W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines Read online

  W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines

  THE CORPS is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Second Lieutenant Drew James Barrett III, USMC Company K, 3d Battalion, 26th Marines Born Denver, Colorado, 3 January 1945 Died Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam, 27 February 1969 and Major Alfred Lee Butler III, USMC Headquarters 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit Born Washington, D.C., 4 September 1950 Died Beirut, Lebanon, 8 February 1984 And to the Memory of Donald L. Schomp A Marine fighter pilot who became a Legendary U.S. Army Master Aviator RIP 9 April 1989 "Semper Fi!"

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Probably the best-known Marines who served with great distinction behind the enemy's lines with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II are Major Peter Ortiz (who was decorated with two Navy Crosses and named a member of both the French Legion d'Honneur and the British Order of the British Empire for his valor); Sergeants Jack Risler and Fred Brunner; Gun-nery Sergeant Robert LaSalle; and Captains Sterling Hayden (the actor) and Peter Devries (the writer). There were others...

  Behind The Lines

  Chapter One

  [ONE]

  Headquarters, U.S. Army Luzon Force

  Bataan Peninsula, Luzon, Philippines

  0915 Hours 7 April 1942

  A Ford pickup truck turned off the Mariveles-Cabcaben "highway" into what was officially called "The Headquarters Area" but known universally as "Lit-tle Baguio." The area held, in flimsy tropical buildings, the main ordnance and engineer depots and General Hospital #1, as well as the collection of buildings that housed the various offices of Headquarters, U.S. Army Force, Luzon.

  The truck had seen better days. Its fenders were crumpled, its windshield was cracked, and the bright crimson paint of its former life as a utility vehicle for the Coca-Cola Company of Manila showed in twenty places through a hast-ily applied coat of Army olive drab. On the truck bed were a footlocker, a fold-ing wooden cot, a battered leather suitcase, and half a dozen five-gallon gasoline cans.

  In a few moments, it pulled up beside the building identified by a battered sign as the Commanding General's.

  A tall, just this side of heavyset man got out of the truck and started to walk toward the building. He was wearing mussed, sweat-soaked khakis, high-topped shoes, and a web belt from which was suspended a Model 1911 Colt.45 ACP pistol. He stopped and returned to the truck, snatched a khaki overseas cap from the seat and put it on. On the cap was the gold leaf of a major. There was no insignia of any kind on his khaki shirt. He rubbed the red stubble on his cheeks.

  I need a shave. To hell with it.

  He entered the open-sided building and walked past a collection of desks toward the building's rear, stopping before the desk of another major of about the same age. On the desk, an ornately carved triangular nameplate-a rem-nant of better times-carried the crossed rifles of infantry, a major's leaf, and the legend "Marshall Hurt."

  A moment or so later, Major Hurt looked up.

  "Fertig," he said. "What can I do for you?"

  "I was sent for," Fertig replied.

  "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten," Hurt said.

  They didn't particularly like each other. Hurt was a professional soldier, Wendell Fertig a reservist. A year before, Hurt had been an underpaid captain and Fertig a successful-and wealthy-civil engineer.

  Hurt stood up from his desk and went deeper into the building. A minute later he returned.

  "The General will see you now," he said, and nodded toward the rear of the building.

  Fertig nodded, walked to an open door, then stood there and waited to be noticed by Major General Edward P. King, Jr., the Commanding General of Luzon Force. King, a stocky fifty-eight-year-old artillery man from Atlanta who wore a neatly cropped full mustache, was at that moment standing before a sheet of plywood on which a large-scale map of the Bataan Peninsula had been mounted.

  Fertig both liked and admired General King. He had known him socially before the war-indeed, General King had played an important role in the di-rect commissioning of Fertig as a Captain, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Re-serve.

  And right now he felt very sorry for him. Fertig didn't pretend to know much about the Army, but he knew enough to understand that the worst thing that could happen to a career officer was to suffer defeat.

  The map of Bataan General King was studying was clear proof that not only was he suffering defeat, but the defeat was very shortly going to be total and absolute. It didn't matter that King was going to be defeated by a well-equipped, battle-hardened Japanese force that outnumbered King's poorly equipped, starving, "Filamerican" force four or five to one; he was about to lose, and that was all that mattered.

  A minute or so later, General King glanced at the door, noticed Fertig, and waved him inside.

  "Wendell," he said.

  "General."

  "Could you see the map, where you were standing?"

  Fertig nodded.

  "I'm afraid it won't be long," King said. "You know how we are defining effectives these days, Wendell?"

  Fertig shook his head, no.

  "An effective soldier is one who can carry his weapon one hundred yards without resting and be capable of firing it after he has gone the one hundred yards. Fifteen percent of our force is effective as of yesterday. The percentage is expected to decline."

  Fertig nodded.

  "I had several things on my mind when I sent for you," General King said. "For one thing, I wanted to hear from you, personally, that we are pre-pared to destroy our ordnance and other stocks."

