Behind Japanese Lines (20 page)

The Huks were convinced that Americans would be more impressed by their power than by their principles, so they tried to secure as many weapons as they could and then use them to weaken other guerrilla units. All attempts to cooperate with them failed, and we eventually waged war against the Huks quite as much as against the Japanese. In fact, up in Nueva Ecija province a situation developed that in less serious circumstances would have been a subject for comic opera. During the occupation the Japanese reorganized the old Philippine Constabulary in an effort to use it against guerrillas. Unknown to them, most members of the Constabulary were themselves secret guerrillas, or so afraid of guerrillas that they might as well have been. Moreover, the governor of Nueva Ecija, though appointed by the Japanese, had a secret understanding with the partisans. He supplied them with Philippine Constabulary uniforms and insignia, and they often travelled about with regular Japanese troops seeking out the Huks and fighting pitched battles with them. Eventually these ill-assorted allies drove all the Huks out of the province.
¹⁰

On a day-to-day basis the Huks had a lot of the same problems we did: they had attracted too many bandits, adventurers, self-seekers, corruptionists, and assorted crazies who undermined their peasant support by such follies as stealing carabao, and destroyed much of their public credit by gratuitous assassinations. One such incident stands out. A fierce woman, Felipa Culala, whom her followers called Dayang-Dayang, organized an irregular unit of her own, fought against the Japanese, and cooperated with the Huks. Unfortunately for her, she also spoke frankly about her intention to get rich from plunder in the process. Even though she was widely regarded as a heroine, Huk general headquarters had her executed.
¹¹

Estimates of Huk strength and effectiveness vary widely. U.S. Army Intelligence in Australia during the war figured Huk strength at 10,000 men and 3,000 rifles.
¹²
Other estimates run higher or lower, depending mostly on how “reserves” are defined and counted. There is similar uncertainty about how many casualties they inflicted on the Japanese.
¹³
But whether the Huks killed 30,000 Japanese or only 5,000, the state of our relations with them is indicated by their common designation of us as “USAFFE robbers,” and by various incidents. A typical one occurred once when Bob Lapham decided to make an earnest attempt to effect some kind of working agreement with the Huks against the common enemy. He sent his executive officer, Maj. Harry McKenzie, and his adjutant, Lt. Jeremias Serafica, to arrange a meeting with the Huk leaders. Memories vary about whether Harry rashly charged some Huks, or the Huks set an ambush. Whichever happened, McKenzie was shot in the chest. As he lay on the ground with blood spurting from his wound with each heartbeat, the boy who had shot him moved his rifle to finish him off, then lowered it slowly and remarked, “I'm sorry, sir. I fought on Bataan just as you did,” and walked away.

McKenzie was triply lucky. The bullet did not hit a vital organ, he happened to get medical attention quickly, and the wound did not become infected. So he lived, but he never forgot or forgave. From that time forward open war blazed between the Huks and Lapham's guerrillas. Whether meetings with Huks were accidental or were arranged with Huk prisoners, they commonly ended in gunfire. Afterward stories circulated that whenever McKenzie engaged captured Huks, or suspected Huks, in conversation, he did so seated at a table with a loaded and cocked .45 in his hand, the barrel resting on the table top in front of him and pointed at the person being addressed. It usually went off before the interrogation was completed. Like so many colorful wartime tales, though, the accuracy of this one is highly questionable. Bob Lapham, who was in virtual daily contact with McKenzie, says he cannot recall any Huk ever getting close to McKenzie again.
¹⁴

With Huks and USAFFE guerrillas perpetually at swords' points the Japanese never tried to interfere in disputes between us. Why should they? Every bullet we fired at each other was one fewer fired at them.

Another organization that complicated our lives to some degree was the Philippine Constabulary, though our relations with its members were always far more amicable than with the Huks. In fact, we
were eventually able to effect an informal working alliance with the Constabulary after all efforts to cooperate with the Huks had failed. This development was due to our increasing ability to vex the Japanese, and their increasing frustration at being unable to do much about it.

