by Ray C. Hunt
Though only Thorp, Lapham, and a few others had instructions from USAFFE headquarters to undertake guerrilla operations, this did not dissuade a varied array of Americans and Filipinos from organizing their own private armies in 1942.
Around Manila two odd, though not bloodthirsty, bands evolved who quarrelled a good deal among themselves: the Hunters, composed heavily of ex-ROTC students, and Marking’s guerrillas. The latter were named after their nominal leader, a Filipino ex-boxer and ex-bus driver, Marcos Augustin; though the brains of the outfit was clearly Marking’s mistress, a sharp, energetic, and tenacious mestiza who bore the picturesque name of Yay Panlilio. Before the war she had been a newspaperwoman. During the conflict she displayed sufficient ability and personal magnetism that Marking’s guerrillas called her Mammy and named one of their regiments after her, while no less a figure than General Willoughby paid tribute to her contribution to the Allied cause. After the war she wrote one of the most informative and interesting books done either by a guerrilla or about irregulars.22
The personal relationship of Panlilio and “Marking” was quite as tempestuous as the guerrilla life they led. Marking respected her talents and knew she was vital to his organization, but he could never stand to be bossed by a woman. As a consequence, they quarrelled incessantly. At the end of the war she left him and came back to the United States, only to succumb eventually to his repeated entreaties and marry him.
Up in north Luzon, when the Japanese landed at Lingayen Gulf in December 1941, nearby Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, was declared on open city. Whether for this reason, from bad judgment, or from mere timidity, Col. John P. Horan, who commanded a U.S. battalion nearby, withdrew in great haste southeastward toward Balete Pass, intending to join other American forces in central Luzon. He destroyed most of his equipment along the way but was still beaten to the pass by the Japanese. He then simply disbanded his tired and demoralized troops, and he and they fled into the mountains. Horan himself was lucky not to be killed by Al Hendrickson, whose guerrilla detachment I later joined. Hendrickson had laid an ambush for the Japanese near Balete Pass. Horan narrowly missed being bagged by mistake, only to be ordered by General Wainwright to surrender to the Japanese. Horan’s conduct has been described by one stern judge23 as heartbreaking evidence that much peacetime army experience sometimes seems to ruin men for war. Nonetheless, his actions did indubitably spread the sparks of guerrilla resistance all over north Luzon.
Meanwhile a baroque character named Walter Cushing had raised his personal guerrilla force. Cushing was a small, hard-drinking, cocky mining engineer from Texas who had come to the Philippines in 1933 in a mining boom. Fearless to the point of foolhardiness, energetic, imaginative, self-sacrificing, capable of joining the French Foreign Legion when drunk and then jumping enlistment when some friends got him interested in a new mining venture, Walter Cushing was the sort of man about whom legends grow. Only two days after the Japanese landed in Lingayen Gulf, he left his mine and began to train his erstwhile Filipino miners to be soldiers. Soon after, to the mingled disgust and admiration of their commanding officer, Lt. Robert Arnold, Cushing simply commandeered thirty American soldiers who had been operating an air warning station on the north Luzon coast and who had been cut off when the Japanese swept through central Luzon.24 The flabbergasted Arnold went along, helped Cushing train the men Cushing had just taken away from him, and cooperated enthusiastically when Cushing began to ambush Japanese detachments. Once they even captured an enemy general and his whole staff. Though Arnold performed with such bravery in these endeavors that he was eventually awarded a Bronze Star, he was disgusted when Cushing claimed all the credit and so deserted him to join Nakar’s outfit after the fall of Bataan.25 Un-discouraged, Cushing then made common cause with Colonel Horan, who reciprocated by commissioning the civilian Cushing a “captain.”
These transactions involving Cushing, Arnold, Nakar, and Horan were all too typical of guerrilla relationships on Luzon. Some of the guerrillas were soldiers and some were civilians; the soldiers came in many ranks; some of them had, or claimed, authorization from MacArthur’s headquarters, but most did not or could not; they cherished widely differing plans; and most of them wanted to boss some of the others.
