Read Escape From Davao for Free Online Page B

owing closely behind, a handful of USAFFE tanks, infantry, ack-ack gunners, and cavalrymen—the latter armed with pistols and soda bottles fil ed with gasoline—gal antly held off the Japanese while engineers dynamited bridges.
    Despite the lack of road signs, military police, and air cover, the plodding exodus was a chaotic success, a “smal Dunkirk,” one Air Corps pilot cal ed it. Much of MacArthur’s army had been able to slip into Bataan intact, carrying with it large stores of ammunition, mostly World War I surplus ordnance, but ammunition nonetheless. The exigencies of the hastily ordered retreat and the tangled bureaucracy of the Filipino government, however, had ensured that stores of clothing, medicine, fuel, and, most important, food were left behind. The abandonment of 5,000 tons of rice at the Government Rice Central warehouse, in Luzon’s Nueva Ecija Province, enough to feed USAFFE troops for at least one year, was one glaring example. As per MacArthur’s original defense strategy, most of the supply depots and reserves had been set up near the beaches, and were now deep inside Japanese-held territory after their landing of December 22. MacArthur had also ordered that Corregidor be stocked first with enough supplies to last the 10,000-man garrison for six months. By the time the door to the Bataan Peninsula was barred, only a few thousand tons of foodstuffs would be secured there.
    The madness of the retreat had scarcely subsided when MacArthur learned that an estimated 26,000
    civilian refugees had drained into the peninsula with the retreating troops. Faced with slow starvation or immediate defeat, MacArthur chose to give his forces a fighting chance. On January 5, 1942, in one of the first orders issued from his new headquarters located inside Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, MacArthur put al USAFFE troops on half-rations.
    And so the epic fight for the Philippines, America’s first major land battle of the Second World War, began with il -equipped American
    and Filipino troops burrowed into defensive positions, their weapons loaded with suspect ammunition and their stomachs empty, waiting for the Japanese to attack and for help from the States.

CHAPTER 3
The Raid
    And we were sacrificed—perhaps to gain
    That little time that warded off defeat
    In those first awful months of swift retreat.
    With the Al ies in ful , humiliating retreat throughout the globe in early 1942, the defenders of the Philippines looked to be waiting a long time. German forces controlled territory from the steppes of Russia to the sands of North Africa to the icy Atlantic. The Stars and Stripes no longer flew over Guam and Wake Island, nor did the Union Jack fly over the British crown colony of Hong Kong. Singapore would fal in February; the Dutch East Indies in March. Japanese forces would close the Burma Road in April, severing the supply link to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist forces. The rays of the Rising Sun shone across the Pacific Rim, to the Solomon Islands and through the Malay Barrier. And should Australia and New Zealand crumble—Australia was virtual y undefended because most of the continent’s troops were fighting in North Africa—it was feared that only Hawaii would stand between the Japanese and the United States.
    The numbing disbelief and national outrage that fol owed Pearl Harbor gave way to mass hysteria. Japanese submarines sank merchant vessels within sight of coastal residents, fueling the invasion paranoia. One elected official, believing the West Coast to be indefensible, demanded that U.S. forces prepare defensive positions in the Rocky Mountains. The original copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were removed from display and shipped to vaults at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Even the Rose Bowl footbal game was moved from Pasadena, California, to the perceived safety of the East Coast. By February, the situation had reached such a fever pitch that President