Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  I was overjoyed to learn that one of those liberated from Cabanatuan was my friend and benefactor William J. Fassoth, the civilian sugar planter who had built the “Shangri-la” mountain camps where I had stayed for several months after escaping from the Death March. A year later I felt immensely privileged to write a recommendation that enabled Mr. Fassoth to receive the Medal of Freedom.

  It was also heartening to learn in due course that other American troops had successfully raided other prison camps. Some broke into Santo Tomas University in Manila on February 3, 1945, and rescued 3,700 American and Allied civilians. Still others, supported by guerrillas, attacked Los Baños prison camp on Laguna de Bay south of Manila on February 24. There they killed the whole Japanese garrison and rescued 2,100 internees at a loss of only two American dead. These brilliant rescues contrasted starkly with the ghastly fate of 140 American prisoners on Palawan Island. On December 14, 1944, these men were doused with gasoline in an underground shelter, set afire by their Japanese jailers, and then machinegunned as they tried to break out. Only nine escaped.8

  Aside from lives saved, fallout from the Cabanatuan raid was mixed. It was appropriate that Colonel Mucci and Capt. Robert Prince should have gotten DSCs for leading the expedition, that the other officers involved should have been awarded Silver Stars, and all the enlisted men and 412 Filipino guerrillas Bronze Stars. But why had two Filipino guerrilla officers, Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson, been left off the list for Silver Stars when both of them had played leading roles in the rescue?9 It was an ominous foretaste of the injustice and ingratitude shown to many Filipino soldiers at the end of the war.

  One feature of the Cabanatuan raid left a particularly bitter taste in my mouth and, I would gather, in that of Bob Lapham as well. It was the part played in it by the Hukbalahaps, the ancestors of the New People’s Army of today. When American forces began to penetrate Luzon, all of us expected to see the Huks disarmed and disbanded. Instead, to our surprise and dismay, and over our protests, the U.S. command elected to give them additional arms and treat them as part of the forces of liberation. Though most of us did not think in ideological terms at that time, and hated the Huks merely because they had consistently opposed and fought us for two years, many American writers were then praising them. The Soviet Union was then regarded as a courageous ally in the common war against Nazi Germany. In the view of contemporary “progressives” there was nothing but nobility to be discovered in anyone or anything Left. I recall becoming enraged on one occasion after reading an article in Reader’s Digest by some ignoramus who obviously knew nothing serious about Huk activities in the war. They showed their true colors anew during the Cabanatuan raid. Guerrilla Captain Joson, who committed eighty of his men to the rescue operation, had to leave the remaining twenty to guard his own headquarters against a possible treacherous Huk attack. Then, after the rescue had been pulled off, some hundred armed Huks tried to prevent the Americans and guerrillas from taking the liberated prisoners through territory under Huk control.10

  Because it was decided in the higher echelons of our government that the Huks should be supplied with American arms and equipment, and then left entirely to the attention of the new Philippine government, Huk bullets killed many Americans and Filipinos for years after the war was over.11 The most notable victims of the murderous scoundrels were Mrs. Aurora Quezon, the widow of the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, and her daughter, both of whom perished in a Huk ambush. The only beneficent result of this vile deed was that it shocked most Filipinos and deprived the Huks of considerable sympathy and support for a time.

  The fate of Japanese soldiers who surrendered in those days was sobering. Now and then one or two would give up and would live long enough to be interrogated by Americans. Occasionally what happened was semi-comic. I have never forgotten one naive prisoner asking during interrogation who was winning the war. He said that if the Americans were winning he wanted to remain a prisoner, but if not he would appreciate it if his captors would return him to his own forces.

  Few were lucky enough to voice such sentiments. Not a single Japanese survived either the raid on Cabanatuan prison camp or on the town of Cabanatuan afterward. Almost nobody tried to take enemy prisoners, and there were instances of Japanese being shot down in cold blood by American soldiers or guerrillas when they came toward our lines naked, with their hands in the air. Barbarity it was, but the Japanese would not have been treated thus had they not set the tone three years earlier. Even now, near the end of the war, some of them would still booby-trap themselves and feign a desire to surrender in a final desperate effort to kill as many Americans as they could.

