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From the time the Japanese troops set foot on Philippine beaches, the American and Allied forces were faced with defeat. Largely cut off from reinforcement and supplies, they fought bravely and inflicted, heavy casualties on the enemy. For five heroic months the defenders held out against overwhelming odds. The Philippines... Bataan... Corregiaor... these names, remote-sounding before Pearl Harbor, now stood for courage and endurance, and the hope for ultimate victory. This description of the defense of the Philippines is given by an American Army officer who took part in it.

We sat in the little boat, riding the night tides of Manila Bay. It was May 1942 and I was waiting for the submarine that was to take me on the first lap of my journey to the United States with the U.S. Army's confidential documents. I had plenty of time to think back through all the tragedy and blood and fury of the Philippine campaign. Seldom if ever in all military history had men fought more magnificently than had the soldiers, sailors, marines and Philippine Scouts in this desperate struggle which ever one of them knew was, in the end, hopeless. I resolved that if I ever got back home I would do my best to tell the true story of their heroism for all Americans to remember proudly.

I did get back. Here is the story.

Memory brings the smell of hot steaming blood to my nostrils: American blood crimsoning the swamps and rice paddies, and Japanese blood flowing beside it: Bataan, that wild and desolate peninsula of savage jungle and rocky mountain slope, a primitive wilderness which few white men had ever penetrated before. Crocodiles and snakes and huge pythons infested its solitary morasses.

Into the northern end of Bataan Peninsula poured 80,000 Japanese veterans, eager for the kill. They knew all the cunning strategies that meant survival, the techniques that only the experienced professional can command. And they had their quarry at bay the men of General Douglas MacArthur's Philippine Command, crouching in jungle foxholes.

But the jungle, which for centuries had protected the pygmy and the wild animal from conquest, now helped our fighting men. Overhead, the interlacing trees shelter them from the dive bomber; underfoot, the treacherous swampland bogged the tank. When the Japanese soldier advanced, he had to advance on foot.

First he would come up against a screen of Filipino riflemen hidden in the undergrowth; and they would take their toll. Beyond these he found himself in a murderous belt of barbed-wire tangles, foxholes manned by American Regulars, machine-guns trained down jungle trails. In every step forward lay the menace of concealed trip-wire explosives, TNT land mines and tens of thousands of fire-hardened, pointed bamboo sticks implanted in the ground, so sharp they penetrated the thickest shoe soles. The Japanese had at last run up against a savage technique of jungle warfare as cunning and merciless as his own. In every foxhole, often shallowly scooped out by bare hands and a tin helmet, the Japanese met an implacable foe; either the Japanese or the defender died right there.

In this fighting, many a soldier came to realize that self-confidence alone was not enough to sustain the human spirit. I remember jumping into a hole during a particularly heavy bombing attack. A sergeant crouched lower to make room for me. Then all hell broke loose, and I wasn't surprised to find myself praying out loud. I heard the sergeant praying beside me too.

Behind the foxholes stood Major-General Edward P. King, Jr., and his artillery. Eddie King, could get as much out of guns and gun crews as any commander who ever handled men. He hid his pieces as a miser might hide gold, with canopies of carefully renewed foliage constantly maintained above them. His outfit poison to the Japanese once knocked out forty of their field guns in three days and, another time, for a stretch of ten days kept up such deadly fire that the enemy field artillery hardly fired a shot. But that was while we had a plane or two left and could get some observation.

Behind General King and his guns were the field hospitals where toiled the unsung, unspectacular heroes of Bataan the doctors, nurses and hospital corpsmen. The nurses were unbelievably brave. All day long they would be covered with blood from amputations and the dressing of dreadful wounds. It did not seem possible that women could stand up to what they did. But somehow they endured it all.

Their immaculate white uniforms gave way too government-issue khaki shirts and home-made khaki skirts, then to army slacks. They ate the same food as the soldiers, went on short rations when the men did, worked countless hours until they dropped from fatigue and slept under barrages of bomb and shell.

