W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents
Prologue
Since General Douglas MacArthur's departure for Australia from the Fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay was in compliance with a direct order from President and Commander-in-Chief Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was the General's belief that the move was nothing more than a transfer of his headquarters. He believed, in other words, that the battered, outnumbered, starving U.S. and Philippine troops in the Philippine Islands would remain under his command.
He believed specifically that Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, a tall, skinny cavalryman who had been his deputy, would, as regulations and custom prescribed, remain under his orders.
General MacArthur's last order to Wainwright--on the small wooden wharf at Corregidor just before MacArthur, his wife, his son, and a small staff boarded the boats that would take them away--was verbal: He told Wainwright to "hold on." Wainwright understood this to mean that he was forbidden to surrender.
Since he had been promised reinforcement and resupply of his beleaguered forces by Roosevelt himself, MacArthur believed that as long as the Fortress of Corregidor held out, Roosevelt would be forced to make good on his promise of reinforcement. The island of Luzon, including the capital city of Manila, had fallen to the Japanese. But there were upward of twenty thousand reasonably healthy, reasonably well-supplied troops under Major General William Sharp on the island of Mindanao. That force, MacArthur believed, could serve as the nucleus for the recapture of Luzon, once reinforcements came.
MacArthur accepted the possibility that Corregidor might fall. But if that should happen, he believed that Wainwright should move his three-starred, red general's flag and the other colors to Mindanao, assume command of General Sharp's troops, and continue the fight.
Before MacArthur reached Brisbane, however, traveling ifirst by PT boat and then by B-17 aircraft. General Wainwright began to receive orders directly from Washington, from General George Catlett Marshall, the Chief of Staff.
General MacArthur and General Marshall were not friends. For instance, some time before the war when Marshall was a colonel at Fort Benning, MacArthur, then Chief of Staff of the Army, had officially described Marshall as unfit for command of a unit larger than a regiment. Several such incidents did not bring the two closer.
It was made clear to General Wainwright by the War Department that he
was no longer subject to General MacArthur's orders, and that the conduct of resistance in the Philippines was entirely his own responsibility.
Without MacArthur's knowledge or consent, the decision had already been made by President Roosevelt, acting with the advice of General Marshall and Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had once served as MacArthur's deputy in the Philippines), that not only was reinforcement of the Philippines impossible--given the relative capabilities of the United States and Imperial Japanese navies--but that the first priority in the war was the conflict against the Germans in North Africa and Europe.
On May 1, 1942, there were thirteen-thousand American and Philippine troops (on a three-eighths ration) in the granite tunnels of Corregidor Island.
These included a large number of wounded and all the nurses evacuated from Luzon in order to spare them rape at the hands of the Japanese. That day, Japanese artillery fired sixteen thousand rounds at Corregidor, one heavy shell landing every five seconds. And that many shells were fired the next day. And the next day. And the next.
On the night of May 5, 1942, when it became evident to General Wainwright that the Japanese were about to make an assault on the fortress, he radioed General Sharp and other commanders elsewhere in the Philippines, releasing them from his command.
Although most of the heavy coast artillery cannon on the island had already been destroyed by Japanese artillery, there were enough smaller cannon and automatic weapons still available to Wainwright's forces so that Japanese losses in the assault were severe. But the Japanese were both determined and courageous, and a foothold was gained.
The fall of Corregidor was no longer in doubt.
There was nothing to be gained by further resistance. In fact, further resistance would have meant that the Japanese would have trained cannon at the mouth of Malinta Tunnel. These would have swept the tunnel clean of nurses and wounded and the rest of the garrison as effectively as a hose washing down a drainage pipe.
Wainwright sent his aide, carrying a white flag, and a staff officer to treat with the enemy.
Soon after that. General Wainwright met with his counterpart, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, on the porch of a small, bullet-pocked frame house on Luzon. The shaven-headed Homma, although he spoke fluent English, addressed Wainwright through an interpreter.
Homma was not interested in the surrender of Corregidor. He demanded the absolute, unconditional surrender of all American troops in the Philippine Islands. If General Wainwright were not prepared to offer absolute surrender
of all U.S. forces, he would resume tactical operations. By this, he clearly meant wiping out the Corregidor garrison.
Accompanied by a Japanese lieutenant named Kano, who had been educated in New Jersey, General Wainwright was taken in a captured Cadillac to the studios of radio station KZRH in Manila. There he broadcast a message to all commanders of all U.S. military and naval forces in the Philippines. As senior U.S. officer in the Philippines, he ordered all American forces to immediately suspend hostile action and to make all preparations to surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army.
Not all Americans chose to obey General Wainwright's final order.
