Von Heurten-Mitnitz waited until they were finished and Fulmar was pouring a little brandy to improve his small, strong cup of coffee, and then he said:
“I think it would be best if I knew precisely what has happened since you entered Germany, Eric.”
“A synopsis would be that everything that could go wrong, did,” Fulmar said.
“What about the Gestapo agent? Did you have to kill him?”
“I killed him when he opened the luggage that had been left on the train for me,” Fulmar said matter-of-factly, “and found the Obersturmführer’s uniform. And then the boots didn’t fit.”
Von Heurten-Mitnitz nodded. “And in Marburg, was what happened there necessary?”
“Yes, of course it was,” Fulmar said impatiently. “I don’t like scrambling people’s brains.”
“You could learn some delicacy,” the Countess said.
“We are not in a delicate business, Cousin,” Fulmar said.
“But that’s it? There’s nothing else I don’t know about?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
Fulmar’s hesitation was obvious.
“What else?” von Heurten-Mitnitz persisted.
“I was recognized on the train,” he said. “Before I got to Frankfurt. On the way to Marburg.”
“By whom?”
There was another perceptible hesitation.
“Christ, I really hate to tell you,” he said. “I don’t want you playing games with her.”
“I think I have to know,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“Fuck you,” Fulmar said. “You have to know what I goddamn well decide to tell you.”
Von Heurten-Mitnitz stiffened. He was not used to being talked to like that. But he kept control of himself.
“Someone you knew when you were at Marburg?” he asked reasonably. And then, when Fulmar remained silent, he added, “I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I will be here when you are safe in England.”
“Tell him, Eric,” the Countess said. “As you pointed out, we are not in a delicate business.”
“I don’t want you trying to use her, you understand me? Her, or her father.”
“Who recognized you?” von Heurten-Mitnitz persisted gently.
“Elizabeth von Handleman-Bitburg,” Fulmar said.
Von Heurten-Mitnitz’s eyebrows went up. The Countess looked at him with a question in her eyes.
“Generaloberst von Handleman-Bitburg’s daughter?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
Fulmar nodded.
“Possibly it’s meaningless,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said. “She met a young Obersturmführer whom she had once known. Was there any reason you think she was suspicious? ”
“Her father had told her that I was seen in Morocco in an American uniform,” Fulmar said. “She knew.”
“And what do you think she will tell her father?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
“Nothing,” Fulmar said. “She won’t tell him a thing.”
“I wish I shared your confidence,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“The only reason I’m telling you this,” Fulmar said, “is because I don’t want you to protect your ass by taking her out.”
“Telling me what?”
“We spent the night together,” Fulmar said. “Okay? Get the picture?”
“Yes, I think I do,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“If anything happens to her,” Fulmar said. “I will . . .”
“Don’t be childish,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“I was about to say something childish,” Fulmar said. “Like I will come back here and kill you myself. But I won’t have to do that. All I’ll have to do is make sure the Sicherheitsdienst finds out about you.”
“My God!” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“I made a mistake in telling you,” Fulmar said.
“No, you didn’t, Eric,” the Countess said. She walked to von Heurten-Mitnitz and put her arm in his, then stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Helmut understands that even in the midst of this insanity, people fall in love.”
Fulmar looked through them, then chuckled.
"Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “The Merry Widow in the flesh. ”
IV
1
THE MAYLAYBALAY-KIBAWE HIGHWAY ISLAND OF MINDANAO COMMONWEALTH OF THE PHILIPPINES 4 FEBRUARY 1943
The mountainous center of the island of Mindanao is virtually inaccessible by motor vehicle, and accessible by foot only with great difficulty. It was for that reason that Brigadier General Wendell Fertig Commanding, U.S. Forces in the Philippines, had elected to place his headquarters and the bulk of his force in the mountains: the Japs had a hell of a hard time getting in there, and when they tried it, he was always notified in plenty of time to plan his defensive strategy.
Almost without exception, that strategy was to evacuate his headquarters and, from positions in the mountainous jungle nearby, observe how close the Japanese had come to finding it.
So far they had failed, although on occasion they had come across outposts or villages where he had stationed small detachments of his guerrilla force. That was, he knew, a somewhat grandiose manner of describing the six, or eight, or a dozen armed men living in those villages and earning their support from the villagers by working in the fields.
When the Japanese had proof (or strongly suspected) that a village was harboring guerrillas, they burned it to the ground. They would have shot the village leaders, had they caught them, but the villagers—men, women, and children, as well as the guerrillas—invariably found safety in the surrounding jungle when Japanese appeared.
Pour l’encouragement de les autres, the elders of several villages that had not been housing guerrillas had been shot, and their villages burned down by the Japanese. The result of this had been to increase the number of natives willing to support U.S. forces in the Philippines. The remaining men would have been happy to enlist in USFIP, but Fertig had neither food to feed them nor arms with which to equip them.
