Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  They built me a low hut with a grass roof near a small river that meandered through a flat field covered with cogon grass. This made it possible to supply me with food and other commodities twice a day by wading in the stream and thus avoiding formation of a trail that might betray my hiding place. They also presented me with a .16-gauge shotgun pistol for protection, a weapon I was afraid to shoot lest it blow up in my hands. Later they gave me a Lee Enfield rifle, in which I reposed more confidence.

  Here I settled down and tried to regain my health. I swam in the stream a great deal, both for enjoyment and for exercise. During the heat of the day I lay in the sun for long periods. Everyone has heard cynical observations to the effect that if one does not like a given medical opinion he has only to wait five or ten years and the opposite one will come into fashion. At the present time (1985) medical orthodoxy has it that long exposure to the sun is harmful to the skin. Maybe so, but it didn’t seem true to me in 1942. Sun, swimming, rest, and ample food gradually healed my foot and restored my health. In the process I turned as brown as the Filipinos themselves. Save for my beard, which I could shave, and my Occidental nose, about which I could do nothing, a casual observer could hardly have distinguished me from a Filipino, no mean asset in the life I was to lead for the next two and a half years.

  Much of the time, of course, I had to stay under cover to avoid being spotted by Japanese planes or passing patrols. These days were, I believe, the longest of my life. I soon discovered that the best way to pass the time was to read and study. The Francos brought me what books they could. Most of them were elementary school texts, but since they were all I had I read and reread them many times. From them I learned much about the history, government, religion, and customs of the Philippines. With some amazement I discovered that more than seven thousand islands comprise the Philippines, that at least eight-seven dialects are spoken by their inhabitants, that Spanish was still the official language of the Islands, that Americans had made English compulsory for school children, and that Tagalog, a smooth, flowing tongue that is pleasant both to speak and to hear, would probably replace both Western languages eventually.

  I became acquainted with the Philippine national heroes José Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, the former considered the father of his country and the latter celebrated as the leader of Philippine resistance to American occupation after the Spanish-American War of 1898. I became acquainted with the details of the U.S. occupation, and of the insurrection that followed it; with the excellent record made by Gen. Arthur MacArthur as governor-general of the Philippines; with the career of Manuel Quezon, the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth; and of his close relations with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the famous son of the able governor-general.

  Not least interesting were descriptions of how the habits of particular Filipinos had caused the U.S. Army to replace the .38 automatic with the .45 as standard issue. The Moros, fierce Moslems who inhabit Mindanao and some small southern islands, hated the Christian and pagan Filipinos and fought them periodically. They also had the disconcerting habit of occasionally running amok. This state was induced either by binding themselves tightly with bamboo or by winding an elastic vine around their genitals. In either case, half-mad with pain and quasi-religious fanaticism, they would race about wildly, killing anyone they met until someone killed them. By hard experience it was learned that a bullet from a .38 did not pack the wallop necessary to stop an amok Moro before he could slash or spear his intended victim. Only a .45 would do it.

  I also began in earnest to learn Pampangano, the dialect of the area. For many days I wrote out phrases phonetically, memorized them, and practiced their pronunciation. There is nothing like concentration for learning, and eventually I developed a good command of the tongue. Mastery was not immediate, though. One day I addressed a native boy: “Magandang Hapon.” He stared at me quizzically and after some hesitation asked me if I realized what I had said. I replied that I had intended to say, “Good afternoon.” He laughed and told me that the meaning of the word “Hapon” depended on which syllable was accented. Ha-pon meant afternoon. Ha-pon meant Japanese. What I had actually said was “Good (or beautiful) Japanese.”

  As my linguistic studies progressed and my health improved, I came out of hiding periodically to visit local villages and homes where I could practice my vocabulary and make Filipino friends. As a teenager I had studied the Hawaiian guitar for a time. Now some Filipinos gave me a standard (Spanish) guitar, on which I practiced a good deal. Soon I learned to sing war songs and love songs in Pampangano.

