May 6, 1942

(See Cover) About 2 a.m. a signal rocket burst palely over the fortress island of Corregidor, Japanese batteries which had been shelling the island constantly for seven days opened up with a new and concentrated frenzy from their positions on the heights of Mariveles. Japanese infantrymen, ferried across the channel by small boats and bamboo rafts, swarmed onto the island's low-lying eastern shore.

From a radio dugout deep in Corregidor 's rock heart a boy from Brooklyn tapped out: "Too much for guys to take. . . . They have got us all around and from the sky. . . . Everyone is bawling like a baby. They are piling dead and wounded in our tunnel. . . . I know now how a mouse feels, caught in a trap, My name Irving Strobing. . . . Tell my mother how you heard from me."

The only account of the final events was the Japs'; no U.S. officer escaped to tell his version.

Shortly before noon, Lieut. General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, commander of U.S. forces in the Philippines, left his headquarters on the stricken island. Wainwright walked towards his conquerors (reported Nichi Nichi's correspondent), carrying a white flag. He "slumped into a chair . . . head held in both hands, his eyes staring at the ground." When the victorious Japanese commander entered the room, "Wainwright and his aides stood up at rigid attention and saluted." Wainwright said that "he had come to talk surrender." It was Corregidor's end. The day was May 6, 1942.

Into the Depths. Since Corregidor two long years have passed. Fresher violences have obscured the memory of Wainwright, the men who fought with him and the bitter story of national humiliation.

Sorely remembered now are more than 13,000 U.S. soldiers, including 35 U.S. generals, now in Japanese prison camps. Jonathan Wainwright, the man left behind to preside at his country's worst military fiasco, waits for death or liberation on Formosa, according to Jap reports. Three vague, hand-printed messages have come from him. That is all. Whether he is well or ill treated is not known. The Japanese look with scorn on the defeated.

But those who knew Wainwright knew that he would accept his fate with the stoicism of a professional soldier. Though he might look back on the events which had landed him behind barbed Wire with bitterness, he could look back on the life of Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright without shame.

The Soldier Born. "Skinny" Wain wright had a soldier's heritage. Great-Grandfather Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, Episcopal bishop of New York in 1852, fought by the Word, his descendants by the sword.

The bishop's sailor son, commander of the flagship of the flotilla which blockaded the Gulf ports, died with a musket ball in his head. The bishop's hard-riding grandson commanded a cavalry squadron in the Battle of Santiago, fought alongside Douglas MacArthur's father in the Philippines, died in the insurrection of 1901.

On Skinny Wainwright's mother's side stood Grandfather Edward Serrell, who devised the "Swamp Angel"--the great 8-in. Parrott gun which was skidded across swamps, set upon piling and used to hurl 200-lb. shells into the heart of Charleston.

Skinny, born in Walla Walla, Wash., raised at Army posts, a gangling, slatty youngster, naturally went to West Point. Graduated in 1906 (a first captain like Douglas MacArthur--'03), he was assigned to the storied 1st Cavalry. He was sent to the Philippines and fought the Moros on Jolo. He returned to the U.S. and married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Holley, daughter of an Army officer.

He was a polo player, a crack rifle shot, a pink-coated M.F.H. for officers' hunts. His lean legs were bowed.

He rode patrol along the Mexican border. He named his favorite horse "Jack," which was what he also called his only son, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright V.

When World War I broke out, he served in France with the 82nd Division, later on the General Staff of the Third Army. When he spoke, it was with clipped speech and to the point. He was a taciturn man who had one business--soldiering. He had the complete loyalty of his troops. At 57 he had had already a long and honorable career as a servant of his country, like his father and grandfathers before him.

In September 1940, a brigadier general, he was ordered to the Philippines.

Beyond the Borders. At the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt said: "The guns of our warships have awakened us to ... new duties." Said pedantic Admiral Mahan: "The Nation in its evolution has aroused itself to the necessity of carrying its life . . . beyond the borders which heretofore have sufficed for its activities."

Half conscious of its new duties, the U.S. had put one foot into the Philippines, like a man testing an icy bath. In 1940, when Wainwright was sent to Manila, the nation had been standing in that tentative position for 41 years. None of this concerned General Wainwright, except that it made his duty more difficult. As commander of the Philippine Division, raised to the temporary rank of major general, he had to defend a U.S. outpost that was not fully recognized as such.

Philippine Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur had a program: a well-trained standing army, 400,000 reserves, 100 PT boats and 250 airplanes. With that force MacArthur believed that the islands which lay across the path of Japanese ambitions could be held. Starting the program in 1936, he had given himself ten years. The trouble was, the enemy did not mean to wait ten years.

Eight months after Wainwright arrived in Manila, he put his wife on the S.S. Washington. He said to her: "If you're in San Francisco the first day of June I'll be very much relieved." Six months later, four years before MacArthur's defense program would reach full flower, the enemy came pelting down from Formosa.

MacArthur's ground forces then were: 19,000 U.S. Army troops; 12,000 crack, professional Philippine Scouts, as good as soldiers come; 100,000 Filipino reservists who had quit the villages of Mindanao, the Visayans and Luzon to shoulder rifles. His air forces: 35 Flying Fortresses; 100-odd P-40s; other oddments.

The Asiatic Fleet of Admiral Thomas C. Hart was no more than a bluff: two cruisers, 13 old destroyers, 29 submarines and a few gunboats, minesweepers, PTs and auxiliaries -- operating from Cavite.

On Dec. 8, the day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers struck at Baguio, north of Manila.

No Overt Act. MacArthur's instructions were not to create any overt act. His planned strategy, in the event of attack, was to send his bombers over Formosa, the enemy's staging point. Sending the B-17s over Formosa would certainly be "overt." Were the Japs really making war, or was this another "mistake" like the Panay incident? Undetected, Jap bombers soared over Clark Field. When they had gone, the Far East Air Force's main airdrome was a wreckage. Half of Major General Lewis H. Brereton's bomber force had been destroyed.

