Dec. 7 et Seq.

THE FALL OF THE PHILIPPINES (626 pp.) --Louis Morton--Department of the Army ($5.25).

At the end of World War II, the U.S.

Army found itself with 17,120 tons of written records on the war. Ever since 1945, a small army (30 to 50) of official historians has been chopping this lumber pile of information into the neat cordwood of history. Stacked to Volume 19 at present, this account of all Army operations in World War II will run to a projected 87 volumes, making it the most ambitious, or at least the biggest, historical undertaking of modern times.

Intended in part as homework for the

Army's own specialists in strategy and logistics, some of the already published volumes are dishwater-dull and studded with enough technical details to paralyze the general reader. A few, e.g., Cross-Channel Attack, Three Battles: Arnaville, Altuzzo, and Schmidt, and The Fall of the Philippines, capture the mud and courage of battle with tense honesty.

Parked on Clark. One of the best is Louis Morton's The Fall of the Philippines. Historian Morton, 39, chief of the Pacific section of the Army's historical department, is no Samuel Eliot Morison or S. L. A. Marshall (The River and the Gauntlet), but he writes with the quiet authority of a man who spent 1943-45 in the South Pacific and the Philippines, spent a lot of further time digging through Army files, private letters and diaries, and personally interviewing survivors. His book builds to a melancholy climax, from the bombing of Clark Field through the Japanese landings, the fight on Bataan, and the departure of MacArthur, to the final battle of Corregidor and Wain-wright's surrender. While The Fall of the Philippines holds no major surprises, it puts the tragedy in clear perspective.

Some questions remain unanswered.

Why were B-17s and P-40s neatly parked on Clark Field for Japanese bombers to pick off hours after Air Chief "Hap" Arnold had alerted responsible officers to the news of Pearl Harbor, and 45 minutes after air spotters had radioed reports of approaching Japanese planes? Historian Morton's best guess: fouled-up communications, command indecision. The cost: 99 planes destroyed out of a total of 277, and the offensive power of the Air Force in the Philippines crippled. Some matters Historian Morton resolves plainly and bluntly. The Philippine army, constituting more than half of MacArthur's 140,000-man command, was inadequately trained and scantily equipped. Though they sometimes fought gallantly, the green Filipino troops all too often panicked and ran. Nonetheless, all troops fought well enough to bring the Japanese to a dead stop on Bataan in the last week of February 1942. One high-ranking Japanese officer later admitted that a U.S. counterattack could have pushed through the Japanese lines and retaken Manila.

"No Papa . . . No Uncle Sam." U.S. forces were too weak in body and supplies to launch such an attack. Their two daily meals at dawn and twilight consisted mostly of sticky globs of rice and a few slivers of salmon and beef. In between, they sampled everything from roots and berries to mules and monkeys. Wrote one G.I.: "That monkey meat is all right until the animal's hands turn up on a plate." Beset by dysentery, dengue fever and malaria, badgered by enemy planes and artillery, blocked off from all aid, the men nursed their back-to-the-wall morale in bitter little ditties:

We're the battling bastards of Bataan; No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam; No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no

nieces;

No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces.

. . . And nobody gives a damn

Acts of heroism were common. One lieutenant won the Medal of Honor by ignoring a bullet-torn left hand and lobbing grenades into a Jap machine-gun nest till he knocked it out. With two more bullets in his chest, he mounted a U.S. tank and fired its antiaircraft gun into a second machine-gun position until still another bullet knocked him off the tank. He was back with his unit within a month.

But by April, courage could no longer stave off defeat for sick and starving men. On April 9 Bataan fell, on May 6 Wainwright surrendered Corregidor. The Japanese high command had set a Feb. 1 deadline for the conquest of Luzon, and the men of Bataan had upset that timetable. They had proved that the Japanese could be stopped. And out of their defeat they had fashioned an enduring American epic.

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