Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  Juan Utleg’s value as an intelligence officer eventually forced me into the most excruciating dilemma I have ever confronted, even worse than dealing with the killer of Dolores. As described above, Juan had learned all about Japanese defensive preparations near San Fernando. Moreover, his counterespionage people had enabled him to catch several Filipinos who were spying for the Japanese. Of course, it did not take the enemy long to learn who was responsible for this or to find out what his position was in my outfit. As an example of how fast such news got around, the governor of Pangasinan once told me that the local Japanese Kempeitai commander had asked him if he knew Capt. Ray Hunt. The governor replied that he had heard of me but did not know me. The Japanese then remarked that the governor must know I was in his area, and added with an understanding smile, “When you see him, tell him I said ‘Hello,’ and that some day we will get him.” The governor relayed this message to me, adding that the Japanese knew my exact description, even to the color of my hair and eyes.

  Juan knew the Kempeitai were looking for him too. One day when he was home he saw some Japanese troops approaching the house. He slipped out a rear window into a bamboo grove. The visitors then questioned his wife. She said Juan was not at home. The Japanese then took Mrs. Utleg and their young son, and left a message with villagers that the two would be retained as hostages and would be killed if Juan did not surrender.

  Juan was a brave man as well as an able one, but, like most Filipinos, he treasured his family above all else. He came to me with tears in his eyes and begged me to let him surrender. I excused myself and went out to consult Greg. When I came back, I had the first of several long talks with Juan. Finally, I told him I absolutely could not let him go. He knew all the leading members of the guerrilla forces in Pangasinan, all our strengths and weaknesses, all our battle plans, all our spies, informers, and sympathizers, and everything about how we were now getting occasional reinforcements from submarines. He promised over and over that he would never reveal anything to the Japanese. I reminded him quite as often that the enemy was familiar with every means known to man of extracting information from even the bravest and strongest, and that they would stop at nothing when dealing with someone as valuable as himself. For this reason we simply could not let him go to them. All our plans to aid the returning American troops might be destroyed. Juan knew this, of course, but it simply reminded him afresh of what the Japanese might do to his wife and son if he did not surrender. He unfolded his whole life to me, told me how much he loved his family, and begged me to relent. I simply could not. Heartless though it must seem, I had to weigh the lives of Mrs. Utleg and her son against those of many hundreds of guerrillas and civilian supporters of ours. I had Juan placed under arrest, sedated, and guarded heavily. For several days I prayed with more fervor than I had ever done before—or have since. A few days later a light appeared in Juan’s house again. His wife and child were home unharmed. Why, I don’t know. Sometimes the Japanese simply acted in legendary “inscrutable” Oriental fashion. Whatever their reasons, and even though we still had to keep Juan in hiding, the way things turned out lifted from me the most terrible burden I have ever had to bear. What I would have done if Juan’s wife and child had been killed I cannot imagine.

  It has sometimes been asked rhetorically what kind of job requires the keenest intelligence and the highest level of general ability: research scientist, medical doctor, manager of a big business, president of a university or school system, political leader, army commander, or what have you? I cannot pretend to know the answer, and anyone in any prominent position has difficult decisions to make occasionally, but I don’t believe anyone in any civilian occupation ever has to face dilemmas as cruel as some of those that crop up in wars. The case of Juan Utleg was Exhibit A in my experience.

  Governor Balingao of Pangasinan, who had conveyed to me greetings from the local Kempeitai commander, also told me a story about a macabre incident of a different sort that he had witnessed. The Japanese had set to work to build a crude wooden bridge over a river near Umingan. When it was almost finished, the river flooded and the bridge was carried away. They rebuilt it, only to have another flood sweep it away again. Then they built it a third time. When they were finished, two Japanese soldiers sat down cross legged, one at each end of the bridge, and their companions piled wood about them. Then all the Japanese began a ceremonial prayer. In the midst of it the wood was lighted and the two soldiers were burned to death without making a movement or a sound. Such actions illustrate the impassable psychological barrier that separated Japanese from Westerners. It also availed them little: a few weeks later we burned the bridge to the water’s edge.

  Fortunately for our sanity, life was not always as sordid as a recital of these grim episodes might indicate. In fact, once I got things reasonably well organized in Pangasinan I began to think, for the first time since the war began, that I might survive it. We even had some good news of a conventional sort occasionally. Nine months after he had become my bodyguard, Greg Agaton surprised us all by revealing that he planned to get married. Of course, we were all pleased for him personally. We found a minister, I loaned him some clothing, and he and his bride Petronia M. Ruiz, were properly wed in our camp on September 15, 1944. My own feelings were mixed, since I had come to respect, trust, and rely on Greg a great deal. I assumed that once married he would quit the guerrillas and I would have to find a new aide. But he did not: instead he sent his new wife back to her home in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, near where we were now encamped, and continued as my number one man. The wedding did produce a break between us eventually, though. Before this I had promised Greg that if I lived through the war I would take him back to the United States with me, if he wanted to go. I extended the offer again after the war, but by then he and his wife were in the process of acquiring a family of five sons, and he felt that their collective future was in the Philippines. We did finally meet once more, but it was decades later, in Honolulu, in December 1984. The reunion was tearful.

