To stunt the growth of the resistance, the Japanese redoubled efforts to convince Filipinos to give up. They tried propaganda, suggesting most of the islanders were cooperating with the Japanese to build that shining hope for the future, the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, but often sent mixed messages that had the opposite effect than intended. One broadcast from Tokyo, for instance, proclaimed, “In central Luzon, 1,300 bandits surrendered in February and were now cooperating wholeheartedly with Japan. American and Filipino bandits, who were active in Northern Luzon are almost wiped out, and the rest—about a hundred—have fled to the mountains, where they will starve to death…. It has become clear that the day is not far away when the whole Philippines will cooperate wholeheartedly with Japan.” But the guerrillas knew better, and so did many ordinary Filipinos.
When propaganda didn’t work, the Japanese tried bribery and treachery. When that didn’t work, they began making wholesale arrests, torturing suspects at Fort Santiago and making those who wouldn’t break dig their own graves. Thousands of soldiers surrounded Mount Canumay in Tanay, Rizal, for two months, trying to flush Marking out of hiding. But they didn’t know the terrain like the guerrillas and eventually realized the native commando had escaped.
Soldiers came for Esperanza Enriquez one morning and took her to a house in the rural northeastern section of Luzon. Her husband was a guerrilla leader, and soldiers had been combing the hillsides, hunting him. Each night the soldiers would bring in a man badly beaten and ask if it was her husband. They forced her to write copies of the same letter, over and over.
Dear Manolo,
Please come home now. The children are missing you very much. The Japanese army are very kind. Peter was very sick and they gave us medicine and plenty of gifts for the children, including school supplies. They promised me they will not harm you. Lay down your arms and come home soon. Everything is fine and normal. Come home and experience the life we are enjoying now. Love, Mommy.
The soldiers dropped the letters all over the mountains, trying to entice Manolo to surrender. A few days later, a servant at the house, who had been fetching water, slipped Esperanza a note. It was from her husband.
Mommy, don’t be frightened. I am only four houses away from you. We are taking care of you. If they hurt you, we will come and kill them all.
All the antiresistance effort only deepened the resentment and strengthened the guerrillas’ commitment to driving the occupiers mad. Soon they had infiltrated the police department, and the friendly officers would tip off the resistance if the Japanese police were planning a raid.
By August 1944, eighteen million Filipinos lived in the islands, and they were being watched by about four hundred thousand Japanese soldiers. But 180,000 Filipinos—1 in 100—were in some way serving the resistance. The resistance ranks were growing daily, and they would number nearly 250,000 by the spring of 1945.
They were middle-class citizens and even society women whose allegiances were with the Americans. They owned cinemas and worked for the YMCA and made fun of their new masters by mocking them in Tagalog. They talked about underground activities at pretend dinner meetings and funneled food to the warriors in the mountains and messages to General MacArthur. In fact, radio traffic picked up to an unusual clip, with nearly four thousand messages being logged each month at the Australian headquarters for the US Army Forces in the Far East. They sent transcripts of secret executive sessions of the puppet regime, guest lists of visitors to the Manila Hotel, movements of Japanese armed forces. Hundreds of groups sprang to life in the islands, with names like the Civilian Liberation Volunteers and Farmer Labor Auxiliary Service and the Heroes of Democracy. Their loyalty rode with MacArthur and Quezon, and when Quezon died from tuberculosis at a cure cottage in Upstate New York on August 1, 1944, it rode with MacArthur alone.
The general’s submarines supplied them with morale in the form of transmitters and equipment and matchbooks that reinforced his promise to return. More and more, they could monitor US troop movements, feel the pulse of the war, and the word spread like prairie fire when, on June 6, 1944, allied troops landed along a fifty-mile stretch of French coastline to fight the Nazis. The bold statistics of the effort, a mighty show of force, were repeated in astonished tones on Calle Real and around Plaza Goiti and on the quiet corners of Escolta Street: more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft ran support for 160,000 allied troops.
