On the morning of May 6, 1942, Japanese war correspondents sat idle in a press tent on the Bataan Peninsula, annoyed that they had missed the night landing on Corregidor, the rocky island fortress guarding the mouth of Manila Bay. Kazumaro Uno, a reporter attached to the Japanese Army’s press bureau, grumbled that he might as well have stayed in Shanghai. Then a reporter ran in shouting that a white flag was flying from Corregidor. Some men cheered.
Uno was more irritated than anything, because first they had missed the landing and now they had missed the surrender. That was the shape of the day for Japan. It won the island. Its cameras filmed the American commander at the surrender table that afternoon.
But the flag that had flown over the fortress, the one trophy a conquering army most wants to carry home, never came into its hands. The man responsible for that had been thinking about the flag for months. Colonel Paul Bunker commanded the 59th Coast Artillery and the seaward defenses of the harbor, the big guns on Corregidor and the smaller forts around it. He was sixty years old, a West Point classmate of Douglas MacArthur from the class of 1903, and had been named an All-American twice on the academy’s football team.
Since the first days of January, he had kept a diary. On January 9, he wrote about the post flag flying from the tall pole on Topside, the parade ground at the island’s high western end. It was tattered and torn, he noted, and it would make a swell regimental trophy. He meant to run up a fresh one and keep the old one.
By spring, keeping anything on Corregidor was hard. The reservoirs on Topside had been bombed early. Bunker’s headquarters clerk, Gavito, remembered the ration as one canteen cup of water a day and no washing at all. Gavito later said he did not choose Corregidor; Corregidor chose him.
He spent most of the siege at the command post, close enough to the colonel to watch how he ran things. On the other side of the water, General Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army was preparing to finish the job. Through the last weeks of April, it gathered landing boats and drilled its assault troops along the east coast of Bataan. Each man going over was issued a week of rations and extra canteens, because the planners expected water on the island to run short.
The guns on Bataan opened their final bombardment on May 1, and by the evening of May 5, they had turned the north shore of Corregidor into wreckage. The force for the first night was the 61st Infantry Regiment under Colonel Gimpachi Sato, with a few tanks. Homma watched the boats push off with real misgiving. At his own trial after the war, he called that night one of the three critical moments of the whole Philippine campaign.
The landing went in after dark against the island’s eastern tail under fire. How badly the crossing went is still argued. Uno, who interviewed survivors, wrote that less than 30 percent of the men in the first wave reached the shore. A Japanese staff officer, Colonel Yoshida, told American historians after the war that losses in that wave were slight, but he gave no number.
Before the next day was out, a Japanese army photographer made a picture that sits today in an American naval archive. It shows four Japanese soldiers on Topside with a long barracks behind them and artillery shells stacked around the base of the pole, hauling an American flag down. Whose flag that was is a question that runs straight through the rest of the story. On Topside, the order to destroy things came at about eight that morning, when Bunker sent his adjutant, Captain Robert Cooper, to the headquarters storeroom to burn the colors and the papers.
Gavito went along. They set it all alight and walked up to the parade ground to meet the colonel. Down at the eastern end of the island, Sato’s men had brought three tanks ashore. A little before ten, they went into action.
They did not do everything the Japanese later claimed for them, but they broke the nerve of men who had no weapon left that could stop a tank. Between six and eight hundred defenders were already dead, and about a thousand more were hurt. Inside Malinta Tunnel lay a thousand wounded men. General Jonathan Wainwright, the American commander in the Philippines, believed the tanks could reach the tunnel within hours.
At ten o’clock, he decided to surrender. His plan, passed down through the harbor defense commander, General George Moore, called for every weapon larger than . 45 caliber to be wrecked by noon. At noon, the American flag on Corregidor was to come down and be burned, and a white flag would go up in its place.
Wainwright then sent a last message to President Roosevelt, telling him he was reporting with a broken heart and head bowed in sadness, but not in shame. At twelve o’clock exactly, on Bunker’s order, the flag on the Topside pole started down. Around the pole stood the colonel, two lieutenant colonels named Norman Simmons and Dwight Edison, Captain Cooper, another captain, Bunker’s driver, the headquarters driver, a few enlisted men, and Gavito, every one of them within about fifteen feet of the pole. They held a salute while it came down slow and steady.
Someone took it off the halyard before it could touch the ground, and it went into a small fire that had already been lit near the base of the pole. They stood there until it was gone. Then someone ran a white sheet up the halyard in its place. There is one more thing about that noon, and it comes from the colonel’s own side of the story.
Before the flag went into the fire, according to a statement certified after the war by a fellow prisoner, Colonel Delbert Osmus, Bunker cut a small strip out of it. The West Point Museum describes that strip as coming from one of the red stripes. Bunker meant to carry it home and hand it to the Secretary of War himself, and he kept it on his body as he walked into captivity. At the Marine headquarters, another service had been doing the same thing on its own.
