by Peter Eisner
Along with the hospital supplies, they hauled in automatic weapons and crates of ammunition. The men ported everything up to Boone’s base camp quickly and stealthily, knowing the Japanese could come at any moment. The hoard of drugs included sulfa drugs that would combat dysentery and other diseases, as well as injuries. Digging further, they came upon the quinine—the only reliable treatment against malaria. “Five grain American quinine tablets,” Boone said, still recalling his amazement years later. “I can remember it now. There were thousand-pill bottles” in quart-sized jugs. The contraband also included “surgical instruments and bandages and antiseptics and so forth.”
The medical supplies lasted for months. After that, he realized there was one other ready way to obtain medicine and food. Claire could take on a wider role than she or Boone had originally envisioned. Boone had one more meeting with Claire while she was in the hills. He needed a base for gathering and sending intelligence reports, but he also needed critical supplies in the jungle. Claire was ready and willing to help.
• • •
Word circulated about Boone’s guerrilla army, now equipped well enough to defend itself. Boone, meanwhile, was on the lookout for others who could join the fight. “I was very guerrilla conscious, because I knew that there was already an American guerrilla commander sent out behind enemy lines months before the surrender.” He was referring to the already legendary exploits of Lieutenant Colonel Claude A. Thorp, who had been pre-positioned in the mountains by order of General MacArthur before the surrender of Bataan. There were Filipinos who wanted to fight and American stragglers who had not surrendered, men who were disoriented, wounded, or shell-shocked. Some of the soldiers had tried to cross the three-mile channel between Bataan and Corregidor Island; they would have been sitting ducks for Japanese spotters. Others thought they might be able to escape by island-hopping across the Philippines to Australia. A few did make the 1,500-mile trip from Mindanao in the southern Philippines to Darwin, mostly open ocean waters controlled by Japan. Some never intended to surrender—disobeying the direct order of General King to surrender amounted to desertion. Moreover, once disobeying the order, a soldier captured by the Japanese would be considered not a prisoner of war but a fugitive who could be killed on the spot.
Just after surrender, there was the case of Brigadier General William E. Brougher, commander of the Eleventh Division, who called his men together for a farewell speech as they surrendered their arms, awaiting imprisonment. Japanese troops burst into the clearing where the Americans and Filipinos had been assembled and began mowing them down with rifle and machine-gun fire. A few, such as Lieutenant Colonel Arthur “Maxie” Noble, managed to escape into the jungle, seething with hatred and dropping any possible thought of surrender. He worked with guerrilla commanders in the hills for more than a year before being captured and tortured by the Japanese. By the end of the war he was presumed dead, but his remains were never found.
Stories such as that of Brougher’s surrender contributed to the decision to head for the hills. Since Boone was one of the earliest to organize, he was able to guide and help stragglers who showed up in his camp. Two army officers, Major Frank Riley Loyd, who had come to the Philippines with his family from Texas, and Lieutenant Edwin Price Ramsey, a cavalry officer from rural Illinois, crossed paths with Boone early on, eventually worked with him, and made contact with Claire.
Before the war Frank Loyd, forty-four, had been provost marshal at Fort McKinley, just south of Manila, a job that usually involves leading a military police contingent. As the probability of war increased, General MacArthur assigned Loyd to be chief instructor of the lightly trained, poorly equipped Philippine Constabulary. It was a challenge to whip the force into fighting shape and with scant resources to outfit them as a factor to combat a Japanese invasion. Loyd lost contact with his Fourth Philippine Constabulary Regiment during fierce fighting a few days before surrender. He survived with the help of Filipinos in the hills, foraged for berries, and roasted giant lizards and monkeys before he practically crawled into Boone’s camp, disabled for months by amoebic dysentery and malaria.
Lieutenant Ramsey, twenty-five, was one of hundreds of men clinging for survival on the side of a hill in sight of the coastal road north from Mariveles. Japanese Zeros strafed their position; bombs exploded around them. “Some fled for the jungle, while those of us closest to the bluff had no choice but to dive over the edge. It was terrifying; dozens of us hung there, grasping at vines and shrubs, flattened against the cliff face as plane after plane roared in, bombing and strafing. The concussions were endless, convulsing the ground, blasting our ears, and raining down on us debris of equipment and flesh.” The cavalry platoon leader stumbled upon John Boone at Mount Malasimbo.
