Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  5. Philip Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 58-62.

  6. Henry Clay Conner, “We Fought Fear on Luzon,” p. 74.

  7. At least this was the opinion of Blackburn (Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 58). Fassoth’s third camp was raided by the Japanese on February 22, 1943, a development tht might have produced added inducement to surrender.

  8. Conner, “We Fought Fear,” p. 72.

  9. Walter Chatham, personal communication to the author (R.H.).

  10. Donald Blackburn relates that, in circumstances not unlike mine, he and Russell Volckmann owed their lives to a Filipino named Guerrero. The man sheltered the pair for a month when they were nearly dead from sickness and starvation. Mr. Guerrero found them places to hide, had his daughters feed them, procured a doctor to treat them, paid the doctor himself, found guides to lead them northward, and even paid for the guides, all at great risk to himself and his family, and when he had little money. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 50-56. Like me, Blackburn had a wound, in his case an infected heel, that troubled him most of one spring. Treatment was unavailing, so he just walked on it anyway. Eventually it healed (Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 164). I doubt that I would have been as lucky.

  Like Blackburn and myself, Clay Conner owed his life to Filipinos who operated miniature camps like that of the Fassoths, and who taught him how to catch shrimp and eels in rivers (“We Fought Fear,” p. 71).

  11. We (R.H. and B.N.) are indebted to Mrs. Ann Petrites, the sister of William Fassoth’s daughter-in-law, for making available to us a copy of Fassoth’s unpublished account of the origin, construction, operation, and demise of his three camps. I (B.N.) am grateful to William Fassoth’s son, Vernon, for allowing me to use his own taped recollections of what happened in the camps.

  I (R.H.) am also obliged to Walter Chatham for numerous personal recollections of the life he shared with me in Fassoth’s second camp. Some of them corrected my uncertain memory. On the question of how many of us escaped from the camp, however, I believe my memory has been more accurate than his.

  Chapter Five: Daily Life with Filipinos

  1. Robert Lapham, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  Chapter Six: Early Guerrillas of Luzon

  1. An excellent account of guerrilla operations through the centuries, shorn of contemporary mythology and replete with examples of irregular operations all over the world, is Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla. For a brief critique of partisan warfare as seen by professional soldiers, see Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars, p. 88.

  2. A lurid account of the bloody excesses of Luzon guerrillas, both American and Filipino, is given by Ernesto R. Rodriguez, Jr., The Bad Guerrillas of Northern Luzon.

  3. Ira Wolfert, American Guerrilla in the Philippines, p. 142.

  4. Trevor Ingham, Rendezvous by Submarine, p. 45.

  5. Edward F. Dissette and H. D. Adamson, Guerrilla Submarines, p. 30.

  6. There is considerable information about Fenton’s background, character, and eccentricities in Charles A. Willoughby, The Guerrilla Resistance Movement in the Philippines, pp. 264-65; and also in Ingham, Rendezvous by Submarine, p. 160; Allison Ind, Allied Intelligence Bureau, pp. 135-42; Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2: 735-37; and Jesus A. Villamor, They Never Surrendered, pp. 89, 106-9, 218. A particularly scathing account is provided by Manuel F. Segura, Tabunan, especially pp. 181-202.

  7. Fenton’s unpublished diary is in the possession of Morton J. Netzorg, proprietor of the Cellar Bookshop in Detroit and of an excellent private research library of materials relating to the Philippines.

  8. Arnold, A Rock and a Fortress, pp. 200-201.

  9. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam,” p. 84.

  10. Albert C. Hendrickson, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  11. Rodriguez, The Bad Guerrillas, pp. x-xi, 38-48, 57-98, 115-25, 130-32, contains gory descriptions of the crimes and vices of various northern Luzon guerrillas. The quotation is from p. 38. Agoncillo relates some of the charges against Escobar (The Fateful Years, 2: 755).

  12. William L. Estrada, A Historical Survey of the Guerrilla Movement in Pangasinan, 1942-1945, p. 33.

  13. Volckmann, We Remained, pp. 36-39.

  14. Al Hendrickson says Nakar got his radio from Warner (personal communication to the author [B.N.]). For varied accounts of Nakar’s activities and fate, see Courtney Whitney, MacArthur, pp. 128-29; Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur, 1941-1951, p. 210; Dissette and Adamson, Guerrilla Submarines, p. 31; and Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2: 655.

