Historical shrines often become diminished by mundane surroundings. One thinks of Saint Peter's in Rome and Boston's Bunker Hill. Still, it is jarring, when driving to the port where the United States entered World War II, to find a prosaic green-and-white freeway sign, exactly like those on the American mainland, directing drivers to:
90 EAST
PEARL HARBOR
Following it, and instructions phoned to me at the Halekulani by CINCPAC, I come to a naval complex of moors and piers, fringed by palms warped by millennia of offshore winds. Elsewhere commercial launches leave hourly for tours of the harbor, but I am booked on a military VIP junket. Judging by my fellow passengers, almost anyone can be a VIP. There are young boys in T-shirts chewing bubble gum; middle-aged, hennaed, hairnetted women; gross men in riotous aloha shirts. They all seem to be carrying Polaroids or Instamatics. A pretty blonde, whose parents must have been teenagers, if not younger, at the time of the great attack here, appears wearing a petty officer's rating chevrons and calls us to order. Before we leave, she says, we are going to see a short motion picture. She leads us into a Quonset hut and the lights go down.
The movie, an NBC documentary, is suggestive of the March-of-Time style and was probably spliced from film clips shortly after the war. The narrator's voice is stentorian; the crashing score is by Richard Rodgers; there is a lot of Japanese footage captured after the war. Its chief interest is in what it omits. There isn't a single reference to U.S. bungling. Much is made of the fact that the Japs missed U.S. oil reserves, enough for two years, and dockyard repair facilities. At the end, with Rodgers's music soaring triumphantly, American warships steam out into the twilight to wreak vengeance on the deceitful enemy. As the lights are turned up, one almost feels that the Pearl Harbor raid was an American victory. Judging by their comments as we file out, the other VIPs are impressed. One recalls that the American navy has always been attentive to its reputation. Especially remembered is the alacrity with which, after the raid, the title of the commanding admiral here was changed to Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), from Commander in Chief, United States (CINCUS).
Shepherding us aboard the VIP launch, our blond seawoman warns us that no pictures may be taken of the port's nuclear submarines, lest they fall into the hands of unfriendly powers. Then we shove off, and she begins her spiel. Little of it is new to me, so I let my attention wander. Ford Island is lush and unpopulated, its runway too short to accommodate today's jets. Floating markers show where each battleship was anchored that December 7. A wood-and-rusted-iron relic pinpoints the location of the Utah, which went bottom-up at 8:12 A.M. on the morning of the raid. The chief point of interest is the Arizona memorial. It is quite lovely, a graceful dipping concrete arch honoring the 1,102 U.S. bluejackets who lie entombed below. (Why wasn't the ship raised? They tried. Two navy divers went down and applied acetylene torches to the hull; accumulated gases within exploded, killing both of them.) Peering down, you can see the rusting forecastle, over whose jutting mast, above the water, the colors are raised and lowered each day.
The VIP passengers swarm around, babbling excitedly. This is distasteful, but not peculiarly American. I have seen the same twittering at European war memorials. It is absent in civilian cemeteries. But scenes where men died violently are somehow stimulating.
The nuclear submarines which we cannot photograph are, in fact, unphotogenic. They are indeed ugly, looking uncannily like sharks. Swinging at anchor in various coves are slate-gray guided-missile cruisers and fast frigates, none of them interesting to a necromancer like me. But I jerk upright as we dart by one inlet. Moored there are the last ships I expected to see in Pearl Harbor — two spanking-new destroyers flying the Rising Sun battle ensign of the Empire of Japan. Ashore, I make inquiries and am told that, yes, I saw what I thought I saw. In fact, Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl's officers' mess. And, my informant adds, they are very polite. Naturally. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.
At 3:00 A.M. in my comfortable Halekulani bed, my eyes pop open. The lean, hard, dreamland Sergeant in me has been leering sardonically, recalling the loudmouthed tourists, Hotel Street's smut, the navy's cover-up movie, and the welcome mat for Hirohito's seafarers. That will be the Sergeant's attitude every night — and he will come every night — during the early stages of my trip. If I rarely mention him, it is because his performance has become as unvaried as a cult rite. He gloats and glares and smirks cynically. I have begun to realize that it will take a great deal, a fire storm of passion, to exorcise him.