Sometimes obscurity and confusion approached infinity. This was especially the case with guerrillas of the lone wolf genre. One such unaffiliated operator was Henry Clay Conner, who allegedly organized no fewer than three thousand guerrillas and was active in several parts of Luzon for three years. He was sufficiently well known and respected that an assemblage of guerrilla veterans of Luzon was convened in his honor in Indianapolis in September, 1984. Several of those who attended publicly paid tribute to his achievements and memory. Conner was even in the Fassoth camp at the same time I was.26 Yet I never knew Conner existed, and I wonder if General Willoughby in Australia did either, since he does not mention Conner a single time in the seven hundred pages of materials he assembled and published under the title The Guerrilla Resistance in the Philippines.
Be all that as it may, after Corregidor fell Walter Cushing decided that further resistance was useless and so disbanded his organization, though he did not surrender personally. Instead he began to publish a news sheet to counteract Japanese propaganda. Soon he was travelling all over Luzon, even into Manila, to contact other guerrilla groups and to solicit money from wealthy Filipinos in order to buy U.S. weapons and ammunition that the Japanese had captured and were now selling on the black market. He took the weapons back north with him in a truck, but the Japanese caught up with him in Isabela province.
What happened next is uncertain. According to some melodramatic accounts, it was a Hollywood-style shootout that ended when Cushing, riddled with enemy bullets, saved his own last one for himself. According to Al Hendrickson, who had once been a guest of the Filipino landowner on whose veranda Cushing died, a servant of the landowner told Hendrickson afterward that Cushing had been killed by Japanese bullets without having had a chance to fire a shot himself. Whichever the case, the Japanese were sufficiently impressed that, even though he had been responsible for the deaths of perhaps five hundred of themselves, they gave him a formal military funeral. Thus ended the career of “the granddaddy of the guerrilla forces in north Luzon.”27
Two decidedly less flamboyant private operators were Lt. Cols. Arthur Noble and Martin Moses. They had commanded Philippine army units when the Japanese made the Lingayen landings. Their inadequately trained troops had crumpled before the invaders. Moses and Noble had then escaped to Baguio in the mountains, where they joined Horan. Then they went back down to the central plains, joined the withdrawing USAFFE forces, and retreated with them into Bataan. Here they performed well, then managed to escape from the peninsula after the surrender and make their way north again. Along the way they met several leaders of newly formed irregular groups, but just what they had in mind is uncertain. They are alleged to have reached agreements with at least two of the guerrilla leaders, Robert Lapham and Charles Cushing, that these men and their followers would affiliate with Noble and Moses, now the senior officers on Luzon, whenever the latter should be able to organize the whole area for systematic guerrilla activity. Long afterward, Lapham says he cannot recall any such understanding. Moreover, he doubts that Moses and Noble, in 1942, had any intention of forming guerrilla units at all.28 In fact, no affiliation took place. The ultimate designs of Charles Cushing, the brother of Walter Cushing, are as cloudy as those of Moses and Noble. Cushing eventually surrendered to the Japanese, supposedly at the behest of his imprisoned wife,29 though Al Hendrickson relates a different account of the surrender and the motivation behind it, later in this narrative.
