…
The Japanese came in just before dawn on the 28th.
They attacked hard and were thrown back.
No tanks took part.
Two were brought up.
They bogged down and were abandoned where they stood.
There is a photograph of Australian riflemen walking past them in the mud a few days later.
General Claus, worried the enemy would infiltrate onto number one strip in the dark, sent the P40s back to Port Moresby for the night.
The Japanese stayed quiet.
The fighters came back in the morning and stayed.
On the 29th, another Japanese convoy came in under heavy mist and put nearly 770 reinforcements ashore under Commander Minoru Yano, who took over the operation.
The 30th was quiet in daylight.
Both sides were getting ready.
That night, the Japanese made their allout effort for number three strip.
Brigadier Field changed one thing in his dispositions.
He moved the 50 caliber machine guns of the 709th to both ends of the line instead of only the eastern end.
The 43rd engineers guns stayed in the center.
Australian 25 pounders half a mile back supported them and so did the P40s off number one strip.
When the Japanese moved on the runway, the fire that hit them was heavy enough that not one man got across the strip alive.
The heaviest attack came before dawn.
It was thrown back like the others, and at first light the attackers withdrew and left60 dead behind them.
American losses in the defense of that strip were one man killed and two wounded.
You will see larger American figures quoted for Mil Bay as a whole, and those are counting a different thing across a different span of time, so be careful which number you are reading.
The wounded went aboard ship on the night of the 4th of September.
The rest went out the following night from the anchorage at Waga Waga, with the leading elements of the Australian 18th Brigade close enough to hear it happening.
Of roughly 1,900 Japanese troops landed, about 1,300 were taken off to Rabbal.
Nearly all of them had trench foot, jungle rot, or tropical ulcers.
Almost none of them, including men who had landed as recently as the 29th of August, were in any condition to fight.
Japanese dead in the operation came to about 600 against 321 Australian ground casualties of whom 123 were killed.
Those are the figures in the United States Army’s official history.
Other accounts give higher numbers on both sides.
This is normal for this theater and you should treat any single casualty figure for the Pacific with suspicion.
You will also hear Mil Bay called Japan’s first land defeat of the war.
That claim needs a tight definition to hold up and different historians draw the line in different places.
What is not in question is that a Japanese landing force went ashore to take an airfield and was destroyed by aircraft flying off the airfield it came to take.
Now, the thing they never counted.
On the 15th of September, 1942, Company E of the 126th Infantry Regiment, loaded onto transport aircraft at Amberly Field near Brisbane.
172 men plus a medical officer, Captain John T.
Boat, four aidmen, and a platoon of the 114th Engineer Battalion.
Captain Melvin Schultz commanded.
They were National Guard, most of them from Big Rapids, Michigan.
Their fatigues were still wet.
A cleaning establishment in Brisbane had dyed them a modeled green on orders from Major General Robert Eichelberger, and there had not been time to let them dry.
Major General Edwin Harding came down to the field to see them off and told them they were the spearhead of the spearhead of the spearhead.
The company called itself the three spearheads from then on.
They landed at Port Moresby that afternoon.
They were the first American infantry unit to set foot in New Guinea.
2 days later, on the 17th of September, two American officers walked into the Owen Stanley Range to answer the exact question the Japanese had gotten wrong.
General Casey was at Port Moresby and he ordered his deputy, Colonel Leaf J.
to reconoiter a crossing by way of Aba.
On the same day, Captain William F.
Boyce went out to reconoiter the Capaca track with First Lieutenant Bernard House, six enlisted men from company E, an officer of the Australia New Guinea Administrative Unit, and 40 carriers.
Sardup reached a bow on the 18th.
Casey went out in a canoe and took soundings of the harbor himself.
Then went into the mountains with a party of one other American, two Australians, 10 Royal Papuan constabularary police, and 26 carriers.
8 days later, having climbed to 5,000 ft, Sverdrip turned around and reported that the route was not practical for troops.
That is the whole difference in one sentence.
Two armies asked the same question about the same mountains.
One of them sent an engineer to walk it and believed the answer because there was another way over that range and the Americans had already used it.
By late September, the 128th Infantry Regiment had completed its move to Port Moresby entirely by air.
It was the largest air movement the Air Force had undertaken anywhere up to that point in the war.
A rifle regiment that would have spent weeks on a ship was put down at the objective in a matter of days.