  Some of the American interrogators of surrendered Japanese were Nisei, American soldiers of Japanese descent who had been imported into the Philippines from Hawaii just before the war to keep the Japanese population of the Philippines under surveillance. They had been trained by the FBI. One could almost feel the hatred between them and the Japanese prisoners. The Nisei tended to be rough questioners.

  Generally, those Japanese who were captured and managed to live were meek and cooperative, quite unlike the vicious little beasts they had been in battle. It was this aspect of Japanese psychology that baffled nearly everyone else but which General MacArthur seems to have understood thoroughly when he accepted the formal surrender of Japan and moved about freely in that country at the end of the war, in circumstances that appeared to invite kamikaze attacks.

  Years afterward, when World War II came to be seen in a somewhat different perspective, and particularly when I had occasion to make short trips to Japan during the Korean War, my former hatred of the Japanese gradually turned into respect. They were obviously bright, industrious people with a distinctive culture, who were fast clearing away the rubble of the big war and making Japan a clean, beautiful place again. They made no trouble at all for our occupation troops. No doubt my change of mind owed something, too, to the crudeness, poverty, destruction, and general disarray that characterized unfortunate Korea in those years.

  Chapter Twelve

  Back into Action

  Why a person chooses a certain course of action at some crossroads in his life, he often does not know for sure. In war, when personal feelings frequently conflict with what seems to be duty, one is often hard put to explain afterward just what impelled him to do a certain thing and not something else. In January 1945 I could have returned to the United States. I wanted to come home, especially after all the tough experiences I had had, and I remember thinking at the time that I must be crazy to turn down the opportunity.

  But turn it down I did. I stayed in the Philippines for another five months, and several times came as close to death as I ever had when a guerrilla. Why did I do it? Perhaps the most elementary reason was that I wanted to stay and see the final defeat of our ruthless enemy. Another consideration was the fate of the Philippines. There were only a handful of us to lead many thousands of guerrillas. If we left our Filipino troops, it was anyone’s guess what they might do. Quite possibly they would be overcome by their hatred of the Japanese and would openly go to war with the invaders, a course certain to bring disaster to Filipino civilians. Maybe they would dissolve into twenty antagonistic factions who would fight each other, or the Huks, to determine the postwar political destiny of the islands.

  Pride influenced my course too. At first guerrillas were not even included in American plans for the reconquest of Luzon. Then as our contributions as guides, sources of information, guards for bridges and ammunition dumps, and fighters alongside regular U.S. troops became better appreciated, commendations from American officers began to pour into guerrilla headquarters. An American, Colonel Cleland, even asked if he might keep Capt. Tom Chengay and his men indefinitely. This was flattering to both Tom and myself, though I hated the prospect of losing my best officer. Since I knew nothing about the red tape involved in such transfers, I finally told the colonel I would let Tom suit himself. He joined Cleland’s unit.1 I al
so learned that General Yamashita had remarked that he could regain control of Luzon if he could capture four American guerrilla leaders, one of whom I would like to think was myself. Of course, Yamashita was grotesquely wrong, for by then the American juggernaut was truly invincible, but his observation touched my pride nonetheless.

  I also wanted to stay behind because I knew I was needed to coordinate our guerrilla forces with American regulars. I had led my men for many months and so was better suited for this function than any newcomer could be. Simplest of all, my Filipino followers had always been loyal to me, and I considered that I owed them loyalty in return.

  Finally, I wanted to do what I could to insure that those who had served faithfully with the guerrillas were properly recognized and rewarded when the war was over. The guerrillas had always fought without official authority, recognition, or pay. Nobody seemed to know anything authoritative about their status, or whether their families would be compensated if they died fighting the enemy. Any guerrilla leader would also know something about Japanese soldiers and Filipino collaborators who had committed crimes against American and Filipino servicemen, a matter of much conern to American CIC (Counterintelligence).

