by Peter Eisner
The escape put the guerrilla camp on alert.
Boone had been promoted to brevet captain of the irregular corps and was now answering to Ramsey, the American straggler he had helped by sending him to recover at a sugar plantation soon after the American surrender. By the end of 1942, Ramsey, wiry thin and with a pencil-line mustache, had recovered from the months of illness and starvation and made a return trip to meet with Boone in the mountainous region above Dinalupihan, where Boone had met with Claire. Boone immediately recognized the chain of command and welcomed Ramsey. “He greeted me with the same brash grin I’d remembered from our meeting in April” (the previous year). Boone was confident of his role in the growing organization and told Ramsey he could see only one problem—not a logistical issue. He had fallen in love with his messenger, Filomena (Mellie for short). Mellie, twenty, had been spying on the Japanese garrison in Dinalupihan, pretending to be working on their behalf, sewing and cooking for them. Claire said, “Mellie gathered considerable information about troop movements and ammunition dumps, and then slipped off to the hills.” Then Mellie started shuttling messages and supplies from Claire to Boone’s camp. Now Boone and Mellie had fallen in love and wanted to get married but did not have a priest and could not go find one or risk bringing an outsider into camp. Problem solved. “I’m the senior officer in this area,” Ramsey said. “I’ll do it.” There in the jungle hideaway, the guerrillas built a bower and a reception area out of bamboo and palm fronds. Ramsey officiated at the wedding on February 19, 1943.
The guerrillas gave speeches in English, Spanish, Tagalog, and local Luzon dialects; they partied, but some of the men remained on station all night keeping guard. Bad enough they were dealing with the escape of a prisoner. On top of that, Williams was playing Cassandra, predicting doom. Ramsey, nevertheless, was confident that the headquarters was well hidden and adequately protected. Williams, going on with his predictions, had told him they were safe for a few more days. “Good, then maybe I’ll get a decent night’s sleep,” Ramsey said. Boone and Mellie also bedded down for the night.
From the small, ragtag group he had gathered around the time he met Claire, Boone’s force had grown into the thousands. “It wound up that I, by some luck, was able to control my own province and develop them from the original guerrilla band,” Boone said, “to a military table of organization, a square division.” Boone’s guerrillas now comprised four 400-man regiments and 400 more in his headquarters unit—a 2,000-member guerrilla army that was still growing. There was a smattering of Americans among them, but most were Filipinos, young and old.
Boone and the other guerrilla leaders operated underground; they organized against the Japanese, infiltrated occupation offices wherever possible, and gathered information and intelligence. Eventually, MacArthur’s orders were made known: Avoid overt attacks on Japanese troops—supply lines would not support major offensive action, and killing Japanese soldiers would bring retaliation against Filipino civilians. When Boone did authorize a mission, it was usually an act of sabotage carried out without leaving a trace that could cause civilian reprisals. “Nobody gets hurt, the men make a little money, and they get to harass the Japs, which is good for morale. Everybody wins—except the Japs.”
Boone had his sector wired and well organized—so much so that he was able to counteract a new effort by the Japanese, who had set up a Filipino constabulary force to combat the guerrillas. He placed men inside the Japanese-controlled constabulary police force, accomplishing a number of goals. The double agents would be fed and housed by the Japanese, though they were steadfastly loyal to the American side. Slowly Boone went beyond the constabulary to infiltrate broad sectors of the occupation infrastructure. “They were guys who had administrative ability and more value there than being in the high ground. . . . At one time there . . . we controlled all of the key men in the municipal governments and the provincial government were [also] our people.” It would have been impossible to feed and support a two-thousand-member army in the field. Those who had not infiltrated the Japanese ranks trained in the jungle but lived at home with their families. The guerrilla enclave was their rolling headquarters, a tight-knit mobile group operating deep in the jungle hills west of Dinalupihan.
His men had done such a good job of infiltrating the occupation government that they even were able to place agents at Kempeitai headquarters itself in Manila. A contemporary aphorism described it well: “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as the fish swims in the sea.” These were the words of Mao Zedong, who by this time had already been leading a peasant insurrection in China for more than a decade. The guerrillas of the Philippines had been successful in winning hearts and minds. The Japanese knew this was so, and that was why they fought so hard to eradicate them.