  "Everything is prepared for detonation, General. Redundantly, in terms of both hardware and personnel. In other words, each blow site has been doubly wired, and there are two locations from which the sites can be blown."

  King nodded.

  "Thank you. Good job. A young lieutenant came up with a means to de-stroy artillery that somehow didn't occur to the authors of the Field Manuals. You simply shove powder bags down the tube ahead of the charge, or the round, and then fire it."

  "I don't suppose the authors gave a lot of thought to destroying our own cannons," Fertig said. "I was going to suggest shoving sandbags down the barrel from the muzzle end. I don't know how it would work with a cannon, but I do know, from painful experience, what happens to the barrel of a Diana-grade Browning when you try to get an ounce and a quarter of Number 6 shot past a lump of mud."

  King smiled. It was a memory of better times... of a cock pheasant rising from the frozen stubble of a cornfield.

  "Secondly, Wendell, I was wondering what to do with you."

  "Sir?"

  "You've blown up-or arranged to blow up-everything here that has to be blown," King said. "It occurred to me that General Sharp might find some use for your skills."

  Brigadier General William F. Sharp commanded, on the island of Min-danao, what was now known as the Mindanao Force of the U.S. Army in the Philippines. From everything Fertig had heard, Sharp's forces had not been subjected to the same degree of attack as the Luzon Force, and so were in much better shape.

  In the absence of reinforcements, Sharp's forces were as inevitably doomed as King's, but that defeat was some time off, perhaps as much as two months, and in two months a good deal could happen.

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Would you be willing to go down there to him?"

  "Yes, Sir. Of course."

  "Well, we have some small craft that periodically try to get from here to there. There's one leaving at nightfall. I've told Hurt to find space for you on it."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Possibly, Wendell, you could make it from Mindanao to Australia. God knows, it would be a waste of your talents t
o spend the rest of this war in a prisoner-of-war cage."

  "If you think I can be of any use here, General..."

  "I think we've passed that point, Wendell. And I'm sure General Sharp will be glad to have you. Give him my best regards when you see him."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "That'll be all, Wendell," King said. He put out his hand. "You've car-ried your weight around here. Thank you. See you after the war."

  "It's been a privilege serving under you, Sir."

  Fertig saluted. King returned it.

  Fertig did as crisp an about-face movement as he could manage, and then marched toward the door. His throat was tight; he felt like crying.

  "Wait a minute," General King called after him. Fertig turned.

  "I said there were several things on my mind," King said. "I forgot one."

  "Yes, Sir?"

  King motioned him to approach.

  "This used to be done with photographers, with a proudly beaming wife standing by, and would be followed by a drunk at the club at your expense," King said. "No clubs, no photographers, and no wife, thank God, but con-gratulations nonetheless, Colonel."

  He handed Fertig a lieutenant colonel's silver leaf.

  "I'll be damned," Fertig said.

  "Well earned, Wendell," King said, and shook his hand. "I'll hold you to the party. In better times."

  "I'll look forward to it, Sir."

  King grabbed Fertig's shoulder, squeezed it, smiled, and then turned away from him.

  Fertig left the office and returned to Major Hurt's desk.

  "Tell me about the boat," he said.

  "It's a small coaster," Hurt replied. "Be at the pier at Mariveles at half past five. They expect you."

  "Do I need orders, or..."

  "You're traveling VOCG," Hurt said-Verbal Order of the Commanding General. "Technically, you're on temporary duty from Luzon Force to Min-danao Force. We don't have authority to transfer anyone."

  "OK."

  "I'll need your truck," Hurt said. "So far as luggage is concerned, one item of luggage."

  "I've got a suitcase and a footlocker."

  "One or the other. Sorry."

  "Well, then, I'll leave the footlocker here with you. For safekeeping."

  Hurt smiled.

  "I love optimists," he said. "Sorry, there really is no room on the boat."

  "If it's all right with you, Hurt, I'll take the footlocker to one of the ammo dumps. And then bring the truck back, of course. There's some personal stuff in there I'd much rather see blown up than fall into the hands of some son of Nippon."

  "May I offer you a piece of advice?"

  "Certainly."

  "You're a lieutenant colonel now. You don't have to ask a major for per-mission to do anything."

  "I'll try to remember that," Fertig said. He put out his hand. "So long, Hurt. Take care of yourself."

  "Yeah, you, too," Hurt said. "And just for the record, I think you deserve that silver leaf."

  "If there was anything left to drink around here, I'd think you'd been at it."

  "If there was anything left to drink around here, I would be at it," Major Hurt said. "Good luck, Colonel."

  "See you after the war, Major."

