delay for as
long as possible a feared Japanese assault on Australia while the main American war effort was directed toward Europe. Forty years later I still don't know exactly what to make of it. The fierce sacrificial struggle of the Filipinos and ourselves on Bataan and Corregidor is thought by many to have been crucial in saving Australia, but the cost in lives and suffering was heavy for us and frightful for the Filipinos. Had I been General MacArthur, I don't believe I could have swallowed the deception and given the orders, though it must be admitted that since 1945 nearly all military analysts have supported the grand strategic decision of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to concentrate on defeating the Axis powers in Europe before Japan in the Pacific.

Most of my working time on Bataan was spent repairing airplanes. Most were P-40 fighters, all that remained from an original motley array of Seversky P-35s, obsolete B-18 bombers, a couple of B-10s, a few A-27 attack bombers, a handful of observation planes, and some P-26 antiques still used by the Philippine air force. We in the ground crews worked day and night, engulfed by stifling heat and clouds of mosquitoes, to keep our steadily dwindling force airworthy. We not only patched bullet holes but cannibalized disabled aircraft for any parts that might possibly be usable on other planes. Engines, even wings, were transferred from planes of one type to another. Somebody even figured out a way to alter gasoline tank brackets on fighter planes so they could hold 500-pound bombs. After one such operation I heard one skeptical pilot ask a crew chief, “How can I be sure that son-of-a-bitching bomb you attached to my plane won't shake loose during takeoff?” I didn't hear the reply. An appropriate one would have been, “The age of faith has not passed.”

Working constantly with planes and watching them in action impressed me with the clear initial superiority of the Japanese Zero to any of our fighter planes. As the war lengthened, America gradually developed better planes of all types, which the Japanese, whose industry was far less advanced or flexible than ours, could not match. In 1942, though, the Zero was king of the Far Eastern skies. Its detractors have put it down as cheap and crudely built; but it was also light, fast, a marvellous climber, and remarkably maneuverable. It had a shorter radius of turn than our latest fighter, the P-40, which meant that in any contest involving circular maneuvers the Zero soon ended
on the tail of the P-40 with fixed guns. For the American pilot in such a situation that was “all she wrote.” Though at least one pilot in the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron wrote favorably of the sturdiness, strength, and straightaway speed of the P-40,
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I never liked the plane. It was tricky to handle, and there was always something wrong with it. In my opinion, its sole claim to excellence was that it could dive like a rock. It never surprised me that a lot of our pilots who flew P-40s were killed taking off or landing. Once during training at Hamilton Field I saw six such accidents in a single day.