MacArthur Strikes Back

In the steaming woods that crowd the engineer-made airdrome on Bataan, the monkeys chattered a tuneless obbligato to the bright-plumaged birds. Below them, sweating hard and grunting often, men in grease-stained coveralls worked over a handful of pursuit planes -the last, bullet-chipped remnant of Douglas MacArthur's Air Force. Now, after days of ingenious patching, the P-4Os were ready to fly.

From the north came the intermittent pop-popping of small-arms fire as patrols bumped and broke off again, but except for an occasional door-slamming bang from the guns the artillery was silent. In the woods the pilots climbed into their seats, fastened their helmets and parachute straps. The engines in the P-4Os belched, coughed, broke into cavernous mumbles. Down the concealed alleyways through the trees the lean airplanes teetered to the airdrome. They bellowed briefly for the warmup.

The Raid. The Jap was close enough to hear the engines when they began to roar. But by then it was too late. The P-40s streaked across this field and across the trees. They were lightly loaded with gas (it was to be a short trip), heavily loaded with bombs (but a lively one).

In the rifle pits on the outpost line, U.S. soldiers looked up as the ships snarled past, grinned at the star cockades on their fuselages. Few minutes later they heard some joyful sounds. Less than 15 miles north of the front line, over the wrecked naval station at Olongapo on Subic Bay, the P-4Os peeled out of formation, and the howl of their engines rolled down the peninsula. The men on the ground could hear the crump of bombs, the clatter of .50-caliber guns. From the mountaintops, outposts saw the P-40s whip up from the attack, roll over, dive again & again. Then smoke began to rise, great billowing clouds of it, and they saw the tiny specks in the sky grow into the shapes of airplanes as the raiders headed home.

They were back within the hour. The planes mumbled back into the trees, grunted and were silent. The pilots clambered down, shook off their parachutes into the hands of grinning mechanics, gave them a brief report.

The Result. The mechanics were entitled to it, for never had bits & pieces been stuck together with more resourcefulness than into the planes that flew that day. The raid had been a smashing success. MacArthur's P-40s, doing a job they were never built to do, had sunk 30,000 tons of shipping (three transports), had chewed up Jap small craft, too. Caught with his finger in his mouth, the Jap had never got a single plane off the ground, had been slow on the draw with his antiaircraft.

There were no U.S. losses. More important still, the raiders had caught the transports while they were still loaded. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Japanese soldiers had gone down with the ships.

For the rest of the week Bataan was reasonably quiet. MacArthur's men knew why. Their commander, informed by some magic of reconnaissance that more Japs were on the way for another try at the death stroke, had hit as he always does-coolly, after careful calculation, at precisely the right time. The men on Bataan could live a little longer.

The Future. While they did, Corregidor heard from other U.S. soldiers, white and Filipino. Far north in Luzon, a guerrilla band burst out of the woods and smashed a Jap truck train. Through the mountainous reaches of the island came rumblings of other raids, of soldiers organizing civilians into the kind of warfare the Japanese in the islands fear most.

Below Luzon, in the lovely islands of the Visayan Sea, and far south in Mindanao, where a small U.S. force was still intact, there must have been more activity of the same kind. The Japanese ordered all civilians to turn in their cutting instruments, even the bolos they use to cut underbrush. Then the Jap landed troops and tanks on the island of Mindoro, across Verde Inland Passage from Luzon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.