Shadows In the Jungle

by Larry Alexander

  Stepping to a microphone, MacArthur said, “People of the Philippines, I have returned.” After a few remarks by Osmena, everyone climbed into jeeps and sped off.

  Geiger shook his head in wonder and said, “Boy. That was a great opportunity for a sniper. I wonder where they were.”

  * * *

  While Mindanao had been bypassed in favor of a landing on Leyte, Allied planners still considered putting troops ashore. To pave the way for a possible invasion, Bill Nellist was called into a briefing on October 20.

  “So long as the Japs control northern Mindanao, they could threaten our operations in southern Leyte and maybe even seal off the Surigao Strait,” Nellist was told by a 6th Army G2 officer. “We’re going to put you ashore. We want you to check into Jap troop strength and defenses, as well as look for possible landing beaches, water sources, road networks, and so forth.”

  On the night of October 23, Nellist and his team boarded PT-132, the Sea Bat, under Ens. Paul H. Jones, the same boat and skipper that had taken Sumner’s team on its Geelvink Bay excursion back in July.

  Traveling at night to avoid roaming Japanese Zeros, a PT boat’s worst enemy in daylight, Jones and his boat arrived off Mindanao near the small coastal village of Ipal, around six a.m. The Scouts rowed ashore, where they were met by their contact, a short, dark native man in dirty khaki shorts carrying an old American-made ’03 Springfield rifle. The man was overjoyed to see them, and in Tagalog told them of a 75mm gun at an eight-man outpost near Bilaa, overlooking the beach where the Scouts had landed. The Japanese had seen them, he said, but had held their fire. Nellist asked the man to send a runner to the headquarters of the 114th Guerrilla Regiment to inform them that they were coming, and to supply a guide to lead the team up into the hills.

  En route to the camp, the team met a group of guerrillas advancing toward them carrying American and Philippine flags. They led the Scouts to the guerrilla camp, where Nellist was introduced to the group’s leader, Philippine army lieutenant Jones B. Castillo. The guerrilla band consisted of forty to fifty men, who were gathered in a bamboo hut when Nellist arrived. Nellist noted that their arms consisted of old Springfields, assorted Japanese rifles, a Japanese mortar, and an aging American Gatling gun.

  The Scouts spent the next several days patrolling the valley with the guerrillas, reporting back any findings to Siason, who had set up a radio station in the camp. The guerrillas reported that a twenty-seven-man Japanese patrol, aware of the Americans’ presence, had kidnapped four native men, including the chief of the village of Ipal, bound them, and were taking them to the nearby Kempeitai unit.

  “We can cut them off and hit the bastards and free the hostages,” Kittleson suggested.

  Nellist thought for a moment, then said, “No. Our mission is to pinpoint the Jap garrison, defenses, and gun emplacements. We have our orders.”

  He then directed Asis and Smith to check out a Japanese observation point reportedly manned by forty men with a heavy machine gun, and told Kittleson and Cox to see if they could spot any more barges hidden in a nearby cove. As the men prepared to go about their assignments, Nellist took Kittleson aside.

  “Kit,” he said. “I’d like to have acted on your suggestion, but I have to think of our mission first. We can’t save everybody, but maybe we can save the world.”

  The team’s pickup from Mindanao did not go well. On the night of October 26, huddled by the water’s edge, Nellist flashed three blinks of his flashlight seaward. He waited, then flashed the signal again. No response.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said, then told Siason to turn on the radio. Nellist finally made contact with Lt. Jack Dove, who was coordinating their pickup. After talking briefly to Dove, Nellist hung up the receiver and turned to his men.

  “The boats aren’t coming,” he said. “The Jap navy is coming through Surigao Strait. We’ll move to the alternate location and try again tomorrow night.”

  The new rendezvous point was three hundred yards south of the village of Ipal. During the night, as they hiked up and down the mountain ridges toward their new pickup point, far out in Surigao Strait they watched the sky light up from searchlights and muzzle flashes and heard the faint roll of distant naval gunfire.

  “Somebody’s catchin’ hell out there,” Andy Smith muttered.

  The next morning, the Scouts saw smoke billowing from burning ships. Overhead, Japanese floatplanes hovered like carrion birds.

