Behind Japanese Lines (40 page)

That Volckmann's accomplishments were impressive is unquestionably true, but what he and other writers have largely ignored is that the guerrillas of Lapham, Anderson, Hendrickson, myself, and others faced more Japanese in Tarlac, Pangasinan, and Nueva Ecija provinces than his men did in the north and that we cleared out our foes in short order. My own 3,400 highly varied irregulars, scattered all over Pangasinan in groups of 100, 200, or 300 received credit for killing 3,000 of the enemy during the five days immediately prior to the Lingayen landings. Volckmann's forces, by contrast, were engaged against the Japanese in north Luzon for another five months, though admittedly conditions there made military progress much more difficult than in the lowlands where most of our operations took place.

The three thousand dead Japanese credited to my units is an estimate, and it has always been difficult to offer anything better than rough estimates about how many enemy casualties should be attributed to any particular body of guerrillas. There are reasons for this—apart from the general confusion of war. For one thing, General Yamashita had almost three times as many troops in north Luzon in June 1945 as General Krueger supposed.
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For another, various estimates of both Japanese and Allied casualties are for different groups, different areas, and different periods of time. For example, James gives one set of figures (8,300 American troops and 1,100 Filipino guerrillas killed in combat and 205,000 Japanese deaths in combat) for the whole Philippine archipelago for all of 1945, and another set (400 Americans and guerrillas and 13,000 Japanese killed in combat) for the last six weeks of the war in north Luzon.
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Volckmann says his guerrilla infantrymen killed more than 4,000 Japanese between January and April 1945, and that all the north Luzon guerrillas inflicted 50,000 casualties on the enemy in the last months of the war.
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William Manchester asserts that after the fall of Luzon 820 American
soldiers were lost while killing 21,000 Japanese in mopup operations.
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John D. Potter, who admires the military skill of General Yamashita, puts U.S. casualties in the reconquest of Luzon at 10,000 dead, 87,000 in hospitals, and 37,000 “others.” He says nothing about Japanese losses.
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The official army historian gives varying figures for several particular actions.
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It is all like comparing apples, squirrels, and seashells. It is especially difficult for me, since I was personally involved, to assess the value of Volckmann's guerrilla activity in the context of all Luzon guerrilla operations; doubly so since I had resisted Volckmann's effort to absorb my forces into his command.

Volckmann came out of World War II much decorated by both the American and Philippine governments, and I heard many laudatory comments about his organization in the spring of 1945. Yet their postwar renown unquestionably owed much to the concern of their leader for what would become the historical record. General Whitney, MacArthur's overseer of Philippine intellligence, says Volckmann came to his headquarters only forty-eight hours after the American landings in Lingayen Gulf and delivered a full report on what he and his guerrillas had done during the preceding thirty months, and what they could do henceforth.
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No other leader of irregulars got there so soon or could report so fully.

A severe critic of guerrillas in Volckmann's locale acknowledges that most of Volckmann's men were able and civilized, and that they fought valiantly; but he denounces a minority among them, some Americans and some Filipinos, as cruel and egotistical scoundrels, drunk with power, who murdered, pillaged, and raped as wantonly as any of the Japanese. He does not accuse Volckmann of approving, much less authorizing, such conduct, but he does maintain that Volckmann did not do enough to restrain these savages.
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How much Volckmann knew about the deeds of some of his subordinates, and what he could or could not have done about it, I have no way of determining, particularly so many years after the events. As indicated earlier in this narrative, there were times when I had to swallow the unauthorized and exceedingly distasteful conduct of some of my underlings. Perhaps he did too.

