by Peter Eisner
Prisoners at Fort Santiago were routinely tortured. As Roy C. Bennett had told Edgar Whitcomb, part of the torture was not knowing whether and when the torturers would come—in an hour, in a month, or never. Peggy suffered that emotional torture and said she had been beaten mercilessly. After several weeks the Japanese inquisitors told her without explanation that she was being released. They demanded, however, that she sign a document declaring that her treatment had been courteous and that she would be friendly to the Japanese. She willingly signed in return for freedom.
Within hours of Peggy’s arrest, Ramón Amusategui had begun secret negotiations for her release. He knew that her Lithuanian papers were in order and that claims to the contrary could not be proved. If the Kempeitai had more serious allegations, they all would be in jail already.
He was, therefore, on safe enough ground to contact people he knew inside the occupation government and to arrange a five-thousand-peso bribe to get her out. He might have done the same for someone else, but there was a certain urgency in this case. Ramón and Lorenza worried that Peggy could be manipulated and, threatened with torture, might reveal the larger operation and put everyone—including Claire and Ramón—in lethal danger. Ramón had been able to use enough leverage that whatever torture had been applied was quickly halted.
On release, Peggy took a cab to her apartment, bathed and changed her clothes, then went to Lorenza’s father, Gerardo Vásquez, a physician. Terrorized, she begged Vásquez to hospitalize her, hoping this would keep her from being arrested once more. By coincidence, Peggy had been putting off an operation to remove a benign uterine cyst. Lorenza’s father confirmed this but agreed with Ramón. Peggy was unbalanced and at times hysterical. She did have the operation, but Lorenza’s father found someone else to perform it. “We kept close watch on her movements while in the hospital, and kept away from her once out of it,” Lorenza said. “This [was] because we did not want the Japs to have proof of our relations with her in case of a second arrest. Ramón was the only one visiting her when back in her house to help her in whatever way he could, also to keep track of her movements.”
Peggy’s arrest was a sign that Kempeitai agents were stepping up their search for dissident activity. Another problem had now developed, this time a communications breach that threatened the future of the entire relief operation to Cabanatuan. Some of the prisoners at Cabanatuan were sending messages back and forth through the underground mail system with their family members and friends at Santo Tomas. The main contact at Santo Tomas was Bert Ritchie, who had been a U.S. Navy intelligence officer during World War I. He told Ramón and Lorenza that five American women in the camp “were overheard squealing to the Japanese commandant about us, about our underground activities.” Bert warned everyone to lay low for a while.
As a result, “we just kept piling up all these letters and money” for Cabanatuan until Ritchie finally gave the okay. Now Ramón and Lorenza decided to censor every piece of mail in both directions. “When we started censoring, many of these women were mentioning our names. They were writing to their loved ones in camp, and they would say thanks to Ramón Amusategui, or his wife . . . or whoever happened to be their contact. . . . If the Japs got that they would catch us.”
“You’ll Have to Kill Me First”
Malacañang Palace, Manila, October 1943
COLONEL AKIRA NAGAHAMA’S staff car sped past the iron gates of Malacañang, the presidential palace, and circled around the drive, where a flagpole flew the Philippine flag—blue, red, white, and a shining yellow sun—which had replaced the occupation flag of the red Rising Sun. The change symbolized the so-called independence of the Second Philippine Republic, conceded by Japan on October 20, 1943.
He vaulted up the stairs and barged into the office of the newly designated president of occupied Philippines, José Laurel.
“I demand the arrest of [General] Roxas,” Nagahama said, nearly snarling as he spoke with neither preamble nor handshake. He threw a sheaf of intelligence documents onto the president’s desk. “I have waited for a long time and at last I have the evidence. I demand that you turn Mr. Roxas over to me, and if it is the last thing I will do in this country I will kill him with my own hands.”
