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Show SSSrpr THEY WERE PT ss WHITE W.N.U.FEATURES beer, to celebrate on. But Peggy had been preparing. The island was on two meals a day, but she'd managed man-aged to hold bock a couple of apples ap-ples and .a whole box of marsh-mallows. marsh-mallows. That was our New Year's Eve supper, and I'll bet that yours, wherever you had it, couldn't have tasted any better. "Running any kind of romance, no matter how mild, was a real problem prob-lem on Corregidor. About the best place to sit was right down where we were, at the tunnel's mouth. But the road ran right in front of it, and every five minutes an army truck would barge tactlessly around the curve, shining its dimmed-down headlights right on you. Then for another three minutes you were choking with dust. If you got tired of this and tried to go for a walk, you'd hardly get started when you would realize that eleven thousand men were trying to sleep all over that little island, and if you went far, you would step on most of them in the dark, and not many of them would thank you for it. There wasn't an unoccupied square foot anywhere. any-where. "We proved that later on when the doctor prescribed walks for me to build back my strength, because be-cause I'd lost thirty pounds and Peggy was assigned to go along. The troops swarmed on that island every pond was crowded with them bathing, and I would always have to go ahead to take a look J? v, ' I try ' 1 v . - , x -i T11K STORY SO FAR : The story of their part In the battle for the Philippines Philip-pines Is btlng told by four of the five naval officers who are all that Is left of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3. They are I. lent. John liulkeley (now Lieutenant Commander), squadron commander; I.ieut. R. B. Kelly, second-in-command; and Ensigns Anthony Akers and (Jeorje E. Cox Jr. Lieut. Kelly, sent to the tunnel tun-nel hospital on CorreKidnr, learned from the wounded there how badly the war was coing for us. Cavite, our big naval base, was gone and our air lorce nearly wiped out. While he was there the hospital hos-pital was bombed. Ensign Akers is telling tell-ing some of bis experiences before Manila Ma-nila fell. CHAPTER V "Twelve hours before the Japs entered en-tered the town I was sent back into Manila to pick up the remnants. I had just eighty gallons of gas to go those thirty miles finally got back with ten. A curious thing happened during those closing hours; nobody had given orders to blow up the oil reserves. Maybe some of them belonged be-longed to private companies; it would go against a business man's grain to blow up good oil. Finally a little junior-grade naval lieutenant noticed it. He had no authority, but he gave orders he had no right to give, and presently the oil was blazing. blaz-ing. I hear he got a Navy Cross for doing it. "I was in Manila about that time," said Cox. "A big air attack was going go-ing on, although it had already been declared an open city. For that reason I had gone in with the guns on my boat with their canvas covers on for welfare reasons. Yet, open city or not, the big air raid was on streets deserted except for a few people running nowhere in particular particu-lar like crazy, planes crisscrossing the sky above. The big church, about a mile from shore, was just beginning to burn. In the harbor, boats were burning and sinking on all sides five and ten-thousand ton-ners. ton-ners. But not a single shot was fired at the planes which came down as low as five hundred feet. "I went up on into the city, and everywhere people were" kind and helpful. The Japs were right outside out-side the town, and yet the storekeepers store-keepers would give me anything we Americans needed without either money or a voucher just sign a paper, that was all. They trusted us." "I took my boat into the harbor just as the Japs were entering the city," said Bulkeley. "It was night, and we could see the town burning a huge death-pall of smoke hanging hang-ing above and oil six inches deep over the water. It looked like doom hanging over a great city, and it was. Made you feel bad. We stayed out there from nine o'clock at night until about three in the morning. Didn't dare go ashore, and anyway our job was to destroy harbor shipping ship-ping so what was left of it wouldn't fall into Jap hands." "I had to leave all my spare uniforms uni-forms in my locker there, damn them," said Akers. "I hope none of them fit." "Watching them take over made you feel pretty sick," said Bulkeley. "We finished up and started home, to get back before dawn, now and then looking back at the fires