---

 

FIVE

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST BATTLE for Bataan was going badly, and on February 8, 1942, at his new field headquarters, a large two-story house in the town of San Fernando some thirty miles north of the Bataan battle line, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, commander of the 14th Army and the man in charge of all Japanese troops in the Philippines, turned again to his officers for advice.1

Beleaguered in the field and beset by political enemies at home, Homma was in trouble.

Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong had been captured in the first three weeks of the war, and by early February, Imperial soldiers were marching hard on Singapore and coming ashore in the Dutch East Indies. Japan was taking the territory it wanted, taking it with just ten divisions, 200,000 troops, a relatively small number of men. The Imperial Army appeared invincible, and that chimera created a fervor back home and fear overseas. Quick strikes followed by fleet advances, swift victories, and stunning propaganda. The strategy seemed to be working—working everywhere except the Philippines. There a ragtag army of natives and the soft Western sots who sponsored them had dug in for a fight in a jungle wasteland, and suddenly there was a hitch in Japan’s plan for early victory in the Pacific.

Homma had been given fifty days to take the islands. His deadline, January 26, had passed without a good result, and he knew that his countrymen, accustomed to waking to news of victories with their morning miso and steamed rice, would be disappointed. “It seems that the general public feels that since we captured Manila easily, the rest of the area is virtually won as well,” he wrote in his diary. “This is immensely annoying to me. They should understand the difficulty we are experiencing here. Our opponent is the United States, an entirely different enemy from China. Of course there is no way for an easy resolution.”2

More troubling, the general had learned through channels that the Throne—likely at the urging of its “advisers,” which is to say his rivals on the Imperial General Staff—had refused to issue a general commendation to the men of the 14th Army, an accolade that by custom should have been theirs, and his, for taking an enemy capital. “I have no response when asked whether the Bataan battle will be over soon,” he continued. “I only have fear.”³

Most troubling of all, Japan’s central strongman, General Hideki Tojo—war minister, prime minister, and one of Homma’s old antagonists—was angry. Japan’s other field commanders had brushed aside the British and bowled over the Dutch, but Tojo felt that against America, Japan appeared to be “blundering.”

In truth, Homma’s failure to secure the Philippines in fifty days had done nothing to delay Tokyo’s timetable in the southwest Pacific. Indeed, the Imperial Army was ahead of schedule, but daily stories in the American press about the “valiant defenders of Bataan” had left Tojo “irritated.” Frank Hewlett, for example, a United Press reporter, kept pounding out the same story line: “American and Filipino troops, after six weeks of battling here in the wilds of Bataan . . . have exploded the myth that the Japanese are ‘supermen.’ ”⁴

 

THE MEETING at Homma’s headquarters in San Fernando began in the middle of the afternoon. As was his custom, the general said little. As was their habit, his officers, divided into camps, were sharp-tongued and full of choler.

One side clamored to continue the attack. They argued that Nara and Kimura had repeatedly pushed the American line back. The 14th Army had the advantage, the initiative. If they would just concentrate their forces along Bataan’s flat east coast, they could break through the enemy line and push the adversaries into the sea.

The other side wanted to break off the attack. To continue, they said, would be jisatsu, “suicide.” Yes, Nara and Kimura had indeed made gains, but between them they had suffered so many casualties, an attacking force of nearly 20,000 men now could scarcely muster three battalions, fewer than 3,000 men, a handful against the enemy’s horde. Take the peninsula under siege, they advised. MacArthur’s men were already on half rations, and with Japan in control of the sea and sky, the situation was bound to get worse. The Filipinos and Americans had no hope of help. All the Japanese had to do was sit back and starve them into submission.

Homma sat in silence. To Major Moriya Wada, a young staff officer, the general looked troubled, “blue.” The general’s face, Wada thought, seemed filled with anrui, “hidden grief, tears in the darkness.”