  15. The whole idea may have been suggested to MacArthur by “Chick” Parsons, later to gain renown as the supreme commander’s director of submarine contacts with Philippine guerrillas. Dissette and Adamson, Guerrilla Submarines, p. 12.

  General Wainwright, who formally surrendered all Allied troops in the Philippines when Corregidor fell, did not share MacArthur’s enthusiasm for guerrillas, perhaps because their very existence complicated his own problems. He called them “hotheads.”

  16. Of several lists of Thorp’s entourage that I (B.N.) have seen, no two are the same. According to a sympathetic biographer, Ferdinand Marcos, who had been in the thick of the Bataan campaign and who long after the war became the controversial and embattled ruler of the Philippines, was responsible for slipping most of these men through chinks in the Japanese forward wall. The Japanese eventually found out about this, arrested Marcos, and tortured him atrociously in Fort Santiago, but he could not tell them anything because he did not know where any of the men had gone afterward. Hartzell Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, pp. 142, 156-58.

  17. Personal communications with William H. Brooks (R.H.), Robert Lapham, Vernon Fassoth, and Donald Blackburn (B.N.). See also Conner, “We Fought Fear,” p. 74.

  18. Estrada, Historical Survey, p. 50. Brooks describes the ambush Thorp set for the Japanese convoy (William H. Brooks, personal communication to both R.H. and B.N.). It seems virtually certain that Brooks’s memory failed him about “McIntyre.” The index to General Willoughby’s Guerrilla Resistance Movement, p. 572, lists a James McIntyre who was active as a guerrilla, but on Mindanao, hundreds of miles to the south. Thus, the dynamiter with Thorp must have been Capt. Ralph McGuire, who was killed by Filipinos in the Zambales Mountains in the following year, 1943.

  19. Ind, Allied Intelligence Bureau, p. 9.

  20. Ibid., p. 118; Intelligence Activities in the Philippines, p. xi, gives the date as November 4, 1942. This is typical of the differences among sources in these chaotic times.

  21. Whitney, MacArthur, pp. 130-31.

  22. Yay Panlilio, The Crucible, pp. 337-46; Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, pp. 112-13.

  23. Arnold, A Rock and a Fortress, pp. 17-39, 75-76.

  24. Ibid., pp. 17-39, 184-88.

  25. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2: 655-66.

  26. Conner, “We Fought Fear,” pp. 70-87, describes his exploits at length.

  27. Albert C. Hendrickson, personal communication to the author (B.N.). Volckmann provides a long description of Walter Cushing and his activities (We Remained, pp. 26-36), as does James Dean Sanderson, Behind Enemy Lines, pp. 196-218. On one of his trips to Manila, Cushing persuaded high Filipino officials to give him three sets of identity papers showing him to be (1) a Filipino of Spanish extraction, (2) an Italian mestizo, and (3) a priest. This was probably the source of the allegation, made by many writers, that Walter Cushing and his brothers Charles and Joseph were mestizos. See Sanderson, Behind Enemy Lines, p. 214.

  28. Robert Lapham, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  29. Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, p. 418.

  30. Volckmann, We Remained, pp. 82-90, describes the journeys and adventures of Moses and Noble, and Blackburn describes the variegated, often ragtag, outfits they “unified.” See Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 96-100. About the latter, Robert Arnold observes that while many American guerrillas put personal rival
ry and political ambition above other considerations, at least they did not shoot at each other as their Filipino counterparts did (A Rock and a Fortress, p. 201). Filipinos were not above settling personal feuds by turning each other in to the Japanese.

  31. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 94, 100.

  32. Volckmann, We Remained, p. 139; Albert C. Hendrickson, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  33. Dissette and Adamson, Guerrilla Submarines, pp. 39, 233, for example. Jesus Villamor turned in a similar official report to USAFFE headquarters in Australia in 1943. See Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, pp. 263-75.

  34. After the war both Volckmann and Blackburn left long accounts of their tribulations, both before they managed to get to northern Luzon and while they were building guerrilla organizations there; see Volckmann, We Remained, and Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters.

  35. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 87-88; Robert Lapham, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  36. Wolfert, American Guerrilla, p. 157.

