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Show ST THEY WERE T WHITE W.N.U.FEATURES THE STORY SO FAR: The story of their part in the battle for the Philippines Philip-pines is being told by four of the five naval officers who are all that is left of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3. They are Lieut. John Bulkeley (now Lieutenant Lieuten-ant Commander), squadron commander; Lieut. R. B. Kelly, second-Ln-command; and Ensigns Anthony Akers and George E. Cox, Jr. Lieut. Kelly has told how he was sent to the tunnel hospital on Corregldor, where he met a nurse named Peggy. Survivors from the sinking of m shipload of refugees were brought to the hospital, and patients from Manila were moved there. From them he . learned bow badly the war was going for us. -A member of the tank corps is speaking. CHAPTER IV "What happened to your tank?" " 'We were lying on our side in that paddy, and the Japs would come over and look at us. We played possum in there all day. They tried to open our door with bayonets, but we had It locked. In the afternoon a Jap officer looked at us through the slots all of us lying still, holding hold-ing breath, and then he said, in English, "They're all dead." " 'But we figured it was a trick kept right on playing possum and, sure enough, in about an hour they came back for another look. But we were lying in exactly the same positions. This time they gave a few disgusted grunts and walked off. About an hour after dark we listened lis-tened carefully, and then unlocked our door. Sure enough, they'd gone, so we beat it for the road.' " 'Tell me what became of your shoes,' I asked him. I couldn't figure fig-ure how an experienced soldier would ever let himself get separated separat-ed from his shoes. The kid grinned sheepishly. 'I guess that was a damn-fool trick,' he said. 'You see it had been hotter than hell in that tank, and we were all dirty and tired and sweaty, so we decided to take a bath in a creek just across the rice paddy. But we had to go through mud to get there, so, keeping keep-ing our clothes on until we got to the water hole, we took off our shoes and hid them in the tall grass. But when we got back we hunted for several hours, and we couldn't find that grass clump. Finally we started on, barefooted.' " 'But where were the Japs?' " 'They'd gone on ahead toward Manila. The next night we were resting by the roadside. We heard a noise behind us, so we scooted low in the bushes by the side of the road, and saw more of them go by on bicycles all headed toward Manila. Ma-nila. It seemed to be a Jap reconnaissance recon-naissance patrol, because behind them came trucks and guns and infantry, in-fantry, going by in the dark so close we could have reached out and touched them. If we'd had a machine ma-chine gun, we could have wiped out several hundred, but we only had our 45' s. They kept up most of that night one group stopped and ate chow on the road bank opposite us; we were scared stiff they'd come over and find us. It was hard for the wounded to lie quiet. Our tank driver had rivet stuck in hs throat every time he took a drink, the water would come leaking out and the radio operator's arm was full of shrapnel from an exploding bullet. The rest of us were okay, but our feet were getting damned sore. " 'At dawn we stopped by a native village to collect some shoes, but their feet were all too small.' " 'How'd they treat you?' " 'Fine gave us all the food we could eat, but you could see they didn't want us around. Afraid the Japs would find us hiding there and shoot them too. You couldn't blame ' the natives. So we got out, and spent the other six days of the trip sleeping in ditches or brush clumps, walking nights.' . " 'Were the wounded weak?' " 'Sure, and so were we. The tank driver with the hole in his throat wanted to stop said for us to leave him behind. We were afraid the Japs would get him and we couldn't spare him a gun we had only three 45's for the six of us.' " 'What did you do, carry him?' " 'Hell, no. We gave him a 45, told him he'd better use it now if he wasn't coming with us. So he changed his mind, and decided to come on. He made it, too. But it took plenty of guts.' "None of them lacked that." Here Kelly shook his head. "Sometimes training, often equipment, but never guts. "But getting back to that hospital. hos-pital. I went back to my bunk. Peggy helped me get my arm settled, set-tled, and we talked a little bit. She was a smart girl. Having been with the Regular Army, she knew real soldiers when she saw them, and you didn't have to talk long with these poor brave kids who were so green they forgot their shoes to know what the score was. Here we were, trying to hold off the Japs with less than two thousand regulars, regu-lars, plus these green kids who had really been sent here to polish off their training, plus thousands of Filipino Fil-ipino boys just as brave but just as green, most of whom had never been in uniform until a few weeks before the war started. " 'Where in hell's the navy?' they'd ask me. 