by Ray C. Hunt
During the American Revolution, 165 years before, Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” would have his men scatter in every direction after an engagement, thereby making enemy pursuit impossible, following which they would eventually meet at some prearranged place.12 Though I knew nothing about Marion’s tactics at that time, we had long used a similar stratagem. When we were in some danger and felt compelled to break up, we would select three possible meeting places, number them in order of their attractiveness, and then try to meet at one of them. Nearly always at least one place would be available and reasonably safe. This time the Japanese probably expected us to go back into the foothills again after dark, but instead we slipped through their lines back into the central rice plains from whence we had come.
We did this for three reasons. The most basic was that we thought the Japanese would not expect it. We were also short of food, and there would be little back in the mountains. Finally, we were worn down physically, and traversing Philippine mountain trails is particularly difficult for Westerners. In most parts of the world mountain roads or trails follow terrain that offers the least resistance; they usually angle upward along mountainsides, frequently by means of switchbacks. Not so in the Philippines. The first time I saw little Igorot tribesmen shoulder heavy loads and lope, not walk, along paths that went straight up mountainsides, I was dumbfounded. Of course, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but many Igorots develop enlarged hearts from heeding this axiom of geometry while we Occidentals could not travel rapidly in this way at all. Laboriously we trekked back across Pangasinan, along the way we had come, and went back into Tarlac province. A major change in my fortunes took place soon after.
As noted earlier, most guerrilla existence was an amalgam of danger, privation, and occasional boredom, interspersed with life’s ordinary problems and vexations. It also bore another aspect which has heretofore received only passing notice in this narrative. That side was grim, cruel, bloody, and degrading, but given the character and deeds of our enemies, unavoidable.
We Americans are notoriously poor judges of the psychology of other peoples and maladroit in our dealings with them. In the 1940s the Japanese were incomparably worse. Had they treated the Filipinos with kindness and generosity from the first day of the war, many of the latter would have accepted their fate, and many who remained loyal to America initially would have gradually gone over to the conquerors as months of Japanese occupation stretched into years. But the Japanese army was filled with hubris as a result of its quick and easy conquests, and Japanese field commanders usually acted harshly in an effort to scare civilians into cooperation. Japanese military administration, by contrast, gradually began to urge leniency in an effort to win the sympathy of civilians. The latter might have worked had it been instituted in December 1941, but by 1943 there had been far too many crimes committed by Japanese against Filipinos for such a policy to have any chance of success. If military administration secured the release of some prisoners, few evidenced any gratitude. Most soon showed up with guerrillas, or worked with them secretly. As soon as guerrillas became strong enough to provide an alternative focus for the loyalty of Filipino civilians, they put pressure on local officials appointed by the Japanese and neutralized them as Japanese instruments. Moreover, the struggles of guerrillas against the Japanese soon passed into Filipino folklore and strengthened the Pro-American sentiments of most civilians. The Japanese were never able to counter this effectively. As the famous nineteenth-century German chancellor Bismarck used to say, it is the imponderables that are the most important factors in human affairs.13
By the time I became a guerrilla, it had been learned long before by hard experience that if the enemy secured rosters of guerrillas they would confiscate the property of these men, and then seize their families and torture them. It is impossible to conceive a more effective tool to use against Filipinos, whose primary allegiance has always been to their families rather than to the nation or state. The Japanese would also do such things as enter a village, herd everyone into the marketplace, then lead out an informer completely cloaked from head to foot save for slits for his eyes, and compel every person in the village to pass before him. When the informer lifted an arm, the individual then passing would be seized by the Japanese and put aside. When all had passed before the collaborator, and those who had aided guerrillas or otherwise shown themselves to be anti-Japanese had been pointed out, the hapless victims were marched to a field, made to dig a pit for their own burial, and then bayoneted to death.14 Another ploy of the Japanese was to send out their own agents, who would say they were collecting money and supplies for the guerrillas. Those who contributed would then be seized and tortured or killed, or both.15 If a guerrilla was captured, the Japanese would often torture him to death, stretching out the process over many days. The enemy would sometimes even behead the corpses of guerrillas.16
The techniques employed by the Japanese to extract information from prisoners and civilians, or to punish their enemies, were revolting, but some of them must be described if the reader is to comprehend the unbridled ferocity with which guerrillas often responded to such deeds. A favorite Japanese punishment was to “flood” a victim; that is, force water into his stomach until it was three times normal size, then pound the victim with their fists as if he were a punching bag, or jump on him, thus forcing liquids to squirt out all his body orifices.17 Another favorite treatment of theirs was to tie a victim’s thumbs behind his back, toss the rope over a beam, and pull him up until his feet were off the floor. In an effort to get information the Japanese once crucified a Filipino boy for three days and then killed him with a sabre.18 At the war crimes trial of General Yamashita, a Filipina woman testified that two Japanese soldiers had held her while two others tried to cut out her husband’s tongue because he would not give them information, which he did not have, about local authorities.19
Simply to punish persons who had crossed them in some way the Japanese did such things as pull out all the victim’s teeth, toenails, and fingernails,20 or chain him to a slab of galvanized iron in the hot sun, to be slowly fried alive.21 Merely to terrorize civilians the Japanese would sometimes send out a patrol at dawn to gather underneath a Filipino house-on-stilts. Many Filipino families then slept all together on the floor. At a signal the Japanese soldiers would thrust their bayonets violently up through the thin bamboo flooring, impaling men, women, and children indiscriminately, until blood would drip down through the floor onto the assailants. They they would burn down the house.22
Ideally, guerrillas should have captured the Japanese responsible for such atrocities and executed them. In practice, this was impossible since the Japanese ordinarily fought to the death rather than surrender, even on those comparatively rare occasions when there was some chance to take prisoners. What was usually done as second best was to ferret out Japanese spies and collaborators among Filipino civilians, and punish them.
