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Show gSfC THEY WERE f-S WHITE W.N.U.FEATURES at the coral the propellers and rudders rud-ders had chewed into. "I called the crew into the forward for-ward compartment and told them the skipper had left it up to us. I talked about what the old boat had done to date with them in it sunk two ships and two landing boats. So now, were we going to let this be her end sit by and watch the surf pound her to pieces? Or were we going to get her off? " 'You're damn right we're going to get her off!" they said, and someone some-one suggested maybe we could hire work gangs of natives to help us, whereupon the whole crowd started pulling money out of their pockets and piling it on the table. They'd had no pay since the start of the war, but since they'd been down here in Mindanao, they'd had shore leave and a chance to play poker with the army. The government could cut the cost of the war by just paying the army and then giving giv-ing the sailors a chance to play poker with them. "We hired what men we could, and all of us got to work with them digging out those razor-sharp coral boulders with our naked hands. But there were other boulders fifty yards out. We got some dynamite and worked all one afternoon pounding holes in them and blowing them up. With our money we hired natives driving carabao to pull pieces away, at the rate of one peso for the native na-tive and another for the carabao. "We were about ready now for the test," said Lieutenant Kelly. "Another army tug showed up. We hitched a line onto it, we bridled the wheelhouse of the first tug with a line, and as the tide came in we took soundings. The 34 boat needed five foot of water to float that L J f.: ... ' . f if v ; 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-in-command; and Ensigns Anthony Akers and George E. Cox Jr. March 11 Lieut. Bulkeley delivered to the squadron their secret orders or-ders to take General MacArthur's party and some addiUonal personnel to the southern islands where they would be met by transport planes which would carry General MacArthur to his new headquarters. The weather was bad. Lieut. Kelly is speaking. CHAPTER XI "Shortly thereafter we were supposed sup-posed to make a landfall an island about half a mile square, at which point we must turn in order to make the final landfall which would bring us into port. "With such a wind and sea, we were probably retarded, but by how much? I had to guess at it. Also the helmsman was having a wrestling wres-tling match with the wheel it was all he could do to keep within ten degrees on either side of the compass com-pass course which meant a possible possi-ble error of twenty degrees. We missed the island entirely in the dark, and from then on until dawn I changed course as I thought necessary. nec-essary. Dawn came at six and we saw land ahead, a point which I thought was the peninsula just west of Cagayan, our destination. I showed it to the Admiral, and he 6hook his head with satisfaction. "We were up to top speed now, carbon burned from the motors-, and at 6:30 we sighted the light on the point at Cagayan's entrance. We slowed to let the 41 boat lead the way, as it had the channel charts. "General Sharp, commanding officer of-ficer of the island of Mindanao, was down to meet us, and as soon as we could see the pier we woke up General Gen-eral MacArthur," said Bulkeley. "He shook the salt water out of his gold general's cap, flipped it on his head somehow it always lands at a jaunty angle, seems to go with his cane and looked around with his jaw set a fine figure of a soldier. sol-dier. "Then he said to me, 'Bulkeley, I'm giving every officer and man here the Silver Star for gallantry. You've taken me out of the jaws of death, and I won't forget it!' "Still later that afternoon he told me: 'If the boats never accomplish anything more and were burned now, they'd have earned their keep a thousand times over. If possible, when I get to Melbourne I'll get you and your key men out.' "We arrived on the thirteenth. Four flying fortresses from Australia Austra-lia were supposed to have met the General. One cracked up on the take-off, two came(down in the Australian Aus-tralian desert, and the one which finally arrived had supercharger trouble and had to turn around and go back without any passengers, so MacArthur didn't get away until the eighteenth. "We told the crews to keep quiet, not to let it get out whom we'd brought in, so the Japs wouldn't find out and maybe attack while MacArthur was waiting." "The afternoon we arrived," said Kelly, "Bulkeley told us what