“Let’s go,” Sumner said in a loud whisper.
As they fled, Sumner sent a runner to alert the guardhouse squad to withdraw. It was ten fifteen; the entire operation had taken just fifteen minutes. They now had four minutes to get away. Confirming all present, Sumner assigned one squad as rear guard and they all headed back up into the hills. By the time the charges were to blow, the group was about five hundred yards from the warehouses. Sumner called a halt so the men could watch their handiwork. Moments later, a series of blasts rocked the night, sending shock waves through the air as the warehouses were blown apart. Flames ignited the camouflage netting, adding to the inferno. Then another, bigger explosion erupted as fuel drums in one of the warehouses began detonating, sending balls of fire hundreds of feet into the air. Burning embers descended around Sumner’s force, starting small fires.
The rolling explosions continued as more fuel drums and ammo ignited, and in the glow of the fires, Sumner felt he and his men were naked and exposed to “every Jap on western Leyte.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he yelled, and the group fled quickly for the concealing safety of the jungles and mountains.
Pursuit was not long in coming. From behind them came angry shouts and the sound of weapons being fired into the underbrush. Sumner knew the Japanese had not spotted them, and that the shooting was random, but that made it even more dangerous. Yet despite the hot pursuit, the raiders slipped away and returned to the safety of their CP around four a.m.
The foray came with a price, however. The Japanese called on the local civilians, as well as guerrilla bands and even bandits, to turn over to them the raiders of the supply dump or face retaliation. In surrounding villages, natives were tortured to death by the enemy bent on finding the Americans. Many were bound and used for bayonet practice and one man was skinned alive. Yet Sumner and his men were never betrayed by the loyal Filipinos.
* * *
At six a.m. on December 7, 1944, Sumner received a radio message from 6th Army HQ that the 77th Infantry Division would be landing at Ormoc at seven a.m. He quickly moved his team to a vantage point overlooking the beach. It was like having the best seats in the house for a spectacular show.
That same morning, a Japanese convoy arrived bearing five thousand infantry replacements from Yamashita on Luzon. The simultaneous arrival of the two forces at the same spot led to a spectacular collision. Aircraft from both sides tangled in the air overhead as fifty-six P-47 Thunderbolt fighters from Tacloban bombed and strafed the Japanese surface fleet. Planes began falling from the sky and enemy ships erupted in flames, many either capsizing or rearing up in the water and sliding below the waves. American ships were hit as well, and two destroyers went down, their spines broken by kamikazes. The Japanese finally withdrew, but not before losing most of their ships and what proved to be two-thirds of their remaining bombers.
On the beaches below the Scouts’ position, large naval guns pummeled the landing zone, tearing up jungle and the Japanese defenses. The prelanding bombardment was brief, then the Higgins boats and amtracs, swarming like water bugs, moved in, beached themselves, and disgorged their human contents: battle-toughened veterans of the 77th Division who had gotten their baptism of fire on Guam and Tinian.
With American troops overrunning their only local supply base, the Japanese were quickly driven back, although once they recovered from the shock, they managed to launch several violent counterattacks over the next few days. On December 10, after a fierce fight, Ormoc City fell into American hands. A huge pall of smoke hung over the city and the air was gray with concrete dust from buildings pulverized by artillery fire.
Sumner and his men were ordered to assist the incoming troops by furnishing them with guerrillas to serve as scouts and for guarding supply dumps.
The invasion presented Sumner with a new problem. With the 77th Division pushing the Japanese from the south and the 1st Cavalry, which had driven across Leyte from the October invasion beaches and were now pressing down from the north, the enemy was being driven back on Sumner’s position. Skirmishes between the guerrillas and enemy units became more frequent, sometimes as many as three or four times a day, but the guerrillas and Scouts had enough firepower to keep the Japanese at bay.
About ten days after the 77th Division came ashore, Sumner received a radio message from its commander, Maj. Gen. Andrew D. Bruce. He wanted to meet with Sumner as soon as possible. Taking his team and a platoon of guerrillas, Sumner headed for one of the division’s regimental CPs as instructed, arriving the next day.
The Scouts, with their camouflage gear, soft hats, airborne M1A1 carbines, and painted faces, were a source of curiosity, not just to the soldiers of the 77th but to their commander as well, and he interrogated Sumner at length.
“What are you men doing out here?” General Bruce asked.
“Monitoring Japanese troop and barge movements in conjunction with the local guerrillas,” Sumner replied, giving a simplified answer.
“How long have you been out here?”
“About six weeks, sir.”
“Are you men survivors of Bataan and Corregidor?”
“No, sir. We’re Alamo Scouts attached to General Krueger,” Sumner said, and went on to explain the Scouts’ function. Bruce listened with intense interest. The 77th had served mostly in the central Pacific, so Bruce had never heard of the Scouts.
Bruce then began asking detailed questions about the beach area and terrain at Palompan. Sumner turned the questions over to his guerrilla intelligence officer, who used maps and aerial photos Bruce’s staff provided to answer the general’s questions. The discussion lasted about half an hour, after which Bruce told Sumner that he was planning an amphibious landing, an end run, at Palompan on Christmas Day.
