Escape From Davao (7 page)

We’re the Battling Bastards of Bataan,

No mama, No papa, No Uncle Sam,

No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,

No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces

And nobody gives a damn.

MacArthur’s pleas for aid fel on deaf ears. “The truth,” wrote historian John Hersey, came to the troops in the Philippines “in mean little doses.” Morale tumbled. Soldiers resented officers or, more precisely, those that took advantage of the privilege of rank. Edgy troops on Bataan envied their counterparts on Corregidor, whom they believed had plenty of food, coffee, and smokes. Many were displeased with what they believed to be an apathetic America. “Where the devil are those planes that Henry Ford is turning out, and the rest of them?” confounded soldiers asked the war correspondents. Lt. John Burns of the 21st Pursuit captured the prevalent feelings in a diary entry: “I can’t see what they are thinking of in the states, they surely could have gotten some help in here, both troops and planes, U.S. aid for every place but the P.I.’s.”

While they never completely gave up hope in America, some came to resent Roosevelt, whose speeches focused on the European war. On Corregidor, Quezon became combustible after one such speech. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe,” shouted the terminal y il Filipino leader. “America writhes in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin, Europe, while a daughter, the Philippines, is being raped in the back room.”

They also resented MacArthur, though he had been deceived, too. He was a persistent and eloquent champion of their cause, and worshipped by many Filipinos, but was conspicuously absent from the Bataan Peninsula, making only one trip in January. Rumors circulated that he was afraid to leave Malinta Tunnel, and “Dugout Doug” soon joined FDR and Stimson as the subject of many deprecating barbs, jokes, and songs.

Their gal ows humor eventual y betrayed their defenders’ true fears and feelings. After the arrival of a newborn in a field hospital, one soldier cracked that if America “won’t send reinforcements, we’l make our own.” Some soldiers attempted to raise money in order to purchase a bomber from their own government. “Better buy one bomber than be buried on Bataan” was the slogan of the “Bomber for Bataan Fund.” The optimism of January was rapidly replaced by the bitter reality of March. Months earlier, some soldiers had chalked a “V” onto their helmets, but the letter, many thought, no longer stood for “Victory” but for

“Victims.”

Monday, March 2, 1942

Bataan Field, Bataan, Philippine Islands

At 1125 hours, a mysterious voice cut into the “Red Net”—the telephone circuit that connected the various USAFFE synapses and commands with MacArthur’s Corregidor nerve center—at Gen. Hal “Pursuit”

George’s headquarters at Bataan Field, which, along with Mariveles and Cabcaben Fields, was one of the three airfields serving the remnant of the Far East Air Force. George’s intel igence officer, Capt.

Al ison Ind, believing the cal to be from USAFFE, immediately cal ed George to the line. A brief, yet fateful y mysterious conversation ensued.

“Two large tankers, three supply ships, and an airplane in attendance are entering Subic Bay,” said the voice.

George hesitated momentarily to digest the statement. “And what action does the Chief of Staff desire me to take?”

“Why, he says you are to use your own judgment, sir,” the voice replied.

The cal was freighted with great significance. The presence of such a large concentration of enemy ships suggested another landing attempt in western Bataan. The weakened defenders would have little chance of repel ing an invasion, and any attempt to contest a landing with airpower would be a dangerous gamble. Only five battle-battered P-40s, each badly in need of engine overhauls, remained in the ragtag Bataan air force. George drew a few puffs from his pipe and then ordered Ind to raise Mariveles Field and order the 20th Pursuit Squadron’s two P-40s loaded with fragmentation bombs. George paused, then issued another crisp command: “Ask Captain Dyess to come here at once.”

While en route to George’s quarters, Dyess ran into his operations officer, Lt. Ben Brown. “Wel , Ed,” said Brown, “we’re putting the big shoes on Joe. Everything’l be ready when you get there.” Brown’s update was veiled in the same code that the pilots used on their radios to confuse Japanese interlopers. Dyess knew what Brown meant. A day earlier, a makeshift bomb rack—the fruit of Dyess’s imagination, the labors of the Bataan Field Flying Detachment, and some coil springs from jettisoned Japanese fuel tanks and automobile spare parts—had been affixed to the fuselage of the battered olive drab P-40 Dyess had named
Kibosh
. The “big shoes” referred to 500-pound, high-explosive bombs.