“The eyes of the world are upon you,” they heard Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, say. “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere are with you.”
22
VENGEANCE
Father Fred Julien and the Catholic priests being held at the Los Baños Internment Camp, snug between Mount Makiling and Laguna de Bay, never heard about D-day. Their secret radio was still at the Ateneo, for all they knew. The days of 1944 bled together, and a dismal routine set in among the 126 priests, several nuns, and other missionaries and their families in a barracks they called Little Vatican. They were kept separate from the two thousand or so Americans, British, Australians, Dutch, Norwegians, Poles, Italians, and Canadians, most of them civilians rounded up after the outset of war. They divided themselves into committees and were each assigned simple tasks like mending, carpentry, and policing.
But with each passing month, food rations were diminished. The twice-daily meals were mostly an ice-cream-scoop-sized portion of rice gruel with a little hog grease on top. One man and his wife had volunteered to be part of an experiment—getting weighed every two weeks at the camp hospital—with the hopes that the Japanese doctors might be humanitarian enough to be saddened by their weight loss and order an increase in rations. After a few months of weighing in, the man and his wife realized they were losing twelve to fourteen pounds every two weeks. They stopped volunteering when she dropped below eighty pounds and he dropped below one hundred.
The prisoners were burying two or three of their own per day, deaths caused by starvation or related diseases. Some of the priests took to eating banana peels directly out of the hog slop. They ate dogs, cats, snakes—anything they could catch—and they made up songs like schoolchildren to fight the tedium, hoping against hope that the Americans were on their way.
Oh, we’ll all have apple pie when they come
Oh, we’ll all have apple pie when they come
Oh, I don’t want to die
Till we have that apple pie
Till we have that apple pie when they come
They were exhilarated when the airplanes began appearing in the sky, and they’d squint against the morning sunshine to try to make out the insignia on the tails. They watched, once, as an American plane was blasted out of the sky, and saw clearly the pilot’s parachute mushroom as he descended into a thicket of trees. Japanese officers left the camp at Los Baños and rode horses into the jungle but failed to find the pilot. A few nights later, local guerrillas—Hunters, most likely—crawled under the barbed wire ringing the camp’s perimeter and told the priests that they had rescued the pilot and needed civilian clothes to help him get back to friendly quarters. It worked.
Forty miles away in Manila, the guerrillas were being called to the hills. Word had reached the islands that the time to fight was drawing near, possibly before June. Filipinos brought their guns out from hiding and sharpened their bolos. Buried caches of artillery were unearthed on Bataan and shipped to fighters in central Luzon. The boy who tended to the pigs at the Ateneo came to Father Forbes Monaghan to resign his job.
“My country needs me,” he told the priest.
Later, Monaghan was riding in a crowded streetcar when a sudden jerk hurled every standing passenger to the rear. One of them inadvertently tugged the coat of the man in front of him, revealing a shoulder belt packed with bullets. A police officer saw this and tapped the armed guerrilla.
“Get off with me at the next stop!” the Filipino officer said.
The guerrilla tapped him back.
“
No,” he said. “You get off at the next stop. There are six of us in this car.”
The police officer got off at the next stop.
At Santo Tomas, where Joey continued to try to minister to the starving internees at great personal risk, a new visitor had arrived: Father John Hurley, the powerfully built, indomitable superior of the Jesuit mission. He had been evicted from the Ateneo and was even arrested and detained at Fort Santiago, but he had successfully defended himself and refused to collaborate with the Japanese. When he was finally ordered to Santo Tomas, the internees gave him a standing ovation.
Though they had been through much hardship, the internees at Santo Tomas were a feisty and ingenious bunch. More than the other war camps, perhaps, Santo Tomas had become a well-organized community with public health facilities, gardens, sports programs, access to goods and money on the outside, schooling, shops, shacks, and even somewhat regular entertainment. They knew how to make the best of a bad situation, as illustrated by tongue-in-cheek songs written and performed by internees, such as “Cheer Up, Everything’s Going to Be Lousy”:
I’ve plenty to be thankful for although it’s hard to bear.
