Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  Working constantly with planes and watching them in action impressed me with the clear initial superiority of the Japanese Zero to any of our fighter planes. As the war lengthened, America gradually developed better planes of all types, which the Japanese, whose industry was far less advanced or flexible than ours, could not match. In 1942, though, the Zero was king of the Far Eastern skies. Its detractors have put it down as cheap and crudely built; but it was also light, fast, a marvellous climber, and remarkably maneuverable. It had a shorter radius of turn than our latest fighter, the P-40, which meant that in any contest involving circular maneuvers the Zero soon ended on the tail of the P-40 with fixed guns. For the American pilot in such a situation that was “all she wrote.” Though at least one pilot in the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron wrote favorably of the sturdiness, strength, and straightaway speed of the P-40,1 I never liked the plane. It was tricky to handle, and there was always something wrong with it. In my opinion, its sole claim to excellence was that it could dive like a rock. It never surprised me that a lot of our pilots who flew P-40s were killed taking off or landing. Once during training at Hamilton Field I saw six such accidents in a single day.

  The only effective tactic a P-40 could employ against a Zero was to gain higher altitude, go into a power dive, fire a burst at the Zero in passing, and then hightail it out of the area—a technique first worked out by Gen. Claire Chennault, commander of the Flying Tigers in China. In fairness, though, I must admit that I once watched a dogfight over Manila Bay between six Zeros and six P-40s in which five of the Zeros were shot down without a loss on our side. Either our pilots were much superior to the Japanese or they packed six months of good luck into that one day.

  Whichever the case, it became clear early in the Bataan campaign that most of the fighting would be on the ground. Since we already had far more pilots, maintenance men, and other specialists than our dwindling air force would ever need, it was decided to convert many of us into infantrymen. All we lacked was equipment and training. Not a single one of us had as much as an entrenching tool. Most of us had thrown away our gas masks and had used the containers to carry ammunition or anything else handy. To me a rifle was merely something to hang on a wall. One day a real infantryman assured me solemnly that my rifle was my best friend, adding that I should treat it with tenderness and care. I was unimpressed, but eventually discovered that he was right. At the moment, though, I was given a few cartridges, shown how to load my rifle, and told to shoot at some trees and vines for practice. That constituted infantry training.

  It did not take long for us to find out if we had learned anything useful. According to the Japanese timetable, the Philippines were supposed to be conquered in fifty days. By January 17 our foes were far behind schedule, and their high command was growing impatient. On that date they launched a series of attacks on several peninsulas along the southwest shore of Bataan that have come to be known collectively as the Battle of the Points. Many of us were hastily trucked to one of them, Aglaloma Point, and deployed in a line across that small peninsula to fight a reported “handful” of Japanese ensconced there.

  Our immediate problem was not the enemy at all but the sheer density of the jungle. Gigantic trees towered up to two hundred feet in the air, grew close together, and were crested with luxuriant intertwining branches. Far below, dense masses of vines and bushes took up most of the space between the trees. The growth was so thick that on the ground it was never really daylight, and there were only about six hours of the day that could even be called twilight. By the end of the afternoon one could avoid getting lost only by hanging onto the belt of the man in front of him. Even so, we spread across the point and slowly negotiated the trackless wilderness until we reached the edge of a cliff about a hundred feet high overlooking a short, narrow beach. We looked about, saw nothing, retraced our steps, and using our hands and steel helmets, dug in for the night. It had been a mere sightseeing tour. “No Japs here,” we told each other, only the usual billions of damnable mosquitoes.

  It required only two days to lay this myth to rest. The Japanese had played possum and let us bypass them twice because they had not yet gotten enough troops onto the peninsula to attempt battle. As soon as they were prepared, they let us have it so vigorously that we had to call for reinforcements. We got some Philippine army men, who were no help at all because they were virtually untrained, and then some Philippine Scouts who were trained and who shored up our ranks at once.

  In the next few days, locked in combat in that stinking jungle, I learned a lot about some of the different kinds of men who make up this world. In particular, I learned not to judge a person prematurely. Many a rear area loudmouth fell silent and cringed when he knew a deadly enemy might be only a few feet away yet completely hidden. Conversely, some of the most unlikely men quietly took initiatives and performed far beyond expectation. I saw one young farm boy, praised for having killed several enemy soldiers, remark quietly that he had just done his duty; while another soldier of equally tender years cried and trembled and pleaded that he was sick. He was sick only with fear, but since he was useless to us I could only send him back to the rear. Our squadron commander, Ed Dyess, accepted his temporary demotion to the infantry with good grace. He observed wryly that he would rather be on his father’s farm staring at the south end of a northbound mule; nevertheless, he led his men on the ground with the same bravery and skill that he showed in the air. By contrast, another soldier whose rifle stock had been shattered by Japanese bullets, fell into hysteria and shouted over and over, “They shot my brother, right in the head.”