  Developments in the last months of the war were not auspicious in any of these areas. The Philippine government established a pay scale for guerrilla forces that was highly unrealistic and unfair. Officers were to be paid the same as American officers of equivalent rank, but enlisted men were to be paid according to the Philippine scale, a paltry seven dollars per month. Worse, if anything, great numbers of Filipinos were now trying to join guerrilla bands or were claiming that they had been guerrillas all along. No doubt many of them had sympathized with real guerrillas throughout; quite a few had probably aided guerrillas covertly. Now, at last, they felt it safe to indicate their sympathies openly. But it was equally obvious that many were mere eleventh-hour opportunitists, rascals who had never risked anything in the whole war but who now wanted to pose as heroes to further their postwar careers, or to claim back pay, or to gain benefits for their families. I have always admired those Filipino men and women who risked their lives to aid us, either with guns in their hands or in less ostenatious ways, but for these eleventh-hour frauds who lacked both valor and shame, and who sought to curry favor and gain honors by trailing in the wake of their dead countrymen, I had, and have, profound contempt.

  After my rear area contretemps with doctors, nurses, supply clerks, and officious military police, I came close to ending my career ignominiously—in a jeep accident. One day I went for a ride with a Lt. Harry Lerner, whose name should have been spelled Learner, for he proved to be indeed a novice at driving. We were moving at a good clip along a straight stretch of gravelled road near Santa Maria, Pangasinan, when suddenly a fork in the road loomed ahead. I could see at once that we were going too fast to negotiate it, but this did not prevent Lerner from trying. We would have rolled over for sure had I not grabbed the wheel from him and held it straight ahead. We jumped a large ditch—almost. The front wheels cleared it but the rear wheels didn’t. I was catapulted straight up into the air. When I hit the ground, the jeep was ahead of me, stopped dead in a field, its lunatic driver still sitting behind the wheel. I was only shaken up, but after the experience it was almost a relief to get into a combat zone.

  Though the fact is not much emphasized in books, the struggle for Luzon was the biggest battle of the whole Pacific war. The Japanese committed more troops there than on any other Pacific island, and the Americans more than in any European campaign save the invasion of northern France. Throughout their defense of the Philippines in general, the Japanese were hampered by a chaotic command structure and by divisions of authority. The Luzon campaign was an exception. Here Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita was in overall command. He had planned to establish three defensive strongholds on Luzon: one in the mountains east of Manila, another in the mountains west of Clark Field, and the most important one in the mountains and jungle of north Luzon, where he hoped to control the food-producing Cagayan valley. His last choice was excellent in the sense that this rugged, primitive area, penetrated by only a few poor roads and mountain trails, would minimize the effectiveness of American armor, heavy weapons, and air power, but it had the disadvantages of aggravating his own supply problems and of being highly favorable terrain for guerrilla operations.2 Thus, the Japanese could control only those areas where they happened to be physically present in considerable numbers. Worse from their standpoint, wholesale sabotage by many guerrilla groups both before and after the U.S. landings had done so much damage to roads, bridges, railways, rolling stock, and trucks that the Japanese could move only a trickle of essential supplies to their defensive positions. Nevertheless, Nipponese soldiers battled on like cornered bulldogs, precisely as Yamashita had expected. It was amazing how long and how well they continued to fight under such adverse conditions. When they were broken as organized groups, they fought on as individuals until they were killed or died from sickness or hunger. Yamashita, in his lair near the top of Mt. Pulog, over nine thousand feet above sea level and about as close to Heaven as he was ever likely to get, had every reason to feel proud of his troops and satisfied with his own efforts. He did indeed give his compatriots in Japan sorely needed time to prepare for the eventual American assault on Nippon proper.

