Shadows In the Jungle (39 page)

Near the end of the sixty-eight days, Littlefield was staggered by a severe bout of dysentery, and it happened at the worst possible time. Alerted of the Scouts' presence, a large body of Japanese troops were on their trail. Littlefield, his guts churning, could not keep up with the men as they slogged through the jungle on their way toward the American lines. He emptied his bowels thirty-two times in one day, mostly passing blood.

“It was terrible,” Littlefield recalled. “I was sick as a dog.” Consequently, the men slowed to his pace. Finally, Littlefield ordered them to move on without him.

“The Japs are about an hour behind us,” he told them. “I'm slowing you down and I won't sacrifice all of you for my sake. Get moving. I'll be coming along.”

Naturally, the team was hesitant to leave Littlefield, or any member, behind.

“I said go, goddamn it,” Littlefield ordered.

They departed. Once out of sight, though, Zeke McConnell dropped back and hid behind a tree, keeping an eye on Littlefield. After a great deal of struggle, Littlefield reached McConnell's position and the Cherokee stepped out.

“What the hell are you doing here, Zeke?” Littlefield said, somewhat startled. “I told you to keep going.”

McConnell smiled.

“You didn't think I'd leave you behind to take care of all those Japs alone, did ya?” he said.

With that, he accompanied his friend to safety.

* * *

On February 17, Herm Chanley, who had been on the Hobbs Team originally but was given a team of his own the previous December, landed near the coastal town of Baler. Chanley's job was to perform a reconnaissance of Casiguran Sound to see if it would provide an adequate anchorage for ships of the 7th Fleet.

Once ashore, Chanley's team, consisting of Staff Sgts. Glendale Watson and Allen H. Throgmorton, Sgts. Juan D. Pacis and Juan E. Berganio, and Pfcs. Bobby G. Walters and Nicholas C. Enriquez, contacted the 103rd and 205th guerrilla squadrons. Chanley and his men quickly discovered that the weaker unit, the 103rd under Lieutenant Ilipio, with five hundred men and just fifteen miscellaneous weapons, was extremely valuable in helping the Scouts accomplish their mission, while the 205th under Captain Bautista, with five hundred men and fifty-two weapons, proved unreliable.

After learning that the one hundred Japanese who had been in the Baler area had been forced to leave due to incessant harassment from the guerrillas, Chanley and his men relocated, conducting reconnaissance excursions around the barrio of Dinadiawan and the Dilalongan River, with the aid of agents from the Allied Intelligence Bureau, who now joined them.

Picked up by a destroyer on March 1, the team was back onshore the next day, this time accompanied by four naval officers, two AIB agents, and nine guerrillas. Hacking their way through the jungle in three groups, with Chanley and eleven men in the center, Throgmorton and four guerrillas guarding the left flank and Watson and five guerrillas on the right, they proceeded to a Japanese airfield two miles south of the Dilalongan River to see if it was usable. They found the runway overgrown with razor-sharp kunai grass, and the navy men were unhappy with it, so the search continued. A new, more satisfactory site was located a mile farther on, and the men returned to the beach, where an LCVP picked them up.

* * *

Even before Manila fell, MacArthur began making plans for his return to that tadpole-shaped rock in Manila Bay, Corregidor. Here, even more than Bataan, was the burning source of his humiliation thirty-two months earlier. It was a sore his pride could not endure.

The problem was, intelligence sources estimated that as many as 5,670 Japanese troops, including 800 Japanese civilians, mostly men who escaped from the fighting on the mainland, were defending the island. The 1st Battalion of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment along with the 3rd Battalion of the 34th Infantry Division were being prepped for the initial assault, but first more information was needed. To get that, 6th Army HQ tapped the Sumner Team, temporarily under John McGowen, after Sumner came down with jaundice.

On January 26, as Nellist and Rounsaville were preparing to push off for Cabanatuan, McGowen and his men boarded a PT boat in Subic Bay and headed across the dark water into Manila Bay and toward Corregidor. Manila, aflame from the raging fight, burned in the distance, the glow from the fires lighting up the entire horizon. Tracers arced through the night sky, and the dull boom of artillery like a drumbeat out of Hell rolled across the bay.

As the PT closed on the island, its radar picked up echoes of two Japanese destroyers. They spooked the PT skipper, who stopped his boat.

