Behind Japanese Lines (8 page)

I wanted to leave our abode, but my companions did not. At length I arose alone and began to call out. Across the stream some Filipino farmers heard me, and one started toward us. He walked up onto a log that lay across the ditch, with his eyes turned downward. I
asked him if there were any Japanese around. Fortunately, he understood some English. He told me to stay down, and slipped into the underbrush. A few minutes later he returned and motioned for us to follow him.

Our Filipino savior took us a short distance to a
bahay
, a house on stilts. It was close enough to the road for us to watch the Death March through slits in the woven bamboo walls. When I saw an American run through with a bayonet by a Japanese guard, it added nothing to my sense of security.

The house already contained another escaped American, a Lieutenant Kiery. His fate was tragic, yet similar to that of all too many in the war. He managed to avoid capture for another two and a half years, only to drown off the east coast of Luzon late in 1944 when he took one chance too many. Al Hendrickson, with whom I was subsequently closely associated, told him to follow a difficult foot trail down the coastline to meet a submarine. Rather than hike through the mountains and jungle, Kiery decided to try a rubber boat in a rough sea. He never made it.

As always throughout the war the Filipinos here treated us warmly and generously, at dire risk to themselves. Various of them brought us rice, water, and crude sugar several times a day. One boy begged me to let him hide me amid fishponds in Manila Bay, promising that he would make me well again and would keep me safe until the Americans returned in perhaps three months. Little did he or I realize that it would be three years. Another Filipino told us that an American civilian owned a nearby hacienda and said he would take us there. This offer we accepted.

The Death March, it must be recalled, did not usually consist of
an unbroken string of marching men but of different groups of about four hundred men, each with two guards, separated by a quarter to a half mile or more. Thus, it was sometimes possible to slip away safely when one contingent had passed and another one had not yet arrived. We waited for one of these breaks about nightfall and started off. As soon as we had put a few sugarcane fields between us and the road, we were loaded onto a cart that had two solid wooden wheels. Then we were covered with rice straw. In this conveyance, pulled by a carabao, we rode all night northwestward toward the Zambales Mountains. I could not have made it on foot. All my previous life I had been strong and healthy, but diseases and starvation had so sapped my flesh that when I looked at my emaciated body I could hardly believe it was my own.

We had a great stroke of luck on the way. Three times our Filipino driver was stopped by Japanese who questioned him in English about whether he had seen any escaped Americans. Since he could not speak English, he was able to answer only when the Japanese questioner happened to be accompanied by a Filipino interpreter who knew the Tagalog language. The Japanese never searched the cart, apparently on the assumption that anyone who could not speak English would be unlikely to harbor Americans. Finally we reached our destination, a cluster of grass-roofed houses under some shade trees. Here some Filipinos fed us and washed our clothes. They also offered us a haircut and shave. I accepted both eagerly, but soon regretted my zeal to be shaved. The barber was a Filipina who commenced operations by dipping her fingers into a coconut shell filled with cold water and patting this on my whiskers. Then she took up a straight razor that had clearly been put to many uses other than shaving. It pulled out at least two hairs for every one it cut. As she scraped away unconcernedly, the tears rolled down my cheeks and I prayed for survival.

While I was undergoing this memorable shave, a muscular, bronzed man entered the house. He was Vincente Bernia, a Spanish mestizo (half-Spanish, half-Filipino). Vincente and his brother Arturo were wealthy sugar planters who lived nearby. Vincente was soon to take me to William Fassoth. He and Fassoth were two of the finest, most selfless men I have ever known. Between them they saved my life.

Fassoth came from a family of Hawaiian sugar planters. In 1913, as a young man, he went to the Philippines where he purchased a 1600-acre rice and sugar plantation. Soon after the war began in December 1941, Japanese planes bombed his house, sugar mill, and
rice mill, and shot all his cows. With his family, his twin brother Martin, and a number of Filipino employees and friends, William Fassoth retreated about ten miles back into the foothills of the Zambales Mountains and built a camp. At first this was intended only to be a refuge for the Fassoth family, who had sufficient food and medicines for their own use. Soon, however, American soldiers began to arrive, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes. Some of them had escaped from Bataan before it fell; some, like myself, had escaped during the Death March; a few had simply wandered aimlessly in the jungle ever since the initial Japanese invasion of Luzon.