And on the 14th of October, the 128th flew again from 14-mile drrome outside Port Moresby over the Owen Stanley’s to an airirstrip at Wanagela on the north coast in C47s of the 21st and 22nd troop carrier squadrons.
the same range, the same rock, the same rain.
Horry’s men had spent weeks getting over it on foot and arrived without food.
The Americans crossed it in under an hour and stepped off onto a runway that had not existed a few months earlier.
I have read a lot of afteraction reports from that war, and the ones that stay with me are almost never the ones about a battle.
They are the ones like Casey’s where a man decided years in advance what a place was going to need and then was not there when it mattered because he was already somewhere else deciding the same thing about the next place.
Here is what Japan actually got wrong and it is not courage and it is not the mountains.
Every Japanese plan for Port Moresby in 1942 treated an airfield as an objective, something to be reached, seized, and used afterward.
Macawa counted 20 or 30 aircraft at Mil Bay and sent 1,500 men.
Ine counted the aircraft within range of the Jard Passage and asked for carriers.
Imperial General Headquarters counted the sea distance from Rabbal to Buna and decided the northern route was cheaper.
Nobody counted what the airfields were doing while the counting was going on.
Nobody had a line in the plan for a bridge at Hairopi that would be taken down every time it went up.
Nobody had a line for a rifle regiment arriving by air.
Nobody had a line for the fact that the seven airfield program at Port Moresby was still under construction and getting bigger every week that they marched toward it.
The airfield was never the prize.
It was the weapon.
It had been firing at them from the first week of the campaign, and they wrote it down as real estate.
Whiteheads aircraft had done their work by the time Hi received new orders on the 18th of September.
Everything was now subordinate to retaking Guadal Canal.
He was to pull back and prepare the Buna and Gona beach head as his primary defensive position.
The plan on paper was that once Guadal Canal was back in hand, those forces would come to New Guinea, take Mil Bay, and move on Port Moresby by sea, while the South Seas detachment came back out of the beach head, recrossed the mountains, and finished the job in concert with them.
A fourth attempt, same objective, same two routes that had already failed, written down in September of 1942 as an actual plan.
The Australian 25th Brigade attacked Aori Bwa on the 26th of September and had it 2 days later.
The Japanese abandoned elaborate prepared positions almost on contact and went back up the track so fast the Australians could not keep pace.
General Casey went forward to Buna in November of 1942 and was awarded the Silver Star there.
Captain Hyman Samuelson and the 96th Engineers kept building.
The regiment stayed in the theater for the rest of the war and went to the Philippines in 1945.
Three questions did not close out and leaving them open beats pretending.
The first Japanese senior officers interviewed after the war said the factor that most influenced the halt was not Guadal Canal but stronger than anticipated Australian resistance at Kakota.
Most popular accounts say the opposite.
Both cannot be right.
The second the 96th Engineers were in Papua from April of 1942 and they are nearly absent from the standard histories of that campaign.
No account consulted for this story explains it and the usual explanation does not cover all of it.
The third in what survives from the Japanese side of that year, no document has turned up in which anyone wrote down what they believed the airfields at Port Moresby could actually do to them.
Not an estimate, not a guess.
If such a document exists, it has not surfaced.
The men who built those strips are almost all gone now.
The ones who flew off them are going fast.
Every year the number of people who can tell you what a steel mat runway sounded like in the rain gets smaller.
And when they are gone, the only thing left is what somebody wrote down.
So write it down.
Your father, your grandfather, your uncle, his name, his branch, where he served.
Engineers, airpore, infantry, navy, it does not matter.
Put it in the comments and let it sit there where somebody can find it in 20 years and tell me where in the country you are listening from.
Somebody built the runway.
Somebody always does.
Central Luzon in the Philippines.
The evening of January 30th, 1945.
A flat plane, the last light going out of the sky.
Men of the Sixth Ranger Battalion are down in the open grass, flat on their bellies, crawling toward a line of barbed wire.
There is nothing between them and the guard towers, but a few hundred yards of ground the enemy had cleared on purpose.
Behind that wire are more than 500 Americans.
The men their own country had been forced to hand over on these islands three years before.
Some of them were about to watch American soldiers come through the fence and refused to believe it was real.
A few would crawl under the barracks and hide.
Certain it was a trick.
Certain that no one was coming for them.
Not now.
