Tears in the Darkness (3 page)

 

October 10, 1941

Dearest Mother and Family,

Have been sitting out on the deck this morning watching flying fish. They are about six inches long and sail through the air like a bird . . . The water
has been sort of rough all the way . . . The ship is bobbing up and down and from one side to the other till I can't even sit still. Am sitting here on the deck and writing on my knee. Hope you can read this.

 

AFTER HAWAII,
the sailing was easy, flat water most of the way and light tropical breezes. Most men spent mornings topside, watching the water or staring at the horizon, absorbed by the vast vista of the sea. Some played cards on the hatch covers or spread out their towels and baked in the afternoon sun. In the evenings Quentin Pershing Devore of eastern Colorado came topside to listen to his Hallicrafter shortwave radio. One evening a dark-haired fellow with a friendly face eased over and sat down next to him.

“I'm Ben Steele,” he said, holding out his hand.

“I'm Pershing Devore.”

“What do you get on that thing?” the fellow asked.

“I get the news, sometimes I get music,” Devore said.

Devore too had grown up outdoors, working the land and livestock in the rye- and wheat-farming country of Yuma County, a day's drive or so from the Nebraska border. He considered himself “a plain boy with no frills,” and that's how this fellow from Billings struck him, too, “real plain.”

“Where did you get that name, Pershing?” Ben Steele asked.

“Well, my name is Quentin Pershing Devore, but they call me Pershing.”

“That's too complicated,” Ben Steele said. “I'm just going to call you Q.P.”
⁵

 

October 18, 1941

Dearest Mother, Dad + Family,

Met a new friend. He likes hunting and fishing about as well as I do. We get together and talk over old times. It sort of makes me feel at home . . .

 

They talked for hours, about farming and ranching and cattle and sheep, about the “hard-up” life on a Colorado farm and the hardscrabble days on a Montana homestead. Ben Steele often turned the conversation to horses—cow ponies, broncs and quarter horses, chestnuts, Appaloosas and bays.

Q.P. thought, “This guy is crazy about horses.”

They talked about war as well. Their convoy was flanked by destroyer escorts, and at night the ship was blacked out, a shadow on the sea.

A week and a half out of Hawaii, their company commander called them together. They were going to the Philippines “to fight a war,” he said.

 

Thursday, October 23, 1941, Pier 7, Manila, Philippines

Assembled on deck, the thirteen hundred soldiers of the 19th Bombardment Group were preparing to greet paradise. Down the pier a line of trucks was waiting to take them north to their billets at Clark Field, a lattice of sand-and-turf runways laid out on a hot, dry plain fifty miles northwest of Manila. As the young Americans made their way down the gangways and ladders to the queue of open trucks, they were wide-eyed with wonder and delight.

 

October
24, 1941

Was sure glad to get off the boat after being on it for so long. We were as dirty as a bunch of hogs when we landed.

It is sure interesting around here . . . The natives are as thick as bees . . . and live in little bamboo shacks . . . Drive little horses about the size of a good sized dog, hitched to a little cart. Some have oxen [carabao] hitched to old wooden wheeled carts, sure is interesting to watch them . . . They are always trying to sell us something. They are running from one barracks to the other trying to get a job making our beds, and shining our shoes . . . Would hate to think I was so lazy I couldn't make my own bed. We have to have mosquito nets over our beds at night so we can sleep. The mosquitoes here are like humming birds . . .

Don't worry about me because I never felt better in my life, and am having a swell time. So please
don't worry
. This will be one of the greatest experiences of my life.

 

FOR DECADES
the Philippines had been a backwater post, a collecting pool for those on the way up, young officers eager to get their tickets punched for promotion, and those on the way out—the deadwood, the drunks, the disappointed who had been passed over for rank and were now holed up in a quiet billet, waiting to put in their papers and take a last parade.

It was a gorgeous backwater. Manila was known as “the Pearl of the
Orient,” and parts of the city, especially the precincts where Americans and Europeans lived and worked, looked like arboretums. Along the boulevards, the trees were trimmed and ringed with pink hydrangeas, and white butterfly orchids grew in the coconut husks.

The duty was easy too, inspections and formations for the most part, then at noon, the workday ended and the enlisted men would head for the beaches and ball fields and brothels of the nearest barrio where they would “shack up” with their “brown-skinned squaws,” their Filipina concubines. Life had its annoyances, of course—the soaking summer monsoons, the suffocating heat of the hot season, the incessant insects, the choking dust—but for less than a dollar, a trooper could buy enough Ginebra gin and San Miguel beer to drink himself senseless.

The officers lived like aristocracy. They played polo, tennis, and golf, then made for their private preserve, Manila's fabled Army and Navy Club, a three-acre toft and croft along the east shore of Manila Bay that looked like a beaux arts mansion set on a waterfront green of palms, flame trees, and bougainvillea. The club hosted dinners and soirees, women and their escorts dancing under the stars and toasting one another over centerpieces of yellow trumpet flowers and white Cadena de Amor. First, and above all, however, the Army and Navy Club was a men's club, and the men of the Philippine garrison and Asiatic Fleet liked to drink.

Almost every officer in the islands bellied up to the club's long polished bar—pilots, tankers, artillerymen, chasseurs, submariners, marines—but none more frequently than the gentlemen of the 31st Infantry, the only “all-American” army regiment in the islands.

 

We are boys from the Thirty-first

We are not so very meek

We never wash behind our ears

And seldom wash our feet.

