The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

Headquarters, U.S. Armed Forces, Far East Corregidor Commonwealth of the Philippines 9 March 1942

On 6 March, there had been another radio message from Chief of Staff George Marshall to Douglas MacArthur. It was not an order, MacArthur judged, but a gloved reminder: ‘‘The situation in Australia indicates desirability of your early arrival there.’’

MacArthur offered no comment on the cable to his staff, nor did anyone bring up the subject of his handwritten resignation, still in his desk.

Today, there had come a third radio message, priority URGENT, on the subject, and this time it was an order. General MacArthur was informed that he, ‘‘by direction of the President,’’ was expected to depart Corregidor no later than 15 March, to arrive in Australia no later than 18 March.

General MacArthur then replied to someone (no one later remembered who) softly, in bitter resignation, that an order was an order, and that he would have to obey. He would, he said, probably leave on the submarine Permit, which was en route to Corregidor.

Later that day, someone told him that the Permit’s arrival was by no means assured, and that even if it came, it would probably not arrive in time for MacArthur to comply with his latest orders.

MacArthur then issued two orders to Huff. First he told him to contact Navy Lieutenant Johnny Buckley and have him consider their chances of getting through the Japanese blockade in Buckley’s remaining patrol torpedo boats, then tied up in battered condition at a fishing wharf in Sisiman Bay, on the Bataan Peninsula.

The second order was to locate Lieutenant James M. C. Whittaker of the Army Air Corps and, if he was still alive, order him to Corregidor.

Near Abucay, Bataan 1330 Hours 10 March 1942

First Lieutenant James M. C. Whittaker, United States Army Air Corps (Detailed Cavalry), late of the 414th Pursuit Squadron (disbanded 10 December 1941) and late of the 26th Cavalry (which had been dismounted and for all practical purposes disbanded 16 January 1941), was wearing pink cavalry officer’s breeches and knee-high riding boots. Most of his uniforms had been destroyed when BOQ at Clark Field had been bombed out on 9 December. The cavalryman’s breeches and boots had been in the apartment in Manila.

On 12 December 1941 he had managed to get to the apartment en route to Clark Field, where he had been handed a message informing him that Chesty Haywood Whittaker, Jr., had died of a stroke. While still terribly shaken by that, his turn came to appear before a hastily convened board of officers.

‘‘The situation, gentlemen,’’ an Air Corps major told thirty-three young Air Corps officers, fliers and nonfliers, ‘‘is that we have a surplus of Air Corps officers and a critical shortage of ground force officers. You have been selected for detail to ground duty. The board will determine where your past experience will permit you to best fit in.’’

His appearance before the board, four field-grade officers of the combat arms and the Signal Corps, had been brief.

As Whittaker was still in the process of saluting, a cavalry officer smiled and turned to the others.

‘‘We’ll take this one,’’ he said. ‘‘How are you, Jim?’’

Two weeks after the cavalry major, a fellow polo player in happier times, had welcomed Whittaker into the ‘‘gentleman’s branch of service,’’ he was killed by mortar fire on the Bataan Peninsula. And just two weeks after that, an even more informal board of officers, convened to reassign what was left (not much) of the officer corps of the 26th Cavalry, had assigned Lieutenant Whittaker to the Philippine Scouts.

That assignment hadn’t lasted long either. Lieutenant Whittaker, who had let it be known that he had had summer jobs in construction, where he had learned to handle explosives, became commanding officer of the 105th Philippine Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment. The unit consisted of two Americans, himself and a Regular Army staff sergeant, George Withers, and eight Philippine Scouts, one second lieutenant, one master sergeant, and six technical sergeants. Lieutenant Whittaker had unit promotion authority to technical sergeant, and he had promoted all of the Scouts, none of whom had previously held rank above

corporal.

