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RED SAILS IN THE SUNSET
•••

I was up at the crack of dawn and on deck when we cast off our mooring lines and headed back out to sea. I saw the name of the destroyer as it took up a position in the lead as escort vessel-USS Chester. I was more interested in the view of the island than I was of the ships in the harbor. In the back of our minds we knew that here was the mightiest navy in the world and no power on earth could ever do it harm. We believed it, as everyone back home in America did. Foremost in our thoughts was the anger at being denied shore leave. Breakfast was delayed that morning for there were no volunteers for KP. Why, we wondered, couldn’t they have let us go ashore? There wasn’t a war going on!

The two troop ships took up positions side by side with the destroyer sailing between and slightly in front of us. After dinner that first night out of Honolulu, we were given orders that called for a complete blackout each night. We were also given permission to sleep on deck. It rained a little during the night but I didn’t mind. It was cool and the moon on the water was beautiful.

The next day, to break the monotony, I let my friends shave my head. We had fun and I took much razzing but I didn’t mind. When we didn’t have work details, we spent our time gambling and playing cards while some wrestled and frolicked on deck. One day while on work detail I found an old cot. I bragged about how wonderful it would be to sleep on deck with a cot. But that night when I set it up and stretched out it collapsed with a bang on the hard steel deck, to everyone’s laughter. I discovered the cot was beyond repair and pitched it in the rubbish. I ended up sleeping in the hold with the rest of the men. My bragging had cost me some teasing for a long time to come. Another night after supper Sergeant Sayer and I went to the officers’ social hall to play music for a colonel’s, birthday party. The sergeant pounded away at the piano while I played the accordion. I became disgusted when I saw the luxury the officers enjoyed compared to the life we enlisted men had to lead in the hellhole where we slept.

We crossed the International Date Line and dropped south across the Equator and paid our dues to Neptune, a shipmate with a mop for a hairdo and a toilet plunger for a scepter. The nights were complete blackouts with not even cigarette smoking permitted above deck. It was miserable below deck. The heat and smell in the holds were dreadful. We slept on deck whenever possible. But almost without fail, it rained and we had to grab our bedding and rush below.

The mornings were usually beautiful and the days balmy, and the ocean a magnificent purplish blue. We never tired of watching flying fish break the surface and shoot across our bow. We marveled how far some could fly, floating only inches above the surface of the water, only to disappear beyond the crest of a breaking wave. We also wondered what monstrous fish might be chasing them to send them flipping across the water as they did. A song I was requested to play on my accordion every day was “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Sometimes Jake the trumpeter accompanied me and half a dozen men kept the beat on tin cans and boxes.

Early the morning of October 19, we sighted a verdant, high volcanic island. Word came down the line that it was Guam, one of America’s eastern naval bases. It was raining and there was a rainbow in the sky. The officers and non-coms were allowed shore leave but the rest of us were not. At six-thirty that evening, while the enlisted men grumbled, we pulled away from the island and sailed westward.

The rest of the trip to the Philippines was uneventful, except now below the Equator dreamy days and balmy evenings were interspersed with rain squalls, crashing thunder and a sky filled with flashes of lightning. It was especially awesome to come on deck at night, into pitch blackness, and suddenly see both sky and sea light up from one horizon to the other in a single flash.

We continued to spend much time watching flying fish jump in front of the bow, and now in the warmer tropical waters of the South Pacific came another marvel-an ocean that glowed, like a sky that’s lighted with billions of fireflies. At first, the phenomena appeared to be reflections from the stars as we cut a course through the water, but we soon learned that on moonlit nights the plankton-rich seas of the South Pacific glow with phosphorus. They were like diamonds you wanted to reach out and grab.

Four days after leaving Guam, we sighted the Philippine Islands and by evening, we were sailing through the San Bernardine Strait, the narrow channel that separates Luzon in the north from the twin islands of Samar and Leyte in the south. ”We all crowded the rails, and there was quite a bit of excitement,” I wrote in my diary. ”We are now heading into the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen. The ocean is just like a lake with hardly a ripple on the water.”

