Behind Japanese Lines (21 page)

A few Americans who managed to make it by boat from the Philippines to Australia in 1942 described Philippine guerrillas they had known as ragged, starved, almost defenseless, and reduced to something close to banditry just to stay alive.
¹
Donald Blackburn paints a vivid picture of Robert Arnold, long missing and presumed dead, when he walked into Blackburn's headquarters in north Luzon in the spring of 1943. Arnold was covered with tropical ulcers, many of them infected and filled with pus. Embittered against all guerrilla organizations, even the Volckmann-Blackburn unit to which he had just come, because he thought them ineffectual, Arnold said he had lived for the past year on a diet of rats and corn, and that he knew other guerrillas who were cannibals as well as bandits. Blackburn adds that after a week or so of plentiful food, a good bed, and some medical treatment Arnold changed his mind, came to appreciate the abilities of his hosts, and even wanted to join their organization.
²
Yay Panlilio says that some men in Marking's guerrillas succumbed to a combination of tension and boredom and began to do such mad things as play Russian roulette, at which several shot themselves.
³
She adds that the combination of privation, danger, and quarrelling among leaders eroded morale seriously. Men grumbled sourly that they were wasting their lives, that the Japanese harmed the Filipino people far more than they (the guerrillas) were able to harm the Japanese, and that the Americans would never come back. Many simply could not endure it, she said; they despaired and went back to the towns.
⁴

That such conditions existed in some other irregular outfits, I
have no doubt, and we had our share of such problems, too, perhaps the worst being gut-wrenching decisions that had to be made about the disposition of prisoners, real or suspected spies, and disobedient subordinates—as will be related in bloody detail later in this narrative. Every one of us also knew that each day might be his last. Even so, neither Al Hendrickson and I together, nor either of us separately, ever had any morale problems of the magnitude described by others.

We moved around a lot, seldom staying in one place for more than a week. Contrary to what some might assume, though, these sojourns did not consist of marching up and down main roads seeking pitched battles with the Japanese. Most of our days were humdrum, spent in simple, obvious ways: hiding, sleeping, gathering and evaluating information, planning, nursing each other, rustling food, recruiting new followers, looking for opportunities to accumulate arms, and occasionally circulating propaganda or committing some act of sabotage.
⁵
Of such activities much the most important was collecting intelligence. Merely ambushing half a dozen Japanese now and then could not have much effect on the outcome of the war.

Still, as time passed it became increasingly evident that we were discommoding our foes. As early as March 19, 1943, Radio Tokyo had made reference to Philippine guerrilla activity, an indication that the Japanese already regarded it as a problem of some consequence. By the end of 1943 Japanese soldiers no longer wandered about alone. Now every Japanese outpost contained at least four men, and they dug trenches under the buildings in which they lived. One night we stopped close to a Nipponese outpost and listened to those inside praying to their emperor to bolster their spirits. Clearly life was a lot less agreeable for them than it had been.

Meanwhile the villagers who hid us went about their customary activities as their ancestors had done for generations. The women squatted on the banks of streams and beat the dirt out of family clothing with wooden paddles, in the process often chewing betel nut or indulging in the strange practice of smoking cigarettes with the lighted ends inside their mouths. Now and then they would take a break and undertake a collective assault on the head lice that are commonplace in the Philippines. They would sit in a line, one behind the other like a row of monkeys, and each would pick the lice and nits from the head of the woman in front of her. I never did figure out how the last one in line was accommodated. It seemed to me that a circle would have been a more logical configuration.

During the rainy season sudden fierce downpours were common, but nobody seemed to mind, or even notice it much. The men,
usually barefooted, dressed in shorts and, armed with bolos in wooden scabbards attached to their belts, went about their business as usual. Women would pack whatever they had to sell and walk off to market quite as readily during a cloudburst as on a sunny day. Funerals were frequent, rain or shine, and were always joyous occasions; never sad. Wine and sweet foods would be shared, as at a party. When the deceased was being taken to his final resting place, his cortege was always preceded by a brass band if anyone could find or assemble one.

