South From Corregidor (Jerry eBooks) by John Morrill

Author:John Morrill [Morrill, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

9

Dodging the Red-balls

THE DAWN broke in the east on a misty, drizzling rain. We were coming to the Camotes Islands ahead. Looking over toward the city of Cebu very carefully, we could see the topmasts of many ships going in and out, but they were too far away to see us and we merely changed our course slightly to the southeast to pass closer to Leyte, where the water was freer from traffic. We were now getting down close to an area where none of us had ever been before and it was difficult to identify the various little islands and jutting rocks. We had no pelorus with which to spot a fix, but Binkley and I learned a number of tricks, such as using two points of land, opening or closing on each other, as a bearing which we could check roughly by holding our small boat compass in our hands and sighting along its top. We worked it out by elimination. We’d get two objects in sight, take their bearing with our compass, and then consulting our chart we’d eliminate all the places we couldn’t be, finally boiling it down to the one of two places where we must be.

We went on through the Camotes Sea without any difficulty. The sun was not too hot and it was very pleasant. Some of the tightened springs coiled inside of us began to unwind. We had our usual two meals, with coffee at frequent intervals between them.

Disconnected scenes and pictures had a way of leaping out of the back of my mind when I had nothing else to do but lean on the tiller and watch the waves roll wetly toward us out of the place where they were born, on the other side of the horizon.

One picture I kept seeing for no reason at all was the day I had gone over to Mariveles to take one of my men to do some special radio work in the Canopus* radio shop. On the way back we passed through a small Filipino village near the beach. Two small native boys about seven or eight years old were playing there, using lumps of dirt for toys. A flight of Jap bombers sailed over, moving flyspecks dirtying a spotless robin’s-egg-blue sky. The two children looked up, saw that the line of Jap flight would carry them off to one side of their village, and went on playing.

That particular flight dropped its eggs on the Baguio hospital—it was the first time they had bombed it—and a second flight came over right above us. The kids looked up again, unhurried and casual but wise in intensive experience with such things. We could see them gauging the angle and deciding that this time the Japs were going to mail them a special-delivery package. They moved calm and unperturbed over to a low spot behind an outcropping of rocks and lay down still clutching their dirt playthings.

By this time I was back in the boat that had brought me to Bataan.

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