Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  The most spectacular phase of the Battle of the Points took place February 1, 1942, two weeks after the campaign started. This time I was only a spectator. Long after darkness the enemy tried to put ashore about one thousand reinforcements from landing barges. Our intelligence had found out about it, and plans were made to give the invaders a warm reception. As the barges began to come in, our shore parties turned searchlights on them, making them ideal silvery targets against the black ocean. Our P-40 pilots roared down on them and strafed them from end to end, shooting them full of holes. Strictly as a spectacle, the operation had a certain weird beauty as the gaudy tracer bullets flashed wildly in every direction when they ricocheted off the water. More to the point, nearly all the occupants of the boats died, either from the gunfire or from drowning. It was one of the most sweeping small victories in the whole war, and it did much for our morale at a time when we had little occasion to feel cheerful about anything.

  Though I can’t prove it, and have never seen any reference to the matter in any book, I am utterly convinced that on that fateful night, because of one of those incredible foulups that have always haunted warfare, the Japanese helped destroy their own invasion force. By February 1942 I had been repairing American airplanes for two years, and in these last two months I had gained more experience than I wanted in listening to Japanese engines. Every motor has a distinctive sound, and I am not being boastful when I say that I could tell each type of American and Japanese plane from every other without seeing them. I could tell by sound when something was wrong with a particular engine, sometimes even what was wrong. On this night, as planes roared back and forth over the doomed barges, I would have sworn that I heard the distinctive sounds of Japanese engines.

  In honesty, I must admit that Sam Grashio, one of the pilots who strafed the Japanese landing barges on this occasion, insists that it is impossible that Japanese planes could have taken part along with U.S. planes and remained undetected.4 Of course, he was better situated than I to judge the matter. All I can say is that my ears never deceived me about the identity of planes on any other occasion.

  If the Japanese debacle at Aglaloma Bay was indeed partly suicidal, such events are by no means uncommon in the armed forces of any nation. One of the wildest mixups I ever heard of took place on a dark night in 1944 off the north coast of Luzon. A surfaced U.S. submarine there sent boatloads of supplies ashore for guerrillas while a Japanese ship anchored nearby was similarly unloading equipment for Nipponese troops. Small American and Japanese boats crisscrossed near each other for hours. Fortunately, the submarine skipper was the first to realize what was happening and departed hastily before the enemy knew he was there.5

  Clark Lee, an American war correspondent, describes many other such foulups, which were often fatal, in both the Pacific and European theaters. Some of them, he thought, while not deliberate, nonetheless owed considerably to the intense rivalry among American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and were regretted but lightly when those who perished were from a different branch of the service.6 Whether Lee’s depressing judgment is justified about Americans, there is no question that the Japanese committed as many blunders of this sort as we did and that in their case the primary cause was persistent rivalry and mistrust between their army and navy, complicated by lack of overall direction of operations.7 An observant Filipino who saw Nipponese army and navy officers regularly was amazed that they seemed genuinely to hate each other. They seldom associated, and they habitually belittled one another in public. On one occasion he saw a Japanese army ambulance refuse to help a naval officer who had suffered a heart attack, on the ground that the navy had its own ambulances.8 One of Japan’s greatest fighter pilots related that when Japanese naval planes were flying toward Clark Field to begin the war in the Philippines, he and eight others dropped out of formation to attack nine bombers flying toward them, only to discover that the latter were Japanese army planes on a routine training flight. The two services simply did not inform each other about anything.9 I suppose it validates the old saw that nobody wins a war: one side out-blunders the other and eventually loses.

  After the Battle of the Points was over, we had time to think about what we had just been through and, hopefully, to draw some useful conclusions. Our casualties had been high because of our inexperience as infantrymen. We had discovered that our foes were ferocious fighters but not necessarily invincible ones. We had been fearful at the outset but had grown less so as we became better acquainted with our weapons and learned to distinguish their sounds from those of enemy arms. We had gained a new appreciation of the necessity to follow orders, and of the value of the hated foxholes—even if we had to dig them with knives, helmets, and bare hands. As the fighting had grown grimmer and the casualty lists longer, we had become calloused, accustomed to death, even that of our best friends. This ability to adjust to circumstances was, I believe, one of our most valuable assets, one of the few areas where we clearly excelled Japanese troops on an individual basis. They tended to be much better at set pieces than at improvisation.

  After our brief careers in the infantry we airplane mechanics turned once more to keeping up our steadily dwindling air force, the only one left in all Luzon. It beat infantry fighting, but not by much. Every day the insolent Bettys, that resembled nothing so much as giant silver fish, came over at 25,000-30,000 feet to bomb us. Lower flying planes supported them with periodic strafing, and Japanese observation planes, which we called Photo Joes, added insult by roaming the skies unmolested to take pictures of what their brethren had wrought. Since the enemy pilots and bombardiers had little idea where their bombs would land, one individual in one foxhole had about as much chance of being hit as he did of hitting the jackpot in Las Vegas. Even so, I never felt secure. A 500-pound bomb falling through the air made a whoooosh like a huge swing. Even if it landed five miles away, it sounded like it had hit the front porch, and it shook the ground like a minor earthquake. Every time I dove into a foxhole, I had to go to the latrine, no matter how recently I had been there, and I was not alone. It was a relief to see the Bettys fly away after a raid but discouraging to know that we had no way to prevent them from coming back the next day.