Mac-Arthur- had said about getting us out if he could. It was good news, but we weren't exactly excited. For if the air force couldn't get even one serviceable plane up here from Australia to take MacArthur out, what chance had we? "Our job, I knew, would be to fight out the war in the southern islands with torpedoes while we had them, and on land with rifles when they were expended. So better bet-ter not get our hopes up. "The boats were to be anchored off the beach, and before I left mine, I told my executive officer to check on the anchor we were close to the beach and there was a lot of surf pounding the coral. Just to make doubly sure, I went on the forecastle for a last inspection myself. The line seemed taut. I tugged to make sure, and it came loose in my hand. " 'Start the engines immediately! They were started in thirty seconds, but five seconds later there was a grinding scrape one propeller had hit bottom. The other engine conked out, and when we did get it going it was too late, the waves were slapping slap-ping at us broadside, each breaker driving us farther and farther on the beach. "I yelled over to the 41 boat to get under way and give us a tow but by the time we'd tied her line onto ours, we were stuck hard and fast. We worked furiously four hours until the tide had gone out, and by midnight we were solid as concrete, in water so shallow that now there were only thru feet of water aft and less than a foot forward. Impossible Im-possible to get off that night. I went to bed disgusted. "Next morning I was up at five and there she was high and dry except ex-cept for six inches of water at her stern, and a crowd of natives gawking. gawk-ing. It all happened because the anchor shackle had parted the threads stripped. It was the old story continuous usage and no replacement re-placement of parts. "Sunday, we were again up at iawn. We had persuaded the army to lend us a sergeant and a work- Ing party of native troops, and wc started digging and pouninc away too risky. But Soriano said as long as I was here, maybe we could go over to the President's home it was about forty-five kilometers away and he might change his mind. We went ripping over there in Sariano'i car at sixty miles an hour. Quezon was up, dressed, and considerably interested. He listened to us, looked me over very carefully I had a long black beard then, which must have been quite impressive and finally said he'd go. (Later on when he saw me in Melbourne, shaved, he said he'd never disregarded Wain-wright's Wain-wright's orders if he'd known he was riding with a mere child of thirty.) Anyway, Quezon and his family were loaded into cars and we were off. "Meanwhile I'd left Akers on patrol pa-trol outside the harbor. If a Jap destroyer came nosing around, I didn't want him to cut off our retreat re-treat and figured Akers could handle han-dle him." "I was riding back and forth, about two miles offshore in my 35 boat," said Akers, "keeping my eyeballs eye-balls peeled for any of these seven Jap destroyers, when all of a sudden sud-den there was a thud and a splintering splinter-ing noise we had crashed into a submerged object, a raft with metal on it apparently, which ripped a twenty-foot strip out of our bow. Water came pouring in, and we got busy with buckets and pump " " and kept right on with your patrol " said Bulkeley "which took plenty of guts." "The water kept gaining on us, but we thought we could hold it. until Bulkeley got back with Quezon Que-zon to the pier, although I knew we could never get her back to Mindanao Minda-nao in that condition. When I saw the lights of the car I figured it was safe to come into the harboi. She was sinking fast then, so we left her in a place where she would drift on the sand and in the morning morn-ing the army could salvage her machine ma-chine guns. Then we all climbed aboard the 41 boat with Bulkeley and the . Quezon party. You might say that was the end of the 35 boat, and yet it wasn't quite, although she fought her last fight. Bulkeley was working frantically to keep the squadron together. A few days later lat-er he came over, plugged the hole temporarily, and towed her back to Cebu, where we hoisted her on the marine railway for repairs. We burned her just before the Japs came into the town." "The trip back with Quezon was as rough as I'll ever see," said Bulkeley. "We left at three o'clock with one hundred twenty miles to go before dawn. At four o'clock a big sea landed us a punch in the jaw which knocked two torpedoes loose in their tubes and instantly they started a hot run a terrific hissing of compressed air, the