Behind Japanese Lines (32 page)

The most significant of Utleg's accomplishments was to map Japanese installations at San Fernando, La Union, north of Lingayen Gulf on the west coast of Luzon. In the latter part of 1944 all signs pointed to American landings somewhere on Luzon before many more months. But where? The Japanese did not know, but it was clear that they regarded the coast around San Fernando as a likely locale, because they steadily moved heavy American guns from as far away as Corregidor and fixed them in strongly fortified tunnels dug into the hillside above Poro Point. Lingayen Gulf itself, a few miles south, was also a possible landing site but a risky one because of unfavorable tides. We discovered afterward that the information our operatives gathered about the Japanese gun emplacements was studied carefully by General Willoughby, MacArthur's G-2 in Australia. On the basis of it the original landing plans were changed and the uncertain tides and surf in the gulf were risked. As a consequence, the Japanese were surprised and not well situated to resist the landings save by kamikaze attacks, and untold hundreds of American lives were thereby saved. Overall, it was a clear vindication of the dictum of the British military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart that obstacles of nature should always be accepted and combatted in preference to undertaking a frontal assault against an enemy in a prepared position. For me
personally, if I had never accomplished anything else in the whole war I would have regarded my time as having been spent profitably.

Juan Utleg's value as an intelligence officer eventually forced me into the most excruciating dilemma I have ever confronted, even worse than dealing with the killer of Dolores. As described above, Juan had learned all about Japanese defensive preparations near San Fernando. Moreover, his counterespionage people had enabled him to catch several Filipinos who were spying for the Japanese. Of course, it did not take the enemy long to learn who was responsible for this or to find out what his position was in my outfit. As an example of how fast such news got around, the governor of Pangasinan once told me that the local Japanese Kempeitai commander had asked him if he knew Capt. Ray Hunt. The governor replied that he had heard of me but did not know me. The Japanese then remarked that the governor must know I was in his area, and added with an understanding smile, “When you see him, tell him I said ‘Hello,' and that some day we will get him.” The governor relayed this message to me, adding that the Japanese knew my exact description, even to the color of my hair and eyes.

Juan knew the Kempeitai were looking for him too. One day when he was home he saw some Japanese troops approaching the house. He slipped out a rear window into a bamboo grove. The visitors then questioned his wife. She said Juan was not at home. The Japanese then took Mrs. Utleg and their young son, and left a message with villagers that the two would be retained as hostages and would be killed if Juan did not surrender.

Juan was a brave man as well as an able one, but, like most Filipinos, he treasured his family above all else. He came to me with tears in his eyes and begged me to let him surrender. I excused myself and went out to consult Greg. When I came back, I had the first of several long talks with Juan. Finally, I told him I absolutely could not let him go. He knew all the leading members of the guerrilla forces in Pangasinan, all our strengths and weaknesses, all our battle plans, all our spies, informers, and sympathizers, and everything about how we were now getting occasional reinforcements from submarines. He promised over and over that he would never reveal anything to the Japanese. I reminded him quite as often that the enemy was familiar with every means known to man of extracting information from even the bravest and strongest, and that they would stop at nothing when dealing with someone as valuable as himself. For this reason we simply could not let him go to them. All our plans to aid the returning American troops might be destroyed. Juan knew this, of course, but it
simply reminded him afresh of what the Japanese might do to his wife and son if he did not surrender. He unfolded his whole life to me, told me how much he loved his family, and begged me to relent. I simply could not. Heartless though it must seem, I had to weigh the lives of Mrs. Utleg and her son against those of many hundreds of guerrillas and civilian supporters of ours. I had Juan placed under arrest, sedated, and guarded heavily. For several days I prayed with more fervor than I had ever done before—or have since. A few days later a light appeared in Juan's house again. His wife and child were home unharmed. Why, I don't know. Sometimes the Japanese simply acted in legendary “inscrutable” Oriental fashion. Whatever their reasons, and even though we still had to keep Juan in hiding, the way things turned out lifted from me the most terrible burden I have ever had to bear. What I would have done if Juan's wife and child had been killed I cannot imagine.