Oh we're below the scum of the earth

And we're always looking for booze

Now we're the boys from the Thirty-first

And who in the hell are youse!
⁶

 

That was garrison life.

Then—it seemed to happen so fast—those unhurried mornings, sultry
afternoons, and sybaritic nights were interrupted by an irritating interloper: the Japanese.

Nippon had been on the march in Asia. In 1931 the Imperial Army occupied Manchuria; in 1937 that same army, reinforced, moved south to invade northern China; in 1940 Japan pushed into lower Asia and stationed troops in upper Indochina. To the Roosevelt administration, the Japanese now appeared ready to move against the Dutch East Indies, islands and archipelagoes rich with tin, rubber, oil. Convinced that America would soon be fighting in Europe, the president wanted to avoid a two-front war, and he decided to impose economic sanctions on Japan, hoping to get them to pull back, perhaps even declare a cease-fire in China. He withheld the carrot, then in the early winter of 1940 he started to show them the stick.

America's military planners began marshaling reinforcements for the Philippines. They knew they could never make the islands a redoubt—Japan, with millions of men under arms, could easily overwhelm any garrison—but, as the thinking went, the new defenses, especially a new long-range B-17 bomber, might deter the Japanese, make them reconsider the cost of attacking the Philippines. If not, then the presence of
reinforcements might at least make them pause long enough for the garrison to ready itself to receive the blow.

In the late spring 1941, the wives and children of American servicemen were ordered to evacuate the islands and sail for home. In July the president recalled General Douglas MacArthur from retirement (he had been serving as a military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth government since 1935) and named him commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East. The same month the Commonwealth government mobilized the tens of thousands of reservists that made up the Philippine Army. In September, American troop ships and freighters began to arrive regularly at Pier 7. By the end of November, the U.S. Army garrison had been increased to nearly 31,000 troops (19,000 Americans, 12,000 Philippine Scouts), triple its original strength. Almost immediately thereafter MacArthur ordered beach defenses dug and manned by the Philippine Army at the most likely landing spots on the main island of Luzon.

 

November 9, 1941

Dearest Mother, Dad and Family:

. . .
Well I suppose you have been reading the head lines about the U. S. and Japan, but don't get excited. Can just see you running around worrying yourself sick. Of course we don't hear much about it. I think we are safe.

We get some of the news and there is a lot we don't get.

 

The workday was longer now as men and machinery moved north and south from the piers and warehouses of Manila. Days carried the din of hammering and sawing, nights the rumble and whine of trucks on the roads. The polo fields were often empty, the tennis courts quiet. Some evenings the bar girls at Cavite's Dreamland Cabaret (“Call us ballerinas, please!” the taxi dancers insisted) toured the dance floor alone or in one another's arms.

And yet there was still an air of assurance in the islands, a sense that the latest alarm or clarion call would pass without incident and paradise would soon be paradise again. Intelligence reports about Japanese troop movements arrived daily at headquarters, but the majority of officers under MacArthur's command had convinced themselves “it would be absolutely impossible for the Japanese to attack the Philippine Islands successfully!” Japan, they reasoned “had everything to lose by going to war and nothing to gain.”
⁷

So they went about preparing for war with little sense of urgency or imminence. And this strange stupor, this “weakness,” as Colonel Ernest B. Miller, a tank commander from Brainard Minnesota, saw it, led to “things left undone,” so many things that even in the end, “with the black clouds of war directly overhead, it was well nigh impossible to quicken the tempo” of the work.
⁸

And why should they? General MacArthur had told his officers that intelligence reports on “the existing alignment and movement of Japanese troops” had convinced him that if Japan, in fact, attacked, it would not do so until the spring of 1942, April at the earliest. Many of his subordinates disagreed, but there was no arguing with the general. The enemy, he insisted, wasn't coming till spring.
⁹

Japan wasn't much of an enemy either, or so the Americans believed. For more than a century whites in Asia had looked on the tawny “locals” as less than human. They thought the Japanese “monkey men”—short, slight, bucktoothed, “slant-eyed sons of bitches” who “couldn't see straight,” even through their horn-rimmed glasses, because, as everyone knew, “their eyeballs didn't open up to the proper diameter.” An enemy who could not see straight could not shoot straight, could not keep his planes on course or drop his bombs on target. The war wouldn't last three weeks, they told one another. “We'll knock the living shit out of them.”
¹⁰

Even at General MacArthur's headquarters, where war planning should have sent up a din, “men went about their work as usual.” On the evening of December 5, for example, MacArthur's clerk, Paul Rogers, settled himself in a seat at the Manila Symphony and enjoyed a program of Mozart.
¹¹

And it didn't take long for the young enlistees and reservists fresh from the States to assume that same attitude of indifference. To be sure, there were a few who went against the tide, officers who'd come to the islands “to soldier,” as they put it, professionals who now bridled at being part of “a military force afflicted” with “siesta-itis,” but their complaints were lost in the laughter around the bar and the sighs coming out of the seraglios.
¹²

 

Monday, December 8, 1941 (December 7 across the International Dateline),
Manila, Philippines

Frank Hewlett, a United Press wire service reporter, got the cable from a colleague in Hawaii around 2:00 a.m. local time. Stunned and looking
for official confirmation, Hewlett quickly called the office of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet. At Fleet Headquarters in Manila, a duty officer answered the phone. Hewlett read him the cable: “Flash! Pearl Harbor under aerial attack.”