Dyess bounded up onto the porch of George’s headquarters building. Ind noticed that the pilot’s eyes

“gleamed.” George, a smile hidden beneath his shaggy beard, asked if Dyess’s bomb rack was ready for a practical test. “There never was a better day, General,” answered Dyess.

“Be careful, Ed,” George replied.

The fact that George was wil ing to commit the last few planes to such a gamble was not lost on Dyess.

He had been pressing George for permission to strike back for both strategic and morale purposes, but the planes had been limited to mostly reconnaissance missions. Dyess knew that he and his pilots had to make the most of this opportunity, an opportunity to take the offensive, even if just temporarily, and win a victory for themselves.

Lt. John Posten commenced the mission, taking off at 1300 hours from Bataan Field with, in the pilots’

parlance, “little shoes,” six 30-pound fragmentation bombs. Minutes later, Lts. Kiefer White and Erwin Crel in, their P-40s similarly armed, lifted off from Mariveles Field. An hour later Posten returned, reporting that he had bombed a tanker, but could not verify any hits; White said that he and Crel in had gone after a cruiser that was “real y throwing lead” and concluded that his wingman was shot down. It was an inauspicious beginning.

On the flight line at Bataan Field,
Kibosh
had been fueled and armed. But a successful conclusion to this mission, Dyess realized, would require something more than high-explosives. Dangling from a chain around his neck alongside his dog tags was a metal crucifix and a Saint Christopher medal he had been given by one of his pilots who had died on Bataan in February. Dyess taxied
Kibosh
into position.

At 1350, a crowd gathered to watch Dyess’s heavily loaded P-40 loft out of sight. Many thought that the plane, struggling under the weight, had crashed. Suddenly,
Kibosh
appeared just above the waters of Manila Bay. “There it is!” someone shouted as Dyess lumbered off toward his rendezvous with Lt.

Donald “Shorty” Crosland. Crosland was Dyess’s “weaver,” the pilot assigned to watch Dyess’s tail.

George and Ind listened with hand-wringing anticipation to the traffic crackling over the Red Net and the monotonous, even-pitched voices of the radar spotters coldly clicking off the ranges and azimuths of the planes as they circled to gain

altitude.

Thirty air miles and several tension-fil ed minutes later, Dyess looked down from his cockpit at Subic Bay and Grande Island, the smal , brown-green landmass in the mouth of the bay. The sea was rippling blue, marred only by smal furrows of dissipating white foam, the watery tracks of chugging Japanese vessels.

“The scene below me was like a bril iant lithograph, the colors almost too real,” he remembered. With the dazzling sun at his back, he headed into his dive. Docks, piers, and warehouses bustling with activity materialized. Seeing that the heaviest concentration of Japanese ships was not along the western shores of Olongapo as he had been told, but instead near Grande Island, he descended toward the latter.

He looked for a large tanker—his primary target—but could not locate the vessel. While cataloguing his options, he spied a medium-sized transport steaming between Grande Island and the western shore and swooped down for the attack.

Gunning
Kibosh
’s throttle wide open at 5,000 feet, he flew into a storm of fire opening up from ship and shore. His eyes riveted on the transport, he plunged the P-40 to 2,000 feet and ripped the release handle, letting loose the 500-pound bomb. He pul ed back on the stick, and while looking over his shoulder saw the bomb splash about forty feet from its

target—a close miss. Angered, he swung
Kibosh
back around, almost down to water level, and “gave the Jap the .50 caliber treatment,” sweeping up and down the decks in three, blistering strafing runs before focusing his guns on the bridge. Mortal y wounded, the ship stopped dead in the water.

