As Good As Dead Page 2

  The Americans had agreed to a cease-fire, but the Japanese ignored the surrender talks and kept right on bombing into the morning of April 9. One artillery officer told Pacheco’s gun crew that they could either flee into the hills near Bataan or head across the bay for Corregidor. The officer was going to the island, so Pacheco decided to follow.5

  They were just two among hundreds of other Americans who headed for the coast several miles away in search of passage to Corregidor, determined to avoid surrender. One of them was Seaman First Class Bruce Gordon Elliott, a dark-haired teenager with bushy eyebrows and a poker face that helped hide that he was just shy of his nineteenth birthday. On the beach at Mariveles, Pacheco, Elliott, and many others found mass confusion—hundreds of frustrated servicemen milling about with no more boats left to transport them across the bay.6

  As many as two thousand Filipinos and Americans, including nurses at the local hospitals, would manage to escape Bataan during the surrender by taking to boats and barges—or some even by swimming. Yet Pacheco, Elliott, and many other soldiers had emerged from the jungle too late to catch any of the outgoing launches. They found the water dotted with hundreds of swimmers attempting to cross the bay. Some were hanging on to lifeboats or bamboo rafts, or clinging to floating debris.7

  Though it was two and a half miles across choppy, shark-infested waters swirling with dangerous undercurrents to reach Corregidor, Pacheco and Elliott individually decided to join those swimming for the island rather than surrendering to the Japanese. The tides helped push the men out toward sea, but soon they were exhausted. Bruce Elliott had been swimming for about six hours, feeling that he was about to drown at any minute, when a launch plucked him from the sea in only his skivvies. Pacheco had made it only a third of the way before a small Filipino fishing boat came along and its crew pulled him from the water. He and several others were transferred to a larger Navy launch.

  Safely aboard the Navy interisland boat, Pacheco was reunited with other members of his artillery unit. The men lay flat on the steel deck as Japanese planes strafed and bombed the boats bobbing across Manila Bay, headed for the Rock.8

  He and his companions were able to obtain new clothes after reaching the island. New arrivals were assigned to machine-gun nests at Monkey Point, facing away from the hell they had escaped at Bataan. Pacheco was still a free man on Corregidor, but his future did not look bright.

  *

  THOSE REMAINING FACED a perilous path. Even as their countrymen reached the relative safety of the Rock on April 9, tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers on Bataan laid down their weapons, and they were soon relieved of their valuables by Japanese soldiers. Months of fighting had come to this. General MacArthur had long since fled to Corregidor, where he stayed until March 11, when, under orders of the U.S. President, a PT boat whisked him away on the first leg of a journey to Australia. Without their commander in chief, the men had sensed that they were expendable. Frank Hewlett, the only U.S. war correspondent left in the Philippines, summed up the feeling of the remaining servicemen in poetry:9

  We’re the battling bastards of Bataan.

  No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,

  No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

  No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,

  And nobody gives a damn.

  The nearly twelve thousand captured American servicemen, as well as fifty-eight thousand Filipino troops, were now little more than an obstacle to the operational plans of General Homma. His conquest of the Philippines would not be complete until his forces could kill or capture the American troops that remained on Corregidor and the other islands in Manila Bay. To accomplish his goal, his forces needed to move their prisoners of war northward to an area where they could contain them.

  The men who surrendered were from all branches of the service: aviators, mechanics, radiomen, artillerymen, infantrymen, all rates and ranks. There were sailors without ships, pilots without planes, and ground crew without squadrons to service. Private First Class Edwin Petry was a twenty-one-year-old airman from San Antonio whose 19th Bomb Group had been stationed at Clark Field. After his aircraft was shot down over Lingayen Gulf on December 16, he had eluded capture and made his way to Bataan to fight with the infantry. Another Texan, Private Thomas Tinsley Daniels, served as a mechanic and carpenter with the Army Air Corps’s 28th Material Squadron. At age thirty-eight, Tommie Daniels was one of the oldest privates in his outfit, and many of his fellow soldiers who were young enough to be his sons called him “Pop.”10

  Visit bit.ly/2e0gvZT for a larger version of this map.