  “Wonder who won last night,” Cox said.

  “We’ll find out if no one is there to pick us up tonight,” Nellist replied.

  As they resumed their hike, the team continued their reconnaissance. A native runner found Nellist and informed him of a small Japanese force that had landed in barges at Bilaa Point. Nellist led his team in that direction, arriving around seven p.m. There he discovered that two barges had put ashore a thirty-eight-man observation team, who had established an outpost equipped with a heavy machine gun. The barges were still moored to a jetty. Pinpointing the site, the team withdrew and headed for their pickup site.

  Two PT boats, Jones’s Sea Bat and PT-326, the Green Harlot, commanded by Ens. Howard L. Terry, arrived the next night with Jack Dove on board. “Thank God,” Nellist thought as he received Dove’s signal that the boats were standing by.

  Rubber boats were dispatched to pick the team up, manned by members of Tom Rounsaville’s team, which had been aboard the Green Harlot coming back from a mission of their own. Their arrival back on the Sea Bat left a lasting impression on the sailors. One crewman, Motor Machinist Mate 1st Class Sherb Bowers, who operated the forward twin .50-caliber gun tub, later wrote that he had never “seen a more qualified bunch of mean, vicious, murderous-looking sons of bitches than them Alamo Scouts.

  “I mean those bastards would kill you, and give you change,” he wrote. “Everything about them said kill.”

  As soon as the Scout team had been recovered, Nellist reported the Japanese observation post to Jones.

  “Let’s go leave our calling card,” Jones said.

  With their engine exhausts muffled in the water, the two boats skimmed silently through a Japanese minefield—the five-and-a-half-foot draft of the PT boats being too shallow to set off the explosives—and approached the position Nellist had indicated. Just offshore, the two boats opened fire with everything they had. Machine-gun tracers and 20mm and 40mm shells arced through the darkness, raking the coastline. The barges were “blown to smithereens,” Jones later recalled. Fuel drums exploded in huge balls of fire, setting the water aflame. Another barge was spotted pulled up on the beach by a small shack. The boats came about and poured deadly fire on the position, shredding the barge and hut, as more gas and ammo exploded onshore.

  Some meager Japanese fire came back at them, and in the melee the 326 boat ran aground. Jones steered the Sea Bat around, a rope was thrown, and, as the crews continued firing at the enemy, the Green Harlot was pulled free. The reprieve was short-lived, for soon the Sea Bat was wedged on some underwater coral. Instantly, Jones, along with crewmen Quartermaster 2nd Class Herb Betz, the chief engineer, and Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Donald Koepke, leaped into the water. Several Scouts joined them and, with the Sea Bat’s XO, Bob Muller, throwing the boat into reverse, rocked the 132 loose.

  When the men in the water reboarded, they found Jones was missing. A strong current had swept him away. Struggling desperately, he freed himself and made it to shore.

  “Get a boat over the side,” Nellist ordered, after Jones was spotted. “Then get us a little closer and give us covering fire.”

  The PT laid down a “murderous stream of fire,” Bowers wrote, and in a strange reversal of fortune, it was Alamo Scouts picking up a PT skipper instead of the other way around. They delivered the wet, and somewhat chagrined, Jones back to his vessel.

  “I thought I was a goner,” he said, safely back on board.

  But the bad news wasn’t over. The coral had badly damaged one of the Sea Bat’s propellers. Worse,
two of her three engines had quit, cutting her speed to about ten to twelve knots. It was about two a.m. and they had 120 miles to go to reach safety, hopefully before the sun came up.

  “That’s not good,” Dove told Nellist. “We have to run up Surigao Strait and across Leyte Gulf to Tacloban, and that’s four hours with a healthy boat. We need to put as much water as possible between here and there before daylight because this whole area is crawling with Jap ships and planes.”

  He told Nellist of the big naval fight on October 25, a three-prong Japanese attack that history would dub the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

  “That’s why we couldn’t get you last night,” Dove said. “Every available ship in this area was engaged. The navy sank two Nip destroyers and two battleships, but up north, at Leyte Gulf, another Jap force got in among our jeep carriers and raised hell.”