Since landing at Lingayen Gulf, the 14th Army had suffered 3,320 killed, 5,350 wounded, and 15,500 sick—men disabled by malaria, dengue fever, beriberi, dysentery, and other diseases. Homma had lost roughly half his army, more than 24,000 casualties. The 2nd Battalion of 20th Infantry, the unit that had landed at Quinauan Point, had, as the general later put it, “vanished without a trace,” and its sister battalions, sent to its rescue, were decimated. An entire regiment wiped out.5

After hours of argument the general finally spoke. He was calling off the offensive, he said. With such losses the army was near collapse. If the enemy counterattacked, he told his staff, “we will have no choice but to hold up our hands and surrender.”⁶

He ordered his officers to prepare a message for Tokyo, a plea for re-supply and reinforcements. For a Japanese commander, no request could be more bitter, for it reeked of resignation and defeat.

 

Under the present conditions, even if we continued our offensive, the chances of success are slim, and at the very least, huge losses will be incurred. In the worst case scenario, this will produce disastrous effects for the entire strategy of the Philippines . . . As the army sees the shedding of more blood and tears, we recommend the maintenance and reorganization of our present position. After increased troop strength arrives, we will think of an appropriate strategy for the changed conditions.⁷

 

And then, turning back to the long lists of casualties, the general’s tears were hidden no more.

 

THE AMERICANS noticed the change almost immediately.

The enemy has “definitely recoiled,” MacArthur told Washington in a series of cables in February. “Heavy enemy losses sustained in his ill advised and uncoordinated attack of the past two weeks have . . . dulled his initiative” and “he begins to show signs of exhaustion.”8

Some of MacArthur’s men were so buoyed by the news, they wanted to leave their foxholes and counterattack. “The situation looks rosy,” one young army captain wrote in his diary. “If we can only get help here,” he said, they could “clear” all Luzon of the enemy. “Hope this happens.”⁹

Fueled by hope, the American rumor mill ground out one canard after another: Relief convoys were on the way from Australia; the war would be over by Easter; they’d soon be playing tennis and golf again.

The gossipmongers were everywhere, even in high headquarters. On March 7, MacArthur sent a radio message to General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff in Washington:

“General Homma committed Harikari [sic], repeat, Harikari, because of his failure to destroy our forces in Bataan and Corregidor.” The funeral, MacArthur went on, had been held in Manila on February 26 and Homma’s “ashes were flown to Japan the following day.” While he could not “completely substantiate this report,” the general said, “it is believed to be correct.” And in a postscript he added, there was even “a touch of irony” in all this—“his funeral rites, and, it is believed, his suicide, took place in my old apartment, which he occupied in the Manila Hotel.”¹⁰

More melodrama from MacArthur, but any bit of good news, fact or fata morgana, suited the moment, and there had been few such moments in the first battle for Bataan.

The Americans had stalled and bloodied their enemy, but no one in the American camp was counting coup, for while the enemy’s hardships were temporary (all Homma had to do was wait for Tokyo to reinforce him), the list of American troubles seemed intractable. And first on that list was hunger.

 

THE FILIPINOS and Americans had been living and fighting on crumbs. For six weeks their ration had been less than two thousand calories a day, a scant twenty-four ounces of food, half the minimum the average man needed for the hard labor of combat. And their stomachs were sore with hunger because MacArthur had made a fundamental mistake: in the rush to retreat, he’d left most of his rations behind.

Tons of provisions stockpiled in northern Luzon to support MacArthur’s plan to fight at the beaches and along the central plain had simply been abandoned. At just one warehouse alone, the army quartermaster had left fifty million bushels of rice, enough grain to keep a garrison going for years.

The missteps—“mismanagement and indecision,” one officer called it—were all MacArthur’s. Somewhere along the line from West Point to Bataan, the general had forgotten the most fundamental lesson of warfare, the lesson on logistics.

Just as an army on the attack must keep its lanes of resupply open as it moves forward, an army that plans to fight a defense, holed up behind bulwarks, must stockpile its supplies in advance. (Many of his officers had implored MacArthur to give up his grand scheme and send the supplies to Bataan, but the general had refused to listen.)11

On January 2, after the Filipinos and Americans had completed their withdrawal to Bataan, the army quartermaster sat down to assess his stores. Roughly 80,000 combatants and 26,000 refugees had found their way to the peninsula, and the quartermaster figured that at full ration (four thousand calories, or roughly four and a half pounds of food per man per day), the garrison would exhaust the supplies on hand in less than a month.