Of course, it was always possible for the Japanese to raise as many as a thousand troops and chase us back into the mountains and jungle, but by the end of 1943 we had become too numerous and well organized to be routed by small enemy patrols, and it was simply not practical for our foes to employ great numbers of men to perpetually comb the countryside in pursuit of isolated handfulls of guerrillas, most of whom, if they could get out of sight for a brief time, would make their next public appearances in fields behind plows and carabao, indistinguishable from several million other Filipino peasants. From a Japanese standpoint, attempting to deal with guerrillas was always frustrating, rather like a cow switching her tail to drive off flies.

In an effort to deal with us guerrillas, who were passing from nuisance to menace, the Japanese organized a new Philippine Constabulary. This body should not be confused with the old prewar Constabulary which, along with the Philippine army and Philippine Scouts, had been closely linked to the American army. The new Constabulary was composed, in part, of civilian volunteers and of men who simply needed jobs to feed their families. The core of it, though, consisted of Filipino prisoners taken after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. These men were gradually released by the Japanese with the proviso that they join the new Constabulary. Nominally, they were then to perform ordinary police duties. Actually, the Japanese planned to train them to become a new army to help defend the Philippines against a possible future American attack. In this role they would absorb some casualties that would otherwise be Japanese; and their presence would enable the Japanese to pose more convincingly as friendly neighbors helping allies defend their homeland against attack. The commander of the new Constabulary was Gen. Guillermo Francisco, a Filipino officer who had served on Bataan and whom the Japanese put through a de-Americanization program before his “promotion.”
¹⁵

Though the new Philippine Constabulary eventually came to comprise thirty thousand men, the Japanese never knew quite what to do with their creation. If the Constabulary was to be effective, its members had to be well armed, fed, and paid. Yet the Japanese knew that, at bottom, neither these Filipino “volunteers” nor their commanding
officer were trustworthy, so they were loath to arm them effectively.

The result was a series of sad compromises, as compromises so often are. Constabulary morale was always low because the men had been humiliated and oppressed by their conquerors, who now watched them closely in the bargain. To Filipino civilians they looked like puppets at best and traitors at worst. Their masters gave them rifles of all types captured from U.S. forces, and special clothing. Thus armed and supervised, they were supposed to maintain domestic peace and order. Some of them were rough on civilians—abusing people, profiteering, and extorting bribes. With some who acted thus the reason was probably low salary, with others a natural response to the tough training they had received from the Japanese, with still others the common phenomenon of power going easily to one's head. Whenever Constabularymen did anything unpopular, they excused themselves on the ground that they had no choice but to follow Japanese orders.
¹⁶
A majority of them, though, just went through the motions of performing their duties, especially when looking for guerrillas. They seldom discovered any of the latter; and if they did, usually managed to do little about it. In many sectors there were tacit understandings that the Constabulary would go easy on Filipino civilians and would not take patrols into areas dominated by guerrillas, in return for which guerrillas would not ambush Constabulary troops. If operations against irregulars did take place in the mountains, the Constabulary forces invariably returned severely depleted, from casualties incurred during guerrilla ambushes, their leaders said, but in truth from extensive defections to the guerrillas. On our side, we had no desire to destroy the Constabulary and see them replaced by regular Japanese troops. On their side, as Chick Parsons predicted in a formal report to General Willoughby as early as June 1943,
¹⁷
and as the actions of the Constabularymen in the last months of the war proved, about three-quarters of them were just biding their time until the day it would become safe to desert either to guerrillas or to an invading American army. Throughout the war some of the best American intelligence operatives were camouflaged as Constabularymen.

Once it became apparent to us that the Huks would be implacable enemies, we decided to try cooperation with the Constabulary instead, specifically to see if they would allow us to slip some guerrillas into their ranks in order to combat the Huks more effectively. Contact was made with the commander of the Constabulary for Tarlac province, and a secret rendezvous was arranged. Some of our
men brought the commander and one of his lieutenants to the prearranged site by a circuitous route designed to avoid detection by the Japanese. The conference was held in an ordinary Philippine house on stilts. Though this
bahay
was bigger than most, the room was packed with guerrilla observers. Those of us who were to be directly involved in the negotiations were jammed together around a table like the proverbial sardines.

