Behind Japanese Lines (38 page)

After my rear area contretemps with doctors, nurses, supply clerks, and officious military police, I came close to ending my career ignominiously—in a jeep accident. One day I went for a ride with a Lt. Harry Lerner, whose name should have been spelled Learner, for he proved to be indeed a novice at driving. We were moving at a good clip along a straight stretch of gravelled road near Santa Maria, Pangasinan, when suddenly a fork in the road loomed ahead. I could see at once that we were going too fast to negotiate it, but this did not prevent Lerner from trying. We would have rolled over for sure had I not grabbed the wheel from him and held it straight ahead. We jumped a large ditch—almost. The front wheels cleared it but the rear wheels didn't. I was catapulted straight up into the air. When I hit the ground, the jeep was ahead of me, stopped dead in a field, its lunatic driver still sitting behind the wheel. I was only shaken up, but after the experience it was almost a relief to get into a combat zone.

Though the fact is not much emphasized in books, the struggle for Luzon was the biggest battle of the whole Pacific war. The Japanese committed more troops there than on any other Pacific island, and the Americans more than in any European campaign save the invasion of northern France. Throughout their defense of the Philippines in general, the Japanese were hampered by a chaotic command structure and by divisions of authority. The Luzon campaign was an exception. Here Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was in overall command. He had planned to establish three defensive strongholds on Luzon: one in the mountains east of Manila, another in the mountains west of Clark Field, and the most important one in the mountains and jungle of north Luzon, where he hoped to control the food-producing Cagayan valley. His last choice was excellent in the sense that this rugged, primitive area, penetrated by only a few poor roads and mountain trails, would minimize the effectiveness of American armor, heavy weapons, and air power, but it had the disadvantages of aggravating his own supply problems and of being highly favorable terrain for guerrilla operations.
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Thus, the Japanese could control only those areas where they happened to be physically present in considerable numbers. Worse from their standpoint, wholesale sabotage by many guerrilla groups both before and after the U.S. landings had done so much damage to roads, bridges, railways, rolling stock,
and trucks that the Japanese could move only a trickle of essential supplies to their defensive positions. Nevertheless, Nipponese soldiers battled on like cornered bulldogs, precisely as Yamashita had expected. It was amazing how long and how well they continued to fight under such adverse conditions. When they were broken as organized groups, they fought on as individuals until they were killed or died from sickness or hunger. Yamashita, in his lair near the top of Mt. Pulog, over nine thousand feet above sea level and about as close to Heaven as he was ever likely to get, had every reason to feel proud of his troops and satisfied with his own efforts. He did indeed give his compatriots in Japan sorely needed time to prepare for the eventual American assault on Nippon proper.

It was into this cockpit that Bob Lapham asked me to go one day in February 1945. I was to serve as liaison officer between the Thirty-second (Red Arrow) Division and the guerrillas attached to them. The Thirty-second was a famous division that had begun the war in the jungles of New Guinea and had been engaged continuously somewhere in the western Pacific for thirty-seven months. Its veterans had climbed so many mountains that some of them said their division insignia should be a mountain goat.
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Their current task was to try to root the Japanese out of their foxholes along the Villa Verde Trail, a track that wound sinuously upward in a northeasterly direction through the cordillera of Luzon towards Yamashita Ridge, heavily entrenched high ground named for the Japanese commanding general. The trail itself was named after a Spanish priest, Juan Villa Verde, who had long ago passed over this jungle footpath to bring Christianity to the Filipinos in the Cagayan Valley. Although guerrillas were not formally incorporated into the Sixth Army until March 1, 1945, they were being used as front line troops alongside the veterans of the Red Arrow division weeks before that. My main responsibility was to see that they did a good job. The task occupied me continually until June.

Aside from trying to stay alive, my most pressing problem was usually transportation. It seemed to me that I was always on the move, and always on dusty dirt roads. The sweltering heat made me sweat profusely, and the sweat caused the dust to cake on me from head to foot. I spent my last four months of the war with a bandanna tied across my face.

