Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  He arrived in La Union province in the far north, a pfc in the signal corps, just in time to be cut off by enemy landings in Lingayen Gulf. His unit disintegrated. Officers and men scattered or hid out. Al managed to escape the Japanese and happened to find a telephone switchboard that was still open. He promptly called MacArthur’s headquarters to tell the general about the catastrophe that had ensued, and then vacated the area himself.

  Al soon hooked up with Maj. Everett Warner, a former provost marshal at Camp John Hay, whom Al liked because he still wanted to fight the enemy. So wild and mountainous was that part of northern Luzon in 1941 that the Japanese took a long time to penetrate much of it. Thus, Al was able to sequester considerable stocks of medicine, canned goods, other food, and ammunition that would be of great value to the guerrilla groups already beginning to take shape in the area. Several small engagements with wandering Japanese patrols ensued, in the course of which Al must have comported himself well, since MacArthur’s headquarters, then still on Corregidor, authorized Warner to commission him a second lieutenant April 25, 1942, and a captain soon after. It was one of the first such commissions granted to free lance operators in the Philippines.

  Not long afterward Al came down with malaria. Luckily, there was a capable Filipino doctor in the vicinity with an American wife who was a nurse. They stayed by him faithfully for about a month and provided him with good food, medicine, and care, lacking which he would have died. After he recovered, Warner asked him to round up some Igorot cargadores (porters) and transport all the gasoline they had accumulated, some one hundred gallons, south into the lowlands. Igorots are a mountain people who dislike the low country and are normally reluctant to go far into it or to stay there long. These cargadores were typical: they took the gasoline only part of the way and then went home, leaving Al alone in an area by now teeming with Japanese patrols. Several patrols got wind of him, and he exchanged gunfire with three of them before he finally fled up a river into a jungle with which he was totally unacquainted. Here he lay in the brush for many hours until the enemy eventually stopped looking for him. When he finally dared to arise and move around, he was hopelessly lost. For at least two weeks, perhaps longer, he wandered aimlessly in the jungle, barely subsisting on such fruits and berries as he could find. Eventually some Filipino woodcutters found him, so nearly starved to death that they thought him an apparition. They carried him to a hut in a jungle clearing and tried to feed him, but his stomach was so shrunken that he vomited immediately. Then they carried him off to a barrio where other Filipinos fed him more gradually and gave him native remedies for his dysentery. Gradually he recovered sufficiently to think of resuming his original trip into the lowlands.

  His Filipino benefactors then expedited his journey in a fashion he said he would never forget. He was put on a raft, along with two exceptionally big, husky young Filipinos. The raft was then pushed out into a wild river that coursed out of the mountains. The frail craft twisted, spun, submerged momentarily, then sprang back to the surface of the water that roared down a rock-walled canyon. Manning long, strong hardwood poles expertly, the Filipino boatmen maneuvered the raft past boulders as big as houses, narrowly averted head-on collisions with sheer rock walls, threaded their way through the deeper passages in whitewater rapids, and skirted murderous eddies with saw-toothed rocks lurking just beneath their surfaces. Every hundred yards Al was sure he had breathed his last. At length, after perhaps five miles of such memorable navigation, the water slackened and they went ashore. Here his companions hid him for a time and moved him about periodically to avoid the numerous Japanese patrols.

  At length the patrols became so frequent that the Filipinos were too frightened to help Al any longer, so he decided to head back northward on the chance that he might be able to resume some former contacts there. He made his way through the jungle by nights and eventually got back to Lusod, a village that had been a lumbering center in the north before the war. Here, in August or September 1942, he met Volckmann and Blackburn, who were on their way back north after escaping from Bataan and spending many weeks at the Fassoth camp. The three of them and a few others managed to secure some supplies that the Japanese had not yet found. Nonetheless, by now great numbers of Japanese were pouring into even this wild, remote area. Volckmann, who quickly assumed command locally, asked Al to go back southward once more to try to find out what was happening. Before he could leave, the whole area was raided by a Japanese patrol. In the ensuing pandemonium Blackburn, Volckmann, and Al all escaped but became separated. Al hid out in the jungle for nine days. On the last day he fell about fifteen feet near a waterfall and knocked himself cold. Once more he surely would have died had he not been found by some Filipinos. They carried him into a cave and fed him for some days. Luckily he had not broken any bones, so he soon recovered.