Things could be a darned sight worse, although I don’t know where.
Don’t think that I’m complaining, ’cause it’s really not the case,
And, if I look disgusted, why, it’s just my natural face.
I haven’t a pot to cook in, but, at least I have a bed.
It may belong to the Red Cross, but, it’s a place to lay my head.
So smile and show your dimples, they’re worth their weight in gold.
You may as well my friends, before you know it you’ll be old.
The most traumatic event had come in the first two months, when three men—an Australian engineer and two British merchant seamen—were executed for trying to escape.
But in the first two years, for the most part, the Japanese generally kept away from most internees. Internees took advantage of the lax oversight. Earl Hornbostel, whose father, Hans, survived the Bataan Death March and was a POW in another camp, was running a shortwave radio hidden in the projection room. But it wasn’t until the guards found transcripts of news broadcasts from America that Hornbostel became a suspect and was sent to Fort Santiago for questioning. In reality, the transcripts were made outside of camp by a man living in San Juan, who would send transcripts to his father, also interned at Santo Tomas, on sheets of onionskin rolled up inside fountain pens. When questioned, the father fingered Hornbostel, probably to avoid torture.
When Hornbostel was transferred to Fort Santiago, where they made him stand facing a wall for hours before interrogation, the halls of the ancient Spanish compound still rang with the stories of defiant guerrillas.
Ramon Cabrera was a small, tough kid who played halfback on the football team at the Ateneo. At the start of the war, Cabrera had gotten to Bataan with the rest of the boys, fought hard, and survived the death march. He was imprisoned at Capas and, when released, joined the underground. He was soon caught and brought to Fort Santiago, and the Japanese secret police wanted him to cough up the names of the guerrillas with whom he was working. “I don’t know any names,” Cabrera said. So they beat him. They smashed his teeth out with a gun butt and broke his jaw. They burned his back with flatirons and tore off his fingernails. Still he refused to rat on his friends in the underground. When the Kempeitai brought Cabrera to the North Cemetery, they ordered him to dig his own grave. “Dig it yourself,” he fired back. An officer drove a bayonet into him, and he fell to his knees. But when he looked up, he was smiling, blood bubbling from his mouth. He never did talk.
Carlos Malonzo, too, had been held at Fort Santiago. He was just eighteen when the Japanese invaded, and utterly indifferent about the new occupiers. But on his way to work one morning, he witnessed a Japanese sentry slap an old woman for failing to bow. Malonzo vowed a personal war. At first this involved staking out a Japanese supply facility, then patiently tunneling underground from an abandoned house across the street, then stealing thousands of pesos worth of supplies, which he sold on the black market. With the money he bought a radio transmitter and hired a Japanese-speaking interpreter and began broadcasting a regular program, The Voice of Juan de la Cruz, which could be heard all the way in San Francisco.
At the start of every program, Malonzo played the American and Philippine national anthems, followed by war news, and then offered a reward of fifty bottles of San Miguel for the capture or killing of the Japanese commander in the Philippines, the lowest of insults. The broadcast drove the occupiers mad, and they soon tracked Malonzo down in Pasay City. The Kempeitai at Fort Santiago tried to turn him. They offered him freedom if he would help spread Japanese propaganda. “Please thank the Japanese Military Administration for their offer to save my life,” he told the interpreter. “But I cannot accept. In fact, if I have to do it all over again, I would do the same thing and even more.” Not long after, he tried to escape and was caught. Soldiers bayoneted his feet, and he was bleeding when they returned him to his cell. “I’ll do it again!” he shouted at the guards. When it came time for his execution, he told his cellmates at the fort to show no fear if their time came. “Never give them that satisfaction,” he said, “but die with pride and dignity.”
