CHAPTER 26
Departure From Manila
Earlier that day on the city street of Clark, the girl who was uniformed as a soldier was soaked with sweat. When asked her name, she told Juanita it was Nora May. The girl picked up her rifle and began to walk away, again heading northward.
Juanita asked what she was doing.
"Ang gusto ko lang," Nora began quickly, which in English meant "What I want..."
then explained in rapid Tagalog sentences that she wanted to find her brother who had run toward the fight.
For the past year, Nora May explained, her brother had wanted to join the Philippine Scouts, a volunteer Filipino army that had been formed by
Philippine President Quezon and the American general Douglas MacArthur.
However, he had been needed at home.
But, when the invasion began, he had rushed from the family's home in Haganoy to fight the Japanese invaders.
Nora had followed him, keeping her distance so he would not see her and insist she return home, then had lost sight of him.
"Japanese planes almost killed me," Juanita told Nora.
"Oh oh," Nora said, which meant 'Yes', then added, 'and me', or, "At ako."
Nora then lifted her men's barong shirt to show Juanita a pistol tucked into a leather belt.
"Take it," she said in English, as she was educated in that language. She removed the pistol and held it out. Juanita, who also spoke English, took the gun and looked at it as if an alien object.
"It is loaded," Nora told Juanita. "You have six bullets, but if you use them all you will need to find more. This is the safety. It is on, so the gun will not fire. Push it like this to turn the safety off, then you can shoot. Go ahead and push it back to off so you do not shoot yourself. That's right."
Nora May took off northward. Juanita watched her for a moment, then hurried to catch up with her.
Nora and Juanita continued walking, not talking, for about an hour, all the time moving in the opposite direction of the Filipino civilian carts, both carabao-pulled,
and human-propelled, traffic that clogged the road heading southward. As the Sun dropped toward the horizon to their West, Juanita heard what she first thought were firecrackers.
Nora May looked at her and then started to run ahead with her rifle raised.
For the next few minutes they saw nothing, but heard the rapidity and volume of gunfire incease. Then the two girls rounded a curve in the road.
There, they met the battle. A whirlwind of action swept around them, as Philippine Scouts fired at an enemy that neither Nora May nor Juanita could yet see, though
they were immediately acutely aware of bullets that sizzled past them. They saw horrendous deaths, yet saw not a single Scout run. Instead, they and the men were pushed
back by the intensity of incoming bullets. Nora and Juanita had sought cover behind a low cinder block wall. It was there they caught their first sight of the Japanese soldiers in a wide robust line
proceeding toward them, firing. They fired back until their weapons were empty. They picked up weapons of those who fell,
ran to the next cover, turned, fired, repeated, irreversibly being pushed southward. Night fell with the same incessant cadence to the fight.
Nora May and Juanita stayed side by side, always roughly in line with the scouts and U.S. army soldiers. Nora always searched for the face of her brother but did not see him.
Just before dawn, Nora May and Juanita and the men they had been fighting alongside, reached a heavily reinforced line of U.S. and Filipino troops at a bridge demarking the North end of Bataan Peninsula. Behind that U.S. Filipino line
to the South they were given food and drink. Shortly after they had finished eating, they lay down beside one another, between exhausted sleeping soldiers
who they had been amongst since their discovery of the front line twelve hours earlier. Cuddled, they slept.
Mac looked out the window of his Manila Hotel suite at the pair of patrol boats with torpedo launchers.
They were PT boats of U.S. Navy Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three. Until yesterday, the PT boats had been based at Subic Bay,
up the western coast of the big Philippine island of Luzon. The boats had just docked on the bayside of the hotel.
Mac also saw two other PT boats maneuvering in Manila Bay beyond. He had planned their arrival time, and they had
arrived precisely at it, near sunset. He had seen it was the time of day when the Japanese planes would most likely have returned to their bases.
Mac smoked a puff of the corncob pipe he had become famous smoking, a part of his iconic commanding image.
His orderly brought him a white undershirt and starched khaki shirt. He looked at his slacks to assure himself they were still starch crisp.
Mac set his pipe in a pewter ash tray against a winged victory statuette pipe rest, then pulled his sweat soaked undershirt and shirt off together
over his head. He accepted a cold towel that his orderly offered and gave his torso a quick invigorating toweling,
then pulled on the clean white undershirt and the khaki shirt, his third shirt change that day.
Mac opened a door of his suite that led to one adjoining it. His shoulder epaulettes had two stars each.
His khaki tie was neatly tied. He had put on his khaki cap with black leather braiding and visor over which was an American flag shield and eagle.
Mac was followed by his orderly, who carried two suitcases.
The commander of U.S. military in the Philippines walked to the side of his aide, Brigadier General Richard Sutherland,
who had one star on each of his shoulder epaulettes.
The year before, Sutherland had replaced Dwight David Eisenhower as number two to MacArthur. Up until the moment the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began,
Sutherland, like Eisenhower before him,
had been entirely consumed by building up Philippine defenses in the face of looming possibility of an attack by the Japanese.
The Philippine U.S. Far East Army force had been made marginally more robust. On December 8th General Wainwright had four infantry divisions
and a cavalry regiments positioned in northern Luzon North of Manila. And General Parker had two infantry divisions to the south of the city.
Each had been executing controlled retreats toward Manila before Japanese troops.
Last week, Mac had reassigned Parker to execute the evac
from the city. Thereafter, a frenetic flow of barge traffic had left docks from the Manila side of the bay with supplies and retreating troops,
as well as Philippine government officials and their families, and U.S. citizens, to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor.
Fortunately, MacArthur mused, he had been a big booster of the Philippine Scouts. His father had been also.
These were not Boy Scouts. They were Filipinos who, since 1901, had been trained to fight and were commanded by American officers. Philippine Scout units, or PSUs in Mac-talk,
had in the prior decade seen combat in Mindanao and Palawan, where they put down the Moro rebellion. As crisis had mounted in the Pacific,
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt created in the Philippines the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) that integrated the U.S. Army
and Philippine Scout regiments under command of MacArthur. When the attack began,
the Scouts numbered twelve thousand and U.S. Army personnel under Mac, including the paltry air corps,
numbered ten thousand.
Sutherland was flanked by a pair of his leading officers. They stood with four cases into which they had already packed up the MacArthur mobile command center.
Mac led his men into the dining room of the suite, where President of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, stood waiting for them, he and his four man
Philippine leadership team, dressed in white suites and white shirt with blue, red, and gold striped ties, with white hats in hand.
With them was a
Filipina in white dress hemmed just below her knees, who Mac knew was President Quezon brilliant political advisor and policy strategist, his wife.
Mac and the president both knew that the small group present was gathered for imminent evacuation,
so a minimum of pleasantry passed between them before Mac simply asked if the president was ready.
President Quezon nodded. The group went down a back stairway and exited the hotel from its side that faced the bay.
Tropical air offered no respite of a breeze as Mac and his command team proceeded with Quezon to the docked PT boats. Mac began to sweat but his fresh undershirt began doing its job of keeping his sweat from staining his shirt. On the dock, Mac shook hands with President Quezon, and Sutherland showed the president and his entourage aboard one of the PT boats. Mac boarded the other. The United States commander put on his aviator sunglasses, another component of his signature look, and he pressed his cap more firmly onto his head.