Things were quiet for a few days after the wedding, as George Williams, the seer, had predicted. Boone had scheduled a much larger ceremony than his makeshift wedding three days later—a jungle induction ceremony for five hundred new recruits. It was Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1943, a date to remember. It had not been a wise thing to do. Nagahama’s Kempeitai agents and informants had been providing information about both Boone and Ramsey; one report said that Nagahama even had in his office a printed wanted poster with a line drawing of Ramsey, offering a reward for his capture of $100,000.
• • •
Sometime after midnight they were all jolted awake by the screams of a boy in the camp, yelling, “Japanese! Japanese!” The camp mobilized; Boone ran to a hill to survey the countryside. All appeared quiet. After a while they settled down again.
The attack began before dawn. “There was a sudden cacophony of rifle and machine-gun fire,” Ramsey said. “In a moment mortar rounds were chugging into the camp, heaving up huts and blasting palm trees from their roots.” Boone and Ramsey, Mellie, and George Williams all managed to escape into the jungle as an outer ring of guerrillas held off the attack. Boone’s forces regrouped at a prearranged site higher in the mountains, and the commanders were able to assess their position. There was no report on casualties, but the bulk of the resistance fighters had been able to disperse to their villages, disappearing back into their cover identities, where they could not be targeted as part of the resistance. Ramsey stayed on for a while with Boone—they both kept moving and eventually split up. The Japanese assault was not a killing blow, but it had disrupted operations. Nagahama’s forces did interrupt guerrilla operations in the region for a time and had captured supplies; they could not track down Boone or Ramsey. Nothing in the camp gave evidence that Claire or anyone else in Manila was the source of their baseline support. Boone said he “was isolated and cut off from all contacts for anywhere up to two months. And the first person who re-established the Manila contact after that was my wife, and she did bring back an average shipment of supplies and money from Claire Phillips.”
After that initial trip from their new mountain hideout, still close to Dinalupihan and to the west, Mellie made weekly treks to Manila for much of the year to replenish supplies and exchange messages with Claire. Claire was able to send food, wine, office supplies, and medicines, along with occasional pieces of clothing. The guerrillas needed quinine, often in short supply, and they needed antiseptics, aspirin, and bandages. Boone shared Claire’s shipments with other guerrilla units whenever there was enough. Some of the food came from aboveboard purchases. Claire filed an application with Manila authorities claiming falsely that the club was a restaurant serving food, which entitled her to additional rations of staples like rice and sugar; those supplies could also go to the hills.
Neither Boone nor Claire had originally conceived of a massive supply operation. It would not have been feasible with thousands of troops to support, far more men than they could equip and feed. Claire’s base in Manila was intended mostly for intelligence, although she sent key supplies as often as possible. She then was able to put other relief workers in touch with Boone so there would
be more sources more frequently. While food for that many people was procured locally, more and more supplies of medicines and specialized items came from Manila. She continued providing care packages to Louise at Santo Tomas and began sending food and supplies north to Carling and the Sobreviñas family once in a while. Carling, in turn, also sent food to Boone when he could. The cost of living in Manila was high, but prices in Bataan were much worse. The price of cigarettes was a good indicator. Everyone was smoking. When Claire came out of the hills in June, she said, she could buy a pack of cigarettes for one peso. Now, in November, the price had gone up to four pesos or more. Price inflation had an impact, and the extra cash from earnings at the nightclub would help. Prices of the basics—cigarettes, bread, flour, and eggs—were way up. Claire was trying to send in tomatoes when available. They were triple the prewar price—three cents each—and they were only about the size of golf balls. Quality was not to be expected, but sometimes the bread she bought at gouging prices had bugs in it and had to be thrown away. Boone also needed administrative supplies for the jungle hideout. Claire also was out shopping for paper, carbon paper, and paper clips. Intelligence information was sometimes easier to come by than extra food and supplies.
While Mellie was making her trips, their longtime helper Pacio also continued to travel back and forth between Claire and Boone. One of Boone’s most difficult requests was for a radio transmitter. It was a difficult and dangerous task. “Pacio told me that this was to be sent up into the hills, piece by piece, using different carriers and over a period of time to avoid detection.”