In Honolulu the old man has no answer for the Sergeant. His experiences here have shaken him. Somehow Hawaii hasn't stirred memories of the blows inflicted on that distant day of infamy. And I think I know why. The answer, I believe, is that there was virtually no opposition to the Japanese, and therefore no fight. Like Fort Sumter, like Sarajevo, the disaster at Pearl is best remembered as a curtain raiser, largely irrelevant to the drama which followed. We were prepared to visit retribution on the enemy tenfold, but we didn't identify with the victims. Few had fought back. And as professionals they should have been ready to fight. Now we, the amateurs, had to do the job. And though we mourned them, the very brevity of the December 7 attack meant that there hadn't been time to hang breathless on their fate.
The Philippines, however, was another story.
CHARLIE
Ghastly Remnants of Its Last Gaunt Garrison
My arrival at manila international airport, in the small hours of a Thursday morning, is hilarious. Carlos Romulo, a friend of mine and a legend to the Filipinos, has sent word from the UN that he wants his countrymen to treat me with “our traditional hospitality.” Traditional hospitality, to one of the Spanish patricians who rule the Philippines, stops just short of offering a guest his place in the marriage bed. One moment I am standing before an officious little airport bureaucrat, arguing with him over the validity of a health form. In the next moment this unfortunate clerk is whisked away, possibly to penal servitude, and I am being greeted by a delegation of ten high officials, headed by a cabinet minister. As I slide into an air-conditioned limousine, a siren commences to wind in a police cruiser directly in front of us, and we are off, following it to the Manila Hotel, where General Douglas MacArthur lived before Pearl Harbor. My schedule, I am told, has been prepared. President Marcos will receive me. His First Lady, the beautiful Imelda Romualdez Marcos — a.k.a. “the Iron Butterfly” — will also grant me an audience, and on the last evening of my visit the Romulo family will hold a reception in my honor.
This sort of thing hasn't happened to me since the Turkish general staff mistook me for an envoy from President Eisenhower. My feelings are mixed. Official sanction opens many doors, but it closes others. The Philippines have been under martial law for seven years; Marcos is a dictator; anxiety over his image abroad has, I'm sure, been one of his motives in staging this fantastic welcome for me. Luckily I haven't arrived unprepared; I have the names of the underground leaders who oppose him, and I know how to reach them. My mission, however, is neither to flatter nor to expose the present regime. I am digging into the past, and the past, in the Philippines, is littered with booby traps. Many members of Manila's present Establishment bear names of men who collaborated with the Japanese during the war; one must be careful with them. In addition, as Teddy White has observed, the journalist who becomes a celebrity has special problems. Those whom he interviews know that their replies to him may be quoted by historians. So they become bland at best, or, at worst, self-serving.
In Manila a prosperous American may quickly acquire the feeling of having become an honorary member of a very small upper class, all of whom recognize one another anywhere. I am unastonished to encounter Imelda Marcos in a public building. We chatter idly about her coronation as Miss Manila '53 — there had been no Miss Manila until then, but her family's powerful friends created the title when she wasn't chosen Miss Philippines ?
?? and we hardly notice her guard of honor, twenty-two uniformed Filipinos with fixed bayonets, standing at present arms. In czarist Russia noblemen called the masses “the dark people.” Here they are more like an endless bolt of gray cloth, every thread exactly like the others. It would be so easy to retreat into one of the patricians' mansions, but the rules of the writer's trade forbid that. So I cancel appointments and, instead, ride on “jeepneys” and explore the city. Jeepneys are minibuses, jeeps roofed with gaudy awnings and decorated, on their bonnets, with silvery Catholic icons. Recognizing my nationality, passengers call me “Joe,” and some ask for money, the shiny barrier between all Americans and the world's have-nots. Its presence is felt most keenly when one wanders into the Tondo, Manila's equivalent of San Juan's Perla, a vast slum of huts and cardboard cartons, where, one is told, strangers may be slain by poison dart guns. I emerge unharmed but glad to be out of it. I wouldn't venture into the Tondo after dark.
Next morning I rise before dawn. My room overlooks Manila Bay, and in the first olive moments of day I sense a hulk of land to my right. Then the land becomes visible, a peninsula floating in a smoke-colored vapor, and the jungly land rises harshly to two five-thousand-foot mountains whose torn, ragged edges, even in that opaque haze, betray their volcanic origin. I am looking at Bataan.
