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Show ISX THEY WERE T- WHITE y Tv.WsUtZ W.N.U.FEATUftES Lieut. R. B. Kelly; "they'd sent him over on courier duty. He was looking look-ing pretty grim. When I asked him about these rumors concerning the air corps, he said it had practically been annihilated we only had six P-40's left, and that was why everything every-thing was going to hell. The Japs had wiped out Clark and Nichols Fields and also Iba, except for a few scattered planes. Also they had got seven of the navy's fourteen PBY's clipped them off neatly when they had landed for gas. One of them had been the navy plane which hit Colin Kelly's battleship before he finally got it. "Vet I couldn't see how they had done it, until a few days later when they began moving patients from the Manila hospital (it was the forerunner fore-runner of evacuation, although we didn't guess that yet) into Corregi-dor. Corregi-dor. In the cot on my left was a Texas kid, a pilot from Clark Field. On the other side was an Ohio pilot from Iba. Texas was pretty sick, so the first night I shot the breeze with the Ohio boy. He said he'd been shot down the second day of the war. His squadron had been circling, looking for Jap planes which the listening devices had picked up out at sea, heading in from the direction of Formosa. They'd been up all morning, were almost out of gas, so decided to land and refuel. The first plane came in all right, but the second overshot the field. His plane was the third, and he said as he put his wheels on the ground a load of bombs crashed down out of the clouds onto the oth- they were sitting there, all gassed up, waiting word to take off and Intercept the Japs before they got to Baguio. Whereas, as a matter of fact, the Japs were perched In a cloud right over their own field, waiting to let them have it. "He said after the bombing they'd managed to piece together out of the wreckage about ten per cent of the planes they'd originally had. A week later he'd cracked up landing on a soft spot on the field a bomb crater that hadn't been properly filled and here he was. "The next time the skipper here dropped In on me, he said that was the dope he was getting that we had only six P-40's left. Soon it got down to two; we called 'em the Phantom and the Lone Ranger. "And I said, 'My God, what's going 'to happen to us?' " "I told him 1 didn't know," said Bulkeley, "but that I'd been talking to the Admiral, who'd said that we couldn't possibly hope to hold the Philippine Islands, that Singapore and Hong Kong would fall too, unless un-less help arrived and soon. And probably the Dutch East Indies." "Well, that floored me," said Kelly. Kel-ly. "So I asked him how they were going to use the MTB's wouldn't they let us go out pn any offensive missions? He said he'd been trying to get the Admiral to let him go to Llngayen Gulf on a raid. Eighty Jap transports were up there landing land-ing troops, and our coastal batteries batter-ies were having to fall back because of Jap air superiority Jap fighters diving on the batteries and machine-gunning machine-gunning them until no one could take it "Then I asked the skipper how. the infantry was holding. 'Not worth a damn,' he said. 'The strafing Is just cutting them to ribbons. Not only that, but the Japs are landing tanks a hell of a lot of automatic weapons which are just what we need and haven't got.' By the time be left, I was as low as he was. "That night Peggy, who was on night duty, got a few minutes off about one o'clock to come In and shoot the breeze with me. She'd been picking up a lot of stuff, and she said a bunch of our tank-corps boys had just been brought in. She told me what they'd been telling her, and finally said she guessed it wouldn't hurt if I went in' and lay down for half an hour on an empty bunk next to them, so I could hear it myself. "They'd walked two hundred kilometers kilo-meters barefoot. Four tankloads of them had been sent in to head off a Jap landing near Batangas they were to go ahead of four columns of Infantry and pave the way for retaking a little fishing village held by a small Jap force. "The boys said their major had assured them the Japs had nothing bigger than SO-caliber machine guns of course their armor would stop that. So they started on in, when all of a sudden Bam I The Japs had waited until they got within good range, and then opened up with an anti-tank gun which knocked the doors off the lead tank, and then, because the road was too narrow for the rest to turn around on, they knocked the treads off all the others oth-ers except one. " 'Well, then what did you do?' I asked the kids. 