Home to Fiddlers Green

Halfway down the trail to hell,

In a shady meadow, green,

Are the souls of all dead troopers

Camped near a good old-time canteen,

And this eternal resting place

Is known as Fiddlers Green.

--Old Cavalry Song

Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright was a soldier of the old U.S. Army. A lean, bowlegged cavalryman, he spent his happiest days in the hard-riding, spur and saber atmosphere of the vanishing Army posts of the West. In an age that produced Army men of many talents--generals who could double as diplomats, showmen, orators or businessmen--"Skinny" Wainwright, a fine horseman,* a crack shot and an all-round good officer, was never anything but a soldier. He had no conspicuous hobbies, outstanding social virtues or noteworthy vices. But his men believed in him, and they followed him to the limit at Bataan and Corregidor.

Wainwright's formal qualifications for leadership were good but not extraordinary. Born at Fort Walla Walla, Wash., where his father was serving, he went to West Point and built himself an orthodox career in the cavalry. He served with the ist Cavalry, fought the Moros in the Philippines, had a succession of combat staff jobs in France in World War I, and went through the usual round of peacetime assignments. In 1940, as a temporary major general, he was sent to command the Philippine division. On Pearl Harbor Day, Wainwright was senior field commander under Douglas MacArthur.

Cheers on the Field. When Wainwright and his fellow generals deployed their troops, they had some 19,000 U.S. Regulars, 12,000 Philippine Scouts and 60,000 semi-trained Philippine army troops to meet the attack of General Masaharu Homma's 250,000 Japanese, supported by their uncontested control of the sea and the air. The troops, still the peacetime Army, were badly equipped. MacArthur ordered Wainwright to put into effect War Plan Orange, the 20-year-old strategy for a withdrawal to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island, where the defenders would wait for help from the U.S. He fell back skillfully, but there was no rescue in prospect.With his scratch army he conducted five months of resistance against the enemy's first team.

General Wainwright appeared on the lines almost every day, personally regrouping his troops right down to organizing front-line machine-gun units. After MacArthur had been ordered off Corregidor to Australia by President Roosevelt, Wainwright took over the entire Philippines command. He slept only a few hours a night, but the certainty of his appearances kept "the bastards of Bataan" fighting long after the book said they should have stopped.

One of his old officers on Bataan remembers "his tall, gaunt, straight body . . . the eyes flashing in his tired face . . . He was on his toes, and had a grasp of every part of the tactical situation. He seemed to be able to put himself in the place of everybody out there. Near the end, Wainwright was suffering from beriberi. Undernourishment had affected him so badly that he could barely use his right leg. Despite this, dragging himself along and leaning on a cane, he walked along the roads all the time, inspecting the final defenses. He was the only general I have ever seen actually cheered by his own men on the field of battle."

Sword at the Side. On May 6, 1942, with Bataan fallen and Japanese landing parties on Corregidor attacking the entrances of his headquarters and hospital tunnels, Wainwright surrendered. He saw the tortures of some of his men at the hands of the Japanese and spent 39 painful months in Japanese prison camps, undernourished, beaten and abused by his jailers. At the end of World War II, he was escorted by Russian troops from the prison camp at Sian, Manchuria. When he appeared on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, at the Japanese surrender, he was a sick skeleton weighing only 120 Ibs.

Skinny Wainwright never fully recovered from the physical effects of his captivity. In August 1947, a four-star general and a Medal of Honor man, he retired from command of the U.S. Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. To be near the post that is most beloved to old soldiers, he took a job as board chairman of a Texas food-store chain. He and his wife lived comfortably but quietly, for his health was poor. He called their small shaded house in San Antonio Fiddlers Green.

Last week, eight years to the day after the surrender of his Japanese enemies, General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, 70, died of a stroke. After his funeral service, a detail of Fourth Army soldiers escorted his body out of Fort Sam's chapel to the post gate. Behind the coffin, his orderly led a cavalry horse with an empty saddle, the general's spurred boots reversed in the stirrups, and the sword he had once surrendered on Corregidor hanging stiffly at the side.

* He wore the pink coat of a Master of Fox Hounds at officers' hunts.

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