Show THEY WERE WHITE THE STORY SO The story of their part In the for the Philippines Is being told by of the five naval mm its who are all that Is left of Motor Torpedo Squadron n. They are John Bulkeley Lieutenant squadron R- IV second and Anthony Akers and Cox After Pearl orders Kelly to take three of the boats to where they set up Kelly has a badly Bashed hut doesn't dare take timo to co to the as things are moving fast During the first air raid PT shot down three Jap dive Kelly is CHAPTER 11 got back he took one look at me and ordered me to the hospital at But when we got there they told us that beautiful big modern one-thousand-bed hospital had been abandoned There it I don't know how much it had 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 I wasn't so delirious that I couldn't figure out Because with no aircraft or anti-aircraft that big expensive topside hospital was just an unprotected next I remember was down in the tunnel in the army hospital under the army doctor asking me what treatment I'd had as he cut the shirt off my back it wouldn't come oil over my hand any the thing that impressed me most even then was the army nurses There were fourteen of them on the and I hadn't talked to a white woman since we sailed from the I hadn't paid much attention to but somehow the war and I thing made a big maybe it was Peggy i because she was a very cute I A brunette about medium height and very but mostly it was her j green I and a cute way j she had of telling you very firmly what you had to so that you I but just the same you did She started right in bossing me around while she helped cut oil my whole army was listening said that Manila radio announcer who they say was shot by the Japs the first I day they entered the was al-I ways And even more so was from the American i west telling us we wouldn't be that the people knew J we were putting up a magnificent came at eleven at Bulkeley went on had my three boats out there by 11 Funny that old ship had been an I aircraft carrier in the battle of Jutland first boat ever to launch a j plane in actual battle She survives I the whole German Imperial fleet and I more than twenty years later ends up on an American mine halfway round the we got survivors were so thick we didn't have to zigzag to pick them up just went straight ahead and we got all we could although there were I cries coming out of the darkness all Finally our shoulders got so weak pulling them up the sea ladder that we couldn't lift So we'd throw lines out into the dark it was like casting for trout and haul them back with a dozen people hanging We'd just pull them on in scraping off a few and now and then a nose and plenty of on the side of our boat but they were drowning every minute and it was the only Our boat managed to rescue as many as Had lying and standing every place the queerest thing came at the The cries out in the darkness had almost and we were cruising for the crumbs when out over the 1 heard someone whistling a I couldn't believe it But we changed and presently came alongside an He'd been blown way out there along with three life He'd put one of them under his another under his head like a and the third under his Had his hands comfortably folded on his He thanked said he couldn't so he'd been whistling just to kill time until someone came Asked if there was anything he could That guy had plenty ol the survivors died before we could land them exposure and began bringing them into my hospital before said of them was a Filipino boy who'd been second He'd been burned all over except where his shorts had and he screamed horribly when they prayed his They'd put him in the stiff but an army doctor felt his pulse and that man's not so they sent him 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 gloomy talk was getting me worried about the whole and the next day the skipper here came in to see me said R B sent him on courier duty He was looking pretty When I asked him about these rumors concerning the air he said it had been annihilated we only had six and that was why everything was going to The Japs had wiped out Clark and Nichols Fields and also except for a few scattered planes Also they had got seven of the navy's fourteen clipped thern off neatly when they had landed for One of them had been the navy plane which bit Colin Kelly's battleship before he finally got it I couldn't see how they had done until a few days later when they began moving patients from the Manila hospital was the forerunner of although we didn't guess that into In the cot on my left was a Texas a pilot from Clark On the other side was an Ohio pilot from Iba Texas was pretty so the first night I shot the breeze with the Ohio He said he'd been shot down the second day of the His squadron had been looking for Jap planes which the listening devices had picked up out at heading in from the direction of Formosa They'd been up all were almost out of so decided to land and The first plane came in all but the second overshot the His plane was die and he said as he put his wheels on the ground a load of bombs crashed down out of the clouds onto the oth- coastal batteries were having to fall er end of the Of course he poured the soup into her and took off He tried to gain altitude and headed for Nichols when suddenly a flight of Jap fighters popped out of the clouds He turned and headed right