The Leper Spy (11 page)

“Get off with me at the next stop!” the Filipino officer said.

The guerrilla tapped him back.

“No,” he said. “You get off at the next stop. There are six of us in this car.”

The police officer got off at the next stop.

At Santo Tomas, where Joey continued to try to minister to the starving internees at great personal risk, a new visitor had arrived: Father John Hurley, the powerfully built, indomitable superior of the Jesuit mission. He had been evicted from the Ateneo and was even arrested and detained at Fort Santiago, but he had successfully defended himself and refused to collaborate with the Japanese. When he was finally ordered to Santo Tomas, the internees gave him a standing ovation.

Though they had been through much hardship, the internees at Santo Tomas were a feisty and ingenious bunch. More than the other war camps, perhaps, Santo Tomas had become a well-organized community with public health facilities, gardens, sports programs, access to goods and money on the outside, schooling, shops, shacks, and even somewhat regular entertainment. They knew how to make the best of a bad situation, as illustrated by tongue-in-cheek songs written and performed by internees, such as “Cheer Up, Everything's Going to Be Lousy”:

I've plenty to be thankful for although it's hard to bear.

Things could be a darned sight worse, although I don't know where.

Don't think that I'm complaining, 'cause it's really not the case,

And, if I look disgusted, why, it's just my natural face.

I haven't a pot to cook in, but, at least I have a bed.

It may belong to the Red Cross, but, it's a place to lay my head.

So smile and show your dimples, they're worth their weight in gold.

You may as well my friends, before you know it you'll be old.

The most traumatic event had come in the first two months, when three men—an Australian engineer and two British merchant seamen—were executed for trying to escape.

But in the first two years, for the most part, the Japanese generally kept away from most internees. Internees took advantage of the lax oversight. Earl Hornbostel, whose father, Hans, survived the Bataan Death March and was a POW in another camp, was running a shortwave radio hidden in the projection room. But it wasn't until the guards found transcripts of news broadcasts from America that Hornbostel became a suspect and was sent to Fort Santiago for questioning. In reality, the transcripts were made outside of camp by a man living in San Juan, who would send transcripts to his father, also interned at Santo Tomas, on sheets of onionskin rolled up inside fountain pens. When questioned, the father fingered Hornbostel, probably to avoid torture.

When Hornbostel was transferred to Fort Santiago, where they made him stand facing a wall for hours before interrogation, the halls of the ancient Spanish compound still rang with the stories of defiant guerrillas.

Ramon Cabrera was a small, tough kid who played halfback on the football team at the Ateneo. At the start of the war, Cabrera had gotten to Bataan with the rest of the boys, fought hard, and survived the death march. He was imprisoned at Capas and, when released, joined the underground. He was soon caught and brought to Fort Santiago, and the Japanese secret police wanted him to cough up the names of the guerrillas with whom he was working. “I don't know any names,” Cabrera said. So they beat him. They smashed his teeth out with a gun butt and broke his jaw. They burned his back with flatirons and tore off his fingernails. Still he refused to rat on his friends in the underground. When the Kempeitai brought Cabrera to the North Cemetery, they ordered him to dig his own grave. “Dig it yourself,” he fired back. An officer drove a bayonet into him, and he fell to his knees. But when he looked up, he was smiling, blood bubbling from his mouth. He never did talk.

Carlos Malonzo, too, had been held at Fort Santiago. He was just eighteen when the Japanese invaded, and utterly indifferent about the new occupiers. But on his way to work one morning, he witnessed a Japanese sentry slap an old woman for failing to bow. Malonzo vowed a personal war. At first this involved staking out a Japanese supply facility, then patiently tunneling underground from an abandoned house across the street, then stealing thousands of pesos worth of supplies, which he sold on the black market. With the money he bought a radio transmitter and hired a Japanese-speaking interpreter and began broadcasting a regular program,
The Voice of Juan de la Cruz,
which could be heard all the way in San Francisco.