Still, we lived under constant strain because we never knew when the Japanese might spring a surprise attack and capture us. The danger seemed especially great at night. I never reached the point where I could take it all in stride, and I don't think Al Hendrickson did either. It seemed that every Filipino farmer had at least two dogs and that every one of them for miles around would bark at the slightest provocation: We all became light sleepers; and Al, who had exceptionally keen hearing, would awaken almost every night, nudge me, and ask me if I had heard “that”—whether “that” happened to be the millionth dog barking, the sound of a truck on a distant road, or something else. I would routinely remind him that we had three rings of guards all around us and tell him to go back to sleep; but I was so edgy that I seldom followed my own advice. Scores of times I got out of bed and made a nocturnal tour of the guards to make sure all of them were awake and alert.

Months later when I was in Pangasinan province, I established a simple and seemingly foolproof method of recognizing friends and foiling enemies in the dark. A guard, when challenging someone, would say, “Halt!” and then follow up with a number, such as “two.” The person challenged would then reply some other number, “three,” “four,” or whatever number comprised the code for that night. This safeguarded us against Japanese, who were adept at repeating English words flung at them as challenges but would have no way of knowing what different word or number was expected on a given occasion. Al preferred a different but comparably simple system: using words from Filipino dialects, which very few Japenese knew, as passwords.

Whatever the system, a person never felt entirely safe; never sure that something unforeseen would not happen. An episode with a particularly bloody ending has always stuck in my memory. It took place near San Nicolas in eastern Pangasinan. Here two Americans, one of them bearing the memorable name of Jewel French, were being protected, they supposed, by a Filipino bodyguard. One night he picked up an automatic rifle, riddled them as they slept, kicked their
bodies into the Agno River, and went over to the Japanese. The guerrillas never captured the man, but they settled accounts with him nonetheless. A few weeks later he was with a small company of Japanese who fell into an ambush.
⁶

Many of our persistent difficulties with our bands of irregulars were rooted in the elementary fact that our control over them was only tenuous. To be sure, all our men recognized Al and myself as their leaders and they would obey us when we were with them, but at any given time only a few of them would be armed and actually with us. Routine guerrilla operations, moreover, were usually carried out by underlings to whom we gave only general directions. Often subordinates would embark on enterprises of their own choosing without bothering to notify superiors. Likewise, the superiors did not always
want
to know everything their lieutenants were doing.

Many times, too, operations were undertaken not for any real military purpose but simply to avenge atrocities against civilains. Panlilio records that on one occasion Marking became so enraged at some particularly fiendish Japanese cruelty that he marched their whole outfit over the Sierra Madre Mountains to fight the Japanese, saying that he was determined to kill as many of the enemy as he could even if the whole Filipino nation perished in the process. Fortunately, his rage subsided before he was able to do anything suicidal.
⁷

I have read that Filipinos, whether guerrillas or ordinary civilians, were often reluctant to fight. Maybe they were in some places or at some times, but my experience with them was quite the reverse. Many times individual Filipino civilians killed Japanese on their own, without reference to guerrillas at all. Many a Filipino, guerrilla or otherwise, came to me with tears in his eyes begging for a gun so he could kill a Japanese who had committed atrocities against his family. Much as I sympathized with such people, and great as my delight would have been to accommodate them, my problem was always to quiet them down and persuade them that it was essential to avoid trouble that would activate the enemy's military police, who might then catch me and inflict some hideous mass punishment on the helpless Filipino civilians who had harbored me. But sometimes we attacked Japanese patrols or small installations for no reason other than to keep up the morale of our men, to allow them to let off steam.
⁸