  Chapter Two

  [One]

  Headquarters, 4th Marines

  Malinta Tunnel

  Fortress Corregidor

  Manila Bay

  Commonwealth of the Philippines

  0915 Hours 1 April 1942

  Major Stephen J. Paulson, USMC, a slightly built thirty-two-year-old from Chicago, who was acting S-l (Personnel) Officer, 4th Marines, had been giv-ing a good deal of thought-much of it uncomfortable, even painful-both to his own future and to the future of First Lieutenant James B. Weston, USMC.

  Paulson had been a Marine for eleven years, and a Naval Aviator for eight. But he had spent almost two years as an infantry platoon leader before going to Pensacola for flight training. So when push came to shove-by which he meant when the Japanese landed on Fortress Corregidor-he thought he could probably do some good, at least hold his own, as an infantry officer. Not in duties commensurate with the gold oak leaves on his collar points, nor even as a captain, commanding a company. But he remembered enough about leading a platoon to be useful when the Japs came.

  On the other hand, in his view, Lieutenant Weston would not. This was not a criticism of Weston, simply a statement of fact. Weston came into The Corps right out of the University of Iowa, went through a sort of boot camp for offi-cers at Quantico, and immediately went to Pensacola for pilot training. He was an aviator, and a pretty good one, but he really wasn't qualified to be a platoon leader.

  Not that that would matter to the overall efficiency of the 4th Marines. There were more than enough fully qualified infantry lieutenants and captains around, both among the officers who came to the Philippines when the 4th Marines were moved from Shanghai, and among those-like Paulson himself and Weston-who joined the regiment because they'd been in the Philippines filling billets that no longer existed.

  Before the war, Major Paulson had been Aviation Officer on the staff of the Commanding Officer, Marine Barracks, Cavite Naval Station, and had commanded a staff sergeant and a PFC. There had not been much for any of them to do, except on those rare occasions when a carrier with a Marine squad-ron aboard actually pulled into Cavite. Then there was frantic activity for sev-eral days, doing what he could to pry necessary parts and supplies loose from the steel grip of Navy supply officers; arranging for the sick to be admitted to shore medical facilities; and trying for the release from the brig of those Ma-rines who had somehow run afoul of the Shore Patrol in time for them to sail with the carrier.

  In those days, he had spent a lot of his ample free time trying to come up with a good reason to ask for a transfer back to flying duties. That was a deli-cate area. Marine officers are supposed to go where they are sent and do what they are told to do, without complaining or trying to get out of it.

  Ordinarily, Paulson would not have tried to get himself out of Cavite. It was a three-year tour, and when it was over, he could expect a flying assign-ment. But he didn't think the war he considered inevitable was going to wait for him to complete his tour, so he tried to get out of it. He had absolutely no success.

  A visiting colonel gave him a discreet word to the wise: Obviously, The Corps had to have someone ashore at Cavite, and he was selected; it was not acceptable behavior for a Marine officer to try to get out of an assignment he didn't like.

  Lieutenant Jim Weston's case was somewhat different from his own. After a two-year tour with a Marine fighter squadron, flying Brewster Buffalo F2-As, he had been selected for multiengine training. After transition training, he had been given a six-month assignment to a Navy squadron flying Con-solidated PBY-5A Catalina twin-engine flying boats.

  The idea was to give him enough time under experienced Navy aviators so that he could return to The Corps and serve as a multiengine Instructor Pilot. That, in turn, meant someone had judged him to be a better-than-ordinary pilot, skilled and mature enough to become an IP... and not, as Weston felt, because he hadn't been able to cut the mustard as a fighter pilot.

  Three months into his "utilization tour" at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese at-tacked. Though many of the planes of the Navy squadron to which Weston was attached were destroyed on the ground, Weston flew, as copilot, one of the few remaining Catalinas to Cavite on a courier flight.

  The Japanese also attacked Cavite, destroying on the ground other Navy Catalinas, one of which had been flown to the Philippines by a Pearl Harbor-based lieutenant commander. When Lieutenant Weston's Catalina landed at Cavite, the lieutenant commander judged that he could be of far greater value to the war effort back in Pearl Harbor than a lowly Marine lieutenant on loan to the Navy. And when the Catalina took off, he was at the controls and Weston was left behind, "awaiting transportation."

  Weston hadn't been in a cockpit since. There were few aircraft of any type left in the Phili
ppines. When it became evident that his chances of returning to flying or of being evacuated to Pearl Harbor were negligible, he was assigned to the staff of the Aviation Officer-Paulson-of Marine Barracks, Cavite.

  When Cavite was blown up and left for the enemy, all remaining Marine personnel were transferred to the 4th Marines. Paulson was assigned to the personnel section, relieving a major who had served with the 4th Marines in China and whose infantry expertise could be put to better use, and Weston be-came his deputy.

  In Paulson's view, there was not much left for the Acting Personnel Offi-cer to do but wait for the Japanese to land on Corregidor; whereupon he would order the destruction of personnel records by thermite grenade, grab his rifle, and fight, until the end, as an overage, overranked platoon leader.