In the reserve area, too, was General Headquarters. Major-General Jonathan M. Wainwright known as Skinny Wainwright to his men Brigadier General William F. (Bill) Marquat and the others were fighting generals. They took it with the men. I saw one of them Brigadier-General A. M. Jones pick up a Browning machine-gun and plunge across enemy lines with a sergeant to rescue three privates who were cut off and out of ammunition. He brought them in, too.

Yet it was not in battle but between battles that Bataan's defenders best showed their depth and strength of spirit. They gathered in little groups and told simple anecdotes of their lives back home. There were long discussions about religion. The general consensus was, "There will be no purgatory for us after Bataan we'll go right on through, without any local stops." But beneath the chaff and banter the listener felt that to these men religion was something real and necessary, something to be respected, whether it was yours or the other fellow's. They talked of morals and manners, economics and philosophy, and often the simplest men among them etched the clearest images in quaint speech.

Their rough American humor never deserted them. I remember walking by a battery pit and over-hearing a conversation on that endlessly discussed question, Why doesn't the fleet come?

The gunner was saying, "Where in hell do you suppose that fleet really is?"

"That's easy," came the answer. "The last letter I got from a girl friend of mine was postmarked St.Louis, Missouri. She never lets, the fleet get more'n ten miles away from her, so it's up the Mississippi"

The Nips, as the soldiers called the Japanese, got many a taste of American courage and ingenuity. There was the Bataan Air Force, for instance, also named the Bamboo Fleet because it was so patched together with native wood. When General Wainwright called for air support, a couple of quivering, battered P-40's would rise to give battle to dozens of Japanese Zeros. Until every last one of them was destroyed, these crates operated from two hastily built airfields constructed and kept in repair by work men under constant bombardment. The fields, standing out like bull's-eye targets in the jungle, were really only widened portions of road, and were plastered so regularly by the Japanese that our men called the enemy raiders the morning and after noon mail planes.

A group of wobbly P-40's was sent out one day to escort the Filipino ace, Captain Jesus Villamor, who was to photograph the Japanese artillery at Cavite. The P-40 pilots were given specific orders not to go after enemy fighters, but to stick with Villamor. The pilots managed to resist the temptation of attacking the Japanese planes swarming towards them. Then, photographs taken, they came down close to the field while Villamor landed. At once Captain Ben Brown, the flight leader, radioed to ask if now, mission completed, he was in the clear. Receiving an affirmative answer, the P-40's zoomed up and, despite all the handicaps of altitude, superior strength and numbers, eliminated six Zeros, while our men cheered from the fox holes. Five of the six P-40's got back.

As long as they could pull a trigger or fix a bayonet, our men held their ground. Veterans of scores of bloody fights, many of them had been wounded once, twice, three times, and still had staggered back to stand again with their comrades.

But courage alone was not enough. Lack of food proved their undoing. Cut off from all supplies, the army on Bataan had to feed from its meager stocks nearly 100,000 people the troops, the natives and the many thousands who had come from Manila when it was evacuated. Back of the fighting, the men of Brigadier-General Charles C. Drake's Quartermaster Corps set up rice mills, bakeries which for a time produced 20,000 loaves of bread a day and slaughter houses in which they butchered horses, mules, wild pigs and carabao -- the water buffalo of the Philippines. They were even credited by the soldiers with slaughtering pythons and crocodiles and issuing them as food. But there was never enough, food to go around.

The Quartermaster Corps also operated a fishing fleet that caught 10,000 pounds of fish a night until the Japanese discovered the boats and strafed them out of existence. Towards the end of January, when the rice gave out, a heroic merchant-marine captain sneaked his inter-island steamer through the Japanese blockade into Manila Bay with 17,000 sacks of rice, 5000 bunches of bananas and 10,000 eggs. But it was the last island boat to get through. After that, the fighters on Bataan went on half rations. As malnutrition weakened the men, they became more susceptible to malaria, dysentery, beriberi and scurvy. And with the increasing incidence of disease came an increasing scarcity of medicine. The number of sick in the hospitals rose day by day. When Bataan surrendered on April 9, most of the men in every regiment were weakened by disease; all were suffering from the ravages of hunger. In the last desperate days, the men who were withstanding the relentless 24-hour onslaughts of the enemy were existing on a daily ration of a cup of rice and a few scraps of mule meat.