  * * *

  The trip back was as miserable and slow as expected as the Sea Bat limped her way through Surigao Strait, her bent screw rattling horribly. The Green Harlot kept pace protectively. The PT crewmen offered the Scouts food on the trip, but the GIs’ appetites were diminished in part, thanks to the six-foot ocean swells that tilted the 132 boat up and down in a sickening motion.

  At four a.m. the boats were illuminated by a harsh spotlight. The light came from the Royal Australian Navy ship HMAS Hobart, and a booming voice through a loudspeaker ordered them to halt and give the password. Jones did, but was told it was no longer valid. A new word had made the rounds in the PT boats’ absence. In response, he began shouting “Babe Ruth” and “Betty Grable” and other things over the radio, trying to convince the Australians he was an American. But the Australian officer was taking no chances.

  “You will heave-to until dawn to be recognized,” Jones was told.

  The boats sat about a thousand yards from the ship for another two hours, then tried again to move. Darkness was running out. But the Australians prevented their leaving, threatening to blow the PTs out of the water if he tried.

  Jones snapped.

  “Goddamn you,” he bellowed into the mic. “I have a crippled boat, and waiting here until daylight makes us a target for every fucking Nip plane in the Philippines.”

  There was a pause from the Hobart.

  “Stand by to be boarded,” the voice said.

  “Aye, aye,” Jones said. Then to Nellist and Dove he snarled, “Do you fuckin’ believe this?”

  A boarding party soon arrived in a whaleboat, and once the Australians were satisfied that the PT boat was not loaded with Japanese infiltrators, Jones was given the OK to proceed.

  “This is bullshit,” Jones cursed to the Australian in charge. He pointed to the east, where the first streaks of dawn were painting the horizon. “This crap is going to get me and my passengers killed.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Australian lieutenant said. “I have my orders. You may proceed.”

  They left and Jones fired up the remaining Packard and wended his way through what he could now, in the early dawn, see was a screen of destroyers and light cruisers. Once beyond the ships, he pushed the throttles open as far as he dared. The Sea Bat rattled as if she was going to shake herself apart. The Green Harlot dutifully kept pace to starboard.

  * * *

  At around eight a.m., the Japanese found them.

  Cruising a mile south of the island of Dulag, still twenty-five miles from their base, the 132’s young radar man, Ray Vining, called out, “Five bogies, coming in from the east.”

  The crewmen at general quarters scanned the sky but saw nothing. Jones, in the cockpit, removed his shirt and hung it over the cockpit door and said to Muller, who was steering the boat, “Well, it looks like—”

  Then came the cry, “Japs!”

  It came from Scout Gil Cox, who was standing on the starboard side with Kittleson.

  The first plane came in low, using the backdrop of Dulag to help hide its approach. It came in so low, Kittleson recalled, that he could see the pilot’s white Hachimaki headband with its brightly painted rising sun in the center.

  The Zero’s nose-mounted machine guns opened up, raking the Sea Bat, and two hundred-pound bombs dropped from the plane.

  “Incoming! Hit the deck!” Kittleson yelled.

  He and Cox dropped behind a torpedo tube just as the bombs hit the water close by the Sea Bat’s port side. Geysers of water lifted from the sea and descended onto the men and boat as shrapnel tore through the already injured craft.

  In the forward gun tub, Bowers swung his gun around, but not in time. Shrapnel from the bombs ripped through his position, tearing off his kapok flack jacket and leaving him slashed and bloodied.

  “I figured I’d been cut in half,” he wrote. Later, at the hospital, surgeons would dig kapok out of Bowers’s insides.

  Kittleson heard Bowers scream in pain when hit. He jumped up and ran to the gun tub. Stepping over the injured sailor, he swung the weapon up at the plane, but his sudden movement, plus the wind-driven spray from the fighter’s propeller as it zoomed by overhead, nearly blasted Kittleson overboard.

  Shrapnel from the same bombs that wounded Bowers also riddled the cockpit. Jones received a slight head injury and a more serious wound in his side, and the Sea Bat’s XO, Muller, had the back of his neck and both shoulders gashed. A wound to his left arm left that hand paralyzed for eight months.

