On October 1, 1942, on the back of a Delinquent Tax Notice, Fertig wrote a proclamation in pencil and nailed it to a tree:
A Moro silversmith hammered out two five-pointed stars—the rank insignia of a brigadier general—from silver dollars, and Fertig pinned them to his collar points.
It was likely, Fertig knew, that his proclamation would be blown by the wind from the tree before anyone saw it. Or if it stayed on the tree (the distribution list, for instance, was a bluff; the delinquent tax form was the only sheet of paper he had), that whoever read it would either laugh or conclude there was a crazy American running loose.
But two days later, as the quartet was walking along the beach beside a Mindanao jungle, ready to rush in and hide if Japanese soldiers appeared, a wiry little Moro wearing vestiges of a uniform and carrying a Model 1917 Enfield U.S. Army rifle stepped into view. And then others appeared, until there were almost two hundred of them.
The wiry little Moro saluted crisply and in the best English he could manage informed General Fertig that he and his men were at the General’s orders, and with respect, could he suggest they go into the jungle, for there were Japanese just a short distance down the beach.
Soon other Filipinos appeared, as well as other Americans who had decided to take their chances in the mountains and the jungles rather than enter Japanese captivity. No one seemed to question the stars on Fertig’s collar points; they all seemed happy to be able to place themselves under the orders of someone who knew what he was doing.
A reasonably safe headquarters was established. Though it was not defensible, it was in a location that would be invisible from the air and difficult to locate on the ground. And even if located, it would be very difficult to surround. If Japanese appeared, Fertig and his forces would be able to vanish into the mountains before the Japanese got close.
Remaining free was the first priority.
The second priority, as Fertig saw it, was to make his presence known to others who had not surrendered and who could join his forces; to the Japanese, who would be obliged to tie down forces on a ratio of at least seven to one in order to look for and contain him; and to the U.S. Army.
There were risks involved in making the U.S. Army aware of what he was doing. For one thing, he simply might be ordered to surrender. He thus decided that if such an order came, he would not acknowledge it. For another, the U.S. Army was likely to frown both on his self-promotion to brigadier general and on the authority he had vested in himself to take command of Mindanao and proclaim martial law.
Fertig decided that these risks had to be taken. There was simply no way he could arm a guerrilla force as large as he envisioned by stealing arms from the Japanese. And the only possible source of arms was the U.S. Army, which could either make airdrops or possibly send a submarine. And then on top of that, just about as important as arms was medicine, especially quinine. And the only possible source of medicine was the Army.
What he really needed most of all was money. Not green-backs. Gold. Preferably twenty-dollar gold coins. Lots of twenty-dollar gold coins. With them he could pay his troops, which would lend sorely needed credence to Brigadier General Fertig and his authority. And he could buy food and possibly medicine, and make gifts to Moro chieftains and others who could thereby be persuaded to help him.
There was one major problem with informing the U.S. Army of the existence of the Mindanao-Visayan force of United States forces in the Philippines: Headquarters, USFIP, had no radio. And if it could somehow get hold of a radio, it had no generator to power it. And if USFIP came into possession of a radio and a generator, and could somehow begin to transmit, there was a very good possibility that the U.S. Army Signal Corps radio operators in the States would not reply. They would presume that the Japanese were playing games with them, because any message from legitimate American forces would be encrypted, that is, sent in code.
Acting on the authority he had vested in himself, Fertig commissioned Chief Petty Officer Orfett and Private Ball as second lieutenants. Lieutenant Orfett was put in charge of a deserted coconut-oil mill. Coconut oil could be sold or bartered. Lieutenant Ball was appointed signal officer, USFIP, and ordered to establish communications with the U.S. Army in Australia. He was to use his own judgment in determining how this could be best accomplished.
