Behind Japanese Lines (2 page)

These sentiments assumed tangible form on a cold, sunny day in January 1939 when two friends and I climbed into a boxcar in a St. Louis freightyard and headed south. We hoped to get to Randolph Field, an air base near San Antonio. A couple of weeks later we enlisted there in the army air corps. Training was prosaic, and life as a KP and latrine orderly was dull. One day I tried out for the camp baseball team but got no response from the coach. Then I went over to the St. Louis Browns training camp in San Antonio for a tryout with the pros. This time those in charge showed some interest in me, but my first sergeant refused to give me time off to go back for a second
session. Thus ended whatever chance I might have had to be enrolled one day in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But, as gamblers know, neither good nor bad luck lasts forever. By the end of 1939 I was assigned to the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, then stationed at Hamilton Field, California. Even better, I was sent to school for a six months course in aviation mechanics, from which I returned a staff sergeant.

It seems to me that draftees, who are usually reluctant soldiers at best, never have any idea of the esprit de corps that can exist in a first-class regular outfit composed of men who know what they are doing and like it. In the Twenty-first everybody—cooks, clerks, mechanics like myself, and pilots—took pride in what they did, got on well with the others, and never worried about doing more than someone else. No doubt this happy condition owed much to our commanding officer, Capt. William E. (Ed) Dyess, a splendid flyer and a man whom we all liked and respected.

For more than a year at Hamilton I worked on the latest U.S. fighter planes (P-40 Tomahawks) and other aircraft, assembling and disassembling them, inspecting the work of others, managing repair crews, and getting in some flying time. But despite the pleasant surroundings and the satisfaction one feels when doing something worthwhile, I grew restless and began to look for adventure. Once I volunteered for service as a civilian mechanic in Gen. Claire Chennault's famed “Flying Tigers” in China, only to be turned down because I had applied after the quotas were filled. Then, on November 1, 1941, our outfit was sent to the Philippines.

Soon after the war began five weeks later, I was swallowed up in the battle for Bataan. Ironically, immediate needs compelled me to become an infantryman and to learn to fight with a rifle, precisely the fate I had taken such pains to avoid by joining the air corps.

Before the struggle for Bataan commenced, I lost all contact with my family. They did not know I was one of the thousands of Americans who surrendered after that struggle, or that I endured the Death March that followed. Fortunately, they were also unaware of the atrocities visited on me by the enemy, much less the savagery I witnessed as a prisoner which led me to escape and fight as a guerrilla until the American liberation forces returned to Luzon on January 9, 1945. The many hardships I endured were insignificant when compared to the anguish of my parents and sisters. They were left to wonder, day by day for three long years while I was listed as missing in action, whether I was dead or alive. It would be six and a half years before I would actually see any of them again.

Somewhere along the line my father, swayed by the opinions of his friends, decided that I was dead; but this my mother never accepted. She wrote to me repeatedly, disregarding each returned letter marked “Undeliverable.” She wrote to one government office after another, to the Red Cross, and to a fighter pilot in the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, Maj. Samuel C. Grashio, following his escape from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. Finally, on November 24, 1944, my parents received an official War Department message informing them that I was alive and safe with guerrilla forces.

No matter how tough it was on me, it must have been worse for my folks. How much, I never realized until my own son Gregory spent two tours of combat in the air over Vietnam. Though he was never wounded, I imagined him aboard every American aircraft reported shot down. I wanted so badly to trade places with him because I realized it would be easier fighting than worrying.

To those today who have relatives or loved ones missing in action, maybe it would be best to assume as did my father and to proceed with your lives. If at some later date you are proved wrong, you will be forgiven as I forgave those who assumed I had been lost forever.

R
AY
C. H
UNT

At midday on December 8, 1941 (December 7 in Hawaii, east of the international date line), I was sound asleep on a camp cot at Nichols Field just outside Manila in the Philippine Islands. Suddenly my slumber was interrupted by a horrendous racket. Bullets were coming down like hail, interspersed with bombs that shook the ground like a series of small earthquakes. I sprang into a half-dug foxhole. A second later a bomb buried itself in the ground no more than thirty feet from me. Providentially, it did not explode. Nearby a friend was buried alive by another bomb burst, but his luck was running: he was dug out after a third man buried up to his neck yelled for help. Still another soldier close to me had a canteen shot off his hip. Thus did World War II begin for me, as it did for the American people, with a shattering surprise.

There was no excuse whatever for our people, or our political and military leaders, or myself personally, being caught so dramatically off guard. The explanation is simplest with regard to the whole country. Most Americans are blithely ignorant of other peoples and nations, most of us are bored by foreign affairs much of the time, and we have a national addiction to utopian hopes for perpetual peace. It is a ruinous combination that no amount of experience, no succession of disasters, has ever shaken out of our people. In the 1930s, specifically, it left our national defenses woefully deficient everywhere, but worst of all in the Pacific.

After we had “won” the first World War, our European allies reneged on their war debts and remained as quarrelsome as ever, so we had lapsed into disgruntled isolationism, vowing never again to be
drawn into their disputes. At the Washington Naval Conference (1921-22) we limited our fleet and agreed not to upgrade our military installations in the Far East. This left the Philippines, only 600 miles off the coast of Asia, defended mostly by naval bases 5,000 miles eastward in Hawaii and 7,000 miles away in California. In 1934 we promised the Filipinos their independence twelve years later. Soon after, we declined to fortify Guam. Tokyo observed this sequence of events and, not surprisingly, concluded that America was withdrawing from the Orient. The British, the Dutch, even the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, regarded our heedlessness with foreboding since their colonies and their interests now lay, thinly defended, beneath the shadow of Japan. Meanwhile the depression had descended, distracting the attention of Americans even more from foreign affairs and strengthening the voices of all those who always want to spend money on domestic programs and trust to good luck for national defense.

