Undefeated: America's Heroic Fight for Bataan and Corregidor by Bill Sloan

Author:Bill Sloan [Sloan, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439199640
Amazon: B00ANYNDZ2
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

As fate would have it, one of General Wainwright’s final chances to evacuate some of the Army nurses, female civilians, older officers, and a few key military personnel from the closing trap on Corregidor occurred on the same day that the enemy began his all-out avalanche of air and artillery attacks.

Two U.S. Navy seaplanes had been dispatched from Australia by General MacArthur to handle the evacuations. After a flight from Mindanao, they were scheduled to land at about 11 PM on April 29 in a sheltered area near the wreckage of Corregidor’s south docks and off the low-lying section of the island known as Bottomside. A minesweeper had cleared a path through the minefield surrounding the island and planted two lighted underwater buoys to guide the planes in. By that hour of the night, the shelling had tailed off considerably, and most of the rounds still falling were hitting along the opposite north shore, but dozens of fires from that day’s bombardment still blazed across the island.

Between them, the PBYs could accommodate only fifty passengers, and except for a lucky few who had been handpicked by MacArthur, the rest would be chosen by Wainwright with the help of Captain Maude Davison, commander of the Army nursing unit.

Twenty of the seats aboard the planes went to the MacArthur appointees, along with a half-dozen senior officers whose health would have made their survival doubtful in prison camp, and two or three civilian women. The remaining thirty places were filled from the 150-member nursing corps, meaning that only one of every five nurses would be allowed to go. Some of those not selected reacted with understandable bitterness, and at least one who was selected, forty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Josephine Nesbit, the unit’s deputy commander, flatly refused to accept a seat.

“I want to stay,” she said simply.

Filled with a mixture of relief and regret at being one of the chosen, Lieutenant Juanita Redmond remarked that she “felt like a deserter” as she took her place among the evacuees waiting to board a small boat to take them out to one of the idling seaplanes. At the last moment, she turned impulsively to General Wainwright, threw her arms around him, and kissed him.

“Oh thank you, General,” she exclaimed.

“We stood there and watched the seaplanes roar and take off and prayed they wouldn’t be hit,” Wainwright later recalled. “They sailed right off the water beautifully, pulled out over the side of Cavite beyond the range of the anti-aircraft guns, and were enveloped in the night. Then we turned and walked back to our jobs.”

Only one of the two planes would make it safely to Australia. The other PBY would strike a submerged object as it landed on Lake Lanao on Mindanao, causing irreparable damage and stranding its twenty-five passengers, including about a dozen nurses, all of whom would end up as prisoners of the Japanese.

Only a handful of others were able to leave Corregidor by air—via two-seater “puddle-jumper” planes—before the surrender. They included Associated Press correspondents Clark Lee

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