Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  Combat under these conditions was ferocious. Eventual victory owed a good deal to superior American improvisation. Armored bulldozers took to plowing their way right up to Japanese machinegun nests. Then tanks would bull in after them and blast the enemy point blank.7 Tanks would also carry flamethrowers, which terrified the Japanese. When enemy soldiers jumped out of holes to escape the fire, our infantrymen mowed them down. U.S. troops and Filipino guerrillas often dug trenches toward Japanese caves, much as European sappers and miners approached fortifications centuries ago, pushing sandbags ahead of them as they went, until they drew close enough to throw dynamite into the caves and bury the inmates alive. Sometimes machinegun fire was employed to isolate a cave and keep its Japanese inhabitants down until Allied troops could crawl close enough to toss in TNT or phosphorous bombs. Sometimes Piper Cub planes only 150-200 feet above the ground spotted for artillery, which then plastered a complex of caves with high explosives to prepare the way for our infantry “cleanup” crew with their own explosives and flamethrowers. Some such Japanese strong places were simply bypassed, or surrounded and cut off from food and water, and their inmates left to die. On at least one occasion American troops fell right into a detachment of Japanese underground when a tunnel caved in. They killed all the inhabitants before the latter knew what had happened.8

  Though I was in the combat zone for several weeks and could easily have been killed any day, at least I did not have to build roads under enemy fire or dig Japanese out of caves. Perhaps what got on my nerves to the greatest degree was our own artillery. The Thirty-second assembled all the 155mm. howitzers they could find and fired them in salvos day and night close to where I slept. The noise was ungodly, and the concussion gave me the feeling of being regularly lifted about a foot off my bunk. I slept little and was consoled only by the fact that the hellish artillery was at least pointed away from me. After a few days of it I comprehended much better the accounts I had once read of soldiers in the trenches on the western front in World War I going mad during intense artillery barrages and rushing into the open to commit suicide.

  The savagery of the fighting and the hatreds engendered thereby strain belief. In one place the Japanese launched so many desperate counterattacks that men of the Twenty-fifth Division named it Banzai Ridge.9 On our side, one day I had to stand aside on a narrow trail to let litter bearers pass as they removed the dead and wounded. On one litter was a boy who had been badly burned by a flashback from a flamethrower he had turned into an enemy cave. Seemingly oblivious to what must have been the excruciating pain of burns over much of his body, he cursed the Japanese hysterically, shouting over and over again, “I got the yellow sons of bitches! I got the yellow sons of bitches!” Sometimes macabre incidents were less serious than this, but no less grisly. One day when I was scurrying along the front I almost stepped on a large stone. When I looked more closely, it was a Japanese head.

  More tragic were the inevitable foulups. Many times the air corps was called in to bomb ahead of the advancing infantry. Inevitably, a bombardier’s aim would occasionally be faulty or a bomb would fall from the rack too soon, and men would be hit by their own bombs. The second time this happened to one outfit, it buried a few men. The survivors raged at the aviators, cursed them, told them to go to hell, and yelled that the war would be won more easily without them.

  Enemy planes took their toll, too. In fact, the last Japanese plane I ever heard or saw very nearly got me. One dark night I was watching an outdoor movie with the Thirty-second Division. The area was not blacked out, and the movie had just ended when a Japanese plane came in low over the mountains, without running lights, unheard, and unseen by radar. Before we knew what happened, the pilot dropped his bombs and strafed the headquarters area. I was lucky: he missed both me and the water wagon I crawled under.

  Another time I came even closer to cashing my chips. I was with a Lt. Col. Smith of the Thirty-second. Smith was a mild-mannered officer who had been with the Red Arrow Division through many harrowing battles all the way from New Guinea. Now he was due to go home, but war had not lessened his essential humanity, so he wanted to go to the front lines to bid his men farewell. A friend of his, a major, and I were along when the trail came out onto an open ridge where U.S. troops and some of my guerrillas were dug in. As we came to the front, the major warned us not to walk in the open since there were enemy snipers about who could “give a person a third eye” as a macabre local saying had it. Accordingly, we moved off the ridge. I talked to some of my men and Colonel Smith shook hands with some of his in their foxholes. After goodbyes we went back to the command post down in the foothills, got into a jeep, and started off. Smith’s eyes were moist, more at the thought of leaving his men than with joy at the prospect of going home. We had gone only a short way when a Japanese artillery shell plastered an ammunition dump a few yards behind us. Had it come a couple of seconds sooner, Colonel Smith and I would now be names on grave markers.

