By Guess & By God

THEY WERE EXPENDABLE--W. L White --Harcourt, Brace ($2).

This book is a personal report by participants about the naval war which U.S. PT-boats waged against the Japanese navy while U.S. troops still held Bataan.

The young men who told it to veteran War Correspondent Bill White, son of the famous editor, were four officers of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3, almost the last active remnants of the crew that brought General Douglas MacArthur safely out of the Philippines.

"If possible, when I get to Melbourne I'll get you and your key men out," MacArthur promised Squadron Leader Bulkeley. The men remembered the promise without enthusiasm. They knew that they and their six little ships were chiefly useful for gumming up the works of the Japanese invaders on Bataan. In their 70-by-20 foot, plywood speedboats, they expended all they had in "America's little Dunkirk." But MacArthur kept his promise, and they came back to tell about it.

They were expendable. They have no kick on that score. What burns them up is that:

> While their squadron was being pasted to hell, people back home let themselves be kidded by "buoyant, cheerful voices talking of victory. . . . There were plenty of [victories]. They were all Japanese."

> Pearl Harbor should have been surprised. "They got the same warnings we did in Manila. That war was maybe days, perhaps even only hours, away." Lieut. Robert Boiling Kelly knew enough to "put aboard the thickest charcoal-broiled filet mignon" Manila could supply, so as to be ready for the attack.

> When Corregidor's anti-aircraft guns opened up, no single shell could reach within 5,000 feet of the Jap raiders.

> Even after the example of Pearl Harbor, planes on Luzon were still left out in the open, where they were blown to bits by bombers.

> Months later, when Lieut. Kelly reached Australia, he found the same thing there--"bombers and fighters parked in orderly rows. . . . 'Hell,' they told me, 'the Japs are hundreds of miles away.' "

When they think of these things, they remember the men who had to pay the price: the dead of Cavite, buried by the process of "collecting heads and arms and legs and putting them into the nearest bomb crater"; the lone repairman at Cebu who fixed their boat and calmly stayed behind to fight the Japs alone. And they think of some 60 men who were once members of their squadron--how their numbers were whittled down by days of incessant, hopeless action.

But they tell their story of this fight simply and conversationally--how their six boats became an infuriating menace to Jap warships and transports, how they fought to keep them afloat even when hulls were ripped open by coral reefs, how their gas tanks were clogged with wax put in their gas by some unknown saboteur. Sent out on patrol from Bataan, to fight lone actions against enemy cruisers and destroyers, Squadron 3 sank "probably a hundred times [its] own combined tonnage in enemy warships."

High Point of the Squadron's job was the evacuation of MacArthur, his family and staff. As described by Bulkeley and Kelly it is a mixture of daring and humor, of the Navyman's good-natured contempt for the Army and respect for its leader. Aboard the PTs, gold braid and oak leaves, drenched with roaring spray, were not in their element. "I noticed a figure by the machine-gun turret," says Kelly. "His stomach was long ago empty, but he was leaning forward, retching between his knees." Kelly told a quartermaster to help him below, got the answer: "The general says he doesn't want to move, sir--he knows what's best for him." Even the lone admiral aboard was horrified to see Kelly take bearings by making a 45-degree angle with two fingers. "How in hell do you navigate?" he protested. "By guess and by God, sir," said Kelly.

Author White tells their remarkable tale with punch and tang. The Navy Department was interested enough to change one letter in the original title, making "expendible" "expendable." Possibly the Navy is also responsible for making Bulkeley describe certain military persons as "dumb dastards."

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