In substance, the conference proved uneventful. After some discussion an agreement was reached with the Constabulary representatives, we shook hands all around, and the Constabularymen were led away first so the direction of our departure would remain unknown to them.

The fallout from the meeting was another matter, one that causes me to chuckle to this day. Before the conference began, some inspired and generous soul had managed to find some good American whiskey and had passed it around. Most of us had taken a couple of drinks, which may or may not have caused Al and me to get into a sufficiently loud argument that Filipinos grabbed both of us to prevent what they feared would be a fight. A short while later Al had to relieve himself. The house was so jammed he couldn't get downstairs, so he did the simplest thing: went to a back bedroom that had an open window. Unfortunately, he lost his balance and pitched head first out the window to the ground eight feet below, landing with a thump heard plainly by everyone inside.

Luckily, the fall only knocked the wind out of Al, so, soon after, he and I climbed into a wooden-wheeled cart for the return trip to our current hideaway. The cart was pulled by a carabao who had the misfortune also to be ridden by the biggest Filipino I have ever seen. Somebody had thrown an old mattress on the bed of the cart, and Hendrickson and I sat on it opposite each other. We had gone only a short distance when Al shouted at the driver, “Tigil!” (stop). Then he revived the argument with me that had almost brought us to blows at the conference, asking me if I didn't really think he had been right after all. I replied “Hell, no!” and told the driver to go on. We rode in silence for a few hundred yards; then Al shouted “Tigil!” again and took up the argument once more. After this had happened several times, I finally told him I would never agree with him and that if we didn't put an end to the stopping and starting we would get caught by daylight, which would be distinctly hazardous to our health.

The last part of the trip was on horseback. It proved as bizarre as the cart ride. A Philippine horse, called a
kabayo
, is small, a little larger than a Shetland pony. A tall man's feet will almost drag on the
ground when he rides one. Al got aboard an unlucky little horse and promptly put it into a brisk gallop, his feet nearly trailing in the dirt. I almost fell off my own horse from laughing. When we arrived at our hideout, Al reined in his
kabayo
so sharply that the animal reared on its hind legs, causing him to slide off its back. For the second time that night he hit the ground with a resounding thud. I couldn't resist shouting, “Heigh ho, Silver!” Al growled something unintelligible and stalked off. Now, forty years later, he says he cannot remember anything about the whole evening save arguing with me in the cart.

The moral must be that all of us have selective memories about past foibles, since I have no recollection of a comparable incident that Hendrickson swears happened. As he tells it, once I had tooth troubles and he took me to a dentist who turned out to be a good-looking young Filipina with a hand drill. While she ground away on my molars, I allegedly developed a more-than-professional interest in her. I can't even imagine my thoughts turning to romance with a dentist's drill in my mouth.

As for appearance, on the night of Al's memorable ride on the overloaded little horse I must have looked as ludicrous as he did, for I was then in the habit of wearing a .45 on my right hip, a .38 backwards on my left hip, and a Garand M-1 rifle slung across my back, an arrangement that permitted me to draw a gun from any possible position. This elaborate regalia was further embellished by two bandoliers crisscrossing my chest and fastened to a webbed belt, all of which together sometimes contained as many as 120 rounds of 30-caliber and 50 rounds of sidearm ammunition. The whole ensemble was topped by a hat fashioned from half a gourd. Any outsider who could have seen Al and me that night, not to speak of the towering Filipino on the carabao, would have sworn we were Mexican revolutionaries in some Hollywood movie.

Al eventually got even with me for laughing at him and quarrelling with him, though it was after the war and in circumstances that seem funny now. Once when he was in a tavern in my native St. Louis, Al got into a noisy argument about General MacArthur. Some officious soul called the police. When they arrived, Al persuaded them to let him go by telling them he was “Ray Hunt, a local war hero.”