by Ray C. Hunt
After breakfast the lieutenant in charge of the detachment loaned me a jeep and driver to take me quickly to Twenty-fifth Division Headquarters, Sixth Army. Since the fall of Bataan I hadn’t ridden anything faster than a horse or carabao. When the jeep started off, I felt like a Montana sheepherder taking his first ride on the New York subway. I huddled in the back seat and hung onto my gourd hat as the maniacal driver hurtled down the dirt road at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. Once I looked apprehensively at the speedometer: it read thirty.
When we reached our destination, I was immediately ushered in to meet a general, whose name I have forgotten. He was anxious to get as much information from me as possible and asked me a great array of questions about Japanese numbers, dispositions and plans, the state of Philippine rivers, bridges and trails, the number and condition of guerrilla outfits, and much else. I answered as fully as I could, but to the surprise of both the general and myself, in the middle of a reply I would occasionally lapse into one of the three Philippine dialects I had picked up. I suppose I was just excited. Anyway, each time I apologized, backtracked, repeated my answer in English, and promised to try not to stray again. Finally I had to acknowledge shamefacedly that I couldn’t seem to speak anything better than broken English that day. The general smiled broadly and waved off the matter lightly.
With regard to my information, my interrogator was far more serious. He wanted me to get into a plane at once and fly back in broad daylight over the area through which I had just escaped. Twenty miles of the flight would be over territory held by the enemy. I went, of course, but it was the most terrifying flight I have ever taken. Right away there occurred a horrendous explosive roar that shook the plane violently. It was caused by a salvo of U.S. 155mm. cannon being fired directly beneath us. A day or two before I had gone to sleep nonchalantly in a bamboo hut in circumstances that alarmed an American officer unaccustomed to guerrilla existence, but a routine ride in a jeep had frightened me, and now this tempestuous flight back behind enemy lines scared me anew. Courage is a general quality only to a degree: often it is quite specific.
After the flight, which was mercifully brief, my spirits revived rapidly when American officers flocked about me and other guerrillas to ask innumerable questions about roads, rivers, bridges, the Japanese, and the spirit of Filipino guerrillas and civilians. They were not only eager to get information but repeatedly expressed mingled amazement and appreciation that we had seized many villages from the enemy. I remember one tank commander who was especially appreciative because information he had gotten from guerrillas had already enabled him to bottle up sixty-five Japanese tanks.
The next day I finally met Maj. Robert B. Lapham, who had been my guerrilla commander for months but whom I had never seen. Bob was a tall, thin, blond, handsome man who smiled easily and spoke in a soft, even voice. Appearances were deceptive, though. Bob was a fighter to the core and a man who commanded effortlessly through force of character and personality. Every sound, reliable person I knew, who also knew Bob, liked and respected him. We had a drink, or two, or three, to celebrate; and talked at length about our experiences and about how long the odds had been against us. We agreed that God alone had seen us through.
There is a common remark in the army, usually voiced by disgruntled enlisted men, to the effect that there are two ways of doing anything, “the right way and the army way.” Like most such acerbic observations, it contains a kernel of truth beneath layers of exaggeration. In my case, nearly three years of highly informal and usually precarious existence had long since led me to say and do whatever I liked without reference to “regulations.” Now I began to encounter military red tape once more.
My guerrilla togs occasioned quite a few chuckles, as did my propensity to salute left-handed, the latter having been picked up during the casualness of guerrilla life. Nonetheless, for some time I continued to wear my unorthodox garb, partly because I was used to it, partly because I was too busy to look for more conventional clothing, partly because we were so close to a combat area that few people paid much attention to what anyone wore.
There were always sticklers for regulations, though, and my eccentricities did bother these purists. One day one of them, an MP stopped Bob Lapham and me as we were entering a command post and asked me if I was an American soldier. When I said I was, he must have concluded that I needed some “shaping up.” He proceeded to inform me that my gourd hat, Mexican bandit ensemble, and southpaw salutes constituted being “out of uniform,” a violation of regulations. Before I could say a word, Bob grabbed my arm, steered me away, and told the MP to go to hell.