Headquarters immediately put every unit on half rations, and the defenders of Bataan now had to fight on less than two pounds of rice, canned fish, or canned meat a day. After two weeks of such subsistence, the men were hungry, very hungry, and losing heart. When word of the grumbling got back to MacArthur, who was holed up underground in a command tunnel on Corregidor just off Bataan’s southern tip, the general wrote a letter to his men, assuring them that “help is on the way from the United States . . . Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being dispatched. The exact time of arrival of reinforcements is unknown as they will have to fight their way through Japanese attempts against them,” but help was coming. They could count on that.¹²

It was a lie, a Judas kiss. The American Pacific Fleet had been crippled in the attack on Pearl Harbor and was in no position to break the blockade of Japanese ships patrolling from the Bering Strait to the Coral Sea. The Philippines was cut off, isolated. Washington knew it and so did MacArthur.

 

EVERY DAY during the lull in the fighting, self-appointed sentinels from various units would climb a hill, shinny up a tree, or stroll down to the water’s edge to squint at the horizon. Somewhere out there, beyond the line of black sea and blue sky, ships loaded with tanks and airplanes, men and food—great floating larders, as some imagined them—were steaming toward Luzon. They were sure of it. Washington had told MacArthur, and MacArthur had told them. Help was on the way.

Naturally there were naysayers, men convinced their country had forsaken them. And there were wise guys too, wags who liked to needle the optimists. (One joker hung up a picture of an old four-masted schooner and added the legend, “We told you so, help is on the way!”)

When the Japanese got wind of this waiting game, the Imperial Army’s honey-voiced propagandist, Tokyo Rose (the name used by several women broadcasters), took to playing a popular ditty on Japanese radio broadcast to the Philippines. “Here’s one for the boys on Bataan,” she would say:

 

Red sails in the sunset,

Way out on the sea,

Oh! carry my loved one

Home safely to me.

 

Everyone talked constantly of a convoy, one rumor following the next: The convoy was coming from Australia, from Hawaii, it was taking the northern route, it was crossing to the south, it was just off shore, just over the horizon, just days away. And each new report, each bruit or bit of scuttlebutt, was an occasion for a bet—a case of scotch or San Miguel beer, a couple of cartons of Luckies.

Tomorrow would bring rescue. America would never abandon them, they told one another. And they held as hard to blind hope as their enemy held to the idea of destiny. Tomorrow, they believed, tomorrow was going to be better than today.

 

THEY WOULD EAT almost anything.

When the canned meat ran out, they hunted and slaughtered carabao, a Philippine water buffalo. The quartermaster set up abattoirs, and the oxlike animals were slaughtered in the cool of the night, then cut into quarters, leaving the hairy hide intact to keep the flesh partially clean, which is to say at least half free of maggots. Once it reached the field kitchens, the meat was soaked in salt water overnight and pounded for hours to make it chewable. Even the best cooks, however, had trouble dressing the flesh of an animal that likes to spend its days wallowing in slime and swamp water. Reporter Frank Hewlett told his readers that he found the taste of carabao distinctive, “just short of rank.”13

Soon almost every carabao on Bataan, some twenty-eight hundred animals, had been eaten, and the quartermaster began to slaughter the cavalry’s mounts, packhorses, and mules. When these too were gone, the men turned to hunting wild pigs, jungle lizards, giant snakes. A veterinary officer who thought birds might make a good meal shot and cooked some crows. “He insisted that they were not bad at all,” a comrade reported.¹⁴

Often whatever the men caught or collected went into a common kettle. When infantryman Dominick Pellegrino of Medford, Massachusetts, went to ladle himself a portion of his unit’s “Bataan stew,” he spotted the skeletal paw of a monkey reaching up from the depths of the pot. “I think I’ll pass,” he decided.¹⁵

Patrols “fished” the streams and rivers with grenades, and the quartermaster tried to organize a fleet of local fisherman to ply Manila Bay, but the Japanese bombed the boats. (During the attack a soldier in a nearby foxhole shouted, “If enough of those bombs hit the bay close to shore we will have fresh fish for dinner.”)¹⁶

Mango trees were picked clean of their fruit, and by the end of February there did not seem to be a single banana left on Bataan. Some men tried eating grass and leaves, cooking them down like spinach to dress up their daily portion of bland rice.