  Now he struck off southward again. Near San Nicolas in Pangasinan province, an area that would subsequently be my own headquarters, he met Bill Moule, a civilian he had once known in the north. The pair continued southward, dodging the everlasting Japanese patrols along the way, and eventually reached Bob Lapham’s headquarters. By now Al had a recurrence of malaria. Lapham welcomed Hendrickson and gave him some precious quinine that Moule had managed to secure. Once more Al recovered his health. Lapham then made him commander of Tarlac province.

  This appointment stabilized Al’s life somewhat, but it was by no means the end of his gut-wrenching adventures. Early in March of 1943 Charles Cushing spent a night at Al’s camp. He told Al he was tired of fleeing the Japanese and intended to surrender soon, which he did. Sometimes those who surrendered volunteered information to the enemy, sometimes they would provide information if threatened, sometimes the Japanese tortured it out of them. Whether Cushing ever gave any information to the enemy nobody knows for sure. Hendrickson always suspected that he might have, for a Nipponese patrol made its way near Al’s headquarters a few days after Cushing’s visit. The Japanese caught a sentry asleep and so were able to slip undetected up to the very house in which Al was staying. He became aware of their presence so late that he ran headlong right through the wall of his grass shack and into a bamboo thicket. The latter was so dense it stopped him in his tracks. Half-bouncing, half-backing out of it, he managed to get into a river unseen and run down it pell mell while the Japanese shot up the bamboo thicket he had just vacated.

  After having lived so long with Filipinos I was overjoyed to meet an American, and Al and I became good friends at once. In fact, we celebrated by staging a dance near Victoria, Tarlac. The orchestra consisted of members of Al’s private army. For one night we relaxed our guard, forgot the enemy, drank freely, and enjoyed life.

  The enemy might have been forgettable, but the booze was not. There were many different liquids one could drink in the Philippines. They ranged from puzzling to lethal. In some places trucks and cars ran on coconut alcohol. This was drinkable if it passed through copper tubing; but there were instances of men drinking it after it had run through galvanized pipe, in which cases the thirsty topers went blind.36 Another common drink was tuba, which was made from palm buds. I drank some of it on occasion and found it not too bad. What our local Filipinos had, though, was two different kinds of wine: basi, made from sugarcane, and miding, concocted from some portion of the nipa palm. The former destroyed one’s stomach, the latter one’s mind. We drank both and suffered fearsome hangovers next morning.

  I can’t claim that this was a lesson to me, but the longer the war lasted the less I drank of anything alcoholic. The reason was practical. If you drank a lot, you increased the chance that the enemy might capture you when you were incapacitated.37

  Soon after I arrived, Al appointed me his executive officer and proclaimed me a captain. What followed indicated a good deal about the informality of our existence. Al asked Lapham’s headquarters to confirm my status. Harry McKenzie, Lapham’s executive officer, said he thought second lieutenant was a sufficiently high rank for such a newcomer. A brief disp
ute ensued, but eventually everything was settled in my favor on the ground that nobody concerned expected to survive the war anyway, and the higher promotion would enable my family to get more government money after the war. One of Al’s boys carved a pair of bamboo captain’s bars to embellish me suitably.

  In our exuberance at having each other for company, we engaged in several skirmishes with Japanese patrols. Little damage was done, but the Japanese, with their unfailing talent for mangling the English language, responded by putting out circulars calling for the capture of an American named Allen Ray (Al and Ray). Spies soon straightened them out, and eventually Al had a price of $50,000 on his head and I one of $10,000 on mine. The offer stood for eight months before the American Lingayen Gulf landings in January 1945.

