Above the Thunder (41 page)

General Clarkson set up his headquarters in the old Baguio Country Club building, and for the first time since Hawaii the air section people got inside a real house. It was a small frame schoolhouse near the Kennon Road and within a couple of hundred yards of the west end of Loacan Field. A shell had collapsed one corner, and the roof there touched the floor, but we made ourselves at home with great pleasure, thanking our stars that we were not infantrymen out there in the hills in the chilly wind and rain.

Over in the corner where the roof was down sat a young Filipino man holding in his arms a very small baby. A little girl of about three also huddled against him, coughing almost constantly, and the baby had cried until its voice was nearly gone. Seldom have I seen so pitiful a little group. I wondered what had happened to the mother, and I was glad they had found even this poor shelter, for thousands of local citizens were homeless, living in tunnels left by the Japanese along the roads or huddling under trees and in the wreckage of buildings.

And then in strode an officer who, with a wave of his hand, told me, “Get them out of here.” I tried to defend them, arguing that the baby, at least, was obviously sick and probably would die if taken out into
the cold rain. I realized, of course, that it was not good to have civilians inside billets occupied by troops, but we had tents we could quickly pitch, leaving the building to this poor family and others wandering in the night. The Filipino listened hopefully, but my arguments were futile. When the officer saw that I was not going to send the people away, he did so himself, coldly, without apology or apparent sympathy.

One night during the late stages of the Baguio campaign, I visited a POW interrogation station. One of the men I saw questioned was a very young Japanese soldier who had been captured when flushed out of a small tunnel by a white phosphorous grenade only hours before. He was quite pale, obviously ill, coughing frequently, his lungs probably pretty well seared by the heat and fumes of the grenade. He looked as if he could barely stand, as he was required to do while being questioned. He said that he was a truck driver.

Although I knew a few words of Japanese, I could not understand the questioning or the replies, but I did gather that something unusual was going on. The POW seemed to be extremely frightened, while the interrogators were searching for something in a book. After he was taken away, I asked what the problem was and was told that the interrogators had suspected that the leather belt the prisoner wore was not an authorized item of Japanese uniform. If it had not been, even though the rest of his uniform was regulation, he would have been accused of being a spy and taken to Manila to be shot, in which case the escort would have been able to bring back some whiskey for the interrogation unit. Unfortunately, they said, the belt had proven to be an issue item for cadets at the Japanese military academy. They were disappointed.

I think General Sherman was not entirely correct when he said that war is hell and you cannot refine it. War certainly is hell, but there are some respects that we
can
refine—if our hearts are so inclined. Nevertheless, so long as leaders and nations remain ambitious, greedy, callous, uncaring about human beings, the wars, with all their inhuman cruelties, will come. As Sherman further observed, “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm.”

We tied down our planes and set up a few tents in a space at the northwest corner of Loacan, and after that first night we moved the
pilots into new billets in Baguio proper. The new place was the former summer residence of the U.S. commissioner, a fine big frame house with a fireplace in the living room and a screened porch off the kitchen. Out by our front gate lay one of the hundreds of dead Japanese soldiers that were scattered all over Baguio and had already become very hard to handle. Our “gatekeeper,” whom we called George, of course, was with us for several days. We never failed to speak to him politely each time we came in or went out.

Our first night in the commissioner's house, Bortz got a big fire going, and it felt good as it dispelled the damp chill of the mountain air. All the pilots gathered around, talking and joking, some of us looking through a small library left there by representatives of the Japanese Domei News Agency, who had been the previous occupants of the premises. We couldn't read the Japanese language, but the illustrations—such as a photo of General Wainwright and General King surrendering to General Homma—gave clues to the nature of the contents.

While we were thus engaged, there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, there stood out in the rainy night a well-dressed young Filipino bearing a large bouquet of flowers. As Dick Bortz came up behind me, the Filipino held out the bouquet to us, bowed deeply, and said, “Gardenias for you, sir. A group of local young ladies has sent these flowers to the brave American officers.”

Although we joked about it, I think all of us were touched by this to tally unexpected visit. Thinking of Baguio as it appeared to us that night, it was hard to envision the presence of young ladies and gardenias and a young man to carry their message of appreciation to us. We thanked the man as well as was possible and asked him to convey our gratitude to the young ladies. Again bowing, he retreated into the darkness.

I don't think it occurred to any of us that the young ladies may have been waiting nearby in the cold, rainy night, hoping to be asked to come inside our warm, dry house. (Virtue is such a burden!)

The liberation of Baguio did not finish the mountain operations of the 33d, but it opened a new and final phase in our campaign against Yamashita. There seemed to be a kind of relaxation on the part of some of the senior officers, and there was even a social event or two that
involved some of us pilots. I remember being at a GI-ration dinner in a large but rather dingy room in northern Baguio at which the division chief of staff had as guests of honor a British mining engineer and his daughter who had been held by the Japanese throughout the war and liberated when we took Baguio. There were two main topics of conversation that I recall. One was Gen. George C. Marshall, of whom the chief of staff told several interesting tales as he made his main point about the general's powerful personality and brilliant conversation.

