Behind Japanese Lines (23 page)

Luckily for us, the Japanese disliked big, fast streams, perhaps this one especially since on earlier occasions several of them had drowned in the Agno. Now they came up to the river, looked over the situation, and decided to camp on the shore opposite us. This gave us a sorely needed breather—and a chance to get ahead of them once more. The respite was brief. Soon they made their way across, picked up our trail, and pursued us relentlessly. For five days and nights Al and I and about fifty guerrillas moved steadily eastward across southern Pangasinan with the enemy never more than a village behind us and sometimes separated from us only by a ricefield.

Still, much as they hated guerrillas, and much as they would have exulted to use all of us for bayonet practice, the Japanese were a calculating lot. If they were in unfamiliar territory, or knew local irregulars had them outnumbered, they usually discovered compelling reasons to stay in their encampments. In our case, they did not dare to close with us, both because we were more numerous and because they would have had to advance toward us across open fields in daylight while we were protected by groves of trees around villages. So they spent their days torturing civilians and pondering what to try when night fell.

It has been observed many times that if habitually destitute people happen to get a little unexpected money, often they will not do the “sensible” thing and purchase necessities with it but will instead spend it “foolishly” on some luxury—at least in the opinion of people who are not destitute. Whatever quirk of human psychology is responsible for such conduct cropped up among us on the fifth day of our flight from our pursuers. We were in a village close to the mountains east of the town of Umingan, collecting provisions. Next day we
were going up into the foothills. The Japanese were one village away, making their own preparations to follow us. In these circumstances, when one would suppose that every one of us would have been serious and vigilant in the highest degree, Al bet me that Lee could field-strip an M-1 as fast as I could. Like a hungry bass who has heard a frog jump into the water, I rose to the bait and bet she couldn't beat me even if I was blindfolded. Anyone could guess what happened next. Just as we got our rifles dismantled, the enemy began to advance toward us. Al shoved Lee aside, I tore off my blindfold, and he and I began feverishly to reassemble the rifles. Alas! One part became interchanged and neither gun would work! So we had to tear them apart and put them back together again since by now both of us had long since come to subscribe to what the infantryman had told me during the Battle of the Points, that a soldier must become wedded to his rifle.

A tense competition in self-control between ourselves and the Japanese followed. We moved out of the east side of the village and down a creek bed while the enemy poured into the village from the west side. Not a shot was fired; on the Japanese side, presumably, because they were not looking for a gun battle in which we would be hidden and they would be in the open; on our side because we did not want to give our foes an extra pretext to maltreat the village people who had helped us. Besides, we hoped next day to be in a place where we would have all the advantages in a battle and there would be no civilians about to complicate matters.

That night we slipped into a farmhouse where the natives from the last village had been preparing rice for us, but almost immediately had to move on when the enemy continued to advance. With the heartening bravery I witnessed so many times in the Philippines, the villagers, even with our common enemy in their midst, tried to deliver the food to us, in the dark, in our new location. Some Japanese snipers, uncharacteristically moving about after dark, jumped them and one villager was bayoneted. The others escaped, though without the food, and ran to our new hideout to warn us.

There followed a scramble that might have been lifted from an old Abbott and Costello movie. Both Al and I were asleep in a pitch-dark room. He ordinarily took off his pants when retiring, and had done so now. I habitually slept in my clothing but had unbuckled my sidearms and had leaned my rifle against the wall. When we got the alarm, both Al and I immediately appreciated the urgency of the situation, but we were still half-asleep when we sprang into action. I rushed to the wall to get my rifle but couldn't find it because I had
gone to the wrong wall. I whispered, “Where is my rifle?” then finally found it, and only afterward remembered that I also had to find my sidearms and put them on. Al, equally confused, stormed around in the dark shouting, “Where the hell are my pants?”

We half-climbed, half-fell out of the house down a bamboo ladder, exchanged quick whispers with the men who had alerted us, and prepared to move out when Al complained that his pants, which he had finally located, didn't feel right. There was a good reason: he had put them on backwards. Despite our hazardous circumstances, I couldn't help laughing, adding that now the Japs would shoot him in the back for sure. Al responded profanely, but we got out of there so fast he didn't bother to change his reversed trousers.

