Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  By the time of the Leyte landings in October 1944, a whole network of 134 clandestine radio stations and 23 weather observation posts had been established all over the Philippines. They supplied MacArthur’s headquarters with detailed information about everything down to which barber shop cut the hair of which Japanese lieutenant.9

  Eventually, in July 1944, I got one of these imported transmitters, in my case a set originally built in the Dutch East Indies. It was a strange piece of machinery. It got its power from being pedalled like a bicycle. One had to pump vigorously to receive a message on it, and to build his leg muscles up to Olympic standards if he wanted to transmit. The contraption had other drawbacks as well. Unlike the new English models, this one was too heavy for a man to carry. It had to be hauled over rough roads and trails and across open fields either in carts or on the backs of carabao. In either case it was constantly jiggled and sometimes shaken off. It seemed to me that we spent half our time trying to repair it—usually without spare parts.10 When the instrument did work, we immediately courted trouble of a different sort: we had to change our location after each transmission lest the Japanese locate us by triangulation. Even so, we used our Rube Goldberg transmitter to send much useful information to Australia. More important for us narrowly, though not for the prosecution of the war overall, we were now able to establish rendezvous points with U.S. submarines and thus get consignments of all sorts of sorely needed arms and supplies on a semi-regular basis.

  The radio and submarines were the means whereby I soon made a couple of memorable political acquaintances. As soon as I learned that submarines would be landing along the Luzon coast with some regularity, I contacted Manuel Roxas and offered to help him get to a submarine and escape from Luzon. He refused on the ground that the Japanese might retaliate against his family, but he gave me all sorts of valuable information which I at once radioed to Australia. Among those many messages was one from the family of Gen. Carlos P. Romulo, then on MacArthur’s staff. Romulo personally thanked me when I met him for the first time in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco in June, 1945.

  Bob Lapham’s letter of June 21, 1944, authorized me to command in Pangasinan province, to enlist personnel there, and to appoint appropriate officers. That would seem to have been clear enough, but in fact trouble began almost immediately. Lt. Col. Russell W. Volckmann, a West Point career officer who had never surrendered on Bataan and who had assumed command of guerrilla forces in north Luzon following the deaths of Colonels Moses and Noble, now sent a runner to inform me that I should place myself and my men under his command. I replied by letter that this was impossible, since I was already under the command of Major Lapham, who had himself earlier resisted being absorbed into Volckmann’s organization. I compared my position to that of a baserunner caught between bases, destined to be tagged out either way I went. Volckmann was not impressed by my baseball metaphor. He repeated his orders. I don’t recall exactly how I phrased my reply this time, but it meant, unmistakably, “No.” Volckmann did not give up easily. Not long afterward two Americans under his command came to see me. My response was typical of the mistrust that existed among so many irregulars. I suspected that their intention was to arrest me, so I told my men to be alert and, if necessary, to seize them, after which I would ship them back north. My fears proved unfounded. The pair had come only to talk. One of them needed glasses badly and I was ‘able to get him some from Manila, so we parted amicably.

  A few months later, though, Volckmann threatened to have me court martialled for desertion if I persisted in maintaining my independence from him. This time I consulted Lapham by runner and received a letter from him, October 31, 1944, in which he advised me simply to ignore Volckmann. The latter, he said, had no business giving me orders at all; nor did he have any authority to court martial me for desertion, disobedience, or anything else, since a guerrilla is a volunteer.

  My real reason for spurning Volckmann was that I did not want to break connections with Lapham. I had joined his forces willingly, and he had treated me well. Though I had never met Bob at this time, I had already come to admire him as a reasonable man and a fighter. I knew he had not subordinated himself to Volckmann, and I thought my primary loyalty should be to him. Finally, both of us believed we had a better organization than Volckmann, many of whose troops were said to be armed only with bolos.11

  To this day I am not sure what Volckmann’s motive was in these transactions. At the time I thought it was mere empire building. There are several other possibilities, though. Volckmann may have genuinely believed he could make better use of Lapham’s men, or mine, than we could ourselves. From all written accounts his own guerrillas performed admirably after the American landings in north Luzon in 1945. Perhaps he wanted our units as sources of supply for his own? Most of his followers were holed up in the mountains of the far north while we operated in the heavily populated, fertile central plain of Luzon, where food was abundant.