The carriers might come up with an excuse for carrying fruit, eggs, shoes, even medicine into Bataan, but the Kempeitai would certainly kill anyone caught with radio parts. Claire’s carriers faithfully managed to ship the gear piece by piece to Boone’s camp, where it was reassembled. Claire had tried, but the parts were either too old or too low-powered to be of any use. Essentially, Boone said, it was “radio junk, an amateur radio transmitter, which never did operate.” He continued to send Claire’s intelligence reports to Ramsey by messenger.
Mellie’s supply runs were convoluted and dangerous. If it was safe, Mellie and whoever was traveling with her on the trip could take a bus part of the way—especially when they were empty-handed inbound to Manila—a trip that took three or four hours on routes not usually subject to roadblocks. The long way was mostly hiking, twelve hours out of the mountains to Hermosa; if the weather was good, she usually could take a boat into Manila across Manila Bay. She was carrying enough supplies gathered by Claire that she needed helpers—usually her four sisters helped at either end of the boat trip. Careful, dressed unobtrusively as peasants carrying loads of supplies, five women were most likely to avoid suspicion. Together they would carry supplies in baskets, bring along other runners when necessary, and load and unload the supplies on the boats that carried them across the bay. The whole trip usually ended up taking a full day. It was arduous and always nerve-racking, but they survived.
The flow of intelligence was central. Every night Claire would compare notes with Fely and the other women. Thanks to their liaisons with Japanese officers, the material she sent up to Boone provided information on potential battles to come—that is, where men were being sent elsewhere in the Pacific and when, along with the names of unit and company commanders. She was also sending up newspapers and, when she could, copies of Ramón Amusategui’s newsletter based on stateside reports from a clandestine radio receiver.
When it was safe after the February raid, Ramsey moved farther north. Boone sent messengers to Ramsey with Claire’s intelligence reports. A few months after the February raid, Ramsey remembered George Williams, who had predicted the attack and had said that he himself would not survive. Boone sent one message to Ramsey that included the news that Williams had made another correct prediction, though his last. “‘By the way, George Williams went into Dinalupihan this morning for supplies, walked into an ambush, and was killed.’ George had been right; he had not survived the war.”
Tojo’s Parade
Manila, May 5, 1943
SOMETHING BIG WAS happening on the morning of Wednesday, May 5, 1943. Claire awoke to a virtual lockdown throughout the city. “Police everywhere,” she wrote in her diary. “Guards on every street in town.” The Japanese Rising Sun flag was flying on most houses. At noon teachers canceled classes, handed out the little white flags emblazoned with a red circle, and had their students line up on the sidewalk along Taft Avenue. What was it? people asked. It must be someone very important; it had to be a Japanese official. In fact it was none other than Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo, who had come to the Philippines on his first overseas trip since the beginning of the war.
The prime minister’s unannounced visit demonstrated the importance of the Philippines in Japan’s scheme to create a new Asian empire. He brought with him a new enticement as part of Tokyo’s propaganda campaign to demonstrate noble intentions: Japan was about to offer Filipinos the elusive prize that the Americans had not given them in forty years—independence.
Tojo had said before the Imperial Diet in January 1943 that he planned to push ahead on the question of independence because Filipinos deserved it. “Substantial progress is being made in the degree of cooperation rendered to the Japanese Empire by the people of the Philippines as well as in the restoration of internal peace and security.” He presented a timetable for independence later in the year and told the Filipinos designated to run the government that his aim was no less than “to bring about the complete capitulation of the United States, Britain and the Netherlands” (all colonial powers in Asia) and “the establishment . . . of a new order based upon moral principles, an order in which each and every race will enjoy a place in the sun.”
Tojo, meanwhile, knew something about public relations. He met with Filipino soldiers who declared their loyalty and readiness to fight and die for Japan. He spoke with schoolchildren and mingled with factory workers and men on the docks. The Japanese-controlled Manila Tribune gushed that Tojo, fifty-nine years old, tireless, and showing the stamina of a much younger man, had “won the hearts” of the people.
