The story of …
Irving Strobing
This is the story of the boy from Brooklyn who was Corregidor’s last link with the United States — this is the story of Corporal Irving Strobing better known as the “ghost of Corregidor”.
He’ll would never forget the day the Japanese took over Manila Bay. As for the men who were his comrades-in-arms - the ones who survived would never forget “the ghost”.
It’s May 6th, 1942. In the tunnels of Corregidor — the exhausted, discouraged American garrison waits for the Japanese to arrive — shells are screaming overhead and the hot sun beats down on the blood and slaughter littering the battered fortress in Manila Bay.
Here a man is sobbing quietly to himself, his thoughts turned inward to the past. Another, just staring ahead, seeing nothing, scarcely able to remember what his life had been back Stateside.
Without hope, the Americans were indeed lost. Something had to be done. There wasn’t much time and there wasn’t much to do, but Strobing saw what should be done and did it. Suddenly his radio transmitter crackled to life and with the sound, the men raised their heads again.
“My name is Irving Strobing. Get this to my mother, Mrs. Minnie Strobing, 605 Barbey Street, Brooklyn, New York…”
Hunched over his radio, young Strobing stubbornly refused to say die. The handsome, dark-eyed solder had graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School when he was 16. He spent a year in Brooklyn College and then quit because he could think of nothing except an career in the military. He wanted to go to West Point, but there wasn’t enough money for that.
At 19, he enlisted in the army on July 9, 1939. “You’ll be proud of me!” he told his parents as he signed his papers. “Maybe I’ll still get to West Point.” He got to the Philippines and fought under General Wainwright. Until the moment he was captured in the blistering heat of Manila Bay. He fought till the last second of time allowed him by his captors — fought not with bullets, for he had none, but with words, tapping out the last messages of courage and humor and hope. That day he became known as the “ghost of Corregidor.” Never was a ghost so popular. Never was a group of men happier to see and hear this friendly spirit, who filled them with new hope and new courage.
“They are not here yet. We are waiting for God only knows what. How about a chocolate soda!”
He tapped the words out and their message brought a rueful chuckle of laughter to the parched lips of his fellow soldiers.
“We’ve got only an hour and twenty minutes.”
Was the young radioman’s next message, The men in Malinta Tunnel stretched their weary bodies and thought “We can make out somehow.” They looked around them and saw their rifles, silenced now, lying in the dirt. They used the little energy they had left to smash these rifles, so that the Japanese wouldn’t get them… “ They are breaking up the rifles!” reported Strobing.
“My love to Pa, Joe, Sue, Mac, Carry, Joy and Paul…”
The Japanese were getting closer now and Strobing’s thoughts inevitably turned to home and family. Joe, his older brother, a staff sergeant on Luzon . .. “Give ’em hell of us!” Strobing’s radio begged … Sue, his sister, who then had not yet graduated from Hunter’s College … Mac and Carry, his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Friedman, who lived upstairs. Would he ever see upstairs again? Joy and Paul, their kids who’d bragged about Irving from the second he entered the army. Would they say in the future “He was our cousin and a brave solder?” And his father, a tailor in East New York, still alive when Irving send that message and smiled in pride when he received it.
“General Wainwright is a right guy” Strobing’s radio said after that “We are willing to go on for him.”
When the Japanese arrived the Americans were willing to march bravely, heads high for Wainwright and by now for Corporal Strobing. The flexible fingers which had tapped out words of courage and humor grew bony and calloused as Strobing worked in a Japanese quarry day after day. “It was work or starve.” he recalled over three years later. “Or probably both. You filled your ten cars of rocks every day or you missed your food and your rest periods.”
Back in Brooklyn, @ 605 Barbey Street, Mrs. Minnie Strobing waited for her son to return. “I never could realize that I might’t be seeing him again!” she said. “I always knew he would come home.” A small, bright-eyed woman, she found the waiting hard, but she had much of the courage that was in Irving and she managed to keep smiling. She treasured some pressed flowers her son had sent her from the Philippines for Mother’s Day. She thought often of how he had always liked to play around with a radio. She was glad she had let him.
After three and a half years of prison the “ghost” was finally freed in September 1945. He was flown in from the Pacific with about 80 other prisoners of war. They came in three big transport planes and were welcomed by over a thousand relatives and friends in San Francisco. Many other thousands lined the streets to cheer wildly as they paraded along Market Street.
High-ranking officers of the Army and Navy met them at Hamilton Field. Honor guards and Army and Navy bands escorted them. The cheering was silenced as messages of gratitude and pride were read.
“You return as conquerors and as heroes and we hail you with the gratitude which your gallantry so richly deserves” said a message from James Forrestal, the then Secretary of the Navy.
The then Secretary of War, Robert Patterson said “You were our farthest outpost in time of great national peril. You stood firm and heroic in the face of certain defeat. We honor you as we welcome you back.”
Strobing and the other returning POW’s were pleased by the reception they had gotten. But the message with the biggest meaning came from that “right guy” Jonathan Wainwright to the men he described as “my comrades” .
“In future years our greatest pride will be these words” said the General’s message. “I was at Bataan and then I was at Corregidor”.
After leaving the Army in 1949, Irving Strobing worked for the Federal Aviation Agency in New York and the Department of Agriculture in New Jersey. After retiring in 1980, he moved to North Carolina and became active in amateur radio clubs. He died of cancer at age 77 on the 8th of July 1997 at a veterans hospital in Durham, N.C.
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