Every morning at breakfast, Calvin Jackson, an army doctor from Kenton, Ohio, found worms and weevils in the porridge served at one of the field hospitals. “The bugs and larvae don’t bother me,” he wrote in his diary. “Most people try to skim them off as they float, but I just stir up the mess and [down] it goes.”¹⁷

Like almost everyone else, intelligence officer Allison Ind of Ann Arbor, Michigan, could think of little save his stomach. He was hungry in the morning, hungry in the heat of the day, hungry at night, a monotony of unrelieved craving and want: “moldy rice . . . tasteless coffee [the grounds left white from many boilings] . . . flies . . . flies . . . moldy rice.”¹⁸

By the middle of February, Ind and others were showing the first signs of malnutrition:

 

In the mornings before chow, one’s legs feel watery and, at intervals, pump with pains that swell and go away again. If you move too rapidly, there is a hint of vertigo. The heart thumps like a tractor engine bogged in a swamp. These not-too-serious discomforts disappear immediately upon eating. For perhaps an hour one feels quite normal. Then lassitude. Between noontime and one o’clock is the worst for me. Seems as though I cannot sit straight, but must hump over.19

 

By the middle of March, well into the lull now, army doctors were reporting that “the physical fitness of [the] troops” is “seriously impaired,” so serious that headquarters had to limit operations. The men simply lacked the energy to exert themselves; they had no stamina to mount long-range patrols, stage ambushes, launch frontal attacks. Some were so far gone they did not have the strength to crawl out of their foxholes or raise a rifle to their shoulder and take aim at the enemy.²⁰

The average weight loss was staggering, between twenty and thirty pounds. “They need food,” the chief surgeon, Wibb E. Cooper, told headquarters. “And lack of proper food is the basic cause of all the trouble.”²¹

Living on a bare diet, the men quickly exhausted their reserves of body fat, then, bereft of the most basic nutrients (vitamins and minerals) they started to waste away.

Doctors noted that the command appeared ever “more emaciated.” Men twenty years old had the feeble gait and haggard cast of octogenarians. They shuffled along head bowed, gasping for breath. Their skin, mottled and streaked like old marble, hung loose on their bones. Their faces were gaunt, the eyes seemed to protrude from their sockets.²²

They felt awful, too. Most medical charts listed the same symptoms: dysesthesia (a burning and painful itch like pins and needles), edema (spontaneous swelling at the joints and in the arms and legs), gingivitis (bleeding gums), hypotension and hypothermia (rapid loss of blood pressure and body heat and the shivers and shakes that go with it), polyuria (frequent urination), and paresthesia (numbness in the hands and feet).

Many suffered from anemia so profound they could not walk. Others were chronically dyspeptic; the enzymes and acid in their empty guts left their gastrointestinal tracts painful and growling. A large number developed eye trouble; their optic nerves began to deteriorate, and men with twenty-twenty vision suddenly became quite nearsighted, saw the battlefield through a blur, suffered night blindness.

The most troubling ocular abnormality, however, was inorganic. Soldiers lost their foresight, their ability to see past the moment. Malnutrition, it seemed, had also laid waste to their morality.23

Hungry men, famished men, think of nothing so much as their next meal. They develop a kind of gustatory psychosis, “a pathological greed for food,” and in their pursuit of something to eat they know no restraint, respect no right, suffer no attack of conscience. “Hunger,” Woodrow Wilson said in 1918 at the end of his war, brings out “all the ugly distempers” in man—man the liar, man the cheat, man the thief.²⁴

 

[Field Memo to All Commands] It has come to the attention of this Headquarters that organizations, individual officers and men are looting supply dumps . . . hijacking [food] trucks [including those headed for the front] . . . and hoarding supplies . . . Anyone caught doing this will either be shot or court martialed.²⁵

 

FIRST THEIR STRENGTH. Then their moral balance. Finally their immunity to illness. On Bataan privation became a partner to disease. Run down from malnutrition, thousands of soldiers were susceptible to the twin scourges that have haunted armies since ancient times: dysentery, which brought on a diarrhea so debilitating that doctors in the field hospitals feared their patients would collapse as they squatted over the straddle-trench toilets, and malaria, the blood disease that burned men’s brains.

