Behind Japanese Lines (18 page)

Whatever the origins of rifles, or their condition, we could not give our men much training firing them, both because we were habitually short of ammunition and because we were usually close to Japanese garrisons whose inmates might hear the noise. To some degree we got around the latter by digging pits in the ground and covering them with grass to muffle the sound of the rifle shots, or by practicing during thunderstorms when thunder would mask the reports of the rifles.

What it came down to eventually was that every squad leader trained his own men as he thought best. The excellent performance of the guerrillas after the American landings late in 1944 is the clearest evidence that sometimes ad hoc arrangements are better than adhering rigorously to some “system.”

Donald Blackburn wrote that one of the most onerous features of guerrilla life was boredom: that much of the time about all there was to do was keep out of sight, check impulses, control tempers, and wait.
³⁸
For me personally that was not true. Blackburn spent much of his time well up in the mountains of north Luzon at considerable distance from the enemy, while I lived in the lowlands with the enemy all around me and thus found greater safety in moving about regularly than in just sitting. Blackburn was right about most Filipino guerrillas, though. They got bored easily unless there was some action.

Organizationally, we did what we could. We tried to construct our units according to the U.S. Army Table of Organization, and discipline them, when possible or appropriate, with the Manual of Courts Martial as a guide. We designated company leaders and bestowed
commissions on them, assigned areas of responsibility, and outlined missions to be performed and objectives to be attained. We tried to add seriousness to the guerrilla profession and to reinforce a spirit of regularity by requiring each inductee to swear to the following oath of enlistment:

The Undersigned, being of legal age, do hereby enlist in the Guerrilla forces of Luzon. In doing so, I pledge allegiance to the Commonwealth of the Philippines and to the United States of America. I agree to protect said governments against all enemies, foreign or domestic. I further agree to respect and obey all orders from my superiors and to remain under the control of said organization, until released by proper authority. I swear that my enlistment is voluntary, of my own free will and without mental reservation or purpose of evasion, So Help Me God.

One principle I took special pains to impress upon recruits was that unlike our rivals, the Huks, we were not going to coerce the civilian population. If the civilians would not support us voluntarily, we would simply disband. Anyone who used weapons for personal gain, to commit crimes, or to bully civilians would be punished, and since we had neither jails nor jailers there could be only one punishment. To be sure, we did lean on the Japanese-appointed leaders in areas we intended to organize. Such dignitaries as a governor of a province, mayors of towns, or village chiefs and elders were warned that we expected their cooperation. Most complied readily, either because they feared us more than they did the Japanese or because, in most cases, they were secretly friendly to us anyway. Civilians en masse proved to be no problem at all. They helped us wholeheartedly. Farmers contributed much rice and livestock, and sold so much in return for what amounted to U.S. government IOUs that in some areas guerrillas ate better than civilians. Sometimes the Japanese would try to deny food to guerrillas by moving all the people out of a given area so they could not produce food, but this proved self-defeating since the longer the war lasted the more the Japanese themselves became dependent on Philippine food.
³⁹

The problem of whether to pay for food and supplies, and if so how much, to whom, and in what kind of currency, was a tangled one. Much of the support our outfit got came from people who did not expect to be reimbursed. Contrarily, many wealthy landowners and city people donated money to guerrillas but wanted receipts showing that they had contributed prewar Philippine pesos that had been worth about 50¢ in U.S. money. The problem here was that the
Japanese had replaced such prewar money with their own military scrip, printed on cheap paper and not even numbered. Filipinos disdainfully named this money
gurami
after a small, worthless Philippine fish, but the conquerors required everyone to accept it at face value. I once received a ten-thousand-peso contribution in
gurami
, for which the donor wanted a receipt specifying postwar payment in prewar Philippine currency. I had to turn him down. Blackburn says he and Volckmann gave out IOUs worth some 10 million pesos for food, clothing, and supplies, all of which the U.S. government redeemed after the war.
⁴⁰
If so, the recipients lived far more grandly than anyone in Al's outfit, or my own later. I never signed for more than a tiny fraction of that amount.