Before long the sanctuary became so crowded that Fassoth and Vincente Bernia decided to build a bigger camp some six miles farther back in the mountains. It would be a semi-permanent rest camp for stray Americans. Fassoth would do the building while Bernia expressed assurance that he could get enough money and supplies from his wealthy friends to help maintain it.

This was not an idle boast. Long afterward, William Fassoth's son Vernon acknowledged that without the help of the Bernias maintenance of the Fassoth camp would have been impossible.
¹
Moreover, during the first few months of the war, before the Japanese occupation could be consolidated and made systematic, the Fassoths themselves could still purchase ordinary foods and medicines in nearby villages. The Bernias stimulated the whole operation by offering fifteen pesos to any Filipino who would bring an American into the camp.

I was one of the first to arrive at the first camp. I started toward it riding a horse, with Vincente walking beside me and holding me aboard. Eventually I grew so weak I could no longer sit on the horse, so I had to be carried the last three hundred yards on the back of a Filipino.

The camp itself was built astride a small stream, completely concealed under tall trees. The only guests when I arrived were a few escapees as sick and exhausted as myself. Some of them had suffered such agony from tramping barefooted or in disintegrating shoes on the Death March that they had begged Japanese guards to shoot them and relieve their misery. The Japanese, usually only too glad to oblige in such cases, had refused, apparently in the belief that the Americans would soon die anyway and that they might as well do so painfully. The men had subsequently been rescued by Filipinos and now lay in the Fassoth camp with their raw feet swelled so badly that they could not put on shoes, much less walk.

Vincente spoke to us expansively of his plans. After we had been
nursed back to health, he was gradually going to form an army of irregulars from people like us and carry the fight to the enemy as guerrillas. He talked of his contacts in Manila that would enable him to get food and medicine through Japanese lines, and of the cruel invaders whom he longed to destroy. I yearned to fight and kill the Japanese as much as he did, and certainly welcomed the food and occasional medicine I received, but for five months I could do nothing but try to recover my health. I was cursed throughout with malaria, beri beri, and jaundice. At times the beri beri was so severe that I was partially blind. It was in this state that I was told that Corregidor had surrendered. I thought grimly of old Mike Ginnevan's assurance to me that the Rock was impregnable.

Of course, the Japanese soon got wind of what was going on. There was nothing to do but move the camp six or seven miles farther back and higher into the Zambales range, which runs along the west coast of central Luzon. William Fassoth, who wrote a brief history of his camps after the war, pays tribute to the famished and weakened Americans who helped him lug everything from the first camp up narrow, slippery mountain trails to the second. I can say only that I will never forget dragging myself to the second camp.

The new camp consisted of one large building about fifty by a hundred feet and several smaller ones, all made entirely of bamboo and without nails. Filipinos are geniuses with bamboo. They make everything out of it: cooking utensils, drinking cups, woven baskets, animal snares, fish traps, scabbards for bolo knives, bridges—anything from tweezers to houses.

The locale of the new camp was ideal, isolated high in the mountains and so near running water that a bamboo pipe carried water into the camp and a nearby waterfall provided a continuous and convenient shower. Nonetheless, the whole enterprise had a near-fatal flaw. If the camp was not to be spotted by enemy reconnaissance planes, it was necessary to do something that was mad, medically. The undergrowth was cleared away but all large trees were left intact for camouflage. Thus, the natural habitat of the mosquito was left substantially undisturbed. Soon the rainy season commenced. Nobody has seen rain until he has seen it in the Philippines. Many downpours would have been called cloudbursts in the United States, yet they went on for hours, day after day. The mountain streams swelled into torrents. While this had the incidental benefit of keeping the enemy away, it made it much harder to procure food or medicine and it allowed the mosquitoes to multiply. This stifled what little progress many of us might have made in our constant battle with diseases. Several times
our rice supply was so seriously depleted that we boiled rice husks and ate them. They were tasteless, but they did combat beri beri somewhat.

