Behind Japanese Lines (22 page)

Since the new Japense stratagem was reported to involve two thousand men, Al and I decided it was time to depart. We left Tarlac and moved off northward into Pangasinan province. Here we settled for a short time near the town of Bayambang on the Agno River in an area known locally as the “fishponds” because fish were raised there commercially. There was so much water everywhere that we had to
move at night by boat, as though we were in Venice. One night we passed through a narrow canal where fish nets had to be removed so we could get by. In the process the fish became so excited they leaped out of the water in all directions, some of them into our boat. The boats themselves were distressingly primitive: mere hollowed logs so overloaded with men and equipment that when I gripped the sides of mine my fingers were in the water. Needless to say, nobody made any unnecessary movements. I was too scared even to ask the depth of the water.

One evening we stopped at a large hacienda. Here were beds with mattresses, a luxury we had not seen for two years. Unhappily, our anticipated joy in getting to sleep in a real bed proved illusory. After trying it a few hours we awoke with our bodies sore from the unaccustomed softness and spent the rest of the night on the floor.

Unquestionably, the best thing that happened to me at this stage of the war, the spring of 1944, was that I selected a new bodyguard, Gregorio S. Agaton. Greg was young, clean-cut, alert, fearless and absolutely loyal. He saved my life several times, the first time not long after he joined me. The occasion arose amid resolution of a persistent problem that has vexed genuine guerrillas for generations: how to deal with “armies” that profess to be guerrillas but are actually mere gangs of bandits.
⁹

Shortly before we fled north into Pangasinan, reports began to come in from distressed people in western Tarlac that a certain Filipino freebooter there was trying to organize a “guerrilla” force of this sort and to exact contributions from civilians. Since nobody in his outfit was known to have fired a shot at a Japanese and since he had made no contact with our headquarters, it was hard to imagine anything constructive coming from his operations. So we sent out an arrest order for him. Three days later he was delivered to us. According to reports, he had made a number of statements highly critical of our organization, so we exercised utmost caution when he was called before us. Greg and Little Joe, Al's bodyguard, and several more of our men trailed the arrested man closely as he walked into our room. The fellow was wearing a native shirt that hung loosely outside his trousers. During our first verbal exchange he made a sudden motion with his right hand toward his right hip pocket. Al and I immediately drew our .45s. He returned his hand to the front. We then told him he was about to die.

Several of our own men at once interceded for the suspect, saying that he now realized how things stood and would not do anything contrary to our wishes. The suspect added his own profuse assurances
that this was indeed the case. So, after a warning, we let him go. After he had departed, I noticed Greg and some of our boys grouped together examining something. I stepped closer to see what it was. It was a strange looking .38-caliber revolver. I asked Greg where it had come from. He said he had pulled it from the back of the belt of the man we had just released, precisely at the time when Al and I drew our .45s. Thus, we had not misinterpreted his intention at all, and had it not been for Greg's alertness one or both of us might have died right then.

The recurrence of episodes like this had much to do with the reluctance of guerrillas to take prisoners and to their general tendency to shoot first and ask questions afterward. They also intensified the constant tensions of guerrilla life. Vernon Fassoth recalls once being hidden in a gloomy, stinking jungle, famished, frightened, utterly spent, and enmeshed in clinging vines. Suddenly he could endure it no longer. Overwhelmed with rage and frustration, he seized his .45 and aimlessly defied fate by shooting wildly at the vines even though he knew the Japanese might hear the shots. Vernon also once saw a big, brawny man gradually sink into exhaustion from carrying a load too heavy for his smaller buddies. After hours of backbreaking toil the giant suddenly stopped and hurled the hated bundle into a rice paddy even though it contained food and other commodities sorely needed by his whole party.
¹⁰

I sometimes responded to similar pressures by similar recklessness, though more often in a way that reflected elation or fatalism than frustration or depression. Al said he liked me because I was usually good-natured, talkative, and ready for anything, where many of the American guerrillas were grim and humorless. In fact, Filipinos who knew us looked upon both Al and me as something like playboys since we would sometimes go to dances in rural barrios and dance with the local girls. I would jitterbug, Al would dance an Irish jig, and his girlfriend Lee would sing, all to the delight of the local people. We knew the risks involved, but I, at least, simply did not care because I did not expect to live through the war anyway.

