Shadows In the Jungle (5 page)

“Good to see you, Jack,” Miller said as Dove and his men, their uniforms torn and rotting, their faces unshaven and sweat-soaked, climbed on board. “Roby and Hall have been fretting about you guys like a pair of mother hens.”

“That sounds like them,” Dove said and smiled. “Now let's go home.”

CHAPTER 2

 

 

 

 

I
n the warm orange glow of the tropical sunset, four PT boats of

Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3 cast off from a small fishing pier and slipped single-file out of Sisiman Cove on the beleaguered peninsula of Bataan.

At the helm of the lead boat, the bearded Lt. John Bulkeley steered his PT-41 out into the open water of Manila Bay. Behind him, the other three boats took up positions so that, from the air, the little flotilla resembled a baseball diamond, with PT-41 at second base, PT-32 under Lt. Vincent E. Schumacker at first, PT-34 under Bulkeley's executive officer, Lt. Robert B. Kelly, at third, and PT-35 under Lt. Anthony B. Akers at home plate.

After a short cruise, the boats split up, each heading to an assigned rendezvous.

Bulkeley continued on toward the tadpole-shaped island of Corregidor, which loomed darkly before him. As he guided the 41 boat into the pier at the South Dock, his stone-cold green eyes took in the devastation that had been wreaked by the relentless pounding of Japanese bombers.

While the boat was being tied up to the pier, a small party of people emerged from the shore and came forward. Bulkeley was not at all surprised to see that one of them was the U.S. Army's southwest Pacific supreme commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Bulkeley and MacArthur knew one another, and, in fact, when MacArthur had been informed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he was to leave the Philippines and escape to Australia, MacArthur selected Bulkeley to take him out.

Bulkeley wasn't happy with this. Since the war began, he had lost two of his six boats, PT-33 on December 26 and PT-31 on January 19. Both had run hard aground, were damaged, and destroyed to prevent capture.

His remaining boats were aging and long overdue for routine maintenance. However, the demand for their services in running messages and attacking Japanese shipping, plus the shortage of spare parts, prevented that necessity. Also, with the fall of the Philippines inevitable, he had hoped to get his surviving boats to safety somewhere along the coast of China. So MacArthur's summons was not welcomed. Still, he did as ordered and prepared for the voyage. After reinforcing the decks of his boats to carry extra weight, he had each craft load twenty fifty-gallon drums of the high-octane aircraft fuel his PT boats drank so prolifically.

“Hello, Buck,” MacArthur said as Bulkeley stepped onto the pier on Wednesday evening, March 11, 1942.

“Good evening, General,” Bulkeley replied, saluting.

He was shocked at MacArthur's appearance. The general's face was white, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Are we all set?” MacArthur asked.

“Yes, sir, as soon as we get your party aboard and your gear stowed away,” Bulkeley answered.

MacArthur's “party” included his wife, Jean; their four-year-old son, Arthur, clutching his favorite toy, “Old Friend,” a stuffed rabbit with scraggly whiskers; and the boy's nanny, a Cantonese woman MacArthur dubbed Ah Cheu, but whose given name was Loh Chui.

Also riding with MacArthur would be his chief of staff, Lt. Col. Richard K. Sutherland.

The party boarded, along with four duffel bags of food and one suitcase apiece. In addition, MacArthur had brought along several cases of Coca-Cola as a treat to the delight of the crews, who had not tasted the soda pop for months.

MacArthur was last to board. Stopping first to face the island, he removed his gold-braided cap and was silent. Then, replacing it on his head, he turned to Bulkeley.

“You may cast off whenever ready, Buck,” he said, and stepped onto the deck.

“Wind 'em up,” Bulkeley said, making a circular motion in the air with his hand. “Cast off.”

The trio of twelve-cylinder Packard engines was fired up, and the seventy-seven-foot craft, released from the pier, glided out to sea.

It was eight p.m. by now, and PT-41 rendezvoused with her three sister craft, who had picked up passengers and supplies at other locations, including the navy's head man in the Philippines, Rear Adm. Francis W. Rockwell, who was riding with Kelly on the 34 boat.

