Behind Japanese Lines (42 page)

When the book is finished, I shall read it and then put the war behind me, but I will never forget the lessons World War II taught me. When I look now at fields, trees, birds, mere clouds in the sky, I see beauty and feel content. It seems so easy to imagine that henceforth peace will engulf the earth because that
ought
to be the case. Yet, on the intellectual level, I have to agree with Margaret Utinsky, who endured worse things at the hands of the enemy than I ever did. She points out that people do not change much. We Americans read history, if we do so at all, as if it had no relation to us, no messages for us. The same terrible things—war, starvation, torture, execution—continue to happen, as they have for ages past, and each time we act surprised. Years pass, people visit places where ghastly crimes were once committed and shameful indignities inflicted, but where museums now stand. They pay admission, acquire a few superficial impressions, and learn nothing from having seen one more “historical shrine.”
³⁸
Perhaps there truly is an unbridgeable gulf between different kinds of human experiences and different categories of knowledge. When men contend with material substances, inanimate objects, and natural forces, each generation can build on what has been achieved by its predecessors, and we witness humanity's visible progress in engineering, medicine, agriculture, the natural sciences, and the multiplication of wealth. Yet in such realms as the relationship of individuals to each other, of individuals to governments, and of governments to other governments, areas where people are on both sides, domains where human vanity, obstinacy, and ambition prevail, knowledge seems noncumulative. Here, each generation seems doomed to repeat the crimes and follies of its predecessors, and we still wrestle with most of the same problems that vexed the ancient Greeks.

For complete information on works cited, see the Selected Bibliography beginning on page 246.

1. There are good descriptions of both the material and the psychological unpreparedness in the United States and the Philippines in Forbes J. Monahan, S.J.
Under the Red Sun
, pp. 12-13; Theodore Friend,
Between Two Empires
, pp. 169-71, 192-95; Marcial P. Lichauco,
“Dear Mother Putnam,”
pp. 6-7; and Manuel Buenafe,
Wartime Philippines
, pp. 26-39. A particularly pungent condemnation of stupid and irresponsible Western “intellectuals” of that era, of American “bunglers” in the Philippines, and of assorted “sons of bitches” in Washington is delivered by Robert H. Arnold,
A Rock and a Fortress
, pp. 75-76, 109. Like myself, Arnold spent much of the war as a guerrilla on Luzon.

2. Samuel Grashio and Bernard Norling,
Return to Freedom
, p. 8.

1. Samuel Grashio, in Grashio and Norling,
Return to Freedom
, p. 2.

2. What training and service were like in the Imperial Japanese Army is related unforgettably in a novel by a perceptive man who served in that army in China in the 1930s. See Hanema Tasaki,
Long the Imperial Way
.

3. John Toland,
But Not in Shame
, p. 183.

4. Samuel Grashio, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

5. Russell W Volckmann,
We Remained
, pp. 158-59.

6. Clark Lee,
One Last Look Around
, pp. 271-76. Lee remarks that the air corps especially detested ground support assignments and never surrendered its official corporate faith that the war could be won by strategic bombing alone.

7. John Deane Potter,
The Life and Death of a Japanese General
, a biography of Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, describes many similar instances.

8. Lichauco,
“Dear Mother Putnam,”
pp. 164-65.

9. Saburo Sekai, with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito,
Samurai
, p. 46. See also pp. 72-74.

10. Teodoro A. Agoncillo,
The Fateful Years
, 2: 896-98.

1. The best brief discussion of the whole question is in Stanley Falk,
Bataan
, pp. 194-98.

2. Monaghan,
Under the Red Sun
, p. 124.

3. The last opinion is that of Monaghan, ibid., p. 108. For other interpretations of the character and motivation of the Japanese, see Bert Bank,
Back from the Living Dead
, pp. 52-53; Robert Considine (ed.),
General Wainwright's Story
, pp. 203-4; 257; Philip Knightley,
The First Casualty
, pp. 292-94; Gregory Boyington,
Baa! Baa! Black Sheep
, pp. 361-62; Quentin Reynolds (ed.),
Officially Dead
, pp. 15, 35; James Bertram,
Beneath the Shadow
, p. 104; Agnes Newton Keith,
Three Came Home
, pp. 3-13, 231-33, 294, 306-14, 317; Sidney Stewart,
Give Us This Day
, pp. 82-83, 97, 104-5, 173-74; Falk,
Bataan
, especially pp. 227-30; Clark Lee,
They Called It Pacific
, pp. 280-82; Ernest Miller,
Bataan Uncensored
, pp. 366-71; Edgar Whitcomb,
Escape from Corregidor
, p. 267; and Ernest Gordon,
Through the Valley of the Kwai
, p. 53. Bank, Wainwright, Boyington, Smith, Bertram, Keith, Stewart, Miller, Whitcomb, and Gordon were all prisoners of the Japanese at one time or another.

