Joey lingered in the lobby until we started up the staircase toward our room, carrying our bags. “I come back in morning,” Joey told Lloyd confidently. “I take you to Dalton Pass. One hundred dollars for whole day. I am yours.”
I gave my husband a not-so-subtle elbow in the ribs. It was true—we did want a driver. Three days in Manila had convinced both of us that we were not cut out to drive in the Philippines. We could barely make it across the street. But I did not want Joey to be “ours” for the whole day; I did not want us to be “his.” Joey was insistent. “I’ll be here early in morning,” he yelled, rattling off in a cloud of noxious fumes.
The hotel staff recommended someone named Arnel Fetilano as a potential driver and guide. Arnel operated a fledgling travel service out of Baguio. He came over, and in the Chinese restaurant adjacent to the hotel, we spread our maps out on the table. Arnel assured us that we’d made the right choice in deciding not to do the driving ourselves. Large portions of the road to Balete (Dalton) Pass were damaged by earthquake, others by a recent typhoon.
I told Arnel, a slender young man with a studious air, that we wanted to go to Dalton Pass because my father had fought a battle there. He nodded. “My mother lived in the forest near Dalton Pass during the war,” he told me. “My grandfather was with the guerrilleros.” We made a plan: Arnel would pick up his friend’s Dodge Caravan and be at our hotel the next morning.
That night, anxious about the next day’s expedition, we tried to sleep as a light summer rain tapped on our windows.
AROUND NINE A.M., Arnel pulled up in a large, boxy van and we set off. What would take us nearly fourteen hours to traverse round-trip (about 140 miles) took the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, beginning in January 1945, 165 days, one way.
We drove northward through a deep, sharp-sided river valley. On the side of the road, old women sold bananas, peanuts, and mangos. Brightly painted jeepneys, packed to capacity, clattered by in the opposite direction. We passed a boy herding piglets, groups of children playing, women sitting in chairs under stilted, thatched huts grooming one another’s hair.
We emerged from the valley onto a flat plain, with fields stretching far off into the distance on both sides. The landscape of the Luzon plain had changed little from my father’s descriptions of it half a century ago. The solid shapes of carabao, the ubiquitous ox of the Philippines, dotted the dry rice paddies. “A carabao is as strong as an elephant,” Arnel informed us proudly. Inside the air-conditioned van, we rode in cool comfort. Outside, the temperature rose steadily.
On the night of January 18, 1945, on the same open plain, my father lay awake in the foxhole he shared with Morrie Franklin, another GI, trying not to move at all.
Due to the strain we’ve been under, some of the boys sometimes get nightmares at night. Luckily I haven’t had any, but Morrie Franklin, the lad I usually sleep with these nights, said that I do mumble in my sleep. One night he thought I had asked him a question and when he looked at me, he realized I was asleep.
A jungle night bird rapping on a tree trunk put my father’s nerves on edge. It could be the enemy knocking out a code on bamboo sticks. He startled at the sound of leaves rustling, his finger on the trigger of his rifle. What felt like an hour passed. He glanced again at his watch. Just a few minutes had elapsed.
My father wished he could write by the light of the moon, but he knew that “no one is safe if he moves about.” He waited until morning to write.
27 January 1945
While I’m writing a young mother is feeding her baby at the breast very uninhibited and a young lad about five is looking for lice in her hair—one of their favorite pastimes is delousing each other. Another of their favorite activities is watching us while we take a bath. It seems as though no one is around when we start but before long we can see faces staring at us from all over. Of course we’re getting used to it.
Today four of us came across a native home and sent a little boy up a coconut tree. Gosh it was tall. Up he went like a monkey and we had juice and the shell. They really treat you friendly. And then they bring out bananas and offer apologies when we ask for eggs and they don’t have any to give us.
When we’re on the move, they stand along the road and yell “Victoree” and something that sounds like “Ah bouhai.” That means Hurrah.
Not until the final paragraph does he confess his nervousness:
The damn dogs prowling around always cause shots during the night. Any slight noise wakes me—I must be up twenty times at night just listening.