Again & again, the Emperor's bombers returned. On the ground, fifth columnists who had sabotaged the air-raid warning put lighted flares and rockets to guide them. Within two days Brereton's effective air force was reduced to about two score planes.

What was left of the 21st Pursuit Squadron was shifted to Lubao on Bataan. Runways had not been completed, there were no ground installations, no revetments, no camouflage. Brereton sent what was left of his B-17s south to Australia before they were lost.

Cavite was destroyed. Left without a base within 1,500 miles, Hart withdrew all of his puny fleet except a few auxiliaries, PTs, submarines. His wing of Catalina patrol boats disintegrated in glory. In northern Luzon, unhampered by warships or aircraft, waves of Japanese infantrymen poured ashore.

"I Hold the Cork." Not until some time after Christmas Day did residents of Manila begin to feel real anxiety. Up to that time bleary-eyed Americans stood in jovial groups around Manila's bars. Skittish ones started a run on stores, buying out bandages, iodine, flashlights. A retired major began to see Japs crawling out of whiskey bottles and had to be confined as a nervous case. But everyone was sure that help was on the way. MacArthur beamed with pride over a congratulatory message from President Roosevelt: "Keep up the good work."

Even the bombing of Manila did not upset residents unduly. They were still unable to believe that they were standing in a tornado's path.

In January MacArthur said: "The enemy may hold the bottle but I hold the cork." He had moved his headquarters to Corregidor.

"Dear Mr. Roosevelt!" He may or may not have realized how soon the cork was going to blow out. Far to the south the Jap tornado was engulfing Borneo and rolling into the Solomon Islands. In the middle of February Singapore fell as casually as a shrug. Then the Japs turned their fury back on the Philippines.

Skinny Wainwright's northern Luzon troops grudgingly began to back up. Ford, Chevrolet and G.M.C. trucks with the insignia of Japan rolled over the roads with General Homma's little men. Jap artillery hurled shells made of U.S. scrap. Jap planes, sent back after Singapore to finish the job, dropped fragmentation bombs made of the same stuff. Back of Wainwright's lines, base hospitals overflowed in gangrened misery.

The Bataan troops had a joke. They wanted a message sent to the States: "Dear Mr. Roosevelt -- Our P-40 is full of holes. Please send us a new one." Desperate, bitter men began to sing:

We are the orphans of Bataan

No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam.

Where was the promised help? Seven ships from Australia had started out with supplies but only three had broken past Jap raiders to arrive at Cebu. In Washington the Philippines were written off. MacArthur was ordered to get out.

The Orphans. On the peninsula of Bataan, now in full command, Skinny Wainwright butchered his horse to eat. Every day he visited the front line. His indifference to snipers became a legend.

With his headquarters on Corregidor, he continued to cross to Bataan to encourage his troops. He was ravaged by beriberi, emaciated. He could barely use his right leg; he dragged himself along with a cane.

His faded breeches shrank up his legs. His shirt was ragged. His steely eyes were sunken with fatigue. But his tours among the starved, tattered, forgotten men of Bataan were almost triumphal. They cheered him on the field. Behind his back they reverently called him "Old Skinny."

They fought as long as human strength endured. The Japanese enveloped their right flank. The orphans tried to counterattack. They were starved, exhausted, sick with malaria, beriberi, dysentery. They had fought without relief for three months. Skinny wrote a final entry in his diary: "Bataan is disintegrating." The counter attack failed.

On April 8, the cork blew out. Bataan was gone, thousands were dead. Thousands had fallen into the hands of Homma's frenzied and victorious troops. Only a few got across the strait to Corregidor.

Driven and badgered, U.S. and Filipino captives trudged back through the Japanese lines. Handsome Lieut. Colonel William E. Dyess (later killed in a West Coast airplane crash) survived that infamous march and escaped to tell the sickening story of how living soldiers were beheaded, or thrown into trenches and buried with the already dead; how Filipinos, dying of thirst, were shot as they wriggled on their bellies towards water; how a gutted soldier with bowels dangling was hung on barbed wire as an object lesson to those who would escape; how men who had dropped in the road were ground by the wheels of the Emperor's Ford trucks, flattened out like rotting rabbits on a busy highway.

The Sponge. Against the Rock and its three smaller, neighboring islands, Homma now turned the full fury of bomb and shell. On the tadpole-shaped Rock men & women prepared to meet their end. Now they knew that no help would come.

Mortar pits became graves for their crews. In the great tunnels, built to make Corregidor as impregnable as Gibraltar, haggard doctors stood and worked on floors slippery with blood. Food, medical supplies, ammunition ran out.

Civilian officials had already destroyed one last sign of U.S. sovereignty in the Philippines. They had burned the U.S. currency which had been transported from Manila banks. Washington, Lincoln, Grant, the Great Seal, the signature of Henry Morgenthau Jr., all had gone up in smoke. Now the last sign of sovereignty was to go. There was nothing more for men to hold on to.

Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright hauled down his flag, threw himself and his men on the mercy of the little conqueror, went off with them to share the nation's degradation. Far to the South, in Australia, General MacArthur penned his memorable epitaph: "Corregidor needs no comment from me. . . . Through the bloody haze of its last reverberating shot I shall always seem to see the vision of its grim, gaunt and ghostly men. . . ."

Today, strong in its machines and young men, the U.S. is sweeping back across the Pacific. Victory lies ahead. Some day in the not too distant future the humiliation of the Philippines will be avenged. Wainwright and his soldiers wait. If they live they will learn that the nation has not forgotten the Philippines' gaunt and ghostly men.

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