Bruce thanked Sumner, and he and his men returned to their mountain lair.
As the American advance continued, Sumner’s area of operations was increasingly constricted, and the guerrillas were constantly engaging Japanese stragglers in fierce firefights that resulted in casualties on both sides. It was plain to see the time had come to leave. After bringing Renhols back to the CP from Abijao, Sumner radioed 6th Army HQ with his decision.
“Leave the radio and the Filipino crew, and enough guerrillas to serve as a guard detachment with the 77th Division,” Sumner was instructed.
Once back inside U.S. lines, Sumner was directed to contact Gen. John R. Hodge’s 14th Corps for transport back to 6th Army HQ.
With a guerrilla escort, the team reached the village of Morgen, a short distance from the 307th Infantry Regiment’s lines. The team cautiously approached the line on December 20, but were fired on by a nervous sentry. Sumner quickly pulled his men back. After all they had been through, the last thing he wanted was for one of them to get shot by a jumpy GI.
Retreating back to the village for the night, Sumner thought that perhaps the reason they were fired on was that they were unrecognizable. The Scouts were dirty, their clothes were grungy, and they did not look at all like American troops. Even the normally neat Bill Blaise, a stickler on appearance, looked terrible.
“Let’s clean up,” he told the men. “I want everyone to bathe, wash his uniform, clean his boots and equipment and get a haircut. I want us to look as if we’re coming off the parade field, and go in with pride, heads high, looking as if this little jaunt we’ve been on has been a piece of cake.”
The Sumner Team passed through lines of the 393rd Infantry Regiment the morning of December 21, forty-seven days after setting out, the Scout record to date. By six p.m., Sumner was reporting to General Hodges, nicknamed “the Mayor of Ormoc,” who insisted Sumner and his men join him for dinner in the officers’ mess tent. Sumner accepted the invitation, and that evening, as they ate, he was amused to find that Hodge dined on standard, no-frills army rations. He did not tell the general that he and his men ate better food during their lengthy mission, thanks to the grateful Philippine people.
Sumner was put on an L-5 s
cout plane and flown back to the ASTC ahead of his men to report to 6th Army G2, arriving back on December 23. His men followed a day later, where Coleman, stitches mending his injured hand, rejoined them.
Christmas 1944 marked a rare moment in Alamo Scout history. For the first time since August, all of the Scout teams were together. On Christmas Day, this elite unit of men gathered in the mess hall for a lavish holiday dinner, and gave thanks that, after forty-nine missions, many fraught with high levels of danger, all of them were there, safe and sound.
Now it was on to Luzon.
CHAPTER 12
“Only an Act of God Is Going to Get You Out.”
Luzon, January-February 1945
At ten forty-five a.m. on January 4, 1945, 850 ships of MacArthur’s Luzon invasion force, including two PT tenders carrying several Alamo Scout teams, sailed out of San Pedro Bay between Leyte and Samar, then steamed south across Leyte Gulf. The next day found them cruising through the Surigao Strait under a sunny, clear sky, then gliding across the Mindanao Sea, bound for the broad expanse of the South China Sea.
Actually, the invasion of the main Philippine island of Luzon had begun on December 15, 1944, with a surprise landing by the Americans on Mindoro, separated from Luzon by the seven-and-a-half-mile-wide Veroe Island Passage. Defended by one thousand Japanese soldiers and some two hundred sailors marooned from sunken ships, the enemy garrison was quickly driven back into isolated pockets of resistance, where they would hold out until being annihilated in late January.
Now the main show was to begin, and the invasion force bound for Lingayen Gulf hoisted anchor and steamed away.
Luckily for the men on the troop transports, they were three days’ sailing behind the bulk of Adm. Jesse B. Oldendorf’s warships. These heavily armed vessels, nine aircraft carriers and several battleships, including two battle-scarred veterans of Pearl Harbor, the West Virginia and the California, ran a gauntlet of Japanese air strikes, including kamikaze attacks. On January 4, a kamikaze slammed into the escort carrier Ommaney Bay, killing ninety-seven men and creating so much damage the small carrier had to be scuttled. The next day sixteen kamikazes hit nine U.S. and Australian ships, and on January 6, in desperation, daylong suicide raids roared out of the clouds. One plane hit the bridge of the battleship USS New Mexico, killing twenty-nine men, including the ship’s captain and Lt. Gen. Herbert Lumsden, British prime minister Winston Churchill’s personal liaison to MacArthur. In fact, that day proved to be one of the worst in U.S. naval history, with eleven ships damaged, a minesweeper sunk, and hundreds of men killed.
On January 8, a kamikaze nosed into the escort carrier Kitkun Bay, and burning aviation fuel and exploding ammo made the ship glow like a red-hot coal. Yet somehow, the ship was saved.
As the Japanese launched strikes, so did the Americans, and planes from the invasion fleet, along with B-25 Mitchell bombers from 5th Air Force airfields on Leyte and, now, Mindoro, plastered the former U.S. base at Clark Field.
