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Show ISSrpc THEY WERE fT-s WHITE W.N.U.FEATURES THE STORY SO FAR: The story of their part In the battle for the Philippines Philip-pines Is elng told by four of the five naval oflUers who are all that is left of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3. They are Lieut. .Vhn Bulkeley (now Lieutenant Lieuten-ant Commander), squadron commander; Lieut. R. B- Kelly, second-in-command; and Ensignti Anthony Akers and George E. Cox Jr, After taking General Mac-Arthur Mac-Arthur and his party safely to Cebu, In the souths tn Islands, Squadron 3 prepared pre-pared to participate in a "great offensive" offen-sive" planned against the Japs. But our planes and ships that were supposed to come didn't appear, and Lieut. Kelly's boat and the one Lieut. Bulkeley was riding In were forced into hiding. "I didn't have time even to wonder won-der what in hell had become of our big American offensive and the air umbrella, because I had to throttle back, stopping the boat momentarily so that the next bomb would land twenty-five feet in front instead of squarely on us. Then I gave her the gun and started trying to zigzag in that narrow four-hundred-foot-wide channel, meanwhile giving word to our machine guns to start firing. "They bombed us for thirty minutes, min-utes, and the farthest bomb was thirty feet away. We would wait for the bomb release, see it start falling, then I'd give hard rudder and it would miss by a few feet. All the while we had to keep In this narrow channel so we couldn't be beached helplessly on a coral reef, and work our way down it toward port, where presently some of the newly arrived American planes would see what was going on and come to help. We didn't doubt, of course, that they'd arrived. Four Jap seaplanes were after us, working work-ing In rotation undoubtedly those from the second cruiser the army had reported as being around. "When their bombs were exhausted exhaust-ed they began diving down just over our mast stub to strafe us. With their first salvo they killed Harris. He was my torpedoman and also manning the starboard 50-caliber machine guns a fine kid he was he slumped down from his guns and rolled on the deck when a bullet ripped into his throat. So I put in T - : , 'A carried him ashore. Then we went back for a last trip. Only Harris was left, lying where he had tumbled tum-bled into the tank compartment. But the radioman and I carried his body ashore, because we hoped to give him a decent buraL After reaching shore at Cebu Island, Is-land, Lieutenant Kelly turned his attention to his casualties. "I rounded up some native soldiers, sol-diers, who got stretchers, and in these we carried the wounded to the other side of the island where they could be loaded into a launch, putting put-ting them in charge of Sheppard, a first-class machinist's mate, to get them to the hospital. "At this point a banca showed up, and it was a native doctor, the one we had sent Ensign Richardson ashore for, before dawn, for Reynolds, Rey-nolds, who by now was en route to the hospital. So I loaded the ship's papers, binoculars, and stuff into this banca, and with them I shoved off for Cebu. "Halfway over the three planes came back and we tried to hide behind be-hind a fish trap a net with bamboo poles sticking up out of the water. But they weren't strafing now. They were looking for the fourth plane we'd shot down. They scoured the area for twenty minutes. After they left we went on in, and of course I went straight to army headquarters, and met the colonel in charge the No. 2 officer of the island. No, he hadn't heard from Bulkeley, but he'd send out a radio message to hunt for him if he was still alive. And maybe I'd better give my report re-port direct to the general. I wanted to, and also I wanted to find out what had happened to our big American Offensive we had been asked to be part of, and that air umbrella which should have protected pro-tected us this morning. "The general had been having a conference at the bar of the American Ameri-can Club, sitting with some other officers and some civilians who were now all having a drink. Now a general gen-eral is pretty important, and you don't just go barging into his conferences con-ferences not if you're a mere naval na-val lieutenant in command of a little lit-tle seventy-foot boat. So, following the lead of this conducting colonel, we stood off a bit and waited until the general gave us the signal to come on in and tie up at his table. He saw us all right, but he didn't give us the signal just went on talking talk-ing to the other officers and civilians. civil-ians. "Now, thinking