Word: corregidor
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Jonathan Wainwright's soldier's eye saw that the end was near. From the shores of the Bay he withdrew his naval forces, sailormen and Marines of the 4th Regiment (evacuated last November from Shanghai) to Corregidor. He tried to strike one last blow. Against a Jap breakthrough on the Manila Bay side of the peninsula he threw a corps in desperate counterattack. It was too much. The glassy-eyed soldiers went forward like men in a dream, so exhausted that many of them could hardly lift their feet, and the Jap mowed them down. The flank folded...
...Corregidor saw only a little of the ghastly end. The last, pitifully small ammunition dump on Bataan went up in smoke and flame; the three ships at the water's edge (including the 6,000-ton sub tender Canopus) were dynamited. Finally, from one of the heights on Bataan, a white flag went up. How many of the 36,000 died fighting, only the Japs knew...
...still swam the shark-infested stretch from Bataan to Corregidor, and in the last few hours boats got across with nurses and a few survivors. But the biggest part of the battle-trained Philippine Army was gone. From the heights the Jap, with artillery already emplaced, began slamming away at Corregidor. The soldiers there and the few civilians who had fled from Bataan (where 20,000 had been an added charge on the troops) knew it could not be long before they were finished too. No gunners had ever been in finer positions than the Jap. From Bataan...
Finally, on April Fools' Eve, the assault came. Lieut. General Tomoyuki Yamashita had held back for weeks, planning, grouping his forces, flexing his muscles. For ten days he had bombarded both Bataan and Corregidor, as if those were things to be softened. The world, knowing an attack was coming, expected it to break Bataan...
Twice they were spotted by a Jap plane-it looked like "Photograph Joe," a reconnaissance pilot who flew over Corregidor every morning-but the expected bombers failed to follow. At native villages where they stopped by day the Filipinos, overjoyed at sight of their boat flying the U.S. flag, told them tales of rape in towns occupied by the Japs...