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Show mrC THEY WERE IT" WHITE y 'Jf30Ulii, W.N.U.FEATURES THE STORY SO FAR: The story ol their part In the battle lor tht Philippine! Philip-pine! li being told by lour ol th five naval officers who are aU that It left of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron J. They are Lieut. John Bulkeley (now lieutenant lieuten-ant Commander), squadron commander; Lieut R. B. Kelly, second-in-command; and Ensigns Anthony Akers and George E. Coi it. Manila has faUen, and our naval bait at Cavlte Is ion. Lieut. Kelly ha i been In a hospital on Correct-dor, Correct-dor, but has finally periuaded the doctor to release htm. Be has fone out on patrol. They have broken up a Jap landing party and have now come alongside a landing barge which has surrendered after a heavy barrage. later High Commissioner Sayre left on a submarine. It seemed like a good many prominent people were leaving Corregldor. And the army had been pushed back to what we knew were its last and strongest defense positions on Bataan. None of it looked too good. "Of our original six boats, two had already been lost, DeLong's over Subic Bay, and the 33 boat while I was in the hospital she'd been going full speed ahead investigating investi-gating what looked at night like the feather of a Japanese submarine's periscope, only It turned out to be a wave breaking over a little submerged sub-merged Bnd uncharted coral reef." "We came close to losing the 32 boat about that time," said Bulkeley. Bulke-ley. "DeLong and I were riding her the night of February 8, patrolling up the west coast of Bataan as usual. usu-al. A little before nine o'clock we saw gun blasts on up ahead of us in the neighborhood of Bagac Bay, so we put on what speed we could to find out who was shooting at what Incidentally, the speed wasn't much. Because the 32 boat had had an explosion ex-plosion while they were cleaning that saboteur's wax out of her strainers and tanks, so that now she was held together with braces and wires, and running on only two engines. But pretty soon we sighted a ship dead-ahead dead-ahead about three miles away. I was maneuvering to put her in the path of the moonlight on the water so I could make out what she was. But now she seemed to put on speed, headlne ud in the direction of Subic Still later the planes reported the Japs were breaking her up tor scrap. But we brought the 32 boat back safe to the base at Sisiman Cove. Our headquarters there was a reformed goat slaughterhouse about one hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, with a concrete floor. We'd scrubbed it out with creosote. cre-osote. It still smelled some, but was habitable. We'd also acquired a tenderan ten-deran old harbor tug called the Trabajador and put her in charge of DeLong, who'd lost his ship." "Then we all sat around envying him," said Kelly, "because here he was, living like an admiral a cabin, cab-in, a wardroom, a real galley (not Just a hot plate, which was all we had on the MTB's), and even a mess boy who could bake pie. It was big-ship life, and Bulkeley and I used to find some excuse to go every ev-ery night and eat his dessert and drink coffee. DeLong liked it so much he later decided to stay on Bataan rather than leave with the rest of us. "Our plan for making a run for China when our gas was almost gone still stood, and Bulkeley had got hold of some landing-force gear which we knew might be useful on the Chinese coast if we missed connections con-nections with our Chungking friends and had to fight our way through the Japs. So we began drilling our men in landing-force procedure. "This got them very curious. They knew our gas was running out, and we had almost no more torpedoes except the ones which were in the hnnl Rn wa tnlrl them we) were ill PA'C- ! I. j I ra V thinking of going south to Join the Moros if Bataan fell, and it satisfied satis-fied them for a while. We let only two other persons in on the secret-Clark secret-Clark Lee and Nat Floyd, newspaper newspa-per correspondents who had been authorized by the Admiral to make the trip with us. "The food situation was getting tough. Our breakfast was alwaya hot cakes made without eggs Just flour, water, and baking powder and the syrup was sugar and water. We hadn't seen butter since the war started. Then for dinner, it was always al-ways canned salmon and rice, and you don't know tired you can get of canned salmon until you eat it regularly for a few months. We welcomed any change." "The one high spot in our diet was the Canopus," said Kelly. "She was an old sub tender, so slow she'd been abandoned, but she had a fine machine shop. She was tied up at the dock and already had been hit twice by bombs, so they worked