Chapter 1 Panama Jones and His Three Thousand Thieves First Lt. Bill Calhoun felt two rough hands shake him awake. The tropical sun was blinding as he opened his eyes and tried to focus on the massive shadow over him. Slowly, the grizzled, unshaven face of an Aussie bulldozer driver, wearing a broad smile, came into focus. "Merry Christmas, Yank," the man said in his thick Australian accent. "Merry Christmas," Calhoun muttered back, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. The Aussie moved on, and after a moment, Calhoun climbed out of his bedroll and stood in the morning brightness, lighting his first cigarette of the day. He was a lean young man, only twenty-two, with a thin mustache and wavy, thick dark hair. Despite his youth, he had a western gunfighter's seasoned squint, and at times his mouth wore a mischievous smirk. Like millions of young American men, he was far from home, fighting a war that sprawled from one end of the planet to another. But unlike most, he wore the jump boots of a paratrooper. All around him the forty paratroopers in his unit climbed out of bunkers and fighting positions to stretch stiff joints or light up their own smokes. Calhoun was their leader, in charge of F Company's first platoon. The Aussie who had awoken him was part of a construction crew tasked with building an airfield on Mindoro Island, which the men of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment had taken only days before. Mindoro's expanse of flat sugarcane fields made it an ideal location from which to launch fighters, bombers, and transports in preparation for General MacArthur's upcoming assault on Manila, which lay less than two hundred miles north. It was December 1944, and for the last two and a half years, American forces in the Pacific had been slowly island-hopping toward Tokyo. At first the war had gone well for Japan, with the seizure of the Philippines, as well as strategic islands that had been occupied by the Dutch and the British. But with a punishing defeat at the hands of the US Navy at Midway, Japan's crusade had begun to sour, and General MacArthur's victory in New Guinea had accelerated their crisis. Back in 1942, MacArthur had famously declared, in reference to the Philippines, "I shall return." And now, as America was grinding into a fourth year of global war, US troops were indeed closing in on Manila. MacArthur's plan was to begin the invasion of Luzon, where Manila was located, soon. Calhoun and his paratroopers of the 503rd had arrived on Mindoro not from the belly of a C-47 but across the ramp of an LCI, or landing craft infantry. They were met not by a well-armed and dug-in enemy force but by an uncontested beach. American patrols encountered only light resistance. After several days of stalking the island's jungles, Calhoun got a new mission: defend the nascent airfield and Australian construction crew against any Japanese harassment that might emerge from the brush. Such an order was an insult for the paratroopers of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. It was bad enough that they had arrived in LCIs, like regular infantry. They didn't see themselves as guards. They were combat troops, the very same men who had made the first combat parachute assault in the Pacific theater. They were the Airborne, for chrissakes. Airborne units were still new to the army. The Soviets had been the first to test parachute assaults, but the German attack on Crete in 1941, during which some twenty thousand German paratroopers dropped onto the Allied-held fortress and seized it in a brutal two-week battle, was the catalyst. It was the first large airborne invasion at the time, and though the Germans had suffered heavy losses, the success of their FallschirmjSger reminded American generals that the United States badly needed their own airborne troops to be combat-ready. The US Army was already testing the concept. Soldiers from the Twenty-Ninth Infantry Division formed a test platoon of airborne infantry. It conducted the first US Army parachute jump from a B-18 over Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning, Georgia, in August 1940. Two years later, in November 1942, the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment jumped into North Africa during Operation Torch. While the 82nd Airborne Division and later the 101st Airborne Division stood up to fight in Europe, it was the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment that was sent to Australia in 1942 to act as General MacArthur's strategic reserve. It was the only independent airborne regiment in the Pacific theater, adopting for its patch a wildcat parachuting from the sky baring its claws and its fangs. Before departing for the Pacific, paratroopers from B Company were ordered to Salt Lake City, Utah, in January 1942 to train on skis. Soon photographs of paratroopers on skis appeared in newspapers, with a caption about how the men were learning "to fight efficiently on sledded feet," training they would never use in the