  Now they were no longer soldiers, but prisoners of war. On April 10, they were assembled at Mariveles and Saisaih Point on Bataan and ordered to march toward San Fernando, near Clark Field. The Japanese command planned to house the POWs at Camp O’Donnell, located at Capas in North Central Luzon. The seventy-thousand American and Filipino prisoners, Petry and Daniels among them, were divided into groups of several hundred men each and prompted down the road along with small groups of Japanese guards. Ahead of them lay a grueling sixty-mile trek that would come to be known as the Bataan Death March.

  Sweat-streaked bodies plodded through heavy clouds of dust kicked up by Japanese trucks, cavalry, and infantrymen who taunted and beat the surrendered men, many bloodied and limping with broken limbs. During one rest period when the prisoners were finally allowed to sleep, Japanese soldiers patrolled the crowd, stepping on men’s faces with hobnailed shoes. Ed Petry figured that he could have escaped during the forced march, but too many of his comrades were sick and needed his support. They had simply refused to believe that the Japanese would treat them unmercifully if they remained as prisoners. Now they were finding out otherwise. The Japanese had a cruel trick of marching the men for miles, then forcing them to walk back over the same road they had just traversed. Prisoners were provided with neither food nor water. Petry’s only water came from drinking out of ditches littered with dead men and animals. By the third day, those who fell behind or were too injured to walk were beaten, bayoneted, or shot.11

  The other Americans could do little to help their comrades, although Army medic Philip Brodsky tried his best. The Japanese had failed to confiscate his medical kit, filled with bandages, iodine, morphine, atropine, and a few other supplies. Each time the marching stopped, Brodsky moved about to tend to the wounded.12

  The Japanese herded their prisoners down the highways under cloudless skies until the dusty road along the edge of sparkling Manila Bay snaked westward for a stretch. Along the way, men were killed for all kinds of reasons. Some were left lying dead along the road with their pants down, slaughtered while simply trying to take care of their most basic bodily functions. Between seven thousand and ten thousand Americans and Filipinos died along the way from beating, execution, exhaustion, or disease. Those who survived had marched distances varying from fifty to sixty-five miles before reaching the staging area at San Fernando, the capital of Pampanga Province. There, the men were crowded into a small area to lie down until they could be moved into proper prison camps. They were given two handfuls of rice and a pinch of salt per man—their first food in five days.

  They stayed in San Fernando until the next morning, when they were loaded onto freight trains and transported to Capas, a distance of about thirty miles. The small boxcars were crowded with a hundred men in each, and three men suffocated in the same car with Petry. Three hours later, at Capas, they were unloaded and started on a six-mile march to Camp O’Donnell, an unfinished former Philippine Constabulary facility that the Japanese would use as an internment camp for the POWs. Along the way, the Filipinos warned the Americans that if they had any Japanese money, they should throw it away or they would be shot, as would anyone who fell out of line.

  Upon arrival at O’Donnell, the men were lined up and searched. Five men found to have Japanese cash were immediately executed by soldiers who claimed that they must have taken it from a Japanese soldier the
y had killed. The remaining men were then separated by services: Army, Army Air Force, Navy, and Marines. Conditions were terrible. Only one small water spigot in the yard served thousands of men. With no medical attention, many died, at a rate of about fifty Americans and five hundred Filipinos per day.13

  Ed Petry, Pop Daniels, and the others who once called themselves “the Battling Bastards of Bataan” had been reduced to masses of desperate souls surviving on mere crumbs. General Homma’s forces were now able to concentrate their efforts on seizing control of the remaining American forces holed up on the Rock.

  2

  PRISONERS OF THE ROCK

  CORPORAL RUFUS WILLIAM “Smitty” Smith was a bitter man. While Ed Petry and Pop Daniels were beginning the Bataan Death March a little more than two miles away, Smitty and some twelve thousand other Americans were trapped on tiny Corregidor Island. Facing a Japanese army that had already routed most of the American and Filipino forces on Luzon, he and his fellow marines were left to fight with little more than old bolt-action Springfield rifles, a firearm left over from the Great War, which had ended the year Smitty was born. The government, it seemed, had never given its men a fighting chance.