her at night and abandoned her by day. But among her stores were barrels and barrels of ice-cream mix and a freezer. And her skipper would let anyone in the navy who came aboard eat all the Ice cream he wanted as long as those barrels lastedthey last-edthey held out until the week we left. "But what we wanted most, of all was fresh meat and vegetables, and along about the second week in February Feb-ruary the first blockade-runner arrived. ar-rived. We piloted her in at night-rendezvous night-rendezvous twenty-five miles out and as daylight came, our mouths watered as we saw her cargo, strings of bananas piled high on her decks, and below, fresh meat and fruit for Corregidor. That afternoon I went over to see Peggy, and they were all busy slicing steaks and candling eggs. By yelling, screaming, scream-ing, and haggling, I got enough fresh meat to serve our crews two meals that week. She was a welcome little lit-tle ship, that blockade-runner made two more trips before the Japs sank her. "But because of Peggy, my diet was a little better than the others. Since she was on Corregidor, she was entitled, under their rationing system, to buy one item per day from the canteen a package of gum, a candy bar maybe, from the little supply they had left "But Peggy pretended she never cared for them, and every time I came to see her, she'd slip me a pocketful. She bought and saved them every day just something to nibble while I was out on patrol, . CHAPTER VII "She was empty except for three Japs must have discharged her landing party and been headed home. One was dead, two were wounded, and one of these two was a Jap officer. "Bulkeley had his 45 in his hand when he jumped aboard, and Immediately Im-mediately this Jap officer went to his knees and began to call, 'Me surrender I Me surrenderl' " "He was talking fast," said Bulkeley Bulke-ley a little grimly, "and he had his hands stuck up very high and stiff, and that ought to stop the myth about how Japs are too noble ever to surrender. I put a line around his shoulders and we hoisted him aboard the 34 boat. "Then I began rummaging around In that sludge for papers, brief cases and knapsacks. I collected, among other things, the muster list of the landing party and their operations plan, before the boat sank beneath me Kelly pulled me into his boat as the barge sank. "The ambulance doctor, glancing at them, said he thought the Jap officer would pull through, but that there wasn't much chance for the little private. "You never know when you're going go-ing to run into something," said Bulkeley. "A couple of nights later, lat-er, I was riding the 41 boat on routine patrol off the west coast of Bataan. When we began to get near to Biniptican Point, the entrance to Subic, we cut it down to one engine, en-gine, to make the least possible noise. Just before ten o'clock, I spotted a Jap ship which seemed to be lying to, near shore. We called general quarters and began sneaking sneak-ing up on her still using only one engine until we got within about twenty-five hundred yards. Then we gave everything the gun and roared in but almost into a trap. Because the Japs had prepared a little welcome wel-come for us, and this ship was seemingly the bait to a trap they had floating entanglements and wires in the water which might foul our propellers and leave us a dead target for their batteries. We saw them just in time, and now we saw they were trying to unbait the trap because that big ship was showing a wake, trying to get under way. "At a thousand yards we fired our first torpedo, and it had hardly hit the water before the Jap ship opened up on us with a pom-pom. They'd been playing possum, waiting for us. But what the hell we wanted to be sure we'd stolen the bait from the trap, so we went right on in, ahead of our own torpedo, and let her have another at four hund 'fd yards. Then I gave hard rudaer and as we turned abeam of her, we sprayed her decks with the 50's, and every man on board picked up a rifle and began pumping at her just for the hell of it and the Japs were dishing it right back, but not for many seconds. Because all of a sudden Bam 1 It was our first torpedo tor-pedo striking home, and pieces of wreckage fell in the water all around us. The explosion gave us our first clear look at her. She was or had been until then a modern, streamlined stream-lined 6,000-ton auxiliary aircraft carrier. car-rier. "But the Japs weren't through with us. A battery of about half a dozen 3-inch guns opened up on us from the shore by the flashes we could see they were pumping it to us as fast as they could load, and they certainly took our minds off our other troubles. So with big splashes all around us, we executed that naval na-val maneuver technically known as getting the hell out of there, swerving, swerv-ing, weaving, avoiding those damned wire nets, and trying to figure out where the Japs would place their next artillery shots, to make sure we wouldn't be under them giving her every ounce of gas we could stuff into those six thousand horses, until we were out of range. 