for the center of but when he pressed the button only one of his six guns would work the rest were He said don't ask him why ask the guys who designed them or installed them or serviced His job was just to press the and he'd done that There he was with two Zeros on his filling him full of holes they were explosive he had gashes all over where he'd been He said he dived into a near-by cloud and managed to shake but then his motor began to sputter had been almost out of gas when the attack and the Jap bullets in his tanks had spilled the So he headed her nose down out of the and as luck would have it spotted an emergency field But his wing tip hit a tree and the plane cracked mashing in all the bones on the right side of his He'd spent a week in a native hospital on a bamboo bunk without the bones and now he could only mumble to me out of the left corner of his next day Tex on the other side told me his He was also a fighter pilot and his squadron had been at Clark Field flying all morning They'd come down to gas the and the pilots were sitting around on the wings or in their wailing for orders to take when suddenly there was a big bang and the plane he was sitting in seemed to jump about forty feet in the and then back with its wings folded over the The Japs had popped out of a cloud and let them have He crawled out but he said for half an hour everything was in the wildest confusion the Japs circling blowing those grounded planes around like popcorn in a hot skillet dope on the listening devices seemed to he that they had picked up the Japs a hundred miles at followed them in all but then lost when they were fifteen miles off the somebody decided the Japs j must be heading for and j they were sitting all gassed waiting word to take off and intercept the Japs before they got to Baguio as a matter of the Japs were perched in a cloud right over their own waiting to let them have it 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 j that hadn't been properly filled and here he next time the skipper here dropped in on he said that was the dope he was getting that we had only six left Soon it got down to we called the Phantom and the Lone I what's going to happen to told him I didn't said that I'd been talking to the who'd said that we couldn't possibly hope to hold the Philippine that Singapore and Hong Kong would fall unless help arrived and And probably the Dutch East that floored said Kelly I asked him how they were going to use the wouldn't they let us go out on any offensive He said he'd been trying to get the Admiral to let him go to Gulf on a Eighty Jap transports were up there landing and our coastal batteries were having to fall back because of Jap air superiority Jap fighters diving on the batteries and machine-gunning them until no one could take I asked the skipper how the infantry was worth a he strafing is just cutting them to Not only but the Japs are landing tanks a hell of a lot of automatic weapons which arc just what we need and haven't By the time he I was as low as he night who was on night 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 and j j she said a bunch of our tank-corps boys had just been brought in She told me what they'd been telling 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 so I could hear it myself walked two hundred kilometers of them had been sent in to head off a Jap landing near 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 boys said their major had assured them the Japs had nothing bigger than machine guns of course their armor would stop that So they started on when all of a sudden The Japs had waited until they got within good and then opened up with an anti-tank gun which knocked the doors off the lead and because the road was too narrow for the rest to turn around they knocked the treads off all the others except then what did you I asked the about two hundred rounds of and four rounds of way were you which You it all happened so fast we couldn't tell where the Jap fire was coming At the end of five three of those tanks ended up in the rice paddy they were fourteen-ton light tanks two of them with the doors blown and in one of the Jap machine-gun fire had cut the legs off the lieutenant in The others were riddled with holes Our lank was the only one that wasn't 44 what did you 44 to turn it around and get the hell out of But the road was loo and then the tank got stuck in and ended up on its side in the rice paddy 44 did the infantry 44 like 44 they have any 44 rifles not a machine gun in the Maybe they didn't have anything else to give but anyway the major said all they would find up there was and if there were any Jap machine the tanks would deal with So there they being cut to ribbons by concealed machine-gun and nothing else to do but get for 44 all this sending those tanks into a trap without scouting ahead seem like a damn-fool maneuver to I asked the kid major and the lieutenant had worked out the same maneuver at armored school back in the It had worked they thought it was pretty I asked the kid why he thought it hadn't worked this because the Japs were j too clever in hiding their anti-tank I guns and too good Thc-y i knocked the treads and doors off j most of the tanks before they had time to do anything And unlike the roads back in the these were narrow native with rice paddies on both sides you couldn't BE |