Laurel knew well Nagahama’s propensity for rage but also knew what they both understood: The colonel could not overstep his powers. The national flag fluttered outside the window, symbolizing the transfer of sovereignty to the Philippines. The Japanese government was making a show of Philippine independence, and Nagahama would have to abide by it. The president did not bother to examine the papers thrown before him. He looked up mildly from his desk and spoke confidently.
“You can go and get Roxas, but you’ll have to kill me first.”
All the while, General Roxas’s office was only a few doors away. Yet Laurel deftly used the power of his office, the fiction of independence, and the strength of his image as a pro-Japanese leader to protect his friend. Nagahama was powerless.
“If you insist on arresting Roxas, you must get orders from the High Command,” Laurel said. “You are a mere subordinate and I refuse to deal with you. I deal only with the diplomatic representatives of your country. You cannot arrest Roxas without orders from the High Command.”
With that, Nagahama stormed out of the office past Laurel’s son, José Laurel III, who then entered and stood before his father. Father and son smiled. Nagahama had offered no specifics, but the Kempeitai chief was correct about Roxas and his true loyalties. Nagahama had never believed in or accepted General Manuel Roxas’s conversion as a friend of Japan. One soldier knew another: The man who had been liaison to General MacArthur simply would not change his stripes. However, the Japanese High Command ruled otherwise, believing Roxas was more valuable alive than dead. When Roxas was saved from execution and returned to Manila, his potential propaganda value on behalf of the puppet government was judged highly important. If General Roxas could be won over “to our side,” intelligence officers reported, “Roxas’s influence [would be] far greater than we had originally imagined.”
From the outset Nagahama suspected Roxas had connections with the underground and sent out his men to prove he was right. Meanwhile, President Laurel named Roxas to a vital post, chief of the Government Rice Procurement Authority. Control of the rice supplies and pricing was power politics in Manila. Roxas and Laurel secretly blocked Japanese access to the rice stores controlled by the agency—they wanted to project that the largest possible supply of the staple food would be available to the civilian population at the lowest possible price. They managed the system successfully. But when the Japanese occupiers were forced to use their own procurement methods outside of the Laurel government, short supply and high demand drove the prices up for everyone.
Roxas had indeed maintained important contacts in the underground movement in Manila and was passing information along through a daring intermediary, Ramona Snyder, who in turn provided the information to Ed Ramsey, Boone’s commander in the hills of Luzon. Ramsey had fallen in love with the young woman. “Diminutive, round-faced, with a frank, cheerful personality, she was absolutely fearless—indeed she seemed to enjoy danger as something of a quaint diversion.” Starting in September 1943, Ramona was sneaking up to spend time with Ramsey and passing along all possible information from General Roxas, the guerrillas’ best possible contact at Malacañang.
Informers had told the Kempeitai that someone within the Laurel administration was passing information to the pro-American underground and that Laurel probably knew. Ironically, President Laurel had faced harsh criticism from pro-American Filipinos for agreeing to be a pawn of the Japanese. By protecting Roxas from arrest, he was doing his own part to undermine the Japanese war effort. Laurel assumed accurately that the Japanese would not want open scandals and questions about loyalty that might embarrass them.
The biggest secret, though, was that the Roxas family, the Elizaldes, and other promine
nt families had a friend on the outside with whom they had once dined, drunk, and played at the Manila Polo Club. That man was now ensconced in Australia and was ready to take the fight to the Japanese: Lieutenant Commander Charles “Chick” Parsons.
Nagahama’s War
Manila, October 1943
INTELLIGENCE REPORT
KAKI 6551 Force (TN DIV HQ) MILITARY ULTRA SECRET
SUBJECT: PUNITIVE AND PROPAGANDA MEASURES AGAINST GUERRILLAS
Southern LUZON Area
Punitive action was carried out against the band headed by Col. Hugh Straughn in the northern bank area of LAGUNA Lake and eastern area of MANILA. Many Home Guards were captured. However, due to the completeness of their organization, disturbance of the peace is expected to increase in Jan. and Feb.
