Behind Japanese Lines (30 page)

After the Japanese had driven us up to the mountains in extreme eastern Pangasinan and we had then slipped through their lines, we moved steadily back southwestward into Tarlac province once more, a sojourn typical of our harried, nomadic life. Minang had not shared our adventures around Umingan because, earlier, she had gone off northward to look for Maj. Bob Lapham. Now, as we made our way back into Tarlac in June 1944, she rejoined us, bringing with her some splendid news and some that was equivocal. The good news was tangible: .45-caliber ammunition with 1943 dates on the casings, American magazines, boxes of matches, and Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes, all decorated with American and Philippine flags and with the signature of General MacArthur beneath the pledge “I shall return.”

Even better was the story behind it. Robert V. Ball, an enlisted man on Mindoro when Corregidor fell, had, like so many, refused to surrender and taken to the bush. He had fallen under the jurisdiction of Col. Wendell Fertig, who had appreciated his talents and commissioned him a captain. In May 1944 he had been dispatched northward from the island of Samar in a small sailboat carrying one radio transmitter. After many tribulations he had managed to land south of Baler Bay on the east coast of Luzon, unannounced and practically under the noses of the Japanese.

My spirits bounded upward. Here at last was the linkup we had needed so badly for so long. Soon we would have a transmitter of our own to pass on to general headquarters in Australia everything we knew about the enemy.

The jubilation was tempered by some other news. Lapham had decided to reorganize his whole command and had sent along with Minang a written directive for me to assume command of Pangasinan province, leaving Tarlac to Hendrickson. I cannot deny that I was pleased to receive what was clearly a promotion. It was recognition of past services and an expression of confidence in me personally, but at the same time it meant leaving Al, whom I had come to regard as a fast friend despite our arguments and misadventures. Al took the news in stride and told me I could take anyone I liked with me as a bodyguard save his own Little Joe. I asked to keep Gregorio Agaton, and Al released him to me promptly. I then mounted a Philippine pony and set off back north once more into the Japanese-infested province we had just fled. I might be the newly minted commander of an entire province, but my retinue could hardly have been more modest: only Greg and Minang, each also on a pony. It was June 21, 1944, twenty-six months after I had tumbled off the road into a ditch on the Bataan Death March.

Much had happened at USAFFE headquarters in Australia during those two years. General MacArthur had never lost faith in the potential of guerrilla operations all over the Philippines. When his initial radio contacts with Praeger and others gave out or appeared about ready to do so, he began to undertake imaginative remedial measures. On December 27, 1942, he sent the Filipino air ace, Capt. Jesus Villamor, by submarine to the Visayan Islands north of Mindanao. Beginning February 18, 1943, Lt. Cmdr. Charles (Chick) Parsons and Capt. Charles Smith were posted to Mindanao. All were charged to contact prominent local people of assured loyalty and to set up regular chains of communication, preferably by radio, with Australia.

Parsons was a particularly inspired choice for a mission of this sort. Sufficiently short and dark to look somewhat like a Filipino, energetic and imaginative, he had lived in the islands for years before the war and had prospered. Early in the war he had been caught by the Japanese and tortured in Fort Santiago, but unlike most who had undergone such an experience he had been freed and had eventually made his way to Australia, where he had volunteered for special duty. No irregular operation can survive on love of freedom alone. It is also essential to have an overall plan, outside encouragement, leadership, discipline, arms, ammunition, supplies, and synchronization of communications. All this Parsons was to supply, by submarine, for the last two years of the war.
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Villamor, Smith, and Parsons were all told to give specific orders
to local guerrillas to gather and communicate information, and to forswear military action that would call Japanese attention to them and bring down reprisals on the heads of civilians who aided them, all before American forces could be in a position to afford them any protection. Anyone who has gotten this far in the present narrative is aware of how casually guerrillas everywhere heeded directives like this one. Finally, Dr. Emgidio Cruz, President Quezon's personal physician in far off Washington, was brought back to Australia. In July 1943 he was smuggled into the Philippines to find out just what was going on, in high places and low. He secured valuable information and made it safely back to Australia.
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Meanwhile a major organizational shakeup was taking place in Australia. Col. Allison Ind's Philippine Subsection of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, which had tried for ten months to oversee Philippine guerrilla activity, was replaced in May 1943 by a much larger Philippine Regional Section, which reported directly to general MacArthur and was run by Gen. Courtney Whitney, one of his personal confidants. Whitney had been a regular army officer in the Philippines in the 1920s. He had resigned his commission and pursued a civilian career for years, but volunteered his services to the air corps when the war began.