Boone was able to help both men. Frank Loyd was thinking about escape to Australia, but Boone advised against it. He sent Loyd with guides to join other guerrilla commandos at a nearby camp. He sent Ramsey to recover at a sugar plantation within two days’ march of Boone’s jungle headquarters. Ramsey eventually took a command position in the regional guerrilla army and promoted Boone to field commander. Boone’s job was to organize a full-scale guerrilla army, thousands of other stragglers like him and Filipino soldiers, to resist the Japanese occupation. He was now circulating around Bataan, moving clandestinely at night, evading capture and looking for help. That was where Claire might figure into his planning. Once they were organized, the goal was to gather intelligence, to spy on, infiltrate, and harass the Japanese occupiers in any way possible.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Manila, April 18, 1942
SPEAKING SPANISH and flashing his diplomatic credentials, Chick Parsons had been able to roam around Manila most of early 1942. However, on April 18, 1942, ten days after the surrender of Bataan, the situation changed drastically. The Japanese occupation army reacted furiously upon word that Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle had led a surprise U.S. bombing run on Tokyo. Doolittle’s attack with sixteen U.S. Army Air Forces B-25B bombers was billed as a retaliatory strike for Pearl Harbor. The planes hit military targets and caused some damage, but bombs also hit six schools and a military hospital. Fifty people died and four hundred were wounded, including civilians. Americans back home and in Manila—news came across on the grapevine—cheered Doolittle as a hero exacting vengeance. Unsubstantiated rumors circulated in Japan, though, that the American raid had caused hundreds of civilian deaths. The Kempeitai staged an indiscriminate roundup of non-Asians around Manila, slapped Caucasians in the face when they encountered them on the street, arrested some and beat and tortured or threw them into dungeons. Despite his Panamanian diplomatic credentials, Parsons was imprisoned at Fort Santiago—the citadel where newspaper editor Roy C. Bennett still was being held incommunicado. Fort Santiago had quickly become the feared location for the Japanese occupiers to torture and break prisoners. Parsons did not give details about his treatment at Fort Santiago. He confessed nothing, and the Japanese never explained why he had been detained; they had no evidence other than his status as a businessman and Panamanian diplomat. After some days he was released to Santo Tomas and then to a Manila hospital on medical leave. Though he said nothing specific, he was treated for a kidney ailment, often associated with water-boarding, a frequent Japanese torture tactic. Water-boarding had been used for centuries, but the practice first came to wide U.S. public attention during the Spanish-American War; American soldiers in the Philippines often used the technique on prisoners.
When he was arrested, Parsons told his wife to destroy the documents and reports he had been compiling in the weeks since occupation. Katsy decided not to do it. “My mom apparently thought the items too important to destroy,” Peter Parsons said. “Aside from the fact that we were being observed indoors and outdoors by our four [Japanese] sentries.” Finally Parsons was free to go home one last time; the Japanese occupation authorities announced that diplomats could expect to be repatriated to their home
countries. When he came home, Katsy had a surprise. In the weeks of Chick’s absence, she and her mother had gathered Chick’s intelligence reports and added even more material: messages “from his far-flung guerrilla contacts,” names and identification of several hundred prisoners of war, and various propaganda documents that might help the war effort.
“Where is it?” Parsons asked his wife.
“It’s all here,” Katsy said proudly.
“Where?”
“In the little suitcase, under the baby’s diapers.”
“Good God!”
Hiding the documents in one-year-old Patrick’s diaper bag was a fine tactic, assuming that their luggage was never searched.
Meanwhile, on June 4 Chick received word from the Japanese consul general that tacitly reaffirmed his diplomatic status: He and the family would be allowed to leave Manila on a Japanese ship, the Ural Maru. He eventually learned that the voyage was part of an exchange of diplomats and civilians with the United States arranged by neutral nations.