That claim was far from true. He represented a system that had made people miserable, physically sick, sad, and morally corrupt. Filipinos on the street were subject to petty indignities; people were slapped or beaten for no apparent reason; everyone had a friend or relative who had been imprisoned, even tortured. A happy, easygoing city had become regimented and highly controlled by Japanese soldiers and police at every street corner. People now scrounged for food, and petty theft was commonplace. Manilans eyed one another with suspicion: Who was a collaborator? Who was spying on whom?
Expressions of support for Tojo and for the Japanese in general were staged and performed under duress. While Filipinos were pressed into the pro-Japanese constabulary and some of them rose in the ranks, most people in Manila reviled Tojo and what he stood for. “The pro-American sentiment prevailing among the great majority of our people here in Luzon” was obvious, wrote Marcial Lichauco, friend to the Roxas family and the Philippine upper crust. Moreover, he said the Filipinos in the southern islands were even more opposed to the Japanese. In the south, he said, “Filipinos who are seen fraternizing with Japanese officials seldom live long enough to reap the fruits of their friendship with their new masters.”
Thursday, the day after Tojo’s arrival, was a holiday. The Japanese occupation government staged a massive parade in honor of the prime minister. Attendance was mandatory for every adult male in the city. Children again had the day off. Government workers and leaders of neighborhood committees took attendance.
Tojo marched out front wearing the field uniform of a general, weighed down with medals, strutting confidently in his gleaming knee-high leather boots. He smiled and raised his right hand as he marched to acknowledge the throng of 400,000 (as estimated by the Manila Tribune). Aides and other high military officials trail
ed dutifully a step behind him. Tojo approached the podium escorted by José Laurel, the interior minister. Next he was greeted by Jorge B. Vargas, the top-ranking Filipino leader under Japanese rule, while Laurel stood to one side of the podium and exhorted the crowd to welcome Tojo, shouting out: “Banzai!” People “cheered him spontaneously,” the newspaper reported. Actually, the response was tepid.
The gathering, Tojo said, was a “huge thanksgiving assembly held in the midst of this great war.” Japan, he said, had “completely routed the enemy” and “they will never again be able to contaminate Oriental soil.”
Some people might have bought the notion, but not many. News from the outside world was limited in print and on the official airwaves. Although tens of thousands of people had turned in their shortwave radios for Japanese “adjustment,” brave souls still risked death to listen to the news. While Tojo declared a rout and that he would crush the Allies, it was true neither in the Pacific nor with his Nazi allies in Europe and the Middle East. The purloined stateside news headlines reported that same day that General MacArthur’s forces were pounding positions in New Guinea in a continued assault on the Japanese and that the Allies had driven German forces out of Bizerte and Tunis in North Africa. The news filtered through to the city, and Tojo’s drumbeat of victory was recognized as hollow rhetoric. That Saturday night, May 8, the internees at the University of Santo Tomas heard more good news about Nazi Germany’s loss in Tunisia and staged a celebration of their own; their Japanese guards probably would have protested had they known the reason for the revelry. The feeling on the street was that the Americans sooner or later would be on their way.
• • •
The internees at Santo Tomas were in the mood for celebration. On April 21, two weeks before Tojo’s arrival, Roy C. Bennett had been released from the cage at Fort Santiago. After a stay at a hospital, where he recovered from the months of beatings and starvation, he was reunited with his wife and daughters. It was a joyous reunion, even under the circumstances. His daughter Joan, now going on nine years old, knew that her father had been in a place called Fort Santiago but did not know what that meant. All she knew was that the family was together again. She followed her father everywhere whenever she could at the camp; she knew he was often meeting with members of the executive committee and gathering the latest news on the underground news mill that somehow always filtered into the camp. Roy C. Bennett was well known to the internees as the bold newspaper editor who had spoken out against the Japanese before the war. For his part, Bennett was amazed that he had survived. Despite the deprivations of Fort Santiago, the worst part had been the lack of information about his family. “I lived under bestial conditions, with no chance to shave or bathe, and more important, without word concerning the welfare of my family. . . . I do not understand how we who went through those experiences managed to last.”