Above the Thunder (43 page)

Vin and I flew our planes to a new landing spot near Tagudin, and our ground crew drove up in our three-quarter-ton truck. We were there a day ahead of the battalion and, pending their arrival, had nothing in particular to do but set up our tents and drive tie-down stakes for the two planes. Once that was done, Vin and I got into the truck and set out for a short drive to become acquainted with the immediate locale. Expecting to be gone only a few minutes, we didn't even tell the boys we were going.

A short distance up the road, we came upon six Filipino guerrillas and two volunteer nurses who had been serving with Volckmann. They were walking, so we offered them a ride. They told us that they were on leave; this was their first chance in three years to go home, and they were hoofing it in that direction. Home for all of them was in the town of Laoag, Ilocos Norte, roughly a hundred miles to the north. Having nothing better to do, we decided to give them a lift a few miles up the road. It was a little risky, maybe, since there were still small bands of Japanese in the coastal areas who had been left behind when their main forces hastily withdrew into the mountains, and they had occasionally attacked small parties along this highway. But we had the six stalwart guerrillas, so we were bold. We decided to take them as far as we could before dark, then turn back.

We were still trudging slowly northward when it began to rain. It was still raining when darkness fell, and we didn't have the heart to
put the Filipinos out in the rain, so we kept going. At about 2100, some fifty miles from Tagudin, we were approaching a long highway bridge over the Abra River when several Filipinos standing in the dark beside the road hailed us—the first sign of life we had seen since we picked up the guerrillas.

They told us that the bridge was down, thanks to the bombers, and they led us off to the left down a narrow, wet trail to the edge of the broad river. The headlights of the truck showed only an endless expanse of surging muddy water in which the presence of much driftwood indicated a flood condition. At the edge of the water floated a raft of bamboo, perhaps thirty feet from end to end and just wide enough for the length of the truck, crosswise to the raft. The loaded truck sank the center of the raft about a foot below the surface, although the ends stuck out of the water on either side.

Out there at the ends were about a dozen Filipino men, all dressed in straw raincoats that made them look like small haystacks with bare legs, each topped with one of the wide, conical straw hats common all over southeast Asia. Each had a long bamboo pole. With our headlights showing the way, they poled the raft out onto the flood.

On the way over, as the rain poured down and the river seethed around us, the raftsmen, one by one, came to the truck and asked Vin and me for cigarettes. We gave each a cigarette—and that was the fare for the ferry ride. Before long, we began to see the opposite shore, and we soon grounded some distance downstream from where we had started. In response to our questions, the ferry men told us that the only place they knew where we might find gasoline was a government radio communications station near Vigan, which they told us how to find.

The radio station was a small, isolated white frame building in the middle of a field. All was dark—in fact, the whole countryside was dark except for the lights of our truck—and it was a long time before anyone responded to our knocks and shouts. Finally, a nervous young man in U.S. Army HBT uniform opened the door a little. He told us that we might be able to get some gas from a certain American civilian who could be found at a hotel in Vigan.

The sizable town of Vigan was dark—totally dark, not a soul in sight—but we found the hotel, a Spanish-style stucco building that was reminiscent
of California. Inside, we saw the dull glow of a candle behind the desk, and a skittish Filipino man asked what we wanted. When we asked to see the American who was staying there, he denied any knowledge of an American having ever been there, and he refused to change his story. However, while we were still insisting that we knew there was an American there, a voice spoke from a western movie–style balcony that overlooked the lobby—and there was our tall and very business like American civilian. Who he was I do not know, but he arranged for us to get some gasoline—although I don't recall just where it was.

We pulled out of Vigan shortly after midnight, still with our guer rillas, still heading north, despite advice from the mysterious civilian that we wait until daylight and join some convoy if we were going toward Laoag. And that's where we had now decided to go—all the way.

It was a long, slow, lonely, and difficult trip, during which we neither saw nor heard any indication of the presence of other people of any kind. Not one bridge on the route was serviceable, but, fortunately, none of the streams was large. We'd find loose planks and lay them across the impossible places, inching the small truck across on those. In many places the blacktop road was cratered, if not by bombs or shells then by lots of heavy wartime traffic with little or no maintenance. We half expected to come up against a road barrier and be fired on by Japanese stragglers, but no such excitement came. Even the rain had stopped. Just at daylight, we came to a place where flimsy barracks along both sides of the road had been hastily set up as a recuperation hospital for sick or wounded guerrillas, and we felt safer from there on. It was the first sign of life we had seen since Vigan.

One more hurdle remained, however. The town of Laoag lay on the north side of the Laoag River, and—you guessed it—the bridge was out. It would carry only pedestrian traffic. Just above the bridge, U.S. Army trucks were fording the stream, which was rather wide but not too deep. Not too deep, that is, for a two-and-a-half-by-six truck. It was just a bit much for our weapons carrier, but we were not convinced of that until it drowned out in midstream.

With polite but rather hasty apologies and most sincere thanks, all of our eight passengers hopped out and waded on across the river. Vin and I sat there with our feet soaking in the muddy water and saw all the
invitations to family breakfasts of fried eggs—something we hadn't seen in more than a year—go sloshing and dripping into the realm of memory.

An accommodating six-by-six driver soon towed us out to the south bank once more and pointed us toward an Army engineer unit where we got breakfast and all the gasoline we could carry in our tank and five-gallon cans. Then we headed back south, posthaste, now hoping we could get back to Tagudin before Uncle Bud arrived there and called for us.