On the other side of the lines the picture was vastly different. Perhaps never before had a .Japanese army eaten so well as did the invaders of Bataan, with their own supplies and the loot of Manila. Further more, most of the Bataan diseases were endemic in Japan, so that when the Japanese did contract them it was in mild form. Thus it was not the dive-bombers or the slashing thrusts of infantry or the ceaseless pounding of heavy guns that brought the Japanese victory: the Allied forces succumbed to the throttling fingers of starvation and disease.

Weeks of savage fighting in tropic heat, weeks without sleep, had made the youngest of these men "Bataan-faced" the lines of old age etched deep; black circles of fatigue under weary, bloodshot eyes; the hollow at the base of the skull matching the sharp-ridged cheekbones.

In the words of General MacArthur, "Through the bloody haze of [Bataan's] last reverberating shot, I shall always seem to see the vision of grim, gaunt, ghastly men, still unafraid."

To understand and to feel something of the ordeal that the city of Manila went through means going back to 12:45 on the afternoon of December 8, 1941(December 7, U.S. time). In one fateful hour the Japanese had in effect captured the Philippines.

They came in over Clark Field at 10,000 feet 54 two-motored Mitsubishi bombers from Formosa(Taiwan). They hit everything in sight runways, hangars, shops, planes on the ground. Then 86 Zero fighters swooped in low. When they left, Clark Field was a bloody shambles of pilots and ground crew, shattered runways, flaming hangars an inferno of red-glowing rubble. That raid and the simultaneous attack on other airfields near Manila sealed the fate of Luzon and Corregidor.

It wiped out more than half the U.S. air power almost before it had been able to get into action. The dreadful significance of the tragedy was not lost on any man, from private to general. From that moment on, they all knew they were fighting in a lost cause. But that knowledge did not weaken their resolve.

Two days later, sharp at noon, the Japanese struck Nichols and Nielson fields. It was the story of Clark Field all over again strafed, blazing barracks; bomb shattered runways and hangars; wrecked, flaming planes; torn and bloody bodies. Dive-bombers wheeled over the adjacent rice paddies, searching out and strafing personnel with their murderous .50-caliber fire. Men were hunted down like wild animals as they sought refuge in the fields. Many a young soldier learned that it was death to take shelter in roadside ditches; the Zeros gave these plausible shelters their most searching fire.

Our men died because ten years of calculated preparation and the ability to concentrate superior force permitted the Japanese Empire to bring against them exactly as much as was needed to destroy them. Eighty dive-bombers came over, that day but 380 could have been assigned to the job if the Japanese General Staff had felt that number was necessary. No adequate defense was possible simply because we had not spent millions upon millions of dollars, through the years, to make our position tenable, and because we had lived up to the letter of treaties with Japan which forbade us to fortify the Philippines adequately.

At almost the same moment that Nichols and Nielson fields and the surrounding area were being strafed, Japanese planes attacked Cavite Navy Yard. I saw them, 54 heavy four-motored bombers in perfect V-formation, their silver wings and bodies shining in the sun. The dull roar of their motors was like the rumble before a storm. They circled the doomed base leisurely there were no fighters to come up at them, no anti-aircraft guns to break them up. When they were ready, they let go. In two hours the Cavite Yard was wiped off the map, and the U.S. Fleet had lost its only Asian base.