[ONE]
Headquarters, Mindanao-Visayan Force United States Forces in the Philippines 28 December 1942
Brigadier General Wendell W Fertig, Commanding, Mindanao-Visayan Force, wore two items not commonly seen on general officers of the U.S. Army: a goatee with mustache and a cone-shaped, woven-reed hat perched at a cocky angle on his head. Prom this dangled what looked like a native bracelet.
General Fertig, a trim, red-haired man of forty-one, was not a professional soldier. He had not gone to West Point; rather, he had entered the military service of the United States just over a year before, directly commissioned as Captain, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Reserve. The U.S. Army in the Philippines had been delighted to have the services of an experienced civil engineer, in particular one who was familiar with the Philippines. When he had entered the Army, Fertig had sent his wife and family to safety in Colorado.
From the time of the Japanese invasion until the surrender ordered by General Wainwright on May 5,1942, Fertig had been primarily involved in the demolition--usually by explosive--of roads, bridges, and tunnels, supply and petrol dumps, and other facilities to deny their use to the enemy. Many of the facilities he destroyed he had built before the war.
On May 5, 1942--by then twice promoted--Lt. Colonel Fertig willfully and with full knowledge of the consequences elected to disobey the lawful order of his military superior, It. General Jonathan Wainwright, to immediately cease hostile action against the Imperial Japanese Army and to make all preparations to surrender.
He went instead into the mountains of Mindanao, with every intention of waging what hostile action he could against the Japanese. With him at the beginning were Captain Charles Hedges, another newly commissioned reserve officer of the Army, Chief Petty Officer Ellwood Orfett, USN, and Private Robert Ball, USA.
Things did not go well at first for the little group. To avoid Japanese capture, they had to live in the jungle, eating what they could find there. Or else they ate the native food Moro tribesmen furnished them every n
ow and again--at the risk of their lives.
Once, they watched from the jungle as a long line of American prisoners-their officers bareheaded and with their arms tied behind them--were moved to a prison camp.
Although they encountered some yet-to-surrender Philippine troops, there -was no rush to Fertig's colors. Most of the Filipinos, in and out of uniform, sadly suggested to them that the war was over and that the only logical course for the ragtag quartet to follow was to surrender.
But Fertig, if personally modest, had a somewhat grand notion of the role he could play in the war. He kept a diary, which has survived, and in it, in a rice paddy near Moray, he wrote:
"I am called on to lead a resistance movement against an implacable enemy under conditions that make victory barely possible.... But I feel... my course is charted and that only success lies at the end of the trail.... If we are to win only part of the time and gain a little each time, in the end we will be successful."
It. Colonel Fertig gave a good deal of thought to the reluctance of the Filipinos and other Americans who had not surrendered to join him. He finally concluded that this was because they quite naturally thought he was simply one more middle-level brass hat, one more American civilian temporarily commissioned into the Army.
They would, on the other hand, follow a real soldier, he realized. He improved on this: If there were a general officer who announced himself as the official representative of the United States and Philippine governments, that individual would command the respect of everybody.
On October 1,1942, on the back of a Delinquent Tax Notice, Fertig wrote a proclamation in pencil and nailed it to a tree:
sible, it was in a location that would be invisible from the air and difficult to locate on the ground. And even if located, it would be very difficult to surround.
If Japanese appeared, Fertig and his forces would be able to vanish into the mountains before the Japanese got close.
Remaining free was the first priority.
The second priority, as Fertig saw it, was to make his presence known to others who had not surrendered and who could join his forces; to the Japanese, who would be obliged to tie down forces on a ratio of at least seven to one in order to look for and contain him; and to the U.S. Army.
There were risks involved in making the U.S. Army aware of what he was doing. For one thing, he simply might be ordered to surrender. He thus decided that if such an order came, he would not acknowledge it. For another, the U.S. Army was likely to frown both on his self-promotion to brigadier general and on the authority he had vested in himself to take command of Mindanao and proclaim martial law.
Fertig decided that these risks had to be taken. There was simply no way he could arm a guerrilla force as large as he envisioned by stealing arms from the Japanese. And the only possible source of arms was the U.S. Army, which could either make airdrops or possibly send a submarine. And then on top of that, just about as important as arms was medicine, especially quinine. And the only possible source of medicine was the Army.
What he really needed most of all was money. Not greenbacks. Gold. Preferably twenty-dollar gold coins. Lots of twenty-dollar gold coins. With them he could pay his troops, which would lend sorely needed credence to Brigadier General Fertig and his authority. And he could buy food and possibly medicine, and make gifts to Moro chieftains and others who could thereby be persuaded to help him.