  In 1943 we had had a lot of trouble either getting information to Australia or securing supplies for our own troops. As indicated earlier, many of our arms were secured by capture from the enemy. Things improved in 1944 when submarines began to land periodically near Baler Bay in Tayabas province on the east coast of Luzon. The site was close to a Japanese naval base, but it had to be chosen since the water was too shallow for submarines anywhere else along that coast. Prior contact had been made with Bob Lapham, who had already established a system of coast watchers in the hope that they might spot a submarine. Both Bob and Al Hendrickson sent many of their guerrillas over the Sierra Madre Mountains to contact the submarines and haul away their cargo. Neither I nor any of my men ever unloaded a submarine, but beginning in June 1944, when Minang came back from her trip to see Lapham, bearing my promotion to commander of Pangasinan, we began to get supplies from submarines.

  Because the whole operation was exceedingly risky, the guerrillas involved were not told where they were going or for what purpose until they actually arrived and were put to work building bamboo rafts to unload submarines. After dark there would be an exchange of coded light signals, following which the sub would slip into shallow water, where it would be temporarily helpless: unable to submerge quickly and escape in case of detection. For this reason the captain and crew of a submarine always wanted to unload their cargo as fast as possible. This made problems. The deck of a submarine loomed eight feet above the bamboo rafts. The natural bobbing of the rafts in the sea combined with the haste of those unloading sometimes caused crates of arms to go to the bottom of the bay. We discovered that many destined for us must have contained .50-caliber machineguns, since we got enough .50 ammunition to shoot at everything that moved for the next several months, but no equivalent number of machineguns. We did receive many small arms of various types: carbines, “grease guns,” tommyguns, M-1 Garands, and sidearms. Also included were various medicines and surgical instruments, radio transmitters, propag
anda materials, money, and the usual assortment of cigarettes and candy. Gradually the subs began to appear more often to augment these supplies and to drop off specially trained men of various sorts: Filipino radio operators and repairmen, teams of demolition experts, and weather observers. Some fifty tons of commodities were sent to Lapham’s headquarters; more intended for him was landed with shipments for Anderson.18 How much of it I got, I do not know exactly: quite a bit.

  A story of some sort went with or soon became attached to most of these items. A case we got marked “Money” was interesting in the sense that on the first submarine it was not broken open. On subsequent trips, however, it was discovered that whiskey and pesos tended to disappear en route. Finally some imaginative soul had an inspiration and took to marking these containers “Military Rations.” None was molested thereafter.19

  The medicines proved invaluable. In preceding months Al Hendrickson and I had occasionally gotten hold of a few quinine tablets or other medicines that happened to be already in the Philippines. With these meager supplies we had tried to doctor tropical ulcers, malaria, and other native maladies, as well as an array of ordinary cuts and bruises, especially those of children. How badly medical care was needed is indicated by tales related by other guerrillas. Col. Robert Arnold describes how he had a terrible stomachache which a local pastor, in default of a doctor, diagnosed as appendicitis. With no doctor, no operation was possible, but some natives suggested an alternative. The lining of a chicken’s gizzard contains juices that will dissolve anything less formidable than an anvil, so all the dried chicken gizzard linings that could be found were boiled to make an incredibly bitter broth which Arnold forced himself to swallow twice a day. Eventually he recovered.20 Illif David Richardson, a guerrilla on Leyte, once faced an even more bizarre medical problem. There the Japanese had bayoneted a Filipino in the stomach, ripping such a gash that the man’s intestines hung out. Incredibly, the victim managed to run three miles without pushing his intestines back inside his body cavity, or even trying to hold them close to his stomach. Richardson consulted a medical book and decided nothing in it was applicable to present circumstances, so he cut the wound larger, stuffed the poor man’s intestines back in, gave him all the sulfa drugs he happened to have, and stitched up the wound with abaca fiber, the only thread available, only to have his hapless patient die after all. Of the whole disheartening experience he said, “It is only in the storybooks that hard work, effort, trying and trying again come out to have a happy ending. Working in the guerrilla has taught me that much.”21 Most likely Richardson was just momentarily, and understandably, disheartened. I don’t think a congenital pessimist could have lasted out the war with irregulars. Though I long thought, as a betting proposition, that I would not survive the war, I never acted on that assumption on a day-to-day basis.

  One useful by-product of the periodic submarine contacts was that Hendrickson was able to send off to Australia five Americans whom he had fed and doctored for weeks but who were obviously too sick or dispirited, or both, to be of any value in battle. They were Captain Lage, Lieutenants Kiery and Naylor, and Sergeants Jellison and Bolstead. As narrated in chapter 4, above, Kiery refused to hike through a jungle and over a mountain to reach the submarine, choosing instead to row a rubber boat around a point of land. It capsized and he was drowned. One of the others told Al flatly that he was “sick of the God-damned war” and only wanted to get away from it, though he stayed in the army after 1945 and eventually attained considerable rank.