'Why aren't they bringing us tanks and planes and more men? It only takes two weeks to get here from Pearl Harbor.' Of course none of them knew what had happened at Pearl Harbor. " They'll be along,' I'd say 'Any day now.' " 'Hell,' they'd say disgustedly. 'We won't see them for six months.' " 'Suppose we don't,' I'd say. 'This place can last six months. Wasn't it built like Malta and Gibraltar to withstand siege?' "Only pretty quick I began to find out how wrong I was. Corregidor had been built years ago, and then we'd agreed not to modernize if the Japs didn't modernize the Carolines. We kept the agreement; they didn't. Anyway, ammunition and provisions were so short the Rock would be doing do-ing good to hold out three months. "A few days after that the nurses in my ward were buzzing around I heard some talk about a party they were giving in their quarters that evening, inviting their boy friends, who for the most part were young army officers stationed on the Rock. And I almost fell out of my cot that afternoon when Peggy, in a seemingly seeming-ly offhand way, asked me if I'd like to go. It was nice, of course, to be chosen, by the girl I liked best, out of 10,999 other men on that Rock, most of whom would have given an ear just to talk to a white girl. But it got me to thinking, too. I liked her, but the other girls had said there was a young medical medi-cal officer she'd been dating pretty steady and what the hell was I? A naval officer in an army hospital here today, gone tomorrow so I t IP . IF - : jKj , ; J rl f txw j ei z ? 1 "Sure enough, in about an hour they came back for another look." hadn't let myself get started thinking think-ing or tried not to, anyway. "Naturally, I said sure I wanted to go. So Peggy said she'd see if she could fix it with the doctor. And after she got through with him, he was certain it would do me good, if I was back in the ward by ten. "Here in Newport maybe you wouldn't think it was much of a party. par-ty. But it was a swell night, with a big moon hanging over Manila Bay peaceful and best of all, the girls had broken out with their civilian dresses. That doesn't sound like much, but one look at them after seeing nothing but uniforms for months was like a trip back home. Makeup too they looked so damned nice you could eat them with a' spoon, and Peggy had put just a touch of perfume in her hair anyway any-way if it wasn't that, it was something. some-thing. What did we do? Well, danced to a portable I'll bet we played 'Rose of San Antone' a dozen times and Peggy and I figured out a way we could dance with my arm in a sling. And afterward we sat out on the grass and talked. I remember somebody saying, 'You think they'll ever bomb this place?' Of course we knew eventually they would, but that night the war seemed a thousand miles away. Only somebody spoiled it all by asking Peggy when this medical officer was getting back from Bataan, and she said she thought tomorrow. "Next day I was out in the courtyard court-yard getting some fresh air," Lieutenant Lieu-tenant Kelly, who was invalided in the tunnel hospital at Corregidor continued: "I was allowed a certain number of hours per day out of my bunk when the air-raid alarm went off, but by now we didn't pay any attention. I looked up to notice that nine Jap planes were going overhead, over-head, but what the hell, they did that all the time, and of course the anti-aircraft opened up just a formality, for-mality, because they were up out of range when all of a sudden Bam! the whole Rock seemed to jump," and we made a dive for the tunnel, because be-cause at last they were bombing us. "It was quite a pasting. Half an hour later a batch of nurses came in in an ambulance pretty well shaken up. They'd been strafed had to leave the ambulance and run for the roadside ditches. A few minutes min-utes later the wounded began to come in all the serious cases went into my ward. They had only two operating tables, so the litters were lined up, waiting their turn, while the nurses pitched in and took care of the minor surgery cleaning wounds, digging for shrapnel, bandaging. band-aging. There was no time for anesthetics anes-thetics except a quarter of a grain of morphine, but the wounded certainly cer-tainly had guts. They'd grab the side of their litter with clenched fists, and tell the nurses to go to it it really wasn't hurting