We spent the rest of the night up in the foothills, but after surveying the countryside with binoculars the next morning we decided to move back down into the flatlands. At once we ran headlong into the enemy. All day long we skirmished with the Japanese but could gain no advantage. By evening we had to decide what to do next.

During the American Revolution, 165 years before, Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” would have his men scatter in every direction after an engagement, thereby making enemy pursuit impossible, following which they would eventually meet at some prearranged place.
¹²
Though I knew nothing about Marion's tactics at that time, we had long used a similar stratagem. When we were in some danger and felt compelled to break up, we would select three possible meeting places, number them in order of their attractiveness, and then try to meet at one of them. Nearly always at least one place would be available and reasonably safe. This time the Japanese probably expected us to go back into the foothills again after dark, but instead we slipped through their lines back into the central rice plains from whence we had come.

We did this for three reasons. The most basic was that we thought the Japanese would not expect it. We were also short of food, and there would be little back in the mountains. Finally, we were worn down physically, and traversing Philippine mountain trails is particularly difficult for Westerners. In most parts of the world mountain roads or trails follow terrain that offers the least resistance; they usually angle upward along mountainsides, frequently by means of switchbacks. Not so in the Philippines. The first time I saw little Igorot tribesmen shoulder heavy loads and lope, not walk, along paths that went straight up mountainsides, I was dumbfounded. Of course, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but many Igorots
develop enlarged hearts from heeding this axiom of geometry while we Occidentals could not travel rapidly in this way at all. Laboriously we trekked back across Pangasinan, along the way we had come, and went back into Tarlac province. A major change in my fortunes took place soon after.

As noted earlier, most guerrilla existence was an amalgam of danger, privation, and occasional boredom, interspersed with life's ordinary problems and vexations. It also bore another aspect which has heretofore received only passing notice in this narrative. That side was grim, cruel, bloody, and degrading, but given the character and deeds of our enemies, unavoidable.

We Americans are notoriously poor judges of the psychology of other peoples and maladroit in our dealings with them. In the 1940s the Japanese were incomparably worse. Had they treated the Filipinos with kindness and generosity from the first day of the war, many of the latter would have accepted their fate, and many who remained loyal to America initially would have gradually gone over to the conquerors as months of Japanese occupation stretched into years. But the Japanese army was filled with hubris as a result of its quick and easy conquests, and Japanese field commanders usually acted harshly in an effort to scare civilians into cooperation. Japanese military administration, by contrast, gradually began to urge leniency in an effort to win the sympathy of civilians. The latter might have worked had it been instituted in December 1941, but by 1943 there had been far too many crimes committed by Japanese against Filipinos for such a policy to have any chance of success. If military administration secured the release of some prisoners, few evidenced any gratitude. Most soon showed up with guerrillas, or worked with them secretly. As soon as guerrillas became strong enough to provide an alternative focus for the loyalty of Filipino civilians, they put pressure on local officials appointed by the Japanese and neutralized them as Japanese instruments. Moreover, the struggles of guerrillas against the Japanese soon passed into Filipino folklore and strengthened the Pro-American sentiments of most civilians. The Japanese were never able to counter this effectively. As the famous nineteenth-century German chancellor Bismarck used to say, it is the imponderables that are the most important factors in human affairs.
¹³