Few men have been so variously estimated as this prominent prewar Manila lawyer and businessman. Many have agreed with one of MacArthur's biographers, William Manchester, who calls Whitney a consummate flatterer and an odious reactionary who was a disaster as coordinator of guerrilla operations because he was condescending to all Filipinos save those who, like himself, had big investments in the islands. Some of Manchester's antipathy may have derived from Whitney's refusal to allow dissemination of propaganda pamphlets composed by Robert Sherwood that reflected conventional American liberal views circa 1943-45.
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Other American writers, some of whom worked closely with Whitney, describe him as a “splendid gentleman” who was keen, perceptive, energetic, rugged, aggressive, fearless, a natural leader, a masterful interrogator, and a fine judge of men who got on well with others.
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Filipino writers have also offered varied assesments both of Whitney and of the broader question of guerrilla operations themselves. Uldarico Baclagon, for instance, acknowledges that MacArthur appreciated the utility of guerrilla activity, but thinks he did not value it enough. He maintains that if irregular operations had been undertaken on a scale comparable to that of the Russians in Europe—i.e., enlisting the whole civilian population—the Japanese
would have had to either abandon the archipelago entirely or tie up the bulk of their forces just to secure communications with their operations farther south. Yet Baclagon seems to have doubts about his own analysis, for he notes how many different Filipino peoples live on Luzon, how numerous were the jealousies and rivalries among the many guerrilla bands, and how little overall direction and planning existed throughout the first half of the war.
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It seems to me that he also fails to consider the truly horrible reprisals the Japanese would have visited on all Filipinos had a policy of wholesale resistance been undertaken at a time when American forces in Australia were still unable to offer partisan groups much more than sympathy.

Villamor, the Filipino aviator, thinks the supreme commander would have done more had he not been systematically misled by Whitney and others near him. Villamor claims that the Filipino contribution to irregular activity was always more important than that of Americans but that this has never been properly recognized. One reason was that many Filipinos seemed to think Americans were more intelligent than themselves and so felt more comfortable if Americans were in charge. More important, he says, many around USAFFE headquarters, and Whitney most of all, were unabashed racists who regarded Filipinos as natural inferiors, treated them patronizingly, failed to give them proper support, and then hogged all the credit for Americans. He even asserts that Whitney sabotaged his own (Villamor's) messages to MacArthur.
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I never knew Whitney, so I cannot pass judgment on his character or alleged lack of egalitarian spirit. Likewise, since I was never at MacArthur's headquarters in Australia, I cannot know for certain whether more could have been done to aid us or whether everything reasonable
was
done. I can judge only by the official record and by what happened where I was. On these bases, it is clear that Whitney got things going promptly. Even before settling into his new job on May 24, 1943, he managed to find some radio transmitters in England that could be carried on a man's back (when the best American transmitters weighed a ton), and began to order them by the dozens, then by the hundreds. He persuaded some five hundred men of Filipino extraction from U.S. military units on the west coast and in Hawaii to volunteer for special service, then brought them to Australia, gave them crash courses in such subjects as radio operation and maintenance, weather and plane observation, and sabotage, and sent them into the Philippines. Whitney and his aides devised codes for secret communication, flooded the Philippines with American newspapers and magazines, put the “I shall return” message onto millions
of packages of cigarettes, gum, candy bars, matches, and toothpaste, and shipped these into the islands on submarines provided by the navy. Ball's landing near Baler Bay was the first of many such expeditions, though it was undertaken primarily to establish a communication linkage with Southwest Pacific Area command (SWPA) in Australia. It was also the only one made by sailboat. Guns, ammunition, clothing, other supplies, and the men trained for special services followed soon after by submarine.