  I also learned something about Filipino psychology and customs. The favorite weapon of most Filipino men was the bolo, a long, curved knife carried in a bamboo scabbard and used for a variety of purposes. Most Filipinos were good-natured much of the time but, like people everywhere, they occasionally lost their tempers and got into fights. The aftermath of a fight waged with bolos could be devastating. I have seen survivors of bolo battles reconstructed with as many as four hundred stitches.

  Filipinos love to gamble, particularly on cockfights. The owners of fighting roosters often appeared to think as much of their feathered protégés as of their own children, and spent much time and effort training them. The training itself breathed the spirit of boot camp in the Japanese army. A favorite way of “conditioning” an unfortunate chicken was to tie its feet to a wire clothesline and then flick the wire to make it spring back and forth. The terrified rooster had to strain every fiber to stay upright, a process which gradually turned his leg muscles into something like steel wire.

  My Filipino mentors did not tutor me merely in their language and folklore. They also taught me various ways to augment my food supply. One such way was to make and set snares to catch wild chickens, which are smaller than American chickens. The roosters are brightly colored and crow their brains out all night long. In the 1940s they were plentiful all over the Philippines and though wild were not hard to catch in a simple noose trap that would snare one by the neck or one foot and hoist it into the air. I also learned to catch birds at night by throwing a fish seine over their roosting places in the tall cogon grass, and to catch fish from the river with the same nets. The Filipinos also taught me another way to catch fish that seemed implausible but was surprisingly effective. They would pile a lot of rocks in a streambed, leave them for a week or so, then cover them with a large net and weigh down its outer edges. Then they would slide their hands carefully under the net and remove the rocks one by one until only fish remained inside.

  Coping with Philippine livestock was more challenging than with local birds and fish. Most Philippine animals are midgets compared to their American counterparts. A notable exception is the water buffalo, or carabao. Wild carabao are fierce, and those in the Philippines once experienced the distinction of being hunted by Theodore Roosevelt; but domesticated carabao are huge, patient, docile beasts, so gentle that children can tend them. They pull the plows, wagons, and carts of the Philippines at a leisurely pace with seeming contentment as long as they are fed and get a couple of baths a day in a nearby river or mud wallow. Unlike the skin of a horse, that of a carabao is loose and rolls back and forth across the animal’s back when it walks. This, I discovered, makes riding one no mean feat. I had seen natives ride them many times, so one day I climbed aboard with a Filipino boy. The carabao either did not like me or rebelled at the idea of being ridden double. He promptly took off cross-country. The Filipino boy wisely jumped off, but I clung desperately to the critter, jerking on the rope that went to a ring in his nose and shouting at him in English, a language to which he remained obdurately indifferent. With each leap and each tug on the rope, I slipped farther forward on his rippling hide until I was astride his neck, just behind his massive, ominous looking curved horns. Here I had no leverage, so I could not jump; I could only fall off. I hit the ground hard and lay motionless. The Filipino boy rushed up to me and inquired solicitously if I was hurt. Fortunately, I was only dazed—and more wary of
carabao.

  As I had just learned, carabao, despite their bulk, could run with surprising speed for short distances. Sometimes Filipinos would race them against horses. The carabao held their own admirably in such matches, though they certainly weren’t graceful runners. One day I watched a man train a carabao for racing. He held the guide rope with one hand and the animal’s tail with the other. The very ground shook as the thundering beast thumpety-thumped across the landscape, his trainer’s feet hitting the ground every twenty feet or so behind him. I also observed what it would have been useful to me to have known earlier: that when the animal’s skin rolled one way the trick was for the rider to roll the other.