During combat, when he wasn’t on the line, his job was in the Message Center, operating phones and switchboard. The Message Center, within half a mile of the most forward troops, was exposed to fire and sneak attacks, but the rifle companies (they handled machine guns and mortars only) had it far worse.
29 May 1945
Dear, you are wrong again, your Ellery Queen deductions have led you astray. I am not a rifleman, those boys take the brunt of everything day and night, for days and weeks and months no let-up. Their job is so much harder than ours in M/C. Of course sometimes it is rough for us but nothing compares to their job.
Some days during combat, the Message Center was just a hole in the ground: “This is being written while sitting in a hole just taking telephone messages and waiting for the phone to ring.” Sometimes he operated the machine “that codes and decodes our messages.” He liked cryptography, “especially when the messages are tricky and I have to figure out the mistakes in them too.”
He held no affection for the nights.
10 February 1945
Gosh the nights are long. They are pretty rough sweating out. Every other night I’m on duty—pulling three hours on and three off. Those are the longest three hours I’ve ever seen. I keep thinking of ways of staying awake. Someday I may write a book on that subject. I’ll write more later—it sure feels good to see morning approach.
Guard duty was shared by all the forward troops. Staying awake on your watch was crucial. The Japanese launched attacks at night. Single Japanese soldiers were hungry and desperate enough to attempt raids on U.S. supply units. The “plink plink” of pebbles falling around one’s foxhole in the midnight hour could mean the beginning of a Banzai attack. Snipers were known to slip behind the lines. The danger wore at one’s nerves. “We pulled guard every night in case any Nips got through the outer defenses,” he wrote in July 1945, after he was in garrison and out of combat, “and in the morning we would count up the dead Nips that the boys got during the night.” More than one GI had his throat slit under the cover of darkness.
ARNEL SWERVED AS a skinny dog ran across the road in front of our van. In Luzon, all breeds of dog seemed to have been reconfigured as the universal skinny dog. Dog meat is a Philippine highland delicacy, but in deference to tourist sensitivities, dog carcasses were no longer on display in the Baguio open-air market.
Reading my father’s letters over the past few years had deepened my understanding of the Balete campaign, but until now it had been an abstract understanding. Driving across the actual landscape fixed both the chronology of events and the strategy of combat into tactile perspective.
What was becoming physically clear at that moment, as we jounced along, was an inkling of what it meant “not to have cover.” I needed to go to the bathroom. There were no trees in sight, and everywhere we looked, there were people working or walking, children playing. Arnel suggested I hang on until we reached the town of Umingan. That was the town, I remembered, where the young man from Texas, Melvin Smith, had been killed. Peter Lomenzo had described in a letter to me what it meant to an infantry soldier to have no cover:
We in the attack lay exposed in the flat rice fields. The enemy was well-entrenched with earth-fortified bunkers to house their machine guns, mortars, etc. Their rapid machine gun fire kept us pinned to the earth and amongst our casualties a platoon leader, Lt. Clark, had his face badly shot. (He did live.) And the sun just scorched our skin. We finally worked ou
r way to the left flank into a dry river bed as our artillery (after placing a few rounds on us) softened them to a point where we could out-flank their protected positions and beat them off into a retreat to the next barrio where we met them again. And on and on.
The Japanese booby-trapped the bare fields and dry riverbeds with landmines. Attacking across the dry rice paddies “was like crawling across a series of pool tables; each time a soldier attempted to cross the dike separating one paddy from another, Japanese tankers, machine gunners, and riflemen laid down withering fire,” Peter added.
The devastating battle for Umingan lasted until February 3, in what the official record called “hop, skip, and jump kind of warfare.” The phrase sounds like a child’s game, but in the battle of Umingan, U.S. GIs employed rifle grenades, bazookas, antitank guns, and fifty-caliber machine guns against the Japanese arsenal.