Crosland charged down to join Dyess and the two planes tore off to engage other targets. Dyess blasted four smal warehouses on the north side of the island and sent swarms of Japanese stevedores and soldiers scurrying for cover as strips of bul ets splintered piers and buildings. He then turned his attention to two 100-ton motor vessels chugging between the island and the Bataan shore. Dyess caught one of the boats in the open and sprayed fire at the ship’s forward guns before aiming at the hul and the engine room. Crosland, fol owing Dyess’s lead, ripped into the other side of the vessel with his .50 caliber guns. Dyess was sweeping around for another run and came in low, his plane just skimming the surface of the water. “The Japs aboard her were putting on quite an act,” he later wrote. “Those astern were rushing forward and those forward were rushing astern. They couldn’t have done better for my purpose.

They met amidships where my bul ets were striking.” Seeing the ship list and then begin sinking, he clicked off the last of his ammunition into the other launch. Then both pilots winged home.

Safely on the ground at Bataan Field at 1415, Dyess entered the operations shack and cal ed George. “I had me a field day,” he said. He then provided an out-of-breath, play-by-play description of his successes—as wel as his failure with the “big egg”—supplemented with commentary characteristic of his sense of humor. When asked to elaborate on the fate of one of his targets, he replied, laconical y, “I’m afraid the boat leaks.” Yet Dyess was hardly content. “I want to try again right away,” his voice begged. “May I?”

Twilight was fast approaching and Dyess was running out of time—and chances. His crew moved about
Kibosh
, feeding fuel and a steady meal of .50 caliber cartridges into the tanks and magazines. Dyess was intent on making this mission—his third and final venture—count. On his second sortie, he had again missed one of the large freighters with his 500-pound bomb, but the miss was so close that bomb fragments had punctured the ship’s superstructure and also damaged some nearby barges and lighters.

Upon returning, Dyess pleaded with George for one more opportunity. George was hesitant; approaching nightfal and tropical winds stirring the airfields gave him reason to pause. But the old ace “eventual y granted permission,” said Dyess. “If he hadn’t, I’d have missed the best shooting of the day.”

Entering his dive at sundown, Dyess noticed that the freighters he had seen that afternoon had left the Grande Island docks and were “running around like mad.” But he instead veered toward the north shore and its supply dumps and warehouses. At 1,800 feet, he loosed his final “egg.” His aim was true; fire, smoke, and debris exploded into the air. Dyess and his new weaver, Lt. John Burns, swept the docks with their guns, adding to the conflagration before arcing skyward with a ferocious hail of tracer bul ets, antiaircraft, and smal arms fire on their tails.

Just as the pilots began their homeward journey, their radios informed them that observers on Mariveles Mountain had spotted a large transport, with landing barges in tow, trying to slip out of the bay.

Dyess immediately veered into an interception course. Il uminated by the glow of the fires in the west, the vessel made an inviting target. He could see the six streams of his wing guns spitting shel s from amidships to the stern, sparking several fires.

Burns fol owed Dyess and pumped additional fire into the vessel. Gunning
Kibosh
’s engine, Dyess climbed to 4,000 feet before screaming down on another strafing run. With
Kibosh
’s nose pointed at a 45-degree angle, he mashed down the trigger and stitched several deadly rows of .50 caliber bul ets across the ship’s bow and bridge. The vessel then exploded in a blinding flash. Dyess jerked the plane’s stick to avoid being caught in the thick wash of black smoke and debris. The move was so sudden, he blacked out for a few seconds. “Colder than a pair of ice tongs,” he later wrote. When Dyess came to at 4,000 feet, he saw the boiling, blue-black waves below him cresting with orange flames.

Dyess sighted another ship silhouetted in the fiery glow and, despite the large volume of antiaircraft fire it was throwing up, swooped down for another kil . In his report, Burns would identify the ship as a cruiser.

it was throwing up, swooped down for another kil . In his report, Burns would identify the ship as a cruiser.

Dyess made three passes, raking the vessel with fire from his .50 cals until his trigger clicked unresponsively. Mortal y wounded, the ship lunged for the shore, beaching on the sand. Dyess could see the effects of the damage he had wrought through several large bul et holes in the underside of the plane.

After giving Burns the high sign, the signal to disengage, he set a course for Bataan Field.