over tlie water. Every time it made us sore." "It was a tough New Year's Eve for me, too," said Kelly, "because we knew more or less what was going go-ing on. Then there was another reason. rea-son. Some of the army officers were throwing a little New Year's party with the nurses that night, and since this medical officer Peggy had been going with was just back from Bataan, of course I knew where she'd be. "Along in the evening after sunset sun-set I walked out to the mouth of the tunnel and sat down, to watch the twilight of the old year die away. It had been a tough year, but the one ahead looked worse. And here was I, useless for the war, in an army hospital. From away oft I could hear them playing the portable at the officers' party, and I remembered remem-bered how cute Peggy had looked in her civilian dress when she danced, and that didn't help any. Pretty soon one of the other nurses I knew, Charlotte, came out and sat down near me. She wasn't at the party because she had to go on duty soon, but that didn't matter, because her boy friend had just been wounded three days before, and she was worried wor-ried sick about him. "Just then I noticed someone sitting sit-ting down on the other side of me I turned and, by George, it was Peggy. Peg-gy. Not in uniform, either. She was wearing that cute cool-looking cotton-print civilian dress. "I couldn't figure it. 'Didn't you like the party?' I asked. 'Wasn't it any good?' " 'I don't know,' she said. 'I didn't go to the party.' " 'Weren't you asked?' " 'Yes.' she said. 'I was asked. But it was New Year's, you see, and I thought it might be nice here.' "Not very many nice things happen hap-pen to you during a war, but this was about the nicest that ever happened hap-pened to me then, or any other time. It made me feel so good that between be-tween the two of us, we managed to get Charlotte cheered up. She had to go back on duty presently, and she managed to sneak us out a couple cou-ple of fairly cold bottles of Pabst Chungking cabled back that it could be done. "They said the Japs held the Swa-tow Swa-tow region thinly at no point did they go more than ten miles inland. So, at an agreed time, and at an agreed rendezvous on the coast, Chungking would send a raiding party down to fight its way to the beach and meet us. "There we would burn our boats now useless with all torpedoes expended ex-pended against Jap targets. The Chinese couldn't hold that point long but long enough to hustle us through that ten-mile Jap-held strip onto free Chinese soil. There trucks would take us to the nearest airfield, air-field, we would fly to Chungking, and from there a four-motored American ferry-command plane would bring us back to the States. "Where was the flaw? We couldn't see one, unless somehow it leaked out. Besides myself, only four living liv-ing people knew. They were De-Long De-Long of our squadron, Captain Ray, chief of staff, Colonel Wong, and of course the skipper here, who had worked out every detail. "But before we left we knew there would be plenty of action ahead for us here, and I told Bulkeley I was crazy to get out -of this hospital, and asked for his help. If they'd let me get back to duty, I'd agree to anything promise to soak my hand for so many hours a day anything any-thing they said, just to get back even on a semiduty status. "So we staged it for the . next morning, when the ward doctor would be dressing my hand at about the same time the head surgeon made his rounds. We tackled him. I made my talk, and he seemed to waver. 'Tell this bird you need me,' I said to the skipper. 'We really do,' said Bulkeley, but just then Peggy overheard and queered the whole thing. 'Certainly not!' she said. 'You can't let him go back to duty with his hand wide-open!' That swung him back. 'Duty!' he growled. 'Who said anything about duty? Two weeks of it and you'd lose your whole arm.' "I tried to argue point out that if the MTB's went out on a mission, I could hold on with one arm as well as two, but Peggy had done it, and now he wouldn't listen. " 'One of these days you're going go-ing to find an empty bunk,' I said. I was gloomy all that next week, but Peggy said I was a fool. That there were plenty of well, fit men to do my job. And that if I hadn't been so damned stubborn in the first place, and had got that hand treated in time, I'd never have come to the hospital, and never met her, and she would never have been able to break up my plan to get out, so it was all my fault! "She's always had that cute way of seeming to storm at you and dress you down, so that you ended up by grinning and couldn't stay mad at anything