  37. Donald Blackburn, many of whose experiences and problems paralleled my own, came to the same conclusion I did about drinking when one of his guerrilla liaison men, bearing the sadly appropriate name of Fish, was caught by the Japanese while drunk. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 174.

  38. Ibid., p. 131.

  39. Estrada, Historical Survey, pp. 28-29.

  40. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 101.

  41. Margaret Utinsky, Miss U., pp. 129, 137.

  42. Ingham, Rendezvous by Submarine, pp. 107-8.

  Chapter Seven: Hukbalahaps and Constabulary

  1. Most of the debts of peasants were incurred not to improve their lands and to increase their incomes but to finance weddings, funerals, and fiestas, and to bet on cockfights. Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, p. 230.

  2. A good brief account of the rise of the Philippine Communist Party is given by George E. Taylor, The Philippines and the United States, pp. 92-97.

  3. More than twenty years after World War II, when Taruc was still in prison, he wrote He Who Rides the Tiger, with assistance from Douglas Hyde, an Irish ex-Communist. In it, Taruc chronicles his gradual disillusionment with communism, a process spread over some twenty-five years. At first he resented chiefly communist discipline. Then he gradually became aware that the Philippine communists were using resistance to the Japanese to serve the ends of the international communist movement, just as other communists employ local discontents for this purpose anywhere. Once these realizations became clear, he was more quickly alienated by their ruthlessness, inhumanity, dogmatism, and self-seeking, which he saw as destroying all the goodness that had infused their original common effort. Taruc, He Who Rides the Tiger, especially pp. 17-18, 20-22, 30-31, 34, 50-53, 79, 167-68.

  Long before, Taruc had written another book, Born of the People. In He Who Rides the Tiger he says that José Lava, general secretary of the Philippine Communist Party, wrote a lot of doctrinaire Marxism in it that did not truly reflect Taruc’s own state of mind at that time (pp. xiii, 7). William Pomeroy, an American communist, later claimed that he wrote all of Born of the People for Taruc. See Morton J. Netzorg, The Philippines in World War II and to Independence, p. 151.

  4. Teodoro A. Agoncillo, in The Fateful Years (2: 674), argues that Thorp’s capture and execution by the Japanese were important factors in the breakdown of cooperation between USAFFE guerrillas and the Huks. Blackburn says Thorp (whom he chooses to call “Crabtree”) ruined any chance for concerted action by behaving in a stupid and arrogant fashion toward the Huks. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 79. Clay Conner, William H. Brooks, and Al Hendrickson, all of whom had considerable experience with the Huks, think the political differences between the two groups would have precluded cooperation in any case. Conner, “We Fought Fear,” pp. 73-75, 78; Albert C. Hendrickson, personal communication to the author (B.N.); William H. Brooks, personal communication to the author (R.H.).

  5. Among many examples of this view of things, see David J. Steinberg, Philippine Collaborators in World War II, p. 93; Teodoro A. Agoncillo and Oscar M. Alfonso, A Short History of the Philippine People, pp. 514-17; Usha Mahajani, Philippine Nationalism, pp. 459-60; Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion, especially pp. xv, 67, 69, 71-79, 105-18, 255-67; Jules Archer, The Philippines’ Fight for Freedom, pp. 179ff.; and Hernando J. Abaya, Betrayal in the Philippines.

  6. Conner, “We Fought Fear,” p. 76.

  7. The phrase is that of Monaghan in Under the Red Sun (p. 144) but the sentiment is mine.

  8. For a good summary of how Marxist irregulars proceeded in this manner in Europe, see Laqueur, Guerrilla, pp. 223-38; in China and the Philippines, see ibid., pp. 256-93. See also Taylor, The Philippines and the United States, pp. 96-97.

  9. Even Kerkvliet, so understanding toward all Huks, acknowledges this (The Huk Rebellion, pp. 50-51). When Vincente Lava left Manila hurriedly in January 1942 just ahead of the Japanese, he left on his desk plans for a village defense corps identical to those drawn up by Chinese communist guerrillas in 1937 after the Japanese invasion there (Taylor, The Philippines and the United States, p. 95). What USAFFE headquarters in Australia knew and surmised about the Huks during the war is summarized in Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, pp. 453-57.

  10. Monaghan, Under the Red Sun, p. 144.

  11. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years, 2: 668, 672.