At the start of every program, Malonzo played the American and Philippine national anthems, followed by war news, and then offered a reward of fifty bottles of San Miguel for the capture or killing of the Japanese commander in the Philippines, the lowest of insults. The broadcast drove the occupiers mad, and they soon tracked Malonzo down in Pasay City. The Kempeitai at Fort Santiago tried to turn him. They offered him freedom if he would help spread Japanese propaganda. “Please thank the Japanese Military Administration for their offer to save my life,” he told the interpreter. “But I cannot accept. In fact, if I have to do it all over again, I would do the same thing and even more.” Not long after, he tried to escape and was caught. Soldiers bayoneted his feet, and he was bleeding when they returned him to his cell. “I'll do it again!” he shouted at the guards. When it came time for his execution, he told his cellmates at the fort to show no fear if their time came. “Never give them that satisfaction,” he said, “but die with pride and dignity.”

The fathers from the Ateneo were prisoners there, too, part of the crackdown on the Christian priests by the secret police. When Gustavo Ingles was sent for questioning, he counted ten priests from the Ateneo being held prisoner, all facing different charges, from possessing illegal photographs of Tokyo burning to stashing bayonets to spy activity. The remaining free fathers were close to being rounded up and shipped to Los Baños as well.

Hornbostel was court-martialed and sentenced to three years in Muntinlupa, which wasn't the worst prison. There were no Japanese; it was run by the Filipino staff that had been in place since before the war. In fact, it was run by Eriberto Misa Sr., the father of a guerrilla, and several Hunters were on staff.

B
y March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. The American fleet of aircraft carriers had exploded from four in the Pacific in 1943 to almost one hundred a year later. American submarines had suffocated Japanese supply routes. In the ten months before October 1944, the Japanese had not sunk a single important US ship, and so depleted was Japan's air fleet that the Americans hopscotched island nations, completely bypassing Japanese air fields as troops jumped from island to island.

Since the decisive US victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, a month after Corregidor fell, MacArthur had stitched together an impressive string of triumphs. The Americans took Guadalcanal, then the Aleutian Islands, then Saipan, then Guam. In two months, he had pushed twelve hundred miles up Papua New Guinea and claimed Hollandia, where he was now moving his headquarters during Operation Reckless. In Tokyo, at Imperial Headquarters, planners used little red flags to illustrate the American movement on a wall map. Red flags spread to Finschhafen, westward along the New Guinea coast, to Saidor, Madang, Sansapor, and eastward to the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls. The Americans had moved within one thousand miles of Mindanao, on the southern tip of the Philippine archipelago.

It was against this backdrop that MacArthur was summoned to Oahu on June 26, 1944, just before his sixty-fourth birthday, to meet with President Roosevelt and Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. MacArthur, late as usual, arrived at the USS
Baltimore
in a leather air force jacket and khaki slacks, saluted the quarterdeck, and went below to FDR's guest cabin. He didn't want to be here and had bellyached on the flight in about having to leave his post during war.

“Douglas, where do we go from here?” Roosevelt asked the general, who was now the Allied supreme commander of the South-West Pacific Area.

“Leyte, Mr. President, and then Luzon!” he replied. MacArthur had been singing the same tune since he abandoned Corregidor on the patrol torpedo boat in 1942, insisting that reclaiming the Philippines was strategically responsible to prepare for an attack on the Japanese mainland and, perhaps more important, was the honorable thing to do. But he was the only cheerleader for this plan. While not as passionate, Nimitz, perhaps the greatest naval commander in history, explained that Japan needed oil to continue operating, and its homeland was dry. So cutting off supply from the South Pacific, the Indies, and Indochina would strangle the emperor's effort.

“Cork that bottle, Mr. President,” Nimitz said, “and Japan cannot go on fighting the war.”

“How do we cork that bottle?” the president asked.