  Just four months earlier, when the Japanese wrecked the Cavite Navy Yard, Smitty had manned a .50-caliber machine gun, a weapon that packed considerably more power than a Springfield. In the aftermath of the attack, the tall, lean Texan had spent several days collecting bodies before his gunnery unit was moved on December 20 through Manila and down the Bataan Peninsula to another position near Mariveles. After only a few days there, Smitty was ordered to cross the bay to Corregidor, where a new machine-gun company was being organized. Disappointed to find that the Army boys on the Rock had but a few .50-calibers, he joined a crew on a three-inch antiaircraft gun.1

  On the morning of April 9, Smitty watched as thousands of soldiers and even nurses arrived on Corregidor’s shore, some via boats, others swimming the wide channel. New personnel were assigned to help man various defensive positions. There were plenty of heavy guns on the island, but Smitty knew the American gun crews had little chance of holding off a large-scale Japanese invasion force when it inevitably came ashore.

  General MacArthur had retreated to Australia weeks before, leaving fifty-eight-year-old Lieutenant General Jonathan M. “Skinny” Wainwright as the senior commander of the Manila Bay island fortresses. His headquarters was at Fort Mills, as Corregidor was officially known, but Wainwright also presided over the military personnel on four nearby islands: La Monja Island, Fort Hughes on Caballo Island, Fort Drum on El Fraile Island, and Fort Frank on Carabao Island. Tadpole-shaped and some 1,735 acres in total, Corregidor was the largest of the five islands and lay a little more than two miles from the tip of Bataan and seven miles from Cavite Province. Wainwright’s island base divided the mouth of Manila Bay into northern and southern channels. Called an “impregnable fortress,” it was known the world over as the “Gibraltar of the East.”

  Skinny Wainwright was determined not to give up the Rock without a fight. War was in his blood—his father was an officer killed in the Philippines in 1902, and his grandfather died in action during the Civil War. Wainwright’s best chance at holding off the Imperial Japanese Army now lay in the thousands of American and Filipino troops manning artillery positions along Corregidor’s nearly four-mile length.

  Private First Class Gene Nielsen from South Logan, Utah, was one of the servicemen of the 59th Coast Artillery unit operating Corregidor’s two main sea-defense batteries. Nielsen and his comrades had been under almost constant assault by Japanese forces since December 29, when they had endured their first two hours of Japanese aerial bombardments.

  Private Ernie Koblos from Chicago was stationed a short distance west from Nielsen’s Battery B. He was assigned as a gun mechanic on the sixty-man crew of the dual twelve-inch gun Battery C, also known as Wheeler Battery. Koblos had once had visions of remaining in the Philippines for years, but now he was not so sure. Slightly west and north of Koblos was Corporal Elmo Deal’s Battery A, also known as Battery Hearn—a single twelve-inch gun located near the two-story stone barracks high atop Malinta Hill, at the base of the island’s tadpole head. An expert marksman with both a .30-caliber rifle and a .45-caliber pistol, “Mo” Deal served as an artillery spotter, but in the heat of combat he also helped load and fire the massive gun. Deal’s future plans, including a girlfriend back in Yuba City, California, were looking dark at the moment.

  Corregidor was split into three elevations, dubbed Topside, Middleside, and Bottomside. The larger cannons mounted on Malinta Hill’s Topside area were old by modern standards, originally installed decades before to protect Manila Bay from enemy ships. The island also sported forty-five coastal guns and mortars organized into twenty-three batteries, plus some seventy-two antiaircraft weapons assigned to thirteen batteries, and approximately thirty-five groups of controlled mines to protect the rocky coastline.

  Gene Nielsen, Ernie Koblos, and Mo Deal were relative strangers among the 59th Coast Artillery gun crews scattered about on the Rock, but in the weeks and years ahead, the three men would build a bond forged in blood, sacrifice, and survival.

  *

  THE GARRISON ON Corregidor hung on during April 1942, just as it had since the start of the war. The island was now squarely in the crosshairs of the Japanese military, subject to almost daily aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments. Living conditions became increasingly difficult for the American defenders. Rations were cut to about thirty ounces of food per day, and drinking water was distributed only twice daily as the month wore on. At times, the men were forced to cook the carcasses of cavalry mules killed by the enemy’s bombardments just to fill their aching bellies.