  In my many weeks in and around Tibuc-Tibuc, I became acquainted with the considerable array of foods eaten by ordinary Filipinos in that locale. Some were delicious; many more were wholesome and reasonably tasty; some I never learned to savor. Perhaps the best foods were the many varieties of fruit. Mangoes were absolutely delectable. Bananas came in a score of varieties, some of which could be fried in coconut oil. Coconuts could be prepared a dozen different ways—after one climbed a tree and laboriously wrestled the nuts out of the top of it. Breadfruit and guava were good, though, once more, procuring them could be arduous. My worst experience picking fruit came in a guava tree when I was attacked by a swarm of large, pugnacious red ants. They were all over me before I noticed them. It would have required a dozen hands to disperse them, and since I had to use one of my two to hold onto the tree I could only swat them ineffectually. By the time I got to the ground, I was painfully chewed up. Cashew nuts were abundant and tasty but had to be handled with care since the shells exuded a juice that produced an irritating swelling if it touched the skin. The best way to deal with them was to roast them slowly until the shell became virtual charcoal, and then remove the nut.

  Because few Filipinos had firearms before the war, carabao, deer, pigs and chickens were plentiful. Chicken and venison were, of course, good. Wild pig was tasty enough, though very fat. Occidental pork producers have carefully bred hogs to reduce their fat content. I was invariably impressed by how much fatter were the wild pigs I riddled with Thompson submachineguns (tommyguns) in the Philippines. (One thinks little about the sporting side of hunting when hunger drives him to stalk animals for their meat.) Carabao meat had an acceptable flavor but was so tough the Devil himself would have been hard put to chew it. Filipinos also esteemed large rats that lived in sugarcane fields, though I must add in their defense that they did not eat rats of the sort that infest garbage dumps. I don’t know whether I ever ate “sugar rat” or not. Sometimes one was served stews and soups that were best consumed without asking a lot of questions.

  Rice was the staple of the Philippine diet. Because of its starch one could easily gain weight on it, though the weight was as readily lost if one fell sick. Once I subsisted for eight days on rice and tomatoes alone. “Coffee” was made from rice and corn roasted together, then served with much sugar. Cassava, the root of a common tropical plant, was cut, fried, and made into something like potato chips. Small, transparent shrimp were somewhat disconcerting when they jumped around live in a coconut shell just before they were to be devoured, but they were palatable. Fish were sometimes dried and stored for later consumption, sometimes merely cooked as they had come from the water, without being cleaned. The diner ate as much as he chose and threw away the rest. Small fish called bagong were often mashed and left to ferment, a process that turned them into a sharp-flavored, smelly seasoning. Cattle intestines were carefully cleaned and much prized. One’s craving for sweets was satisfied most easily by chewing sugar cane, though the Filipinos did make a crude brown sugar by pouring boiled cane juice into coconut shells to harden. Sometimes they made candy by boiling sugar and freshly grated coconut together. What resulted made a respectable confection—and a memorable laxative.

  Filipino cooking and serving techniques required some adjustment on the part of an Occidental. Most Filipino food was either boiled or roasted, and it ran heavily to soup. Silverware was unheard of. Everything but soup was put on banana leaves spread on the floor and eaten with the fingers. I occasioned much good-natured laughter before I finally mastered the knack of kneading food into a ball before popping it into my mouth. But learn it I did, just as I learned to eat nearly everything put before me. Soon the Filipinos complimented me for not being “delicado” (choosy).

  There were times, though, when I drew the line. I never became reconciled to the delicacy called balot, a fertilized egg that had been buried in manure for some time, and I never developed a taste for Philippine jerky after watching clouds of flies blow it while it was being dried in the sun.

  But the worst was dog. The first time I ate it, I didn’t know what it was. When I was told, I promptly vomited my entire dinner. It was not that the flavor was repellent; it was just that I had always liked dogs and the thought of having eaten one gagged me. Maybe devouring Man’s Best Friend would not have seemed so bad had I not learned of the barbarities that preceded a dog’s appearance as the main course in a dinner. The usual procedure was to tie the poor beast to a tree, starve it for several days, then stuff it with all it could eat and batter it to death with a club. The carcass was then cut into small pieces, cooked with rice, and served with wine. Eventually I got so I could force myself to eat dog if I didn’t have to watch the butchering, but I always drank a lot of wine with it.