  Among such varied responses to danger the most inspiring was that of one of my buddies, Sgt. Verlon O. Hayes. Once we were strung across the Aglaloma peninsula, one way to insure that the line of men was intact was to pass the words from man to man, “Contact the right flank (or left flank).” The last man at the end of each line would then start the message back with “Right (left) flank contacted.” These messages began well but many times failed to return, which caused men to fear that the Japanese had either penetrated our front or outflanked us, either eventuality dictating sudden withdrawal. Verlon fouled up this system repeatedly because he was half-deaf in one ear, the result of being barely missed by a bomb. One day I sent him back to our rear command post with a Japanese prisoner, just to get rid of him. A few minutes later I was surprised to see that he was still with us. He had passed the prisoner on to a lower ranking man in order to stay with us and risk his life in the thick of the fight. This was the spirit that eventually enabled us to kill the “handful” of Japanese in the area—some 850 of them.

  I also had my eyes opened about the quality and outlook of enemy troops. To the Japanese, war was not a contest waged according to rules written in Geneva but a struggle to the death in which nothing was barred. Earlier at Cabcaben Field I had been shocked to see Japanese pilots strafe a helpless American pilot as he hung in his parachute. Now I saw something that seemed even more abominable, perhaps because the victims were in my outfit. One day Staff Sgt. William Fowler was killed by a Japanese bullet. Sgt. Benjamin Kerr and a companion went out to remove the body. As they set down the stretcher the Japanese shot and killed Kerr. Because we often saw the enemy thus cruelly use the dead and the wounded alike as decoys, there were times when we had to listen for hours to maimed Americans crying for help while no one dared go to their aid.

  I soon learned that Japanese infantrymen were not merely savage and treacherous but also remarkably brave, tough, tenacious, and disciplined. Physically, maybe 80 percent of them could have come from a mold. They were about 5’2” and weighed about 125 pounds. Most were in their early twenties and had only an elementary education. Perhaps a third came from farms. Most had been in uniform a couple of years, and all had passed through the world’s harshest military training regimen.2 Because of the brutality of their training and the thoroughness with which they had been indoctrinated to make any sacrifice for their emperor and their country, they we
re capable of incredible feats of endurance, not to speak of conduct that seemed insane to Occidentals. In desperate circumstances the Japanese would kill their wounded, even burn wounded men to death in buildings, to prevent the disabled from slowing the pace of military operations.

  This grim approach to war did possess a certain macabre “efficiency,” but it was also counterproductive. All the support services in the Japanese army, medical included, were meager because Japanese troops were supposed to fight rather than engage in peripheral activities or go on sick call. This meant that many Nipponese soldiers threw away their lives in displays of brainless bravado, while many others sickened and died because they seldom received the medical treatment they needed and deserved. In our army, by contrast, for every man who was actually in combat there were as many as twelve others in training, maintenance, liaison, planning, special services or, above all, generating mountains of paper.

  Like soldiers of most times and places, the Japanese were great looters and collectors. Some of their dead wore as many as three or four wrist watches, taken off the corpses of our buddies. The pockets of many of them were stuffed with several different kinds of money. Like G.I.s, most of them kept pictures of families and friends.

  Japanese infantrymen were armed with .25-caliber Arisaka bolt-action rifles that weighed about ten pounds with bayonets attached. Both commissioned officers and non-coms carried pistols modelled on the German Luger, and commissioned officers sported fancy samurai swords, which some of them delighted to use for beheading. It is possible that this particular penchant indicated a desire to humiliate the enemy since ordinary Japanese soldiers had a superstitious fear of having their own heads and bodies buried in separate places.

  Enemy soldiers usually wore hobnailed boots, with the rough side of the leather outside. Sometimes they wore split-toed tennis shoes which were better suited for climbing rocks, trees, and vines than Western tennis shoes. Oddly, Japanese equipment usually had a disagreeable smell, though I never knew why since most Japanese are clean personally. Such were the opposing troops that I, a rather green young man from Missouri, now encountered for the first time.

  Our side instituted action as optimistically as possible. One of our men took up a bullhorn and appealed to the foe to surrender. Back came a reply in perfect English, “Piss on you, you Yankee son-of-a-bitch. If you want us, come and get us.” From his enunciation the speaker might have come from Harvard, but the sentiment hardly did.

  There was nothing left but to get down to business. We grouped in line to prepare for an advance. There was a clearing dead ahead. On signal (a whistle) I as platoon leader raced across the clearing and jumped into a hole—right on top of a dead Japanese soldier. I was shaken, and repelled, but at least he wasn’t alive. With bullets whizzing overhead like hornets I lay low with my distasteful companion until I gradually realized that our entire left flank had failed to advance. There was only one thing to do, however hazardous; race back across the clearing and pull the flank forward, then dash back to the company of the dead Japanese in the foxhole. Bullets whistled about me both ways and I was splattered by bark knocked off trees and vines, but my luck held. Indeed, my good fortune throughout the war was little short of miraculous. Though I came close to death many times from a variety of causes, I was never hit by a Japanese bullet.