Pacific. America's war was in its infancy, and the training was a ruse meant to convince Adolf Hitler that the Americans were planning to invade Norway. Not long after the training, the 503rd was sent to Panama on its way to Australia. The 503rd made its first combat parachute jump in 1943. The assault on Nadzab, New Guinea, was an example of how an airborne operation was done, with one hitch: there were no Japanese in the area. The unit's second jump, on Noemfoor in July 1944, was a disaster because the C-47 cargo planes dropped the paratroopers from too low. Calhoun joined the 503rd while the unit was in New Guinea, after the jump at Nadzab. He started as an assistant platoon leader before his platoon leader was transferred back to the rear base in Australia. He took command of F Company's first platoon and saw his first combat action during operations on Noemfoor, an island off the northern coast of New Guinea. The paratroopers were called in after the initial assault to help mop up Japanese resistance. One day, Calhoun led his platoon into a jungle flanked by two ridges. After clearing the valley of Japanese, Calhoun and his platoon sergeant climbed to the top of one of the ridges to collect the third squad, which was dug in covering the rest of the platoon. The ridge was steep, with a crown of heavy brush, vines, and small trees. The brush was dense, making movement tricky. Calhoun fought through the undergrowth for a couple hundred feet, hacking a corridor for his platoon sergeant to follow. It was so thick, Calhoun figured there was little chance of there being any Japanese hiding nearby. Then a shot rang out. A jolt of pain shot up Calhoun's body. His right calf was on fire. The gunfire was so close, he felt the heat from the muzzle blast on his skin. He staggered back and his right leg collapsed. Calhoun fell to the ground. Another shot rang out. The bullet passed his face near his right eyebrow. Calhoun rolled onto his stomach. The platoon sergeant heard the shot and moved back into the brush for cover. "You OK?" Calhoun yelled back to his platoon sergeant. "Yes," the sergeant said. "What happened?" "Jap up ahead," Calhoun said. "I'm hit. I'm going back to the platoon. You go get third squad." Calhoun crawled back through the hole in the brush. He made it back to the clearing, where his platoon waited. Second Lt. Emory Ball, his assistant platoon leader, met him halfway down the ridge with several other paratroopers. The medic cut away the back of Calhoun's pants near his buttocks. "You're in the wrong place," Calhoun said. "It's my calf." The medic ignored him. Calhoun said it again. Finally, the medic scolded him. "Dammit, Lieutenant, I can see." Nearby, paratroopers were building a litter. When Calhoun spotted it, he shook his head. "You're not carrying me," he said. "I'm walking." Calhoun stood up, took a step, and his right leg failed. He fell on his face. He didn't argue about the litter after that. The medic gave him morphine for the pain. As the platoon moved out, they heard firing. Another patrol spotted the Japanese soldier who had shot Calhoun coming down the ridge and killed him. Col. George Jones's own launch evacuated Calhoun to a nearby hospital. On the boat, Jones, the normally taciturn commander of the 503rd, quipped, "You must have wanted a Purple Heart pretty bad to give up a piece of ass to get it." At the hospital, doctors told Calhoun the bullet had entered his right buttock near the hip joint, grazed his sciatic nerve, and exited an inch from his spine. While he recovered, Calhoun found out that he had indeed earned a Purple Heart. The award was given to all soldiers wounded in combat. But Calhoun saw the award as validation-he was a combat veteran now. On Mindoro, the soldiers of the 503rd endured their guard duty, waiting for their next combat mission. The only excitement came when General MacArthur gifted the outfit a shipment of frozen turkeys. CalhounÕs platoon gleefully built roaring fires and roasted the big birds on spits, turning them for hours. Just after noon, a large spread was set and the paratroopers moved down the line, filling their plates with meat. Calhoun savored each bite because it reminded him of home. The paratroopers were free the rest of the day. F Company had never been into nearby San Jose, and Calhoun followed the others into town. It was made up of frame houses, built near a three-story sugar refinery with a tower. The paratroopers congregated near the center of town and gave out pieces of hard candy to kids. Calhoun watched as each child received one piece. Most got back in line. No one stopped them-they'd suffered enough under Japanese occupation. The candy was a small reward for years of inhumane treatment. After the New Year, with the threat of a Japanese counterattack on Mindoro over, the 503rd moved out of their defensive positions. They set up a camp with pyramidal tents in the sun-drenched valley of the Bugsanga River bottom. About three thousand men lived at the camp while Australian construction