• • •
Chick Parsons’s final evening in Manila gave a hint at his strange, charmed life. As president of Luzon Stevedoring Company, he was actually running a Japanese firm, the Nihon Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha. The subsidiary had been given an English name under U.S. commercial laws requiring that local companies be majority U.S.-owned. In effect, Parsons was the president of a Japanese company. His nationality was well known to Japanese residents of Manila, and someone easily could have turned him in. Instead, his friend Pete Yamanuchi, a photographer, stopped by on the evening of June 7 for a warm send-off that included a case of beer. Yamanuchi, like Parsons, had been called to active duty—as a Japanese naval officer. The two friends from enemy nations drank and talked into the night and then bade each other luck and farewell.
The following morning Chick and Katsy rode to the Port of Manila with their children, prepared for the first leg of the trip to China and onward to safety. The voyage was overshadowed by the fear that the secret documents might be discovered. At the pier, officials told all the passengers to line up with their luggage and prepare for a search. Parsons was prepared. He had brought along a little fishing pole attached to a piece of string. He gave the pole, along with the diaper case, to his middle son, Peter, who now had turned five. He told him to use the little suitcase as a seat and to go and try to catch some fish over the side of the dock. But whatever you do, his father said, Do not let go of the bag!
The boy dutifully listened to his father, walked to the side of the dock, and dangled his feet over the water, clutching the diaper bag. “I never even let go when a Jap soldier came over, put me on his lap and started giving me candy,” Peter recalled as an adult more than half a century later. “I was supposed to be fishing but my line only had a piece of bread at its end, no hook. The guard thought this was hilarious.” The soldier kept laughing and began asking the boy questions in Japanese. He laughed even more when this boy with European features answered him in Japanese—Peter had picked up the language from guards at the Manila house during those months of the occupation. “I still remember the fish that came up to nibble at my line and the Jap soldier laughing at me.”
Meanwhile, a stern Japanese customs official looked over the Parsonses’ larger suitcase and asked Chick why he had declared two pieces of luggage when he was only carrying the one. Parsons said he had been confused—he had counted the small briefcase in his hand that contained their travel papers and passports as a second item. The man moved on to the next family, and the Japanese soldiers led Peter back to his parents, patting him on the head while he held on to the incriminating diaper bag in all earnestness. The boy could not have comprehended the moment. Discovery of the documents inside most likely would have meant torture and death for Parsons and detention or worse for the rest of the family. Instead, they were ushered through, boarded the Ural Maru, and set sail for Takao, Formosa. From then on, they were officially designated a diplomatic family, honored with all immunity. Two days later they traveled by plane from Formosa to Shanghai. There Chick Parsons, the honorable Panamanian consul to the Philippines, was interviewed on Japanese-controlled news media. Yes, he said, he had just come from Manila. The Japanese are doing a fine job in Manila, he said. “He said he was impressed by the strength of the Japanese military and by the efficiency of their occupation of Manila.”
They boarded the exchange ship Conte Verde in Shanghai and reached the neutral Indian Ocean Port of Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa on July 22; there the Swedish exchange ship Gripsholm awaited them, ready to transfer Japanese passengers bound for Tokyo in the other side of the prisoner and detainee trade. Parsons, his family, and more than 1,400 other Americans then sailed for the Western Hemisphere. The Gripsholm arrived on August 10 in Rio de Janeiro, where Brazilians cheered the passengers. Newspapers were already reporting that U.S. officials feared the Japanese had planted spies among the passengers. The ship continued northward, hugging the Atlantic shore up the East Coast of the United States to New York, where it arrived on August 25, 1942. Until that moment Parsons had been listed officially on navy rolls as missing in action. He had managed to slip through the Japanese intelligence net by just walking out through the front door and taking his entire family and intelligence documents along with him.
Lieutenant Charles Parsons, U.S. Naval Reserve, stood proudly on deck when the Gripsholm entered port, with the Statue of Liberty before him, now ready to fight World War II. Moments later he was under arrest. FBI agents came on board at dockside and took him into custody. Nothing personal, the agents said. The attorney general of the United States, Francis Biddle, had ordered the detention of hundreds of those on board, and Parsons was just one of them. “Every precaution must be taken in time of war to prevent enemy agents slipping across our borders. We have already had experience with them and we know them to be well trained and clever.”
