Behind Japanese Lines (39 page)

With our troops, sagging morale derived from quite different causes. When battle-weary veterans, especially if they were once draftees, think victory is at last in sight there develops among them a
marked reluctance to tempt fate and become one of the last casualties. During most of the war I had assumed fatalistically that I would never live through to the end, but now that the end seemed so near, now that true safety at home again loomed as a distinct possibility rather than a utopian dream, the fear of death flooded my imagination remorselessly.
¹⁴
Especially poignant were thoughts of my family, so recently filled with elation to learn that I was alive. What a crushing blow it would be to them if I was now killed after all. Every other day I relived all my wartime experiences and prayed that no stray bullet would seek me out so near the end of the trail. So far as I know, I was the only American guerrilla leader actually on the battle line along the Villa Verde Trail at this late stage in the war, though others of Lapham's guerrillas were fighting in the Cagayan Valley.

Some of the great soldiers of history—Alexander of Macedon (356-323
B.C
.) and especially King Charles XII of Sweden (1697-1718)—thought war was the grandest and most inspiring of all human experiences. Another such a one, in World War II, was Gen. George Patton. Like most people, I did not share this sentiment. Overall, I thought war was horrible. I was glad when World War II ended, and now I would rather die than relive my experiences during it. Nonetheless, Patton and his spiritual ancestors did have a point. Despite the frightful aspects of war, which are known universally and publicized endlessly, if a person can wrench his imagination away from the issues in a conflict, away from the personal danger involved, away from the
cost
of war,
¹⁵
there is no question that for many war is the most vivid of human experiences. Violence has a malign attraction for most of us, as every television advertiser and moviemaker knows. Likewise, if one can persuade himself to view mayhem
strictly as a spectacle,
there are sights in battle that are aesthetically pleasing; “beautiful,” Patton would have said. I will never forget the sight of the pale green sea slowly turning red from the blood draining out of a wounded Japanese at Aglaloma Bay. An exploding phosphorus shell, a sudden blossom of white against the sun, is a splendid sight. Planes flying into sunsets, smoke trails against a clear blue sky, multi-colored tracer bullets buzzing through the air like swarms of angry bees, a plane going into a graceful dive preparatory to strafing, the “whoomp” of a bomb hitting the ground followed immediately by a great circular mass of dirt hurtling into the air—all have a certain impressiveness and attraction if one does not think of what gives meaning to them.
¹⁶

Perhaps my anxiety about enduring until the end of the war was
quickened by the departure of my longtime friend and compatriot Al Hendrickson. Al had recently had a couple of narrow escapes reminiscent of some of his chilling experiences early in the war. On December 22, 1944, he and some of his men were withdrawing in the face of both Japanese and Huk attacks when his horse slipped while crossing a river and fell on him, breaking his ankle. A month after this mishap Al made contact with American troops in Tarlac and became attached to units of the Eighth Army, then headed for Manila, much as my men and I became attached to the Red Arrow Division. At that time the Japanese were fighting mostly delaying actions in this area since they were expecting major U.S. thrusts elsewhere. This consideration, however, had not yet diminished their habitual ferocity and ingenuity in combat. One of their favorite strategems when retreating was to leave behind an elaborate array of booby traps supplemented by sharpshooters and even an occasional machinegunner. On January 20 they nearly got Al. An isolated and camouflaged machinegunner opened up unexpectedly. Al leaped into a bomb crater and promptly refractured his half-healed ankle. Almost immediately he spotted a Japanese sniper and, with the last bullet in his rifle, shot the man—but only wounded him. The maimed Japanese careened toward him, bayonet fixed. Providentially, a GI happened to be right there and finished off the sniper with a burst from his BAR before Al could be spitted with the bayonet.