THOUGH NAGAHAMA FAILED to arrest General Roxas, he was making other inroads and used his successes to their maximum propaganda value. The Kempeitai chief knew, however, from reading the intelligence briefings that when one American commander was hit, a replacement emerged.
For public consumption, when a search-and-destroy team, working with military intelligence, seized a prominent American guerrilla leader, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Straughn, in early August 1943, the Japanese propaganda machine proclaimed the death knell for the insurgents.
Straughn had been evading capture in the ten months since the seizure of his comrade-in-arms Lieutenant Colonel Claude Thorp, forty-five, one of the first Americans who had gone to the hills. In January 1942, still at Corregidor, General MacArthur had authorized a secret mission, led by Thorp, behind enemy lines. Thorp had set up a camp with sixteen men and two women in the mountains above Clark Field to monitor Japanese planes and troop movements.
After the surrender at Bataan in April 1942, the price on Thorp’s head was steep. Nagahama’s Kempeitai paid off villagers and guides in the hills for information as they hunted for Thorp. They lined up suspected collaborators in village squares, interrogated their friends and neighbors, and were willing to kill the innocent just to terrorize others. The Kempeitai planted informants and sent in double agents posing as guerrillas or young women feigning innocence as they gathered information. Nagahama’s men listed their successes in numbers: report after report of search-and-destroy missions. One read:
Punitive operation around LAGUNA Lake against HUGH STRAUGHN and MARCOS Guerrillas
Surrendered 1
Shot 4
POWS 13
Rifles 1
Hand made pistols 2
Philippine pistol 27
Knapsack 1
Bolos 1
Small Quantities of documents
Camp incinerator 1
Pistol 9
Hunting Rifles 16
Hand Grenades 2
Air rifles 7
Parade swords 3
Hand grenades 3
Shovel 1
Dummy Pistols 3
Rice 4 Bags
Thorp survived more than a dozen attacks but was finally surrounded and captured by Japanese counterinsurgency operatives on October 29, 1942. The remnants of his guerrilla unit avoided capture. Japanese intelligence was under no illusions. “Even after the capture of Lieutenant Colonel Thorp, the American Thorp Commando Unit has been succeeding in organizing guerrillas in the Sierra Madre Mountains area.”
Japanese intelligence reports said that Thorp’s reorganized forces, under new leadership, were still able to gather recruits and organize. “The remaining guerrillas of Lieutenant Colonel Thorp are waiting for the American Army’s help or for the time when the Japanese Army’s strength decreases. They will then strike.”
Military intelligence had now managed to capture Straughn and advertised it as a much greater victory than it was. “The self-appointed American chief of guerrillas in the Philippines . . . predicts collapse of guerrilla warfare” on the islands, crowed a report accompanied by a banner headline in the Manila Tribune on August 7. At the same time, a series of staged propaganda photographs suggested Straughn was readily cooperating with the enemy. In one photograph the wiry sixty-four-year-old guerrilla officer posed in a jungle clearing chatting with an interpreter as one soldier listened while seated in a folding chair and another leaned against a tree nearby, none of the three Japanese appearing to be armed. In a second photograph Straughn smoked his pipe and used a pencil to point at features of a map laid out on the ground. It was a fake: No one would believe that capture by the Japanese Army was a civilized affair or that prisoners would be more than willing to help their captors.
The report said Straughn admitted that the guerrillas were deserting their ranks. “Straughn said that his followers had been steadily losing faith in the possibility of the Americans returning to the Philippines. At the same time they were fast being convinced of Japan’s generous intentions towards the Philippines.”