Lieutenant Ball appointed as his chief radio operator a Filipino high school boy by the name of Gerardo Almendres. Almendres, before war came, had completed slightly more than half of a correspondence course in radiotelephony. Using the correspondence course schematic diagrams as a guide, Almendres set about building a shortwave transmitter. Most of his parts came from the sound system of a motion picture projector that had been buried to keep it out of Japanese hands.
A boatload of recruits from Luzon arrived. It comprised the remnants of a Philippine Scout Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment: six master sergeants, one of them an American. With them they had an American captain who had deserted USAFFE, U.S. Army Forces, Far East, and taken to the jungles, rather than face certain capture on Corregidor.
The captain, Horace B. Buchanan, USMA ’34, a slight, balding man showing signs of malnutrition, provided the second item necessary to establish communication with the U.S. Army in Australia. It was a small metal box bearing a brass identification tag on which was stamped:
SECRET Device, cryptographic, m94 serial number 145. It is absolutely forbidden to remove this device from its assigned secure cryptographic facility SECRET
General Fertig had never seen one before. He found it fascinating.
It consisted of twenty-five aluminum disks. Each disk was about the size of a silver dollar and just a little thicker. The disks were stacked together and laid on their edges, so they could rotate independently on an axle. The stack of disks was about five inches long. On the outside of each disk there was printed an alphabet, sometimes A, B, C in proper sequence and sometimes with the characters in a random order.
“How does it work?” Fertig asked.
Captain Buchanan showed him.
Each of the disks was rotated until they all spelled out, horizontally on the “encrypt-decrypt line,” the first twenty-five characters of the message they were to transmit. That left the other lines spelling out gibberish.
Cryptographic facilities were furnished a Top Secret document, known as the SOI (Signal Operating Instructions) . Among other things, the SOI prescribed the use of another horizontal line, called the “genatrix,” for use on a particular day. The gibberish on the genatrix line was what was sent over the air.
Actually, Buchanan explained, the SOI provided for a number of genatrix lines, for messages usually were far longer than twenty-five characters. The genatrix lines were selected at random. One day, for example, Lines 02, 13, 18, 21, 07, and so on were selected, and Lines 24, 04, 16, 09, 09, and so on, the next.
When the message was received, all the decrypt operator had to do was consult his SOI for that day’s genatrix lines. He would then set the first twenty-five characters of the gibberish received on that genatrix line on his Device, Cryptographic, M94, and the decrypted message would appear on the encrypt-decrypt line. He would then move to the next prescribed genatrix line and repeat the process until the entire message had been decrypted.
The forehead of the red-goateed brigadier general creased thoughtfully.
Buchanan read his mind.
“In an emergency, Sir,” Buchanan said, “in the absence of an SOI, there is an emergency procedure. A code block . . .”
“A what?” Fertig asked.
“A five-character group of letters, Sir,” Buchanan explained, “is included as the third block of the five five-character blocks in the first twenty-five characters. That alerts the decrypt operator to the absence of an SOI.”
“And then what?”
“First, there is a standard emergency genatrix line sequence. The message will then be decrypted. The receiving station will then attempt to determine the legitimacy of the sender b
y other means.”
“Such as?”
“His name, for one thing. Then the maiden name of his wife’s mother, the name of his high school principal, or his children. Personal data that would not be available to the enemy.”
General Fertig nodded.
“You are a very clever fellow, Buchanan,” Fertig said. “You are herewith appointed cryptographic officer for United States forces in the Philippines.”
That left two connected problems. The first was to get Gerardo Almendres’s International Correspondence School transmitter-receiver up and running. That would require electrical power, and that translated to mean a generator would be required.
Buchanan had no idea how that could be handled, but both he and Lt. Ball suggested that perhaps Master Sergeant George Withers might be of help. Withers was the NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment on whose boat Buchanan had escaped from Luzon. He was a competent fellow; master sergeants of the Regular U.S. Army are almost by definition highly knowledgeable and resourceful. He had, after all, managed to acquire and hide the boat and bring his detachment safely to Mindanao on it.
Master Sergeant Withers was summoned.
