Tears in the Darkness Read Free Page B

papers and take a last parade.
    It was a gorgeous backwater. Manila was known as “the Pearl of theOrient,” and parts of the city, especially the precincts where Americans and Europeans lived and worked, looked like arboretums. Along the boulevards, the trees were trimmed and ringed with pink hydrangeas, and white butterfly orchids grew in the coconut husks.
    The duty was easy too, inspections and formations for the most part, then at noon, the workday ended and the enlisted men would head for the beaches and ball fields and brothels of the nearest barrio where they would “shack up” with their “brown-skinned squaws,” their Filipina concubines. Life had its annoyances, of course—the soaking summer monsoons, the suffocating heat of the hot season, the incessant insects, the choking dust—but for less than a dollar, a trooper could buy enough Ginebra gin and San Miguel beer to drink himself senseless.
    The officers lived like aristocracy. They played polo, tennis, and golf, then made for their private preserve, Manila’s fabled Army and Navy Club, a three-acre toft and croft along the east shore of Manila Bay that looked like a beaux arts mansion set on a waterfront green of palms, flame trees, and bougainvillea. The club hosted dinners and soirees, women and their escorts dancing under the stars and toasting one another over centerpieces of yellow trumpet flowers and white Cadena de Amor. First, and above all, however, the Army and Navy Club was a men’s club, and the men of the Philippine garrison and Asiatic Fleet liked to drink.
    Almost every officer in the islands bellied up to the club’s long polished bar—pilots, tankers, artillerymen, chasseurs, submariners, marines—but none more frequently than the gentlemen of the 31st Infantry, the only “all-American” army regiment in the islands.
    Â 
    We are boys from the Thirty-first
    We are not so very meek
    We never wash behind our ears
    And seldom wash our feet.
    Oh we’re below the scum of the earth
    And we’re always looking for booze
    Now we’re the boys from the Thirty-first
    And who in the hell are youse! 6
    Â 
    That was garrison life.
    Then—it seemed to happen so fast—those unhurried mornings, sultryafternoons, and sybaritic nights were interrupted by an irritating interloper: the Japanese.

    Nippon had been on the march in Asia. In 1931 the Imperial Army occupied Manchuria; in 1937 that same army, reinforced, moved south to invade northern China; in 1940 Japan pushed into lower Asia and stationed troops in upper Indochina. To the Roosevelt administration, the Japanese now appeared ready to move against the Dutch East Indies, islands and archipelagoes rich with tin, rubber, oil. Convinced that America would soon be fighting in Europe, the president wanted to avoid a two-front war, and he decided to impose economic sanctions on Japan, hoping to get them to pull back, perhaps even declare a cease-fire in China. He withheld the carrot, then in the early winter of 1940 he started to show them the stick.
    America’s military planners began marshaling reinforcements for the Philippines. They knew they could never make the islands a redoubt—Japan, with millions of men under arms, could easily overwhelm any garrison—but, as the thinking went, the new defenses, especially a new long-range B-17 bomber, might deter the Japanese, make them reconsider the cost of attacking the Philippines. If not, then the presence ofreinforcements might at least make them pause long enough for the garrison to ready itself to receive the blow.
    In the late spring 1941, the wives and children of American servicemen were ordered to evacuate the islands and sail for home. In July the president recalled General Douglas MacArthur from retirement (he had been serving as a military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth government since 1935) and named him commander of United States Army Forces in the