A reader might suppose that we would have sought the most inaccessible mountain fastnesses of Luzon to establish our base of operations. A few individual American escapees tried to do this and then just wait for the end of the war; and in the far north Volckmann's guerrilla headquarters was well up in the mountains, though he controlled large areas of lowland in the Cagayan Valley too. Where I was, however, first in Tarlac province and then in Pangasinan, this was simply not practical. It was hard to find much food in the mountains, difficult to keep in contact with the civilians on whose support we depended, and miserable trying to move about on mountainsides that might look inviting from a distance but which were often covered with sawgrass ten to fifteen feet high that ripped clothing and flesh impartially, not to speak of obscuring numberless rocks, ravines, and chasms. Moreover, if we holed up in the mountains we would draw the Japanese there after us, and they would then oppress the mountain people atrociously. In the lowlands enemy cruelty toward civilians was at least tempered by the consideration that food was produced there. Since the Japanese grew increasingly dependent on it, there was a practical limit to how beastly they could behave toward the Filipinos who produced it. Thus, we stayed out of the mountains and moved about almost constantly across the ricefields of central Luzon.

Our strength varied enormously, and it is difficult even to estimate it with any accuracy since every guerrilla outfit consisted of a small core of permanent semi-professional soldiers; a much larger force of occasional warriors; and a vastly more numerous retinue of supporters, sympathizers, and periodic helpers of varying stripes and degrees. If one counts only those whose regular activities were gathering information, fighting, training, and making plans to fight, then all guerrilla forces were small. If one counts all the peripheral people too,
then they appear large. Bob Lapham eventually “controlled” some 15,000 men, and by the end of 1944 I could have mustered 3,400 for a given occasion, though it would have stretched the truth to call all of them soldiers. Most of the time we, and other irregular groups as well, had far fewer, and we always travelled with far fewer since a small force could move faster and was harder to detect. I tried to maintain a small headquarters contingent of ten to twenty men, but often roamed the countryside with as few as four. Most of our troops, after all, were rice farmers who joined us actively only on occasions when some specific need existed.

Travel was highly varied. We rode on handcars on the railroad, in horse-drawn buggies on lightly travelled roads, on horses or carabao through fields when we could, and walked the rest of the time. It was not uncommon for us to move thirty miles in a night across fields that had no trails and rivers that had no bridges, all without lights.

We never could have made it without help from the “puppet” leaders, whose loyalty to their Japanese masters was only nominal, and the Neighborhood Guards. The latter were civilian groups organized to prevent stealing. They became our best friends. They kept us supplied with up-to-date information about the enemy and provided the guides who were invaluable on our numerous moves. But we used guides with all possible caution: in relays and for short distances only. We gave each one different, and false, information about our destination just in case one of them might be pro-Japanese or might be captured. At night we put out a double circle of civilian guards at every trail the Japanese might take, and then inside these a third ring of our own guerrilla guards. We were comparably careful about our personal security. Though individual habits varied, I always slept fully clothed, my rifle at my side, and my .45 in its holster with a bullet in the chamber and the hammer at half-cock position.

The most difficult obstacles to our nocturnal travels were ricefields during the rainy season, after the ground had been broken and planted. Then we had to follow a zigzag course atop the dikes that surrounded the fields. The dikes themselves varied greatly in height, width, and strength. All of us took many a header into a sodden rice paddy whose retaining walls proved weaker than they looked. Of course, this was disagreeable for the victim of the moment, but for onlookers it provided some occasions for laughter in circumstances where humor was sorely needed.

If a person didn't get soaked from falling into rice paddies, he usually did from the awesome rainstorms that descended periodically, turning every gully into a raging torrent and virtually drowning
any person caught outdoors. Still, the rain was warm and did not discommode us unduly.