  All we could do was curse the bombers and hope for our long awaited reinforcements. For weeks men climbed trees to look for American ships, and everyone prayed that they would come soon. One high ranking West Point officer even made elaborate plans for what to do when the reinforcements arrived. He must have graduated at the bottom of his class.

  Maybe we were sustained, ultimately, by our sense of humor, not the least valuable quality of American troops. Even on the blackest days when the fighting was most fierce, if there was a break in the action somebody usually thought of a joke that picked up our spirits a bit. One I still remember. It was told by one of our planeless P-40 pilots about a U.S. navy pilot who could never do anything right. During a mission one day luck was with him and he shot down five Japanese planes. Elated, he flew over a carrier doing victory rolls and followed this with a perfect landing. Jumping to the ship’s deck, he shouted, “I’m an Ace! I shot down five of those yellow sons-of-bitches.” A uniformed listener bowed politely and replied, “Ah, so! Ah, so!”

  Another such story was related to me one day by an old-timer. God, he said, had seen fit to create two kinds of mosquitoes for the Philippines: large daytime mosquitoes that caused dengue fever, and small nighttime mosquitoes that carried malaria. Unhappily, he wasn’t joking: I soon contracted both maladies. Of the two ailments, malaria was worse. It could be, and often was, fatal. Its victims endured severe chills, followed by vomiting, fever, and paralyzing headaches. Dengue fever was not accompanied by chills: it merely caused every joint to ache and prevented one from remaining in one position for more than a few minutes at a time. It was rarely fatal: it just made a person wish he was dead.

  Medicines to deal with these and a dozen other tropical ills were always in short supply, and no substitute was left untried. Since quinine pil
ls were lacking, I was once dosed with liquid quinine for my malaria. The stuff made everything else, even the air I breathed, taste bitter for the rest of the day.

  Even so, one is never so badly off that he cannot find someone else in a worse state. One day I went to the Bataan General Hospital, which was entirely out of doors, to visit some of our wounded airmen. One was a young sergeant who had lost a leg. He told me he didn’t mind losing the leg that was now gone, but his voice broke when he added that the doctors were thinking of amputating the other one as well. He was nineteen.

  Every effort was made to secure desperately needed medicines, especially to combat gangrene, which developed easily in tropical ulcers. On occasion planes were sent hundreds of miles south to search for drugs and medical paraphernalia. On one such flight the pilot had gotten into the cockpit while others packed all available space around him with small packages and boxes of medicines. Because he was thus laden like a Christmas tree, he could see only directly forward on his return flight. Near home he was jumped by a pair of Zeros he had been unable to sight. He raced for his life and managed to land his oil-streaked plane. Understandably excited, he threw open the canopy and fairly erupted from the cockpit like a dancer from a birthday cake, showering medical packages in every direction before anyone could even tell who he was.

  The medicine helped, but there was never enough, particularly to deal with gangrene. Doctors learned to do the best they could with whatever they had—or lacked; in the case of gangrene simply to slash the infected flesh and let air get to it.

  We had one burden that was even worse than disease: the threat of starvation. During the month of muddle that followed the onset of the war, a variety of snafus resulted in far too little food being moved into Bataan. During the flight into the peninsula we got a break of sorts when large numbers of Philippine Constabulary troops simply abandoned their units, hid their guns, “resigned” from the war, and went home to plant rice. They would have been of little use in combat anyway, and when gone they no longer depleted our skimpy stock of food. Unhappily, their numbers were more than replaced by some 20,000 panic-stricken Filipino civilians who fled into Bataan and who then had to be fed along with the 80,000 or so assorted American infantry, airmen, and sailors, together with Philippine Scouts, regular army, and Constabulary remnants. When the Bataan campaign began, there were about three thousand tons of canned meat and salmon on the peninsula, supplemented by inadequate supplies of rice. Altogether they constituted regular rations for 100,000 men for a month. Since the siege of Bataan was expected to take much longer, we were put on half rations (approximately 2,000 calories per day) on January 8. This was cut to 1,500 calories on February 1 and to 1,000 calories on March 1 in circumstances where men needed at least 3,500 calories per day to maintain health and strength.

  Of course, we were never entirely without food, just condemned to inadequate and diminishing quantities of it. This had physical and psychological repercussions that any doctor might have expected but which seemed odd to us at the time. There is a joke that has been endemic around logging camps for generations to the effect that lumberjacks stay out in the woods all week and talk about women, then go to town Saturday night and talk about logging. In normal times the thoughts of soldiers also run heavily to women, and so they did during January 1942 on Bataan before the insidious effects of semi-starvation made themselves felt. By February ruminations about women had given way almost entirely to preoccupation with food. Some men talked so much about menus and food preparation that they sounded like delegates to a convention of chefs.

