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Since the middle of January the men on Bataan had gone short of food. In Australia the Army had poured out good U.S. dollars to hire the adventurers of the South Seas to run the Jap blockade with food and ammunition. But nearly two out of three of the blockade-runners were lost-most of those, it seemed, which carried food.
Jonathan Wainwright's soldier's eye saw that the end was near. From the shores of the Bay he withdrew his naval forces, sailormen and Marines of the 4th Regiment (evacuated last November from Shanghai) to Corregidor. He tried to strike one last blow. Against a Jap breakthrough on the Manila Bay side of the peninsula he threw a corps in desperate counterattack. It was too much. The glassy-eyed soldiers went forward like men in a dream, so exhausted that many of them could hardly lift their feet, and the Jap mowed them down. The flank folded up.
The men on Corregidor saw only a little of the ghastly end. The last, pitifully small ammunition dump on Bataan went up in smoke and flame; the three ships at the water's edge (including the 6,000-ton sub tender Canopus) were dynamited. Finally, from one of the heights on Bataan, a white flag went up. How many of the 36,000 died fighting, only the Japs knew.
Men still swam the shark-infested stretch from Bataan to Corregidor, and in the last few hours boats got across with nurses and a few survivors. But the biggest part of the battle-trained Philippine Army was gone. From the heights the Jap, with artillery already emplaced, began slamming away at Corregidor. The soldiers there and the few civilians who had fled from Bataan (where 20,000 had been an added charge on the troops) knew it could not be long before they were finished too. No gunners had ever been in finer positions than the Jap. From Bataan's heights he could pour fire night & day across two miles of water into Corregidor and see where every shell fell.
In the Islands, as in the U.S., hundreds of cities and villages mourned their men. Virtually all of the 2,300 of the New Mexico National Guard had been in the Philippines. Mothers and wives met from Deming to Rosewell to Santa Fe, still hoped their coast artillerymen were on Corregidor. Salinas, Calif, lost a company of infantry soldiers; California mothers wept with Filipino women whose sons were veterans in the Scouts, or lean-faced youngsters just out of the West Point grey of the Philippine Military Academy.
In Cleveland, relatives counted the loss of 75 sons (some of whom might still be in Corregidor.); in Maywood and other towns on Chicago's edge, the loss of a National Guard tank company. Other tankers, 106 of them, had gone to the Islands from Janesville (pop. 23,000) in the dairy country of Wisconsin.
The survivors of the 9,000 American troops and 27,000 Filipinos fell into the hands of the Jap-all of them U.S. soldiers and U.S. losses. Alongside troops from the mainland, Tagalog and Moro and Igorot had fought just as bravely, died just as tight-lipped and with just as little fuss as their white comrades. It took that fighting and those deaths to make the U.S. know that the men from the Islands were their brothers and their equals.