MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  “Yes,” Claire answered, “I did write a few letters to Cabanatuan and received some answers.”

  Luckily, she had confirmed what the interrogators already knew. The questioner then said:

  “I shall read your last letter and then you can explain. . . . Dear Everlasting . . . Now, who is Everlasting?” “Everlasting” was the code name for Captain Frank Tiffany, the Cabanatuan camp chaplain.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  Someone immediately punched her in the side of the head.

  “You don’t expect us to believe that statement, do you?”

  “I have spoken the truth so far. Why can’t you believe me now?”

  The questioner asked more: “Then tell us how these letters got back and forth from Cabanatuan to you.”

  “There’s a Filipino boy who came to my house every few months. I don’t know his name.”

  Someone punched her again and then kicked her shins with his boots.

  They beat her repeatedly in this first session, for trying to disguise her handwriting and for foolish things.

  She said they read to her from a message she had written. “Dear Everlasting: I was glad to hear that you received cal and feel so much better. Will you please sent out demijohn.”

  The questions kept coming back to the same thing—Who is Cal? Who is John? Who are Cal and John Demi?

  She could have laughed: They thought the references to calamansi (lemon) and demijohn (a narrow-necked bottle) were references to people named Cal and John. She said they beat and slapped her for the answer until she fell to the floor.

  “Look in a Webster’s Dictionary, if you have one,” she said. “You will find the word ‘demijohn’ there. Ask any native if they do not call their lemons ‘calamansi.’” Claire answered truthfully when she calculated it was safe, and she knew not to speak when it was dangerous for the others.

  She answered, for example, that she knew who Spark Plug and Fancy-Pants were—Ramón Amusategui and German Eroles, who had already been arrested. However, the Japanese said Ramón and German had already confessed everything they knew about her. She did not believe it.

  “I don’t know what they could say about me . . . except to say that I have sent money, letters, and medicine to Cabanatuan.”

  “They say you are also doing guerrilla work. What do you say to that?”

  “It’s not true, so I am sure that they would not say that.”

  “We know you were doing guerrilla work and so were they. Speak now and we will let you off easy. If you persist in being stubborn, I will see that you get the limit. We can bring your child here and make her suffer too. Maybe that would make you talk!”

  Threatening little Dian was certain to terrify her. They left her back in her cell for three days to think about that, with no more contact with her inquisitors.

  Mizu, kudasai, Claire called out, some of the few words she knew in Japanese. “Water, please.” A guard came to the cell and spit at her. Baka, he said. “Idiot.” For two more nights, there was little water and occasionally a small bowl of rice. When thirst overwhelmed her, she drank from the dripping pipe spattering into the cement hole in the floor.

  Claire struck up a conversation with a Filipino child in the cell across from her. She judged him to be nine years old. He said he had been arrested for stealing food and clothes.

  A new guard came along in the evening and gave Claire and the boy each a cup of water. She spent three days in the dungeon before the guards brought a ball of rice and some tea. As the days passed, she began to search for some way to break out of the temporary cell. She kicked and clawed at boards on the wall, but it looked impossible. They held her in the cell for two weeks, every day providing just a small ration of rice, water, and tea. The boy was her only companion. She comforted him when he cried and figured he might be released long before her. They would not keep a child. If he was released, she told him, he should go to see two people: Judge Roxas who lived on Batanga Street and Fely Corcuera at Tsubaki Club on Mabini. Tell them she was alive. Somehow she had scrounged paper, and she gave him notes—she wanted to make sure that Dian would be taken to safety.

  After two weeks of the same routine, Claire finally was taken to Fort Santiago. This meant that she was likely in for more torture. She did not know whether the boy would get word to her friends or whether the Japanese would follow up on the threat of grabbing Dian.

  • • •

  All the while, Judge Roxas had been fretting about the arrests: first Blanche Jurika, then the Elizalde brothers in February, then Ramón—these were his friends. Now the Japanese had taken Claire, a member of the family. He had been powerless to do anything. Then one day, a little Filipino boy was standing before him with a note. Claire had managed to do what the others could not do—she had smuggled out word from within the Japanese prison system.

  • • •

  Claire asked Roxas to locate Peggy and to make sure that Dian was safe. The judge tracked her down at the Remedios Hospital, where Peggy was still working nursing shifts. “She told me that she was [Claire’s] intimate friend . . . and that Dian had become very close to her and that she had decided to take care of the girl as long as necessary.” In fact, Peggy had hardly let Dian out of her sight since Claire was taken. The judge went home, satisfied that the child was well, that Peggy was a close, caring friend to Claire, and that there was a bond between the woman and the four-year-old.

  For her part, Dian was Peggy’s joy, “the best baby I ever saw,” more than twenty years since her son Charles was born. Within weeks, Peggy decided that Manila was now too unsafe for them and that they had to leave for the hills. With help from the runners, she joined Boone as a field nurse, taking Dian with her. She stayed in his camp for a while but also operated with Frank Loyd, Ed Ramsey, and Colonel Victor Abad, a Filipino guerrilla leader, wherever it was safe and wherever she was needed. She had precious little medicine to combat tetanus or malaria or any other disease. She dealt with gunshot wounds and barbed-wire cuts and worse. When there were tools to be sterilized, someone started a small campfire to make do.