back, I realize it was a most important conference. But at the time I was excited, because be-cause I had just come from my boat in which I'd fought all through the war and with which we'd just helped to sink a Jap cruiser my boat which was now lying beached across the bay, with one man dead, another an-other dying, and all the rest but three wounded. I suppose I was unstrung. un-strung. I wanted to have him make my report by radio about the cruiser. cruis-er. And then, although maybe it wasn't my business, I'd have liked to find out about that American offensive of-fensive he'd invited us to join the night before. "We kept standing there, the two of us, while I got madder and madder. mad-der. I see now it was unreasonable, unreason-able, but I couldn't help it then. Finally it embarrassed even the colonel and he invited me to step over by the bar and have a drink with him. I said no, thanks, I had work to do, but I'd have a Coca Cola. I stuck around ten more minutes min-utes drinking it and then, since the general gave us no signal, I shoved off. "I arranged to have the boat guarded. Because I wouldn't yet admit that maybe both it and we were expended now. High tide was at four o'clock. Couldn't we maybe patch her up, float her over to 'Dad Cleland's, get torpedoes and a crew from somewhere, and maybe fight her just once again? "I went over there to where Brant-ingham Brant-ingham and the 35 boat were, taking the stuff I'd salvaged from the boat, and they gave me some lunch as I talked about the fight and what had happened to us, and during it Ensign En-sign Richardson telephoned. He said Reynolds ad died, and they were burying mm and Harris in the American cemetery with a military escort and a priest, at four o'clock. I said of course I would go, and would meet Richardson at the bar of the American Club, from which we'd go over together. "I got there but Richardson didn't show up. I stood around. I was tired and mad and lonesome as hell. Finally a civilian came up and I got to talking to him. He was a very nice guy vice president of the club. I told him our story and he said how sorry he was, and asked if he might go to the funeral. He was the first sympathetic person I'd met. 'Presently a truck arrived, driven driv-en by a Filipino soldier with a message mes-sage for me that the funeral had been postponed until ten o'clock tomorrow. to-morrow. This American found out I knew nobody in Cebu, hadn't slept, and had no place to go, so he invited in-vited me out to his house for dinner din-ner and the night. Before I went, I located our three men who were unwounded. I gave them fifty pesos and told them to go ashore and get drunk and forget the whole mess if they could. (TO BE COWISIED) CHAPTER XIII "They didn't get us then," said Kelly. "At midnight our escape began. be-gan. The destroyer lost me with its light temporarily, so I did a ninety-degree turn so as to pass astern of her and lose her. I continued con-tinued on that course five minutes, heading directly away from her, then to the left in another ninety-degree ninety-degree turn, and I started looking around the ship. "I found Reynolds, my port gunner gun-ner (he was also cook), had been shot through the throat and shoulder. shoul-der. I got him down below and had the chief torpedoman and the radioman give him first aid. "I found our mast had been shot off a foot over my head, so we couldn't use our radio for sending. The port turret had been hit and its guns were out of action. Lieutenant Kelly continued: "Our objective now was to get Reynolds to a doctor. We were going go-ing like a bat out of hell. I couldn't see the 41 boat it was so dark I couldn't even see the shore. I just had to look at the compass and make mental estimates as to how far we had gone in various directions direc-tions since I last had seen land I recognized, and then guess where we now were. I thought we were near the narrow channel between the islands; would another Jap destroyer destroy-er be laying for me there? "Suddenly, directly ahead, a searchlight came on, less than a mile away a Jap steaming full speed at me. I barely had time to give a hard left and a hard right and we went scooting past each other oth-er at a relative speed of sixty knots " before he had a chance to fire a shot. He turned, holding me down with his light like a bug under a pin, and started chasing, blazing blaz-ing away with big guns two splashes four hundred feet away, two more fifty feet away. I started zig-ging zig-ging to squirm out of that light wouldn't let my gunners fire a shot; it would help him keep our position. I was getting away, all right, but he kept firing for ten