In the Philippines money for defense was chronically short, so all things were done late and in a half-hearted, slovenly manner. To be sure, this dismal situation began to improve in 1941. On July 26 the Philippine army was reincorporated into the U.S. Army. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was soon named supreme commander of these combined forces, and he began to assemble a capable staff. By then, too, a few thousand Philippine Scouts, who were part of the regular American army, had been made into effective soldiers.

Nonetheless, these reforms came too late in the day. The bulk of the Philippine army was still virtually untrained, badly armed, and almost impossible to command since the men spoke something like seventy different dialects. Airfields remained too few, their runways too short and unpaved. Intelligence was poor everywhere. Ominously, thousands of Japanese “tourists,” “fishermen,” “merchants,” even bird fanciers, roamed the archipelago at will. They mapped everything, purchased land, bought into businesses, and smuggled in more of their countrymen. To top off this amalgam of heedlessness and folly, West Point was able to find room for cadets from many countries, even Japan, but for a long time could accommodate only one Filipino per year. Even in 1941 there were only a handful at the Point; thus, a permanent shortage of well-trained top-ranking Filipino officers was insured.

Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippines, was keenly aware of these deficiencies, but he was as heedless as Washington in dealing with them. In fact, he made the situation worse; in 1939 he visited Japan and returned convinced that Filipinos could never defend
their country successfully. Soon after, at his behest, the Philippine legislature stopped military construction, cut the defense budget, deemphasized ROTC, halved reserve training, and postponed the mobilization scheduled for 1940, though money was found to build new roads, bridges, and public buildings, and especially to begin construction of Quezon City, adjoining Manila, to immortalize the Philippine president. Quezon justified this course, which in retrospect looks suicidal, by declaring that defense of his homeland from foreign aggression was the responsibility of the United States.
¹
Informed Filipinos hoped that somehow General MacArthur, whom they virtually deified, would see that everything turned out all right.

The failures and derelictions of our military leaders on December 8, 1941, are harder to account for than are those of the American people or even the Philippine government, since our professional soldiers
had been expecting
war. Yet many hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half the American Far Eastern air force was wiped out by bombing and strafing as the planes sat in rows on the runways at Clark and other fields on Luzon Island. Ultimately, of course, all military catastrophes are laid at the door of the commander in chief, in this case General MacArthur; but attempts to fix responsibility more precisely long ago disappeared in a morass of divided authority, selective memories, conflicting testimony, and missing records.

Personally, I was caught sound asleep with no more justification than either my military superiors or my countrymen generally. Two months earlier, back at Hamilton Field in California, our commander, Capt. Ed Dyess, had told the whole Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron that war was virtually certain in the near future. He had added that since we were the most fully prepared combat unit in America we would soon be sent overseas.

Though Ed admonished us not to reveal this news to friends or relatives, in my case he need not have bothered. When I wrote to my parents three days later, I merely expressed regret that I would not be home for Christmas. I added that I was not sure what I would do when my three-year enlistment ended three months later. I had recently half-planned to become a pilot in the Canadian air force but that scheme, like comparable precursors, had come to naught.

On November 1, 1941, the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron and twenty-three P-40 fighter planes left San Francisco on the USS
President Coolidge
. I had no idea where we were going. I did recall that a few months before I had seen a number of B-17 Flying Fortresses land at Hamilton Field and had been told by a crew member that they were
on their way to the Philippines. Thus, I was not particularly surprised when we eventually reached the channel that separates the Bataan Peninsula from Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay. I wasn't alarmed either, for Mike Ginnevan, an old sergeant only two years away from retirement, assured me that he had once done duty on Corregidor and that the Rock was impregnable. Mike's fate was as sad as his judgment was faulty: he died in a Japanese prison camp.

Once ashore, I found nothing that seemed to have anything to do with imminent war. Downtown Manila seemed a typical modem big city. Sunsets over Manila Bay and the Zambales Mountains on Bataan Peninsula were the most gaudily brilliant spectacles I had ever seen, like the canvases of an impressionist painter gone beserk. A second lieutenant with a heavy red beard startled me momentarily, but I was told that American soldiers thereabouts often grew such beards to impress Filipinos, who have little facial hair. The jai alai building seemed particularly modern since it had air conditioning and gambling apparatus similar to pari-mutuel machines at U.S. racetracks. Equally memorable, if less happily so, was the pungent smell of native villages (barrios) without facilities to dispose of sewage.

Most striking of all were the women. Like most red-blooded American boys of legend, I had a keen interest in girls. It had not been dulled by nineteen days at sea with a shipload of men. Now small, dainty Spanish-Filipina girls with incomparable complexions seemed inexpressibly beautiful. Not far behind were white Russian girls, refugees from Singapore and Hong Kong. Even the straggly-haired
lavenderas
(washerwomen), sitting on their haunches and pounding their dirty clothes with large wooden paddles, would have looked at least moderately enticing if only their lips and teeth had not been stained a ghastly, almost neon, red from chewing betel nut.