TIENTSIN: II
After a while, a shipment of Marines came in. They were going to go to Tientsin or Peking, so they put me on the train with them and Dr. Gill gave me a double shot of morphine and a pocket full of codeine pills. They carried me onto the train in a stretcher, and they laid the stretcher on the rifles lying between the seats. Along the way there were delays. The bridge was out or damaged, so the train had to stop for several hours. The Marines had plenty of beer, and they were having a good old time, but I had morphine and codeine; I was having as good a time as they, even though I was stretcher-bound.

We got to Tientsin, and I was taken to the hospital in the barracks in the Marine compound, and stayed there for about four months, I believe. There I had lengthy surgery. The sustained high fever had caused damage to my lower intestine and a fistula had formed which required extensive surgery to remove all the damaged tissue. But considering everything, I came out of it all right. I recovered from it all, and all was well.

Now back in Tientsin, I went back to duty as a radio man in the radio station and I had hired a friend, a little Japanese-American girl. She was wiser, it seemed, than the Americans were as to our position with the Japanese. She told me that I should get back home because there is going to be a war. This little girl, I don't know exactly what she did for a living; I think she sold millinery in a shop in Tientsin. She knew there was going to be a war with the Japanese, and the Americans didn't know -- at least the ones in Tientsin didn't know. If they knew, they didn't tell us -- we were living there as if nothing had changed, but apparently it had.

Around November 1941, they said we were going to leave. They shipped out about two hundred fifty people that were in Tientsin. They sent two hundred to the Philippines. On board a civilian ship called the Maripolis, we landed a few days later in Manila, in the Philippines. There, too, everything seemed to be business as usual. No preparations were being made for war; nothing unusual was happening in the Naval yard.

MANILA: I
So I went to work. Since there were more radio men there than they needed, I went to work as a telephone/switchboard operator and was serving in that capacity. On Sunday morning, December 8, 1941, I was going down to breakfast. I remember it

was my birthday. Now, on Sunday morning, it was traditional that they have hotcakes and sausage, or hotcakes and bacon -- it was one of the better breakfasts that you could expect during the week. You always looked forward to breakfast on Sunday morning.

December 8 (International), 1941 -- The war begins on December 7th at Hawaii with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Our first knowledge of it came from a news commentator on KZRH in Manila. The Marines in Cavite were routed out about 4 o’clock on the 8th, and there is some controversy as to whether we heard of it then or about 4 hours later. Radio Cavite received news about 2:30 a.m., when the op on watch copied “AIR RAID HONOLULU – - NO SHIT”.

So Sunday morning, I was going down to breakfast, some people had already gone down, and I happened to have a radio in my locker. I was listening to a program from RADIO KZRH in Manila, and all of a sudden, the announcer said: "We interrupt this program to bring you a special announcement. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." He repeated that, so I went down to the dining room and there were several hundred Marines there. I got on a table and tried to get their attention. I hollered to them, and finally I got their attention. I said, "I just heard a special radio announcement that the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor!" But nobody believed me! They just told me to go to hell, and went back to eating their breakfast. Then, pretty soon, the word came in from many different sources. Then, of course, they believed it.

We finished our breakfast and went outside. We didn't have any special duties to do unless you had an assignment. As I recall, we were just standing around about 10:00 in the morning when we noticed there were airplanes approaching.

The days of the 8th and 9th we spent manning and augmenting “AA” and inter-battery communication. On the nite of the ninth we had numerous air raid warnings and Nichols Field across the bay from us was bombed, some fires were started.

The 10th of December was a fateful day. Until about ten o’clock we carried on as on the day before. Around ten or 10:30 we had a warning that enemy formations were approaching to bomb Manila. About a half hour later we saw them approaching from the northeast. At first they looked like a flight of geese, then as they came closer we watched them, fascinated.

They were approaching from the seaward side of Manila. They were extremely high. I had never seen airplanes flying so high before. There were about twenty-seven of them flying along, and when they reached the naval yard, they made a 45 degree turn and went right over the navy yard. And of course, by this time, everyone knew or expected them to bomb the compound. But they didn't bomb. We fired anti-aircraft at them but we had nothing to reach anywhere near as high as those planes were.

The anti-aircraft started to shoot from the ships in the bay, the navy yard and from various places, Caridad, Imus, etc. It was obvious from the first that we weren’t getting much more than half way up. On the first time over, they were all in one formation -- 56 of them. They passed on over and split into two groups, 29 and 27 each. Then as one group turned to come back over us, we realized we were to be the targets -- and still we watched, spellbound on the bulls-eye. Poor innocents!