  Many were not so fortunate. One such was a cousin of mine, Warren Corn, of Willow Springs, Missouri. Unknown to me, Warren, whom I remembered only as a small boy, had come to the Philippines as a rifleman in the Twenty-fifth Division of the Sixth Army. He knew I was “missing in action” and had written to his family that he intended to look for me. After landing on Luzon he learned that I was indeed alive, and he informed his family of my good fortune. But I never saw Warren: it was only after I returned to the United States that I learned from his parents that he had been shot through the heart by a Japanese sniper and had been buried at Rosales, Pangasinan.

  The Official Army History (Robert Ross-Smith, Triumph in the Philippines) mentions that during the spring of 1945 there was a perceptible decline in the morale and combat efficiency of various U.S. regular army units engaged in the reconquest of north Luzon, one evidence of which was a marked increase in psychiatric casualties.10 It is not hard to understand why, nor to appreciate why the same tendencies existed amid our enemies. If the three F’s of combat are “fog, fatigue, and fear,”11 the latter two deepen visibly near the end of long campaigns or long wars. In the latter stages of the grinding, bloody struggles on the steep mountainsides and honeycombed hilltops of north Luzon, American troops would sometimes hear muffled explosions far underground. They were set off by Japanese troops whose tunnel openings had been sealed by American explosives and who now, sick and despairing, chose to blow themselves up with grenades. American Intelligence wanted us to take prisoners: they even offered riflemen a case of beer for every Japanese prisoner delivered.12 Most of the prisoners were in a sorry state: wounded, starved, and suffering from beri beri to such a degree that they could no longer fight or retreat, and so drained psychologically that they no longer had the will even to attempt suicide.13

  With our troops, sagging morale derived from quite different causes. When battle-weary veterans, especially if they were once draftees, think victory is at last in sight there develops among them a marked reluctance to tempt fate and become one of the last casualties. During most of the war I had assumed fatalistically that I would never live through to the end, but now that the end seemed so near, now that true safety at home again loomed as a distinct possibility rather than a utopian dream, the fear of death flooded my imagination remorselessly.14 Especially poignant were thoughts of my family, so recently filled with elation to learn that I was alive. What a crushing blow it would be to them if I was now killed after all. Every other day I relived all my wartime experiences and prayed that no stray bullet would seek me out so near the end of the trail. So far as I know, I was the only American guerrilla leader actually on the battle line along the Villa Verde Trail at this late stage in the war, though others of Lapham’s guerrillas were fighting in the Cagayan Valley.

  Some of the great soldiers of history—Alexander of Macedon (356-323 B.C.) and especially King Charles XII of Sweden (1697-1718)—thought war was the grandest and most inspiring of all human experiences. Another such a one, in World War II, was Gen. George Patt
on. Like most people, I did not share this sentiment. Overall, I thought war was horrible. I was glad when World War II ended, and now I would rather die than relive my experiences during it. Nonetheless, Patton and his spiritual ancestors did have a point. Despite the frightful aspects of war, which are known universally and publicized endlessly, if a person can wrench his imagination away from the issues in a conflict, away from the personal danger involved, away from the cost of war,15 there is no question that for many war is the most vivid of human experiences. Violence has a malign attraction for most of us, as every television advertiser and moviemaker knows. Likewise, if one can persuade himself to view mayhem strictly as a spectacle, there are sights in battle that are aesthetically pleasing; “beautiful,” Patton would have said. I will never forget the sight of the pale green sea slowly turning red from the blood draining out of a wounded Japanese at Aglaloma Bay. An exploding phosphorus shell, a sudden blossom of white against the sun, is a splendid sight. Planes flying into sunsets, smoke trails against a clear blue sky, multi-colored tracer bullets buzzing through the air like swarms of angry bees, a plane going into a graceful dive preparatory to strafing, the “whoomp” of a bomb hitting the ground followed immediately by a great circular mass of dirt hurtling into the air—all have a certain impressiveness and attraction if one does not think of what gives meaning to them.16

