We had scads of 60mm mortars, but we had no ammunition for them.
For example, they had a new weapon in the infantry units, a 60mm mortar.
We weren't well prepared, it just sounds like we were. Nearly all of the air corps units, the 192nd, 194th tank, the ordnance company, chemical companies, like that. Now, the majority of those probably came in 1941. The first day Veneranda saw me, I was so sick I was lying naked on what’s called a papag.Įvery month there was other transports that came in behind us up until a week before the war started. That was the start of the troop buildup.īarrio Natividad is where I met Veneranda, my wife. We made about 11 knots and it took 22 days. We went over there on the old USAT Republic. We were stationed right in Manila when I first went there, at Santa Lucia barracks in the old walled city, Intermuros it was called. I took a short discharge in February of '41 and reenlisted for three years so I could be sent there. You got two pesos for every dollar, and things were very cheap. And then of course, all the old soldiers that had been stationed there did tell you how far your money went in the Philippines. I wanted to go to the Philippines because it seemed that if any action was going to start, that would be the most logical place. So they swore us in on the first day of March. I enlisted on the 28th of February 1940, but they wouldn’t swear us in the next day since it was a leap year. They held POWs in San Fernando in a cockfight arena." Pampanga’s the next province above Bataan. "They were taking us from Mariveles up the east coast of Bataan to San Fernando in Pampanga Province.
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