The Villa Verde Trail, a locale where Al Hendrickson had hidden for a time in December 1942, was well named. It was not a road at all but a trail that wound up steep mountainsides and across exposed ridges from near sea level to altitudes of 3,500 feet. U.S. troops had to
use bulldozers and graders to widen it enough so trucks and other vehicles could move equipment and supplies along it. Japanese snipers picked off the dozer operators with such disheartening frequency that dozers and graders had to be armorplated. One day I witnessed an episode that I will never forget because it exemplified some of the best qualities of American troops and of the United States itself. I heard an officer order an enlisted man to drive a bulldozer. The man refused, saying it was suicide. For such a reply he could have been executed for disobeying orders in combat, but the lieutenant merely looked at him, climbed onto the bulldozer himself, and went to work. The enlisted man watched silently for a few minutes, then motioned to the lieutenant to stop, and the two traded places without a word.

Fierce fighting along the trail had begun in January when I was still holed up in the foothills east of San Quintin. Progress had been slow. That there had been
any
progress was due mostly to the combat engineers. It is hard to overpraise these men who had to toil under fire to gouge eight-to-twelve-foot roads out of mountainsides so steep that sheer drops of 300-1,500 feet on the outer edges were commonplace. Later, when the rainy season set in, they often had to do their work all over again, since avalanches of mud and water would pour down the mountainsides and wash out the roads. Then the bulldozers would have to wallow in mud sometimes as much as four feet deep and struggle for twelve hours a day to rebuild roads that rose as much as twenty-two feet in a hundred. Many times logs had to be buried in roads to reinforce them. Nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of sandbags were used to make retaining walls.
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Merely watching supply trucks go up and down such roads, in the daytime and under fire, with two wheels on the edge of the cliffs, was hair-raising. How ambulance drivers managed it at night I cannot conceive—but they did. Gen. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell showed up once along the trail and said the whole situation was as tough as anything he had seen in Burma.
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Life was no more salubrious off the immediate trail. Everywhere on high ground the Japanese had widened and cleared natural caves in mountainsides and along hilltops, and had consolidated them with a vast series of interlocking tunnels, one of them so big it had been made into a hospital with seventy beds.
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Most of these dugouts were positioned so that the enemy could cover U.S. positions below with machinegun and mortar fire. Often entrances to the caves and tunnels were on reverse slopes, making them difficult to locate and almost impossible for U.S. artillery to hit. As usual with them, the
Japanese were not content merely to sit in these strongholds and await Allied attacks. They sneaked up close to American lines at night, then threw twenty-pound packs of TNT or dynamite into the midst of our troops and tried to set it off with hand grenades. Sometimes they would undertake banzai charges, carrying long bamboo poles with either bayonets or mines on the ends of them. One of their favorite tactics was to infiltrate at night and fight fiercely for springs that had drinkable water.

Combat under these conditions was ferocious. Eventual victory owed a good deal to superior American improvisation. Armored bulldozers took to plowing their way right up to Japanese machinegun nests. Then tanks would bull in after them and blast the enemy point blank.
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Tanks would also carry flamethrowers, which terrified the Japanese. When enemy soldiers jumped out of holes to escape the fire, our infantrymen mowed them down. U.S. troops and Filipino guerrillas often dug trenches toward Japanese caves, much as European sappers and miners approached fortifications centuries ago, pushing sandbags ahead of them as they went, until they drew close enough to throw dynamite into the caves and bury the inmates alive. Sometimes machinegun fire was employed to isolate a cave and keep its Japanese inhabitants down until Allied troops could crawl close enough to toss in TNT or phosphorous bombs. Sometimes Piper Cub planes only 150-200 feet above the ground spotted for artillery, which then plastered a complex of caves with high explosives to prepare the way for our infantry “cleanup” crew with their own explosives and flamethrowers. Some such Japanese strong places were simply bypassed, or surrounded and cut off from food and water, and their inmates left to die. On at least one occasion American troops fell right into a detachment of Japanese underground when a tunnel caved in. They killed all the inhabitants before the latter knew what had happened.
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Though I was in the combat zone for several weeks and could easily have been killed any day, at least I did not have to build roads under enemy fire or dig Japanese out of caves. Perhaps what got on my nerves to the greatest degree was our own artillery. The Thirty-second assembled all the 155mm. howitzers they could find and fired them in salvos day and night close to where I slept. The noise was ungodly, and the concussion gave me the feeling of being regularly lifted about a foot off my bunk. I slept little and was consoled only by the fact that the hellish artillery was at least pointed away from me. After a few days of it I comprehended much better the accounts I had once read of soldiers in the trenches on the western front in World War I going mad
during intense artillery barrages and rushing into the open to commit suicide.

