Wainwright sent his aide, carrying a white flag, and a staff officer to treat with the enemy.
Soon after that. General Wainwright met with his counterpart, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, on the porch of a small, bullet-pocked frame house on Luzon. The shaven-headed Homma, although he spoke fluent English, addressed Wainwright through an interpreter.
Homma was not interested in the surrender of Corregidor. He demanded the absolute, unconditional surrender of all American troops in the Philippine Islands. If General Wainwright were not prepared to offer absolute surrender
of all U.S. forces, he would resume tactical operations. By this, he clearly meant wiping out the Corregidor garrison.
Accompanied by a Japanese lieutenant named Kano, who had been educated in New Jersey, General Wainwright was taken in a captured Cadillac to the studios of radio station KZRH in Manila. There he broadcast a message to all commanders of all U.S. military and naval forces in the Philippines. As senior U.S. officer in the Philippines, he ordered all American forces to immediately suspend hostile action and to make all preparations to surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army.
Not all Americans chose to obey General Wainwright’s final order.
[ONE]
Headquarters, Mindanao-Visayan Force United States Forces in the Philippines 28 December 1942
Brigadier General Wendell W Fertig, Commanding, Mindanao-Visayan Force, wore two items not commonly seen on general officers of the U.S. Army: a goatee with mustache and a cone-shaped, woven-reed hat perched at a cocky angle on his head. Prom this dangled what looked like a native bracelet.
General Fertig, a trim, red-haired man of forty-one, was not a professional soldier. He had not gone to West Point; rather, he had entered the military service of the United States just over a year before, directly commissioned as Captain, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Reserve. The U.S. Army in the Philippines had been delighted to have the services of an experienced civil engineer, in particular one who was familiar with the Philippines. When he had entered the Army, Fertig had sent his wife and family to safety in Colorado.
From the time of the Japanese invasion until the surrender ordered by General Wainwright on May 5,1942, Fertig had been primarily involved in the demolition–usually by explosive–of roads, bridges, and tunnels, supply and petrol dumps, and other facilities to deny their use to the enemy. Many of the facilities he destroyed he had built before the war.
On May 5, 1942–by then twice promoted–Lt. Colonel Fertig willfully and with full knowledge of the consequences elected to disobey the lawful order of his military superior, It. General Jonathan Wainwright, to immediately cease hostile action against the Imperial Japanese Army and to make all preparations to surrender.
He went instead into the mountains of Mindanao, with every intention of waging what hostile action he could against the Japanese. With him at the beginning were Captain Charles Hedges, another newly commissioned reserve officer of the Army, Chief Petty Officer Ellwood Orfett, USN, and Private Robert Ball, USA.
Things did not go well at first for the little group. To avoid Japanese capture, they had to live in the jungle, eating what they could find there. Or else they ate the native food Moro tribesmen furnished them every now and again–at the risk of their lives.
Once, they watched from the jungle as a long line of American prisoners-their officers bareheaded and with their arms tied behind them–were moved to a prison camp.
Although they encountered some yet-to-surrender Philippine troops, there -was no rush to Fertig’s colors. Most of the Filipinos, in and out of uniform, sadly suggested to them that the war was over and that the only logical course for the ragtag quartet to follow was to surrender.
But Fertig, if personally modest, had a somewhat grand notion of the role he could play in the war. He kept a diary, which has survived, and in it, in a rice paddy near Moray, he wrote:
“I am called on to lead a resistance movement against an implacable enemy under conditions that make victory barely possible…. But I feel… my course is charted and that only success lies at the end of the trail…. If we are to win only part of the time and gain a little each time, in the end we will be successful.”