“This is as far as I dare go,” he told McGowen. “You'll have to go the rest of the way on your own.”

“It's seven goddamned miles,” McGowen fumed. “We can't take rubber boats that distance.”

“That's your decision,” the skipper said. “But I go no farther.”

Angrily, McGowen, who hated leaving a job undone, polled his men.

“We decided to get the hell out of there,” Bill Blaise later wrote. “It would have been suicide.”

It was the first and last mission the Scouts ever aborted on their own.

* * *

On February 8 McGowen, again at the head of the Sumner Team, with Lawrence Coleman, Bill Blaise, Bob Shullaw, Harry Weiland, Ed Renhols, and Paul Jones, accompanied by Filipino Sgt. Vincent Quipo of the Philippine Message Center, were back in the bush.

This time their mission was to establish a radio station on the coast of Zambales province, which borders Bataan to the north. Traveling by native bancas, they landed at Loclocbelete, a barrio near the city of Palauig, a few miles north of the airfield at Iba. Setting up the radio in a house, the team began patrolling north along the National Highway from Santa Cruz, checking out roads and bridges, as well as Iba Field, which they found to be usable.

Although they saw no Japanese, they were informed by guerrillas of the Montalla command that as many as one thousand of the enemy were in the area, mostly operating in small foraging groups three miles east of Santa Cruz. The guerrillas also said between three thousand and six thousand Japanese were strung out over a two-mile stretch east of Botolan along the Capiz Trail.

The team continued patrolling the area for the next week, before being recalled by 6th Army headquarters.

* * *

After Cabanatuan, Nellist and his team did a stint bodyguarding MacArthur and his staff on Bataan. On February 19, Nellist and his men, with Sergeant Quipo, just back from the McGowen expedition, boarded a Mariner seaplane in Lingayen Gulf and were flown to Magallanes on southwest Luzon. There they were to contact the Escudero guerrilla group, a large but poorly equipped unit under the Sorosogon province governor Escudero. It was 6th Army HQ's belief that if the guerrillas could be resupplied, they would be of great use in the upcoming invasion of Ligaspi in March, so the team boarded native bancas for the trip to the town of Casiguran. Things got off to a bad start. While the team was unloading the generator that powered the SCR-694 radio, it fell overboard and was lost.

Out of communication, Nellist led his men on foot toward Escudero's headquarters at San Juan. There, Nellist requested use of the guerrillas' radio to ask that a new generator be airdropped. Escudero agreed, provided they also drop ammo for his men. The drop was done, after which Nellist instructed Escudero to meet him at the village of Bulan, where they would link up with the Lapus guerrilla band. Nellist was unaware that Lapus and Escudero were adversaries.

Arriving at Bulan on February 23, the Scouts conducted reconnaissance forays and captured one Japanese soldier and several Formosan laborers. They also took depth soundings of the water and analyzed beach conditions. Six days later, Escudero, with about two hundred men, and Lapus, with about sixty guerrillas, both arrived in camp, and the air of hostility between the two men could have been cut with a knife. Nellist headed off trouble by stepping in to act as mediator. Neither Escudero nor Lapus would serve under one or the other, but both agreed to take orders from Nellist. A potentially violent confrontation was avoided.

On March 9, Nellist assumed authority over all the guerrillas in the area, about one thousand men in all. It was a precarious command, since the guerrillas came from various organizations and fiercely bickered among themselves. As a means of separating them, Nellist assigned each group to a specific sector. Each was also given a radio, enabling them to communicate through the Guerrilla Net Control, a network that had been established on Luzon. Since the guerrillas were not professionally trained soldiers, adept at conducting major assaults, Nellist instructed them to snipe at the enemy and harass their patrols and outposts. At this they excelled, and the Japanese withdrew to an area ten miles west of Legaspi known as Little Bataan.

Nellist continued to monitor this far-from-homogenous outfit, establishing a much-needed military policy and stern discipline.

One unit, the Orubia group, pulled out of the defense line and returned to Nellist's HQ, saying they were going home to rest. Nellist could not allow that, for fear others would do the same. Instead, he lined the men up, disarmed them, and told them to leave without their weapons and not return. The guns were dispersed among other guerrillas.