One day when I did at length get around to looking for a more conventional wardrobe, I went into a clothing sales store. I saw a long line, which I did not want to join, so I went directly to a clerk where there was no line. He informed me that only field grade officers were served there. I told him I had been in the field for three years. Having been a mere enlisted man before becoming an ersatz guerrilla captain, I had never learned that “field grade officers” referred to majors or above.
Other imbroglios over regulations followed. One day I went to Sixth Army headquarters to investigate a rumor that the Philippine army was being “reformed.” Exactly what “reform” meant was not clear, but it was causing many guerrillas, who had been Philippine army men, to abandon their guerrilla assignments. The first person I encountered was a major whose name I have forgotten and wouldn’t want to remember anyway. He wanted to know what rank I had held when the Bataan surrender took place. I told him staff sergeant in the air corps. He then informed me that henceforth he would refer to me as a staff sergeant. I had a short fuse in those days, no doubt made shorter by my experiences. I told him I didn’t give a damn what he called me.
The major then changed the subject to back pay. Some months later, in the United States, I was to collect nearly $10,000 tax free, representing forty-six months of accumulated pay, but in February 1945 I hadn’t given the subject ten seconds’ thought. The major began to explain the system under which I would be paid and returned stateside. At that I blew my cork and told him I had not come to return to the United States but to attend to some business, and that I would like to see his colonel at once. He then ushered me in. I asked the colonel immediately if the Philippine government was in the process of reorganizing its army. He replied “No” with equal abruptness. I thanked him and strode out, still smarting from my encounter with the major.
Unhappily, that was not the end of the pay question. I needed only a small amount of money on a month-to-month basis, but I did need some. I had drawn nothing since December 1941 save a $100 partial pay the previous month. Now I went to a finance section and applied for another partial pay. The finance officer informed me that all “recovered personnel” were entitled to only one partial pay: that his only options were to give me all my accumulated back pay, or nothing. I explained that I needed a little money at once but would not be going back to the States for several months. He took refuge in bureaucratic obduracy. I stomped out cursing. I was so disgusted that I signed up on the Philippine army payroll and collected partial pay from it for the remainder of the war. The whole episode was especially galling since I was staying in the Philippines voluntarily.
I had not completely recovered my equanimity from this eminently unnecessary snafu when I came down with recurring fever (malaria) for the first time since 1943. After the initial chills had subsided, I went to an army hospital and requested treatment. There I was bedded down and had glucose fed into my arm. As soon as the treatment was finished, I felt better so I got up and started to leave. A nurse immediately objected that I did not have permission to depart. Perhaps I should note here that only a couple of days before I had met several American nurses for the first time in three years. Of course, I had not forgotten the difference between American women and brown Filipinas; nonetheless, their skins were so white that the first thought that had popped into my mind was that they must be sick. Now this
new female paleface was telling me I could not leave. I told her in a few plain words that I was leaving. She fled to a doctor, who returned and backed her with some trenchant phrases of his own. To emphasize his point he threatened to report me to my commanding officer. I told him I didn’t have one, and walked out the door. I have never had an attack of malaria since.
Of course, I simmered down eventually and began to accommodate myself to military routine once more. I stopped carrying a rifle and discarded the ammunition bandoliers. I contented myself with a nickel-plated mother-of-pearl German Luger 9-mm. pistol in a shoulder holster. Many GIs stopped me to look at this baroque sidearm. One, who had seen General Patton’s famous pearl-handled pistol, told me my Luger was much more impressive. Others offered to buy it, even for as much as $500. Generally speaking, I cared little for souvenirs, but I turned down these offers because the Luger was one of the few items I had acquired in the war that I wanted to keep. It never ceased to surprise me how avid so many men were to get Japanese souvenirs, especially samurai swords, sidearms, and flags of the Rising Sun—which by now was becoming the Setting Sun. My Filipino followers were as indifferent to souvenirs as myself, so I often collected much stuff from them and gave it to various Americans. But a wise man once observed that no good deed goes unpunished. One ungrateful rascal, to whom I had given several items, stole my gourd hat, the only thing other than the Luger that I had intended to take home. The samurai sword I had taken off the body of the Japanese garrison commander at the “battle” of San Quintin I still had, though I had thought so little of it that I had used it mostly to cut tobacco and bamboo. Now it occurred to me that some future child of mine might prize it, so, although I had heretofore regarded it as hateful, I had it boxed and mailed home.