  It may also have been that both natural inclination and experience had convinced Volckmann that everyone should be fitted into a single disciplined organization, albeit with himself at the top. Unlike those of us farther south, Volckmann removed his guerrillas from their barrios, put them in company camps for training, and disciplined them strictly (even to ordering that anyone who surrendered or let himself be captured by the enemy would be shot on sight); after which he broke them into small units and let them attack the Japanese periodically to keep up their spirits.12 These Prussian procedures would have been impossible where we were in the lowlands, but Blackburn, Volckmann’s chief aide, says they were welcomed by guerrillas and civilians alike in the wild, remote north where there had been an urgent need for control and direction for many months. He adds that he and Volckmann received much willing cooperation from wise old Igorot chiefs who were themselves good organizers and who appreciated what was being attempted.13 Villamor, who did not esteem most American guerrillas, calls Volckmann “tough” in an admiring way, and contrasts favorably Volckmann’s centralization of authority with the “useless overlapping” of the many units in central Luzon.14

  On the last point I must disagree with both Volckmann and Villamor. Much history is against them. Both in the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, and all over Europe in World War II, efforts to integrate different, competing, and often hostile guerrilla bands into one organization failed completely.

  Not the least interesting aspect of the matter is the way Volckmann and Blackburn deal with it in their books. Blackburn barely mentions Lapham; and myself not at all. Volckmann’s book, We Remained, is quite informative generally, and it is calm and measured in tone. Yet in it Volckmann says nothing at all about his efforts to absorb Bob’s command earlier in the war or mine in 1944!

  Looking back four decades later, I still cannot see how anything would have been gained by merging our units with Volckmann’s. We would have merely passed under the command of someone from a different area who was accustomed to operating under different conditions, and at a time when none of us, individually or collectively, had enough guns or ammunition to undertake a major battle with Japanese. At the time my main regret about the whole affair was that during it Lapham asked me to give up my bicycle-powered radio transmitter to Maj. Parker Calvert, commander of Volckmann’s First District. The reason was that Volckmann had not yet received his first supplies by submarine and so needed a radio to send his messages to Lapham, who then relayed them to Australia.

  While I was fending off the unwelcome attentions of Volckmann, I was also trying to put my new domain in order. Majs. Edwin Ramsey and Charles Cushing had once tried to organize it, but it had since fallen apart. I now went around recruiting leaders and men, some ex-followers of theirs, some new men, and explaining to both what our major objectives should be.

  Right off I had what I regarded as a stroke of luck. Many of those whom I recruited were Igorots, mountaineers who inhabit the cordillera of northern Luzon. The diverse peoples of the Philippines vary c
onsiderably in native capacity and attitude toward life; and no less diverse were the opinions of various Americans about them. Donald Blackburn, for instance, thought it was useless to try to make soldiers out of Ilocanos. They were hopeless, he said: undisciplined, indifferent, undependable, and brainlessly good natured, in every way inferior to the husky, bright, energetic little Igorots.15 Al Hendrickson, by contrast, rated Ilocanos above Igorots for education, intelligence, and bravery. He disliked Igorots because they were unwilling to venture out of the mountains. Tom Chengay, he said, was the only one of them he ever knew who readily went down into the lowlands to fight. I don’t agree entirely with either Blackburn or Al. I think Blackburn downgraded the Ilocanos unduly, but like him I did think Igorots were better fighters and more loyal than Ilocanos. They were also tough physically, amazingly agile, and strong. Religiously, most of them were pagans; and many, though not all, were still primitive.