Once through the channel, we turned north and entered the Visayan Sea. I slept on deck and was up at 4:30 and began writing in my diary: “Awoke during the night to see islands on both sides of the ship, and this morning            there are islands in every direction. On the starboard side, there is a mountainous island that resembles a volcano. The peak is shrouded in clouds and it’s actually hard to tell what it is. All the islands are quite close and we can see vegetation. The water is calm although there is a fresh breeze blowing. All the boys are on deck and we are getting quite a kick out of the flying fish. Coconuts and strange sea kelp float by. At 9:20 a.m. two U.S. Army pursuit planes dove at us, over and over, giving us a show. It was quite thrilling.”

In a few weeks seeing planes dive at us would no longer be a thrill. It would turn to terror.

We sailed into beautiful Manila Bay, where the rock of Corregidor, like a lone sentinel, guarded the entrance as it had done diligently for the Spanish for 400 years before the Americans came. At last, we were in Manila, the end of our journey. Tasker H. Bliss and Williard A. Holbrook ended their voyage at the docks at Cavite on October 23. To mark our arrival, a rainbow above the city was there to greet us. We tied up to the dock and excitedly disembarked with all our gear to a wonderful reception. There was a strong sense of patriotism in the air. I felt I now knew that proud feeling the Yanks had experienced when they landed in Europe during the First World War. A band played the Philippine and American national anthems while Filipino stevedores sold bottles of cokes for a quarter and packs of cigarettes for a dime. We boarded Army trucks and through cheering crowds drove to Fort McKinley. Here we were assigned to our new units.

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Since 1936, American military officers had been serving in the Philippines, organizing and training Filipino troops. When the threat of war in the Pacific increased, the Philippine Army was ordered into the regular service of the U.S. Army. Finally, in July, 1941, American enlisted troops were sent to the Philippines to further assist with the training of Filipinos and to prepare for the defense of the islands. Mario Machi was among those sent to the Philippines … – Harold Stephens

GOODBYE FRISCO, HELLO SOUTH PACIFIC
•••••

At 2:30 p.m., we boarded Tasker H. Bliss, formerly President Cleveland, a grand old luxury liner that had seen better and happier days. Gone were its luster and polish; it was now repainted and converted into a troop transport that carried 5,000 officers and men, crammed into tight quarters with pipe bunk beds stacked eight high. Our quarters were aft about three flights down in a converted freight hold. Sailing with us was Williard A. Holbrook, formerly President Taft, another converted liner bearing the same dismal grey color. A band played “Anchors Away” and a large crowd gathered on the dock shouting and waving to wish well and to send us on our way. Some men threw their garrison caps to the pretty girls on shore. We left at 5:30 that afternoon and the two ships sailed together through the Golden Gate and embarked for Hawaii, our first stop en route to the Philippines.

An hour after we left the Golden Gate we encountered rough seas and a strong wind out of the northwest. Soon most of the men were heaving over the railing. I did not feel so good myself but I was fortunate that I didn’t have to heave like the others.

Seeing the others did remind me of my first voyage on the open sea. It had been aboard a drag boat out of San Francisco for Shelter Cove along the northern California coast. Due to bad weather, what would normally have been a seventeen-hour voyage, took us twenty-four. Before leaving the dock in San Francisco, we had each eaten a bowl of the captain’s salmon soup, and although I had followed a friend’s suggestion and nibbled on soda crackers and chewed a lemon, I became deathly seasick before we passed through the Golden Gate. The sickness remained with me throughout the trip, and it wasn’t until

I had been ashore for some time that I felt normal again. To this day, I can taste the salmon soup that nauseated me then.

Now, as I watched my sick comrades aboard the Bliss, I remembered how weak and wobbly I had been as I climbed up the ladder and stood on the pier at Shelter Cove that beautiful day. I can still recall the exact date, May 22, 1930. The boat that brought us was owned by the San Francisco International Fish Company, a company my father, Petro Machi, helped start back in 1908. He was still a stockholder then in the company.

Although I was only sixteen at the time, I was deeply impressed with Shelter Cove. As I studied the rugged coastline and the cove itself, I marveled at the spectacular scenery. I even thought how fine it would be to have a seaside resort there one day.