At the sight of such commodities, and particularly the message they bore, guerrillas and Filipino civilians alike burst into tears of joy, for at last the aid so long hoped for and expected was coming.
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Panlilio says she and others in Marking's guerrillas were devastated when they learned that Bernard Anderson, with whom they enjoyed good relations, had burned most of his U.S. magazines, newspapers, and other propaganda lest Filipinos caught with even a scrap of it be tortured and killed by the Japanese.
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My people were overjoyed like the rest, but my troubles were different from those Anderson envisioned. Some of the papers and magazines we received fell into the hands of “paper” guerrillas, really bandits, who used them to recruit followers. A few who persisted after being warned had to be killed.

By the time of the Leyte landings in October 1944, a whole network of 134 clandestine radio stations and 23 weather observation posts had been established all over the Philippines. They supplied MacArthur's headquarters with detailed information about everything down to which barber shop cut the hair of which Japanese lieutenant.
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Eventually, in July 1944, I got one of these imported transmitters, in my case a set originally built in the Dutch East Indies. It was a strange piece of machinery. It got its power from being pedalled like a bicycle. One had to pump vigorously to receive a message on it, and to build his leg muscles up to Olympic standards if he wanted to transmit. The contraption had other drawbacks as well. Unlike the new English models, this one was too heavy for a man to carry. It had to be hauled over rough roads and trails and across open fields either in carts or on the backs of carabao. In either case it was constantly jiggled and sometimes shaken off. It seemed to me that we spent half our time trying to repair it—usually without spare parts.
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When the instrument did work, we immediately courted trouble of a different sort: we had to change our location after each transmission lest the Japanese locate us by triangulation. Even so, we used our Rube Goldberg transmitter to send much useful information to Australia. More important for us narrowly, though not for the prosecution of the war
overall, we were now able to establish rendezvous points with U.S. submarines and thus get consignments of all sorts of sorely needed arms and supplies on a semi-regular basis.

The radio and submarines were the means whereby I soon made a couple of memorable political acquaintances. As soon as I learned that submarines would be landing along the Luzon coast with some regularity, I contacted Manuel Roxas and offered to help him get to a submarine and escape from Luzon. He refused on the ground that the Japanese might retaliate against his family, but he gave me all sorts of valuable information which I at once radioed to Australia. Among those many messages was one from the family of Gen. Carlos P. Romulo, then on MacArthur's staff. Romulo personally thanked me when I met him for the first time in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco in June, 1945.

Bob Lapham's letter of June 21, 1944, authorized me to command in Pangasinan province, to enlist personnel there, and to appoint appropriate officers. That would seem to have been clear enough, but in fact trouble began almost immediately. Lt. Col. Russell W. Volckmann, a West Point career officer who had never surrendered on Bataan and who had assumed command of guerrilla forces in north Luzon following the deaths of Colonels Moses and Noble, now sent a runner to inform me that I should place myself and my men under his command. I replied by letter that this was impossible, since I was already under the command of Major Lapham, who had himself earlier resisted being absorbed into Volckmann's organization. I compared my position to that of a baserunner caught between bases, destined to be tagged out either way I went. Volckmann was not impressed by my baseball metaphor. He repeated his orders. I don't recall exactly how I phrased my reply this time, but it meant, unmistakably, “No.” Volckmann did not give up easily. Not long afterward two Americans under his command came to see me. My response was typical of the mistrust that existed among so many irregulars. I suspected that their intention was to arrest me, so I told my men to be alert and, if necessary, to seize them, after which I would ship them back north. My fears proved unfounded. The pair had come only to talk. One of them needed glasses badly and I was ‘able to get him some from Manila, so we parted amicably.