Behind Japanese Lines (16 page)

What happened next is uncertain. According to some melodramatic accounts, it was a Hollywood-style shootout that ended when Cushing, riddled with enemy bullets, saved his own last one for himself. According to Al Hendrickson, who had once been a guest of the Filipino landowner on whose veranda Cushing died, a servant of the landowner told Hendrickson afterward that Cushing had been killed by Japanese bullets without having had a chance to fire a shot himself. Whichever the case, the Japanese were sufficiently impressed that, even though he had been responsible for the deaths of perhaps five hundred of themselves, they gave him a formal military funeral. Thus ended the career of “the granddaddy of the guerrilla forces in north Luzon.”
²⁷

Two decidedly less flamboyant private operators were Lt. Cols. Arthur Noble and Martin Moses. They had commanded Philippine army units when the Japanese made the Lingayen landings. Their inadequately trained troops had crumpled before the invaders. Moses and Noble had then escaped to Baguio in the mountains, where they joined Horan. Then they went back down to the central plains, joined the withdrawing USAFFE forces, and retreated with them into Bataan. Here they performed well, then managed to escape from the peninsula after the surrender and make their way north again. Along the way they met several leaders of newly formed irregular groups, but just what they had in mind is uncertain. They are alleged to have reached agreements with at least two of the guerrilla leaders, Robert Lapham and Charles Cushing, that these men and their followers would affiliate with Noble and Moses, now the senior officers on Luzon, whenever the latter should be able to organize the whole area for systematic guerrilla activity. Long afterward, Lapham says he cannot recall any such understanding. Moreover, he doubts that Moses and Noble, in 1942, had any intention of forming guerrilla units at all.
²⁸
In fact, no affiliation took place. The ultimate designs of Charles Cushing, the brother of Walter Cushing, are as cloudy as those of Moses and Noble. Cushing eventually surrendered to the Japanese, supposedly at the behest of his imprisoned wife,
²⁹
though Al Hendrickson relates a different account of the surrender and the motivation behind it, later in this narrative.

Whatever their earlier intentions, Moses and Noble eventually claimed control over perhaps six thousand men heretofore scattered
throughout a dozen lesser partisan groups. Through Praeger's transceiver they reported to MacArthur that they had established a unified command, adding that they had also done much damage to Japanese installations at small loss to their own forces, that morale in their units was excellent, that thousands of young Filipinos would join them eagerly if arms became available, and that their most pressing immediate need was for radio communication to keep track of their scattered forces.
³⁰

Perhaps they exaggerated. Donald Blackburn thought Moses habitually depressed and pessimistic, and considered that both Moses and Noble readily found excuses
not
to undertake significant guerrilla activity.
³¹
The truth matters little: before any effective response could come from Australia, the luck of Moses and Noble ran out. The Japanese captured their orderly, tortured him until he revealed the whereabouts of his superiors, then captured them June 3, 1943, and executed them three months later. The careers of a high percentage of guerrilla leaders ended either like those of Noble and Moses or like that of Captain Manuel P. Enriquez who assumed command of Nakar's unit after Nakar was captured. Al Hendrickson, who became my commanding officer in the guerrillas in mid-1943, had once been in hiding with Enriquez and had gotten to know him well. He thought Enriquez was more of a playboy and self-conscious local celebrity than a warrior. Be that as it may, the Japanese, with their habitual barbarity, seized Enriquez's wife and children. The poor woman then pleaded with her husband to surrender. He gave way, but unwisely tried to keep up his contacts with guerrillas around Baguio. Eventually he disappeared.
³²

With the demise of Moses and Noble everything in north Luzon fell into chaos for a time. I have read accounts that describe Luzon guerrillas then as poorly fed, clothed, and equipped; often barefooted; lacking medical supplies; uncoordinated, badly led, and mutually hostile; living in constant fear and danger; and susceptible to Japanese propaganda.
³³
The description is recognizable but it is overdrawn, especially for central Luzon. Of course, guerrilla life anywhere, anytime, is not like that around a country club. Nonetheless, to say that most guerrillas were barefooted meant nothing. Few Filipinos out in the countryside wore shoes in the 1940s: I myself went without them for a year and a half. More important, these descriptions of “guerrilla attitudes” make no distinction between serious, dedicated guerrillas and mere “paper” irregulars and gangs of bandits.