The trip to Honolulu took five days. Every day I played my accordion, usually on deck beneath the shade of a lifeboat, and often with a trumpet player, I met on board. Some days we had work assignments, chipping paint and scrubbing the decks. We saw flying fish and had our first blackout, which lasted twenty minutes. The weather was balmy and so hot in the holds we were forced to sleep without blankets or clothes.

It was October 9th, my birthday, that Tasker H. Bliss rounded the southeastern tip of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands and Diamond Head came into view. Soldiers crowded the railing and joked about seeing coconuts, pineapples and hula girls. In the distance five or six planes circled in the sky. We entered a narrow channel that opened up into a wide port as big as a lake. All about we could see powerful battle wagons, destroyers and their escorts and a couple of carriers either at anchor and or else moored along the docks. The sailors aboard who had been here before called the place Pearl Harbor. “A good liberty port,” they told us. Some asked if the name comes because there are pearls in the harbor. With excitement, we talked about our shore leave. We were assured of leave and each man had dressed in his cleanest suntan outfit, ready to rush down the gangplank the moment we docked.

As we came alongside the dock, a band started playing and we could see hula girls dancing on the pier. We were excited beyond words. Our first port-of-call. But when a destroyer came and tied up alongside us, I sensed something was wrong. And sure enough, I was right, for as we lined the deck, waiting for the gangplank to be lowered, a voice came over the loudspeaker. It was the commanding officer. He announced that no one was to leave the ship. Our sailing time had been set for 5:00 the following morning. The men were terribly disappointed. They voiced their disapproval by grumbling and making nasty remarks. The band stopped playing, the hula girls disappeared and a cordon of M.P.s now lined the dock. The order was meant to be enforced. This was as close as I ever came to the Hawaiian Islands.

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THE CALL TO ARMS

“Never in American history was an event more anticipated yet more of a surprise than the attack on Pearl Harbor,”…. Time Magazine.

Against my father’s advice, I dropped out of college and enlisted in the Army of the United States of America on February 17, 1941 at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco. Like most everyone in America in early 1941, I thought war in the Pacific was imminent and I believed it would be best for me to enlist early and get myself into something I liked. I had three years of college behind me, at San Francisco State, with a major in physical education. I had studied anatomy, biology, and some medicine and decided the medical corps might be the answer.

Unfortunately, I received very little training and in September of the same year, I asked for a transfer to the infantry. During this time, I met men with whom I would serve in Manila and then later on Bataan. I got my request, and never was a transfer so immediate, and for good reason. No sooner had I joined my new outfit than we received orders to move out. We were going to the Philippine Islands across the Pacific.

On September 26, we transferred from Letterman to Fort McDowell and a week later on October 4 we sailed for the islands. During this week, I truly enjoyed my last look at San Francisco, my hometown. In the evenings with a couple buddies, I would walk up to the summit above the fort where beneath a full moon I could look out over the town, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, and to as far away as other cities on the bay. The weather much of that week was warm and clear and lovely. I made a dollar on a bet when Joe Louis floored Nova.

One-day two friends and I got passes to the city. We enjoyed abalone sandwiches on Fisherman’s Wharf, a banana split in North Beach and then had dinner with my family. My whole family had not been together like this for some months; it would be even longer before we were together again. That night on the way back to Fort McDowell my friends and I made wishes and for good luck each of us tossed pennies into the bay. I spoke my wish aloud and then later in the barracks I faithfully recorded it in my diary. I hoped that we would all have experiences of value in the islands and would return to the U.S.A. Two months later when we were thrown into a world we had not thought humanly possible, those wishes would seem naive and far away.

Background of the book

The original title of this book was “The Emperor’s Hostages” written by the same author. However, another writer, Harold Stephens, who also was a Second World War veteran in the Pacific Stage got a copy of it, shared the same feeling and enthusiasm and eventually encouraged him to rewrite it with its new title, “Under the Rising Sun”. Here is Stephen’s introductory comment:

Introduction of Harold Stephens

Harold Mendes is a businessman, born and raised in northern California, and he knows just about everyone and anyone who lives in Humboldt County. If he doesn’t know them personally, he knows all about them. It wasn’t long after I got to know him that he told me about Mario Machi. “You’ve got to meet him. He’s a writer, like yourself,” he said. “He was a prisoner-of-war, you know.” Then he added, “He lives in Shelter Cove, has a marina there.”

