Death of an American Illusion

Bataan finally fell. In a military sense the big news meant that 150,000-200,000 Jap fighters were now released, to be used on other fronts. But that was not the fact that struck home to the U.S. Not until the last burned-out man put down his rifle on the soil of a Bataan that was now Japanese did Americans learn their lesson.

Bataan taught the U.S. a thing it had forgotten: pride of arms, pride in what the young men could do when tested.

Bataan taught America a humiliating thing, too: that U.S. soldiers could be beaten, could be taught the fullest ignominy of unconditional surrender. And they could be given this lesson by the funny, myopic, bucktoothed, bandylegged, pint-sized Jap--who, it suddenly appeared, was taut-muscled, courageous, vastly menacing.

The Jap had not changed. He was the same fellow who ran the curio shop in Rockefeller Center, or fished off California's coast. What had changed was a U.S. state of mind almost as old as the Republic. Before Pearl Harbor there was only one world to U.S. citizens. The world, the only world that Americans believed in or cared about, was the U.S. The rest of mankind was in an American sense, unreal. The American might-and did-throng the tourist spots like London and Paris, "discover" Bali or the Dalmatian Coast, but he could never quite believe that these outlandish foreign parts could have a real connection with his world.

The Jap lived in the U.S. and worked against it, but his image was even mistier than the forms of the white men of Europe. Even after he had smashed at Pearl Harbor, his true form did not emerge. Americans did not yet believe what Pearl Harbor and Wake and Guam told them. They did not believe it because these first reverses of the war had a newsreel quality of unreality.

Bataan's end was different. Here was no blow that could be repaired in a navy yard. With Bataan went 36,000 or more courageous U.S. soldiers-heroes, three out of four of whom were sons of the Philippines. They had been worn to hollow shadows of men by 15 days of smashing by the finest troops of the Son of Heaven. Because the U.S. had been well satisfied with the world it lived in, had pinched its boundless flood of pennies and sat alone, those U.S. soldiers had stumbled ragged, sleepless and half-starved through the last days of the most humiliating defeat in U.S. history. In no previous battle had so many U.S. fighting men gone down before a foreign enemy, and seldom had any beaten U.S. soldiers been in such pitiable condition-believing until the last hour of destruction that their country could and surely would send them aid.

The U.S. had known the end was near. But it had not and could not, beforehand, taste the taste and smell the smell of crashing defeat.

The end was slow and agonizing and struck home the harder because Lieut. General Jonathan M. Wainwright's communiques were terse and professional. For 15 days the Jap struck at Bataan with everything he had. Dive-bombers blew great craters in forward positions. Artillery roared endlessly day & night; the nervous chatter of Jap machine guns rattled until it rasped men's nerves like a file. The Jap even struck again at the hospital, scattered the wounded like straws.

Since the middle of January the men on Bataan had gone short of food. In Australia the Army had poured out good U.S. dollars to hire the adventurers of the South Seas to run the Jap blockade with food and ammunition. But nearly two out of three of the blockade-runners were lost-most of those, it seemed, which carried food.

Jonathan Wainwright's soldier's eye saw that the end was near. From the shores of the Bay he withdrew his naval forces, sailormen and Marines of the 4th Regiment (evacuated last November from Shanghai) to Corregidor. He tried to strike one last blow. Against a Jap breakthrough on the Manila Bay side of the peninsula he threw a corps in desperate counterattack. It was too much. The glassy-eyed soldiers went forward like men in a dream, so exhausted that many of them could hardly lift their feet, and the Jap mowed them down. The flank folded up.

The men on Corregidor saw only a little of the ghastly end. The last, pitifully small ammunition dump on Bataan went up in smoke and flame; the three ships at the water's edge (including the 6,000-ton sub tender Canopus) were dynamited. Finally, from one of the heights on Bataan, a white flag went up. How many of the 36,000 died fighting, only the Japs knew.

Men still swam the shark-infested stretch from Bataan to Corregidor, and in the last few hours boats got across with nurses and a few survivors. But the biggest part of the battle-trained Philippine Army was gone. From the heights the Jap, with artillery already emplaced, began slamming away at Corregidor. The soldiers there and the few civilians who had fled from Bataan (where 20,000 had been an added charge on the troops) knew it could not be long before they were finished too. No gunners had ever been in finer positions than the Jap. From Bataan's heights he could pour fire night & day across two miles of water into Corregidor and see where every shell fell.

In the Islands, as in the U.S., hundreds of cities and villages mourned their men. Virtually all of the 2,300 of the New Mexico National Guard had been in the Philippines. Mothers and wives met from Deming to Rosewell to Santa Fe, still hoped their coast artillerymen were on Corregidor. Salinas, Calif, lost a company of infantry soldiers; California mothers wept with Filipino women whose sons were veterans in the Scouts, or lean-faced youngsters just out of the West Point grey of the Philippine Military Academy.

In Cleveland, relatives counted the loss of 75 sons (some of whom might still be in Corregidor.); in Maywood and other towns on Chicago's edge, the loss of a National Guard tank company. Other tankers, 106 of them, had gone to the Islands from Janesville (pop. 23,000) in the dairy country of Wisconsin.

The survivors of the 9,000 American troops and 27,000 Filipinos fell into the hands of the Jap-all of them U.S. soldiers and U.S. losses. Alongside troops from the mainland, Tagalog and Moro and Igorot had fought just as bravely, died just as tight-lipped and with just as little fuss as their white comrades. It took that fighting and those deaths to make the U.S. know that the men from the Islands were their brothers and their equals.

In Australia frail Manuel Quezon, who had lost 18 pounds on Corregidor, spoke the stout determination of the Islands: "The Filipino people will stand by America and our Allies to the bitter end. ... I am profoundly grateful to the whole Army, which thus vindicated the honor and right of the Filipino people to become an independent nation."

They were all Americans on Bataan.

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