The true situation was bad enough. All irregular groups save Lapham's were operating without authority, since everyone was supposed
to have surrendered with General Wainwright when Corregidor fell. None of us had any idea what might happen to us in the unlikely event that we survived the war. If the Japanese won, there would, of course, be no uncertainty about the matter. But if America won, would we be hailed as heroes or court martialled for disobeying orders? or, perhaps, regarded as mere bandits and put on trial back in the United States for murder and other crimes? or instead, tried thus in the Philippines before Filipino judges? Nobody knew, just as nobody exercised unquestioned authority over anyone else. Because of the guerrilla practice of leaders bestowing commissions on themselves and each other, there were units that consisted almost entirely of officers. Colonels were commoner than in Kentucky. Anyone who valued military regularity would have thought he was with Alice in Wonderland.

It is in circumstances like these that exceptional individuals rapidly gain ascendancy. They are not necessarily the “best” men, however “best” might be defined, but they are the most intelligent, or energetic, or ambitious, or clear-sighted, or ruthless, or charismatic, or some combination of these. So it was here. In north Luzon Capt. Russell W. Volckmann rapidly assumed overall command after the capture of Noble and Moses. Volckmann was a West Pointer who had been intelligence officer for General Brougher's Eleventh Philippine Army on Bataan. He and his friend Capt. Donald Blackburn, Brougher's signal officer, had escaped from Bataan before its fall and were in the Fassoth camp for a time when I was. After an array of hardships, adventures, and close calls at least as impressive as my own, they had eventually made their way north to Moses and Noble.
³⁴
There Volckmann was assigned the task of coordinating the activities of three of their subordinate commanders. Following the deaths of his superiors, Volckmann proclaimed himself a colonel, designated Blackburn as his chief aide, and took over what Moses and Noble had begun. He divided north Luzon into seven districts, tightened operating procedures, and established a regular system of communication between his headquarters and those units he declared to be within his jurisdiction. He appointed Capt. George Barnett to implement this reorganization.

One immediate difficulty was that some of the guerrilla leaders declined to be reorganized. The most important of these was Robert Lapham. Volckmann and Blackburn had already met Lapham on their trek northward in 1943 and had stayed overnight at Lapham's camp near Umingan in eastern Pangasinan province. Their mutual impressions on that occasion are interesting in view of Volckmann's subsequent
efforts to incorporate Lapham's organization into his own. Blackburn says he found Lapham uncooperative personally but that Lapham's camp was remarkably well run, an example of what human intelligence and energy could produce even in the most unpromising circumstances. Lapham said long afterward that both Blackburn and Volckmann seemed anxious to get on north into the mountains where they would be safer, and that neither gave any indication that they planned to become guerrillas. He added that he gave them guns and guides through the territory he then dominated.
³⁵

Eventually I joined Lapham's organization, and though I did not meet Bob personally until near the end of the war, I heard enough about him from others and learned enough from my regular communication with him that I came to appreciate his abilities, just as Blackburn had, and to like him in the bargain. Unlike some of the other chiefs of irregulars, Lapham was not selfish or personally ambitious. At the moment he was a guerrilla major who had taken advantage of the prevailing anarchy to reorganize his own command and strengthen his hold on several provinces in central Luzon. He named as his executive officer Capt. Harry McKenzie, a former civilian mining engineer who had lived in the Philippines for years and who had a Filipina wife and a son. The province of Tarlac he had put under the command of Capt. Albert C. Hendrickson, with whom I was to have much to do later.

Lapham simply ignored Volckmann's overtures and orders, just as he had earlier fended off the attentions of another ambitious guerrilla free lancer, Maj. Edwin Ramsey. Such was the milieu into which I moved when I fled north from Tarlac in mid-1943.

I had heard that Major Lapham had developed an extensive guerrilla organization in Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and parts of Nueva Vizcaya to the north and east, and that his influence extended into Tarlac, the province where I had collected a few ill-armed guerrillas of my own. As I moved northward in early fall 1943, I sent a runner to contact him and to offer to place myself and my small force under his command. About three weeks later the runner returned bearing instructions to me to contact Capt. Albert C. Hendrickson, commander of Tarlac province, and to work with him. After several days of wandering and searching I finally found him. Thus began one of my most memorable associations in the war.