  Al was a great talker, and we spent many hours exchanging accounts of our personal adventures. Some of the wilder of his I have already related. He told me of others, comparably spine-tingling, that had happened after he joined Lapham’s organization but before he met me. A couple I remember still. Once Al, Little Joe (his bodyguard), and four of his men were invited to dinner by a local mayor. On a dark night they set off in a calesa (buggy) down a gravelled road that crossed a railroad track. Another buggy was sent ahead, and scouts had been dispatched to reconnoiter the railroad. For some reason the latter didn’t do their job. The first calesa crossed the track without incident, but when Al and his party came to it a Japanese patrol sprang out of the darkness. One Japanese grabbed the horse’s reins, one tried to grab the legs of a man sitting at the back end of the buggy, and a third shoved a rifle into the buggy, perhaps merely for fun without realizing that the buggy contained several armed guerrillas. Little Joe had the presence of mind to ward off the intruding rifle barrel with his own. The sudden clash of steel against steel so startled everyone concerned that those in the buggy were able to jump out and dash away in the darkness before anyone fired a shot.

  The silence was short. Little Joe ran full tilt into a wire fence, bounced back into Hendrickson, who was close on his heels, and knocked both of them down. As soon as they recovered their wits, they crawled under the fence, jumped off a bank into a small river, wallowed their way across, and scrambled up the far bank. The accompanying noise and curses alerted every Japanese and every dog in the neighborhood. At once Japanese bullets whistled about in the darkness amid a cacophonous chorus of barks and yelps. Nonetheless, the luck of Al and Little Joe held. They made it safely to a heavily timbered hill some distance away.

  Not long afterward Al suffered one of his recurring attacks of malaria. Little Joe, whose devotion to Al was absolute and unquestioning, feared he would die, so he told some Filipinos in a nearby barrio that he would kill them if they did not carry Al into one of their houses and treat him. Despite their fright, for they knew the Japanese would kill anyone caught harboring an American, the civilians took Al in, got him a doctor and some quinine, and persuaded a local girl to be his nurse. Recovery was slow, and before it was completed one of Al’s men impregnated his nurse. After Al left, the Lothario declined to marry the maiden he had wronged, whereupon she fled to Al’s camp in the mountains and asked him to marry her, presumably because he should regard her as a friend. Al was not ungrateful for her past medical services, but he had no desire to embrace matrimony in such circumstances, so he sent her back to her home village. The complexities of war are not all on the battlefield.

  There were several memorable characters in Al’s immediate entourage. One of them was his girlfriend Lee, a beautiful Filipina who could shoot a .45 better than most men. More important, she was intelligent, and she knew many people in the towns and villages where we operated. Thus, she was invaluable in supplying us with information. At one time Al wanted to marry her, and he continued to write to her after the war, but she died young of tuberculosis in 1946.

  Another nonpareil was Little Joe, whose worth I soon came to appreciate. Good-humored, almost totally uneducated, and innocuous looking, Little Joe was hardly five feet tall and might have weighed ninety pounds with a rifle on his back and his pockets full of ammunition. As a presumed bodyguard for the husky Hendrickson he appeared ludicrous. Nontheless, he knew his business thoroughly, and in dangerous situations he invariably proved to be resourceful and fearless. He could handle weapons skillfully, and he controlled and drilled recruits with the panache of a Prussian sergeant.