He was obviously uncomfortable, and after some gentle prodding, General Fertig got him to blurt out:
“The truth of the matter is, General, I’m not sure I’m a master sergeant.”
“Would you care to explain that, Sergeant?”
Withers explained that he had been a staff sergeant assigned to an Army ammunition depot on Luzon when he had been suddenly transferred to a Philippine Scout Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment.
“There was fifteen Scouts, General . . . we lost ten before we finally got out. Anyway, Sir, two of them was technical sergeants. They didn’t know nothing about explosives, they’d come out of the Twenty-sixth Cavalry with Lieutenant Whittaker when it got all shot up and was disbanded.”
“Lieutenant Whittaker? A cavalry officer? Was he killed, too?” General Fertig asked.
“No, Sir, and he wasn’t a cavalry officer, either. He was a fighter pilot. They put him in the cavalry after they ran out of airplanes, and then they put him to work blowing things up when the Twenty-sixth Cavalry got all shot up and they butchered their horses for rations. He was a fucking artist with TNT . . .”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” Withers said. “The brass on Corregidor sent for him. That’s where we got Captain Buchanan. He was sent to fetch Lieutenant Whittaker, and he talked Lieutenant Whittaker into letting him come with us.”
It made sense, Fertig thought, that a demolitions expert . . . “a fucking artist with TNT” . . . would be summoned to Corregidor to practice his art just before the fortress fell. Poor bastard, if he wasn’t dead, he was now in a prison camp. With a little bit of luck, he could be here, and free. USFIP could use a fucking artist with TNT.
“You were telling me, Sergeant,” General Fertig said, “about your rank.”
“Yes, Sir. Well, Lieutenant Whittaker thought that since I knew about explosives, and the Scouts didn’t, it would be awkward with two of the Scouts outranking me, so he said, right when I first reported to him, that I had been promoted to master sergeant. I’m not sure he had the authority to do that, Sir. I wasn’t even on the technical sergeant promotion list.”
Sgt. Withers looked at General Fertig for the general’s reaction. His face bore the look of a man who has made a complete confession of his sins and has prepared himself for whatever fate is about to send his way.
“Sergeant Withers,” General Fertig said. “You may consider that your promotion in the field, by my authority, has been confirmed and is now a matter of record.”
“Yes, Sir,” Sgt. Withers said. “Thank you, General.”
“The reason I asked you in here, Sergeant,” General Fertig said, “is to ask for your thoughts on a problem we have. We have need of a source of electrical power.”
“What for, Sir?”
“To power our radio transmitter.”
Withers hardly hesitated.
“There’s a diesel on the boat—”
“We sank the boat.”
“We sunk it before on Luzon,” Withers said, undaunted. “The engine’s sealed. I’ll take my Scouts down there and get it.”
“And how will you get it up here?”
“We’ll steal a water buffalo and make a travois . . . like the Indians had? . . . No problem, General.”
“The sooner the better, Sergeant,” General Fertig said.
2
NAVAL COMMUNICATIONS FACILITY MARE ISLAND NAVY YARD SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 5 JANUARY 1943
The radioman second looked to be about seventeen years old. He was small and slight, and his light brown hair was cropped close to his skull. He wore government-issue metal-framed glasses, and his earphones made his head look very small.
But he was good at his trade, capable of transcribing the International Morse Code coming over his Hallicrafters receiver far faster than it was being sent. He had time, in other words, to read what he was typing instead of just serving as a human link in the transmission process.
He raised one hand over his head to signal his superior while with the other, with practiced skill, he took the sheet of paper in his typewriter out and fed a fresh sheet.
The lieutenant junior grade who came to his station looked very much like the radioman second, except that he was perhaps four years older and just a little heavier. But he was slight, too, and wore glasses and looked very young.