Of particular trouble was a guerrilla leader named Zabat, who ran an oppressive administration in his sector, which sometimes included robbery and murder. He levied excessive taxes on the people, 20 percent on sharecroppers and landowners. Nellist ordered Zabat to cease these activities, and he did. For a short while. Then he started again, reinstating his taxes and placing an additional 20 percent tax on gross revenues from cabarets, cockfights, and gambling houses. Nellist again ordered him to stop, threatening to cut off his supply of American arms and ammo. That finally worked, and Nellist came to realize that controlling their flow of support was a means of keeping the guerrillas in line.

In addition to guerrilla units, Nellist also organized a civilian spy ring. He quickly found that the best agents were elderly Filipino women, who would go village to village selling eggs, chickens, and produce, all the while pinpointing fuel dumps, artillery supplies, and other possible military targets.

In Legaspi, the women discovered that the most important Japanese installations were in buildings with red tile roofs, and one woman located ammunition storage tunnels. They uncovered so many targets that 6th Army simply ordered saturation bombing on the entire area.

The invasion of Legaspi was set for April 1, and for two weeks prior to that Nellist was in direct contact with the invasion task force, sending them daily reports on enemy movements. Once the troops were ashore, Nellist and his team linked up with the task force HQ and coordinated guerrilla operations.

* * *

Meanwhile, Tom Rounsaville, after Cabanatuan and Los Baños, had established a command post at the barrio of Pila in order to monitor enemy traffic at Laguna de Bay. Joining Rounsaville's Team was Pfc. Leroy Donnette, replacing Frank Fox, who returned to his original unit. Donnette was the only member of an Alamo Scout team to never have gone through the ASTC program. Donnette had been “overhead personnel,” assisting the Scouts in training exercises, until Nellist invited him to join the team.

On March 2, Bill Littlefield—still on the mission that would end with his bout of dysentery—linked up with Rounsaville at the town of Pila. Together they set up OPs to keep an eye on four square miles of area around Laguna de Bay. Assisting them were forty-eight Chinese communists of the Wai Chi guerrilla group, fierce and well-disciplined fighters, Littlefield recalled.

Between March 2 and March 25, Rounsaville established a network of radio stations connecting Pila, Mount Atimba, Nagcarlan, Dyapp, and Tayabas. This network allowed Rounsaville to coordinate guerrilla activities with the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment. Nellist oversaw this network until April 6, when it was turned over to the 1st Cavalry Division, and the Alamo Scout team departed.

* * *

Littlefield continued to operate in Pila. The town was held by one thousand guerrillas from five different groups, including Squadron 48, all communist Hukbalahaps. Littlefield and his men were quite comfortable in Pila. Shown nothing but hospitality by the villagers, the men slept in a large modern home. Villagers cooked for them, and the house had a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes. There were electric lights and even a bidet.

“I'd never seen one before,” Littlefield said in 2007.

The only problem was with the electricity. Power came from a generating plant fifteen to twenty kilometers away, and when the Japanese, who had electricity in their bivouac area as well, occupied the plant, they shut off the service to Pila. When guerrillas recaptured the plant, they shut down power to the Japanese. Control of the plant seesawed back and forth, but neither side destroyed the useful facility.

The provincial capital of San Fernando soon fell to the guerrillas, and Littlefield and his men relocated there and arranged for ammo drops for the Filipinos. This drop included bazookas, which the guerrillas had never seen. Over the next two days, Littlefield received frequent requests from the guerrillas for more bazooka rockets. Wondering what the hell was going on and where all this ammo was going, he trekked up to the guerrillas' line to investigate.

It was a difficult trip, over felled trees used as roadblocks and across rice fields. When he reached the front, Littlefield mounted some high ground and indicated that the Squadron 48 guerrilla leader join him. The leader, Alfredo Amdavid, a name he had assumed in order to protect his family in Manila, did so nervously. A Japanese shell whistled overhead and both men quickly scooted down the hill and into a ditch. They stayed there as a few more shells came screaming in. When he raised his head, Littlefield saw a Japanese soldier jump out from cover about a hundred yards away and take off running. Suddenly there was a loud whoosh as a guerrilla fired a bazooka rocket at the man. The Filipinos were using the bazooka to fire at individual soldiers.