minutes, although bis accuracy was going to hell. By 1:30 I could barely see his light, which was waving around, searching search-ing the water back of us. "I kept on, wide-open, wondering how we'd ever get in, since we had no charts, it was black as pitch, and I knew coral reefs must be all around us. At four o'clock I slowed down and headed into where I hoped the beach was, taking soundings. The water suddenly shoaled off and bump! we were aground a pinnacle pinna-cle of coral under her belly. Looking Look-ing down with flashlights we could see the, water was twenty feet deep with coral pinnacles all around us about every twenty feet, like a petrified petri-fied forest, rising to within five feet of the surface. "Studying the shore line, I realized real-ized we were about ten miles too far up the coast. I sent Ensign Richardson Richard-son ashore in a rowboat to send an army doctor and ambulance out from Cebu for Reynolds, and also a tug for us. "For the next hour we sallied ship-rocking ship-rocking it, trying to jiggle it off the pinnacle, backing with the engines and finally managed to roll it off. "Reynolds was feeling fine now. I'd suddenly remembered a little present Peggy had given me on the Rock, went down to my locker and brought it up for him a couple of codein tablets and a sedative pill. Now he was sitting topside smoking, although he couldn't drink because the water would leak out the hole in his throat. They'd been short of drugs on the Rock, but she sneaked these out for me just in case I got wounded out on patrol. A hell of a thoughtful present, and much more valuable and useful than a gold cigarette cig-arette case. "Dawn came with a low fog which shut out the coastal contours, and because of all the coral we had to stand well off the coast. The sun was well up but that didn't worry me;1 with air superiority we didn't need to stalk in the dark any more. By 7:30 the sun had burned the fog away and we started out on two engines one screw had banged up on the coral but that didn't matter we were crippled now, but 'Dad' Cleland would quickly fix us. At eight o'clock we spotted the entrance en-trance to the long channel and turned in. "So there we were, fat, dumb, and happy, heading up the narrow channel at fifteen knots, when all of a sudden Wham! It was a hundred-pound bomb which landed about ten feet off our bow. "Then I looked up, and here a second plane was peeling off, coming com-ing out of a cloud. But instead of the big white stars of the American air corps on her wings, there were the flaming suns of Japan! "But meanwhile Ross had shot down one of the four planes." Martino, or started to, but found they had also hit the gun and put it out of action. "But meanwhile Ross, with the starboard 30-caliber machine guns, had shot down one of the four planes. The next plane got Ross in the leg, and also put out his gun. So we now had no guns, only two engines en-gines and a boat full of holes with three planes diving down to less than one hundred feet, raking us with fire which we couldn't return only try to dodge. "The engineer now reported the engine room was full of water and the boat was sinking, so there was nothing to do but beach her, if we were to save the wounded men. I headed her over towards nearby Kawit Island, and there she beached hard and fast. There were about twelve hundred yards of shallow surf, four feet of water over an uneven un-even bottom of coral and sand, and then the palms. The planes kept up their strafing as we lay there, but there was nothing to do now but dodge while we got the wounded ashore. "I went down into the engine room and there was Hunter, my chief machinist's ma-chinist's mate, with his arm practically practi-cally blown off a bullet had entered en-tered his elbow and gone out a three inch hole in his forearm, but he was still manning the engines. I gave the order to abandon ship. It turned out that there were only three of us unhit, so it was a job getting the wounded out while the Japanese dived to rake us. We made the mistake of taking off our shoes, and the coral cut our feet to ribbons as we staggered carrying the men. "I found Reynolds, who had been wounded in the throat during the night, now lying with his hand over his belly. " Mr. Kelly,' he said, 'leave me here.' " 'What happened?' I asked. " 'When the planes attacked,' he said, 'there didn't seem to be anything any-thing for me to do, so I went below and lay down on Mr. Brantingham's bunk. They hit me in the belly while I was lying there. I'm done for. sir. I'll be all right here. You get out the others.' "Well, the hell with that. So in spite of his protests, Martino and I |