While the capture of Straughn was significant, none of the claims made about him was true in any sense, and the Japanese military was overinflating his importance. Far from being the leader of all the guerrillas, Straughn was the head of a single guerrilla army south and east of Manila on Luzon. Many more stood in line to replace him. Like Parsons and MacArthur himself, Straughn had been a familiar, long-standing member of the Manila expatriate community. He had fought in the Spanish-American War and was an old colleague and contemporary of MacArthur’s. Straughn had retired years earlier and stayed on; after the fall of Manila, MacArthur approved his request in early 1942 to mount a guerrilla force in the Luzon mountains. Straughn moved aggressively and was considered one of the toughest commanders in the early days of the occupation, having launched attacks on Japanese convoys even before the U.S. surrender. He attracted a large number of volunteers and his operations became a focus of the Kempeitai’s antiguerrilla campaign.
At the same time as the capture of Hugh Straughn, Nagahama stepped up his counterinsurgency campaign. He also issued a nationwide proclamation on October 1. Once more he stressed the honorable intentions of the Japanese government and called on the guerrillas to turn themselves in.
“Upon my word of honor I guarantee one hundred percent that your life and the lives of all your followers will be spared and safeguarded if you lay down your arms and present yourselves to the garrison commander in your locality.” Apparently, he was speaking to Filipinos and not to the Americans among the guerrillas. “We shall all forget the past differences between us and shall welcome you with open arms as brothers, which you are and always shall be. Must you continue fighting for America at the expense of your own native country now that continuing to fight means obstructing Philippine progress?”
Nagahama was not interested in amnesty or the humane treatment of prisoners, nor was he required by Tokyo to observe the Geneva conventions, which laid out specific requirements for the treatment and protection of prisoners of war. Nagahama wanted to eliminate opposition while maintaining the false image of Japanese-Filipino friendship. He was operating under regulations that said clearly that “the bad elements amongst those who surrender will be unhesitatingly, but unostentatiously executed, and will be counted amongst those killed in battle.”
It was not a question of whether Straughn and Thorp would be killed—just a matter of when. Japanese orders said such prisoners “should be detained for a period, and the reactions of the people observed. When the latter have forgotten the incident, these bad elements will be secretly and quietly ‘00ed’ [double zeroed, that is, executed] or under the pretense of taking them off to some distant place, they will be unostentatiously ‘00ed.’”
Thorp, who had been held since his capture ten months earlier, and Straughn, interrogated for six weeks, had not surrendered, but they were to be treated in the fashion that the command document described. They were summoned before a Japanese military court-martial on September 30, 1943, along with twenty-two other men, including Guillermo Nakar, the Philippine Army li
eutenant colonel who had exchanged radio messages with General MacArthur in 1942. The proceedings lasted fifteen minutes. The men received an English translation of the trial but no chance for defense. The judges then sentenced them to death.
Several days later Straughn, Thorp, Nakar, and six other men were driven to the Chinese Cemetery, while the fifteen other men were taken to the La Loma Cemetery. One witness, Lieutenant Richard C. Sakakida, was a Japanese American double agent who was working as a translator with the Japanese Army, secretly loyal to the United States. He and another witness reported that Straughn refused the offer of a hood to cover his head. A firing squad shot all of them and their bodies toppled into a common grave.
The idea that Straughn’s capture led to desertions “in ever-increasing numbers” was pure fantasy. After the deaths of Straughn and Thorp, American officers and their Filipino allies rose to reorganize and extend operations in anticipation of MacArthur’s return. With encouragement from Australia and Parsons’s imposition of a chain of command as ordered by MacArthur, the guerrillas were well established and operated in a sea of goodwill. The only problem was impatience—both Filipino guerrillas and civilians could hardly wait for the inevitable. “They have ceased wondering who is going to win the war, or whether the war will ever end,” Parsons reported to MacArthur. “The people want us to return—they are disappointed that we have not done so sooner.”
Holding On
Tsubaki Club, Manila, November 1943
ON NOVEMBER 14, the day Claire returned home after about six weeks in the hospital, a massive typhoon slammed into Luzon, provoking a week of torrential rains. The resulting flood caused problems in the city, forced a standstill of military search operations against the guerrillas, and increased misery at Santo Tomas for the detainees and even more suffering for the POWs at Cabanatuan.