It has sometimes been asked rhetorically what kind of job requires the keenest intelligence and the highest level of general ability: research scientist, medical doctor, manager of a big business, president of a university or school system, political leader, army commander, or what have you? I cannot pretend to know the answer, and anyone in any prominent position has difficult decisions to make occasionally, but I don't believe anyone in any civilian occupation ever has to face dilemmas as cruel as some of those that crop up in wars. The case of Juan Utleg was Exhibit A in my experience.

Governor Balingao of Pangasinan, who had conveyed to me greetings from the local Kempeitai commander, also told me a story about a macabre incident of a different sort that he had witnessed. The Japanese had set to work to build a crude wooden bridge over a river near Umingan. When it was almost finished, the river flooded and the bridge was carried away. They rebuilt it, only to have another flood sweep it away again. Then they built it a third time. When they were finished, two Japanese soldiers sat down cross legged, one at each end of the bridge, and their companions piled wood about them. Then all the Japanese began a ceremonial prayer. In the midst of it the wood was lighted and the two soldiers were burned to death without making a movement or a sound. Such actions illustrate the impassable psychological barrier that separated Japanese from Westerners. It also availed them little: a few weeks later we burned the bridge to the water's edge.

Fortunately for our sanity, life was not always as sordid as a recital of these grim episodes might indicate. In fact, once I got things reasonably well organized in Pangasinan I began to think, for the first
time since the war began, that I might survive it. We even had some good news of a conventional sort occasionally. Nine months after he had become my bodyguard, Greg Agaton surprised us all by revealing that he planned to get married. Of course, we were all pleased for him personally. We found a minister, I loaned him some clothing, and he and his bride Petronia M. Ruiz, were properly wed in our camp on September 15, 1944. My own feelings were mixed, since I had come to respect, trust, and rely on Greg a great deal. I assumed that once married he would quit the guerrillas and I would have to find a new aide. But he did not: instead he sent his new wife back to her home in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, near where we were now encamped, and continued as my number one man. The wedding did produce a break between us eventually, though. Before this I had promised Greg that if I lived through the war I would take him back to the United States with me, if he wanted to go. I extended the offer again after the war, but by then he and his wife were in the process of acquiring a family of five sons, and he felt that their collective future was in the Philippines. We did finally meet once more, but it was decades later, in Honolulu, in December 1984. The reunion was tearful.

In 1943 we had had a lot of trouble either getting information to Australia or securing supplies for our own troops. As indicated earlier, many of our arms were secured by capture from the enemy. Things improved in 1944 when submarines began to land periodically near Baler Bay in Tayabas province on the east coast of Luzon. The site was close to a Japanese naval base, but it had to be chosen since the water was too shallow for submarines anywhere else along that coast. Prior contact had been made with Bob Lapham, who had already established a system of coast watchers in the hope that they might spot a submarine. Both Bob and Al Hendrickson sent many of their guerrillas over the Sierra Madre Mountains to contact the submarines and haul away their cargo. Neither I nor any of my men ever unloaded a submarine, but beginning in June 1944, when Minang came back from her trip to see Lapham, bearing my promotion to commander of Pangasinan, we began to get supplies from submarines.