  12. Intelligence Activities, October 23, 1944, no. 81, pp. 3-4.

  13. For other estimates see Taylor, The Philippines and the United States, pp. 121-22; Abaya, Betrayal, p. 219; Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, pp. 211-12; and Kerkvliet, Huk Rebellion, pp. 87, 93-94. Spence notes that the Huks themselves claimed to have killed thirty thousand Japanese in “1,200 pitched battles.”

  14. Robert Lapham, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  15. Russell Brines, Until They Eat Stones, pp. 48-51.

  16. Buenafe, Wartime Philippines, pp. 226-28.

  17. Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, p. 363. Marcial Lichauco, a law partner of Manuel Roxas, says he asked a Constabulary patrolman late in 1943 what he would do if American and Filipino troops landed some day and the Japanese put him on the firing line. The man replied that he and several of his friends had put the same question to their commanding officer. He had told them that every man would have to decide for himself, and that he wished all of them well. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam,” pp. 136-37. It was well known among Constabularymen that General Francisco’s sentiments were similar. See Teofilo del Castillo and José del Castillo, The Saga of José P. Laurel, p. 304.

  Chapter Eight: Guerrilla Life

  1. Allison Ind, Allied Intelligence Bureau, p. 116.

  2. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 223-26. Arnold, in A Rock and a Fortress, p. 192, also alludes to his plight then.

  3. Panlilio, The Crucible, p. 111.

  4. Ibid., pp. 239, 248-49.

  5. Panlilio acknowledges that for all the trouble she and Marking had with their guerrillas, much of their time was spent a good deal like most of ours. She said Marking himself was the only doctor they had, and his knowledge came from a correspondence course in nursing he had once taken. She learned some from him, and everyone learned from experience. Marking’s guerrillas were often close to Manila. There many of them posed as civilians and got jobs on the Manila docks, where opportunities for sabotage were much greater and more diversified than they ever were for our men. The Crucible, pp. 56, 58, 110.

  6. Blackburn says Enoch French was killed by a Filipino subordinate who thought French had given him too little Japanese military scrip for his wedding; that the killer surrendered to the Japanese, who then let him join the Philippine Constabulary; and that one of French’s officers ambushed him on a patrol soon after. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 175. I think this is a reference to the same person and the same incident, and that either Blackburn’s recollection of the details, or mine, is faul
ty, but it is impossible to be certain so long after the events. Conceivably, there were two different persons and two separate events. Either way, the moral is the same: one could never be entirely sure of the loyalty of even his closest associates.

  7. Panlilio, The Crucible, p. 185.

  8. Blackburn relates that he once let a Filipino subordinate ambush a Japanese patrol just to keep up everyone’s spirits, only to have the man botch the job. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 201. My luck was better.

  9. Laqueur, Guerrilla, cites many examples of guerrillas’ efforts to cope with bandits, going back as far in time as the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, 1808-13. See especially pp. 36, 95.

  10. Vernon Fassoth, personal communication to the author (B.N.).

  11. Laqueur believes that one of the main reasons for the effectiveness of Russian guerrillas in World War II was that they were in regular radio communication with their general staff and thus were never burdened with a feeling of isolation and abandonment (Guerrilla, p. 212).

  12. Ibid., p. 21.

  13. For a thoughtful survey of the problems and dilemmas of the Japanese, see Steinberg, Philippine Collaborators, pp. 56-58.

  14. Monaghan describes such an episode that took place in Tayabas province early in the war (Under the Red Sun, p. 147).

  15. This particular ruse seems to have been commonest around Manila. See Panlilio, The Crucible, p. 192.

  16. Willoughby, Guerrilla Resistance Movement, p. 247. Rufino Baldwin, a north Luzon guerrilla, was captured in 1943 when his ex-fiancée learned that he had acquired a new girlfriend and turned him in to the Japanese. They tortured him every day for two weeks in Baguio, then sent him to the infamous Fort Santiago in Manila, from which he never emerged. Harkness, Blackburn’s Headhunters, pp. 158, 175.

  17. This particular barbarity was even inflicted on women, one being the Filipina wife of Fish, Blackburn’s liaison man who had been taken by the Japanese while drunk. Fish himself was flogged into unconsciousness before being executed. Harkins, Blackburn’s Headhunters, p. 184.