One incident during this era of semi-starvation I will never forget. Vincente managed to get us a considerable quantity of navy beans, the sort universally reviled in World War I but now regarded as manna from heaven by those of us who had eaten little but rice for months. Mrs. Catalina Dimacal Fassoth, William's Filipina wife, who gave unselfishly of her time cooking and trying to care for us, prepared the feast. We lined up with our bamboo tableware in ardent anticipation. With my first bite I was astounded. Judging from the looks on the faces of the others, so were they. Filipinos like sugar and prepare many of their foods with it. Mrs. Fassoth, knowing nothing about navy beans, had thrown a lot of sugar into the water when she boiled them. But we ate them.

Something should be said here of the Fassoth camps in general, for they have been the subject of markedly different postwar accounts. At one time or another there were three of them, each situated farther back in the mountain fastness than its predecessor. It has been claimed that as many as three hundred American soldiers were in and out of one or another of the camps at various times, with anywhere from sixty to ninety at any one time, though these numbers are probably inflated.
²
As many as seventy-five Filipino porters were employed to carry in food at different times. I lived in the first camp for a few days and in the second for five months.

A particularly dark description of the second one is given by Forbes Monaghan, who never saw the camp and who must have derived his information from two Jesuit scholastics from his Manila college who once spent a day and a night with us. Monaghan says we were fed regularly, but were so undisciplined, demoralized, and wolfish that we were little better than animals. He asserts that a West Point captain, Samuel Dosch, was the only sane man among us. He says the two scholastics organized a musical program at the camp, followed by a sermon and some prayers, and then went to Col. Peter Calyer, the highest ranking American officer still free in Luzon, and persuaded him to appoint Dosch commandant of the camp, after which order and discipline were restored.
³

Col. Russell Volckmann, with whom I had serious trouble later and who eventually became the leader of all the guerrillas in north Luzon, spent some time in the camp. He agreed with Monaghan that some men there had sunk to the level of beasts, but he thought they were only a small minority, much outnumbered by two other groups:
the despondent, pessimistic, and listless; and a band of heroic types who had grown in adversity, had become imaginative, resourceful, optimistic, and resolute. The thoughts of the latter were on recovery, for they wanted to get well and form guerrilla bands to harass the Japanese.
⁴
Volckmann's sidekick, Maj. Donald Blackburn, largely agrees with Monaghan. He says that when he and Volckmann arrived the camp was unbelievably filthy because it was dominated by renegade enlisted men who refused even to dig latrines, and was rife with dissension of every sort. He claims he made friends with the disagreeable leader of the place, a Sergeant Floyd, following which he and other officers began to do the needed camp chores and gradually led the enlisted men, out of shame perhaps, to join in. Even so, he thought most men in the camp just wanted to hide out in the mountains and await an eventual American reconquest of the Philippines.
⁵

William Fassoth's own account, written soon after the war, contrasts sharply with all these. He describes food as plentiful and morale as high throughout. My friend Walter Chatham, who was lying in the ditch when I jumped off the road on the Death March, and who spent five months in the Fassoth camp with me, says (1985) he remembers morale as generally high, especially on July 4 when pieces of bamboo were joined together to make a flagpole on which to hoist the American flag in defiance of possible Japanese observation planes. He says food was more plentiful than on Bataan, and claims he never heard of the renegade enlisted men who allegedly ran the camp. I would be inclined to accept Walter's assessment, save that he acknowledges that he was out of his head with cerebral malaria for at least ten days on one occasion, that he was so sick he could scarcely move for many days at a time, and that once he was so near death that he saw another man buried in a grave that had been dug for himself. Thus, one cannot be sure how much he knew of what went on, or how accurate his memory was.