By the time I became a guerrilla, it had been learned long before by hard experience that if the enemy secured rosters of guerrillas they would confiscate the property of these men, and then seize their families and torture them. It is impossible to conceive a more effective
tool to use against Filipinos, whose primary allegiance has always been to their families rather than to the nation or state. The Japanese would also do such things as enter a village, herd everyone into the marketplace, then lead out an informer completely cloaked from head to foot save for slits for his eyes, and compel every person in the village to pass before him. When the informer lifted an arm, the individual then passing would be seized by the Japanese and put aside. When all had passed before the collaborator, and those who had aided guerrillas or otherwise shown themselves to be anti-Japanese had been pointed out, the hapless victims were marched to a field, made to dig a pit for their own burial, and then bayoneted to death.
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Another ploy of the Japanese was to send out their own agents, who would say they were collecting money and supplies for the guerrillas. Those who contributed would then be seized and tortured or killed, or both.
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If a guerrilla was captured, the Japanese would often torture him to death, stretching out the process over many days. The enemy would sometimes even behead the corpses of guerrillas.
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The techniques employed by the Japanese to extract information from prisoners and civilians, or to punish their enemies, were revolting, but some of them must be described if the reader is to comprehend the unbridled ferocity with which guerrillas often responded to such deeds. A favorite Japanese punishment was to “flood” a victim; that is, force water into his stomach until it was three times normal size, then pound the victim with their fists as if he were a punching bag, or jump on him, thus forcing liquids to squirt out all his body orifices.
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Another favorite treatment of theirs was to tie a victim's thumbs behind his back, toss the rope over a beam, and pull him up until his feet were off the floor. In an effort to get information the Japanese once crucified a Filipino boy for three days and then killed him with a sabre.
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At the war crimes trial of General Yamashita, a Filipina woman testified that two Japanese soldiers had held her while two others tried to cut out her husband's tongue because he would not give them information, which he did not have, about local authorities.
¹⁹

Simply to punish persons who had crossed them in some way the Japanese did such things as pull out all the victim's teeth, toenails, and fingernails,
²⁰
or chain him to a slab of galvanized iron in the hot sun, to be slowly fried alive.
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Merely to terrorize civilians the Japanese would sometimes send out a patrol at dawn to gather underneath a Filipino house-on-stilts. Many Filipino families then slept all together on the floor. At a signal the Japanese soldiers would thrust their bayonets violently up through the thin bamboo flooring, impaling
men, women, and children indiscriminately, until blood would drip down through the floor onto the assailants. They they would burn down the house.
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Ideally, guerrillas should have captured the Japanese responsible for such atrocities and executed them. In practice, this was impossible since the Japanese ordinarily fought to the death rather than surrender, even on those comparatively rare occasions when there was some chance to take prisoners. What was usually done as second best was to ferret out Japanese spies and collaborators among Filipino civilians, and punish
them
.

Now many writers have charged, after the event, that all guerrillas were unreasonably hard on anyone who collaborated with the Japanese.
²³
Their point of view is understandable, but many times we had to take drastic action on not much more than suspicion, or simply disband. We had organized guerrilla units in the first place to make life difficult for the Japanese and to collect information for Allied headquarters in Australia. We could not do either one without consistent, widespread, predictable civilian support. We could not get that support unless we made it safe for civilians to cooperate with us. Thus, our foremost immediate problem was always to pursue informers relentlessly and exterminate them. This not only made life safer for civilians sympathetic to us; it also caused fence sitters to gravitate to our side. The way we dealt with spies and suspected spies does not make pleasant reading, nor does it give rise to happy memories even forty years later but, like so much in war, it was the result of excruciating quandaries that armchair moralists never have to face.

There is no question that some guerrillas, both Filipinos and American, exceeded all norms of reason and humanity in their relentless pursuit of informers and subsequent treatment of them. Most Filipinos are mild, peaceful people, but if aroused or enraged they can become vindictive and capable of frightful cruelties. Illif David Richardson relates an instance on Leyte that illustrates the point. Some Filipino guerrillas there caught some of their countrymen collaborating with the Japanese, so they minced their bodies and floated the pieces downstream into Filipino villages. The number of collaborators dropped off sharply.
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An even more sickening case on the same island involved a luckless ten-year-old Filipino boy whom the Japanese had taught to become a sharpshooter for them. Some guerrillas of the criminal sort caught the poor youngster, smashed his face to a pulp, collected a cup of his blood and tried to force his twelve-year-old sister to drink it, a barbarity that immediately provoked a fight between the American commander of the
units and the men involved.
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I never
saw
atrocities at this depth of depravity and madness, but I saw enough that I don't doubt that such tales are true.