There were some ships in the bay that could shoot that high, but they were unsuccessful in doing any damage to the planes. The airplanes continued over the Navy yard, and 35 miles further, went over Manila. When they passed over Manila, they broke into three different groups of nine planes each. Then they came back to the Navy yard. First, one group came and unloaded their bombs, hitting the Navy yard very hard. They dropped a few bombs on one side into the water, stretched across the yard, then dropped bombs on the other side of the water. Then another nine planes came over the Navy yard, criss-crossing over us, and successfully demolished it.

The first set of bombs didn't do too much damage to us, not killing very many people. We had all been trained that in a bombing we were to lay down and take cover. But while we were lying down, there were plenty of Filipinos lying down -- a lot of Filipinos worked there -- and when they saw the Americans lying down, they laid down. The first set of bombs damaged buildings and installations, but didn't harm many people. The noise of the bombs dropping was so great that you didn't really hear the explosion. But it excited the Filipinos so much that after the first rack of bombs hit, they jumped up and about five-hundred of them tried to get out of the gate. They were running all over the Navy yard. The next set of bombs just slaughtered them. Not many Americans were killed on the first attack but a lot of Filipinos died.

Inside the navy yard was holocaust. After the first run, the native labor tried to run out of the narrow gates. The next rain of bombs caught Filipinos running all over the place; it was mass murder. The whole yard and most of Cavite town was ablaze.

The bombs did a great deal of damage. I didn't see it all myself, but was told that one of the bombs had gone right down the conning tower of a submarine that was tied up at one of the piers. I was amazed at the damage a bomb could do, that a truck just standing there, not directly hit, was completely destroyed when pieces of the bomb flew through the truck and through the motor. The truck was completely destroyed even though if you stood off a distance, it didn't appear to be damaged. It did a great deal of damage to our mess hall where we had had our breakfast an hour before, and, of course, to our self-confidence.

The feeling of going from peacetime to a wartime situation is shockingly different from anything that you can imagine. You can't get the experience from pictures, stories that you read, or anything that someone could tell you; the only way is to really experience it yourself. The noises are much greater than you would expect; the damage, the carnage is much greater than expected. The suddenness in which these things happen is unnerving and unsettling to otherwise competent strong men. Our Commanding Officer was one of these -- a colonel, a good man, a good colonel. On that day he was rendered unable to function -- crying and blubbering while at the same time, other men, his junior officers, functioned very well.

When the first group of nine planes came over to make their bombing run, I was standing with a group of men near the radio station. There could have been about twenty in the group. That was also near the shore of the bay. From ground level where the radio station was down to the water level of the bay was about 10 feet. One of the men I was standing with was a Navy commander. We stood right where what was nearly the exact target for the bombing. We watched those planes go overhead, not realizing what was going to happen.

December 10, 1941 --I stood with a group of comm men near our CP, just outside the navy yard, and as the planes were directly overhead, I saw the sun glint on the bombs as they turned on the way down. Instinctively I cried, “Here come the bombs!” and jumped over the sea wall, thus putting about 8 feet of protecting cement between the explosions and myself. Third Battalion CP was fairly out of the bombed area, but almost immediately the fires were threatening us.

We suddenly heard a noise getting louder and louder. I noticed a flashing somewhere well below the planes, halfway or so to the ground. Then I recognized what was happening. I said, "Those are bombs!" I turned around and made a short run and jumped over that wall down to the shore. There was a little sandy beach there about three or four feet wide. A number of the men came tumbling down on top of me. Of course it was not the target; that was several hundred feet from where the bombs landed.

After the first rack of bombs fell, there was a pause. To indicate to you how irrational thinking had become, I jumped from this very secure place and ran out into a small park. I laid underneath a small bench, which offered me some protection, but the seawall was better.

Our concern was for our Radio Locater Equipment. By dark on the 10th, we had moved all our gear and most of the comm men out to Dahlahegan, 4 miles from the navy yard. There we set up and worked for the next ten days or so.

The bombing ended. There were buildings destroyed, and they were carrying people. The Navy yard was pretty well destroyed. Later on in the day, they took us to a garage which they had previously told us was off limits and not to go in there at all. They wanted us to take equipment out and set it up. It was radar equipment. I, for one, had never heard of it before that time. The people they were asking to set it up had not even seen it before, with the exception of this one corporal who had been sent to Canada before going to the Philippines to learn about radar. We towed this trailer to a small clearing about five miles from Cavite Naval Yard and set it up and tried to operate it. We got everything working with a diesel engine generating electricity. The people operating the radar scanner could get one blip on the screen and that was from a three hundred-foot tall U.S. radio tower at Cavite. That's all we could get! After about one week of that, Major Kale, my commanding officer, got in touch with the Army and told them to take their radar equipment because it would just get his men killed. So they came and got it.