It was no surprise to us when the Japanese pushed 76 crowded transports into Lingayen Gulf, north of Manila Bay, on December 21. We had always figured they would make their main attack on this gulf, and we had held warfare maneuvers there for years to get ready for it. They did just what was expected. But they had us without naval or air protection. They were able to swing in boldly with a line of cruisers and destroyers. These laid down a reduced-charge fire lobbed big stuff into our beach defenses. Then, in their steel-armored barges which they slid out of the hulls of special carriers, they got 80,000 men ashore minus plenty who bit the sand of the beach. Next came their miniature tanks, 10 feet by 5, weighing 3 tons and capable of 30 m.p.h.; and finally the larger 7-ton jobs.

Before this superior strength our troops fell back to Manila. And here the Japanese made a bad blunder. If they had landed in force on Bataan Peninsula -- which was then almost undefended except for one small fort in Subic Bay -- their campaign might have been quickly concluded without the loss of the thousands of men they subsequently sacrificed. But they counted on bottling up the American army in Manila, and General MacArthur out smarted them. Instead of trying to keep Manila, he withdrew into the Bataan Peninsula, holding off the enemy forces converging from north and south long enough to slam the door in their faces.

I was on duty with General MacArthur's staff in Manila. One day as the Japanese were closing in, I had to go south to Batangas on a mission. While I was there, the Japanese advance guard passed through; so when I finished my business, they were between me and Manila. There was nothing to do but drive up the Manila Road and see what would happen. Fortunately my Filipino driver, a Corporal of the Scouts, was as cool and capable as they come. We started off at 2 a.m. New Year's Day. With the help of a Jesuit priest we had picked up on the road, we succeeded in fooling Japanese soldiers into letting our car pass.

We made our way through darkened Manila towards the glow of flame that was the waterfront. The thunder of distant artillery fire shook the air. Close by, terrific explosions followed successive enormous flashes of blue flame. Air Corps demolition men were blowing up aviation petrol. To the east the shambles of Cavite still glowed like a white-hot inferno. To the south great columns of black smoke, shot through with crimson flame, reached thousands of feet into the sky the oil reservoirs at Pandacan. To the north, just 500 yards away, all the remaining boats that might be used for a Japanese assault on Corregidor were being fired by our demolition men. The leaping flames lighted up the shattered hulks of twenty other ships, themselves aglow, sunk by the Japanese that afternoon. Three large wharves nearby were burning fiercely.

And directly across the street in front of me was the Manila Hotel. It, too, was ablaze but not from explosives. A big New Year's Eve party was still going strong at 4:30 a.m. While Manila's solid citizens were at home preparing for the ordeal which would come in a few hours, the less stable element, mostly Americans, with some English, was engaging in one last, hysterical binge.

I paced along the waterfront looking for anything that might float as far as Corregidor. I could see nothing. Then a welcome voice called out, "Hey, Colonel, we're shoving off -- last boat!"

I got in. We looked around to see if there was anyone else we could pick up. All around us on the waterfront the flames were leaping higher. Silhouetted against the fire we could see gangs of Quartermaster Corps men still plunging into the warehouses and carrying out ammunition, medicine, foodstuffs and clothing. Under the endless strafing of Japanese planes they dumped them into battered trucks which came and went unceasingly all that night until the last split second, carrying, precious loads of supplies into Bataan Peninsula.

We shoved off. The Rock, as the island fortress of Corregidor was called, was a target the Japanese bombers couldn't miss, and it mattered little where they hit it. Every square yard was packed with personnel, food, ammunition or communications. The common conception of Corregidor as a huge impregnable rock labyrinthed with tunnels is entirely erroneous. There was one central tunnel, with lateral passages for hospital wards, supplies and ammunition. Of the 10,000 people on the island, only 600 could be sheltered in them. Most of these were the sick and wounded.

All the great 12-inch rifles and mortars and all but one of the 3-inch guns were out in the open, and there was no protection for the gun crews. Hiding the guns in galleries blasted out of Corregidor's rocky cliffs had often been recommended, but the provisions of America's treaty with Japan, honorably observed, prevented this modernization of the island's defenses. From the captured Mariveles Mountains, at the southern end of Bataan, the Japanese were able to command all of Corregidor with their big guns. And our men, without observation planes, had to fight blindfolded against an enemy who had constant and complete observation.