  Later in the war I heard tales about famished Japanese soldiers who allegedly resorted to cannibalism. Though I am not so ill-balanced that I think more of dogs than of human beings, somehow the prospect of cannibalism never seemed as repulsive to me in those days as devouring a dog, and I sometimes wondered idly if I could ever become so starved that I would sink to cannibalism. Fortunately, no test case ever arose.

  Usually I was alone in my grass hut, but now and then I had visitors. The least welcome one appeared one day while I was lying on my side with my ear to a bamboo floor. I heard something near my foot and looked down. There was a good-sized snake crawling alongside my leg toward my head. Momentarily I was frozen with terror: I even stopped breathing. Gradually I recovered my senses sufficiently to decide that I must grab the loathsome creature with my hands if it came much closer, since it might bite me and the closer a bite is to the heart the more dangerous it becomes. Perhaps the snake also had a premonition of impending disaster: when it reached my waist it abruptly made a ninety-degree turn and vanished into the cogon grass. My heart resumed beating.

  Other visitors were more agreeable. Nobody will ever know exactly how many American soldiers escaped into the hills and jungle during the Bataan campaign or on the Death March. There must have been several hundred. Many died soon of starvation or diseases, and the Japanese caught quite a few. Others tried to live out the war in wilderness hideouts, or moved furtively from one Filipino settlement to another for months or years. Some sought a way out of the Philippines, others looked for guerrilla forces to join, still others tried to melt inconspicuously into the Filipino populace. Periodically one or more of these footloose fugitives passed through the small village of Tibuc-Tibuc. One such was a Maj. John E. Duffy, a Catholic priest whom I was to meet again in San Antonio, Texas in 1946. He had graduated from Notre Dame and enjoyed talking about his namesake, the famous Father Duffy of World War I, who had reputedly said to his troops, “May the Good Lord take a liking to you, but not too soon.” I remember him chiefly because he had what seemed to me a remarkable vocabulary of profanity for a clergyman. I used to wonder if he could swear as impressively in Latin as in English.

  Another visitor was a Brooklynite named Louis Barella. Because Japanese patrols were known to be close by, he and I were moved one night into the center of a large cogon grass field. Here we were covered with a mosquito net secured at the corners by tying it to the cross stems of the grass. This arrangement foiled the Japanese and the mosquitoes but not a large rat that somehow made its way in but could not find an exit. It kept us busy unti
l I lifted the whole net in desperation and let it scurry away. Needless to say, the mosquitoes promptly exploited the situation; but one thing you learn in war is that life is not a series of clear-cut decisions between good and evil: it is a succession of choices among alternatives all of which are disagreeable.

  Another time I had several visitors rather than one. They turned out to be Hukbalahaps, Philippine communist guerrillas. I was to have much more to do with the Huks later on, and my introduction to them on this occasion was not auspicious. Their leader had a parrot which he insisted that I take in trade for my rifle. The bird was beautiful but of doubtful utility to a fugitive from the Japanese, so I declined. A couple of his armed companions then made gestures the import of which could not be misunderstood. I hastily handed over the rifle and accepted the bird.

  For unusual people, wartime often provides exceptional opportunities to exhibit resourcefulness. One such individual whom I had encountered in the Fassoth camp and whose path I crossed again at Tibuc-Tibuc in the spring of 1943 was an American soldier who bore the easily remembered name of Johnny Johns. Johnny and a Captain Newman had been captured at the same time by the Japanese. Johnny had persuaded the captain to write a statement calling on all Americans hiding in the mountains to surrender. They were assured that the Japanese would feed them and treat them well, but warned that if they obstinately remained fugitives they would be captured and beheaded. Armed with this piece of paper, Johnny went to the Japanese and talked them into giving him $7 cash, some cigarettes, and a five-day pass, in return for which he proposed to travel about in this portion of Luzon and try to induce American escapees to surrender. To insure that he was serious and would come back, the captain was held hostage. After five days Johnny dutifully returned from his travels without having persuaded me, or anyone else, to surrender. In fact, he proved to be more persuasive with the Japanese than with Americans, gradually convincing them that five days was too little time to accomplish anything. Eventually his captors gave him a pass of indefinite duration and sent him on his way once more.