crews finished the airfields. The 503rd had a reputation for "liberating" equipment and supplies from other units. The paratroopers noticed other units had refrigeration trucks and base headquarters had beer stacked up on pallets nearby. The paratroopers wanted the same. When a general commands a division, he sees that his troops get supplies like fresh food, new equipment, and uniforms. The 503rd had no general. Their thirty-one-year-old commander, George Jones, was only a colonel. A member of the 1935 class of West Point, Jones used to joke that he had graduated in the 93rd percentile-if you looked at the rankings from the bottom up. He had been commissioned in the infantry, and after serving in various units he volunteered for the Airborne soon after parachute school at Fort Benning. He was the thirty-first officer to qualify as a paratrooper. After earning his wings, the badge awarded to all soldiers who complete jump training, Jones was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, first as a company commander and then taking full command of the 501st Parachute Battalion, one of the army's first airborne units. That assignment had earned him the nickname "Panama Jones." He was also called "the Warden" after he caught several junior officers sneaking beer on the ship from Panama to Australia and confined them to their staterooms. After the United States declared war, the 501st was absorbed by the 503rd on its way to Australia. As a lieutenant colonel, Jones served as the regimental executive officer until after the Nadzab mission in 1943, when the first commander, Col. Kenneth Kinsler, committed suicide. Jones was bumped up to full-bird colonel and assumed command before the landings on Mindoro. A professional soldier, he drew a distinction between the citizen soldiers who made up most of his ranks and the career officers. Since Jones wasn't a general, the 503rd was low on the priority list when it came to supplies and amenities. Jones may have lacked the clout of a general, but he was persistent enough to get the cigarettes he wanted. He preferred Chesterfields, but when he got ration packs with lesser brands, he asked his subordinate officers to trade him their Chesterfields. As he outranked them, the officers wouldn't refuse. With no aboveboard means of getting what they needed and wanted, the paratroopers became experts in requisitioning. That's the reason the unit was nicknamed "Panama Jones and His Three Thousand Thieves." They'd looted the surrounding bases in New Guinea, and on Mindoro, as soon as the threat of Japanese attacks passed, they started in on their neighboring camps. It wasn't uncommon for a soldier to lose a jeep when men from the 503rd were around. Once the paratroopers acquired a vehicle, a new serial number found its way onto the left-side frame rail behind the front bumper on the driver's side, and the jeep was theirs. Few mastered the art of procurement better than Calhoun's good friend First Lt. Edward Flash. Flash, formerly a platoon sergeant in the 503rd's G Company, had graduated from the US Army Officer Candidate School in Brisbane and was assigned as the second-platoon leader in F Company. In New Guinea, he displayed his new leadership chops by pulling off some great capers. When the 503rd camp was issued a 220-volt generator, Flash needed 220-volt bulbs to light their tents. The bulbs were stored in a canvas tent surrounded by a wood fence and protected by a watchful Australian supply sergeant, who refused to give them over without the proper requisition papers. Flash knew he couldn't get the right signatures, at least without headaches. Instead, he grabbed Calhoun and asked him to go in and talk with the supply sergeant. Make nice, keep him distracted, Flash told him. Calhoun went in and stopped at the supply sergeant's desk. He knew his mission, and asked for "blue goose" ammo-incendiary bullets-for F company's machine guns. The Australians had planes with .30-caliber machine guns, which was the same caliber as the paratroopers' light machine guns, but Calhoun was pretty sure the sergeant didn't have the ammunition, which was likely stored in a different supply tent. "You have to requisition the ordnance supply at Dobodura," the supply sergeant told Calhoun, who smiled and played dumb. "How do you get there?" While the sergeant gave Calhoun directions, Flash walked past, avoiding eye contact with the sergeant at the desk, and disappeared into the rows of supplies. The sergeant hadn't noticed him enter. Moments later, Flash came out carrying a box of bulbs. The sergeant looked up as Flash passed by. "Stop!" the sergeant barked. "Hey, you there! Stop!" Flash ignored him and walked to his jeep parked outside. He put the box in the back and drove off without a backward glance. The sergeant looked at Calhoun, who just shrugged. Excerpted from Rock Force: The American Paratroopers Who Took Back Corregidor and Exacted MacArthur's Revenge on Japan by Kevin Maurer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