  It was into this cockpit that Bob Lapham asked me to go one day in February 1945. I was to serve as liaison officer between the Thirty-second (Red Arrow) Division and the guerrillas attached to them. The Thirty-second was a famous division that had begun the war in the jungles of New Guinea and had been engaged continuously somewhere in the western Pacific for thirty-seven months. Its veterans had climbed so many mountains that some of them said their division insignia should be a mountain goat.3 Their current task was to try to root the Japanese out of their foxholes along the Villa Verde Trail, a track that wound sinuously upward in a northeasterly direction through the cordillera of Luzon towards Yamashita Ridge, heavily entrenched high ground named for the Japanese commanding general. The trail itself was named after a Spanish priest, Juan Villa Verde, who had long ago passed over this jungle footpath to bring Christianity to the Filipinos in the Cagayan Valley. Although guerrillas were not formally incorporated into the Sixth Army until March 1, 1945, they were being used as front line troops alongside the veterans of the Red Arrow division weeks before that. My main responsibility was to see that they did a good job. The task occupied me continually until June.

  Aside from trying to stay alive, my most pressing problem was usually transportation. It seemed to me that I was always on the move, and always on dusty dirt roads. The sweltering heat made me sweat profusely, and the sweat caused the dust to cake on me from head to foot. I spent my last four months of the war with a bandanna tied across my face.

  The Villa Verde Trail, a locale where Al Hendrickson had hidden for a time in December 1942, was well named. It was not a road at all but a trail that wound up steep mountainsides and across exposed ridges from near sea level to altitudes of 3,500 feet. U.S. troops had to use bulldozers and graders to widen it enough so trucks and other vehicles could move equipment and supplies along it. Japanese snipers picked off the dozer operators with such disheartening frequency that dozers and graders had to be armorplated. One day I witnessed an episode that I will never forget because it exemplified some of the best qualities of American troops and of the United States itself. I heard an officer order an enlisted man to drive a bulldozer. The man refused, saying it was suicide. For such a reply he could have been executed for disobeying orders in combat, but the lieutenant merely looked at him, climbed onto the bulldozer himself, and went to work. The enlisted man watched silently for a few minutes, then motioned to the lieutenant to stop, and the two traded places without a word.

  Fierce fighting along the trail had begun in January when I was still holed up in the foothills east of San Quintin. Progress had been slow. That there had been any progress was due mostly to the combat engineer
s. It is hard to overpraise these men who had to toil under fire to gouge eight-to-twelve-foot roads out of mountainsides so steep that sheer drops of 300-1,500 feet on the outer edges were commonplace. Later, when the rainy season set in, they often had to do their work all over again, since avalanches of mud and water would pour down the mountainsides and wash out the roads. Then the bulldozers would have to wallow in mud sometimes as much as four feet deep and struggle for twelve hours a day to rebuild roads that rose as much as twenty-two feet in a hundred. Many times logs had to be buried in roads to reinforce them. Nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of sandbags were used to make retaining walls.4 Merely watching supply trucks go up and down such roads, in the daytime and under fire, with two wheels on the edge of the cliffs, was hair-raising. How ambulance drivers managed it at night I cannot conceive—but they did. Gen. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell showed up once along the trail and said the whole situation was as tough as anything he had seen in Burma.5

  Life was no more salubrious off the immediate trail. Everywhere on high ground the Japanese had widened and cleared natural caves in mountainsides and along hilltops, and had consolidated them with a vast series of interlocking tunnels, one of them so big it had been made into a hospital with seventy beds.6 Most of these dugouts were positioned so that the enemy could cover U.S. positions below with machinegun and mortar fire. Often entrances to the caves and tunnels were on reverse slopes, making them difficult to locate and almost impossible for U.S. artillery to hit. As usual with them, the Japanese were not content merely to sit in these strongholds and await Allied attacks. They sneaked up close to American lines at night, then threw twenty-pound packs of TNT or dynamite into the midst of our troops and tried to set it off with hand grenades. Sometimes they would undertake banzai charges, carrying long bamboo poles with either bayonets or mines on the ends of them. One of their favorite tactics was to infiltrate at night and fight fiercely for springs that had drinkable water.