Ghostly Garrison

Toward the end there was no sleep on Corregidor.

The ammunition was about gone, the food had run out. The wounded, crowded into the catacombs of The Rock, cried out for help that no one could give. Malaria had seized the garrison; gaunt cannoneers, flushed with fever, stood at their stations beside pieces that had to be served with telltale economy.

Corregidor was through. Five months after the Jap's first attack, the last island of formal resistance in the Philippines was going. An army of more than 10,000 crack troops, wasted by want, without hope of relief, was going to its end.

Thirteen Raids. In the last few days, the Jap hit the defenders with everything he had. For four days in a row The Rock and its three satellite forts took 13 bombing raids a day. Meanwhile from Cavite, to the south, and from Mariveles' heights, north of The Rock, the Jap poured in a merciless artillery fire, 24 hours a day.

His low-caliber, flat trajectory pieces hurled their projectiles screaming into The Rock's gun positions and galleries and shelters. His mortars and howitzers looped great shells high in the air. With all his observation points on surrounding shores, the Jap could not miss.

Twenty-four Hours. One day when the sun had gone down and there was little light from the waning moon, the Jap set out in assault boats from Bataan. Corregidor, still on its feet, slashed at the landing parties with rifle and machine-gun fire, but the artillery pieces that should have been there to stop them were silent. In the great rents made in the barbed wire by the Jap's guns he beached his troops.

For 24 incredible, bloody hours, American fighting men--marines, sailors, U.S. and Filipino soldiers--grappled for Corregidor. The island's death rattle could be heard far inland.

To Corregidor's men it was an old story. There were always live Japs where the dead ones came from. They poured across the narrow waters in flood, swarmed over and through the defenders. The Jap was just too many.

Dashing Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew ("Skinny") Wainwright, fighting scion of an illustrious military family, horseman, balladeer, fighter-to-the-end, was finally forced to the greatest tragedy in a soldier's life. He surrendered, and walked off through the dead and dying to discuss with fat, able General Yamashita the terms of his capitulation.

What they were, General Wainwright was not privileged to tell his people back home. In a last-minute message to the States, Corregidor had urged the U.S. to be of good heart. The rest was silence.

In Australia, where a few of Corregidor's old garrison were leading a new fight, The Rock's fall struck deep, even though, like the fall of Bataan, it had been inevitable. Officers there thought not of the troops the Jap could now free for other areas, not of Manila's fine harbor, now open for a Jap base. They thought of the cheerful, undaunted soldiers they had left behind. Wrote Douglas MacArthur:

"Corregidor needs no comment from me. . . . But through the bloody haze of its last reverberating shot I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt and ghostly men, still unafraid."

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