'Fired about two hundred rounds of 50-caliber and four rounds of 37-millimeter 37-millimeter cannon.' " 'Which way were you shooting?' " 'Every which way. You see, It all happened so fast we couldn't tell where the Jap fire was coming from. At the end of five minutes, three of those tanks ended up in the rice paddy they were fourteen-ton fourteen-ton light tanks two of them with the doors blown off, and In one of these, the Jap machine-gun fire had cut the legs off the lieutenant in command. The others were riddled it THE STORt SO FAR: The story of their part In the battle lor the Philippines Philip-pines It being told by lour ol the five naval officer! who are all that It left ol Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron J. Thejp are Lieut. John Bulkeley (now Lieutenant Lieuten-ant CommanJer), iqnadron commander; Lieut. R. B. Kelly, tecond ln-commind; ud Ensigns Anthony Aken and George E. Coi ir. After Pearl Harbor, Lieut. Bulkeley orders Lieut. Kelly to take three ol the boati to Bataan, where they let op headquarters. KeUy hat a badly gashed finger, but doesn't dart take time to go to the hospital, at things are moving last. During the first big air raid the PT boats shot down three Jap dive bombers, Kelly Is speaking. CHAPTER III "When Bulkeley got back he took one look at me and ordered me to the hospital at Corregldor. But when we got there they told us that beautiful beauti-ful big modern one-thousand-bed hospital hos-pital had been abandoned. There it was, I don't know how much it had cost, as useless to us as a Buddhist monastery. The patients had all been moved down into one hundred beds in one of the tunnels In the Rock. I wasn't so delirious that I couldn't figure out why. Because with no aircraft or anti-aircraft protection, pro-tection, that big expensive topside hospital was Just an unprotected target. tar-get. "The next I remember was down in the tunnel In the army hospital under Corregldor, the army doctor asking me what treatment I'd had as he cut the shirt off my back it wouldn't come off over my hand any more. "But the thing that impressed me mosteven then was the army nurses. There were fourteen of them on the Rock, and remember, I hadn't talked to a white woman since we sailed from the States. Heretofore, I hadn't paid much attention to women, wom-en, but somehow the war and everything every-thing made a big difference. "Or maybe it was Peggy herself, because she was a very cute kid. A brunette about medium height and very trim, but mostly St was her green eyes, I guess, and a cute way she had of telling you very firmly what you had to do, so that you grinned, but just the same you did it. She started right in bossing me around while she helped cut off my shirt "The whole army was listening In," said Bulkeley. "Don Bell, that Manila radio announcer who they say was shot by the Japs the first day they entered the city, was always al-ways encouraging. And even more so was KG EI from the American west coast, telling us we wouldn't be forgotten, that the people knew we were putting up a magnificent fight." "It came at eleven at night," Bulkeley went on. "I had my three boats out there by 11:30. Funny thing, that old ship had been an aircraft carrier in the battle of Jutland first boat ever to launch a plane In actual battle. She survives the whole German Imperial fleet and more than twenty years later ends up on an American mine halfway round the world. "When we got there, survivors were so thick we didn't have to zigzag zig-zag to pick them up just went straight ahead and we got all we could handle, although there were cries coming out of the darkness all around. Finally our shoulders got so weak pulling them up the sea ladder lad-der that we couldn't lift them. So we'd throw lines out into the dark-it dark-it was like casting for trout and haul them back with a dozen people hanging on. We'd just pull them on in scraping off a few ears, and now and then a nose and plenty of skin, on the side of our boat but they "Were drowning every minute and it was the only way. Our boat managed man-aged to rescue as many as 196. Had 'em lying and standing every place. "But the queerest thing came at the end. The cries out in the darkness dark-ness had almost stopped, and we were cruising for the crumbs when suddenly, out over the water, I heard someone whistling a tune! I couldn't believe it But we changed course, and presently came alongside an aviator. avi-ator. He'd been blown way out there along with three life belts. He'd put one of them under his feet another under his head like a pillow, and the third under his behind. Had his hands comfortably