Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets by Stafford David

Author:Stafford, David [Stafford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

12

O ur M an in M anila

‘Bataan has fallen’ came the announcer’s voice over the coast-to-coast NBC broadcast on 19 April 1942, ‘but stout Corregidor fights on. The Japanese bombers smash away at the dogged defenders of the Rock on Manila Bay, and still the gun-crews rally, still the shells go screaming up with their messages of death for the invaders.’

Japan had invaded the Philippines the day after Pearl Harbor. On Christmas Eve 1941, after days of heavy bombing, the American General Douglas MacArthur had declared Manila an open city and moved his headquarters to the heavily fortified island stronghold of Corregidor across Manila Bay – the ‘Gibraltar of the Far East’ – riddled with underground tunnels and stocked with a hospital and supplies enough for 10,000 men to survive a six-month siege. American and Filipino forces retreated to the Bataan peninsula. After a hard-fought battle they had surrendered just ten days before – and already embarked on the notorious march that saw thousands of them clubbed and bayoneted to death by Japanese troops.

But Corregidor still held out and NBC had relayed its broadcast to its defenders as well as to the BBC in London. And it was for them that the second voice now came on air, a man who had lived on the Rock for several weeks as British Liaison Officer with MacArthur and who was now speaking from Washington. ‘I can see the guns now and the men who man them,’ he reported, ‘stripped to the waist, burnt by the sun, with their pet signs painted on their gun barrels – blue devils, green dragons, and their favourite emblems. The ground around them will be mostly scars and craters now, and they’ll all be taking a cruel, incessant pasting …’

Then, highlighting the vital importance of air power, he concluded: ‘The bombardment may even be too heavy to permit any of them to hear this broadcast. But if any of them are listening today, I would like, as a British officer, [to say] that the hearts of men and women throughout America are inspired by Corregidor today. So, too, are the hearts of free men everywhere.’

The voice was that of Major Gerald Hugh Wilkinson, a thirty-year-old Englishman caught in the Pacific maelstrom who was to play an intriguing clandestine role in Churchill’s efforts to know his American allies better – and yet another example, like Alan Hillgarth, of the Prime Minister’s desire for personal sources of his own. Thanks to official secrecy, his story until now has remained obscure. [1]

A few weeks after Bataan’s fall, on a Saturday in June 1942, a khaki-camouflaged Humber Pullman car driven by an army sergeant pulled up outside Chequers. Out stepped Wilkinson, promptly on time for lunch with Winston Churchill.

As he gazed on the weathered brick mock-Tudor frontage, he must have been all too aware of the burdens troubling the Prime Minister. In North Africa Rommel’s forces had reached the gates of Tobruk, Stalin was pressing hard for the second front, and in the Atlantic Doenitz’s U-boats were reaping their grim harvest of Allied merchantmen.

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