He took the sheet of yellow paper from the radioman second and read it:
MFS FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
MFS FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
ACNOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ ERASH
POFTP QOPOQ CHTFS SDHST ALITS
CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYE
ACNOW BRTSS DXSYT QRSHJ ERASH
POFTP QOPOQ CHTFS SDHST ALITS
CGHRZ QMSGL QROTX VABCG LSTYE
MFS STANDING BY FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
MFS STANDING BY FOR US FORCES AUSTRALIA
“What the hell is this?”
“Look at the third block, Sir, ” the radioman second said.
“What about it?”
“It was the emergency code, no SOI, when the Army was still using the old M94,” the radioman second said.
“Who’s MFS?” the j.g. asked.
“There’s no such station, Sir,” the radioman second said.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s the Japs playing games,” the radioman said.
“Well, what the hell, I’ll send it over to the Presidio,” the j.g. said. “Maybe they’ve still got an M94 around someplace. ”
“You don’t think I should give them a call back?”
“They weren’t trying to reach us, they were calling Australia. Let Australia call them back.”
3
THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH BUILDING WASHINGTON, D.C. 10 JANUARY 1943
Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class Charles D. Staley, USN, in compliance with his orders, presented himself at the National Institutes of Health building.
Five weeks before, Staley had been running the tune-up shop at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center motor pool, outside Chicago. It was a hell of a thing for a first class petty officer with eighteen years’ service to be doing with a war on; but Staley was a Yangtze River Patrol sailor, and he had learned that Yangtze River Patrol sailors who had managed to make it back to the States—instead of either getting killed or captured in the Philippines—seemed to get dumb billets like that. The Navy didn’t seem to know what to do with them, so it gave them billets like running a motor pool, shit that had to be done but had little to do with ships or fighting a war.
And then the personnel chief had called him in and said there was a levy down from BuPers—the Navy Bureau of Personnel—for someone with his rate, who had been a China Sailor, and who was unmarried. The personnel chief
said he had to volunteer, for the billet was “classified and hazardous.” Reasoning that anything had to be better than cleaning carburetors, Staley volunteered.
Five days later, his orders came through. For the first time in his service, Staley was flown somewhere in a Navy airplane. He was flown to Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington, where a civilian driving a Plymouth station wagon met him and took him to a large country estate in Virginia about forty miles from Washington. Some very rich guy’s house—there was a mansion, and a stable, and a swimming pool, set on 240 acres in the middle of nowhere—had been taken over by the government for the duration.
A real hard-nosed civilian sonofabitch named Eldon C. Baker had given him and ten other guys a short speech, saying the purpose of the training they were about to undergo was to determine if they met the standards of the OSS. Staley didn’t know what the hell the OSS was, but he’d been in the service long enough to know when to ask questions and when not to ask questions, and this was one of the times not to ask questions.
Baker, as if he had been reading his mind, almost immediately made that official.
“This is not a summer camp,” Baker said, “where you will make friends for life. You are not to ask questions about the backgrounds, including girlfriends and families, of other trainees, and if a trainee asks you questions that do not directly concern what is going on at the school, you will report that immediately to one of the cadre.”
Baker had made it clear that if you reported it, the trainee who had asked the questions would be immediately “relieved” (which Staley understood to mean thrown out on his ass), and if you didn’t report it, you would be relieved.
They would be restricted to the camp, Mr. Baker told them, for the length of the course, or unless “sooner relieved for cause.”
The training itself had been part boot camp—running around and learning about small arms; part how to fight like a Shanghai pimp—in other words, with a knife, or by sticking your thumbs into a guy’s eyes, or kicking him in the balls; part how to blow things up; and part how to be a radio operator. Staley hadn’t had any trouble with any of it, but some of the other guys had had a hell of a time, and although they had said as little as possible about themselves, Staley had been able to figure out that most of the other guys were college guys, and he would have laid three to one that at least three of them were officers. Of the twelve guys who started, six made it through. Three got thrown out, one broke his leg climbing up the side of a barn, and two just quit.
The Fighting Agents Page 2