Supreme Headquarters

South West Pacific Ocean Area

Brisbane, Australia

1615 Hours 2 November 1942

"Pull up a chair, Pickering, I'll be with you in a minute," Brigadier General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence officer, said to Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR.

Why am I offended when this sonofabitch calls me by my last name?

Pickering walked over to General Willoughby's office window and looked out, although this meant searching for and operating the cords that controlled the drapes.

A minute or so later, General Willoughby raised his eyes from his desk and found Pickering at the window.

"So, Pickering, what's on your mind?"

"General, thank you for seeing me."

Willoughby made a deprecating gesture.

"I want to talk about guerrillas in the Philippines," Pickering said.

Willoughby shrugged.

"Sure," he said, "but there's not much to talk about."

Willoughby always spoke with a faintly German accent, but now, for some reason, his accent was more than usually apparent. Pickering's mind went off at a tangent: Willoughby sounds like an English name, not a German one. Where did he get that accent?

"Let's talk about this General Fertig," Pickering said.

"He's not a general. He's a captain. A reserve captain. Technically, I suppose, he's guilty of impersonating an officer."

Well, I know how that feels. Every time I check my uniform in the mirror and see the stars, I feel like I'm impersonating an officer.

"What did he do before the war?"

"He was a mining engineer, I think. Or a civil engineer. Some kind of an engineer."

Pickering had a sudden suspicion, and jumped on it.

"You knew him, didn't you, General?"

"Yes. I met him at parties, that sort of thing."

Now, that's interesting. The question now becomes what kind of parties. Patricia and I met El Supremo half a dozen times at parties in Manila. But they were business parties Pacific and Far East Shipping gave. El Supremo and his wife were invited there under the general category, Military/Diplomatic. I don't recall that you were ever invited to one of those, Willoughby. Colonels didn't make that list.

Come to think of it, did I ever meet this guy? I don't think so. I would have remembered that name. Wendell Fertig isn't John Jones. And "Fertig" in German means "finished. " I would have remembered that, I think.

"What kind of parties?"

"At the Polo Club, for one."

I belonged to the Polo Club. But only for business reasons-and for Patricia. She liked to have lunch out there. I arranged guest cards for our masters and chief engineers when they were in port. The only time I can remember going out there myself was when Pick was in boarding school-he couldn't have been older than fourteen. During summer vacation he came out on the Pacific Venturer-worked his way out as a messboy. While she was in port, I took him out there so he could play.

He had a sudden clear memory of Pick at fourteen-a skinny, ungainly kid wearing borrowed boots and breeches that were much too large for him, sweat-soaked, galloping down that long grass field. He was unseated when his pony shied; he skidded twenty yards on his back, while Patricia moaned, so slowly, "Ohhhhh myyyyy Lordddddd!!!!"

"This man Fertig belonged the Polo Club?"

"I suppose he did. I saw him out there a good deal. And he played, of course."

OK. We have now established that General/Captain Fertig was a member of Manila social hierarchy. Polo Club membership wasn't cheap, and there was a certain snobbish ambience to it. You didn't just apply for membership; you had to be invited to apply. And then the membership committee had to approve you. They were notorious for keeping the riffraff out.

"How did he come by his commission?" Pickering asked.

"He was directly commissioned just before the war, in October or November 1941. The General saw the war coming..."

Why am I tempted to interrupt and ask, '' Which general would that be, General?"

"... and we set up a program to directly commission civilians with useful skills. Fertig came in as a first lieutenant, Corps of Engineers, Reserve, as I recall."

Yeah, you knew him, all right. And now he wasn't one of the overpaid civilians at the Polo Club, he was a lieutenant who had to call you "Sir."

"What was his skill, engineering?"

"Yes. Demolitions, as I recall. There was another one, a chap named Ralph Fralick. They were both commissioned into the Corps of Engineers as first lieutenants."

"And what did they do when the war started?"

"That category of reserve officers came on active duty 1 December 1941. Their call to active duty was originally scheduled for 1 January 1942. But with the situation so obviously deteriorating, the General moved it up a month."

"What did Fertig and this other fellow... Fralick?"

"Fralick," Willoughby confirmed.

"... do when the Japanese invaded?"

"I don't know specifically, of course..."

Someone as important as you was obviously too busy to keep track of a lowly reserve lieutenant, right?

"... but I presume demolitions. That's what they were recruited for. The best people to blow a bridge up, of course, are the engineers who built it."

"He apparently did it well enough to get himself promoted," Pickering thought aloud.

"No one is casting aspersions against his competence, Pickering. As an Engineer officer. Without men like Fertig and Fralick blowing bridges and roads-literally in the teeth of the Japanese-Bataan would have fallen sooner than it did, and at a considerably cheaper cost to the enemy."

"And then, presumably, rather than accept capture by the Japanese when Bataan was lost, Fertig somehow got to Mindanao."

"A less generous interpretation would be that Captain Fertig chose to ignore his orders to proceed to the fortress of Corregidor, and elected to go to the island of Mindanao."

"He was ordered to Corregidor?"

"All the specialist officers were ordered to Corregidor. There was work for them there."