There was one major problem with informing the U.S. Army of the existence of the Mindanao-Visayan force of United States forces in the Philippines:
Headquarters, USFIP, had no radio. And if it could somehow get hold of a radio, it had no generator to power it. And if USFIP came into possession of a radio and a generator, and could somehow begin to transmit, there was a very good possibility that the U.S. Army Signal Corps radio operators in the States would not reply. They would presume that the Japanese were playing games with them, because any message from legitimate American forces would be encrypted, that is, sent in code.
Acting on the authority he had vested in himself, Fertig commissioned Chief Petty Officer Orfett and Private Ball as second lieutenants. Lieutenant Orfett was put in charge of a deserted coconut-oil mill. Coconut oil could be
sold or bartered. Lieutenant Ball was appointed signal officer, USFIP, and ordered to establish communications with the U.S. Army in Australia. He was to use his own judgment in determining how this could be best accomplished.
Lieutenant Ball appointed as his chief radio operator a Filipino high school boy by the name of Gerardo Almendres. Almendres, before war came, had completed slightly more than half of a correspondence course in radiotelephony.
Using the correspondence course schematic diagrams as a guide, Almendres set about building a shortwave transmitter. Most of his parts came from the sound system of a motion picture projector that had been buried to keep it out of Japanese hands.
A boatload of recruits from Luzon arrived. It comprised the remnants of a Philippine Scout Explosive Ordnance Disposal Detachment: six master sergeants, one of them an American. With them they had an American captain who had deserted USAF FE U.S. Army Forces, Far East, and taken to the jungles, rather than face certain capture on Corregidor.
The captain, Horace B. Buchanan, USMA '34, a slight, balding man showing signs of malnutrition, provided the second item necessary to establish communication with the U.S. Army in Australia. It was a small metal box bearing a brass identification tag on which was stamped:
SECRET
device, CRYPTOGRAPHIC, M94
SERIAL NUMBER 145.
IV IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO REMOVE THIS DEVICE FROM
ITS ASSIGNED SECURE CRYPTOGRAPHIC FACILITY
SECRET
General Fertig had never seen one before. He found it fascinating.
It consisted of twenty-five aluminum disks. Each disk was about the size of a silver dollar and just a little thicker. The disks were stacked together and laid on their edges, so they could rotate independently on an axle. The stack of disks was about five inches long. On the outside of each disk there was printed an alphabet, sometimes A, B, C in proper sequence and sometimes with the characters in a random order.
"How does it work?" Fertig asked.
Captain Buchanan showed him.
Each of the disks was rotated until they all spelled out, horizontally on the "encrypt-decrypt line," the first twenty-five characters of the message they were to transmit. That left the other lines spelling out gibberish.
Cryptographic facilities were furnished a Top Secret document, known as the SOI (Signal Operating Instructions). Among other things, the SOI prescribed the use of another horizontal line, called the "genatrix," for use on a particular day. The gibberish on the genatrix line was what was sent over the air.
Actually, Buchanan explained, the SOI provided for a number of genatrix lines, for messages usually were far longer than twenty-five characters. The genatrix lines were selected at random. One day, for example. Lines 02,13,18, 21,07, and so on were selected, and Lines 24,04,16,09,09, and so on, the next.
When the message was received, all the decrypt operator had to do was consult his SOI for that day's genatrix lines. He would then set the first twenty five characters of the gibberish received on that genatrix line on his Device, Cryptographic, M94, and the decrypted message would appear on the encrypt decrypt line. He would then move to the next prescribed genatrix line and repeat the process until the entire message had been decrypted.
The forehead of the red-goa teed brigadier general creased thoughtfully.
Buchanan read his mind.
"In an emergency, Sir," Buchanan said, "in the absence of an SOI, there is an emergency procedure. A code block..."
"A what?" Fertig asked.
"A five-character group of letters, Sir," Buchanan explained, "is included as the third block of the five five-character blocks in the first twenty-five characters.
That alerts the decrypt operator to the absence of an SOI."
; "And then what?"
"First, there is a standard emergency genatrix line sequence. The message will then be decrypted. The receiving station will then attempt to determine the legitimacy of the sender by other means."
"Such as?"
"His name, for one thing. Then the maiden name of his wife's mother, the name of his high school principal, or his children. Personal data that would not be available to the enemy."
General Fertig nodded.
"You are a very clever fellow, Buchanan," Fertig said.
"You are herewith appointed cryptographic officer for United States forces in the Philippines."
That left two connected problems. The first was to get Gerardo Almendres's International Correspondence School transmitter-receiver up and running.
That would require electrical power, and that translated to mean a generator would be required.
Buchanan had no idea how that could be handled, but both he and It. Ball suggested that perhaps Master Sergeant George Withers might be of help.
W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents Page 1