The little flotilla picked up a minesweeper, which guided them safely through an American-laid minefield and, avoiding a Japanese destroyer and cruiser said to be in the area, cleared the bay and zoomed out to sea.

Standing in the cockpit beside Bulkeley, MacArthur watched Bataan and Corregidor fade into the darkness. Off in the distance, red and orange flashes illuminated the night sky, accompanied by the fading rumble of artillery, marking the battle lines.

“Before I left, I told General Wainwright that if I get through to Australia, I'll come back as soon as I can with as much as I can,” MacArthur said, as much to himself as to Bulkeley. “And as God is my witness, I will.”

The seeds of Japanese militarism and expansionism, which by 1942 would give them control of one-sixth of the world's surface, began almost from the time Adm. Matthew Perry hoisted anchor and sailed out of Tokyo Bay in 1854, after having opened Japan to Western trade. Within ten years, the old Shogun rule had been abolished and Emperor Mutsuhito established the Meiji Restoration, which embraced Western technology.

In 1878 the military high command was placed outside of parliamentary control, allowing it to function independently of the emperor. Casting their eyes away from the home islands for expansion and the procurement of needed natural resources, Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on China in 1895 and captured Korea.

In 1904, the Japanese got caught up in a war with Czarist Russia, which culminated in 1905 with the Nipponese navy dealing the Russian fleet a crushing loss at the Battle of Tsushima. By the time of World War I, the Japanese, thanks to an alliance with Great Britain, signed in 1902, took over German possessions in the Pacific, keeping many after the conflict as “mandates.”

By 1921 Japan was looking again at China, with plans to monopolize trade. This put Japan in conflict with America's “open-door” trade policy, and led to the Washington Naval Treaty, or Five-Power Treaty, limiting the size and number of warships in the American, British, Japanese, French, and Italian navies, with Japan, France, and Italy allowed less than the other two powers. Japan signed the so-called 5-5-3 Treaty, even though it permitted them just 300,000 tons of naval ships, as opposed to the 500,000 tons granted to both England and America, but soon was looking for ways to get around it.

In 1931, citing a series of supposed acts of aggression by China, Japanese forces overran all of Manchuria, annexed it, and created a puppet state called Manchukuo.

Their thirst for conquest still unsated, in 1937 Nippon's military leaders demanded the right to send men across the Lugou Bridge connecting the Japanese-held Fengtai province, south of Beijing, to Chinese territory across the Yongding River.

Dubbed the Marco Polo Bridge after the famous early European explorer who once crossed the ancient span, the Japanese wished to cross it now to search for a deserter. Whether this Japanese deserter actually existed or was concocted by the Japanese as a pretext for invasion, or whether an actual solider was kidnapped by local Communist Chinese to create an incident between Japan and the government of Chiang Kai-shek, remains unknown.

Chinese officials, as expected, refused. The result was that on July 8, Japanese artillery began shelling the Chinese side of the bridge, followed by an attack by the soldiers of Nippon. The resulting Sino-Japanese War would last until Japan's ultimate surrender in 1945.

It wasn't just China that recoiled at Japanese aggression. A year before the Marco Polo Bridge incident, 1936, western Europe, Russia, and America grew alarmed when the Japanese signed their Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, agreeing not to interfere if the Nazis got into a war with the Soviet Union. And a year later, President Roosevelt, concerned over the treaty with Germany as well as the atrocities and mass murders reportedly committed by Japanese troops in China, called for a quarantine of Japanese assets in America.

International tensions were cranked up another notch a few months later when Japanese planes sank the gunboat USS
Panay
on December 13, 1937, while it was escorting American oil tankers on the Yangtze River. Japan apologized and paid reparations. But the next year, Japan slammed closed America's open-door trade policy and set up what would soon be called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a supposed cooperation among Asian nations, which, not surprisingly, the Japanese would control.

Japan stunned the Western world in 1940 when it signed the Tripartite Pact, allying itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Roosevelt responded by slapping an embargo on Japanese exports.