Agoncillo, a Filipino who survived the Death March and later became a historian, says that even though he did not face up to it at the time he eventually came to realize that mortality on the march owed more to the sickness and weakness of the prisoners than to the deliberate brutality of the guards (
The Fateful Years
, 2: 901-2). All I can say is that there was plenty of both.

1. Vernon Fassoth, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

2. On September 14-16, 1984, I (B.N.) attended a meeting of the Indiana Oral Military History Association in Indianapolis. Also present were about twenty veterans of Bataan, Corregidor, and Luzon guerrilla life. Several of them had been in the Fassoth camps at one time or another. At the meeting a poster was displayed which listed by name all those known to have been in the Fassoth camps. There were 104 names on it. Nobody present proposed either to add or delete names.

3. Monaghan,
Under the Red Sun
, pp. 133-40.

4. Volckmann,
We Remained
, pp. 62-70.

5. Philip Harkins,
Blackburn's Headhunters
, pp. 58-62.

6. Henry Clay Conner, “We Fought Fear on Luzon,” p. 74.

7. At least this was the opinion of Blackburn (Harkins,
Blackburn's Headhunters
, p. 58). Fassoth's third camp was raided by the Japanese on
February 22, 1943, a development tht might have produced added inducement to surrender.

8. Conner, “We Fought Fear,” p. 72.

9. Walter Chatham, personal communication to the author (R.H.).

10. Donald Blackburn relates that, in circumstances not unlike mine, he and Russell Volckmann owed their lives to a Filipino named Guerrero. The man sheltered the pair for a month when they were nearly dead from sickness and starvation. Mr. Guerrero found them places to hide, had his daughters feed them, procured a doctor to treat them, paid the doctor himself, found guides to lead them northward, and even paid for the guides, all at great risk to himself and his family, and when he had little money. Harkins,
Blackburn's Headhunters
, pp. 50-56. Like me, Blackburn had a wound, in his case an infected heel, that troubled him most of one spring. Treatment was unavailing, so he just walked on it anyway. Eventually it healed (Harkins,
Blackburn's Headhunters
, p. 164). I doubt that I would have been as lucky.

Like Blackburn and myself, Clay Conner owed his life to Filipinos who operated miniature camps like that of the Fassoths, and who taught him how to catch shrimp and eels in rivers (“We Fought Fear,” p. 71).

11. We (R.H. and B.N.) are indebted to Mrs. Ann Petrites, the sister of William Fassoth's daughter-in-law, for making available to us a copy of Fassoth's unpublished account of the origin, construction, operation, and demise of his three camps. I (B.N.) am grateful to William Fassoth's son, Vernon, for allowing me to use his own taped recollections of what happened in the camps.

I (R.H.) am also obliged to Walter Chatham for numerous personal recollections of the life he shared with me in Fassoth's second camp. Some of them corrected my uncertain memory. On the question of how many of us escaped from the camp, however, I believe my memory has been more accurate than his.

1. Robert Lapham, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

1. An excellent account of guerrilla operations through the centuries, shorn of contemporary mythology and replete with examples of irregular operations all over the world, is Walter Laqueur,
Guerrilla
. For a brief critique of partisan warfare as seen by professional soldiers, see Michael Howard,
The Causes of Wars
, p. 88.

2. A lurid account of the bloody excesses of Luzon guerrillas, both American and Filipino, is given by Ernesto R. Rodriguez, Jr.,
The Bad Guerrillas of Northern Luzon
.