What I hated and feared more than rain or mud was light. Most American troops in the Pacific heartily disliked night operations, but not I. I always felt far more secure in the dark, and whenever I could I moved my men in the dark. Moonlit nights, though beautiful aesthetically, were especially dreaded because they enabled enemy patrols to move about easily without lights, thus increasing the danger that they might slip up on us. Normally the Japanese used lights on dark nights and so could be detected from long distances. By contrast, we had become accustomed to moving in the dark without lights and so had an advantage on moonless nights. Moonlight seemed to cause dogs to bark more than usual too, and I have never forgotten the fear that invariably gripped me when dogs began to bark or howl at night.

Thus, guerrilla existence was hard, dangerous, unpredictable, and psychologically wearing. Still, as Margaret Utinsky, a valiant Red Cross nurse, once put it, it was better than being a prisoner of war, for a guerrilla was still a free man, a volunteer. She should have known, for she was both prisoner and guerrilla during the war, and as a prisoner she had been tortured shamefully by her Japanese captors. She also made another sagacious observation: she said that she would never have survived the war had she been able to see into the future; that people can do impossible things
if they don't know what is coming
, if they don't know that they will be called on to do the seemingly impossible.
⁴¹
I agree totally. In war you must live from day to day, even minute to minute. Highstrung or unduly thoughtful people crack up in war. You need to be stolid, to put your imagination on the shelf for the duration; otherwise you simply cannot bear to witness the gory demise of friends and associates, or their sudden disappearance, and yet go on about your business knowing the next may be yourself.

As I related earlier, when I first began to form a guerrilla band I had not expected to fight pitched battles with regular Japanese troops but to ambush small detachments of them, particularly to pick off the Kempeitai. From memories of the Death March and the sight of what the enemy had done to Filipino civilians, I thought less of a Japanese life than of that of an animal. One of the reasons we moved around so much, sometimes toward Japanese garrisons, sometimes away from them, was that we were often looking for opportunities to set an ambush.

Chick Parsons, who was in contact with guerrillas throughout the Philippines during the last two years of the war, described one of
the commonest ruses employed by them. It went something like this. Since the Japanese always wanted to lure guerrillas into the open to fight pitched battles, they would set an ambush and try to entice guerrillas to fall into it. The irregulars would pretend to take the bait, and would pepper the enemy a bit with rifle fire from concealed positions just to pin him down long enough for Filipino civilians to flee out of harm's way. Then the guerrillas would withdraw into the bush and try to induce the Japanese to follow them to places where they had set ambushes of their own. Thus, they acted defensively against initial Japanese harassment, then offensively if the enemy tried to penetrate the mountains or jungle that protected them.
⁴²
Sometimes we tried stratagems of this general character, but most of our strikes were simple hit-and-run operations, after which my men would scatter, hide their weapons, go back to their homes, and appear to the world to be ordinary rice farmers.

On one of these occasions I learned a valuable lesson in the inherent limitations of planning and regulation. I assigned a Filipino lieutenant to undertake a particular ambush and prepared an elaborate plan for him. After explaining each portion of it to him I would stop and ask him if he understood. He invariably answered, “Yes, sir.” I gradually became suspicious that he did
not
understand, so when I had finished I asked him to repeat the entire order to me. All he could explain was what it was he was to attack. At first I was enraged, but after simmering down I reflected that he was an utterly loyal man of respectable ability who could probably do a better job in his own way. Since our problem was usually to restrain Filipinos rather than encourage them, since they had their own hatreds and priorities, since our control over them was only tenuous anyway, since language barriers frequently blurred understanding, and since we did not dare write out specific battle orders, it simply worked better to pick a Filipino subordinate whom you trusted, tell him in general what you wanted done, and then leave him alone. Perhaps needless to add, circumstances like these do not make it easier, after a war has ended, to determine who was and who was not a “war criminal.”