Not this late in the war.
They had reason to think that way.
They knew what the guards did when Americans got close.
Only weeks before on another island, prisoners had been herded together and burned alive rather than let go.
So the question that hung over that whole dark plane was a plain and terrible one.
How do you cross 30 m of enemy held ground at night and take a prison camp without the men inside being killed in the first 60 seconds? And once you are through the wire, how do you convince men who have been left for dead that the rescue standing over them is real? If your father or your grandfather ever wore that uniform, stay on this road with these men all the way to the end.
Because what happened here is the reason some of them ever came home at all.
The men inside the wire at Cabinet were the survivors of the worst defeat in American military history.
In the spring of 1942 on the Baton Peninsula and the island fortress of Corugador, tens of thousands of American and Filipino troops had run out of food, out of ammunition, and out of any hope of rescue.
When they surrendered, the Japanese marched them north under a sun that killed men by the hundreds.
Those who fell were bayonetted or left where they dropped.
The road they walked would be remembered as the Baton Death March.
It had begun with the largest surrender in American history.
Tens of thousands of men ground down to nothing on halfrations and failing supplies laid down their arms because there was nothing left to fight with.
What the enemy did with them afterward would take years to fully come to light.
The ones who lived reached the camps.
Kabanatwan became the largest of them.
At its worst, it held thousands.
Men died there of malaria, of dysentery, of plain starvation, buried by their own comrades in shallow ground.
3 years is a long time to be forgotten.
The men measured it in small things, in the weight they had lost, which they could count by the way their ribs stood out, and their wedding rings slid off their fingers.
In the friends who had gone into the burial details ground, in the letters from home that never came.
Some had stopped believing anyone was coming.
They had made a kind of peace with the wire.
At its peak, Cabanatuan had held more than 5,000 men, the largest prison camp in the islands.
Over the years, it had buried thousands of them in graves the prisoners dug themselves.
By the time of the raid, barely 500 were left.
The camp had been emptied out around the survivors, one work draft and one burial detail at a time until only the weakest remained.
Others had spent three years learning to read the guards, and the guards were changing.
As the American advance drew nearer, the men who ran the camp grew harder, quicker to anger, quicker with the rifle butt.
By the start of 1945, most of the men strong enough to work had been taken away.
They were loaded into the holds of unmarked cargo ships and sent toward Japan to labor in the mines and factories, packed so tightly into the dark with so little air and water that many did not survive the crossing.
The ships carried no sign that prisoners were aboard, and some were sent to the bottom by American submarines and aircraft that had no way of knowing who was inside.
What remained behind the wire were the ones too sick, too broken, too far gone to be worth the labor, the weakest, the forgotten, and they had watched from inside their cage as the war finally turned.
They could hear American aircraft overhead now.
They could feel the front coming closer.
It should have been the best news of their lives.
Instead, it was the thing they feared most because the guards had a standing order for what to do with prisoners when the Americans arrived.
On the 14th of December 1944 on the island of Palawan, the garrison had forced roughly 150 American prisoners into air raid shelters, poured gasoline over them, and set them al light.
The men who clawed their way out were shot or bayonetted at the openings.
Word of that reached the gorillas in the hills, and it started a clock.
The math was simple and merciless.
The moment American forces came close enough to threaten Cabanatuan, the men inside it would most likely be dead before anyone reached the gate.
The guards had already made the threat plain.
Any prisoner who tried to walk out, they were told, would be treated as an escaping enemy soldier and shot on sight.
So the men stayed inside the fence that was slowly killing them.
Because the alternative was a bullet, someone would have to come and take them out fast, quiet, and from 30 mi inside enemy country.
The job went to the Sixth Ranger Battalion.
They were a new outfit, handpicked and hardtrained, built for exactly the kind of work no one had asked American soldiers to do before, to go in behind the lines in small numbers, and come back out with living men.
They had not started out as anything so grand.
Many were farm boys who had begun the war leading pack mules, hauling artillery through the mountains of New Guinea.
When the army decided it no longer needed the mules, it kept the men and handed them to Mucci.
Under his relentless training, the mule handlers turned into something else entirely.
marksmen, knife fighters, marchers who could cover ground all day and still fight hard at the end of it.
Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, a West Point man, wiry and relentless.
He had driven his rangers through the mud and the hills until they could march farther and shoot straighter than anyone thought reasonable.