  The outcome of one of his drills was both pathetic and funny. In our travels we often picked up volunteers. One memorable one we did not want. He was a Filipino boy named Norberto Sula, maybe thirteen years old, but small for that age and with a slightly deformed foot. One day he simply showed up and attached himself to us. Nobody knew where he had come from or who his family was. In such cases it was not uncommon to execute an intruder on suspicion that he might be a Japanese spy, but we contented ourselves with trying to shoo the boy away. He would not be dissuaded. No matter how many times he was chased off, he always turned up at the next stop, saying he wanted to become a guerrilla. One day Al lost patience and told Little Joe to give the kid a rifle and drill him. Little Joe set to the task enthusiastically. He slammed a rifle into the boy’s hands and marched him unmercifully in the heat and dust. Every time “Norby,” as we had come to call him, made a mistake, Little Joe would deluge him with loud shouts and insults that would have impressed an old-time marine sergeant. Despite the harshness of it all, Al and I couldn’t help doubling up with laughter at the spectacle, especially when Little Joe would shout periodically, “Do you want to go home now?” only to receive the same dogged “No” from the boy, after which Little Joe would step up the tempo of the drill. Finally Al had enough. He called the boy over and asked him if he truly wanted to become a guerrilla. Despite all the dirt and heat and punishment, the boy immediately replied, “Yes, sir.” Al then told him to raise his right hand, and swore him into our ranks. Norby never had much of a childhood, but he became a valuable member of our outfit. Boundlessly loyal, he regarded Al with a respect approaching adoration. More significant, like Lee and Little Joe, Norby had a good head to go along with a brave heart. Since he looked like a mere child, it was easy to send him into towns to gather information, find food, and let local inhabitants know that their future prospects would be brighter if they cooperated with us. After the American army landed in north Luzon in 1945, Norby finally got a suitable reward: he was made a sergeant of artillery in the Philippine army.

  Of course, we did not try to train most guerrillas the way Little Joe “trained” Norby. In fact, training them at all was difficult since most were civilians who knew nothing about military regularity. Consequently, they relished some kinds of training, hated others, and tended to ignore what they disliked. What most of them enjoyed most was competitive drill and repeatedly cleaning their weapons. They especially delighted in contests to see who could most rapidly take apart and then correctly assemble weapons when blindfolded. The weapons themselves were often in a terrible state. Many had been buried in the grass roofs of houses, others in the ground. I was surprised to discover that those buried directly in the dirt were usually in a less deplorable condition than those that had been wrapped in cloth before burial. In either case, many rifles had rotten, worm-eaten stocks that had to be replaced. Many of those that had been wrapped had “sweated” until their bolts and firing pins had been fused by rust and their firing chambers pitted.

  Some of our rifles and other equipment were secured by ambushing the enemy, though the utility of materiel so acquired was limited severely by the ambivalent attitude of the Filipinos toward it. For instance, it was convenient to wear uniforms taken off dead Japanese, yet because Filipinos and Japanese are about the same size physically this made it hard to tell friend from foe. The best way, if one was close, was to look at the feet. Filipinos often liked to go barefooted, but the Japanese had some superstition about it and never did. Japanese boots the Filipinos disliked because their hobnailed soles made impressions in the dirt that scared people. Nipponese
rifles were objectionable because they had a sound that a trained ear could easily distinguish from that of American weapons. Thus, in nighttime operations no guerrilla wanted to fire a Japanese rifle lest he be mistaken for the enemy and fired on by his comrades.

  Whatever the origins of rifles, or their condition, we could not give our men much training firing them, both because we were habitually short of ammunition and because we were usually close to Japanese garrisons whose inmates might hear the noise. To some degree we got around the latter by digging pits in the ground and covering them with grass to muffle the sound of the rifle shots, or by practicing during thunderstorms when thunder would mask the reports of the rifles.

  What it came down to eventually was that every squad leader trained his own men as he thought best. The excellent performance of the guerrillas after the American landings late in 1944 is the clearest evidence that sometimes ad hoc arrangements are better than adhering rigorously to some “system.”

  Donald Blackburn wrote that one of the most onerous features of guerrilla life was boredom: that much of the time about all there was to do was keep out of sight, check impulses, control tempers, and wait.38 For me personally that was not true. Blackburn spent much of his time well up in the mountains of north Luzon at considerable distance from the enemy, while I lived in the lowlands with the enemy all around me and thus found greater safety in moving about regularly than in just sitting. Blackburn was right about most Filipino guerrillas, though. They got bored easily unless there was some action.