The other topic was one on which there was general agreement among the officers present. We had recently fired a celebratory barrage on our local enemy with all available weapons: the war in Europe was over! With that out of the way, we had available in Europe the most powerful war machine ever seen, and the consensus was that we should keep it rolling—toward Moscow. In retrospect, I'm convinced that not only would such a move have resulted in disaster for all nations in volved but it would have been morally indefensible. The Soviet Union had been one of our allies through the long hard years of the war, and no other had suffered so much nor contributed so much to the defeat of the Nazis. To have turned on them in the moment of victory would have been a terrible thing, yet I joined then with those who favored the idea.

Not so the men in Europe who constituted that “great war machine.” To the melody of the bittersweet German wartime song, “Lili Marlene,” my brothers, Bob and Gerald, in Europe were singing:

Oh, Mister Truman, why can't we go home?
We've liberated Paris and we have conquered Rome.
We have defeated the “Master Race,”
Now why is there no shipping space?
Oh, why can't we go home?
Oh, why can't we go home?

Despite their combative natures, President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill had the character and good sense to resist whatever temptation they may have felt. To the joy of American motherhood and several
other categories of interest, Truman scraped up the shipping space as fast as he could and began dismantling the great armies—although some of the less fortunate men were sent to reinforce the Pacific forces.

I took advantage of a lull in the action to fly east to where the 25th Division was fighting at Balete Pass and visit my friend Bill Gibson, in the 8th FA Bn, and friends in my old outfit, the 89th. I found a place to land along a dirt trail where a few blasted snags of trees gave the landscape the look of a Hollywood war movie set, and then I found someone who could direct me to the 8th. After a good talk with Bill, I borrowed a jeep from his battery commander and went over to the 89th. I spent an hour or so with several of the men from my old radio section, which now was headed by Ralph Park. Leroy Ryder, Ralph's erstwhile “damned handcuffed volunteer,” smiled modestly as I congratulated him on his new gold bar, evidence of a field commission. One of the men I had most wanted to see, Burnis Williamson, was up forward somewhere with an FO party, so I missed him. Some of the boys had gone home or on to other assignments. My former battery commander, John Ferris, had become a lieutenant colonel and commander of the battalion.

But the tragic news was that Carl Bunn, the old beer drinker and orange lover from Columbus Grove, was no more. He had been radio operator for an FO party with the 161st Infantry when it became engaged with a Japanese tank unit in the town of Binalonan. Under fire from a tank, Bunn lay on the ground beside a jeep, his microphone in hand, when a shell struck a nearby tree and blasted splinters into his body. At the same time, a shell fragment punctured a fuel container and burning gasoline poured down onto the wounded man. No one could help him. He died there before the night was done.

Up there on the highest mountain ridge on Luzon we got some ex tremely bad winds. We had flown our L-4s at Fort Sill in winds that made us actually drift backward while in flight, but the turbulence in the mountain winds was something else. Somewhere a few miles generally north
of Baguio there was a broad ridge that terminated in a very high, almost vertical bluff. One day when the wind was howling down that ridge and burbling off the bluff, I foolishly ventured into the worst of it—just to see what it was like.

One second I was flying along in pretty rough air, and the next second I wasn't flying at all. I was simply being slung about inside a crate over which I had absolutely no control. Totally disoriented and unable even to keep hands and feet on the controls, I just tried to keep from being battered against parts of the plane or thrown completely out of it. I had a vague sensation of rapidly losing altitude, but there was nothing I could do about it. How long that condition lasted I cannot say, but while it seemed like a long time it couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty seconds.

When the gyrations eased enough for me to get back on the stick and regain control, I was fifteen hundred feet lower than when I started and was headed in the opposite direction. Believe me, I was thoroughly frightened and most thankful for several things, including the fact that the L-4 was a sturdy little airplane.

Just before dark one day, I was coming around one of those high bluffs in the Cordillera Central. On a narrow shelf cut into it was a hair-raising mountain trail such as Donald Duck and his nephews used to travel on some mission in the Andes for Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Rounding a curve, with the high wall close on my right, I saw ahead of me a Japanese patrol of about fifteen men. Evidently they were getting an early start on their mission of the night.

The only place for the Japanese to hide was on a small, brush-covered knoll that jutted out about forty yards from the cliff. It was connected to the cliff by a slim neck of earth, and it formed the top of a cone-shaped slide area that dropped about two hundred feet to a jumble of boulders and dirt in the edge of the forest below. The brushy top was no more than fifteen yards across, but the patrol members dashed out there and concealed themselves in the brush. I suppose they hoped I hadn't already seen them.

It would have been quite difficult to hit the men with artillery even if I'd had time to do it before dark, so I decided not to ask for fire. But there was that matter of pride that made it necessary for me to show
them they had not escaped my eagle eye, so I swooped across the knoll and dropped a yellow smoke grenade into their midst.

As the evil-looking yellow smoke billowed up through the bushes, Japanese soldiers erupted from their cover like a covey of quail out of a patch of weeds. I guess they thought it was toxic gas of some kind, for it panicked them in an instant, and they went in all directions. The trouble was, they couldn't stop going, for the moment they left the brush they were on that long, steep slide of dirt and rock, and they went skidding and tumbling all the way to the bottom. Among them, I saw falling the usual light Nambu machine gun, and, like the men, it vanished into the maze of rocks and debris far below. Only one man ran back across the path to the cliff trail. The others were scattered widely around the base of the slide cone, some of them undoubtedly injured. Their equipment likewise was scattered and lost, and I feel certain that they accomplished little that night except to get themselves together and salvage their gear. I flew on to Loacan, quite pleased with myself.