  Not the least interesting characteristic of Filipinos was their superstitions, those of the pagans being the most picturesque. Both Volckmann and Blackburn lived among Igorots and other pagan tribes, and they relate a number of interesting anecdotes about them. Once Igorot pagan priests sacrificed several chickens and studied their spleens to determine if it was safe for Blackburn and Volckmann to stay in their house. They decided that it was, and no harm befell them. Another time a pagan priest prayed and sacrified chickens when Blackburn was sick. He got better at once. Still another time Volckmann was ill. An old native said it was due to a witch, and that the bewitchment could be undone only by another witch. An ancient one was procured. She decided she needed a consultant. The next day the two of them prayed until they were exhausted. Volckmann’s condition improved promptly.16 Volckmann himself records that he once wanted to leave an area in north Luzon because he had heard that a Japanese patrol was headed in that direction. The leader of a pagan tribe there, a man whom Volckmann trusted, insisted that pagan priests be consulted. Four of these dignitaries then cut open four chickens, their favorite vehicle for divination, studied the spleens, and directed that the legs of the chickens be buried on the trail leading to Volckmann’s camp. They assured him that when the Japanese reached that spot they would grow lethargic and would not continue to look for him. Nothing Volckmann could say or do would move either the chief or the priests from their resolve. They buried the chicken legs. Soon the Japanese came to the burial spot. They stopped, then changed directions and went off down a river valley.17 I’m not sure what the moral is; perhaps that not all the world’s medical expertise is found in high priced American hospitals.

  These tales have long reminded me of comparisons that have been made, partly tongue-in-cheek, between healers of different cultures in different historical epochs. The clerical exorcists of medieval and early modern Europe used to try to cure patients by praying over them and casting devils out of them. For centuries, perhaps millennia, African witch doctors, garbed in grotesque regalia, shaking bones and spouting incantations, have tried to do essentially the same thing. In the twentieth-century Western world, psychoanalysts put patients on couches and try to induce them to confront and transform their malign subconscious impulses. Among these varied practitioners, rates of cure appear to have been comparable, but the psychoanalysts are much the most expensive. (Of course, contemporary psychiatrists employ an array of recently discovered drugs to help a higher proportion of their patients than their predecessors could.)

  None of my Igorots did anything as striking as Volckmann’s and Blackburn’s consultants, but the beliefs of some of them were intriguing. It had once been the custom among them that a prospective bridegroom should demonstrate his eligibility for matrimony by bringing in the head of a Christian before the wedding. They also had an equally memorable, and considerably more appealing, custom. A man sometimes selected a prospective wife and lived with her for several months. If she did not become pregnant, he returned her to her family and undertook the same experiment with another girl. This must have been a great locale for a young man who was infertile—or would have been for someone who had had a vasectomy.

  These idle speculations aside, the most valuable of the Igorots I had was a highly intelligent, tough and absolutely fearless little fellow named Tomas Chengay. Tom had worked in the gold mines of the north before the war. Here he had become familiar with Americans and had grown to like them. Early in the war he had served under Volckmann, and he had been with Al Hendrickson when Al raided the Itogon mine in north Luzon in October 1942. When Tom and I met, he commanded a small detachment of his fellow Igorot guerrillas. He joined our forces readily and became one of my most trustworthy officers. He hated spies and collaborators passionately and did an excellent job of clearing them out wherever we went. He had a particularly mercurial temperament. If enraged at someone bigger than himself, he would leap straight up in the air and strike at the taller man. Because of his attitude toward enemies of any sort, he was sometimes called “No Retreat.”

  Two of our recruits, Joseph and William Henry, are worth mentioning by name because their cases illustrate why it was never hard to fill guerrilla ranks. Their father was an American, their mother a Filipina. Their father had died in 1942, and the Japanese had laughed when they viewed his body. For the brothers this was a deadly insult. They sought revenge, and so joined my guerrilla band. Many recruits had some personal motive like this; most often either they or some member of their family had been brutalized by the Japanese in some sickening way.