Seeing the Western powers, led by America, as a threat to their overseas program of expansion, the Japanese high command concocted an elaborate series of plans to strike at America, Great Britain, and the Dutch, in one bold swoop, starting with the biggest perceived threat, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, now anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

From December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier planes roared in over Oahu, through April 1942, the war had been a succession of Japanese triumphs and Allied humiliations. The world watched in stunned silence as the Western powers, complacent in the belief of their military prowess, were thrown into headlong retreat on a front stretching for thousands of miles from the central Pacific to the East Indies and on into Southeast Asia. Before the Allies could regroup and stand firm, the rising-sun flag would flutter over more than a million square miles.

Within days of Pearl Harbor, Guam, some fifteen hundred miles east of Manila and a stop for the lumbering Pan American Clippers that linked America to the Orient, was gone. The island's tiny garrison of 427 marines and 247 native troops, inadequately armed with World War I weapons, were gobbled up by 5,400 Japanese marines.

Wake Island, another Pan Am stop located twenty-three hundred air miles west of Hawaii, was bombed just hours after the Pearl Harbor attack by Japanese planes based on Kwajalein, 650 miles to the south. The 447 marines and 75 army signal corps and navy men, along with the help of some of the 1,200 civilian workers whom the war had stranded on the atoll, where they had been working on roads and an airstrip, valiantly fought off the Japanese for two weeks as America watched proudly from afar. But it was a doomed defense, and the island fell two days before Christmas.

The British fared no better.

Hong Kong, Britain's China bastion, fell on Christmas Day.

On the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked, December 7 (December 8 west of the international date line), thousands of Japanese of the 25th Army commanded by Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita swarmed ashore on the Malay Peninsula at Singora, Pattani, and Kota Bharu, and began rolling south toward the fortress city of Singapore, Britain's crown jewel in Asia. The British had discounted the idea of a land attack, hence most of the city's formidable big guns faced the sea, as if mocking Singapore's defenders.

The British sent their two most powerful ships in all of Asia, the thirty-two-thousand-ton battle cruiser HMS
Repulse
and thirty-five-thousand-ton battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
, out to challenge the invasion. Foolishly, the ships had no air cover, and on December 10, a swarm of Japanese planes sent both to the bottom, along with the new commander in chief of Britain's Far Eastern Fleet, Adm. Sir Tom Phillips, giving proof again, as if proof was needed after Pearl Harbor, of the vulnerability of unprotected capital ships to modern airpower.

Meanwhile, on land, British and colonial troops pulled together hastily and sent to stop the land attack were easily smashed, and the Japanese were soon shouting a victorious “Banzai” just across the narrow isthmus from Singapore, which they now pummeled with artillery.

On February 8, the Japanese opened a thunderous bombardment and crossed the isthmus. A week later, on February 15, Lt. Gen. A. E. Percival surrendered the battered city and its garrison.

As the Union Jack was lowered at Singapore, the Japanese began advancing on the resource-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. On February 14, seven hundred of the emperor's paratroopers descended on Palembang in Sumatra.

On the high seas, Japanese ships beat up on a combined Allied naval force of five cruisers—one American, one Australian, one British, and two Dutch—plus two Dutch and four U.S. destroyers, all under the command of Dutch Rear Adm. Karel Doorman. In a running series of clashes collectively known as the Battle of the Java Sea, which was complicated by the fact that Doorman could not speak English, forcing all of his orders to be translated before they could be executed, the Allied force was destroyed. Doorman was lost along with his flagship, the
DeRuyter
.

Two surviving cruisers, the Australian HMAS
Perth
and the USS
Houston
, which was reported sunk so many times her crew called her the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast, made a desperate run for safer waters. On February 28, they were caught and sunk in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. A few days later, on March 9, the Dutch East Indies were surrendered to the Japanese.

As bad as the war news was, the one defeat that most rankled America's senior military commander in the Far East, Douglas MacArthur, was the loss of his beloved Philippines.