At midday on December 8, 1941 (December 7 in Hawaii, east of the international date line), I was sound asleep on a camp cot at Nichols Field just outside Manila in the Philippine Islands. Suddenly my slumber was interrupted by a horrendous racket. Bullets were coming down like hail, interspersed with bombs that shook the ground like a series of small earthquakes. I sprang into a half-dug foxhole. A second later a bomb buried itself in the ground no more than thirty feet from me. Providentially, it did not explode. Nearby a friend was buried alive by another bomb burst, but his luck was running: he was dug out after a third man buried up to his neck yelled for help. Still another soldier close to me had a canteen shot off his hip. Thus did World War II begin for me, as it did for the American people, with a shattering surprise.
There was no excuse whatever for our people, or our political and military leaders, or myself personally, being caught so dramatically off guard. The explanation is simplest with regard to the whole country. Most Americans are blithely ignorant of other peoples and nations, most of us are bored by foreign affairs much of the time, and we have a national addiction to utopian hopes for perpetual peace. It is a ruinous combination that no amount of experience, no succession of disasters, has ever shaken out of our people. In the 1930s, specifically, it left our national defenses woefully deficient everywhere, but worst of all in the Pacific.
After we had “won” the first World War, our European allies reneged on their war debts and remained as quarrelsome as ever, so we had lapsed into disgruntled isolationism, vowing never again to be drawn into their disputes. At the Washington Naval Conference (1921-22) we limited our fleet and agreed not to upgrade our military installations in the Far East. This left the Philippines, only 600 miles off the coast of Asia, defended mostly by naval bases 5,000 miles eastward in Hawaii and 7,000 miles away in California. In 1934 we promised the Filipinos their independence twelve years later. Soon after, we declined to fortify Guam. Tokyo observed this sequence of events and, not surprisingly, concluded that America was withdrawing from the Orient. The British, the Dutch, even the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, regarded our heedlessness with foreboding since their colonies and their interests now lay, thinly defended, beneath the shadow of Japan. Meanwhile the depression had descended, distracting the attention of Americans even more from foreign affairs and strengthening the voices of all those who always want to spend money on domestic programs and trust to good luck for national defense.
In the Philippines money for defense was chronically short, so all things were done late and in a half-hearted, slovenly manner. To be sure, this dismal situation began to improve in 1941. On July 26 the Philippine army was reincorporated into the U.S. Army. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was soon named supreme commander of these combined forces, and he began to assemble a capable staff. By then, too, a few thousand Philippine Scouts, who were part of the regular American army, had been made into effective soldiers.
Nonetheless, these reforms came too late in the day. The bulk of the Philippine army was still virtually untrained, badly armed, and almost impossible to command since the men spoke something like seventy different dialects. Airfields remained too few, their runways too short and unpaved. Intelligence was poor everywhere. Ominously, thousands of Japanese “tourists,” “fishermen,” “merchants,” even bird fanciers, roamed the archipelago at will. They mapped everything, purchased land, bought into businesses, and smuggled in more of their countrymen. To top off this amalgam of heedlessness and folly, West Point was able to find room for cadets from many countries, even Japan, but for a long time could accommodate only one Filipino per year. Even in 1941 there were only a handful at the Point; thus, a permanent shortage of well-trained top-ranking Filipino officers was insured.
Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippines, was keenly aware of these deficiencies, but he was as heedless as Washington in dealing with them. In fact, he made the situation worse; in 1939 he visited Japan and returned convinced that Filipinos could never defend their country successfully. Soon after, at his behest, the Philippine legislature stopped military construction, cut the defense budget, deemphasized ROTC, halved reserve training, and postponed the mobilization scheduled for 1940, though money was found to build new roads, bridges, and public buildings, and especially to begin construction of Quezon City, adjoining Manila, to immortalize the Philippine president. Quezon justified this course, which in retrospect looks suicidal, by declaring that defense of his homeland from foreign aggression was the responsibility of the United States.1 Informed Filipinos hoped that somehow General MacArthur, whom they virtually deified, would see that everything turned out all right.
The failures and derelictions of our military leaders on December 8, 1941, are harder to account for than are those of the American people or even the Philippine government, since our professional soldiers had been expecting war. Yet many hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half the American Far Eastern air force was wiped out by bombing and strafing as the planes sat in rows on the runways at Clark and other fields on Luzon Island. Ultimately, of course, all military catastrophes are laid at the door of the commander in chief, in this case General MacArthur; but attempts to fix responsibility more precisely long ago disappeared in a morass of divided authority, selective memories, conflicting testimony, and missing records.
Personally, I was caught sound asleep with no more justification than either my military superiors or my countrymen generally. Two months earlier, back at Hamilton Field in California, our commander, Capt. Ed Dyess, had told the whole Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron that war was virtually certain in the near future. He had added that since we were the most fully prepared combat unit in America we would soon be sent overseas.
Though Ed admonished us not to reveal this news to friends or relatives, in my case he need not have bothered. When I wrote to my parents three days later, I merely expressed regret that I would not be home for Christmas. I added that I was not sure what I would do when my three-year enlistment ended three months later. I had recently half-planned to become a pilot in the Canadian air force but that scheme, like comparable precursors, had come to naught.
On November 1, 1941, the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron and twenty-three P-40 fighter planes left San Francisco on the USS President Coolidge. I had no idea where we were going. I did recall that a few months before I had seen a number of B-17 Flying Fortresses land at Hamilton Field and had been told by a crew member that they were on their way to the Philippines. Thus, I was not particularly surprised when we eventually reached the channel that separates the Bataan Peninsula from Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay. I wasn’t alarmed either, for Mike Ginnevan, an old sergeant only two years away from retirement, assured me that he had once done duty on Corregidor and that the Rock was impregnable. Mike’s fate was as sad as his judgment was faulty: he died in a Japanese prison camp.
Once ashore, I found nothing that seemed to have anything to do with imminent war. Downtown Manila seemed a typical modem big city. Sunsets over Manila Bay and the Zambales Mountains on Bataan Peninsula were the most gaudily brilliant spectacles I had ever seen, like the canvases of an impressionist painter gone beserk. A second lieutenant with a heavy red beard startled me momentarily, but I was told that American soldiers thereabouts often grew such beards to impress Filipinos, who have little facial hair. The jai alai building seemed particularly modern since it had air conditioning and gambling apparatus similar to pari-mutuel machines at U.S. racetracks. Equally memorable, if less happily so, was the pungent smell of native villages (barrios) without facilities to dispose of sewage.
Most striking of all were the women. Like most red-blooded American boys of legend, I had a keen interest in girls. It had not been dulled by nineteen days at sea with a shipload of men. Now small, dainty Spanish-Filipina girls with incomparable complexions seemed inexpressibly beautiful. Not far behind were white Russian girls, refugees from Singapore and Hong Kong. Even the straggly-haired lavenderas (washerwomen), sitting on their haunches and pounding their dirty clothes with large wooden paddles, would have looked at least moderately enticing if only their lips and teeth had not been stained a ghastly, almost neon, red from chewing betel nut.
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.2 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.