“Bypass the Philippines,” Nimitz said. “Land on Formosa or even Okinawa. Interdict all Jap shipping with sea and air power. Collapse and surrender has to follow.”

MacArthur was having none of it. His own honor was riding on liberating the people of the Philippines, even if it delayed troop movement toward Japan. He'd made a promise.

Roosevelt expressed concern about the human cost of taking the islands.

“National honor is a strong sentiment,” he said. “Can you take the Philippines with the forces you have? I cannot spare anything for you … not when we've got Hitler on the run in Europe.”

MacArthur, who knew when so much as a sparrow fell in the Philippines because of his communications with guerrillas, tried to put the president at ease.

“Mr. President, my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past,” he said. “The days of the frontal attack are over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and direct assault is no longer feasible. Only mediocre commanders still use it. Your good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.”

As he climbed back onto his plane, bound for Australia, MacArthur declared to his staff, “We've sold it!”

Meanwhile, Manila was changing as the Japanese, who suspected the dual advance by MacArthur and Nimitz to the Philippines, ramped up for what Tokyo called “the decisive battle.” Transport planes landed at Nielson and Nichols Fields on Luzon with Japanese commanders relocating their headquarters. Reinforcements were arriving on troopships in Manila Bay as part of the last-ditch imperial plan called Operation Victory. The military also gained a new and feared leader in Tomoyuki Yamashita, known as the Tiger of Malaya for his spectacular victories in Malaya and Singapore, which Winston Churchill called the “largest capitulation” in British military history.

Then, on the morning of September 21, the incredible happened. A boy, age twelve, was studying mathematics on the roof of Santo Tomas, where he and his family had been captive for nearly three years. He only heard the sound at first, a dull, indefinite humming in the air, a low vibration.

The sound began to grow. And as it swelled into a road the windowpanes trembled till the concrete building started to shake. Out of the massy surge of clouds, the American bombers came, tier upon tier of them, flying high, flying low, an earth shaking armada of aeroplanes, glistening silver-white in the sun as they rode the air.

One, two, three …

The prisoners began to count them.

Four, five, six …

Some internees ducked into the safety of the air-raid shelter but couldn't help sticking their heads out to watch the American bombers.

Seven, eight, nine …

The planes shifted formation like players on a football field. What grace. What timing.

Ten, eleven, twelve …

The people on the ground spotted Hellcats, Helldivers, and Avengers charging through the sky. American planes. When they came over land, bombs began to drop from their bellies and underwing apparatus, bombs on which boys had written in chalk, O
NLY THE
B
EGINNING
, and they smashed the harbor defenses, the gun emplacements Joey Guerrero had so diligently mapped and turned over to the United States. The explosions shook the earth and sent plumes of dirt spraying skyward.

T
he newspaper headline the next day was predictable: GREAT M
ANILA
A
IR
B
ATTLE:
US B
OMBER
F
LEET
W
IPED OUT!

A joke developed in its wake:

What can shoot down more American aircraft than all the guns in the Japanese Combined Fleet? A new secret weapon?

No. The
Manila Herald.

Unbeknownst to those in Manila, by late October, giant American guns aboard two US fleets were blazing, firing on Red Beach on the Island of Leyte, 550 miles southeast of the capital city. Soldiers fanned out, flushing snipers out of trees and routing them from foxholes. General MacArthur stood on the bridge of the
Nashville,
watching as the shoreline came into view, the same spot where in 1903 he had reported as a second lieutenant. He was as excited as a teenager going to his first dance, and he beamed in front of the cameras as he waded ashore. Roosevelt had already radioed him on the
Nashville:
“You have the nation's gratitude and the nation's prayers for success as you and your men fight your way back.”

The general stood before a microphone and, over the crackle of volleys, gave an address to every Filipino within earshot of a shortwave radio:

I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the
blood of our two peoples. We have come, dedicated and committed, to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring, upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of your people.