  “Guerrilla nursing would have been greatly simplified if we could ever have remained in one spot [but] we struck camp twenty times. We’d move on a little way, put up some more huts for our patients and carry on the best we could.” “No authority on childcare would ever recommend the kind of life Dian had to live, without shelter or sanitation or anything like sufficient food, and constantly in danger of her life, yet she never cried and never complained. Lessons no baby should have to learn had been drilled into her” by experience. Peggy was commissioned as a guerrilla lieutenant, a full member of the fighting forces.

  • • •

  Claire languished in a series of miserable cells at Fort Santiago for several more weeks. Her face was bruised and beaten, and she and the women with her all were underfed—rice gruel and wormy potatoes were their standard fare. Claire described her cell at Fort Santiago in similar fashion to the cage Roy C. Bennett had been held in—a barred door facing an open courtyard and walls of stone. Once more the toilet was a cement hole with dripping water. Here her cell mates included two American nuns, a young woman named Carmen whose husband was also imprisoned, and three German Jewish women. Like all prisoners, they were to remain quiet, although they could whisper. The guards could watch and leer at the women when they took off their clothes or used the cement hole or very occasionally were allowed to take a quick shower in a cubicle nearby. The women could not protest and knew it would be fatal to do so. Others suffered more than she did—men appeared to be treated even worse. Male prisoners nearby were beaten every day. “Ours was the only cell containing women. When I arrived there were probably two hundred men in the fifteen other cells, and the moans of those poor devils came constantly to our ears.”

  All military prisoners received a version of the standard practices meted
out two years earlier, at the start of the war, to Roy C. Bennett—beatings, deprivation, and as Bennett had warned, “be prepared, they may come for you in two minutes, two hours, two weeks, or never.”

  Finally they came for her again. Two officers repeated many of the same questions she had faced two months earlier. When her blindfold came off, she saw that one of them was Kobayashi, the captain who had joked with her at the club at the beginning of the year about making her the provincial head of Portland under Japanese occupation. Kobayashi played the good cop. He promised she would be released if she told the truth. This time they had a chart with code names of each of her contacts and asked for their real identities. She still told them only the names of people who already had been arrested. She said she did not know any more names. There were plenty of bad cops to go around. The other Japanese officer beat her and kicked her. The torture increased.

  “They beat me in an attempt to make me divulge the names of the others. I was tied to a bench so that I couldn’t move and a garden hose was put over my mouth and the water turned on until I thought I’d drown. Then to bring me back, they would put lighted cigarettes on my legs. I still have the scars.”

  Water-boarding was routine torture for many—the prisoners called it “the water cure.” Some were forced to sit or kneel in uncomfortable positions. The prisoners wore hoods at times and could not see their inquisitors. There were Japanese speakers and English speakers among the interrogators. The interpreters’ skills were sometimes weak and that was potentially deadly. Prisoners suspected they sometimes were tortured because the interpreters had not understood and misinterpreted their answers.

  When that bout of torture ended, Claire returned to her cell. After a while, a new Japanese guard recognized her as he walked by and agreed to contact Fely and ask her to send toiletries. He returned a few days later with soap, laundry detergent, a small towel, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. She said she shared the items with the other prisoners. She also said that she saw her fellow member of the underground, Ramón Amusategui, led in for a few days and held temporarily in a cell close by. They managed to speak quickly in whispers. He told her that he had in fact done what he intended—he had taken full responsibility for everything they had done. The others of their group were apparently safe—Lorenza had not been arrested, and German Eroles, though weakened and sick, had been released. Claire realized that she had been implicated only as being among a group of smugglers and that there was no information to suggest that she was connected to Boone, Mellie, Pacio, Zigzag, Juan Elizalde, or anyone else with the guerrillas. If they asked more questions, she would stick with the same line she had followed: She would tell them only that she knew the people who were already under arrest. She did make one mistake, however, when they tricked her into giving hints that might have led to Maria Martinez’s arrest. Claire and Maria had a special relationship. Maria was the only other member of their group who was working directly with the guerrillas. Maria had been gathering donations and sending supplies to Boone’s camp. Worn down one day, and measuring how much information to give, Claire gave an answer she regretted when an interrogator said they knew that Claire was working with a friend code-named Papaya and asked, “Who is he?”

  “Papaya is not a man, but a woman,” Claire answered. She then went on to say that Papaya was a short woman with dark brown eyes. She realized that she might have given too much information, even though the interrogators said they already knew this. This was the balancing act: pretending to be willing to provide information but saying she did not know that much. In this case she might have inadvertently helped the police capture Maria, although almost any young Filipina could fit that general description.

  • • •

  Eventually Claire was able to send out notes again with another Filipino boy who brought the gruel they ate every day. Fely messaged back that Dian was safe with Peggy and Boone, who had sent a message that the Americans were working their way back to the Philippines. Boone expected real fighting before long. Claire said the message ended: “Hold on and pray.” After more than two months of imprisonment, things got worse: Claire was moved to a different cell, about fifteen feet by twelve feet, with twenty-two women crammed in with her. “There was room here for all of us to sleep at night, lying spoon-fashion. When one turned, the rest of us had to follow suit.” Food rations decreased to two cups of rice gruel per day, and the women became increasingly weak.

