Not Often Told Story Dec 41 Pt2

"....Clark's air raid alarm had sounded at 9 a.m. causing the B-17s to
scramble for their own protection. However, it turned out to be a
diversionary attack on an Army installation north of Clark. After the "all
clear" sounded at 11a.m., the planes landed and were prepared for the
afternoon bombing mission to Formosa. At noon, most of the headquarters
officers went down the street to the Officer's Mess for lunch. I stayed
behind to make tracings for the Group's navigators of a classified
hand-drawn sketch, which showed the location of Japanese airfields on
southern Formosa.

I was listening to the noon news on the radio when the reporter announced
that Clark Field had just been bombed, obviously a false report I thought.
All I could hear was the singing of birds, but in the next breath, I heard
the whistle of falling bombs, followed by shaking explosions. Fifty-four
high flying Japanese bombers laid two strings of bombs across Clark Field.
At first, it all seemed like a movie. I grabbed my helmet off the wall as I
ran out the door and jumped into a trench that had been dug the night
before. For a moment, it became unearthly quiet, then the Japanese Zero
fighters came in like a swarm of hornets, strafing everything in sight.

When the "all clear" sounded, I headed back to headquarters. As I
approached Colonel Eubank's staff car, I thought it odd that his driver was
still sitting in the car, but then I noticed that half his face was gone.
Shrapnel had killed him. When I took my helmet off back at the office, I
saw that it had a shrapnel hole in it. Fortunately, it had been made before
I put it on. After the raid, only two of the nineteen B-17s at Clark were
repairable, the others were a total loss. Half the Group's aircraft had
been destroyed in a single attack. Fortunately, the sixteen B-17s that
had flown to Del Monte Field on Mindanao the day before were safe. All the
refueling trucks at Clark had been destroyed, but luckily the fuel dump was
still intact. The Officer's Mess, however, received a direct hit killing
fifty officers. I was thankful that I chose to skip lunch that day. One of
the slain was my immediate boss, the Group Materiel Officer. I took over
his job, which now focused on servicing B-17s that flew staging missions
into Clark from Del Monte to attack Japanese invasion forces. Group
personnel not injured in the raid camped out in a sugarcane field a short
distance away from Clark. I happened to see my flight school classmate Ed
Graham again and asked him how he'd like to be back at "primitive" Port
Moresby now. He replied, "O boy, would I!"

After three weeks of daily bomber and fighter attacks, not to mention the
approaching Japanese Army, Clark Field was abandoned. On Christmas Eve,
Group personnel were trucked to the Bataan Peninsula. That night, in a
grove of trees by the road, we camped out again and sang Christmas carols
around a campfire. We had one major thing going for us: the 19th had the
best Mess Sergeant in the Philippines. His cooks fixed us a great Christmas
feast from food they brought along from Clark. As for myself, I was
traveling light. Back at Clark, I packed for three modes of travel: by
truck, walking, or running. My weapons were my Colt .45 and an 18-inch Moro
bolo knife I had purchased while at Clark. Once at the port town of
Mariveles on Bataan, we were to be evacuated on two small inter-island
passenger steam ships bound for Mindanao. However, the Japanese bombed and
sank one before our planned departure. This meant only half the personnel
from Clark could leave Bataan on the steamer Mayon. I was one of the
fortunate ones to make the trip. The men who remained on Bataan were used
as infantry to defend a nearby airstrip. Those not killed in the bloody
fighting that followed became POWs and were part of the Bataan Death
March...."