folded on his stomach. He thanked us, said he couldn't swim, so he'd been whistling Just to kill time until someone came along. Asked if there was anything he could do. That guy had plenty guts. "Six of the survivors died before we could land them-exposure and burns." "They began bringing them into my hospital before dawn," said Kelly. Kel-ly. "One of them was a Filipino boy who'd been second engineer. He'd been burned all over except where his shorts had been, and he screamed horribly when they sprayed his burns. They'd put him in the stiff wagon, but an army doctor doc-tor felt his pulse and said, 'Hell, that man's not dead, so they sent him here. It hurt so bad to touch him when they had to turn him for spraying that he finally persuaded the nurses to lift him by the hair on his head. . "Meanwhile gloomy talk was getting get-ting me worried about the whole picture, pic-ture, and the next day the skipper I ocre. came in to see me" said "Our coastal batteries were having hav-ing to faU back." er end of the field. Of course he poured the soup into her and too!: off. He tried to gain altitude and headed for Nichols Field, when suddenly sud-denly a flight of Jap fighters popped out of the clouds. He turned and headed right for the center of it, but when he pressed the button only one of his six guns would work the rest were jammed. He said don't ask him why ask the guys who designed them or Installed them or serviced them. His job was just to press the button, and he'd done that. There he was with two Zeros on his tail filling him full of holes they were explosive bullets, too; he had gashes all over where he'd been nicked. He said he dived Into a near-by cloud and managed to shake them, but then his motor began be-gan to sputter had been almost out of gas when the attack started, and the Jap bullets in his tanks had spilled the rest. So he headed her nose down out of the cloud, and as luck would have it spotted an emergency emer-gency field. But his wing tip hit a tree and the plane cracked up, mashing in all the bones on the right side of his face. He'd spent a week in a native hospital on a bamboo bunk without the bones set, and now he could only mumble to me out of the left corner of his mouth. "The next day Tex on the other side told me his story. He was also a fighter pilot and his squadron had been at Clark Field flying all morning. morn-ing. They'd come down to gas the planes, and the pilots were, sitting around on the wings or in their cockpits, cock-pits, waiting for orders to take off, when suddenly there was a big bang and the plane he was sitting in seemed to Jump about forty feet in the air, and then pancaked back with its wings folded over the cockpit. cock-pit. The Japs had popped out of a cloud and let them have It He crawled out unscratched, but he said for half an hour everything was in the wildest confusion the Japs circling above, blowing those grounded planes around like popcorn pop-corn in a hot skillet. "The dope on the listening devices seemed to be, he said, that they had picked up the Japs a hundred miles at sea, followed them in all right but then lost when they were fifteen miles off the coast. "But somebody decided the Japs must be heading for Baguio, and with holes. Our tank was the only one that wasn't hurt' " 'So what did you do?' " 'Tried to turn It around and get the bell out of there. But the road was too narrow, and then the tank got stuck In reverse, and ended up on its side in the rice paddy.' ' 'What did the infantry do?' " 'Ran like rabbits.' ' 'Didn't they have any guns?' " 'Only rifles not a machine gun in the crowd. Maybe they didn't have anything else -to give them, but anyway the major said all they would find up there was rifles, and if there were any Jap machine guni, the tanks would deal with that So there they were, being cut to ribbons rib-bons by concealed machine-gun fire, and nothing else to do but get for cover.' " 'Didn't all this sending those tanks into a trap without scouting ahead seem like a damn-fool maneuver ma-neuver to you?' I asked him. " 'Well,' the kid said, 'the major and the lieutenant had worked out the same maneuver at armored school back in the States. It had worked there; they thought it was pretty good.' "So I asked the kid why he thought it hadn't worked this time. " 'Maybe because the Japs were too clever in hiding their anti-tank guns and too good shots. They knocked the treads and doors off most of the tanks before they had time to do anything. And then, unlike un-like the roads back in the States, these were narrow native roads, with rice paddies on both sides you couldn't maneuver.' TO BE COSTIXVED) |