long. "So it went along for another week, she leading me out for walks every day to get some of those thirty thir-ty pounds back, and then one day we returned to find that Bulkeley had been by looking for me said he was going out on a raid that night, up to Subic Bay looking for a Jap cruiser, that he'd waited hoping to take me, but finally had to leave. "It set me almost crazy. If I hadn't been out on that damned health tour with a pretty girl, I wouldn't have missed the raid! So here I was while my gang was up there tangling with a cruiser, maybe may-be getting killed, because the Japs had Subic Bay so thick with guns that it was almost suicide to go in. "All that night there was no news. I was up at 5:30 'Any dope from the torpedo boats?' still nothing. But at seven they said, yes, Bulkeley Bulke-ley had come back, managed to sink a cruiser and get away, but the other boat was missing probably proba-bly lost." "It was a job we did for the Army," explained Lieutenant Bulkeley Bulke-ley (describing the historic attack of his P. T. Boat in Subic Bay mentioned.) men-tioned.) "A couple of Jap ships, one of them an Imperial Navy auxiliary aux-iliary cruiser with 6-inch guns had been shelling our 155-millimeter emplacements on Bataan blasting them with heavy stuff. The major in charge had been wondering how to get rid of them and had phoned Admiral Rockwell, who gave us permission to tackle the job. We knew they were based in Subic Bay, probably in Port Binanga. Subic is on the west coast of Luzon, just north of Bataan. I decided to send two boats the 31 boat, which was Lieutenant DeLong's, and the 34 boat, which was Kelly's, now commanded com-manded by Ensign Chandler. I went along in it for the hell of it. "We tested everything tuned the motors, greased torpedoes, and got under way at nine o'clock, chugging north along the west coast of Bataan. Ba-taan. It was very rough. We throttled throt-tled down to thirty knots, and even then we were shipping water, but we got off the entrance to Subic Bay about half an hour after midnight. Here, according to plan, the two boats separated. DeLong in the 31 boat was to sweep one side of Subic Bay and I the other. We were to meet at Port Binanga. at the end. If something happened and we didn't meet there, then we were to rendezvous at dawn just outside the mine fields of Corregidor. (TO BE COXTMCED) "Yet, open city or not, the big air raid was on." over hilltops and be sure Peggy wouldn't surprise them. "Meanwhile Bulkeley was reporting report-ing to the Admiral daily and was formulating a plan which he would talk over with me, as I was his second officer for what we would do when our gas ran out. We had damned little left, and the army couldn't spare us any. "Our first plan was, when we got down to our minimum, to get out to Australia. The navy patrol bombers had planted caches of gasoline among the islands like stepping-stones, stepping-stones, and the Admiral gave us their location. But the first step-plngstone step-plngstone was Singapore, and the Japs were working their way down the peninsula, closer and closer to it Could we get there first? Of course we wouldn't leave the Philippines Philip-pines until all of our torpedoes were gone and we had just enough gas left to make the final run. But then, as you know, Singapore fell and also the southern islands Celebes and Zamboanga. The route with the cached gas was closed that plan was out. "So then we said, who wanted to go to Australia anyway? Our job was to defend Manila Bay wasn't that our part in the war plan? Yet even then it kept coming up: suppose sup-pose the worst came to the worst and Luzon folded up the whole archipelago ar-chipelago even Java what then? "Then Bulkeley here hit on a real plan. When our gas was down to just what we could carry on our decks, instead of waiting around to get captured by the Japs, we'd take our boats to China to continue the war. At first glance you'd say that was crazy the Japanese holding most of the Chinese coast but not the way the skipper had it thought out. He knew China from the years he'd spent out there on a gunboat while I was there on a destroyer. "The Japs were closing in on Hong Kong that was fine for us! We'd make our dash shoot our last few remaining fish at their gathered transports just where they least expected ex-pected an attack, and then head north toward the region of Swatow. "Of course the Japs held that coast too, but Bulkeley had worked out an answer, all in the utmost secrecy. He'd gotten in touch with Colonel Wong, the Chinese military observer. Wong had cabled Chungking Chung-king to investigate the vicinity. |