Somehow, during Umingan and the many hard days that followed, my father still managed to write a letter or V-mail to his wife almost every day. His buddies called him “the Ernie Pyle of the campaign” and wondered what he was writing about. His first vignettes from Luzon sometimes convey a traveler’s wonder at being in a strange land.
19 January 1945
A little boy that lives in the house right near my pup tent came up and said, “We eat now,” and pointed to the house. I said, “That’s a good idea. Go right ahead.” But he kept repeating, “We eat now,” until I realized he was inviting me into the shack to have dinner with them. I told him I wasn’t hungry. This morning, a gang of kids started singing “God Bless America” until I had to tell them to please stop.
A few days later, the reality of war reappears:
Yesterday the civilians were almost frightened to death. A Jap patrol infiltrated our lines and killed some civilians and all of them started moving down the road in a stampede. The old, the young, the aged, the crippled, the sick. Mostly women and children.
The next day, his company picked up a Filipino boy who claimed to be nineteen, but looked thirteen.
He is very happy because we’re going to give him a rifle and uniform. The poor kid has scars on his hands and legs from where the Japanese tortured him. He was their prisoner for a year before he escaped to the hills.
The occupying Japanese treated the Filipinos so cruelly that when the tables were turned the Americans sometimes had to intervene: “We caught a Jap prisoner and the Filipinos wanted to cut him to pieces. We had to convince them that he was more valuable to us alive. Their attitude is the only good Nip is a dead one.”
I’d learned a lot about the nature of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from Sylvan Katz. Sylvan made it a condition of his college scholarships that his awardees go to their elders—their parents, their grandparents, older people in their barrio or town—and ask them what it was like during the war.
“I didn’t ask them to write bad things about the Japanese,” he told me, “but I wanted them to be aware of what happened. The old folks are dying out. There is very little said about the Japanese during the war. It’s almost as if it’s all forgotten—the horrible way they mistreated the people.”
Sylvan sent me sheaves of these interviews. After interviewing an elder in her village, seventeen-year-old Evy Kimmayong reported: “Babies were cut out of the womb and killed with bayonets. Each woman was raped by five to ten Japanese men and after raping them the soldiers would sometimes insert a stick or an eggplant into her sex organ. Captured guerrillas were tortured, some dumped into mud, others forced to drink the water from swamps. The Japanese also forced the menfolks to rape the pigs. If they hesitated, they would be killed.”
The local Filipinos, my father wrote, were “always eager to work for us. Dig our holes. Do our laundry. Anything at all. Mostly, they want to kill Japs. They want guns and ammunition.”
More than three hundred Americans were killed at Umingan. My father’s letter exhibits a chilled, subdued tone:
4 February 1945
Dearest, this is the first letter to you in about a week—that is the first chance that I’ve had to write. I’m not going to write about combat, it isn’t very pleasant. After you are in it, you don’t talk about it—the sounds, smell, mud, dirt, tension, fatigue are all like a nightmare.
Miraculously, he survived the battle without a scratch, “though I might have aged a little and lost a little weight. You and Ruth were my inspiration always—whenever I was too tired to go on—and whenever I was too tired to dig a hole—I always thought of how much I have to come back to—and I’d go on. Then there is the old adage that you are caught without a hole only once.”
By the tenth of February, the Central Plains phase of the Luzon Campaign was over. Some 2,654 Japanese were dead, including twenty-one-year-old Yoshio Shimizu. Three days later the troops had begun their ascent up Highway 5 toward Balete Pass. On February 13 my father reported his acquisition of Yoshio’s flag. A few days later, without fanfare, he mentions, “we were all awarded the combat infantryman badge.”