DAHLAHEGAN

The stay at Dahlahegan was the best part of the war. We took over private homes, as they were, for our quarters, for all civilians had fled. We lived off the land. Foraging parties went out and we had food and drink aplenty. There were three refrigerators available and for the first time in my experience I received a daily ration of beer from the mess. While we were in Dahlahegan we didn’t hear much about the progress of the war on the fighting front, only rumors. But it seems we were concerned mostly with fifth columnists, terrorists, mysterious flares at nite, etc.

Of those of us who were at Dahlehegan (there were only about 20), most were comm men. We had First Lt. Davis and Captain Weeks in charge; the senior N Co present was Tech. Sgt. Sparks. The affair at Dahlehegan was certainly a sorry mess. Of all the men there, not over six gave a damn about how things were going. Our officers were drunk and incompetent all the time; the men, with the exception of six or so, were running loose, almost complete disorganization. Colonel Adams came to see us often, and he must have seen what was going on because he put Major Kaid over Weeks and Davis, and he made them stay on the job.

While all this was going on, there were air raids every day and the japs were steadily pushing down from the North and up from the South. So on about the 20th of December began the withdrawal of all navy and marines out of Cavite area and out to the Bataan Peninsula where we made our stand against the Japanese.

After that, I was assigned to an anti-aircraft group -- three guns, I think -- and I was a telephone operator for this aircraft group. I was told to stay and operate the telephone, and I did not notice that people were leaving. After some time, I guess about a whole day, someone said, "Hey, aren't you going to leave?" He told me that if I was going to stay there that I would be the only one. I got a ride with him back to the Navy yard and found that the entire Navy and Marine contingent were commandeering cars and trucks and buses. They were heading for Bataan, which was quite a long way, about seventy-five miles around Manila and back up the Bataan Peninsula.

What an epochal ride that was! I was on duty covering the withdrawal of a AA Btry from Imus. They were dismantling the guns, and I was there to keep in touch with a CP by a 2-way radio-telephone. When that job was over, I proceeded back to CP by truck. On arriving back at Dahlehegan, I found everyone and everything packed up and prepared to evacuate the Cavite Peninsula. All manner of trucks and cars were commandeered for the purpose. It was a regular “Taxi-cab Army”. In our particular car there was four other Marines, one girl (disguised in uniform), myself and -- a bottle of White Horse Whiskey (MINE!). We traveled in convoy, at nite, no lights, and our little Ford (1930) with no brakes. Accidents there were many, but the patron Saint Christopher must have rode with us on that nite, for we had literally dozens of hair-breadth escapes. The most serious mishap we suffered was motor failure.

I squeezed into a 1935 AirFlow Chrysler, and we traveled at night with no lights. There were many accidents -- cars and buses going off the road -- but we managed to stay on the road.

We proceeded from Cavite to Manila, thence northward to San Fernando. At San Fernando, the convoy took on gasoline and I was shaken out of a drunken sleep and decided to switch cars to ride with some friends of mine who had a little more leg room. A fellow named Ike Williams was driving this car, a ’35 Airflow Chrysler. Due to his inexperience, we had several very close calls and so a fellow named IP Davis insisted he be allowed to take the wheel. At San Fernando we learned that the Nipponese were coming from the south to meet us. We knew they were close, but we knew not how close they were.

We were running out of gas, though, south of Manila. At a town called Cabanatuan we got some gasoline from a Filipino, and he told us that we'd better hurry because the Japs were coming in from the other end of town. We barely squeezed by the Japs coming from further south, who would have cut us off if we hadn't made the turn in time.

A few miles north of San Fernando, the part of the convoy we were following decided to make a race of it. We raced along behind them for several miles, and then they outran us. So there we were, lost, in a strange country. We decided not to wait for the main group, so we traveled on by following the main traveled roads. After a time, we met some Army trucks and one driver gave us instructions. Then the main convoy caught up to us and we followed a driver who knew the way. When we neared our destination the country became very hilly. The old car had a leaky radiator, and when we were only a few kilometers from Mariveles, she overheated and quit altogether. We deserted the old car, and hitch-hiked on in to the Mariveles Section Base on Army trucks. (continue)

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