Hendrickson was several years older than I and a couple of sizes bigger, 5′11″ tall and weighing about 180 pounds. He was also a colorful figure, habitually bedecked with a nickel-plated .45 automatic
and an M-1 Garand. He was of Finnish extraction and, aside from a year in college, had spent his youth working in the mines and living in the tough towns of western Montana and Alaska. He had enlisted in the army in the fall of 1940 and had been sent to the Philippines almost immediately thereafter.

From the first day of the war until the time we met, Al's life had been a virtual nonstop series of hair-raising adventures that exceeded many of my own. Though we did not then know of each other's existence, Al, like me, was at Nichols Field when the war began December 8, 1941. When the first wave of enemy bombers came over, he looked about frantically for shelter and spotted a nearby taxi with its engine running. He sprinted for it, leaped inside—and found the gears locked. He sprang out, raced to a nearby banyan tree, clambered up it a few feet, and was promptly blown out of it by a Japanese bomb which left him unconscious and temporarily deaf. When he regained consciousness, the bombs were still falling, so he dashed for a nearby stream, jumped in, and found himself buried up to his chest in clinging mud. The Japanese then began to strafe the area. With bullets splattering all about him Al managed to work his way out of the mud, crawl up a steep bank, and run toward a nearby church. When another wave of enemy bombers came over, he had a sudden impulse and dashed out of the church toward another banyan tree. Hardly three seconds later the church collapsed behind him, hit dead center by a Japanese bomb.

Al then took off down a road toward a burning building in front of which were several Filipinos gesticulating wildly and shouting that a female member of their family was inside, drunk, but that they were afraid to go in after her. Perhaps steeled, or numbed, by his experiences thus far, Al entered the flaming building, found the woman with a gin bottle, drunk indeed, and proclaiming to anyone within earshot that she did not care if the Japs killed her. He carried her out and surrendered her gladly to her relatives. Next day he volunteered to go up to north Luzon in the hope of embracing a quieter life fighting the Japanese.

He arrived in La Union province in the far north, a pfc in the signal corps, just in time to be cut off by enemy landings in Lingayen Gulf. His unit disintegrated. Officers and men scattered or hid out. Al managed to escape the Japanese and happened to find a telephone switchboard that was still open. He promptly called MacArthur's headquarters to tell the general about the catastrophe that had ensued, and then vacated the area himself.

Al soon hooked up with Maj. Everett Warner, a former provost
marshal at Camp John Hay, whom Al liked because he still wanted to fight the enemy. So wild and mountainous was that part of northern Luzon in 1941 that the Japanese took a long time to penetrate much of it. Thus, Al was able to sequester considerable stocks of medicine, canned goods, other food, and ammunition that would be of great value to the guerrilla groups already beginning to take shape in the area. Several small engagements with wandering Japanese patrols ensued, in the course of which Al must have comported himself well, since MacArthur's headquarters, then still on Corregidor, authorized Warner to commission him a second lieutenant April 25, 1942, and a captain soon after. It was one of the first such commissions granted to free lance operators in the Philippines.

Not long afterward Al came down with malaria. Luckily, there was a capable Filipino doctor in the vicinity with an American wife who was a nurse. They stayed by him faithfully for about a month and provided him with good food, medicine, and care, lacking which he would have died. After he recovered, Warner asked him to round up some Igorot
cargadores
(porters) and transport all the gasoline they had accumulated, some one hundred gallons, south into the lowlands. Igorots are a mountain people who dislike the low country and are normally reluctant to go far into it or to stay there long. These
cargadores
were typical: they took the gasoline only part of the way and then went home, leaving Al alone in an area by now teeming with Japanese patrols. Several patrols got wind of him, and he exchanged gunfire with three of them before he finally fled up a river into a jungle with which he was totally unacquainted. Here he lay in the brush for many hours until the enemy eventually stopped looking for him. When he finally dared to arise and move around, he was hopelessly lost. For at least two weeks, perhaps longer, he wandered aimlessly in the jungle, barely subsisting on such fruits and berries as he could find. Eventually some Filipino woodcutters found him, so nearly starved to death that they thought him an apparition. They carried him to a hut in a jungle clearing and tried to feed him, but his stomach was so shrunken that he vomited immediately. Then they carried him off to a barrio where other Filipinos fed him more gradually and gave him native remedies for his dysentery. Gradually he recovered sufficiently to think of resuming his original trip into the lowlands.