  Perhaps my anxiety about enduring until the end of the war was quickened by the departure of my longtime friend and compatriot Al Hendrickson. Al had recently had a couple of narrow escapes reminiscent of some of his chilling experiences early in the war. On December 22, 1944, he and some of his men were withdrawing in the face of both Japanese and Huk attacks when his horse slipped while crossing a river and fell on him, breaking his ankle. A month after this mishap Al made contact with American troops in Tarlac and became attached to units of the Eighth Army, then headed for Manila, much as my men and I became attached to the Red Arrow Division. At that time the Japanese were fighting mostly delaying actions in this area since they were expecting major U.S. thrusts elsewhere. This consideration, however, had not yet diminished their habitual ferocity and ingenuity in combat. One of their favorite strategems when retreating was to leave behind an elaborate array of booby traps supplemented by sharpshooters and even an occasional machinegunner. On January 20 they nearly got Al. An isolated and camouflaged machinegunner opened up unexpectedly. Al leaped into a bomb crater and promptly refractured his half-healed ankle. Almost immediately he spotted a Japanese sniper and, with the last bullet in his rifle, shot the man—but only wounded him. The maimed Japanese careened toward him, bayonet fixed. Providentially, a GI happened to be right there and finished off the sniper with a burst from his BAR before Al could be spitted with the bayonet.

  That was enough for higher authorities. Al was promptly restored to regular American military status, categorized as disabled, and given orders to return to the United States. I saw him the night before he was to leave and helped him celebrate his departure. After the party was over and Al had said his farewells to many of his guerrilla troops, I drove him toward a camp where he was to be processed for a flight scheduled for the next day. We never got there, or at least I never did. Somewhere along the way we got on a wrong road and arrived at a river. The camp we sought was on the opposite side. Only a railroad bridge spanned the stream. After some consideration we decided to try to drive across the trestle, only to be halted by an American MP. Al, who had had a few additional drinks since the end of his going-away party, inquired belligerently who presumed to prevent us from crossing. The guard replied firmly that his orders came from General MacArthur. Al considered the point briefly, then informed the MP that if MacArthur could retake the whole Philippines singlehandedly, he (Hendrickson) was certainly going to cross “this God-damned bridge.” The guard said, “No, sir,” but did nothing when Al got out of the prewar Chevy we had commandeered, shook hands with me, shouldered a sackful of souvenirs, and limped off across the trestle, supported intermittently by Lee, his tiny Filipina girlfriend. Every moment I expected to see him fall into the river. When, at length, he reached the other side he turned, waved goodbye, and started down off the trestle. In a moment Lee’s head disappeared, then Al’s.

  My emotions were muddled. I was somehwat jealous of Al, who was going home, and I felt continually remorseful about staying behind and quite possibly getting myself killed, which would utterly dismay my family, who had only recently learned that I was alive and who would surely learn that I could have come home. Yet I still considered it my duty to stay with my guerrillas while the war was going on. But then, after all, I did leave on June 20, 1945, several weeks before the end of the war! So much for logic in human affairs.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Reflections on the War

  Did guerrillas in general, and we in the Philippines in particular, contribute significantly to overall Allied victory? If so, was our contribution worth what it cost in money, human lives, and intangibles? I cannot say for certain. Russell Volckmann, both a fellow guerrilla and an adversary of mine, maintains that neither the British nor the Americans ever appreciated the potential of guerrillas and consequently never made the best use of them either in Europe or in the Far East. They were never integrated into the whole military structure (as they were in the Soviet Union), never given proper logistical support, and were usually confined to gathering intelligence. He considers this to have been one of the lost opportunities of the war, on the Allied side.1