I usually don’t fancy meeting writers “like myself’ and probably would have declined his offer had I not been anxious to visit Shelter Cove. I was new to redwood country and had heard about the merits of this beautiful hidden cove tucked away on the Pacific Coast.

We made the 24-mile drive one Sunday afternoon and found Mario talking to a couple of boat owners in front of his marina overlooking the cove. A dozen boats were at anchor, waiting to be pulled ashore; others were entering the harbor.

Mario greeted us warmly and we shook hands. He was soft spoken and easy mannered. He was past 70 then, a bit stocky, suntanned and obviously very fit for his age. His hair was white and he had a neatly trimmed moustache. He sported a well-worn captain’s hat with an anchor emblem at the peak. In a conversation that was all too brief (more pleasure boats with their salmon catches were coming in), he mentioned something about serving in the Philippines and that he had a great admiration for the Filipinos, but he spoke mostly about the cove and the fishing season not being what it used to be.

Other bits of information about Mario had come from Harold Mendes on our drive down to the cove. It seems that after Mario was discharged from the army, he completed college and then taught school for twenty-two years at an elementary and junior high school in Miranda, a small town in northern California. Later I met another teacher, Rip Kirby, who had taught school in Miranda the same time as Mario did. “Mario was the hardest working man I had ever met,” Rip said when I asked him about Mario. “He drove a school bus in the morning, taught school all day and then in the evening ran the Grotto Restaurant in Redway. He did the cooking as well. He’s a man that just can’t be idle.”

Mario had acquired some land in Shelter Cove and when he had the capital, he developed it. Mario’s Marina is one of the biggest and most prosperous enterprises in Shelter Cove today.

As I was leaving Shelter Cove that first time, Mario thanked me for stopping by, and as I was getting into the car, he handed me a book, a small book less than a hundred pages, titled The Emperor’s Hostages. His name appeared below the title. “It’s one of my last copies,” he said. “You might want to read it.”

I began reading the book the very next day. Once I started, I couldn’t do another thing until I finished it. As I read I kept picturing Mario, standing at the Marina in Shelter Cove, a proud successful man, and then I saw the same man, almost fifty years before, being kicked and savagely beaten, forced to march through malaria infested jungles for nearly sixty miles with neither food nor water to drink. And I could see marching side by side with him other prisoners, men too weak to continue, dropping by the roadside, only to be bayoneted for failing to keep up. Somehow, Mario managed to survive the brutality, the hunger, the thirst, the disease, and the dreadful feeling that he had been abandoned. Some 10,000 men died on that march, an average of 178 men for every mile they tread. But Mario Machi lived.

I wanted desperately to talk to Mario again; there was so much to ask him. I couldn’t help wondering about the many people who had read The Emperor’s Hostages, his students, the fishermen who used the marina, even his friends, how many of them knew anything about Mario the prisoner-of-war, a soldier who had survived the notorious Bataan Death March? How can one equate Mario the soldier with Mario the devoted husband and father, the schoolteacher, the man who runs the marina in Shelter Cove?

I can’t remember but I may have seen Mario a half dozen times after that, at the bank in Garberville, and at the Cove when I took friends down to visit. Each time I saw him I thought about the war in the Pacific. Always in the back of my mind was the hope that one day I might be able to sit down with him and ask about those days of long ago. But I didn’t. The days passed, the months and the years.

Then, on May 6, 1992, an event took place that left an impression so deep I won’t ever be able to forget it. And it was at that moment that Mario’s book took on a new meaning and came to life for me.

On that day in the heat of the afternoon, with eighty former prisoners-of-war, I entered Malinta Tunnel on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. As a journalist, I was invited by the Philippine government to attend a ceremony marking the 50^th anniversary of the Fall of Corregidor. The Corregidor Foundation was staging a light-and-sound presentation of the siege of Corregidor that they called “The Malinta Experience.”

As we stood there inside the tunnel, not knowing what to expect, the lights dimmed and then went out. We were in total darkness. Suddenly this was not May6, 1992, but May 6, 1942.