Col. Robert Arnold, who commanded the ill-trained, ill-equipped, and understrength Fifteenth Infantry, had a low opinion of Volckmann's whole operation. He relates that he once visited Volckmann's headquarters where he found some of Volckmann's chief subordinates not merely in good health but positively overweight, and more interested in the good-looking girls who frequented the premises than in anything connected with the war. After a sumptuous
dinner a Filipino company commander told him that there were no Japanese within twenty-five miles of the camp and that they had not been bothered by the enemy for months.
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Yet a few things must be remembered. Arnold had a sour nature; he regarded guerrilla operations as senseless; and when he stumbled into Blackburn's camp in the spring of 1943 he was weak and sick. Blackburn says that after a week or so of rest, good food, and good treatment Arnold's spirits rose visibly.
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There are other indications that guerrilla life was not always filled with hardship and danger for Volckmann and his associates. His number one aide, Blackburn, describes supplies of quinine as plentiful, notes that they sometimes received gifts of whiskey, Coca-Cola, and fried chicken, and mentions matter-of-factly that they bought a good deal from an ordinary Philippine grocery store.
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He says he hated to move out of his own mountain hideout near Ifugao in September 1944 because it was safe: he was surrounded by friendly Filipinos, there was plenty of food, and he dominated all the officials nearby.
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He relates that Volckmann, who sometimes became depressed, seldom strayed from the heights of virtually inaccessible mountains; but that when he happened to meet him at Tuao in the Cagayan Valley early in 1945, after they had been separated for nearly a year, his superior looked healthy and dapper. A Spaniard gave them a bottle of whiskey, and a Chinese cook fixed them a fine lunch.
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All this may be true, but it hardly proves anything noteworthy. Only a fool would live precariously if he could live safely: only saints and mountain climbers actively seek hardship and suffering. Nowhere does the effectiveness of a military organization depend crucially on the standard of living of its commanding officer.

Still, I think Volckmann's achievements have been magnified; or, perhaps more accurately, that those of some of the rest of us have been slighted by comparison. William Estrada justly praises his countryman Tom Chengay as a fearless man and an excellent leader of a band that performed splendidly late in the war,
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and he praises Lapham,
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but he says little about any of the rest of us, and in any case his work had an extremely limited circulation. Bob Lapham could have made an outstanding military career for himself by trading on his fame as a guerrilla leader, but he was indifferent to glory or even to credit. In the spring of 1945 he broke his arm, fell sick, resigned his command, and went back to the United States. Thereafter he pursued a civilian career with the Burroughs Corporation. He never wrote anything about his wartime experiences. Lt. Col. Bernard L. Anderson
likewise left the army. So far as I know, he wrote nothing about his wartime deeds. I was the only major guerrilla leader in north central Luzon who stayed and fought alongside my men through most of the spring of 1945, but until now I have never published anything, either. Thus, some of the credit for guerrilla achievements in north Luzon in 1945 fell to Volckmann's units by sheer default.

But more was due to foresight. Astute and ambitious, Volckmann seems to have been the only American guerrilla commander on Luzon who kept detailed records, diaries, and rosters of troops. As a result, most of his exploits became part of recorded history. If the rest of us had kept similar records, it would now be much clearer who were authentic guerrillas and who were mere poseurs, which families of fallen irregulars deserved to be compensated, and how much credit ought to have been given to various guerrilla leaders and their groups for their contributions to final victory. But many of us did not keep such records lest they fall into the hands of the enemy, who would not only gain much useful information thereby but would also certainly use them to take murderous vengeance on the families of guerrillas.
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Yet there is no denying that when decades have passed and memories have failed, “official” history is written from records, and these inflate the importance and immortalize the deeds of those who kept them.
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The Philippine government eventually tried to straighten out the historical record but abandoned the effort in the face of insuperable obstacles. Those guerrillas who had once been soldiers in the Philippine army were part of USAFFE, and so their personal records can be found with U.S. military records. As for their compatriots who were civilians, there exist somewhere in Philippine army files official rosters of civilian Filipino guerrillas, but the names thereon may be those of anyone from true partisans to mere rascals who knew somebody important near the end of the war. Whether authentic or phony, few such guerrillas ever got either recognition or financial benefits from the U.S. Army after the war. Most of them simply scattered to their homes and farms in the wake of victory. Soon it became virtually impossible to trace them or to distinguish true from spurious guerrillas. By now the vast majority of them must be dead.
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Thus, it appears impossible that anyone can ever determine accurately how much which irregular bands contributed to the ultimate triumph of Filamerican forces on Luzon in 1945, and which individuals indubitably served in those bands.