  Of course, it occurred to us that if submarines could bring in supplies and take away the sick, they could also take away men liberated from Japanese prison camps, not to speak of ourselves. The last temptation was hard to resist. We American guerrillas had all been in combat zones for three years, we all wanted to save our skins, and doubtless we would have been permitted to leave had we asked. Nonetheless, Lapham, Hendrickson, and I stayed on longer, for reasons that will be explained later.

  The weapons brought to us by the submarines were most welcome, obviously, though not every guerrilla unit got a sample of every type. I was keenly aware of what my organization needed but did not get. There were no artillery pieces, mortars, rifle grenades, mines, or dynamite, all of which would have been extremely useful to us. Of course, there was no use complaining about this. A submarine can carry only so much, and it cannot carry artillery at all.

  Dynamite would have been invaluable for demolition. Lacking it, we once tried to blow up a bridge by attaching thirty-second fuses to some 75-mm. shells we happened to have. All they did was blow holes in the reinforced concrete deck. In fact, more damage was done to two of our own men, Eusebio Membrado and Juan Leal, than to the bridge; and the medical “treatment” they got afterward was worse than their original injuries. It made me sick to watch our company doctor, Fidel Ramirez, probe around in their wounds without an anesthetic, looking for fragments of concrete. When I questioned him about his crude procedures, he said he was a pediatrician, not exactly the medical specialty we needed most just then.

  Every gun we got presented problems of some kind. All those in the semi-automatic class had different recoil actions. For each a minimum time had to elapse after firing before the gun would settle back into its original position so it could be fired again with some accuracy. If insufficient time was allowed, each successive shot would hit higher than the preceding one. One had to aim low and fire in short bursts, otherwise most of the bullets would go high and be wasted. Low shots at least had a chance to ricochet into the target. For me, the worst such weapon was the Browning automatic rifle (BAR). When it worked properly, it was a devastating gun; but it was heavy, had large, bulky clips, and jammed easily. I tried firing it from a sling and from the hip, but I could never control it. I practiced by shooting at tree roots. Invariably, within a few seconds I was shooting out treetops.

  I liked the semi-automatic M-1 Garand 30.06 better, though it was also heavy and jammed easily if its ammunition clips were dented or dirty. Its sights were also sensitive and could be knocked awry merely by passing through brush. One had to spend a lot of time cleaning and sighting a Garand, but if it was properly kept up it was a fine weapon. Though less accurate than a Springfield, it spat out bullets in a stream.

  My sentimental favorite was the Springfield .03. It was an older (World War I) rifle than the Garand but much the most reliable gun we had. It was bolt action, carried five shells individually inserted plus one in the chamber, and had open iron sights that were not easily jimmied. You could drop it in a river and expect it to fire faithfully when it was fished out. Lighter than a Garand, it was easier to carry save in dense brush. Not least, it had a good feel in one’s hand, like a certain cue does to a pool player or a favorite old glove to a baseball player. Under primitive conditions a simple, durable weapon is often the most practical, as the global popularity of the Russian Kalashnikov rifle has demonstrated since World War II.

  We got a few tommyguns: heavy, clumsy, short-barrelled .45-caliber blasters that fired either twenty-shot clips or fifty-round drums of bullets, though they were most effective when fired in bursts of five shots. The FBI made tommyguns famous. I used mine sometimes to hunt wild pigs.

  We also got three weapons that were brand new, at least to me. One was a carbine, a light, flimsy, tinny sounding thing that looked like it might have been made from a Prince Albert tobacco can. Though its sights were not reliable, it was a good weapon in the brush because it splattered bullets all over the place. The grease gun was another .45, so called because it looked like a grease gun and poured out a seemingly endless steam of bullets. It had a retractable iron stock, and was short, heavy, awkward to carry, and hard to handle. Finally, we got a case of bazookas. We did not know what they were, and no instructions came with them. Not surprisingly, we had a hard time figuring out how they worked or what could be done with them. Filipinos are fond of guns, and many of our men had repeatedly taken apart and reassembled the ancient relics we had been carrying a
bout for many months. Because they had sometimes made mistakes, we had had lot of misfires. Now they had some new toys to tinker with. Before long a couple of adventuresome tyros managed to fire a round from a bazooka by accident, fortunately without killing anyone in the process. I had a couple of narrow escapes myself. Once one of my men reported that his BAR would not fire in the automatic position. I had had so little to do with BARs that I did not realize that the mere force of loading would cause the firing pin to strike the cartridge. Thus, when I took his gun and began to look at it the first thing I did was inadvertently fire a shot that creased the arm of a curious Filipino lieutenant nearby. Another time I was casual with a tommygun inside a house and thereby fired an unplanned burst. This occasion was especially embarrassing, since I had just dressed down my men for being careless about misfires and for shooting when the Japanese were near enough to hear them. In this case, luckily, the walls of the house prevented the racket from reaching enemy ears.