That was enough for higher authorities. Al was promptly restored to regular American military status, categorized as disabled, and given orders to return to the United States. I saw him the night before he was to leave and helped him celebrate his departure. After the party was over and Al had said his farewells to many of his guerrilla troops, I drove him toward a camp where he was to be processed for a flight scheduled for the next day. We never got there, or at least I never did. Somewhere along the way we got on a wrong road and arrived at a river. The camp we sought was on the opposite side. Only a railroad bridge spanned the stream. After some consideration we decided to try to drive across the trestle, only to be halted by an American MP. Al, who had had a few additional drinks since the end of his going-away party, inquired belligerently who presumed to prevent us from crossing. The guard replied firmly that his orders came from General MacArthur. Al considered the point briefly, then informed the MP that if MacArthur could retake the whole Philippines singlehandedly, he (Hendrickson) was certainly going to cross “this God-damned bridge.” The guard said, “No, sir,” but did nothing when Al got out of the prewar Chevy we had commandeered, shook hands with me,
shouldered a sackful of souvenirs, and limped off across the trestle, supported intermittently by Lee, his tiny Filipina girlfriend. Every moment I expected to see him fall into the river. When, at length, he reached the other side he turned, waved goodbye, and started down off the trestle. In a moment Lee's head disappeared, then Al's.

My emotions were muddled. I was somehwat jealous of Al, who was going home, and I felt continually remorseful about staying behind and quite possibly getting myself killed, which would utterly dismay my family, who had only recently learned that I was alive and who would surely learn that I could have come home. Yet I still considered it my duty to stay with my guerrillas while the war was going on. But then, after all, I did leave on June 20, 1945, several weeks before the end of the war! So much for logic in human affairs.

Did guerrillas in general, and we in the Philippines in particular, contribute significantly to overall Allied victory? If so, was our contribution worth what it cost in money, human lives, and intangibles? I cannot say for certain. Russell Volckmann, both a fellow guerrilla and an adversary of mine, maintains that neither the British nor the Americans ever appreciated the potential of guerrillas and consequently never made the best use of them either in Europe or in the Far East. They were never integrated into the whole military structure (as they were in the Soviet Union), never given proper logistical support, and were usually confined to gathering intelligence. He considers this to have been one of the lost opportunities of the war, on the Allied side.
¹

My immediate, emotional response is to agree with Volckmann; yet there is much to be said for the claim of B. H. Liddell Hart, one of the major military theorists of the twentieth century, that to encourage guerrilla warfare is a mistake in the long run because its political and moral residues are almost entirely pernicious and poison civilian society long after the war is over.
²
There is no question in my mind that what we guerrillas were able to do in the Philippines was of great value to the American army in the latter stages of the war. Moreover, measured in dollars and cents, it was dirt cheap compared to what the United States spent and got in other parts of the world. Yet so many Filipinos were killed, maimed, despoiled, and brutalized either by guerrillas of the outlaw type or by the Japanese in reprisals that I cannot help but believe that the Filipino people would have been better off had neither any of them nor Americans ever formed guerrilla
organizations. Certainly, they would have suffered less, though it would also have taken longer to liberate them. Whether the absence of American resistance in the Philippines would have enabled the Japanese to conquer Australia early in the war and then brutalize
its
people, nobody can know. History cannot record catastrophes that timely action may have averted.

Past history provides little guidance. Without the aid they received from Wellington's army, and lacking the disaster Napoleon Bonaparte suffered in Russia in 1812, the Spanish guerrillas who opposed Napoleon would have been defeated eventually. Their real achievement was political and psychological: they made serious problems for the invaders, prevented them from imposing their will on the whole Spanish people, and provided inspiration to the enemies of Napoleon all over Europe. If one believes the accounts left by Russian partisan leaders who badgered Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow, each one of them defeated him single-handed. Yet the French army in Russia suffered vastly more from heat, cold, and diseases than from military action of any kind. Moreover, Napoleon was not
driven
out of Russia: he decided to attempt an orderly retreat only six weeks after winning the battle of Borodino, and had he begun perhaps three weeks earlier still he would have gotten most of what remained of his army safely out of the country. As in Spain, the greatest contribution of the Russian guerrillas was to keep up the morale of the civilian population.
³