After December, when the Japanese had destroyed all of the great barracks on Topside, the upper part of the island, the troops had to live, sleep and eat in the open. During bombings they ran from one foxhole to another, naked in their defenselessness. Major-General George F. Moore, commander of Corregidor, and I were standing 50 yards away when a 500-pound bomb scored a direct hit on a 12-inch battery, killing a young Coast Artillery Captain and 35 of his gun crew. They were crushed to death in an improvised dugout.

But once we were able to give the Japanese a taste of their own medicine. They mounted six 9.4-inch guns on the southern peninsula, in an area plotted and calibrated years before by our far-sighted Coast Artillery officers. Natives slipping in at night by canoe gave us their positions. We had them as surely as if they had been ten feet from our guns. General Moore waited patiently day after day until the enemy batteries had been completely established and personnel moved in to man them. Then, at three o'clock one fine morning, eight of our big howitzers began hurling 762-pound demolition and shrapnel shells into the enemy emplacements. We learned later that 600 Japanese were killed and hundreds of others had been wounded. The enemy batteries were completely destroyed. In the Japanese-controlled newspapers in Manila, the Emperor's High Command protested "this brutal and treacherous killing of sleeping men."

Fifty bombers made a special effort to destroy General MacArthur and his staff. The dive-bombers first strafed 100 cars parked about the administration building and set them on fire. Then the heavy bombers began dropping 500-pounders. Four hit the corners of the big concrete building, making craters you could drop a house in. Two bombs tore through the three concrete floors above the room in which Major General Richard K. Sutherland and two aides were crouching. The building heaved and shuddered like a ship in a storm. Chunks of ceiling and 50-pound pieces of shrapnel showered the lower floor. One end of the building was sucked out by the tremendous vacuum created by the bursting of a huge bomb a few yards away.

"I guess this is it," was General Sutherland's only comment. Many others died in the building that day, but the Chief of Staff and his aides miraculously escaped unhurt.

The great hospital on Topside was blasted off the face of the earth by 67 Japanese bombers. Fortunately, the medical officers had removed all the patients a couple of days before and carried them down to the tunnel. Even there the patients were only relatively safe.

In one of the laterals next to them were 250,000 pounds of black powder. In other laterals were 220,000 gallons of petrol, thousands of rounds of 3-inch anti-aircraft (A-A) ammunition, giving off explosive picric-acid fumes, and thousands of 8-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch shells. Nobody needed a no smoking sign to strike a match there would have meant death for everybody on the island. Every man there knew that he was living on top of a volcano.

The chapels on Topside were bombed. So the Christian Church once again had to take shelter in the catacombs. Every Sunday morning the chaplain would improvise an altar in the tunnel, using heavy cases filled with anti-aircraft shells. Soldiers and nurses knelt on the concrete floor or sat on empty ammunition boxes. The wounded, most of whom insisted on attending, were wheeled from the hospital laterals or carried in on litters.

All through the endless days of hardship and horror, General MacArthur's courage and coolness contributed to the maintenance of morale throughout all ranks. The same is to be said for Mrs. MacArthur. Many a night she had to make a dash from the exposed timber house in which she slept to the shelter of the tunnel, carrying little Arthur, their son, in her arms. Arthur never came willingly he wanted to stay out to see the bombs burst.

There was money to burn on Corregidor. I mean that literally. Millions of dollars had been brought from Manila, and to save it from the enemy it had to be destroyed. Great stacks and armfuls of $5, $10 and $20 notes were burnt in bonfires, to the intense interest and wonderment of the soldiers standing by. One of the officers got a great kick out of lighting his cigar with a $100 note.