  Before long a large part of Pangasinan was unified, at least on paper. I then divided the province into four sectors and placed a captain over each: Tom Chengay over the north district, Antonio Garcia over the west, Emilio Hernandez over the central, and his brother Antonio Hernandez over the east. For my headquarters staff I selected Maj. Severino M. Obaña of the Philippine army as my second in command; for supply officer, a former newspaperman and writer, Jimmy Galura; and for chief of intelligence, a college graduate named Juan Utleg, who proved to be an inspired choice. The whole organization, while impromptu, was patterned as closely on regular American army tables of organization as circumstances permitted. We had doctors and nurses of sorts, Protestant and Catholic chaplains, demolition experts, an elite fighting company composed exclusively of ex-Filipino Scouts, a special sabotage squadron, and a squadron of military police. One of the main duties of the last was to handle the complaints of civilians. So dominant had guerrillas become in the Philippine countryside by 1944 that if a peasant’s carabao was stolen or some comparable crime was committed against him or his family, he would not ordinarily take his grievance to either the Japanese or some representative of their puppet Philippine Republic, but to the local guerrillas. In our unit the military police would then deal with the matter as best they could.

  All our units had experienced leadership. The official army history (Robert Ross-Smith, Triumph in the Philippines) refers to several of our units combined as the Buena Vista Regiment, a body that gave an excellent account of itself fighting in tandem with the Thirty-second (Red Arrow) Division along the Villa Verde Trail in the northern mountains in the spring of 1945, where I myself spent my last days in the Philippines.

  I tried to pay equivalent attention to the civilian and diplomatic sectors. I sought out Alfred Balingao, the governor of Pangasinan, explained our circumstances and problems to him, and offered him our cooperation in return for his loyalty. He agreed readily, and put no obstacles in the way of our recruitment. One of my particular objectives was to gather into our organization as many men as we could from the Constabulary. If we were successful, we could bleed the Constabulary white, and could add trained and armed recruits to our own forces. To this end, I took a professional printer, his family, and his equipment; hid them; took care of all their needs; and put him to work printing leaflets to circulate among civilians and to call on Constabularymen to come over to us. Undoubtedly, some of these missives fell into the hands of the Japanese, but we were feeling our oats by now, growing stronger e
very day, and simply did not care any longer. The effort itself, I must admit, was not much of a success. We gained the sympathy and cooperation of many members of the Constabulary, but few of them actually joined our ranks.

  Picking Captain Juan Utleg to head the intelligence section proved to be the best appointment I made, even though the man eventually forced upon me the most agonizing decision I have ever had to make about anything. Juan was a neat, personable Filipino with a college degree in forestry. When I first met him, I found that his beliefs and sympathies were close to my own. I talked to him many times and finally asked him to join our organization. He declined at first because he had a family, then abruptly volunteered. Juan proved to be an excellent organizer and showed uncommon practical sense in his job as well. He recruited all sorts of people and paid them to gather all sorts of information. Soon he designated specific assignments to specific persons who had demonstrated expertise at particular tasks. He worked their varied findings into intelligence briefs, and thereby produced reliable intelligence summaries for me. In short order he collected an impressive amount of information about Japanese installations, troop strength, movements, and plans. Later reports showed it to have been remarkably accurate.

  The most significant of Utleg’s accomplishments was to map Japanese installations at San Fernando, La Union, north of Lingayen Gulf on the west coast of Luzon. In the latter part of 1944 all signs pointed to American landings somewhere on Luzon before many more months. But where? The Japanese did not know, but it was clear that they regarded the coast around San Fernando as a likely locale, because they steadily moved heavy American guns from as far away as Corregidor and fixed them in strongly fortified tunnels dug into the hillside above Poro Point. Lingayen Gulf itself, a few miles south, was also a possible landing site but a risky one because of unfavorable tides. We discovered afterward that the information our operatives gathered about the Japanese gun emplacements was studied carefully by General Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2 in Australia. On the basis of it the original landing plans were changed and the uncertain tides and surf in the gulf were risked. As a consequence, the Japanese were surprised and not well situated to resist the landings save by kamikaze attacks, and untold hundreds of American lives were thereby saved. Overall, it was a clear vindication of the dictum of the British military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart that obstacles of nature should always be accepted and combatted in preference to undertaking a frontal assault against an enemy in a prepared position. For me personally, if I had never accomplished anything else in the whole war I would have regarded my time as having been spent profitably.