After some days of such varied activity I decided that I had to write to my parents. Though it must seem absurd to a reader, soldiers who have been out of all contact with their wives or loved ones for long periods sometimes find it difficult to write anything. So it was with me. Though I had not seen my parents and sisters for six years, nor even heard from them for three years, I had to start several times before I could compose a letter to them and mail it.4
Later I discovered something that turned my bewilderment to anger: the American State Department had learned in March 1944 that I was alive and serving with guerrilla forces in the Philippines but for reasons best known to themselves had not reported this to my parents for another eight months. This has always galled me. Of course, when the United States is engaged in a titanic struggle that may determine the character and direction of civilization for centuries to come there are more important things to consider than the forebodings and sorrows of one soldier’s family. Still, we are a democratic people who profess to value the welfare and to be concerned with the feelings of each person. Besides, not every individual among the hundreds of thousands employed by the government in Washington was busy every day pondering issues of global significance. Somebody could have spared my family much needless anguish by simply letting them know that I was still alive.
Be all that as it may, my letter soon produced a reply from my father, postmarked March 9, 1945. I picked it up, looked at it, set it down, and picked it up again. Only after several minutes of this did I open it at last, and then I tried to read it all at a glance. Most American soldiers who had much to do with the Japanese regarded Nipponese psychology as hopelessly puzzling—as I have indicated earlier in this narrative. To this I must add that in retrospect I find my own psychology in early 1945 comparably unfathomable. I had hardly been able to read the message telling me the U.S. invasion of Luzon was coming in five days, or to digest its meaning; I had had trouble speaking English to a general in a routine and relaxed interrogation; I could hardly write home; and now I couldn’t read the reply. Maybe war does unbalance a person? Maybe, in the last case, I was subconsciously fearful that my father’s letter would contain some catastrophic news? Whichever, I finally worked myself up to read it. It was innocuous. A portion went: “We are all well and exceedingly happy. We can only remember you as a strip of a boy. We love you with all our hearts. Your Dad.” I felt momentarily drained but immensely relieved.
While I was gradually becoming an Occidental again, the struggle for Luzon proceeded with unabated fierceness. One of the most heartening features of it was the liberation of many American prisoners of war and civilian detainees from several Japanese prison camps. Though I did not personally participate in any of these operations, one of them was especially gratifying to me because a large detachment of Lapham’s guerrillas played an important role in it.
Long before the American landings we guerrilla leaders had devoted much thought to liberating American prisoners, and there were times when we were strong enough to have successfully stormed various camps, but we never made the attempt for the same reasons that other guerrillas on Mindanao far to the south never tried to rescue two thousand American prisoners from the Davao prison camp there. What would we do with the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of men we would acquire? Some of them no doubt would be overjoyed to swell our ranks, but the majority were sick and weak. We did not have food enough for them; we had no place to hide so many; and they were not up to long marches through jungles and over mountain ranges to the sea, most likely pursued by Japanese troops throughout. Even if we got to the sea, what then? The navy could hardly be expected to risk twenty or thirty submarines to try to take them off. Seaplanes could not land without grave risk of detection. Using a couple of submarines to shuttle prisoners to a ship many miles offshore seemed like the longest of long shots. Thus, many months had gone by, and we had done nothing.