Once I did something that a psychiatrist would probably ascribe to temporary insanity. It was December 1943, and we appeared to be well settled in Eastern Pangasinan. December 11 was my twenty-fourth birthday. For the occasion we located a cameraman with good equipment and had him take some pictures of our headquarters staff. I really knew better than to do this, and if one of my subordinates had done it I would have punished him. Why I did it I cannot explain convincingly even to myself. Anyway, I did take the precaution of
having only one print made of each picture, and had it delivered to me. The negatives were hidden by the photographer. It soon became evident that Murphy's Law applied in the Philippines just as it does everywhere else. We heard that the photographer had been picked up by the Japanese. We sweated blood. Everyone in the picture would be wanted immediately. Most of those concerned rushed into hiding. I ordered a search made at once for the negatives. Luckily they were found, hidden under the grass roof of a house.

Another instance involved defective judgment, too, but at least the blunder was less egregious. This time we were holed up in a village near Bayambang in southern Pangasinan in December 1943, when a Filipino from a neighboring barrio came to us one day and said he had a radio receiver powered by an automobile battery. He asked us if we wanted to hear a news broadcast. He assured us that he did not mean Tokyo Rose, the notorious Japanese propagandist, but an American broadcast. Since we hadn't heard a radio report in two years, we assented. Then came the bad news. The receiver was on the opposite side of a town occupied by the enemy. Probably we would have been discreet and stayed where we were, had our informant not added that the town contained an ice plant where we could get ice cream, something we had not enjoyed since the war started. That clinched it. We followed our man, crossed a river in a canoe, then climbed into a
calesa
for a ride around the outskirts of the town. As we rolled along, our guide informed us casually that we would soon have to pass a Japanese sentry. For a moment I was paralyzed with fear, and I would guess that Al was too, but neither of us wanted to lose face in front of the other so we rolled down the buggy's side curtains, pulled out our .45s, and laid them across our laps. For insurance I prayed that we would not be challenged. If we were, the first thing that would happen would be that we would leave a dead Japanese solider lying in the road, but of course the gunfire would be followed by an alarm and there was no obvious place for us to try to escape. Luckily for all concerned, we rolled serenely past the guard, who gave us a perfunctory wave.

The radio was hidden in a haystack near a large mango tree, which our guide climbed to secure the antenna. We sat down to listen to the news and music. I particularly recall hearing Bing Crosby sing, of all songs for our locale, “White Christmas.” No doubt this would have buoyed up the spirits of many, but it had the opposite effect on Al and me. For me every Christmas since 1939 had seemed more depressing than the last. To hear this song brought back memories of my father, mother, sisters, and friends back home, whom I had trained
myself for many months
not
to think about. I now thought of how good wheat bread and ice cream would taste; of what a pleasure it would be to smoke a Camel instead of uncured Philippine tobacco cut into strips and rolled into cigars so strong that for months I got a cheap drunk every time I smoked one. It was all a dismal reminder of how lonely, forlorn, and precarious our present existence was. Now, if there is one thing a guerrilla must battle constantly it is depression and despair.
¹¹
This experience was not helpful.

Sometimes combatting depression took strange forms. I recall once when Hendrickson was feeling particularly down that I tried to cheer him up by telling him that I did not expect to survive the war either but that we ought to die fighting, shot in the front, not shot in the back while running away or beheaded by the Japanese in some prison. He never told me whether he found this rumination consoling. Be that as it may, after we had listened to the radio we rode back unmolested past the same guard. Though he never knew it, his inattention to duty saved his life.