The savagery of the fighting and the hatreds engendered thereby strain belief. In one place the Japanese launched so many desperate counterattacks that men of the Twenty-fifth Division named it Banzai Ridge.
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On our side, one day I had to stand aside on a narrow trail to let litter bearers pass as they removed the dead and wounded. On one litter was a boy who had been badly burned by a flashback from a flamethrower he had turned into an enemy cave. Seemingly oblivious to what must have been the excruciating pain of burns over much of his body, he cursed the Japanese hysterically, shouting over and over again, “I got the yellow sons of bitches! I got the yellow sons of bitches!” Sometimes macabre incidents were less serious than this, but no less grisly. One day when I was scurrying along the front I almost stepped on a large stone. When I looked more closely, it was a Japanese head.

More tragic were the inevitable foulups. Many times the air corps was called in to bomb ahead of the advancing infantry. Inevitably, a bombardier's aim would occasionally be faulty or a bomb would fall from the rack too soon, and men would be hit by their own bombs. The second time this happened to one outfit, it buried a few men. The survivors raged at the aviators, cursed them, told them to go to hell, and yelled that the war would be won more easily without them.

Enemy planes took their toll, too. In fact, the last Japanese plane I ever heard or saw very nearly got me. One dark night I was watching an outdoor movie with the Thirty-second Division. The area was not blacked out, and the movie had just ended when a Japanese plane came in low over the mountains, without running lights, unheard, and unseen by radar. Before we knew what happened, the pilot dropped his bombs and strafed the headquarters area. I was lucky: he missed both me and the water wagon I crawled under.

Another time I came even closer to cashing my chips. I was with a Lt. Col. Smith of the Thirty-second. Smith was a mild-mannered officer who had been with the Red Arrow Division through many harrowing battles all the way from New Guinea. Now he was due to go home, but war had not lessened his essential humanity, so he wanted to go to the front lines to bid his men farewell. A friend of his, a major, and I were along when the trail came out onto an open ridge where U.S. troops and some of my guerrillas were dug in. As we came to the front, the major warned us not to walk in the open since there were enemy snipers about who could “give a person a third eye” as a macabre local saying had it. Accordingly, we moved off the ridge. I
talked to some of my men and Colonel Smith shook hands with some of his in their foxholes. After goodbyes we went back to the command post down in the foothills, got into a jeep, and started off. Smith's eyes were moist, more at the thought of leaving his men than with joy at the prospect of going home. We had gone only a short way when a Japanese artillery shell plastered an ammunition dump a few yards behind us. Had it come a couple of seconds sooner, Colonel Smith and I would now be names on grave markers.

Many were not so fortunate. One such was a cousin of mine, Warren Corn, of Willow Springs, Missouri. Unknown to me, Warren, whom I remembered only as a small boy, had come to the Philippines as a rifleman in the Twenty-fifth Division of the Sixth Army. He knew I was “missing in action” and had written to his family that he intended to look for me. After landing on Luzon he learned that I was indeed alive, and he informed his family of my good fortune. But I never saw Warren: it was only after I returned to the United States that I learned from his parents that he had been shot through the heart by a Japanese sniper and had been buried at Rosales, Pangasinan.

The Official Army History (Robert Ross-Smith,
Triumph in the Philippines
) mentions that during the spring of 1945 there was a perceptible decline in the morale and combat efficiency of various U.S. regular army units engaged in the reconquest of north Luzon, one evidence of which was a marked increase in psychiatric casualties.
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It is not hard to understand why, nor to appreciate why the same tendencies existed amid our enemies. If the three F's of combat are “fog, fatigue, and fear,”
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the latter two deepen visibly near the end of long campaigns or long wars. In the latter stages of the grinding, bloody struggles on the steep mountainsides and honeycombed hilltops of north Luzon, American troops would sometimes hear muffled explosions far underground. They were set off by Japanese troops whose tunnel openings had been sealed by American explosives and who now, sick and despairing, chose to blow themselves up with grenades. American Intelligence wanted us to take prisoners: they even offered riflemen a case of beer for every Japanese prisoner delivered.
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Most of the prisoners were in a sorry state: wounded, starved, and suffering from beri beri to such a degree that they could no longer fight or retreat, and so drained psychologically that they no longer had the will even to attempt suicide.
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