Yet past experience with the Japanese indicated that they might well kill all their American prisoners after an Allied invasion of Luzon. That this dark conjecture was not overdrawn became evident after the war. Then we learned that had U.S. ground forces invaded Japan proper the Japanese would have begun defense of their homeland by killing all the American prisoners there. Those who view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as uniquely horrible episodes in human history seem never to have pondered this.
Bob Lapham and Col. Bernard Anderson, a prominent guerrilla leader in Tayabas province to the east, had long been especially concerned about the prisoners. They had pleaded with MacArthur’s Headquarters to let them undertake a raid on the infamous prison camp near Cabanatuan in Nueva Ecija province, and had expressed confidence in their ability to get the rescued men to the seacoast. When they met General Krueger in person after the Lingayen Gulf landings, they renewed their entreaties. This time they got the green light, though Lapham was refused permission to take part personally on the ground that his life was too valuable to run the risks involved.5
Before the U.S. landings on Luzon, the Japanese had removed most of the stronger prisoners from Cabanatuan and put them on ships destined for Japan. Among those evacuated was my friend Walter Chatham, who had escaped with me on the Death March, spent five months with me in the Fassoth camps, been captured there, and subsequently been consigned to Cabanatuan. As usual, the prison ships were unmarked and so, as usual, several of them were attacked by American planes and submarines. Walter’s luck held. His ship made it to Japan. With hundreds of others who landed on Honshu or Hokkaido, he was promptly put to work in a coalmine, from ten to sixteen hours per day, seven days a week. Only about five hundred weak, sick, bewildered men, many hardly able to walk, were left in Cabanatuan by January 1945.
The plan to raid Cabanatuan was worked out by Col. Morton V. White of General Krueger’s staff. He got much assistance from Bob Lapham and from Lt. Col. Henry A. Mucci, who was to lead the actual attack by something over a hundred members of the Sixth Ranger Infantry Battalion. The attackers were to be preceded by ten elite Alamo Scouts, who would infiltrate many miles behind Japanese lines twenty-four hours in advance of the main force. The whole venture was to be supported by about four hundred of Lapham’s guerrillas, led by two of Bob’s Filipino guerrilla
lieutenants, Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson. Colonel Mucci tried to impress upon his Rangers the extreme gravity of the enterprise by taking them to a church where he briefed them and then asked each one to take a blood oath that he would die rather than allow any harm to come to the prisoners.
The whole venture was planned with unusual skill. When the attack was launched at 7:30 P.M. January 30, 1945, complete surprise was achieved. In twenty minutes it was all over. Every single one of the 225 Japanese soldiers in the camp garrison was killed, and 513 prisoners were freed. The cost was remarkably small: one prisoner died from excitement on the way out; two Americans were killed and seven others were wounded; and about a dozen Filipino guerrillas suffered superficial wounds.
What it cost the enemy is less certain. The author of the most detailed account of the operation says more than a thousand Japanese soldiers in the town of Cabanatuan, a short way north of the camp, heard the firing and rushed to aid their comrades. They ran into a guerrilla ambush set by Lieutenant Pajota and were all slaughtered.6 I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this contention, but perhaps it should be viewed in the context of various claims that my own guerrillas killed three thousand Japanese in the five days immediately preceding the Lingayen landings, and that Tom Chengay’s battalion alone killed three hundred then. Al Hendrickson, who certainly had as much experience as anyone of fighting all over Luzon throughout the war, thinks all these claims are much exaggerated.7 Quite likely he is correct, but both my own observation and reports I received from all sides in those days indicate that Japanese were “wall to wall” all over Pangasinan and that a high proportion of them did not live long enough to make it into the mountains.
Aside from saving the lives of five hundred men, the most important aspect of the Cabanatuan raid was symbolic: it showed how much Americans value their own people and the extremes to which we would go to rescue them. In those same weeks Japanese kamikaze attacks were demonstrating how little our enemies valued any lives, even their own; how inhuman was their determination to fight on no matter how hopeless the circumstances or how high the cost. The contrast must have helped convince many Americans, if anything further was needed, that any measure was legitimate if it could compel the Japanese to surrender and thereby save American lives.