  Men like Radioman First Class Fern Joseph Barta resorted to extreme measures to sustain themselves. Transferred from Radio Cavite in June 1941, Barta was among those responsible for manning the Monkey Point Navy Communications Center at Fort Mills. His job became increasingly dangerous as the fort experienced frequent and intense enemy bombardment and artillery fire. Monkey Point, located on Corregidor’s north beach, was vital to the Navy, as it had become the main communications hub for the 16th Naval District after the war commenced.

  Simply to keep the vital station in operation, Barta’s radio gang was forced to undertake dangerous trips to fetch food, drinking water, and other supplies. He used a supply truck to make the three-mile run from Monkey Point to Malinta Tunnel, an extensive system drilled through solid rock that ran beneath Malinta Hill. The labyrinth of subcorridors housed Corregidor’s thousand-bed underground hospital, ammunition and fuel storage areas, communications facilities, offices, and supply rooms. Twice daily, Barta cheated death numerous times along the journey. On one occasion, a Japanese dive-bomber loaded with incendiary bombs attacked his truck as the men returned from the tunnel with a full load of water. As the aircraft swept in low, Barta ditched the truck, took cover, and braced himself as three bombs landed. One exploded about fifty feet behind the prone radiomen, another ten feet to their side, and another about fifty feet in front of them. The crew and their truck escaped injury, but such runs became more perilous by the day.2

  On another occasion, Barta was caught high atop his radio station’s antenna pole making a repair when antiaircraft guns opened up. As he scurried back down the pole, a plane swooped in low, ready to strike, but it did not open fire before Barta reached the safety of the radio tunnel. His bravery in keeping communications open during six months of Japanese attacks would earn him the Silver Star.

  By early May, Barta could see that future supply runs were impossible. The Japanese had launched their final assault on the Rock. There was nowhere to swim and no way to leave now. On the night of May 3, the submarine Spearfish met the last evacuees from Corregidor. Eluding a Japanese destroyer and minesweeper, the sub slipped beneath the surface of Manila Bay to the Rock, where General Wainwright saw off those departing at the dock.

  The group included
Army and Navy officers and nurses, plus one civilian female and two unauthorized stowaways to be transported to Fremantle, Australia. Lieutenant (junior grade) John Ragner Janson Jr. had a final, tearful hug from his wife, Margaret, before putting her on board Spearfish and bidding her good-bye. Janson, a reservist, had been living with his wife in Manila in his role as a diesel engineer for an American gold mining company. The two would never see each other again.3

  During the next day, an estimated sixteen thousand shells rained down on Corregidor. The once-lush green island became a smoky ruin of splintered tree stumps, blackened hunks of granite, and smoldering bomb craters. Gene Nielsen’s artillery crew returned fire with a vengeance. Weeks earlier, his twelve-inch cannon had shelled only areas of Bataan where leaders felt it was safe enough to do so without hitting friendly forces. Nobody gave a damn now, as persistent Japanese shelling and bombing assaults had whittled down the defense on the Rock. Battery Geary, once sporting eight twelve-inch mortars, had only one gun left by the night of May 4. Nielsen’s crew helped fire that last gun until it became so hot, they could not close its breech.4

  An initial Japanese landing force of 790 soldiers began slogging ashore during the early morning hours of May 5. The American and Filipino defenders on the Rock offered fierce resistance to the first wave, but a second wave of 785 soldiers soon landed.

  Beto Pacheco and Bruce Elliott, who now manned .50-caliber machine guns, were armed with .306-caliber Springfield rifles, hand grenades, and two boxes of ammunition. Elliott waited until the ramps dropped on the landing barges, just twenty yards from his position, before he, Pacheco, and other gunners let loose. Smitty and his 4th Marine Regiment ripped into the khaki-clad Japanese infantrymen with rifle fire, machine guns, and hand grenades until the rocky shores were splattered crimson and littered with twisted and torn bodies.5