Lieutenant Whittaker’s tall riding boots were highly polished. They formed an interesting contrast to the rest of his uniform: a peasant’s wide-brimmed straw hat, a short-sleeved white (nonuniform) polo shirt, and a Colt Model 1917 .45 revolver (manufactured for the last war) stuck in the waistband of his breeches.

For a number of reasons, Lieutenant Whittaker was highly thought of by his subordinates. For one thing, they were all eating well. Lieutenant Whittaker carried with him a strong-box containing gold coins. One of his missions when assigned to the 26th Cavalry was to visit a rural branch bank and relieve it of its gold before the bank fell to the Japanese. When he returned with the coins, the officer who had sent him was dead, and he decided that he could put the gold to better use keeping his troops fed than it would serve in a box sent to Corregidor.

The natives on Bataan did not trust paper money. But they would sell rice, eggs, chickens, and pigs for gold, and Lieutenant Whittaker had kept first his Filipino troopers of the 26th Cavalry and now his Boom Boom Boys well fed with the coins from the bank. The gold had also purchased transport, when other units had none, and gasoline. The Boom Boom Boys had two pickup trucks and one fenderless 1937 Ford convertible. Some of the fuel came from dwindling Army stocks (because getting Explosive Ordnance Disposal people where they were needed enjoyed a high priority), but most of it Whittaker bought from the natives.

He was regarded highly even by Staff Sergeant George Withers, who did not ordinarily have much respect for officers who were not West Pointers with fifteen years’ service. Staff Sergeant Withers was a highly skilled Explosive Ordnance Disposal expert, and Whittaker readily acknowledged Withers’s superior technical skill when it came down to taking the fuse from an unexploded 105 or 155 shell.

But the 105th EOD Det spent most of its time blowing things up, and Lieutenant Whittaker—who had learned the art at sixteen from a man who had blown a railroad tunnel through the Rocky Mountains—was the most skilled sonofabitch Withers had ever seen with any kind of explosives. He took down bridges, closed tunnels, ruptured dams, and laid trees across roads with a skill that could only be called artistry. And when he was not blowing something up, he was leaving lethal traps for the advancing Japanese.

The one thing Luzon Force had in abundance was field artillery ammunition. There weren’t, in fact, enough cannon and howitzers to fire all they had, although the cannon were seldom silent. Whittaker had decided that the less of this abundance that fell into the hands of the Japanese, the better. Thus bagged powder charges for the larger cannon were converted into demolition material, and the smaller, integral ammunition converted to mines.

Only lately had the advance of the Japanese been so relentless against weakening Philippine-American forces that it had been necessary to blow ammo dumps that couldn’t be moved in place.

Whittaker’s reaction to their inevitable defeat was to look forward to blowing up the last three ammo dumps on the Bataan Peninsula. He made elaborate plans to do this the moment the first Japanese stepped inside the fence.

‘‘It will look like Mount Vesuvius,’’ he promised.

Most Americans in Luzon Force based their hopes of survival on making it to Corregidor when the Japanese finally occupied the Bataan Peninsula. Whittaker had other plans. He had found an ancient thirty-four-foot boat, a bit damaged by small-arms fire, sitting with decks nearly awash on the bottom of a small harbor near Mariveles. But her engine was intact, and her tanks were full, and there was extra fuel in fifty-five-gallon barrels in her hold. When the time came, her pumps would work. Whittaker had scuttled her, and he intended to refloat her, make for one of the other islands, and take his men with him.

The major contributing factor to the high morale of the 105th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment was their faith in their commanding officer’s ability to get them off Bataan. The rest of the Battling Bastards were doomed, and everybody knew it, but there was hope for them.

The officer who came looking for Lieutenant Whittaker had both a jeep and relatively clean clothes, although he was as gaunt from the three-eighths rations, no malaria pills, and overwork as anybody else on Bataan. The jeep and clean clothes identified him as a staff officer, probably from as far back as United States Armed Forces, Far East (USAFFE), at the tip of the peninsula.