The Japanese had quickly learned, too, that their expeditions into the mountains were very expensive—and did little good. They were almost always engaged by Fertig’s guerrillas. Not in pitched battles, not even in situations that could be considered an armed engagement. Although Fertig liked to think that he was doing to the Japanese what the Minutemen had done to the English on their way back from Concord—causing them serious harm by attacking their formations with accurate rifle fire from the surrounding forests—all he was really able to do was harass the Japanese patrols.
When it was absolutely safe to do so—in the sense that there was a sure escape route into the impenetrable jungle—and when there was an absolutely sure target, two or three or half a dozen shots would ring out from the jungle, and one or two or three sweating Japanese soldiers marching along a trail would be killed or wounded.
With some exceptions—there were some guerrillas who had as much as one hundred rounds of ammunition, which they were unwilling to share), most of Fertig’s troops had no more than twenty-five rounds of ammunition for their Model 1917 Enfield .30-06-caliber rifles, or their Arisaka 7.7mm-caliber captured Japanese rifles, or their Winchester or Savage hunting rifles, or their Browning and Remington shotguns.
Fertig’s guerrillas were not equipped to engage Japanese forces in battle.
Before long, the Japanese, who were not fools, had for all practical purposes abandoned their expeditions into the mountains. Fertig wasn’t posing any bona fide military threat to their occupation. He was contained. And they could live with him until such time as the Filipinos came to understand that it was in their best interest to cooperate with the Japanese, to enter willingly into the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. At that point, they would stop feeding and supporting Fertig’s guerrillas, and the threat would be over.
The Japanese had turned to winning the hearts and minds of the people. Propaganda detachments, protected by company-size detachments of riflemen, began to visit villages on the periphery of Fer
tig’s mountainous jungle area of operations. The propaganda detachments carried with them 16mm motion picture projectors and generators and gifts of food and candy. They would set up a screen and show Charlie Chaplin and Bugs Bunny motion pictures, along with newsreels of the fall of Singapore, and of Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrendering to General Homma, and of long lines of American soldiers— hands in the air in surrender—entering Japanese captivity.
And then there would be a speech, or speeches, most often by Filipinos already convinced that the future of the Philippine people lay with their Japanese brothers. The speeches would invariably contain sarcastic references to General Fertig and his so-called U.S. forces in the Philippines.
Where were they? If they hadn’t already died of starvation, hiding out like rats in the jungle, why weren’t they attacking the Japanese?
General Fertig was aware of the problem, and aware that it had to be dealt with. With some reluctance, he had concluded that the only way to deal with it was by doing exactly what he believed he was probably incapable of doing: engaging a Japanese company-strength unit in a battle. A battle in which there would be a winner and a loser, not just a dozen shots fired from concealment in the jungle.
The Japanese cooperated in two ways that helped Fertig’s plans. First, they were methodical. Their propaganda detachments had a schedule. And Fertig obtained a copy of it from a Filipino woman who had been employed by the Japanese as a typist. Secondly, when it had become apparent to the Japanese that Fertig was unwilling to attack the propaganda detachment convoys, they had grown a little careless.
When the first convoys had gone out, fully expecting to be attacked, they had moved slowly and with great caution. They had sent a point ahead and they were prepared to fight at any moment. Now, as a general rule of thumb, the troops in the trucks did their best to sleep when they were on the road. Their officers indulged them, for they believed that if Fertig were going to attack, he would do so at night. The way to preclude that was to establish a strong perimeter guard. That required the use of wide-awake soldiers. It was better that the troops get what sleep they could when they could, so they would be wide-awake guards at night.
Two highways crossed the main portion of the island of Mindanao, both running north-south, one to the west of the mountains, the other to the east. There was no highway running east-west through the mountains. The terrain was difficult, construction would be practically impossible, and there was no economic justification to build such highways.
The place Fertig picked for the attack on the convoy was almost exactly equidistant between Maylaybalay and Kibawe on the highway that crossed Mindanao to the west of the mountains. The nearest Japanese reinforcements would be twenty-three miles north in Maylaybalay, or twenty-one miles south in Kibawe. In one possible scenario—where one of the trucks would escape the ambush and run for help—it would be anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours before Japanese reinforcements could reach the ambush location.
In another—and much worse—possible scenario, they would not be able to totally overwhelm the Japanese in twenty minutes. In that scenario, the Japanese troops would be equipped with both machine guns and mortars. If they were not able to knock out the mortars and machine guns in the first minute or two of the ambush, overwhelming the Japanese would be difficult and time-consuming.
And overwhelming the Japanese quickly was absolutely necessary. The initial attack would consume a great percentage of available ammunition, including their entire stock of fourteen fragmentation hand grenades. Fertig’s only possible source of resupply was from the bodies of vanquished Japanese. There would be no question of breaking off the attack and making for the mountains. And the longer it took to overwhelm the Japanese, the more time they would have to defend themselves, which meant the more ammunition they would expend, and the less there would be for the guerrillas to capture.