Beginning at 2:00 A.M. on Monday, December 22, 1941, three shopping days before Christmas, some forty-three thousand troops of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma's Fourteenth Army began wading ashore at Lingayen Gulf, 120 miles north of Manila. They had been expected for two weeks. Guam had fallen to the Japs in a few hours, and although the U.S. Marine garrison still held Wake Island, after a forty-five-minute battle in which a handful of Marines had routed a Nipponese invasion fleet, Wake was also doomed. But everyone knew that the real struggle would come in the Philippines. Allied troops were commanded by a sixty-year-old general who had retired from the U.S. Army in 1937 and had been recalled to active service by President Roosevelt the same day Roosevelt shut off Tokyo's oil spigots. Douglas MacArthur's great years lay ahead, but no one could have known that in the tumultuous days which followed Pearl Harbor. Despite nine hours' warning from Pearl, the general's air force was destroyed on the ground at Clark Field. Moreover, he had failed to move his rice stocks to defensible positions. And now, with Homma ashore, most of Mac-Arthur's green, undisciplined Filipino troops broke and ran for the hills. Over ten thousand Jap assault troops, spreading like a vast stain over northern Luzon, merged into three columns and came thundering down Route 3, the old cobblestoned military highway that led to Manila.
Then MacArthur recovered. The Japanese expected him to defend the capital. Instead, he abandoned it and executed a series of dazzling moves which stunned and bewildered Homma. Soliders call a retreat a “retrograde maneuver.” MacArthur was carrying out a double retrograde maneuver, extricating both the surviving troops which were still fighting Homma and the smaller force defending southern Luzon, uniting them and thereby foiling the enemy's attempt to split his command. Leapfrogging his divisions backward, holding positions until the last possible moment and then twitching down barriers for their pursuers to stumble over, he withdrew his forces across the twin-spanned Calumpit Bridge, twenty miles northwest of Manila, just south of the San Fernando rail junction. Then, with his forces intact, he ordered the bridge blown. Looking like “a tired hawk” — the phrase is Romulo's — MacArthur had succeeded in forming an army of sixty-five thousand Filipinos and fifteen thousand Americans within the sheer green ridges and deep valleys of Bataan Peninsula. On January 6, 1942, they sowed mines, dug trenches, and wired themselves in, awaiting the enemy's assault on their line.
It came and they held. And held. And held. To the amazement of the world, which had seen resistance to Dai Nippon crumble everywhere else — the siege of Singapore had lasted just seven days when the British general surrendered eighty-five thousand Empire troops to thirty thousand Japanese — MacArthur's men, ridden by malaria, beriberi, smallpox, dysentery, hookworm, dengue fever, and pellagra, repulsed Homma's January offensive and, when he attempted two amphibious landings behind their lines, flung the invaders into the sea. Again and again the American regulars and their Filipino allies barred the enemy from penetrating deeper than the midriff of the peninsula. They thought they could retake Manila, which, at the time, seemed a distinct possibility. Homma was a bumbling commander, and his troops, also afflicted by diseases, were second-rate; Japan's elite divisions were attacking the Malay Barrier, south of Singapore. All MacArthur's men needed was help from the United States. And therein lies a tragic tale.
They had every reason to believe that convoys were on the way. Roosevelt cabled Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Commonwealth, then on Corregidor: “I can assure you that every vessel available is bearing … the strength that will eventually crush the enemy. … I give to the people of the Philippines my solemn pledge that their freedom will be retained. … The entire resources in men and materials of the United States stand behind that pledge.” General George C. Marshall, FDR's army chief of staff, radioed MacArthur: “A stream of four-engine bombers, previously delayed by foul weather, is enroute. … Another stream of similar bombers started today from Hawaii staging at new island fields. Two groups of powerful medium bombers of long range and heavy bomb-load capacity leave this week. Pursuit planes are coming on every ship we can use. … Our strength is to be concentrated and it should exert a decisive effect on Japanese shipping and force a withdrawal northward.”