Does it matter? In the grand context of history, not much: to
those of us who are still alive and were personally involved, it still burns a little.

In late spring I left the battle zone, moved southwestward to Rosales, Pangasinan, and set up a headquarters there from which to coordinate the activities of my guerrillas. Shortly afterward I went down to Manila for some purpose I no longer recall. While there, I went to see a Filipino writer, Lt. F.M. Verano, whom I had come to know when he had served as liaison between my headquarters and that of Gen. Manuel Roxas. Verano told Roxas I was in town, and almost immediately we were invited to a party at the house of Roxas's brother. There I encountered one of the most remarkable personalities I have ever known. Manuel Roxas was a politician par excellence. As the thirty or so guests prepared to leave, he called each of us by his right name and spoke to us in a moving, personal manner. He also seemed to me to be an unusually humane man. I once watched tears stream down his cheeks as he listened to tales of the tortures suffered by his countrymen at the hands of the Japanese. Such sentiments can be faked by ambitious politicians, I know, but in Roxas's case I felt sure they were genuine. He was a born leader with an exceptional facility for inspiring others. Though the Japanese had pressured him to serve as president of the Philippine Senate in their wartime puppet government, he did as little as he dared and aided the guerrillas and Allies all he could. At the end of the war he surrendered his military commission and was soon elected president of the Philippine Republic. Though published estimates of Roxas vary markedly, depending mostly on the ideological orientation of the writer, I thought his early death from a heart attack was a grievous loss to the Philippine people.

On this particular occasion Roxas asked me to stay in Manila for a time, but I became impatient and drove back to Rosales. I had hardly alighted from my car when Verano drove up behind me and wanted to know why I had left. He said General Roxas wanted to see me at once, and virtually dragged me into his automobile for the return trip. Back in Manila we met Roxas and rode grandly with him in a chauffeured army car across the wrecked metropolis to the headquarters of General MacArthur. Here I was ushered into the private office of the supreme commander. Already present were fellow guerrillas Lt. Col. Anderson, Majors Lapham, Edwin P. Ramsey, Harry McKenzie, and John P Boone, and Capt. Alvin Faretta. General MacArthur delivered a short speech. My main recollection of it was that it was not at all of the “I have returned” genre: the general stressed, rather, that
we had
remained
, that we had represented our country well by staying on and struggling to erase the stain of the defeats of Bataan and Corregidor. Then he pinned on each of us the Distinguished Service Cross, America's second highest award for valor. My feelings, as was so often the case in those years, were mixed. Naturally, I was pleased and proud, but I was also so taken by surprise that I had to ask someone what the award meant. Moreover, I felt out of place, even faintly foolish, for I was dressed in issue khaki and combat boots, lacked a tie, and had crossed rifles and captain's bars on my collar when I was still officially a staff sergeant in the air corps.

My particular DSC cited me for materially aiding American operations on Luzon; specifically for providing intelligence, raiding the Japanese garrison at San Quintin, and carrying on propaganda work among civilians. Three months later I received the Bronze Star for staying with my troops when I could have gone home. I was also honored by a Philippine congressional citation. I heard a story that I had been recommended for the Philippine Distinguished Star, an award equivalent to our congressional medal of honor, but if so nothing ever materialized. It was probably just the nine millionth “latrine rumor” of the war. The anomaly of my rank was clarified a few days after the audience with General MacArthur. I was appointed a captain AUS from USAFFE headquarters, with rank from December 11, 1943.

Of the many guerrilla organizations in the Philippines, Bob Lapham's was the only one whose officers were not reduced in rank at the end of the war. The highest rank in the whole outfit was Bob's own: major. That we were not reduced seemed to me proper recognition of our accomplishments, but not less an acknowledgment of Bob's sense of proportion. Some other outfits had as many backwoods “colonels” as rabbits have descendants.