Talawan Island is fictitious and not to be confused with the very real, and much larger, Palawan Island in the Philippines. This story is based in part on a true incident in the Philippines, however, when a US submarine struck a Japanese sea mine and broke in half. There were initially fourteen survivors but only a few made it to shore, where they were picked up by the local Filipino resistance group. Eventually they were captured by the Kempeitai and imprisoned in a POW camp on Palawan Island for taking part in guerilla activities. After a bombing raid by US carrier aircraft, the commandant of the camp had the four submariners pushed into a ditch, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. One of them was the son of the admiral who’d been in command of the Pacific Fleet when the Japanese attacked.
There have been many books written about the battle of Midway and for years I thought I knew what had happened out there, but I was wrong. Find and read a book called Shattered Sword, by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, for a different account, different because it’s based on Japanese primary sources.
The carrier USS Hornet was sunk at the battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. The ship was abandoned once the fires caused by Japanese bombing attacks got out of control. Their escorts managed to get almost everyone off and then left her to burn. Two Japanese destroyers came upon the burning hulk and dispatched her with torpedoes.
The Kawanishi H8K flying boats existed as described in this story. They carried a crew of 11, as well as torpedoes, bombs, and depth charges, and they bristled with 20mm cannon and .50-caliber machine guns. They could range 4,000 miles on a single mission and if the seas permitted, they could land at dusk and just float around all night to save fuel.
I chose the name Tachibana as the chief villain of this story because a Japanese army lieutenant general named Yoshio Tachibana was hanged in Guam after the surrender for war crimes against Allied POWs, including the ghastly ritual cannibalism that occurred on the island of Chichi Jima, where the Japanese beheaded captured pilots and consumed their internal organs. To the Japanese militarists, a soldier who ran up a white flag lost all of his personal honor and most of his humanity. Allied POWs under Japan’s boot were treated so miserably because, in the eyes of their captors, they had become despicable creatures for not fighting to the death as any real warrior would.
And, finally, you might think I exaggerated the ocean depths around the Philippines, but the so-called Philippine Trench is 34,580 feet deep at its deepest point, or just shy of seven miles deep. The country has some of the biggest volcanoes in the Ring of Fire, including Pinatubo, which evicted the entire American base establishment when it erupted in 1991 in the second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century.
I’ve personally been to the Philippines often during my naval service, and our family has wonderful memories and connections to those amazing people. My mother and father were married in Manila when he was a young naval officer and her father was the Studebaker Automobile representative for the entire country. She had a Filipina amah during her childhood so my mother spoke a mixture of Spanish and Tagalog characteristic of Manila. My older brother was born in Manila just before the family moved to Shanghai, eight years before war broke out.
My last time in Manila was when I was assigned to the US embassy as the head of a US Navy mobile training team in 1966, teaching Philippine navy crews how to operate Swift-class gunboats. LBJ had given the Philippine government three Swift boats in return for his being able to claim that the war in Vietnam was an “Allied” endeavor. During the at-sea phase of that training we operated their three Swift boats in the waters around Corregidor, chasing pirates. The boats would come rumbling in at sundown to the Manila Yacht Club where I was billeted. They’d pick me up and we’d go out for night operations in Manila Bay. I stayed in the same club guesthouse building where my parents had honeymooned thirty-four years previously.
The pirate problem was real. They’d come out onto the waters of Manila Bay at night and pretend to be fishermen, just two men and a small light in a banca boat. Tipped off by corrupt customs officials in Manila, they’d wait for a specific cargo ship to come through, headed for the city. On signal, a dozen of these “fishermen” would light off 75HP outboards on their banca boats and swarm the ship like iron filings to a magnet. They’d climb aboard, slaughter the entire crew, and then run the ship aground and loot it. We engaged in several nighttime firefights with them; they could outrun our boats but not our radar and our lovely 81mm mortars.
One night the Philippine commander of the three-boat division, whom I was “advising,” got fed up and decided to attack the two seaside villages where most of the pirates were known to be based. They shelled the villages and the piers and then machine-gunned the whole burning shoreline, Magron style. The next day I went to see the naval attaché to inform him of the incident, and to suggest that perhaps our usefulness was at an end. The horrified ambassador quickly agreed and the next day my crew and I flew over to Saigon from Clark Air Base to join a Swift boat division based on the Long Tau (or Saigon) River. I think we saw more action on Manila Bay than we did for the next year in Vietnam.
During the Second World War the Filipinos suffered badly, both from the conquering Japanese and then the eventual battles when the Americans returned to drive them out. They were some of our staunchest allies against the Japanese invaders and the Japanese knew it. Thousands died, both in Manila at the hands of the Kempeitai, and out in the countryside and the outlying islands, but they never wavered. Our history books make it sound like they were staying fiercely loyal to America in hopes of eventual liberation. I think they were simply continuing their dogged determination to evict, one way or the other, the latest group of foreign occupiers.
PTD