1 think the Japs were getting tired of us MTB's, and risked exposing that ship to rid themselves of a nuisance." "Early in February they started sending submarines up from Aus-traba, Aus-traba, and our boats would always meet them outside the mine fields and bring them In Bulkeley getting aboard to ride as pilot. The subs had news. They said America was building a big Australian base that supplies were rolling down there. The submarine Trout would bring In ammunition for army's 3-inch guns on Bataan and take out gold which had been brought over to Corregidor Cor-regidor from Manila before it fell. The unloading, of course, would all be at night, and then Bulkeley would take them out and show them deep water, where they could submerge end hide from Jap bombers during the day. Quezon went out on one .ubmarine to Cebu, and a wek "Immediately this Jap officer went to his knees." Bay maybe, if she had seen us, to get under the protection of the Jap shore batteries there. "Why had she been firing near Bagac Bay? We learned that later. She was a 7,000-ton Jap cruiser covering cov-ering a Jap landing party with her guns. We didn't know we'd broken up this party at the time. Following Follow-ing her, we seemed to be gaining because she had apparently slowed down, maybe thinking she had lost us. We were closing on her fast now, when suddenly a huge big searchlight came on, holding us directly di-rectly in its beam, and a few seconds sec-onds later two 6-inch shells came screaming over, landing just ahead of ua with a terrific explosion and waterspout. Her searchlight was blinding us and we could only head directly into it, firing the starboard torpedo at that light at about four thousand yards' range. There was another flash of 6-inch guns from the cruiser, and this salvo dropped much closer to us hardly two hundred hun-dred yards ahead. A third two-gun salvo landed just astern of us, and then we let her have the port torpedo, tor-pedo, figuring the range at a little over three thousand yards. "Now we were empty, and the problem was to dodge that blinding searchlight. Before we veered off to the east, we tried to douse it with spray of 50-caliber bullets, but they did no good. We could hardly see where our tracers went for the glare. We could see now she was chasing us, firing salvoes in pairs from her four 6-inch guns, when suddenly there was a dull boom, and we could see debris and wreckage sailing up through that searchlight's beam. There was a pause in her firing-no firing-no doubt about it, one of our torpedoes tor-pedoes had struck home, probably the second one. We knew she was crippled because she had slowed down that light which was trying to hold us in its glare was getting farther and farther away, and about 10:30 we lost it by making a hard turn to the right. Presently it went out It came on again once or twice on the horizon, feeling for us over the waves, but never found us. "The next day the army told us we'd broken up a 7,000-ton cruiser's landing party on Bataan near the village of Moron, which was then in no-man's land, and said their planes reported the Japs bad had to beach her seventy-five miles up the coast she explained. "I began to feel funny about that break-through to China we were planning. Of course the Admiral had ordered it and of course it was the way we could be most useful. But here were all these brave people peo-ple on Bataan and the Rock, Peggy among them, realizing more clearly clear-ly every day that they would never get out Doomed, but bracing themselves them-selves to look fate in the face as it drew nearer, knowing that they were expendable like ammunition, and that it was part of the war plan that they should sell themselves as dearly as possible before they were killed or captured by the Japs. But a handful of us secretly knew that we, and only we among these many brave thousands, would see home again, and soon. "And the more I liked Peggy she was a swell kid the guiltier I felt. Furthermore, I knew if we ever left it would have to be soon. Gas was getting dangerously low barely enough to make the run for China. And so was our torpedo supply. We would have to leave with every tube full if we were to throw effective weight against Jap shipping on the China coast, and in addition to what we would need for this, we had only a few torpedoes left enough for one good fight and that was to come sooner than we knew." (TO BE COST ISl ED |