  We grasped at every expedient imagination could devise to add something to our shrinking daily ration of watery rice mixed with canned salmon. The best one was to make rice cakes and pour a little Eagle Brand condensed milk on them, but this could be done only occasionally because the milk was chronically in short supply. Then we did the next best thing, undertook “moonlight requisitioning” of whatever pigs and goats could be found on Filipino farms. We also hunted deer and small game in the jungle. We tried eating carabao, the huge water buffalo Filipinos use as draft animals, though carabao meat is better suited for making saddles than for steaks. Before long we butchered and rationed all the cavalry horses. Even General Wainwright’s favorite horse, Joseph Conrad, ended his military career not in battle but on a menu. Toward the end of the Bataan campaign we were eating anything that walked, ran, crept, swam, or flew, and much that did none of these.

  The creatures I hated most to eat were monkeys. It was bad enough that monkey meat was so tough and stringy that it seemed to grow right out of the animal’s bones. The worse part was killing the monkey in the first place. I shot one out of a tree for food once. It fell at my feet, still alive, and looked at me in the most pathetic way imaginable, seeming to say, “Why did you do this to me?” I am not sure what it proves, but after seeing and experiencing the malice and ferocity of the Japanese I could kill one of them without a qualm, indeed I became eager to kill as many of them as possible, but I could never kill another monkey.

  An animal I did try hard to kill was the iguana, a large lizard with a forked tongue and a hide like a crocodile. Though iguanas are ugly, repulsive creatures, their meat is sweet and tasty, much like the white meat of chicken. One of my bitterest disappointments on Bataan came when hunting iguana at a time when I was famished. I spotted a big one, sighted in carefully on its head with my Springfield .03, pulled the trigger—and the gun misfired. The lizard had also sighted me, meanwhile, and flicked its tongue about menacingly. As quietly as I could, I ejected the faulty cartridge, slid another into the chamber, sighted in just behind the animal’s front leg this time, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The iguana crumpled. Without bothering to reload, I stepped forward to pick up my victim. Alas! it was only playing possum. It scrambled off abruptly and disappeared into the jungle. Many a broken heart has been due to disappointment in love, and I’ve had a few; but heartbreak due to hunger is worse.

  By early March some of our pilots had gotten so weak from lack of food that they could no longer fly. Our senior air officer, Gen. Harold George, then interceded with Gen. Edward P. King, at that time General MacArthur’s chief of artillery, to get some food from Corregidor for them. Before the supplementary rations were given to the pilots of the Twenty-first Pursuit Squadron, Ed Dyess called in several of us sergeants, explained the situation to us, and asked us how the men would respond to such an arrangement. We replied that they would accept it. Dyess later wrote in his book that he had never been more proud to be an American. No doubt that was the way it seemed to him; and I will say for us that we did understand the necessity of the action, but inwardly we were resentful. The pilots were officers and we were enlisted men. They had decent quarters while we slept outdoors on the ground amid mosquitoes so thick that by dawn our eyes were often swollen shut from their bites. Now, when we were all half-starved, the officers were to get extra food as well.

  Each day the enemy crowded us into a smaller area. Scores of thousands of hungry, sick, weak, and increasingly dispirited American and Filipino troops, burdened additionally by hordes of hapless Filipino civilians, milled around in the stifling heat, clouds of dust, and numberless mosquitoes. Bombs fell among us day and night by now, often starting fires in bamboo thickets, for it was then the dry season. Artillery, both American and Japanese, roared incessantly. No literary description of hell could have exceeded it. It was evident that the end could not be far off.

  It has been charged that the fall of Bataan was not inevitable, but was due to Allied bungling and slackness: to endless confusion because officers did not know what their subordinates were doing and one unit was ignorant of the intentions of others; to inadequate defenses, lax discipline, and hordes of inexperienced Filipino trainees; to the hijacking of rations by both Americans and Filipinos; and above all to the greater will of the Japanese to fight and absorb losses. The enemy, after all, was also short of food and medicine, also had thousands of men in hospitals and, con
trary to legend, did not outnumber us.10

  There is considerable truth in this indictment, but it underrates the most important component of war, which is psychological. An army is defeated, after all, if one of two things happens; it is physically exterminated, or it no longer believes that victory is possible. The Japanese might have been sick and hungry, but we were more so, as the dreadful toll on the subsequent Death March showed. More important, our foemen knew they could eventually get additional food from Japan, while we had no such assurance of outside succor. They also knew they could get troop reinforcements if these were needed, while we were reduced to hoping for reinforcements, and our hope grew dimmer with each passing day. By now our air force was virtually gone, and few experiences in modern war demoralize ground troops more than constant pounding from the air when they know retaliation is impossible. Finally, in every other theater of the war the Japanese were winning, while we were losing. Numbers or no, by April 1942 the Bataan campaign had become a mismatch, both materially and psychologically.

  A few days before the final collapse there occurred one of those curious events that could take place only in the American army, though it was not without dismal practicality. We were asked if we wanted to take out $10,000 GI life insurance policies. Given the circumstances, I would have taken out $100,000, but $10,000 was the limit. Nobody quibbled over premiums. Later I discovered that the names of policy subscribers were radioed out.