much. "The raid had been going an hour when all of a sudden the lights went out, but in half a minute the girl! had produced flashlights. I remember remem-ber Peggy standing there holding a flashlight on a guy's naked back on the operating table while a doctor probed for some shrapnel in his kidney. kid-ney. You could see her face and those steady blue-green eyes of hers by the light reflected back up from this guy's back, and just then there was a terrific crunching bang a bomb had landed right outside the tunnel entrance and with it a sudden sud-den blast of air through the tunnel. It wasn't nice, and yet I don't think Peggy's hand even wobbled. "Presently the lights came on, and we found one hospital-corps man had crawled under a bed. He wasn't even sheepish. 'You're damn right I was scared,' he said. 'Thought the whole place was coming down on us.' Peggy's flashlight beam on that naked back had not moved. Hell of a fine, nervy girl to have in a war. Or any other time. J "But it was getting on toward New Year's, and bad news began to come from Manila. The Japs were closing clos-ing in." "But very few of them realized it in Manila," said Akers. "I was there with my boat on courier duty from December 13 until Manila fell. Staying with Admiral Hart until the seaplane took him out to join the Dutch East Indies fleet. "You certainly couldn't criticize morale. The average Filipino had a childish belief in us. He was absolutely ab-solutely certain that the Americans would be there next week with plenty plen-ty of equipment. Dead-sure that our American soldiers would throw back the Japanese. Believed all the optimistic opti-mistic broadcasts and rumors. "When a raid would come, of course, they were pretty excitable. We slept aboard the boat, and when the bombs started down, we were supposed to get away from the wharf and out into the bay. Sometimes Some-times people used to stow away, to get away from the bombs. "They never lost faith, though. Right up to the end there were big dances at the Manila Hotel, and you could watch the Filipino boys in uniform, telling their girls about their heroic exploits. And there were plenty of them to tell, too. "But over at the American Army and Navy Club, they knew what the score was. They didn't feel like dancing there. Their faces were plenty long. "Of course the higher-up Filipinos knew the truth. If you'd see one with a long face, you could be sure he was a Senator, or better. "I had a girl there Dolores was her first name, and by American standards she was good-looking as hell. Her father was a Spaniard from Catalonia and her mother was a mestiza. She'd been elected Miss Philippines a year or so before. Fairly tall and lithe, with big black eyes and enough of the Oriental so you'd never forget her face among the other brunettes you know. "Her father I think was a Senator, and the family had a hell of a lot of money. His brother owned a lot of mines. They had a big colonial house in the suburbs. Usually when I was invited out she'd send a car down for me, but the first time I was coming out alone she said never mind about directions and so it turned out. Every traffic cop I met knew just who they were and could point me on my way. So they were really big shots on the island. "Her father knew what the score was, although Dolores didn't dream it was coming so soon. The last time I saw her, just before the Japs came jn, she knew Manila had been declared de-clared an open city, but she thought that only meant there wouldn't be any more bombs. All that night the southern army bad been moving through Manila, trying to get to Bataan before they were cut off, but she didn't know what the marching march-ing meant. That night her uncle, a tough old Spaniard who had mines all over the world, got pretty drunk and almost had a row with her father, fa-ther, the Senator. "The uncle said the whole mess was the fault of this opposition faction fac-tion of Filipino politicians hollering their silly heads off for independence independ-ence no wonder the Americans, if they were getting out in four more years, hadn't socked a lot of money into fortifications. Then he cussed the Filipino politicians out for not appropriating money for the army they'd set MacArthur up with a big salary and a penthouse, and then hardly given him a dime to train and equip an army it was all window-dressing. "He said he wasn't so worried about himself because he owned plenty of property outside the islands. is-lands. But he told the Senator he'd probably end up pulling a rickhsa for his part in this independence foolishness, and serve him damned well right. So I could see there were a few natives who knew what the score was. ITO BE CONTINIED) |