Elizabeth M. Norman Read Online Free PDF Page B

Commendation
TO: Second Lieutenant Helen M. Cassaino [ sic ], ANC
The commanding General has directed me to commend you and to express to you sincere thanks for your courageous conduct and unfailing attention to duty at Fort Stotsenburg [ sic ], P.I., on December 24, 1941, during a Japanese air attack. By your conduct and fearless example you calmed a number of litter patients … on a hospital car … when the air alarm was sounded and a number of enemy planes passed overhead. The litter patients had become panic stricken and tried to leave the car causing great confusion which might have resulted in serious injury to a number of patients … but you remained at your post.…
    Allan C. McBride
Brigadier General, G.S.C.,
Chief of Staff 5
    Manila could not hold. The enemy controlled the sky and sea, and the allies had neither the men nor the materiel to defend the city. By the end of December MacArthur knew he would have to retreat south in advance of the enemy attack.
    In Washington, Generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall met with Secretary of War Henry Stimson and President Roosevelt to analyze the situation in the Philippines. America was fighting a two-front war, and the two theaters of battle, Europe and the Pacific, werevying for the scant resources Washington could provide. Making matters worse, the Pacific fleet was in ruins and incapable of running the Japanese blockade in the Philippines. Stimson insisted that America’s top priority should be to keep open the North Atlantic sea lanes, and Roosevelt agreed. So on December 23, at a conference with top American and British leaders, the president announced that the primary theater of war for the United States would be Europe. 6 MacArthur was told that he would have to use the forces at hand to stop the Japanese offensive.
    American commanders in the Philippines decided to implement a decades-old strategy called War Plan Orange 3: to avoid massive civilian casualties and the destruction of property, Manila would be declared an open, neutral city; all military personnel, with their equipment, would retreat to the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor Island, a fortress known as “the Rock,” and from these two positions the Americans and their Filipino allies would try to defend Manila Bay until Washington could send help.
    It was a doomed plan and everyone knew it. MacArthur and his generals were, literally, bottling up their army, tens of thousands of troops, on a small peninsula, fighting a holding action without air cover or any assurance of resupply. All the Japanese had to do was to press their attack until the Americans and their Filipino allies lost the capacity, or will, to fight.
    On December 22, 1941, forty-three thousand well-trained, well-equipped enemy soldiers, many of whom had already seen action in other campaigns, came ashore through the turbulent waters of the Lingayen Gulf, a bay in northern Luzon Province that lay at the mouth of a wide valley between two ranges of mountains, a natural corridor from the sea south to the city of Manila.
    The next day General MacArthur, his family and his staff left Manila to join top Filipino and American politicians in the underground fortress of Malinta Tunnel on the island of Corregidor. From this command center across the bay from the capital, they would direct the retreat of their forces and the defense of the Bataan peninsula. On December 24, the Japanese landed another seven thousand infantrymen, this time at Lamon Bay, to the southeast, at Manila’s back door, closing the trap.
    M ANILA HAD LONG since lost its shimmer. It was hit first on December 10, two days after the bombings at Baguio. Seventy-seven warplanesattacked Manila’s port area, sinking ships and setting the docks afire. More raids quickly followed. When gasoline stocks were hit, the city ran short of fuel, and people took to riding bicycles and hauling things in horse-drawn carts. Blackouts were the rule at night and many of the clubs