Now many writers have charged, after the event, that all guerrillas were unreasonably hard on anyone who collaborated with the Japanese.23 Their point of view is understandable, but many times we had to take drastic action on not much more than suspicion, or simply disband. We had organized guerrilla units in the first place to make life difficult for the Japanese and to collect information for Allied headquarters in Australia. We could not do either one without consistent, widespread, predictable civilian support. We could not get that support unless we made it safe for civilians to cooperate with us. Thus, our foremost immediate problem was always to pursue informers relentlessly and exterminate them. This not only made life safer for civilians sympathetic to us; it also caused fence sitters to gravitate to our side. The way we dealt with spies and suspected spies does not make pleasant reading, nor does it give rise to happy memories even forty years later but, like so much in war, it was the result of excruciating quandaries that armchair moralists never have to face.
There is no question that some guerrillas, both Filipinos and Ameri
can, exceeded all norms of reason and humanity in their relentless pursuit of informers and subsequent treatment of them. Most Filipinos are mild, peaceful people, but if aroused or enraged they can become vindictive and capable of frightful cruelties. Illif David Richardson relates an instance on Leyte that illustrates the point. Some Filipino guerrillas there caught some of their countrymen collaborating with the Japanese, so they minced their bodies and floated the pieces downstream into Filipino villages. The number of collaborators dropped off sharply.24 An even more sickening case on the same island involved a luckless ten-year-old Filipino boy whom the Japanese had taught to become a sharpshooter for them. Some guerrillas of the criminal sort caught the poor youngster, smashed his face to a pulp, collected a cup of his blood and tried to force his twelve-year-old sister to drink it, a barbarity that immediately provoked a fight between the American commander of the units and the men involved.25 I never saw atrocities at this depth of depravity and madness, but I saw enough that I don’t doubt that such tales are true.
One such case I will never forget because it took place in my own outfit after Hendrickson and I separated. It was one of those many instances in which guerrilla underlings acted on their own and only afterward told their superiors what had taken place. In this instance a spy was bled to death, and each guerrilla in the band that had captured him drank his blood. His heart was then torn from his body and roasted over an open fire, after which each guerrilla ate a bit of it. The whole ghastly business was done in public to impress civilians. Afterwards I asked the officer in charge how it had affected him. He said it made him feel brave. I was sickened, but I could not resurrect the victim, and to have executed the whole guerrilla troop responsible would have demoralized all my men, so I did nothing.
Yay Panlilio, an intelligent woman and seemingly a humane one as well, says she did all she could to insure that Marking’s guerrillas killed Japanese and traitors quickly and cleanly because she did not want their men to become sadists. But even she could be provoked beyond endurance. She acknowledges that once in an especially atrocious case she and Marking let their men beat some traitors to death, and that she personally killed one of the victims who had murdered a friend of hers and had then violated the corpse.26 In most guerrilla outfits collaborators were routinely executed, with or without benefit of a trial, usually by beheading, shooting, or being buried alive.27
No matter how callous it seems to say this, and since the Vietnam War no matter how unpopular, it comes down to this: we could not allow the Japanese to terrorize civilians with impunity or to employ spies among us without exacting a prompt and proportionate vengeance. Otherwise, no Filipino civilian would dare to aid us. We also had the new Philippine Constabulary to consider. A high proportion of men in it remained loyal to America in their hearts, but others became genuinely converted to the Japanese cause by persuasion, despair, or pay, or some combination of these; and there were many who fell somewhere in between. Those who were pro-American could not openly avow it lest their pro-Japanese colleagues betray them to the enemy. Of course, it was impossible for any outsider to sort them all out accurately, yet we could not disregard the Constabulary, for if the pro-Japanese elements in it were never opposed or molested they would dominate their fellows and make the Constabulary an effective force that would then allow the Japanese to release thousands of their own regular troops for duty elsewhere. As Russell Volckmann once put it, guerrilla life is no place for the tender-minded.28
The ideal way to deal with a suspected spy would have been to turn the person over to an ordinary civilian court for a formal trial under American or Philippine law. But there were no such civilian courts where we were, nor any regularly constituted court martial system either. After I became commander of Pangasinan province in the summer of 1944, I did the best I could: I organized a company of military police whose duty it was to apprehend anyone suspected of spying, or of committing murder, rape, robbery, or any other serious crime against a civilian. When a case existed against someone, he was arrested, brought before the officers of this military unit, and tried. It wasn’t a trial that would have pleased the American Bar Association, since those who passed judgment were mostly simple men untrained in the law, but it was a step above a kangaroo court.