There’s no way to know the exact circumstances of Yoshio’s death, but it’s fair to say he was probably spared worse to come. In the early stage of the northern Luzon Campaign, General Yamashita’s troops were well fed, battle ready, convinced of their duty to kill any American rather than risk having him walk the streets of Tokyo. By the end of June, when the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division finally reached the town of Santa Fe, the downhill side of Balete Pass, Yamashita’s surviving soldiers were in desperate shape—wandering around the jungle in a hallucinatory daze. They had little ammunition. They were lice-ridden. Many had malaria and other tropical diseases. Their food and medical supplies had run out. Officers ordered their soldiers to kill their own wounded comrades who could not keep moving. Early in the campaign on Balete Pass, the Japanese military command issued an order to their troops: “Positions will not be yielded to the enemy even though you die. Our only path is victory or death; therefore, defend to the last man. Those who retreat without orders will be decapitated.” By June, the survivors were reduced to foraging for grains of rice in the pockets of the rags that covered their fellow soldiers’ remains, or even worse—eating the flesh of their dead comrades.
In 1986, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun issued a call to readers to share their memories of World War II. Over four thousand letters were received. One surviving Japanese veteran of Luzon described how “spending every day among dead bodies makes one doubt whether one can know where the dividing line between life and death is. One’s thoughts become hazy and disorientated.” That same former soldier, now a corporate executive in his seventies, also recalled his lowest moment:
A fellow soldier whose name I didn’t know came crawling over to me. Taking off his clothes, he bared his pointed rear end. It had become dark bluish-green. “Buddy, if I die, go ahead and eat this part,” he said, touching his scrawny rear end with his bony finger. I said, “Idiot, how could I eat a war buddy?” But I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh on his rear.
A marauding black dog spared him the final descent into cannibalism. The man managed to fend off the beast with a knife. He stabbed it to death, roasted it, ate it with salt, and regained enough strength to stumble on.
After the Battle of Umingan, on February 10, my father sat down at a desk chair salvaged from a bombed-out schoolhouse and composed a letter. The air corps zoomed over his head, en route to a mission. He smoked his pipe and surveyed the smoldering landscape: “It would be pretty if it were peaceful. But with the noise of firing and the burned out areas, and the rubble and especially the smell—God what a stench.”
HALF AN HOUR past Umingan, we reached San Jose, the little town at the Highway 5 intersection. After refueling, we began to drive up mountainous Highway 5 toward Balete Pass.
The hillsides were mostly bare. Aggressive logging over the past decades has stripped away the jungle canopy. On February 21, 1945, when the Twenty-seventh Regiment was ordered to advance and secure Highway 5 from San Jose to the next little t
own of Digdig, these same hillsides were dense with luxuriant tropical growth: palms, clumps of bamboo, gnarled balete trees, which indigenous headhunter tribes considered sacred and never cut down.
The thick underbrush provided the Americans with plenty of cover and concealment. Unfortunately, the Japanese, who waited above them in suicidal readiness, shared the same advantage. As General Swede Larsen put it, the enemy was “looking down our throats.”
Peter Lomenzo recalled, “You were always wondering about the enemy—where was he?” Novelist Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam vet, once commented that in Vietnam, “You couldn’t find the enemy. So the place itself became the enemy.” That was also true for the infantry in northern Luzon. The Japanese were dug into caves, camouflaged in bunkers. They struck at night in the dark. The place was spooky.
My father’s voice sounded in my head. Why in God’s name have you come to this place? Dad, I know it seems perverse. I can explain.
But I couldn’t really explain. I couldn’t yet answer what I hoped to learn in this place where he had spent “six long months in hell.”
12 March 1945
Dearest,
I was feeling blue all day until a little while ago and this is why. We got some second-class mail and I was helping to sort them for the Battalion. I came across some mail for a fellow in our Message Center and I threw it at him.
When I walked over a little while later and glibly asked him about his hometown news, I noticed how pale and sad he was. Then he showed me the front page where one of his closest friends was killed in Europe. He couldn’t snap out of it for a long while—so it had me down too.
Then along came your letters and anniversary cards and golly they gave me a lift, especially the two pictures of Ruthie. You know that’s the very first picture that I have of my father since I’ve been overseas. The folks have never taken any snaps of themselves and I’ve begged them for pictures so many times. He sure looks grand. And it was a thrill seeing him and Ruthie together.
The Souvenir Page 15