Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

The demands were backbreaking, and for some BechtelMcCone executives, like George S. Cooley, Jr., hazardous as well. Called to the Philippines in the spring of 1941 to modernize an existing naval base in Manila and build an emergency airfield outside the capital, Cooley was in the midst of work when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and, the next day, began massive bombing attacks on Clark Field, the main Philippine air base. These attacks were followed in quick succession by raids on Manila and the not-y et-completed bases at Cavite and Sangley Point. As the Japanese pressure increased, Cooley; his wife, Marjorie, and a small party of Americans retreated to the Mariveles Mountains to build emergency airfields and ammunition tunnels. Just as quickly, the Japanese landed in force. Aware that the enemy was tapping his phone, Cooley managed to get a last call through to Steve Bechtel in San Francisco. “You won’t be hearing from me for about a month,”5 he told his boss. He, Marjorie and the others were trapped.

Cooley had two choices, neither of them at all appealing: he could wait to be captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, or he could attempt an escape by boat to Australia through 1, 500 miles of normally dangerous waters made more so by Japanese patrols. In early 1942, with the Japanese closing in and a number of other Bechtel executives already taken prisoner, he opted for the latter. Accompanied by his wife, another Bechtel couple and a British doctor from Shanghai, Cooley put to sea at night aboard a small pleasure boat and headed south. After a brief stop at Corregidor, where they were fired on before they could identify themselves, they crossed the Sulu Sea and landed on a small island just north of Borneo. There they transferred to a 59

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

kumpit, a native sailboat, and set out once again, this time for the British-controlled port of Sandakan. They arrived to find the British gone and the Japanese in control. Increasingly desperate, Cooley continued on, slipping the kumpit into a tidal river and gradually making his way past the Japanese to the shelter of a rain forest, where the group made camp for the night.

At daylight, it was apparent that the fragile kumpit had been so battered by storms they had passed through that it was no longer seaworthy. Cooley set off in hopes of finding a nearby native village where he could buy another boat. Unable to pass through the dense jungle, he waded into the river and began swimming upstream. He had not gone a thousand y ards when he encountered a kumpit si -

zed crocodile

which sent him scampering up a mangrove tree. He was still perched in its branches, waiting for the crocodile to depart, Cooley recounted in a privately published account of his wartime experiences, Manila, Kuching and Return, when a Japanese patrol boat spotted him. The crew found his situation quite amusing. Cooley, his wife and the rest of the group would spend the remainder of the war in a disease-ridden Japanese prison camp.

In the United States, meanwhile, BechtelMcCone’s shipbuilding efforts were continuing. By September 1942, less than six months after work on the Richmond yard had begun, Marinship had christened its first Liberty ship. Hardly was the christening ceremony over when Ken received one of Vickery’s needles. “NOW THAT THE SHOUTING IS