Whatever their earlier intentions, Moses and Noble eventually claimed control over perhaps six thousand men heretofore scattered throughout a dozen lesser partisan groups. Through Praeger’s transceiver they reported to MacArthur that they had established a unified command, adding that they had also done much
damage to Japanese installations at small loss to their own forces, that morale in their units was excellent, that thousands of young Filipinos would join them eagerly if arms became available, and that their most pressing immediate need was for radio communication to keep track of their scattered forces.30
Perhaps they exaggerated. Donald Blackburn thought Moses habitually depressed and pessimistic, and considered that both Moses and Noble readily found excuses not to undertake significant guerrilla activity.31 The truth matters little: before any effective response could come from Australia, the luck of Moses and Noble ran out. The Japanese captured their orderly, tortured him until he revealed the whereabouts of his superiors, then captured them June 3, 1943, and executed them three months later. The careers of a high percentage of guerrilla leaders ended either like those of Noble and Moses or like that of Captain Manuel P. Enriquez who assumed command of Nakar’s unit after Nakar was captured. Al Hendrickson, who became my commanding officer in the guerrillas in mid-1943, had once been in hiding with Enriquez and had gotten to know him well. He thought Enriquez was more of a playboy and self-conscious local celebrity than a warrior. Be that as it may, the Japanese, with their habitual barbarity, seized Enriquez’s wife and children. The poor woman then pleaded with her husband to surrender. He gave way, but unwisely tried to keep up his contacts with guerrillas around Baguio. Eventually he disappeared.32
With the demise of Moses and Noble everything in north Luzon fell into chaos for a time. I have read accounts that describe Luzon guerrillas then as poorly fed, clothed, and equipped; often barefooted; lacking medical supplies; uncoordinated, badly led, and mutually hostile; living in constant fear and danger; and susceptible to Japanese propaganda.33 The description is recognizable but it is overdrawn, especially for central Luzon. Of course, guerrilla life anywhere, anytime, is not like that around a country club. Nonetheless, to say that most guerrillas were barefooted meant nothing. Few Filipinos out in the countryside wore shoes in the 1940s: I myself went without them for a year and a half. More important, these descriptions of “guerrilla attitudes” make no distinction between serious, dedicated guerrillas and mere “paper” irregulars and gangs of bandits.
The true situation was bad enough. All irregular groups save Lapham’s were operating without authority, since everyone was supposed to have surrendered with General Wainwright when Corregidor fell. None of us had any idea what might happen to us in the unlikely event that we survived the war. If the Japanese won, there would, of course, be no uncertainty about the matter. But if America won, would we be hailed as heroes or court martialled for disobeying orders? or, perhaps, regarded as mere bandits and put on trial back in the United States for murder and other crimes? or instead, tried thus in the Philippines before Filipino judges? Nobody knew, just as nobody exercised unquestioned authority over anyone else. Because of the guerrilla practice of leaders bestowing commissions on themselves and each other, there were units that consisted almost entirely of officers. Colonels were commoner than in Kentucky. Anyone who valued military regularity would have thought he was with Alice in Wonderland.
It is in circumstances like these that exceptional individuals rapidly gain ascendancy. They are not necessarily the “best” men, however “best” might be defined, but they are the most intelligent, or energetic, or ambitious, or clear-sighted, or ruthless, or charismatic, or some combination of these. So it was here. In north Luzon Capt. Russell W. Volckmann rapidly assumed overall command after the capture of Noble and Moses. Volckmann was a West Pointer who had been intelligence officer for General Brougher’s Eleventh Philippine Army on Bataan. He and his friend Capt. Donald Blackburn, Brougher’s signal officer, had escaped from Bataan before its fall and were in the Fassoth camp for a time when I was. After an array of hardships, adventures, and close calls at least as impressive as my own, they had eventually made their way north to Moses and Noble.34 There Volckmann was assigned the task of coordinating the activities of three of their subordinate commanders. Following the deaths of his superiors, Volckmann proclaimed himself a colonel, designated Blackburn as his chief aide, and took over what Moses and Noble had begun. He divided north Luzon into seven districts, tightened operating procedures, and established a regular system of communication between his headquarters and those units he declared to be within his jurisdiction. He appointed Capt. George Barnett to implement this reorganization.