Much the same was true in Europe during World War II. Guerrillas of a dozen nationalities risked their lives to oppose the Nazis in innumerable ways, yet sabotage on the part of transport workers probably did more real harm to the Axis cause than all the activities of all the partisans combined.
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Real guerrillas grossly exaggerated their exploits; and after the war so many latecomers, braggarts, and outright frauds talked so grandly of their deeds in the “Resistance” that an outsider might wonder how their homelands had come to be conquered in the first place. Like their predecessors in the Napoleonic era, their chief importance was psychological: their actions and efforts helped clear the consciences of their peoples, and served as a source of national pride when the war was over.

This was fundamentally true in the Philippines too, yet the resistance there did make a more direct and important contribution to eventual victory than anywhere else. Without the deeds of guerrillas the Japanese certainly would have exacted heavier casualties from the American invaders of the Philippines. It was true that there were feuds among American guerrilla leaders; and true that wartime
rivalries between Filipino partisan bands often carried over into postwar feuds and gunfights. But, at bottom, nearly all the Americans subordinated their intramural quarrels to the common need to support MacArthur's plans to return; and at bottom a large majority of Filipinos spurned the awkward blandishments of their Oriental conquerors and gave the guerrillas the whole-hearted support without which we could not have operated or even survived. How many casualties and how much damage guerrillas inflicted on the Japanese, and how much they and Filipino civilians suffered in return, will never be determined precisely, but both considerably exceeded European norms. At no time during the war did the Japanese ever devise an effective way to deal with partisans, and near the end of the war General Yamashita lamented that the whole Filipino population had become a vast guerrilla system whose intelligence gathering and sabotage had surpassed all his calculations and fears.
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Yet it is in no way denigrating to acknowledge that one of the most valuable services we irregulars performed was simply to keep alive the faith of Filipinos that America had not forgotten them, that our strength would eventually enable us to prevail, that, to paraphrase MacArthur, we would return.

That guerrillas played a vital role in the defeat of the Japanese in Luzon after the Lingayen Gulf landings in January 1945 is unquestioned. What will never be settled is how much was contributed by various groups and whether credit for guerrilla achievements has been distributed equitably. The U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines, Northern Luzon (USAFIP-NL), commanded by Col. Russell Volckmann, have been given the lion's share of the credit. The official U.S. Army history provides a detailed account of how General Krueger originally intended to use Volckmann's guerrillas to gather intelligence, carry out sabotage, raid isolated Japanese units, relieve regular army units on guard duty, and engage in mopping up operations. It adds that all the guerrilla leaders, but Volckmann especially, interpreted orders and directives as broadly as possible and soon expanded their assigned tasks to such a degree that they were performing as regular troops. Some 8,000-18,000 of them blasted bridges, roads, and trails; ambushed Japanese forage parties; picked off enemy messengers and liaison groups; destroyed untold numbers of Japanese vehicles; killed thousands of enemy soldiers; rendered it difficult for the enemy to move anywhere save in large numbers; captured great quantities of Japanese equipment and supplies; and conquered the whole northeast coast of Luzon. All this vastly complicated enemy communications, drained his resources, and reduced the ability of
Yamashita's troops to live off the land. Indeed, when the Japanese in north Luzon at last surrendered it was guerrillas who had fought their way within five miles of Yamashita's headquarters, closer than any other Allied unit.
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These exploits caused both General Krueger and MacArthur's Headquarters to declare that Volckmann's guerrillas had proved as valuable as a front line division.
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In his own book Volckmann recounts the deeds of himself and his followers at length, though not boastfully.
⁸
He does allege that, given the ruggedness of the terrain in northern Luzon, the familiarity of the guerrillas with it, and the nature of the fighting there, it would have taken twice as many regular troops as guerrillas to have duplicated these feats.
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