When Sixth Army handed him Cabanatuan, he had a matter of days to plan the deepest rescue American soldiers had yet attempted.
He gave the assault itself to one of his captains, Robert Prince, a quiet, careful young officer who would lay the whole thing out down to the minute.
Before they set out, Mucci gathered his rangers in a church and spoke to them plainly.
“These were volunteers only,” he told them.
any married man was free to step away and there was no shame in it.
Then he told them what they were going to do.
The men in that camp had been beaten and starved for nearly 3 years.
If they could not walk to the river, the rangers would carry them.
Not one of them would be left behind.
Not a single one.
And he asked his men to swear an oath that they would die fighting before they let harm come to the prisoners.
Every ranger in the room stayed.
Not one man stepped away.
The Alamo scouts went out ahead on the 28th of January.
The Rangers followed, and by the 29th they had linked up with the Filipino gorillas and lay hidden in the country near the camp, waiting on the last pieces of the plan.
But the numbers told them plainly that this could not be done by force.
121 rangers and 13 Alamo scouts against a countryside crawling with Japanese troops.
The camp sat out in the open beside a highway with garrisons and moving columns all around it.
The rough count was daunting.
A few hundred troops in and around the camp itself, perhaps a thousand more within striking distance at a bridge down the road, and thousands beyond that, garrisoned in Cabanatuan city just a few miles off, any of whom could come running once the shooting started.
A straight fight was a good way to get 500 sick men killed and the rescuers along with them.
So the plan would live or die on two things America could not supply on its own.
Knowledge of the ground and the men who owned it.
That knowledge came from the Filipinos.
The Alamo scouts went in first.
Small teams moving at night.
They worked their way up close to the camp and then simply watched.
From the treeine and the tall grass, they counted the guards, timed the changing of the watch, sketched the towers and the sheds and the gate, and marked where the machine guns sat.
They lay still through the daylight hours, close enough to hear the enemy talk, and sent back everything they saw.
Two of the scout officers crept close enough to sketch the inside of the camp, almost building by building, where the prisoners were penned, where the guards slept, where the towers and the machine gun pits were cited.
When Mucci laid out his final plan on the last night, he was working from a map drawn by men who had lain in the grass and counted it all with their own eyes.
Filipino gorillas carried the rest of the load.
Under Captain Juan Pota and Captain Eduardo Hosan, hundreds of local fighters, men who had never once stopped resisting the occupation joined the column as guides, as scouts, and as combat troops in their own right.
They knew every trail, every ditch, every friendly farmhouse.
Without them, the rangers would have been strangers walking blind, and it was a Filipino who saved the whole rescue before it began.
The raid was set to go on the first night, but as the hour came near, Pota brought Mucci a hard piece of news.
A large Japanese force had bedded down for the night, right beside the route near the very bridge the rescuers would have to cover.
Hundreds of enemy troops resting directly in the path.
To go in as planned was to walk 500 helpless men into the middle of an army.
Mucci made the call to hold.
24 hours, a full day lying hidden in enemy country, hoping the column would move on and the secret would keep.
It was the hardest kind of decision to do nothing when every hour of waiting was another hour the men in the camp might not have, but it was the right one.
By the next night, the enemy force had shifted, and the door POT had spotted was open again.
When Mucci gathered his officers for the final plan, the thing that worried him most sat a few miles off across a bridge over the Kaboo River.
Beyond it was a large Japanese force.
By some counts as many as 2,000 men close enough to reach the camp within minutes of the first shot.
He said as much to Pashota, whose men would have to hold that bridge.
The Filipino captain’s answer was flat and certain.
They would not get through.
He would see to it.
Prince built the assault around seconds, not strength.
The rangers would crawl the last open ground unseen and ring the camp on every side.
On a single signal, they would tear the towers and the barracks apart in one sudden storm of fire before the enemy could organize, before anyone could reach the prisoners with a rifle.
Every man had a lane, a target, a job timed to the others.
There was no room for a mistake because a mistake meant dead Americans behind the wire, not only in front of it.
The scouts had warned that enemy tanks and trucks were in the area.
So Mucci had borrowed bazookas and anti-tank grenades before setting out.
light infantry though they were the rangers would go in with a way to stop armor if it came to that.
Prince split his force in two.
The main body under his own hand would rush the front gate.
A second platoon under Lieutenant John Murphy would work its way around to the rear.