From somewhere deep in the tunnel a bomb blast ended our silence. It was followed by another, and another. Shock after shock vibrated through the rock walls! A string of light bulbs suspended from the ceiling came on, dimly, flickering, swinging from side to side. The concrete floor beneath our feet trembled with such violence I reached for something to grab. Soon the sound was deafening, like a weight pressing down, about to crush us. Dust fell from everywhere and the walls seemed as though they might collapsed.

The god-awful feeling, the sensation we encountered, was about as close as we could get to the real thing. In fact, it was so realistic I wanted to break loose from the others and run from the tunnel. Any of us could very easily have done that, run for the light at the far end, but for the soldiers who were defending the rock fifty years ago that would have been impossible. They were doomed to die, or else surrender to the Japanese.

On May 6, 1942, after defending the island fortress for five long months, General Jonathan Wainwright did just that-surrender. He gave the orders to raise a white flag. Corregidor had fallen.

Following the presentation, I stood on Corregidor with a half dozen former prisoners and looked across the water toward Bataan. The peninsula appeared peaceful and serene, like a color photograph in a travel magazine. But the men who stood beside me remembered another Bataan. And it was then, standing there on Corregidor, that I remembered Mario Machi and his book.

Corregidor was only half the story of what had happened to American forces in the Philippines. The other half, what took place on the Peninsula of Bataan, was Mario Machi’s story, and I knew then that I had to talk to him again. The story he told in The Emperor’s Hostages was all too brief. I read through the text again, and came up with hundreds of unanswered questions. I wanted to know more about Manila and the Philippines, and, of course, more about the Japanese. Why did these men, the prisoners as well as the Japanese guards, act the way they did? The story that Mario has to tell the world is history in its purest sense. It’s not history told by a scholar who gets his information from research but by one who had been there, one who had seen and witnessed it first hand, and who had recorded in a diary many events as they were happening. And most miraculously, this leather-bound diary-a written confession that would certainly have meant immediate death to Mario had it fallen into enemy hands-has survived to this day. Mario’s story is a story for this generation and for future generations to read and ponder. Then, perhaps, we might better understand what went wrong with the world back in 1941, and hopefully learn from those mistakes.

I finally met with Mario, now nearing eighty years old, in Shelter Cove, and he was receptive to my suggestion that he republish his memoirs. When we did sit down together to discuss the new book, often with his wife Shirley present, I was surprised to find he could recall with minute accuracy every detail of his war years experiences. And Shirley added greatly to his story. She could relate the more intimate details, about death and suffering, and about loving too, that Mario had revealed to her in their years together.

Sometimes when talking to Mario our conversations took painful twists. Mario’s eyes occasionally filled with tears as he recalled a particularly painful incident. At other times, he corrected my assumptions. I remember saying to him; ”You really had to be a wheeler-dealer to survive.” In a stern voice, he fired back, “I survived because I was not a wheeler-dealer.”

Mario immediately set to work on the revision with the new title Under the Rising Sun. He has expanded the original text and answered many questions that had gone unanswered. Some questions, however, cannot be answered, and it is up the reader to find his own interpretations.

Under the Rising Sun is written for both the generations who remember Bataan and for those who have yet to hear. It is the story of survival under conditions of utmost brutality and depravation, but more importantly, it stands as witness to the values that sustained the author on his terrible journey: his sense of humor, his love for country, family and friends, and finally his commitment to work and to helping those whose circumstances were even worse than his. On his return to the United States in 1945, Mario Machi was awarded the Bronze Star for the work he had done in the camps. Now, a half century later, he has told his story, and we are all made the richer for it. Readers will notice some chapters contain headings in italics. Most of these are historical notes that I prepared and are not necessarily the opinion nor the conclusion of the author. I have added them in hope that they serve to enlighten readers to other events that were happening at the time. It is impossible to set all the facts straight. For example, every history text and every source material lists a different number for prisoners lost during the death march. Some sources believe the figure is well over 10,000. But such figures and facts are not what concerns Mario Machi. He leaves that to the writers of textbooks.

Harold Stephens
California, June 1994