STATION C - CORREGIDOR AS I REMEMBER IT
by
Capt. Duane L. Whitlock,
U.S. Navy (Ret'd)
Corregidor commands the entrance
to Manila Bay somewhat closer to Bataan on the west than to Batangas on
the mainland to the east. Between Corregidor and
Batangas at
the start
of WWII
were two
other island forts
that were scarcely
ever
mentioned in
MacArthur's
communiques,
although they
perhaps should have been because they were pounded almost
incessantly during the early months of the war by Japanese batteries
that had moved into Batangas quite unopposed. One of these islands,
known as Fort Hughes, was shaped like a chocolate chip,
and the Japanese used to start shelling it at the very top where a
dust cloud would form, then like a big doughnut the cloud would
gradually roll down to the water line, helped along by the descending
barrage.
The other
island was Fort Drum, a
concrete battleship constructed on a big rock, and while it lay closer
to Batangas than did Fort Hughes,
the Japanese didn’t seem to
derive too much pleasure from shelling it because their field guns were
too light to do any real damage. For many weeks, their artillery fire,
which also landed in
our area of operations quite regularly, went unanswered because the big
guns on Corregidor and the other two forts were in fixed positions
facing the open sea, and they could not be trained on targets in either
Batangas or Bataan. The Army finally did succeed in getting a mortar
jockeyed around on Corregidor to where they could bring Batangas until
fire, and while those twelve-inch mortar shells tore up one grand piece
of real estate wherever they landed, they
were not too effective for
want of accurate spotting - spotting that was done from an unarmed and very vulnerable
Piper Cub.
Corregidor itself is shaped like a comma, - the head faces toward
Bataan, and the tail, known as Monkey Point for good reason, swings back
into the bay on the Batangas side. The tunnel that housed Station
“C” was about halfway out on the tail,
and the island at that point was something less than half a mile
wide. The main entrance to
the tunnel faced generally southeast, and within fifty paces or so in
front of it there was a sheer drop into a cove perhaps one hundred and
fifty feet below.
The tunnel went back under a hillside with a maximum of about sixty
feet of earth above it. The first fifty or sixty feet of the tunnel
was used for emergency stores
and for sleeping space after the war started. At the inner end of this
space were the diesels for the auxiliary power supply,
and they were closed off from the main operating tunnel by a
doorway partition. Just
inside that doorway and to the
left was a lateral tunnel
about forty feet long that housed the Officer in Charge, his
yeoman, four traffic analysts, and four or five
language officers. At
the far end of this lateral
and to the right was another short lateral that served as the
crypto center. To the left of the entrance to that center, was a door
and a steep flight of steps leading upward to an emergency exit.
The operations tunnel itself was perhaps seventy feet long,
and at the far end was
a door and another steep flight of steps leading to the second emergency
exit. This
areaway served also as the antenna trunk for the whole tunnel, an
engineering nightmare in which some brilliant designer had specified the
use of lead shielded cable. The operations space was separated into two
sections by a simple parted curtain draped so that the bottom hung a
foot or two off the deck.
The area on the front or office side of the curtain, which took up about
a third of the operations area, was occupied by general service
communicators (NPO) who had been bombed out of the Navy Yard at Cavite.
One of those communicators, a radioman by the name of McWilliams, had a
particularly trying problem,
as I recall. It seems that WWII caught him the day after he had all his
teeth extracted, and his new dentures were destroyed before he ever had
a chance to try them out. A dental technician on Corregidor did manage
to fashion him a set of choppers out of stainless steel, and many times
as I passed behind his operating position on my way into the intercept
area I would look over his shoulder to find him busily filing his teeth
down for a better fit. He really didn't suffer all that long, I guess,
because we rather quickly got down to a diet highly susceptible to
gumming - namely, rice and beans.
In the intercept area, there was a position or two for automatic Morse
and about a dozen manual Morse positions. There was no provision for
voice intercept because that was a problem that the Japanese Navy never
really gave us. While the cryptanalysts were
beginning to make significant progress, they were still far from
producing anything useful in the way of operational intelligence. The
burden of producing a current running estimate of Japanese Naval
dispositions in the area
fell upon the four traffic analysts headed by C. J. Johns. I was one of
those analysts, and about three months before Pearl Harbor we compiled
an order of battle from Japanese Navy communications and submitted it to
the Commander in Chief Asiatic Fleet, who decided to forward it to
Washington. The Commander in Chief's endorsement, written by LCDR (Later
Rear Admiral) Rosey Mason construed the Japanese organization as thus
presented to constitute a definite wartime disposition.
Whether this document ever reached the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV)
I do not know, but I do know that about a month later we informed
Washington by message that some 250 merchant
ships had been impressed into the Japanese Navy,
and that most of them were located just north of the Philippines in
ports along the straits of Taiwan. After a few days, the Chief of Naval
Operations (CNO) requested we verify the number of ships we had
reported, and during the time it took OPNAV to ask the question the
count had gone up some fifty more ships. We duly reported that fact to
Washington, and nothing further was heard of that subject again.
Shortly after the start of hostilities it was decided to start burning
old files and back traffic.
This process went on day and night for several weeks. In February, Charlie Johns and one other of the traffic
analysts, Ted Hoover, left
Corregidor with a small group of men headed by Lt. Fabian to set up a “fall back” site in the Dutch East Indies. That left me
mainly responsible with Al Geiken for producing whatever information
could be gleaned from traffic analysis. Al's desk was on my right, one
of the officers collaterally responsible for beach defense was on my
left, and another had his desk immediately behind me.
All of our desks were
perpetually littered with traffic, files,
reports, and various
papers, so Al
and I were rather
surprised one night when we returned from our midnight breath of fresh
air to discover that both
officers had cleared
their desks completely
and were carefully field stripping their Colt 45's.
I was standing at my desk next to one of them when I jokingly asked him
if he was expecting an invasion before morning. He turned to me and
looked me squarely in the eye and said, "No, these are for you and the
others. We have discussed it between us and have decided we will not let
a single one of you fall into their hands. When the time comes, we are going to shoot
everyone of you, then shoot
ourselves." He turned back
to his desk; I looked at
Al, he looked at me, and we both sat down rather abruptly in our chairs.
We knew both of the officers well enough to know they weren't simply
joking.
Fortunately, the time never came, and we all finally left the Rock in
small increments to regroup again as FRUMEL in Australia - all, that is,
except a poor lad named Grisham who was crushed by a tractor he was
driving when it went over a cliff on Malinta Hill. Amazingly, he was the
only casualty sustained by Station "C".
Capt. Duane L. Whitlock,
U.S. Navy (Ret'd)
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