The fathers from the Ateneo were prisoners there, too, part of the crackdown on the Christian priests by the secret police. When Gustavo Ingles was sent for questioning, he counted ten priests from the Ateneo being held prisoner, all facing different charges, from possessing illegal photographs of Tokyo burning to stashing bayonets to spy activity. The remaining free fathers were close to being rounded up and shipped to Los Baños as well.
Hornbostel was court-martialed and sentenced to three years in Muntinlupa, which wasn’t the worst prison. There were no Japanese; it was run by the Filipino staff that had been in place since before the war. In fact, it was run by Eriberto Misa Sr., the father of a guerrilla, and several Hunters were on staff.
23
LANDINGS
By March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. The American fleet of aircraft carriers had exploded from four in the Pacific in 1943 to almost one hundred a year later. American submarines had suffocated Japanese supply routes. In the ten months before October 1944, the Japanese had not sunk a single important US ship, and so depleted was Japan’s air fleet that the Americans hopscotched island nations, completely bypassing Japanese air fields as troops jumped from island to island.
Since the decisive US victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, a month after Corregidor fell, MacArthur had stitched together an impressive string of triumphs. The Americans took Guadalcanal, then the Aleutian Islands, then Saipan, then Guam. In two months, he had pushed twelve hundred miles up Papua New Guinea and claimed Hollandia, where he was now moving his headquarters during Operation Reckless. In Tokyo, at Imperial Headquarters, planners used little red flags to illustrate the American movement on a wall map. Red flags spread to Finschhafen, westward along the New Guinea coast, to Saidor, Madang, Sansapor, and eastward to the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls. The Americans had moved within one thousand miles of Mindanao, on the southern tip of the Philippine archipelago.
It was against this backdrop that MacArthur was summoned to Oahu on June 26, 1944, just before his sixty-fourth birthday, to meet with President Roosevelt and Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. MacArthur, late as usual, arrived at the USS Baltimore in a leather air force jacket and khaki slacks, saluted the quarterdeck, and went below to FDR’s guest cabin. He didn’t want to be here and had bellyached on the flight in about having to leave his post during war.
“Douglas, where do we go from here?” Roosevelt asked the general, who was now the Allied supreme commander of the South-West Pacific Area.
“Leyte, Mr. President, and then Luzon!” he replied. MacArthur had been singing the same tune since he abandoned Corregidor on the patrol torpedo boat in 1942
, insisting that reclaiming the Philippines was strategically responsible to prepare for an attack on the Japanese mainland and, perhaps more important, was the honorable thing to do. But he was the only cheerleader for this plan. While not as passionate, Nimitz, perhaps the greatest naval commander in history, explained that Japan needed oil to continue operating, and its homeland was dry. So cutting off supply from the South Pacific, the Indies, and Indochina would strangle the emperor’s effort.
“Cork that bottle, Mr. President,” Nimitz said, “and Japan cannot go on fighting the war.”
“How do we cork that bottle?” the president asked.
“Bypass the Philippines,” Nimitz said. “Land on Formosa or even Okinawa. Interdict all Jap shipping with sea and air power. Collapse and surrender has to follow.”
MacArthur was having none of it. His own honor was riding on liberating the people of the Philippines, even if it delayed troop movement toward Japan. He’d made a promise.
Roosevelt expressed concern about the human cost of taking the islands.
“National honor is a strong sentiment,” he said. “Can you take the Philippines with the forces you have? I cannot spare anything for you … not when we’ve got Hitler on the run in Europe.”
MacArthur, who knew when so much as a sparrow fell in the Philippines because of his communications with guerrillas, tried to put the president at ease.
“Mr. President, my losses would not be heavy, any more than they have been in the past,” he said. “The days of the frontal attack are over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and direct assault is no longer feasible. Only mediocre commanders still use it. Your good commanders do not turn in heavy losses.”
The Leper Spy Page 8