  Vining, the young radar man, was mortally wounded.

  Shrapnel from another bomb that landed just astern of the Sea Bat struck Torpedoman 2nd Class William J. Speer, a twenty-year-old North Hollywood boy who had transferred from submarines to PT boats and served as the Sea Bat’s 40mm loader. Hit in the back and abdomen, he was dead within fifteen minutes.

  Motor Machinist Mate 2nd Class (MoMM2c) Bill Fox, who had been in the engine room but had just come topside and was talking to Speer, was hit in the leg and thrown into the cable near the engine room hatch. MoMM2c Bob “Parry” Parazinski, at the 20mm mount with MoMM3c Dewey Hiner, was struck in the foot. Fox, who at twenty-seven was the “old man,” took over Parazinski’s position, but could no longer see the Japanese plane.

  Radioman 3rd Class (RM3C) Owen Beach, a twenty-year-old New Englander at the number-two twin .50, saw a bomb drop, recalling, “It had a large detonator, like a stinger, about eighteen inches long.” He ducked down as it exploded and got a small nick on his leg, but he never got off a shot from his machine guns.

  With both Jones and Muller down, RM3c Thomas Gibson, after sending out a distress signal, took over the boat. He thought of his assistant, young Vining, who just a day earlier had confided to chief engineer Bowers the fear that he was going to die.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bowers had told him, trying to calm the boy’s nerves. “We’re gonna make it fine. I got two years in here, and we’re gonna be all right.”

  Now Vining’s fears had come true. In fact, within minutes, half the Sea Bat’s crew were casualties, including two, Vining and Speer, who were dead or dying.

  The Alamo Scouts fared a bit better.

  About an hour before the attack, Jack Dove had gone below to get some sleep. He planned to use Jones’s stateroom, but Muller said, “Use mine. I have a fan at the head end. You’ll be more comfortable.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Dove replied.

  The decision saved Dove’s life, for Jones’s room was shredded by bomb shrapnel. Dove was also saved by his not using a pillow. A chunk of steel ripped through the PT boat’s wooden hull, leaving a hole so big, Dove recalled, that he could stick his head through it. The shrapnel grazed Dove’s nose. Had his head been raised on a pillow, he might have been blinded or, more likely, killed outright. He also caught a bullet in the leg from a strafing plane.

  Nellist treated Dove’s wounds after sticking him with a morphine syrette.

  Andy Smith had been talking to crewman Betz just before the attack. Betz had shown him photos of his two young daughters. Smith then lay down on the deck to get some sleep, propping his head up on some spare kapo
k jackets. But the sun was in his eyes, so he reversed his position, lying flat and propping his legs up on the jackets. When the Japanese attacked, he was jolted awake. Smith saw his legs were bloodied, but it wasn’t all his blood. Most of it was from Betz. The young father lay seriously wounded near the base of his 20mm gun mount. Smith, with just minor injuries, jumped up and began helping to care for the bloodied man, and thought that Betz might survive. However, the young Missourian died three days later on the hospital ship USS Comfort.

  Scout Bob Asis took a shrapnel wound to the arm while using the forward gun tub as cover.

  American fighters, responding to Gibson’s distress signal, arrived and chased the Zeros back over Dulag.

  The 346 boat had miraculously sustained little damage, and now her skipper, Ensign Terry, brought her close to her stricken sister craft. His XO, Ens. Pete Rardin, had been a medical student before the war, and now came aboard the 132 boat with his medical kit and ministered to the wounded, for which he would receive a Silver Star.

  The two PT boats then continued to limp their way home.

  They arrived at Tacloban on October 27, where Nellist filed a report that there were between six hundred and eight hundred Japanese on Mindanao, although many seemed to be unarmed, and they were short on food. He provided 6th Army G2 with a detailed map of troop positions, ammunition dumps, supply depots, and travel routes, as well as sources of fresh water and whether or not the beaches could sustain an invasion. But even in Tacloban, now in American hands, the men were not safe from the enemy. The day after Nellist got back from the Mindanao mission, a Japanese fighter strafed the beach where he and several other Americans were sunning themselves. The men scattered but Nellist was grazed by bullets in the leg and neck.