One bite from a delicate, dapple-winged female anopheles mosquito infected with the Plasmodium parasite, and six to sixteen days later a man would likely suffer an attack of “ague,” the classic term for the cycle of surging fever, soaking sweats, and fits of chills and shaking that mark the onset of an attack of malaria.

The Philippines was one of the most malaria-infested countries in Asia—some two million Filipinos a year suffered from the disease—and, as prewar topographic surveys clearly showed, Bataan with its many streams and rivers was among the most fertile breeding grounds in the world for the mosquitoes that transport the malaria parasite. Millions of anopheles minimus flavirostris were waiting in the hills of Bataan as the Filipinos and Americans dug in, and sensing fresh prey, the avaricious insects immediately began to sally forth in search of a “blood meal.”

Quinine, the drug used as both a preventative and a cure, was in short supply. By late February most of the command had been infected, and the disease was beginning to manifest itself in the ranks. By early March there were three hundred new cases of malaria a day; two weeks later, five hundred cases, then seven hundred. By the end of the month a thousand men a day were coming down with the disease.

To General Jonathan Wainwright, malaria “hung over” the army “like a black cloud, enveloping a land of men whose bones were lumping through their tightly stretched skin.”

In a handwritten note from the field, another general advised headquarters that only half his command was capable of fighting. The rest of his men, he said, were so sick, hungry, and tired they could never hold a position or launch an attack.26

He sailed at the dawning,

All day I’ve been blue,

Red sails in the sunset,

I’m rushing to you.

 

The optimists still sat cockeyed by the shore, scanning the horizon, but by early March, well into the lull, most men knew, or strongly suspected, that a convoy was not coming.

“Had terrible breakfast—oatmeal and rice and [weak] coffee,” Captain Thomas Dooley, aide-de-camp to General Wainwright, wrote in his diary. “Went to [headquarters] where General Wainwright discussed food situation w/General McBride . . . Very discouraging. Six out of eight of the last [local] supply boats that have tried to get thru to us have been sunk or captured. Rice supply will last 30 days. All other supplies a lot less—some items only 5 days . . . Frankly things look darker now for this force than ever before.”27

The men blamed MacArthur, of course. The general of an army is the wellspring of its spirit, the source of its soul. Men draw on his strength, his courage, his love, and when they are troubled they ask him to carry their burdens, their doubts, their dread. He is the scapegoat who accepts their censure, the colossus who shoulders their worry.

 

Dugout Doug MacArthur lies a shaking on the Rock,

Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock.

Dugout Doug is eating of the best food on Bataan

And his troops go starving on.²⁸

 

That broadside, a balladic takeoff on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” must have stung MacArthur. No quality of character is more central to a soldier’s psyche than valor, and Douglas MacArthur, cited often in his early years for courage under fire, was one of the most decorated officers in the United States Army. On Bataan, however, he had refused to lead from the field.

For the most part he stayed holed up underground on the island of Corregidor, a tiny cay shaped like a tadpole sitting just off the tip of Bataan, square in the mouth of Manila Bay. Fortified with long-range cannon and huge pit mortars, Corregidor prevented the enemy from entering the bay and using the port of Manila. The island had been formed from the detritus of an old volcano, hence its nickname, “the Rock.”

Some of the rock formed a 390-foot hill, called Malinta Hill. A decade earlier army engineers had cut a tunnel through the hill—a shaft thirty feet wide and almost a mile long with dozens of smaller laterals running off it. In this honeycomb of reinforced concrete passageways, beneath tons of solid rock and earth, the supernumeraries of the various army and navy commands worked safely at their desks. At the last desk in Lateral Number Three sat the boss, the general.

 

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Send to Franklin the glad tidings

That his troops go starving on!

 

MacArthur, his wife, Jean, and young son, Arthur, had arrived on the island Christmas Eve. At first they stayed in a cottage topside, then when the bombing became incessant they moved into the laterals. Malinta Tunnel was the army’s communications and control center, its battle hub; only from there could MacArthur speak with all the elements of his command and with the War Department in Washington. For two weeks he stuck to his desk in Lateral Number Three; then, around January 7, he got a note from a trusted staff officer on Bataan. Morale on the peninsula was “sagging,” the officer said. The general needed to come across the water, walk the battlefield, and buoy his men.29

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 comrade.

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.