  One morning at 2:00 a.m. she was dragged out of her cell and blindfolded, and interrogators started again. Who were her contacts in the underground? What were the names of the men they worked with at Cabanatuan? She continued to say she did not have the names of men who received aid there or in any other camp.

  “Are you still going to continue telling us lies?” one said.

  “I tell you the truth, but you won’t believe me.”

  The men dragged her out of the interrogation room, along a corridor, and then outside onto the grass, close to the Pasig River. They pushed her to the ground.

  “We don’t like to do this, but you must die unless you speak the truth. You have two minutes to decide.”

  Claire said she felt a blade cold on her shoulder; it was then released quickly and suddenly as if someone were preparing to bring it down hard on her neck. She fainted.

  When she awoke, she was back inside. When the other women in her cell asked what had happened, like many before her, she was afraid to say anything for fear of retaliation and more torture.

  A Chase Across the Pacific

  Philippine Sea, Summer and Fall, 1944

  INVASION PLANS WERE coming together. By mid-1944, Parsons was able to report huge progress to MacArthur. After more than a year of clandestine missions from Australia to the Philippines, they had done well in their goal of uniting, organizing, and supplying guerrillas in the Philippines. “Some of the islands were swinging beautifully into line under strong individual leaders,” Parsons said. Some problems were to be expected, but tens of thousands of American and Filipino guerrillas were prepared to rise up, greet and support the general’s return to the Philippines. Parsons was frank in his assessment. “Because of jealousy and strife between the aspirants,” some guerrillas were still disorganized and “could not be recognized as unified districts until just before invasion.” It would not be a problem.

  In July 1944 that invasion was coming hard upon them. The United States had already launched a major offensive in the waters east of the Philippines. The Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19 and 20 was an overwhelming victory for the Allies. In head-to-head battles the United States knocked out three Japanese aircraft carriers and more than 500 Japanese planes. On June 19 U.S. carrier-based planes launched attacks on Japanese forces in the Mariana Islands, a 1,065-mile stretch of stepping-stone islands from Guam toward Japan. The American victory became known as the Turkey Shoot; more than 200 Japanese planes were destroyed, ten times more than American losses. Overall in the sea battle, U.S. losses were minimal in weaponry and manpower, with one ship damaged and an estimated 123 planes shot down. Controlling the sea meant the Americans had bisected the supply lines from Japan and severely damaged the empire’s sea and air operations. After that, in more than two weeks of fighting from July 21 to August 10, the United States wrenched away control of Guam, decimating Japanese forces there. Only 1,500 miles of open water separated Guam from the closest Philippine landfall to the west. More victories followed Guam: U.S. ground troops landed at Morotai on September 15, less than 500 miles from southernmost Mindanao, and soon at the Palau archipelago, about the same distance away.

  MacArthur, aiming all the time for the quickest possible return to the Philippines, welcomed the analysis of Admiral William Bull Halsey, who suggested that the first attack on the Japanese-controlled islands should be at Leyte, a central island 350 miles southeast of Manila. President Roosevelt cabled his support for the idea. MacArthur’s return was marked for mid-October 1
944.

  The United States command began to assemble an attack force of three hundred ships and 1,500 airplanes for what became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf and was considered by many historians to be the largest naval battle in world history.

  The submarine missions between the Philippines and Australia were occurring on a regular schedule—forty-one missions by nineteen submarines from late 1942 until the end of the war. The operation was known as Spyron. The missions delivered more than one thousand tons of food and other supplies, equipment, and propaganda material. Despite the danger of discovery and the possibility of attacks at sea, the return trips carried more than four hundred American civilians and Allied foreign nationals to safety, including women and children.

  About 120 radio sets were furnished to coast watchers and others. . . .Aside from arms and ammunition, the Spyron cargoes consisted of medicines, sewing kits, cigarettes (with the box bearing the promise, “I shall return”), shoes and hundreds of thousands of counterfeit Japanese yen. Submarines made landings in practically all parts of the Islands and even occasionally came alongside a dock in Mindanao to the music of “Anchors Aweigh,” by a bamboo band.

  General MacArthur’s command was now producing daily radio programming directed at the Philippines and a monthly magazine with news of the war both in the Pacific and in Europe. Parsons was successful enough on his distribution lines that Japanese military intelligence often saw copies themselves, with the irritating (to them) refrain on every copy “I shall return.”

  While Boone and the other commanders on Luzon listened to the rundown of U.S. victories on the sweep toward the Philippines, more requests than ever were coming in for intelligence. Claire’s ground-level reports on Japanese military officials and their comings and goings were replaced now with new information compiled by intelligence drops throughout the city. Ramona Snyder, Ed Ramsey’s longtime lover and intermediary with General Roxas, managed to elude detection, even though the Japanese were certain that Roxas was conniving against them.