  My immediate, emotional response is to agree with Volckmann; yet there is much to be said for the claim of B. H. Liddell Hart, one of the major military theorists of the twentieth century, that to encourage guerrilla warfare is a mistake in the long run because its political and moral residues are almost entirely pernicious and poison civilian society long after the war is over.2 There is no question in my mind that what we guerrillas were able to do in the Philippines was of great value to the American army in the latter stages of the war. Moreover, measured in dollars and cents, it was dirt cheap compared to what the United States spent and got in other parts of the world. Yet so many Filipinos were killed, maimed, despoiled, and brutalized either by guerrillas of the outlaw type or by the Japanese in reprisals that I cannot help but believe that the Filipino people would have been better off had neither any of them nor Americans ever formed guerrilla organizations. Certainly, they would have suffered less, though it would also have taken longer to liberate them. Whether the absence of American resistance in the Philippines would have enabled the Japanese to conquer Australia early in the war and then brutalize itspeople, nobody can know. History cannot record catastrophes that timely action may have averted.

  Past history provides little guidance. Without the aid they received from Wellington’s army, and lacking the disaster Napoleon Bonaparte suffered in Russia in 1812, the Spanish guerrillas who opposed Napoleon would have been defeated eventually. Their real achievement was political and psychological: they made serious problems for the invaders, prevented them from imposing their will on the whole Spanish people, and provided inspiration to the enemies of Napoleon all over Europe. If one believes the accounts left by Russian partisan leaders who badgered Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow, each one of them defeated him single-handed. Yet the French army in Russia suffered vastly more from heat, cold, and diseases than from military action of any kind. Moreover, Napoleon was not driven out of Russia: he decided to attempt an orderly retreat only six weeks after winning the battle of Borodino, and had he begun perhaps three weeks earlier still he would have gotten most of what remained of his army safely out of the country. As in Spain, the greatest contribution of the Russian guerrillas was to keep up the morale of the civilian population.3

  Much the same was true in Europe during World War II. Guerrillas of a dozen nationalities risked their lives to oppose the Nazis in innumerable ways, yet sabotage on the part of transport workers probably did more real harm to the Axis cause than all the activities of al
l the partisans combined.4 Real guerrillas grossly exaggerated their exploits; and after the war so many latecomers, braggarts, and outright frauds talked so grandly of their deeds in the “Resistance” that an outsider might wonder how their homelands had come to be conquered in the first place. Like their predecessors in the Napoleonic era, their chief importance was psychological: their actions and efforts helped clear the consciences of their peoples, and served as a source of national pride when the war was over.

  This was fundamentally true in the Philippines too, yet the resistance there did make a more direct and important contribution to eventual victory than anywhere else. Without the deeds of guerrillas the Japanese certainly would have exacted heavier casualties from the American invaders of the Philippines. It was true that there were feuds among American guerrilla leaders; and true that wartime rivalries between Filipino partisan bands often carried over into postwar feuds and gunfights. But, at bottom, nearly all the Americans subordinated their intramural quarrels to the common need to support MacArthur’s plans to return; and at bottom a large majority of Filipinos spurned the awkward blandishments of their Oriental conquerors and gave the guerrillas the whole-hearted support without which we could not have operated or even survived. How many casualties and how much damage guerrillas inflicted on the Japanese, and how much they and Filipino civilians suffered in return, will never be determined precisely, but both considerably exceeded European norms. At no time during the war did the Japanese ever devise an effective way to deal with partisans, and near the end of the war General Yamashita lamented that the whole Filipino population had become a vast guerrilla system whose intelligence gathering and sabotage had surpassed all his calculations and fears.5 Yet it is in no way denigrating to acknowledge that one of the most valuable services we irregulars performed was simply to keep alive the faith of Filipinos that America had not forgotten them, that our strength would eventually enable us to prevail, that, to paraphrase MacArthur, we would return.