propellers pro-pellers grinding, it sounded like the end of the world. "In a situation like that," said Bulkeley. "The logical thing is to get them out by firing an impulse charge touch off some black powder pow-der in the rear of the tube which sends them scooting. But we were having trouble with the mechanism it took a minute to get this done, and meantime the two aft torpedoes were sticking out of the tubes so far they seemed about to fall, so the two torpedomen, Houlihan and Light, got out on them with their feet, hanging hang-ing on by their hands to the forward for-ward tubes, and tried to kick them loose. They couldn't, but they certainly cer-tainly impressed President Quezon, who, when he got to Australia, gave them the Distinguished Conduct Star of the Philippines for what they did that night, as well as to Ensign Cox and me. And it was a ticklish job for the torpedomen too. Before we blew the torpedoes out, their back ends, where their motors are, turned pink and then bright red from the heat. On a normal run, of course, the surrounding water keeps them cool. But out of the water, they're not nice things to crawl around on. "At first President Quezon didn't understand what was going on, and asked why we were getting ready to fire the two torpedoes. Not wanting want-ing to worry him unnecessarily, I said we were just firing them at the enemy, who was near by. When we got him ashore at Oroquieta, I explained ex-plained that we'd really been in quite a dangerous situation. "We found a passage through the coral reef outside Oroquieta just at dawn and found General Sharp waiting in his car. In order not to be recognized, Quezon tied a red bandanna over his face below his eyes. But the natives all knew him in spite of it hats were waving from the sidewalk as he rode off down the street," "We missed it all," said Kelly, "because we were up there in Ana-ken Ana-ken trying to repair the crumpled steel in our hind end at that little oversize garage back among the bamboo which they called a machine ma-chine shop. Native divers, holding their breath, took off the struts and shafts of the rudders and the propellers. pro-pellers. We tried to pound the propellers pro-pellers back into shape with hammers ham-mers on palm logs, while the proprietor propri-etor did his best to straighten the rest in his machine shop. "Finally there was a trial run. She'd make only 12 knots a fraction frac-tion of her normal speed and the vibration was terrible; you'd think someone had packed an earthquake in our lazs-et. (TO BE COTIXUED) "All of us got to work digging out those coral boulders." meant we'd had to dig a two-foot hole under her had we done it? "High tide was nine o'clock at night. At 8:45 the two tugs started a steady pull; she didn't budge. The water churned as we took soundings. sound-ings. As nine approached, we signaled sig-naled the tugs to give everything they had. At 9:03 the 34 gave a sudden lurch she was free and would fight once more! But first something had to be done about her back end rudders, struts, and propellers pro-pellers were a jumble of bent steel. "Before he left for Del Monte the skipper had told us he'd heard of a little machine shop up the coast at Anaken which might possibly have tools to straighten out steel if by some miracle we got her free. So we begged a tug from an army colonel to tow us up there. We were gone ten days, and I missed one of the high spots of the whole campaign while we were gone." "It wasn't much," Bulkeley insisted. in-sisted. "Just one of those things where they thank you if you do it, but give you hell if you fail. The army called me in and said that President Quezon was over on Ne-gros Ne-gros Island, and if he could be brought over here, they hoped to get him to Australia by plane. The trip to Negros was risky seven Jap destroyers were loose in the vicinity. Probably to cut off Quezon's escape. So they weren't going to order it "So we left at seven o'clock I was in the 41 boat and Akers was commanding the 35. Off Apo Island, we sighted one Jap destroyer, but luckily she didn't see us and we could dodge around the island in time. It was one o'clock when we entered Dumaguete it was pitch-dark; pitch-dark; both the town and the harbor were blacked out. We had no chart I'd never been there before and when we pulled up to the pier no President! However, his aide. Major Ma-jor Soriano, was there to meet us. He said three hours ago, after we had already left Mindanao. Quezon had got a telegram from General Wainwright ordering him to cancel the trip there were so many Jap craft in the neighborhood it was |