The 4th Marines, the regiment that had held Corregidor’s beaches, had colors of their own. A Marine colonel named Curtis handed them to a captain named Robert Moore, with orders to burn them. Moore went out with the colors and came back weeping, reporting that it was done. The regiment’s commander, Colonel Samuel Howard, put his face in his hands and cried, saying he had to be the first Marine officer ever to surrender a regiment.
The Marines out on Hooker Point at the far eastern tip of the island did not lay down their arms until about five that afternoon. For the afternoon, Japan’s own account comes almost entirely from Uno. The surrender conference took place on the Bataan shore at a small village called Cabcaben, a few shacks along the highway and a lumber pier. A newsreel cameraman set up his equipment in front of the shack where Wainwright waited with his staff.
When Wainwright saw he was the focus of every lens, he turned away. A staff colonel from Homma’s army climbed the steps, saluted him, and spoke a few words, and the Americans came down off the veranda and lined up to be photographed. The reporters, Uno wrote, agreed among themselves that the Americans should have given up the night before and spared their own infantry the killing in the dark. Then General Homma arrived.
With him came beer, orange juice, and fresh fruit, and the drinks went into a bucket of ice in the next room while the guards looked on. Wainwright sat down across the table and said he had come to surrender his men unconditionally. The cameras had their pictures by evening. The flag from the Topside pole had been ash since noon.
General Moore later wrote his own verdict on what Japan had paid. His garrison, he said, had been half starved and exhausted, most of them in ground combat at short range for the first time, against veterans of the landings in Malaya, to get a few outdated seacoast batteries. The Japanese had needed to beat a whole field army on Bataan, spend five months pounding the fortified islands, and make a costly landing on the rock. He called the defense gratifyingly obstinate.
The rock’s garrison marched into captivity, and the strip went with it. The captors brought the prisoners across to Manila and paraded them along Dewey Boulevard, the city’s waterfront avenue, with a colonel in the column. Bunker had turned sixty-one the day after the surrender. From there he went to Bilibid prison, and on or about June 10, 1942, he sent for Osmus.
According to the statement his fellow colonel later certified, Bunker told him about the strip, said that the two lieutenant colonels at the flagpole had never known he cut it, and asked him to carry two things to the Secretary of War if he did not survive to carry them himself: a message and a piece of the flag that flew over Corregidor. Then he cut the strip in two and handed over half. The other half stayed with Bunker, sewn under a patch on his shirt. The senior officers were moved north to a camp at Tarlac and later across the sea to Formosa, to a camp at Karenko on the island’s eastern coast.
Somewhere along the way, Osmus said, the guards went through his shirt and every possession he owned, and never found the hidden piece. Bunker kept up his diary into the new year, sick and starving. The last entry is dated March 1, 1943. He died at Karenko of starvation and disease some days later.
Even that date is unsettled. Osmus’ statement gives March 11, and the museum at West Point gives March 16. He was cremated in the shirt. General Wainwright, who was held at Karenko as well, said afterward that the colonel went into the fire still wearing the rags with the cloth sewn inside them.
The other half was still hidden on Osmus, and he carried it for three more years. He hid it in a false shirt cuff and took it with him through the camps all the way to Mukden in Manchuria, where the senior American prisoners were freed at last in August 1945. That November, he took the strip to Washington and handed it to the Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. His certified statement dates the handover to November 9.
An Associated Press photograph caption from the time says the 14th. Either way, it arrived. One newspaper headline that week called it the last tattered fragment of the flag lowered at Corregidor. That leaves the photograph.
The men who stood within fifteen feet of the Topside pole at noon said they lowered their own flag and watched it burn. Gavito, writing more than half a century later, said that nobody pulled down the flag flying from the Topside pole except the men around him. The Corregidor Historical Society, which keeps his account, describes the Japanese picture as staged solely for the camera. So the Japanese army got its photograph of an American flag coming down off the Topside pole, and every man who was at that pole when the real one came down says the flag in the picture could not have been theirs.
Whose flag the soldiers in the picture are holding, and where they got it, is something no surviving document explains. Gavito raised one more question. The flag lowered at noon was in good shape, nothing like tattered or torn, and he saw nobody cut a piece from it. He pointed to Bunker’s own January diary entry about the worn old flag he wanted to keep.
If Bunker took his strip, Gavito thought, it may have come from that older flag. Osmus’ statement says the cut was made before the noon flag burned. Both men were at the center of this, and their accounts do not agree. Here is where everything ended up.
The noon flag is ash, burned near the foot of the Topside pole. The colors of the 59th Coast Artillery went into the fire in the headquarters storeroom that morning. The colors of the 4th Marines went the same way the same day. A naval photo archive holds the Japanese picture of soldiers lowering an American flag under the number NH73223.
The library at West Point holds the original of Bunker’s diary. His half of the strip went into the crematorium at Karenko with him. In 1948, his remains came home to West Point for burial. Secretary Patterson showed Osmus’ half to the public on Flag Day in June 1946.
Today it belongs to the West Point Museum, which puts it on display for a stretch, takes it down to rest, and puts it out again.