The trip home was much faster and easier during the dry and sunny daytime. We didn't need to stop for fuel, we hit the ferry just right, and the only people who had worried about us were the air section men. They were not used to having their officers go AWOL, and they had no idea what had happened to us. Vin and I were pretty well exhausted, but we believed we had done a good service for some deserving young people. In later years, our daughter said that my story of the trip to Laoag sounded like a scenario for the TV adventure series
Tales of the Gold Monkey,
and it does appear that an excellent setting for a truly swashbuckling adventure was largely wasted.

And then it was back to the mountains for Vin and me, flying up narrow valleys between spines so thin that the Japanese easily dug through nearly anywhere they wished, and where the nervy little Filipino guerrillas, now equipped like American GIs, fought them at close quarters in some actions as spectacular as any I ever saw. Clouds roofed over the valleys, making them tunnels from whose sides machine guns lashed out at us as we flew our L-4s along just beneath the ceiling. From a tunnel position in a sharp ridge just at our altitude, a gun would send out a spray of bullets and wait for us to fly into them. We quickly became quite proficient at rapid 180-degree turns. Getting artillery hits on the narrow ridges was most difficult, so the well-protected enemy gunners were not afraid to cut loose on us.

As Volckmann's men worked their way from Cervantes toward the region of Bontoc and the 122d gave them fire support, there came a day when Uncle Bud wanted to personally recon the terrain over which they would have to fight. He wanted to go all the way up until he could see the final objective area, and then to Baguio, where the 33d Division headquarters were still located.

I told him we would have to refuel after the reconnaissance in order to make it to Baguio, but he suggested that we shorten the trip by going straight down the high mountain route without returning to the coast, thus saving time and obviating a need to refuel. Of course, we would be over enemy territory all the way, but he was willing to risk that if I was. I thought it would be kind of fun to surprise the enemy and see some areas we hadn't looked at before, so I agreed.

From where we finished the recon, it was about sixty miles almost straight south to Baguio, and that made about forty-five to fifty minutes of flying for the L-4. The farther south we flew, the lower came the bases of the towering cumulus clouds to the rolling plateau over which we were flying, and on both sides they were already clinging to the ridges and peaks that rimmed the plateau. I didn't like it much, but we soon had reached a point from which it was impossible to return to Tagudin on the fuel we had, so we had to go on toward Baguio.

The clouds kept rearing higher and higher, crowding nearer together, and lowering their wispy bottoms closer and closer to the ground, and that surface was nearly six thousand feet above the sea. With the colonel and me and our two radios with power packs, the plane could not hope to top those clouds, so we had to either stay below them or wend our way between them. It became increasingly difficult to do either, and very often we had no choice. During one of the times when we were passing under one of them with no more than a hundred feet of clear air in which to operate, we suddenly realized that we were flying right down the runway of a Japanese-occupied airfield. We saw only one or two planes, a few buildings, and, finally, a machine gun that sprayed a few tracers at us just before we got out of range.

It had gotten so bad that I no longer even consulted the wildly gyrating magnetic compass that was our only directional reference. I just flew where I could—and by that time I was convinced that finding Baguio was a forlorn hope. I could only hope that when we finally either piled in or ran out of gas we would have gotten out of the enemy area. I just searched the murky atmosphere for the place where I could see farthest, and I flew that way.

At last that procedure led me to a dead end. There appeared to be no
place to go, no way to get over a ridge that suddenly came into view just ahead. I supposed that I would have to just head up the slope, look for the clearest place I could reach, and then cut the ignition and set it down, for better or worse. But as I flew closer and closer, the bottom of the clouds kept following up the slope, leaving me just enough room to keep climbing. I was encouraged—until the clouds stopped rising with the ground. Ground and clouds came together no more than a quarter of a mile ahead of us. But then I spied one small place where the crest of the ridge was barely visible, and I thought maybe I could slip through. But into what? I had no idea, but maybe the land beyond would lead us downward and out of the high mountains, so I headed for that thin spot.

We passed over the ridge no more than twenty-five feet above the ground, and flying in the cloudy mists at that. Ahead, for the first time in half an hour, there was good, clear air and sunshine in the distance, and—I could hardly believe my eyes—dead ahead, spread out there in its bowl of hills, was Baguio! I had never seen anything so beautiful as that poor, beaten-up city. In a few more minutes, we landed at Loacan Field.

As he climbed out of the plane, Uncle Bud said, “Crash, that was great, but don't you ever take me on a trip like that again!”

“Sir,” I replied, “I'll be very happy to comply with that order.”

On the night of 4 June 1945, Rudy Krevolt called me at the Tagudin strip and told me that Lt. Bill Swift would be flying down next morning from Div Arty to take my place in the battalion. I should be prepared to fly his plane back to Baguio. I was going back to the States!

It was a shock, since I'd had no inkling that such a thing might happen. But I learned that after VE-Day—the end of the war in Europe—a rotation plan for troops in the Pacific theater had been instituted, selections being made on the basis of points awarded for such factors as time overseas, time in combat, decorations, and number of dependents. I was to be in the first group of rotatees from the 33d.

I was up at the battalion CP bright and early next morning, turning in my weapon, watch, blankets, and a few other issue items, picking up
my orders, and saying goodbye to the people I knew, from Uncle Bud on down. And then I was back at the airstrip, watching for Bill Swift. Vin shook hands with me and went off on a mission, expecting that I'd be gone by the time he returned.

But Swift was late, and the next thing that happened was a telephone call from Colonel Carlson himself.