Last Stand

This was the brackish taste of defeat that American soldiers had not known in a major battle since Appomattox. To the grim, battle-weary soldiers of General Douglas MacArthur, backed up into the mountainous fastnesses of the Bataan peninsula, northwest of abandoned Manila, or desperately fending off Japanese attacks on the great harbor fortress of Corregidor, this was it.

It had been inevitable since the Jap smash at Pearl Harbor, his decisive slices into the Philippines' supply line at Wake and Guam. From then on it was a desperate, stubborn, downhill retreat before a foe of overwhelming numbers. The Jap admitted to the folks back home that his own losses were "colossal," that U.S. and Filipino troops fought "like demons." But he had command of the sea and the air.

The pursuits flown with dash and gallantry by stringy Filipinos and husky American boys were finally used up. The bombers that had sunk the ships of the Jap were gone. As the Jap neared Manila, even the flying fields were lost. And the Jap knew as did the American soldier that there would be no more to worry about for a long time. Maybe never.

The Shadow. Backing up in good order, taking their collections in casualties from the invader, Douglas MacArthur and his men had plenty to think about besides the battle.

While they fought and worked with coolness and precision at their staff and supply work, they must have thought of the American women on Luzon. Many of them, perhaps all of them, were now in the areas held by the Jap. Army & Navy men could thank their Government's forethought in ordering service families out of the islands. All were gone, except Douglas MacArthur's wife and three-year-old son, when war struck.

But the wives and daughters of U.S. civilians were still there, and the Japanese were strutting. In abandoned Manila they ordered all whites to stay indoors or be shot. From his fortress in the harbor, Douglas MacArthur charged that this treatment of U.S. civilians was already "especially harsh."

Days before, Douglas MacArthur knew what he had to do. The naval base at Cavite, on the south shore of the harbor, had already been abandoned, its stores removed or destroyed. Admiral Tommy Hart had snaked his ships out and away to the open sea. The Army was disposed in a crescent about Manila with its right flank in the narrow neck south of the town, its left sweeping north and westward into the Bataan peninsula.

The Retreat. Manila was an unequivocal liability. It lies in flat land with its back to the bay. It could be only a trap--a soft spot for a wedge to be driven home by the Jap to split the Army. As he had long planned to do in a last-ditch fight, General MacArthur abandoned Manila, already declared an open city, already heavily bombed.

The careful training of U.S. forces paid handsome dividends. U.S. troops moved their guns and trains in good order.

Before the week's end the withdrawal had been skillfully completed. The Army of the Philippines was holed up in an area almost devoid of roads, tough for armored-force operations, ideal for making the Jap pay for what he might eventually get. He made his first payment as this week began. Douglas MacArthur announced the Jap had lost at least 700 killed in a single, thwarted attack on the U.S. lines.

The left flank of the Army, now facing northeast, rested on the sea. Within its lines lay Subic Bay and the naval base at Olongapo, where a relieving force could be landed if it should come. Behind it, separated by only two miles of water lay Corregidor, a tadpole-shaped fortress in the mouth of Manila Bay, with its sandy low-lying tail pointed toward the city.

The Fortress. It was Corregidor that the Jap wanted most. Until its 12 in. guns are silenced, until the troops are bombed out of galleries bored through solid rock in the rearing head of the tadpole, the Jap can never hope to sail his ships into Manila Bay. For south of Corregidor it is only seven miles to the other shore of the harbor's mouth.

The invader went to work on Corregidor at once. From mass flights (which may have come from the U.S.'s Nichols Field, only ten minutes away) he began to bomb. There were 60 planes in the 'first attack, 21 in the second, 52 in the third. Standing to their guns, under Corregidor's spectacled, coast artilleryman commander, Major General George F. Moore, anti-aircraft men knocked 15 into the Bay, sent others away limping.

The Shame. But for Douglas MacArthur the future looked dark. The best he could reasonably hope for was that he and his men could hang on, delay the Jap, perhaps effectively hamstring some of the forces that the enemy hopes to use on a more important strategic position: Singapore. For want of airplanes, MacArthur had been forced to a bitter decision: make the enemy pay for what he gets.

Last week one of MacArthur's colonels told of what might have been: "The Japs are no damned good on the ground. . . . When our tanks and planes go into action we'll chase them back into the sea."

Said onetime isolationist Editor Joseph Medill Patterson's New York Daily News: "That Colonel's cry . . . should shame and humble every American on the home front. . . . Too much has been said, too many tears shed about the loss of a few ships and some scores of planes at Pearl Harbor. . . . Too little has been said about the much worse blunder of failing a year ago to convert automotive and other peace industries to defense production. By that failure we have lost a thousand planes and tanks and ships for every one lost at Pearl Harbor. . . .

"This week and every week in 1942 we can make up for what we neglected to do in 1941.

"Unless we do, our superior soldiers and sailors and flyers will continue to be driven back and slaughtered by little men with bigger weapons. Unless we do, it will be not the Japs but ourselves who are 'no damned good.'"

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