One immediate difficulty was that some of the guerrilla leaders declined to be reorganized. The most important of these was Robert Lapham. Volckmann and Blackburn had already met Lapham on their trek northward in 1943 and had stayed overnight at Lapham’s camp near Umingan in eastern Pangasinan province. Their mutual impressions on that occasion are interesting in view of Volckmann’s subsequent efforts to incorporate Lapham’s organization into his own. Blackburn says he found Lapham uncooperative personally but that Lapham’s camp was remarkably well run, an example of what human intelligence and energy could produce even in the most unpromising circumstances. Lapham said long afterward that both Blackburn and Volckmann seemed anxious to get on north into the mountains where they would be safer, and that neither gave any indication that they planned to become guerrillas. He added that he gave them guns and guides through the territory he then dominated.35
Eventually I joined Lapham’s organization, and though I did not meet Bob personally until near the end of the war, I heard enough about him from others and learned enough from my regular communication with him that I came to appreciate his abilities, just as Blackburn had, and to like him in the bargain. Unlike some of the other chiefs of irregulars, Lapham was not selfish or personally ambitious. At the moment he was a guerrilla major who had taken advantage of the prevailing anarchy to reorganize his own command and strengthen his hold on several provinces in central Luzon. He named as his executive officer Capt. Harry McKenzie, a former civilian mining engineer who had lived in the Philippines for years and who had a Filipina wife and a son. The province of Tarlac he had put under the command of Capt. Albert C. Hendrickson, with whom I was to have much to do later.
Lapham simply ignored Volckmann’s overtures and orders, just as he had earlier fended off the attentions of another ambitious guerrilla free lancer, Maj. Edwin Ramsey. Such was the milieu into which I moved when I fled north from Tarlac in mid-1943.
I had heard that Major Lapham had developed an extensive guerrilla organization in Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and parts of Nueva Vizcaya to the north and east, and that his influence extended into Tarlac, the province where I had collected a few ill-armed guerrillas of my own. As I moved northward in early fall 1943, I sent a runner to contact him and to offer to place myself and my small force under his command. About three weeks later the runner returned bearing instructions to me to contact Capt. Albert C. Hendrickson, commander of Tarlac province, and to work with him. After several days of wandering and searching I finally found him. Thus began one of my most memorable associations in the war.
Hendrickson was several years older than I and a couple of sizes bigger, 5′11″ tall and weighing about 180 pounds. He was also a colorful figure, habitually bedecked with a nickel-plated .45 automatic and an M-1 Garand. He was of Finnish extraction and, aside from a year in college, had spent his youth working in the mines and living in the tough towns of western Montana and Alaska. He had enlisted in the army in the fall of 1940 and had been sent to the Philippines almost immediately thereafter.
From the first day of the war until the time we met, Al’s life had been a virtual nonstop series of hair-raising adventures that exceeded many of my own. Though we did not then know of each other’s existence, Al, like me, was at Nichols Field when the war began December 8, 1941. When the first wave of enemy bombers came over, he looked about frantically for shelter and spotted a nearby taxi with its engine running. He sprinted for it, leaped inside—and found the gears locked. He sprang out, raced to a nearby banyan tree, clambered up it a few feet, and was promptly blown out of it by a Japanese bomb which le
ft him unconscious and temporarily deaf. When he regained consciousness, the bombs were still falling, so he dashed for a nearby stream, jumped in, and found himself buried up to his chest in clinging mud. The Japanese then began to strafe the area. With bullets splattering all about him Al managed to work his way out of the mud, crawl up a steep bank, and run toward a nearby church. When another wave of enemy bombers came over, he had a sudden impulse and dashed out of the church toward another banyan tree. Hardly three seconds later the church collapsed behind him, hit dead center by a Japanese bomb.
Al then took off down a road toward a burning building in front of which were several Filipinos gesticulating wildly and shouting that a female member of their family was inside, drunk, but that they were afraid to go in after her. Perhaps steeled, or numbed, by his experiences thus far, Al entered the flaming building, found the woman with a gin bottle, drunk indeed, and proclaiming to anyone within earshot that she did not care if the Japs killed her. He carried her out and surrendered her gladly to her relatives. Next day he volunteered to go up to north Luzon in the hope of embracing a quieter life fighting the Japanese.