There were other problems, of course. For one thing, statistically—and this was not a reflection on the Filipinos’ loyalty generally—he had to assume that several of his troops were in Japanese service. A father, or a wife, or a child was in Japanese “protection,” with the understanding that as soon as proof came of the “loyalty” of the guerrilla the father or wife or child would be released. Loyalty could be proved by getting word to the Japanese of where and when there would be an ambush of Japanese forces, or where and when Fertig or one of his senior officers could be found.
It was not black and white. The same guerrilla who would decide that his greater loyalty lay to his family, and that therefore he should let the Japanese know where they could find Fertig, could more often than not be counted upon to be willing to lay his life on the line sniping at a Japanese patrol.
What this situation required was keeping secret the actual place and time of the planned attack until virtually the last minute, so that the guerrilla with a member of his family in Japanese “protection” would not have the opportunity to communicate with the Japanese.
To assemble the 120-150-man force he considered the optimum for the ambush of the propaganda detachment, therefore, Fertig had to pick several sites within two hours’ march of the ambush site. In the event, he picked five different sites, then sent word by runner to various guerrilla cells—numbering in the aggregate just over two hundred men—to assemble into five larger groups at the designated sites.
His experience had taught him that about sixty percent of the guerrillas summoned would appear at the designated site at the proper time.
Five hours before the propaganda detachment and its company of guards was scheduled to reach the ambush site, a second group of runners was sent to the five assembly areas, bearing orders for the men to come to the final assembly point. From the moment the runners reached the five sites, it was presumed that anyone leaving intended to betray the troops to the Japanese. If someone ran and it was impossible to capture him, the operation would be called off, and the guerrillas would disperse. If someone ran and was caught, he would be beheaded. Beheading with a heavy, razor-sharp machete was supposed to be more or less painless, and it did not expend ammunition.
One hour before the Japanese were to pass the ambush site, the last group of guerrillas arrived. No one had disappeared, or tried to. The force now totaled 136 men; and two of the guerrillas, formerly Philippine Scouts, had brought with them BARs—Browning Automatic Rifles—and seven loaded magazines.
Fertig was of two minds about using the BARs. They were splendid weapons, and God knew his troops needed something to counter the Japanese Namimba machine guns the guards would certainly have. But he had only seventy rounds per gun—three and a half magazines. And every round that ripped through the BARs with such speed could be fired one at a time from an Enfield in sniping fire, where the kill-per-cartridge rate was so much more effective.
In the end, he decided that the more fire expended at the beginning of the assault, the sooner the Japanese would be overwhelmed, and thus the more ammunition could be taken from their bodies.
Fertig then explained the tactics of the attack, which were very simple.
The force would be divided into two elements, with two-thirds of the force close to one side of the road. From there a devastating fire could be delivered at close range. The second element, commanded by Fertig and consisting of the remaining third of the force, with both BARs and ten of the fourteen fragmentation grenades, would be on the opposite side of the road.
On signal, which would be when Fertig and a former Philippine Scout opened fire with their Enfield rifles on the driver of the first vehicle in the convoy, the smaller force would bring BAR fire to bear on the trucks carrying the troops. Other riflemen would disable the last truck in the convoy, preferably by killing its driver.
At this point, Fertig authorized the throwing of one— only—fragmentation grenade at each troop-carrying truck.
The Japanese convoy would thus be immobilized, and it was to be hoped that many, if not most, of the truck-borne troops would be k
illed before they exited the trucks.
Some, of course, would survive. Most, Fertig believed, would exit toward the ditch and forest opposite the direction from which they had been attacked.
They would then present themselves as targets to the bulk of the ambush force. Meanwhile, the third of the force that had opened the attack would rapidly divide itself in half, half going to the head of the convoy, and half to the tail. This would get them out of the line of fire of the larger ambush force and leave them in a position to fire upon any Japanese from the sides.
Fertig did his best to impress upon his men the absolute necessity of aimed fire. They were dangerously short of ammunition, and there was absolutely no excuse for a guerrilla to fall from a bullet fired by another guerrilla.
Everyone seemed to accept his reasoning. But Fertig knew that even the most phlegmatic of people got excited once the crack of small-arms fire filled the air. And by no stretch of the imagination could his force be called at all phlegmatic.
In the engagement that followed, the ambush force of United States forces in the Philippines, Brigadier General W. W. Fertig commanding, triumphed over the 1104th Army Information Detachment and Company 3, 505th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army. There were no Japanese survivors.
USFIP suffered eleven dead (including the Philippine Scout who had opened the engagement at General Fertig’s side, and of whom he had been extraordinarily fond) and thirty-six wounded. Of the thirty-six wounded, twenty would subsequently die. USFIP had virtually no medical supplies.
The Japanese, once they overcame their initial surprise, had fought gallantly and well. It was more than half an hour before the last of them had died for his Emperor. By the time the engagement was over, the Japanese had expended a large part of their ammunition.
The Fighting Agents Page 10