A worse difficulty has been noted earlier: there were no jails. Thus, no matter what the nature of any serious crime or the care we took to treat the accused as fairly as we could, the accused was either found innocent and released or found guilty and executed. Even if we had had jails, or guerrillas willing to become mere jailers, prisoners would then have had to be fed and clothed, when we sometimes had a hard time feeding and clothing ourselves. Moreover, if a prisoner escaped his only practical course would be to flee to the Japanese for protection. This would mean that the vengeance of the cruel conquerors would then descend on any Filipinos who had helped guerrillas, aided in the capture of the criminal, or guarded him. When weighing the lives of many friendly Filipinos—and their families as well, remember—against the life of one spy, collaborationist, or criminal, real or suspected, normally there could be only one decision. The Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa once summed up the essence of the matter succinctly. When asked what to do with some prisoners when he lacked food for his own men, or any extra men to guard prisoners, he is supposed to have replied, “Let’s shoot them for the time being.”
Yay Panlilio acknowledges shooting prisoners before an impending battle, and also describes a grimly appropriate way in which Marking’s guerrillas dealt with one of their own best fighters who had raped a woman who had given them much rice. They told the man they would fake his execution: shoot over his head. Then he should fall as if dead in order to satisfy the woman he had wronged. But the firing squad did not shoot over his head.29
Nobody will ever know how many innocent Filipinos lost their lives because they lacked proper identification, or were a long way from home for no clear reason, or because either guerrillas or Japanese considered that they could not take chances. For instance, a collegian from Manila joined the underground and fraternized with Japanese officers to get information about them. Some guerrillas observed this, did not realize what the boy was trying to do, and ambushed him. Another from the same school was guarding some machinery at a private estate when local guerrillas got the mistaken idea that the machinery was to be sold to the Japanese, so they murdered him30
It is against this whole background that the reader should consider the disposition of two of the toughest spy cases I ever had to deal with. One day when we were fleeing from the Japanese, we crossed a river and holed up in a village where we hoped the enemy would not find us. Soon some men showed up who had not been with us when we crossed the river but who belonged to our organization. Acting on their own, they had dressed themselves in Philippine Constabulary uniforms, posed as members of the Constabulary, and questioned an old man whose clothing was made from gunnysacks. They told the man they were looking for Filipino and American guerrillas. Then they accused him of collaborating with guerrillas, which he indignantly denied. He insisted that, like themselves, he worked with Japanese. One of our phony Constabularymen then asked him how much the Japanese would give him if he led them to a Filipino or American guerrilla. He named a figure our men know to be accurate, and added other information that indicated that he was indeed on familiar terms with the Japanese.
I first became aware of the affair when some of our men dragged the culprit into the house where I was staying. He had been beaten unmercifully, and it appeared that his back was broken. I then asked some of the village people if they had witnessed the affair. They said they had, adding that they had no doubt that the stranger was a Japanese spy. I then told the guerrilla lieutenant concerned to finish what he had started and bury the victim, but to make sure nobody fired a gun since that would reveal our position to the Japanese somewhere across the river. That done, I assumed that another messy incident with another spy was over. Alas! It was not.
Three da
ys later a woman who was a stranger to the district, and about eight months pregnant in the bargain, entered the village in search of the recently deceased “spy.” She said he was her husband. We arrested her and interrogated her about her alleged husband’s connections with the Japanese. She denied repeatedly and tearfully that he was a spy at all, and did so with such conviction that to this day I wonder if our men did not make a tragic mistake. But what to do with her? She was bound to hate us for having killed her husband and the father of her unborn child. If we released her and she went to the Japanese, either because she too had been a spy all along, or because she wanted to avenge her husband, the enemy would burn the village to the ground and murder all the one hundred or so people who had already risked their lives to give us aid and shelter. We guerrillas could probably escape during such a Japanese attack, but civilians have to stay where they gain their livelihood, so ill-advised lenience on our part would condemn them rather than ourselves. Yet no civilized person wants to kill a woman eight months pregnant; doubly so when he fears that her jeopardy may be due to ghastly misjudgment by some of his own men.
Ray Hunt, January 1945, shortly after the liberation of Luzon. Note cross-rifles and guerrilla rank of captain, later made official and retroactive to December 11, 1943.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos are from Col. Hunt’s collection.
Some of the guerrillas attached to Hunt’s headquarters, Pangasinan Military Area, in December 1944. Hunt is third from the left in the front row; his bodyguard, Lt. Gregorio S. Agaton, is fifth from the left.