And it was Murphy’s men who would fire the first shots from behind so that the guard’s attention was pulled the wrong way in the first deadly seconds.
To keep his own men from shooting one another in the dark, each ranger tied a strip of white cloth around his arm.
The gorillas slipped ahead to cut the telephone lines so that when the shooting started, no call for help would leave Kabanatwan.
And there was still the problem of the open field.
The Japanese had cleared the ground around the camp for hundreds of yards exactly so that no one could approach it unseen.
The Rangers would have to cross that field flat on their stomachs in the failing light with the guards looking straight down the fence line.
They needed the enemy to be looking somewhere else.
The march was 30 mi and every one of them lay behind the lines.
They moved at night in a long single file.
Rangers, scouts, and gorillas, wading rivers with their weapons held over their heads, crossing open country where a single flare would have ended everything.
Getting there was its own kind of battle.
The route ran through a countryside the enemy still owned.
There were garrisons in the towns, columns on the highways, and patrols that could stumble onto the line at any moment.
The rescue force could not fight its way through, and it could not afford to be seen.
It could only move quietly, and trust the people of Luzon to hide it, and the people did.
This was their war, too.
For 3 years, the gorillas had lived in the hills, harried the occupier, and waited for a night exactly like this one.
Now they fed the Americans, guided them, watched the roads, and sent children up into the trees to keep an eye on the crossings.
At the national highway between Manila and Cabanatuan, the column reached the most dangerous line of all, a hard road the enemy used, running straight across their path.
They crossed it in the dark, a few men at a time, and melted back into the fields on the far side.
Every mile deeper was a mile that would have to be walked back out again.
This time carrying men who could not walk at all.
By the last day they lay hidden less than a mile from the camp, close enough to smell the cooking fires, waiting for dark.
The waiting was its own trial.
They lay in the heat with the camp in plain sight, so near that a careless move or a barking dog could have brought the whole enemy garrison down on them.
They could see the towers.
They could see thin figures moving behind the wire, and they knew those shapes were the very men they had come all this way to reach, and they could do nothing yet wait for the sun to go down.
Then they started across the open ground.
The last stretch was the hardest ground of the whole march.
The Rangers went across the open field flat in the dirt, pushing forward inches at a time, dragging their rifles and themselves over the bare earth the enemy had cleared for exactly this, to leave a man with nowhere to hide.
Every raised head was a risk, every sound carried.
Behind them, the field slowly filled with more men doing the same, a whole force pressing itself into the earth, so that the towers would see nothing.
And then a bell began to ring.
Inside the camp, a Navy prisoner had rigged a piece of iron into a ship’s bell, and he was sounding the watch the way he had on a deck years before.
Out in the grass, to men whose whole lives now hung on not being heard, that gonging sounded like an alarm.
Hearts stopped.
Hands froze on triggers.
But no search light came on.
No shouting.
The bell was only a bell.
The prisoners inside had no idea that a rescue was lying in the dirt a few hundred yards away.
Now they needed the guard’s eyes off the fence.
That job belonged to a single airplane.
Out of the dark came a P61 Black Widow, a big twin boommed night fighter of the 547th Night Fighter Squadron flown by Captain Kenneth Shriber.
He brought it in low over the camp and then he began to put on a show.
He cut one engine and let it bang and backfire.
He dropped the nose and dove as if he were going down, then caught it at the last moment and climbed away, only to come around and do it all over again.
To the guards below, it looked like an American plane in its death throws, about to fall out of the sky onto their heads.
They came out to watch.
They pointed.
For 20 long minutes, the whole camp stared upward at a machine that was never in any trouble at all.
and along the fence in the dark the rangers rose to their feet.
The signal was a single shot.
At exactly 1945 hours, a4 to 8 in the evening, the 30th of January, the first Ranger rifle cracked, and in the same instant, the whole camp came apart.
From every side at once, fire poured into the guard towers, into the pill boxes, into the barracks where off-duty soldiers lounged in their underwear.
Men who a moment before had been watching an airplane were cut down before they understood that the plane had been a lie.
The towers fell silent almost as fast as they were hit.
The fight for the camp itself was over nearly as soon as it began.
The Rangers had rehearsed it until it was reflex, and reflex was what carried them.
Squads peeled off to their assigned buildings, kicked in the doors, and cleared the rooms where the garrison had been sleeping.