As Parsons did a slow burn, the agents looked at the specifics and asked him why exactly the Japanese had released him. He told the truth, that they had accepted his status as the consul general of Panama, a neutral country. The agents also may have had access to the interview Parsons had given while still technically a Japanese prisoner in Shanghai. Could he even prove he was who he said he was? The FBI suspected him of being an enemy spy. While the State Department and Naval Intelligence sorted it out, Parsons and family were held in detention. Parsons fumed. When it was over, he told the FBI investigators “they were nearly as bad as the Kempeitai.”
Back from Bataan
Bataan, June 2, 1942
THE TIME HAD finally come to get out of the hills. Claire spoke with Carling once more, and this time he agreed. With the American Army defeated, it would be somewhat easier to move around. If Claire had the energy after weeks suffering from malaria, they could now try to get her to Manila. She was ready, but it had taken months to organize the trip.
Ever since her meetings with Boone, Claire had been ready and eager to take him up on his offer. If she had a plan about how to become a spy, she told no one. However, Claire was bold and unconventional, and she never took the easy road. She had been scraping a life together ever since she quit high school. She had no experience dealing with the Japanese, but she had the will to fight and had developed hatred for the Japanese these last months in Bataan. This much was evident: She would have to establish herself in Manila and avoid detention; most of her friends were already locked up at Santo Tomas. If she could do that, she would have to make contacts and earn money. Only then could she figure out a plan to help the war effort by supplying Boone. She also wanted to pick up the trail of John Phillips. If he was still alive, he would be a prisoner somewhere, but she had no idea how to find him. There was much planning to be done; once in Manila, she would have to approach the Japanese and somehow earn their trust. Then she would need a way to establish contact with Boone from Manila, probably with help from Carling Sobreviñas. A young Filipino
, Damian, who had been serving as her guide and helper, might be the perfect conduit. It would require an official transit pass, and locals usually had no trouble coming by foot if necessary or via public transportation, including the trains that traveled north from Manila to Baguio and beyond. Increasingly, Carling was sneaking back and forth to Manila when he had to, but always at night to minimize the chance of coming across Japanese sentries who demanded paperwork. Apparently, even he did not have a pass yet.
• • •
The steaming spring of 1942 advanced toward the hottest days of the year. Claire was besieged by rats and bugs, covered by lice and fleas; she would have leaped out of this hellish existence, but for more than a month she was too weak to even get out of bed. She was hardly able to move or even write in her diary from April 18 to late May.
The fever broke by early June, and though she was still feeling shaky, Claire finally had to try to get down to Manila. Carling understood better how to manage schedules for crossing Japanese control points on the road back to the city. One advantage was that with the cessation of fighting, the Japanese occupation authorities had cut back on wartime blackout and martial law provisions. There had been a dawn-to-dusk curfew since January, but as of May 18 they had heard that the curfew was only from midnight to daybreak, and officials also said they would suspend the requirement for passes to travel from one province to another. That should make it easier for Claire on the road from Bataan, but as a European-looking woman, she would still be suspect if found traveling into Manila.
Carling had worked out a relatively safe plan with Boone, who had a stake in getting Claire to Manila. They had tried for weeks to find someone who would prepare fake documents or some other travel papers for Claire. “I’ve tried my best to get a pass for you,” he had said. “But everyone is afraid to help an American. All of my friends said that sooner or later you will be caught and sent to Santo Tomás.” Finally Carling found someone who could forge a document with a fake name and authorization. Nevertheless, the best thing was to avoid getting caught. The forged travel pass identified Claire as a Filipina authorized to be on the road. She would leave all other papers with Carling, who would bury them back at the settlement for the time being. John Boone came down for one final meeting with Claire to offer any last-minute help and advice. Claire would find a way to start gathering information about the Japanese. They agreed that Damian eventually would come down to Manila and keep Boone informed.