All this was untrue. Not a plane, not a warship, not a single U.S. reinforcement reached Bataan or Corregidor. The only possible explanation for arousing false expectations on the peninsula was that Washington was trying to buy time for other, more defensible outposts. As the truth sank in, the men facing Homma became embittered. Unaware that MacArthur had to remain on the island of Corregidor — “the Rock” — because its communications center provided his only contact with Washington, they scornfully called the general “Dugout Doug.” That was cruel, and unjust. But if ever men were entitled to a scapegoat, they were. Quite apart from the Japanese, they faced Bataan's almost unbelievable jungle. Cliffs are unscalable. Rivers are treacherous. Behind huge nara (mahogany) trees, eucalyptus trees, ipils, and tortured banyans, almost impenetrable screens are formed by tropical vines, creepers, and bamboo. Beneath these lie sharp coral outcroppings, fibrous undergrowth, and alang grass inhabited by pythons. In the early months of the year, when the battle was fought, rain poured down almost steadily. The water was contaminated. MacArthur's men ate roots, leaves, papayas, monkey meat, wild chickens, and wild pigs. They sang, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
Dugout Doug MacArthur lies ashakin' on the Rock
Safe from all the bombers and from any sudden shock …
And one soldier wrote:
We're the battling bastards of Bataan:
No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces,
No rifles, no planes, or artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn.
Yet they fought on, with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers. One civilian was a saddle-shoed American youth, a typical Joe College of that era who had been in the Philippines researching an anthropology paper. A few months earlier he had been an isolationist whose only musical interest was Swing. He had used an accordion to render tunes like “Deep Purple” and “Moonlight Cocktail.” Captured and sentenced to be shot, he made a last request. He wanted to die holding his accordion. This was granted, and he went to the wall playing “God Bless America.” It was that kind of time.
Only in early spring, when Homma was strengthened by twenty-two thousand fresh troops, howitze
rs, and fleets of Mitsubishis and Zeroes, did the Filipinos and Americans on Bataan Peninsula surrender. Then Corregidor, the bone in the throat of Manila Bay, held out for another exhausting month. Even so, Marines and bluejackets entrenched on the island's beaches killed half the Nipponese attack force. And it wasn't until June 6 that formal resistance ended, when a Jap hauled down the last American flag and ground it under his heel as a band played “Kimigayo,” his national anthem.
Nevertheless, the capitulation was the largest in U.S. history. For those who had survived to surrender on Bataan, the worst lay ahead: the ten-day, seventy-five-mile, notorious Death March to POW cages in northern Luzon. Jap guards began shooting prisoners who collapsed in the sun and suffocating dust beneath the pitiless sky. Next they withheld water from men dying of thirst. Beatings followed, and beheadings and torture. No one knows how many Allied soldiers perished during this Gethsemane, but most estimates run between seven and ten thousand. After the war the Filipinos decided to pay tribute to these martyrs with signposts marking each kilometer on Route 3, which was paved and rechristened MacArthur Highway. Each sign bore a silhouette of three stumbling Allied infantrymen trying to help one another, and travelers were told how far the Death Marchers had struggled at that point. It is sad to note that over half the signs have vanished, lost through neglect or taken by sightseers. This is that kind of time.
But other memorials are intact, though not always where one might expect to find them. The airstrip where MacArthur lost most of his B-17 air force is merely another B-52 runway. The vital Calumpit Bridge is identifiable only by an odd reference point: a soft-drink bottling factory surrounded by weeds. There are no plaques or shafts in the rainforests where the beleaguered Filipinos and Americans counterattacked Homma's troops, driving them back and back. However, in the village, or barrio, of Lamao, which lies on the bay side of the peninsula, a stone identifies the spot where Major General Edward P. King, Jr., the Bataan commander, capitulated on April 9, 1942, and in Mariveles, on the southern tip, an American rifle is cemented into a block, with a GI helmet welded to the butt of the gun. If you charter a helicopter, monuments may be found on the slopes of the peninsula's towering heights, Mount Mariveles and Mount Natib. One inscription reads, “Our mission is to remember”; another, in Tagalog, the native tongue, marks the “Damabana Nang Kagitingan” — the “Altar of Valor.” A relief map with colored red and blue lights shows successive Japanese and Allied positions on the peninsula. It is interesting to note that the altar is the work of Ferdinand E. Marcos, who, as a junior officer here (he was a third lieutenant), was awarded two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Silver Stars, and two Purple Hearts, making him the war's most decorated Filipino. If Mussolini made trains run on time, it can at least be said that Marcos lets the dead lie in style. There is just one happily discordant note. Chiseled letters bear the democratic message “To Live in Freedom's Light Is the Right of Mankind.” Above it stands a crucifix formed of two parallel uprights and two horizontal bars. It can only be described as a double cross.