Because the whole operation was exceedingly risky, the guerrillas involved were not told where they were going or for what purpose until they actually arrived and were put to work building bamboo rafts to unload submarines. After dark there would be an exchange of coded light signals, following which the sub would slip into shallow water, where it would be temporarily helpless: unable to submerge quickly and escape in case of detection. For this reason the captain
and crew of a submarine always wanted to unload their cargo as fast as possible. This made problems. The deck of a submarine loomed eight feet above the bamboo rafts. The natural bobbing of the rafts in the sea combined with the haste of those unloading sometimes caused crates of arms to go to the bottom of the bay. We discovered that many destined for us must have contained .50-caliber machineguns, since we got enough .50 ammunition to shoot at everything that moved for the next several months, but no equivalent number of machineguns. We did receive many small arms of various types: carbines, “grease guns,” tommyguns, M-1 Garands, and sidearms. Also included were various medicines and surgical instruments, radio transmitters, propaganda materials, money, and the usual assortment of cigarettes and candy. Gradually the subs began to appear more often to augment these supplies and to drop off specially trained men of various sorts: Filipino radio operators and repairmen, teams of demolition experts, and weather observers. Some fifty tons of commodities were sent to Lapham's headquarters; more intended for him was landed with shipments for Anderson.
¹⁸
How much of it I got, I do not know exactly: quite a bit.

A story of some sort went with or soon became attached to most of these items. A case we got marked “Money” was interesting in the sense that on the first submarine it was not broken open. On subsequent trips, however, it was discovered that whiskey and pesos tended to disappear en route. Finally some imaginative soul had an inspiration and took to marking these containers “Military Rations.” None was molested thereafter.
¹⁹

The medicines proved invaluable. In preceding months Al Hendrickson and I had occasionally gotten hold of a few quinine tablets or other medicines that happened to be already in the Philippines. With these meager supplies we had tried to doctor tropical ulcers, malaria, and other native maladies, as well as an array of ordinary cuts and bruises, especially those of children. How badly medical care was needed is indicated by tales related by other guerrillas. Col. Robert Arnold describes how he had a terrible stomachache which a local pastor, in default of a doctor, diagnosed as appendicitis. With no doctor, no operation was possible, but some natives suggested an alternative. The lining of a chicken's gizzard contains juices that will dissolve anything less formidable than an anvil, so all the dried chicken gizzard linings that could be found were boiled to make an incredibly bitter broth which Arnold forced himself to swallow twice a day. Eventually he recovered.
²⁰
Illif David Richardson, a guerrilla on Leyte, once faced an even more bizarre
medical problem. There the Japanese had bayoneted a Filipino in the stomach, ripping such a gash that the man's intestines hung out. Incredibly, the victim managed to run three miles without pushing his intestines back inside his body cavity, or even trying to hold them close to his stomach. Richardson consulted a medical book and decided nothing in it was applicable to present circumstances, so he cut the wound larger, stuffed the poor man's intestines back in, gave him all the sulfa drugs he happened to have, and stitched up the wound with abaca fiber, the only thread available, only to have his hapless patient die after all. Of the whole disheartening experience he said, “It is only in the storybooks that hard work, effort, trying and trying again come out to have a happy ending. Working in the guerrilla has taught me that much.”
²¹
Most likely Richardson was just momentarily, and understandably, disheartened. I don't think a congenital pessimist could have lasted out the war with irregulars. Though I long thought, as a betting proposition, that I would not survive the war, I never acted on that assumption on a day-to-day basis.

One useful by-product of the periodic submarine contacts was that Hendrickson was able to send off to Australia five Americans whom he had fed and doctored for weeks but who were obviously too sick or dispirited, or both, to be of any value in battle. They were Captain Lage, Lieutenants Kiery and Naylor, and Sergeants Jellison and Bolstead. As narrated in
chapter 4
, above, Kiery refused to hike through a jungle and over a mountain to reach the submarine, choosing instead to row a rubber boat around a point of land. It capsized and he was drowned. One of the others told Al flatly that he was “sick of the God-damned war” and only wanted to get away from it, though he stayed in the army after 1945 and eventually attained considerable rank.

Of course, it occurred to us that if submarines could bring in supplies and take away the sick, they could also take away men liberated from Japanese prison camps, not to speak of ourselves. The last temptation was hard to resist. We American guerrillas had all been in combat zones for three years, we all wanted to save our skins, and doubtless we would have been permitted to leave had we asked. Nonetheless, Lapham, Hendrickson, and I stayed on longer, for reasons that will be explained later.