  The enemy did more than just fire rifle bullets at us. The Japanese had many grenade throwers, which we called knee mortars, that lobbed shells up to seven hundred yards. Though these missiles were no larger than artillery shells, when they sailed overhead they sounded like large ashcans turning end over end. Though the density of a jungle restricts the damage that mortar shells can do, since most of them explode in the treetops, we found them sufficiently unnerving that we called in tanks to root out mortar emplacements. This was a fiasco. The trees were so close together, and the brush and vines so thick, that a tank wallowed as helplessly as a rhinoceros in quicksand.

  The Japanese seemed to enjoy nothing about war so much as murderous chicanery. The shooting of U.S. medics I have noted. Another of their unsettling tricks was to send snipers up trees where they tied themselves fast and covered themselves with camouflage. Then, as we advanced against their comrades on the ground and the sound of ground gunfire would hide their own, they would shoot us in the back. This happened so often that we took to spraying trees with bullets indiscriminately during each advance. Even when a sniper was hit, as happened occasionally, he would seldom move or cry out. We would become aware of his presence only if we happened to encounter drops of blood spattering the thick undergrowth.

  In these grim surroundings one quickly learned iron self-control or he did not live. Once just before darkness I deployed thirty Filipinos into the center of our line, which had been badly shot up. Soon after this I made the appalling discovery that both our right and left flanks had silently slunk off. If the enemy learned of this, they could outflank us with ease. I feared to tell the Filipinos what had happened, lest they panic. Meanwhile it had become too dark to retreat. So there we sat, motionless, throughout the longest night of my life. I was dying for a cigarette but dared not light a match with the enemy only spitting distance away. But once more our, or at least my, luck held and nothing happened until daylight. Then we had to slip backward into the jungle individually and hope our own troops did not mistake us for Japanese.

  One thing that vanished rapidly in this environment was fastidiousness. We learned to eat amid swarms of flies, with cotton stuffed in our noses to lessen the stench of dead Japanese bodies nearby. It was nauseating to discover disabled enemy soldiers whose wounds were filled with maggots, but one soon got used to that too. Actually, the maggots performed a useful service. They ate away the decaying flesh and prevented the onset of gangrene.

  Sometimes in war one is torn between duties that seem equally pressing but cannot be reconciled. This happened to me once near the end of the Battle of the Points. There had been a lull in the fighting, and where I happened to be there was a hole in the jungle directly overhead. I looked up and saw two P-40s slip from the top of a cloud bank onto the trail of three unsuspecting Japanese planes cruising below the clouds. Suddenly our planes dove and blasted two of the enemy aircraft, though the third got away. Right away the Japanese retaliated by bombing us on the ground. Two of my close friends were hit. Pfc. John Baker from Illinois was blown in two, and Sgt. Jerry Karlick, a teammate in many enjoyable baseball games back in California, was badly wounded. At this juncture our squadron leader, Ed Dyess, came by and directed me to help him and some others make preparations for an anticipated boat landing along the seashore. I liked and admired Ed, just as everyone else did, and I wanted to go with him, but I could not have lived with myself had I simply abandoned Jerry to die. Ironically, Jerry did die soon anyway, but while I stood indecisively Dyess and his companions passed out of sight. Then I could not join them. The whole matter was of no great importance, and I was not even reprimanded for having stayed behind, but it caused me considerable personal anguish. War strains many different kinds of loyalties.

  Little by little, almost step by step, for two weeks we pushed the Japanese back through the dense, stinking, steaming, pest-ridden jungle to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the beach below. Here they could be bombed and strafed from the air, shelled by heavy artillery on Corregidor, fired on by Dyess and others in small boats offshore, and pressured from the jungle side by ourselves. Still they fought on with incredible tenacity and fanaticism. A lieutenant once marked their machinegun nests for us and warned us that the last part of our mission was apt to be as tough as what had gone before. His words were tragically prophetic. When we began our final advance, he was the first to die, from a bullet through his heart. Many enemy soldiers leaped off the cliffs to their death below rather than surrender. Others clambered down the cliffs and crawled into caves in their faces. We then lowered boxes of dynamite in front of the caves and exploded them, though how much damage was done thus is questionable.
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br />   After we had secured the top of the cliffs, two memorable episodes occurred. One has been recorded by the historian John Toland.3 I was sitting propped against a tree enjoying the beautiful view over the ocean. I glanced toward the beach and saw a Japanese run across it and jump into the water. “A hell of a long way to Tokyo,” I thought idly. Nearby a Filipino machinegunner who was eating his lunch saw the same spectacle. As nonchalantly as if he was target shooting with friends, he set aside his messkit, picked up a machinegun, positioned himself comfortably, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger. The swimming soldier stopped abruptly, and a circle of bloody water began to form around his body. The red was brilliant against the emerald green sea. With each wave it grew wider, a sight at once vivid and horrible that I have never forgotten.

  The other event occurred a few minutes later. It was embarrassing. I had been sitting close to several hand grenades when I suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of a released grenade pin. The thought flashed through my mind that I must have sat on a grenade and accidentally dislodged the pin. There was no time for a leisurely investigation. I lunged to one side, felling several buddies with a flying block. What had actually happened was that a soldier on the opposite side of a tree from me had pulled the pin on a grenade he intended to toss over the cliff. Having seen him while I had not, the victims of my “human missile” performance were not amused.