Men and women who lived in Japanese prison camps have related much more about the depression attending such an existence than I will ever know. Still, it was apparent to me how depressed many prisoners became during the war. For instance, some of the American prisoners at Cabanatuan, which was not far from where we operated, were assigned to drive trucks to nearby towns to secure vegetables and rice to feed those in the camp. Many times I had individual guerrillas approach these drivers and urge them to escape. They always got the same reply: “Not now, Joe, maybe later.” It surely was not that they had no desire to escape, since all prison camp literature indicates that most prisoners think about escape a great deal. I eventually learned, too, that the prisoners in Cabanatuan knew guerrillas were active in the vicinity; indeed, that they sometime heard gun battles between guerrillas and Japanese, and saw dead Japanese soldiers being hauled back to the camp in trucks. The truth seems to be that there is a vast gulf between thinking idly about escape, or even planning an escape, and actually trying to get away, especially when one is weak from disease and undernourishment, and when he knows that if he is captured not only will he be killed but that quite possibly as many as ten of his fellow prisoners will also be killed in reprisal. I have often wondered how many of the drivers whom our men tried unsuccessfully to lure away survived the war. Some died in the camps themselves; others were killed inadvertently by American bombs and submarine torpedoes when the Japanese tried to transfer them in unmarked ships to Japan; still others died in Japan itself.

Soon after our narrow escape when listening to the clandestine radio, Japanese activity in the area increased, so Al and I vacated the environs of Bayambang and headed off northeastward across Pangasinan. As we travelled, we met several heavily armed units belonging to Lapham's command. Each escorted us to the next one within the area. Along the way I traded my old M-1 rifle for another and got myself into a predicament which illustrates some of the constant problems we had with weapons. Whenever possible, we tested rifles before having to depend on them in combat. Greg took this new one into the usual underground covered pit and fired it. The ejector tore away part of the shell rim, leaving the shell casing in the chamber. I looked at the gun and discovered that the chamber was so badly pitted that I would have to use a ramrod every time I fired the piece in order to knock out the old casing. I didn't have a ramrod, and several hours of laborious filing to try to smooth the chamber proved fruitless.

Eventually the problem was solved in a way not prescribed in any manual. A few days later we met a Filipino Constabularyman who had been armed by the Japanese with an M-1. I proposed to him that we trade rifles, or parts of them. He said he couldn't because his Japanese masters would notice the different serial number. I wasn't worried about
his
problems, so I offered him an alternative: trade rifles or join our guerrillas on the spot. He traded.

One morning when we had proceeded some thirty or forty miles northeastward from Bayambang into the vicinity of San Manuel in eastern Pangasinan, we ran into a nest of Japanese. We sighted some to the north across a ricefield and so turned south to a village where we promptly encountered more. Runners told us there were still more to the west, so we did the only thing possible: we moved east until we reached the Agno River, a large stream that flows out of the central Luzon mountains southwestard across Pangasinan and then turns north and runs into Lingayen Gulf. Here our prospects looked dark indeed: surrounded on three sides by the enemy and with the far side of the river an unknown quantity. For all we knew, the Japanese might have set an ambush there. No matter. To cross was our only chance.

Many times before this Al and I had crossed streams by a means that will surely seem odd to Americans: we had been “bobbed” over by Filipinos. The method was simplicity itself. Though we were bigger than Filipinos, each of us would climb onto the back of one, the man would leap into the stream, hit bottom, leap upward, gulp in air when his head bobbed out of the water, spring off the bottom again, and so on. Each motion carried “bobber” and rider farther downstream, but both gradually got across.

This time no such luxurious mode of transit was available to us, for the rainy season had arrived and the Agno had become a raging torrent. Some Filipino civilians saved the day by bringing us some large gourds wrapped with vines. We put our sidearms and ammunition inside, tied our rifles across the top, grasped the vines with one hand, and paddled energetically with the other. Everyone got across satisfactorily save a Filipino spy whom we had unwisely kept with us. As soon as he got into the water, he swam downstream as fast as possible, returned to the same side where we had started, and took off across the countryside. We didn't dare shoot at him because the noise would alert the Japanese, who were too close to us already. Now he was free again; free, as we subsequently learned, to go back to his home, a place fortified with a stone wall topped with broken glass and surrounded by floodlights.