The Philippines were ready. For days before the war began, the guns had
been manned and the planes had stood alert. The Philippines were still
ready. After a week of heavy bombing, of fierce scraps on Luzon
beachheads, of dogfights among black bursts of ack-ack, of desperate
aerial assaults to hold Japanese ships off the coast, the Philippines
stood fast. For all his losses the Jap had little to show this week. He had done a
decently good job of bombing; he had smashed up some buildings, some
airplanes. He had managed to grab a precarious foothold on a beach 260
miles from the center of Luzon's resistance. But the Army's Far Eastern
Commander, lean, brilliant Lieut. General Douglas MacArthur, and his
grizzled Navy sidekick, Admiral Tommy Hart, had been waiting with
their knives out. As professional fighters they could afford to regard the enemy's effort
with an appraising eye, to commend him for some military virtuosity
that the world did not realize he possessed. They could afford it
because they had given him a thumping good round. They had made an
impressive start on the proof of a proposition that many strategists
had believed insoluble: the Philippines can be held; At Clark Field
alongside Fort Stotsenberg, 50 miles northwest of Manila, the gun
crews had just finished their noonday Monday dinner when the Jap
struck.
Well-trained but combat-raw, the gunners spotted a precise formation of
52 planes high in the blue sky. They watched, began to wonder. Then
they knew. Across the field, in a wicked, jagged line, the bombs struck. The mess
truck, rumbling back to quarters, disappeared, and with it the drivers. “We stood up and had a kind of a relaxation period,” one of
the gunners said later. “We all said: 'I never knew what war would
be like….This is it. Let's get busy….' We wished we could
fire a couple of rounds to get over that tense feeling, but we held our
fire till all of a sudden the pursuits started coming in over us. “I just yelled to the fellows to stay low, keep calm and keep
firing….None of us were really excited after the first minutes
when the bombers caught us. We were too busy—and it felt good to be
firing….We just said:.'Get those bastards out of the air,' and we kept at
it till we knew we'd run them off. After it was all over we knew we had
stood up to them.” In the Air. Through that day and the following
days, the Jap struck in many places from the air. He bombed Nichols
Field, just south of Manila, time & again; in one raid alone he
lost eleven planes.
He struck at Cavite, the Navy's base on Manila's south harbor; there he
wrought heavy damage, barely missed the base's commander,
weather-beaten Rear Admiral Francis Rockwell. Youngster officer-pilots of the new Philippine Air Force sailed into the
Jap with a daring and skill that popped the eyes of their opposite
numbers from the U.S. One army flight of three jumped 20 Jap planes,
knocked out three, chased the rest, picked up a straggler on the way
home and sent him down in flames. A bombing flight lumbered serenely
through heavy ack-ack fire to unload on warships, then kicked off
altitude and strafed a landing party on the beach.