The island's only defenses against the endless and merciless fleets of silver-colored bombers were a few 3-inch anti-aircraft guns. The total amount of A-A ammunition on hand at the start of the siege was 30,000 rounds; at an average daily expenditure of 1000 rounds, this would have lasted only a month. The air raids were so frequent, and it was so necessary to conserve ammunition, that Japanese bombers were able to dump their loads without being fired on. With the type of ammunition they had, the gun crews had to wait until the planes were directly over head, the shortest range.

During the first days of February a submarine got through the Japanese blockade with a small quantity of modern 3-inch ammunition with mechanical fuses. The battery commanders doled it out as if each shell were made of solid gold. They bided their time until large bomber formations came over and presented extremely favorable targets. With the new stuff, our gunners reached up 25,000 feet and knocked many an over-confident Japanese pilot out of the sky.

And so it went on to the inevitable end. I wasn't there for the final days, but I can see the big bombers searching out the few remaining guns, the dive bombers swooping down for the kill at exhausted gun crews. Day after day the enemy batteries on Bataan poured their screaming projectiles into the tunnel mouth, tearing away the face of cliffs, smothering the beach defenders in bloody debris. And then the steel barges, loaded with savage foes, loomed out of the darkness of the channel and spewed their crews ashore.

The island was on fire. Ammunition dumps were blowing up. Relentlessly the fresh hordes of attackers moved forward towards the tunnel. In the hospital laterals 100 white-faced women huddled, shuddering, against the walls. All was darkness and confusion, destruction and death. Into the black tunnel itself smashed the invaders. There was bloody work there with bayonet, knife and hand grenade. It had to come at last -- the very end.

But some days before this, I was told that my transportation had arrived the previous night. The submarine was lying on the bottom throughout the day, but would surface at midnight, when I was to be ready to go aboard. No personal baggage was allowed, and I was sworn to secrecy.

The day was spent seeing friends on the Rock for the last time, without being able to say good-bye. Perhaps a few hints were dropped that there might be a way to get precious letters home if given to me -- I know I was a walking post office when I left.

That afternoon I climbed the narrow crest of Malinta Hill with General Moore. Across the bay, Manila's shattered waterfront was caught in the bright rays of the descending sun. Through General Moore's glasses I could see an enormous Japanese flag flaunting on top of the Manila Hotel. I wondered momentarily how the New Year's Eve party makers liked the invaders....

We turned towards the setting sun. A mile away, on Topside, the Stars and Stripes flew serenely from an oft-shattered, oft-mended pole. It looked pathetically small against the darkening sky.

Captain Ray, Rear-Admiral Francls W. Rockwell's Chief of Staff, came up to me. "In five minutes," he said, "one of my officers will guide you to a boat which will take you to the rendezvous point in the bay." We went down to the beach, lugging the six mail sacks of confidential documents which I was taking along.

A moment later the little boat slipped away from the beach. We reached the rendezvous and sat waiting, as I have related earlier. To the north, across the bay, the flashes of a tremendous artillery duel tore gashes in the purple-black sky. Gradually the flashes united into a sheet of flame fifteen miles long, the length of the front. The flame on our side appeared bright blue and yellow; on the Japanese side it was dull red. The roar of the guns and crash of the shells seemed to strike down upon us. Under those screeching shells were my friends and comrades of a quarter of a century of soldiering....

Then, off the port bow, a small blue light blinked twice. Cautiously our little craft edged forward. There was the submarine. A hand reached down and I scrambled up the wet sloping side.

"Take a good look at the sky," the commander said. "It will be ten days before you see it again."

The hatch closed behind me, shutting out the flaming frenzy of battle, the last sight of doomed Corregidor. Silently the sub glided through the black waters, slowly we crept past the menacing minefields. Bataan and Corregidor slipped astern into the night.

General Jonathan M. Wainwright broadcasts at a Manila radio station, reluctantly ordering his troops in the Philippines to lay down their arms. As he speaks a Japanese guard watches attentively. Guerrilla resistance by Filipino patriots and American survivors continued to harass the victors until the long-awaited return of American troops took place.