3. Ira Wolfert,
American Guerrilla in the Philippines
, p. 142.

4. Trevor Ingham,
Rendezvous by Submarine
, p. 45.

5. Edward F. Dissette and H. D. Adamson,
Guerrilla Submarines
, p. 30.

6. There is considerable information about Fenton's background, character, and eccentricities in Charles A. Willoughby,
The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines
, pp. 264-65; and also in Ingham,
Rendezvous by Submarine
, p. 160; Allison Ind,
Allied Intelligence Bureau
, pp. 135-42; Agoncillo,
The Fateful Years
, 2: 735-37; and Jesus A. Villamor,
They Never Surrendered
, pp. 89, 106-9, 218. A particularly scathing account is provided by Manuel F. Segura,
Tabunan
, especially pp. 181-202.

7. Fenton's unpublished diary is in the possession of Morton J. Netzorg, proprietor of the Cellar Bookshop in Detroit and of an excellent private research library of materials relating to the Philippines.

8. Arnold,
A Rock and a Fortress
, pp. 200-201.

9. Lichauco,
“Dear Mother Putnam,”
p. 84.

10. Albert C. Hendrickson, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

11. Rodriguez,
The Bad Guerrillas
, pp. x-xi, 38-48, 57-98, 115-25, 130-32, contains gory descriptions of the crimes and vices of various northern Luzon guerrillas. The quotation is from p. 38. Agoncillo relates some of the charges against Escobar (
The Fateful Years
, 2: 755).

12. William L. Estrada,
A Historical Survey of the Guerrilla Movement in Pangasinan, 1942-1945
, p. 33.

13. Volckmann,
We Remained
, pp. 36-39.

14. Al Hendrickson says Nakar got his radio from Warner (personal communication to the author [B.N.]). For varied accounts of Nakar's activities and fate, see Courtney Whitney,
MacArthur
, pp. 128-29; Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain,
MacArthur, 1941-1951
, p. 210; Dissette and Adamson,
Guerrilla Submarines
, p. 31; and Agoncillo,
The Fateful Years
, 2: 655.

15. The whole idea may have been suggested to MacArthur by “Chick” Parsons, later to gain renown as the supreme commander's director of submarine contacts with Philippine guerrillas. Dissette and Adamson,
Guerrilla Submarines
, p. 12.

General Wainwright, who formally surrendered all Allied troops in the Philippines when Corregidor fell, did not share MacArthur's enthusiasm for guerrillas, perhaps because their very existence complicated his own problems. He called them “hotheads.”

16. Of several lists of Thorp's entourage that I (B.N.) have seen, no two are the same.
According to a sympathetic biographer
, Ferdinand Marcos, who had been in the thick of the Bataan campaign and who long after the war became the controversial and embattled ruler of the Philippines, was responsible for slipping most of these men through chinks in the Japanese forward wall. The Japanese eventually found out about this, arrested Marcos, and tortured him atrociously in Fort Santiago, but he could not tell them anything because he did not know where any of the men had gone afterward. Hartzell Spence,
For Every Tear a Victory
, pp. 142, 156-58.

17. Personal communications with William H. Brooks (R.H.), Robert Lapham, Vernon Fassoth, and Donald Blackburn (B.N.). See also Conner, “We Fought Fear,” p. 74.

18. Estrada,
Historical Survey
, p. 50. Brooks describes the ambush
Thorp set for the Japanese convoy (William H. Brooks, personal communication to both R.H. and B.N.). It seems virtually certain that Brooks's memory failed him about “McIntyre.” The index to General Willoughby's
Guerrilla Resistance Movement
, p. 572, lists a James McIntyre who was active as a guerrilla, but on Mindanao, hundreds of miles to the south. Thus, the dynamiter with Thorp must have been Capt. Ralph McGuire, who was killed by Filipinos in the Zambales Mountains in the following year, 1943.

19. Ind,
Allied Intelligence Bureau
, p. 9.

20. Ibid., p. 118;
Intelligence Activities in the Philippines
, p. xi, gives the date as November 4, 1942. This is typical of the differences among sources in these chaotic times.

21. Whitney,
MacArthur
, pp. 130-31.

22. Yay Panlilio,
The Crucible
, pp. 337-46; Willoughby,
Guerrilla Resistance Movement
, pp. 112-13.

23. Arnold,
A Rock and a Fortress
, pp. 17-39, 75-76.

24. Ibid., pp. 17-39, 184-88.