Many a raid, too, was undertaken mostly to get supplies. The Japanese occupation forces and their creation, the new Philippine Constabulary, were outfitted heavily with what had been taken from
Americans after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. Guerrillas would then raid Japanese installations, kill the defenders, and take back the arms, ammunition, food, gas masks, shoes, money, and wrist watches sequestered earlier by their foes. Japanese corpses were even fished up from rivers to get such commodities. How precarious life often was for everyone in the wartime Philippines can be indicated by a number of disparate incidents, some funny, some grim, some both. One night Al Hendrickson and I were on the move when we came to a broad, deep ditch bridged by a single large bamboo pole with a frail hand rail attached. As mentioned earlier, Al had exceptional hearing. He tested the bamboo bridge and jumped back, asking me if I had heard it crack. I said I hadn't, and assured him that it was strong enough to bear an elephant. Al was still skeptical, but at my urging he started to cross it. He edged out cautiously to the middle when, with a crack like a pistol shot, the bamboo broke. Al plummeted into the water several feet below. Fortunately, the water wasn't deep, but the mud beneath it was both deep and stinking. As Al strugged to climb out of the mess, he let loose a torrent of profanity. Most of it was directed at me for having urged him on in the first place, and now for laughing at his predicament. He was doubly infuriated when I refused to walk close to him because of the stench of the mud.

Al was still simmering from this mishap when we came to an exceptionally large ricefield. Clomping around the near edge of the paddy was an old man carrying a lamp that consisted of a lighted wick in a Vaseline jar full of coconut oil. He said he was trying to catch frogs. Al, who knew the local dialect, directed him to lead us along the dikes to our destination across the field. Since the dikes in and around this ricefield went in every direction, it was hardly surprising that after much walking in complete darkness we found ourselves back at our starting place. Nevertheless, we were dismayed; and Al was still burning from having fallen into the stinking mud earlier. Now he stormed at the old Filipino as though he would explode. He drew his .45 and cursed the old man in English until his vocabulary was exhausted. Then he repeated the cussing in Finnish, then in Spanish, then in the old man's dialect, and finished by telling the frog hunter he was going to be shot because he was a Japanese spy. I'm sure the poor fellow fully expected to be killed before Al cooled off and we moved on.

As if we didn't have enough routine troubles, the Huks began to undertake nuisance raids against us late in 1943. In an effort to put an end to this, Hendrickson made arrangements for one more conference with Huk leaders, this time in a small village near La Paz in
Tarlac province. Of course, I can see now, four decades later, that it was always useless to try to make common cause with the Huks about anything since we, quite as much as the Japanese, were obstacles to their ultimate aims, but if we still tried to deal fruitfully with communists periodically it can at least be pleaded that we were no more gullible than Allied governments who strove to treat amicably with the USSR in the same years.

To get to the meeting place we first had to ride in a
calesa
along a well-travelled road. Then we transferred to a railroad handcar propelled by a long pole, and then to horses. We finished the trip on foot. This was typical of the precautions necessary when moving in no man's land where everyone was suspect. We knew well enough the risk we were taking in meeting the Huks on their home ground, and when we finally arrived I was decidedly uneasy. About Al's state of mind I am less certain. He told me afterward that he knew that the Huk leader had stashed a couple of his men in a shack behind us where they could shoot us if they wished, adding that he had countered this maneuver by posting a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) man and a rifleman of ours behind
them
. Apparently he found this setup reassuring since he spoke to the Huks bluntly; though once, during a breather, he remarked to me half-ruefully that he wondered if we would get out of the place alive. Maybe the Huks did not mind Al's hard words unduly or simply did not have orders to kill us; anyway, they let us depart unmolested. The effort itself was a waste of time, as we should have expected after they had shot Harry McKenzie.

Proverbially, we had escaped the frying pan only to fall into the fire. As soon as we got back to our area, we found that the Japanese army and military police had decided to combine and make an effort to capture as many guerrillas as possible, Al and me in particular. To this end they devised a new tactic: to send a handful of soldiers, for some reason called “snipers,” to slip up to individual Filipino houses at night, where they would listen to conversations. On the basis of whatever information they gleaned, the Japanese would then undertake guerrilla-type countermeasures. This development produced panic not only among civilians but among some of our own men as well.