A rocket team knocked out a shed full of enemy trucks and a pair of tanks before their crews could reach them.
In minutes, the guard force that had lorded over these prisoners for years simply ceased to exist.
It had to be that fast.
The whole plan rested on a single hard truth.
That a guard cannot murder a prisoner he never gets the chance to reach.
Every second the rangers shaved off the fight was a second the enemy did not have to carry out the order everyone feared.
So they did not slow down.
They moved [clears throat] through the camp like something rehearsed a thousand times because it very nearly had been.
Prince’s men blew the lock on the main gate and came through it fast, gunning down the guards in their path and racing for the barbed wire pens where the prisoners were kept.
But the danger was never only inside the camp.
A mile off at a bridge over the Kaboo River waited the thing that could have undone everything.
A far larger Japanese force close enough to reach the camp in minutes once the shooting told them what was happening.
Holding that bridge was Captain Pota and his gorillas.
They had wired it with charges, and when the enemy surged for the crossing, they blew a hole clean through it, wide enough that no tank or truck could pass.
Then they held the near bank with rifles and a handful of bazookas against wave after wave of men trying to force their way across on foot.
overhead.
Shriber’s Black Widow came back and worked the far side, and the tanks that tried the ford were left burning at the water’s edge.
For as long as the rescue needed, a couple hundred Filipinos and one American airplane kept an army penned on the wrong side of a river.
That was the measure of it.
That was how much steel it took to buy 30 minutes at Cabinet.
The men on that bridge were not Americans.
They were Filipinos fighting on their own soil for a cause that had become their own.
Holding a line so that other men’s countrymen could be carried to safety.
Some of them were wounded holding it.
They held it anyway until the last cart was clear and the signal came to fall back.
Inside the wire, those 30 minutes were something the Rangers would carry for the rest of their lives.
They had come to save 500 men and found many of them unwilling to be saved.
The prisoners heard the gunfire and thought the Japanese had finally come to finish them off.
Some dove under the huts.
Some lay still and waited to die.
When the rangers threw open the pens and shouted that they were Americans come to take them home, the men inside only stared back and did not move.
They did not recognize the uniforms.
They did not know the new helmets, the new weapons, the big healthy soldiers standing over them.
One of the freed men said afterward that the rescuers looked so strange, so foreign that the prisoners took them for men from Mars.
They could not believe they had been released.
So the rangers did the only thing left to do.
They picked the men up.
They carried them out on their backs and over their shoulders, one at a time, some so light now that a single soldier could lift a grown man alone.
They coaxed the ones who were hiding.
They half carried the ones who could shuffle.
Whatever it took to get every last man through the gate and moving toward the river before the enemy on the far side of the caboo found a way across.
Many of the prisoners were barefoot, their shoes long since worn to nothing.
Rangers pulled off their own boots and jackets and handed them over and went on in their socks.
Some of the freed men were so dazed they were not sure any of it was real.
A few even now reached back for a tin cup or a scrap of cloth, the last small things they owned before they could be coaxed along toward the gate.
The rescue was not free.
Two Americans did not come back from Cabanatuan.
One was a young enlisted man, Corporal Roy.
The other was the battalion’s own surgeon, Captain James Fiser, the doctor who had come along to save lives and who gave his own.
That was the whole cost on the American side of pulling more than 500 men out of the enemy’s hands.
Getting into Cabanatuan had been the hard part to plan.
Getting back out was the hard part to endure.
More than 500 men had to be moved 30 m across enemy country, and most of them could not walk a single mile.
The Rangers carried them at first on their own backs.
Then, out of the dark, the answer came rolling up from the Filipino villages.
Carts.
Wooden carabow carts pulled by water buffalo sent by farmers who had heard what was happening and emptied their barns to help.
The column had started the night with a couple dozen.
Before it was over, it had swelled to more than a hundred, creaking through the dark in a line nearly a mile long, each cart loaded with men too weak to stand.
It was a strange and unforgettable procession.
The rescued and their rescuers, the water buffalo and the young rangers, the sound of wooden wheels and shuffling feet, and here and there, the sound of grown men weeping.
They moved all night.
Filipino gorillas screamed the flanks and the rear.
Not every man would be carried.
One old soldier who could barely stand refused a place in the carts and set out to walk on his own.
He had made the march out of Baton 3 years before he told them.