Miles behind all of this carnage, the GIs in the troopships sailed unmolested.
MacArthur’s landing on Mindoro surprised Yamashita, who had assumed the Americans would rely on air cover from the bases he knew they were building on Leyte. Yamashita had no way of knowing that heavy rains had delayed the completion of those airfields, forcing MacArthur to turn his attention to Mindoro. In response, Yamashita ordered more air strikes, including by kamikazes, this time at the forty-mile-long American convoy of troop and supply ships. While many of these planes, generally flown by inexperienced pilots, did not get through the wall of antiaircraft fire, some did with devastating results. The ammunition ship John Burke vanished in a spectacular explosion and another, the Lewis L. Dyche, blew up so violently it picked up two PT boats a quarter mile away and dumped them back into the water with heavy damage, while a hail of falling debris, including unexploded shells, rained down on adjacent ships, causing more damage and casualties.
Yamashita was a pragmatist. With the fall of Leyte, he knew he had no hope of stopping an American landing on Luzon and little chance of defeating them once they were ashore. He had lost half of his shipping and thousands of men trying to reinforce Leyte. His naval force now consisted of two submarine chasers, nineteen patrol boats, ten midget subs, and 180 one-man suicide boats, mostly in the Manila Bay area. Perhaps worse, all but about two hundred planes of his air force had been shot down or destroyed on the ground, and by the time the Americans actually came ashore, that number would be reduced to a few dozen.
Luzon is 340 miles long and 130 miles across at its widest. To defend it, Yamashita had six infantry and one armored division, or about 275,000 men, to draw on, but this number was deceptive. Many of his men were not frontline caliber, including convalescing sick and wounded, and most were poorly armed and equipped. There were also about 16,000 naval personnel around Manila, mostly sailors whose ships had been sunk in Leyte Gulf in October, under the command of Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi. But interservice rivalry meant Yamashita had little authority over them.
Unable to prevent a landing, Yamashita ordered that the beaches would not be defended. Instead, he would fight a battle in-depth, making the Americans pay in blood for every yard and to deny for as long as possible the Americans’ use of Luzon as an air base to strike at the Japanese homeland. To accomplish this, he broke his defending force into three main elements. His main force of about 152,000 men, called the Shobu Group, were sent into the mountainous regions to the north with orders to tie down the Americans for as long as possible. This would also allow the Japanese to control one of the island’s main food-producing areas in the Cagayan Valley. Yamashita remained in command of this unit, setting up his CP in the village of Baguio, a summer mountain resort five thousand feet above sea level.
Another eighty thousand men, called the Shimbu Group, under the command of Lt. Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, were sent to the south to hold the high ground east of Manila and thus control the city’s water supply. The remaining thirty thousand troops, the Kembu Group, under Maj. Gen. Rikichi Tsukada, were to hold the Caraballo Mountains and the west side of the Agno-Pampanga Valley, where the former U.S. bases of Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg were located, and stretch south to Bataan. They were to hold as long as possible, then retreat to the Zambales mountain range and fight a delaying action.
Manila was indefensible, Yamashita decided, so he ordered his men out except for a small detachment to protect supply routes and blow the highway bridges leading from the city. Iwabuchi decided otherwise and commanded his sixteen thousand sailors to hold the city, which would soon be turned into a charnel house of death and destruction.
* * *
The landings, Operation Mike I, started the morning of January 9. Even though guerrillas onshore had radioed that there would be no Japanese resistance on the beaches, Oldendorf ordered his big naval guns to fire, which they did, needlessly destroying homes and public buildings. At nine thirty a.m., the first of sixty-eight thousand men of the 6th Army came ashore to find, as the guerrillas had said, the Japanese gone. The Scouts landed the next day, setting up their camp near a captured airfield.
As on Leyte, the Scouts were told that their mission on Luzon would mainly be to establish and maintain communications between the various independent guerrilla groups. Information coming from the guerrillas was often exaggerated and sometimes self-serving, meant to boost the prestige of the guerrilla band’s leader, and thus was of questionable reliability. The Scouts would also set up observation posts to watch the roads and radio stations, and teach the guerrillas how to gather accurate information, and what to look for, especially numbers of enemy, their armaments, and types of equipment.
The Scouts in the field relied on the natives and often paid them. The teams were issued American dollars or Philippine pesos. When the paper money was gone, they wrote IOUs, which the 6th Army honored. On occasion the Scouts would barter information in return for clothes, food, and ammunition.
Bill Littlefield and his team drew the f
irst Alamo Scout mission on Luzon, a twenty-four-day excursion that began near the town of Tarlac on January 14 and would end February 7 near Manila. Their mission was to reconnoiter southeast of Tarlac, where Highways 3 and 13 intersected. Passing through the American lines and moving well ahead of the advancing army, Littlefield and his men were the first Americans the Filipinos in this region had seen in three years who were not prisoners of war. They responded by giving the Americans flowers and singing songs, including “The Star-Spangled Banner,” that left the Scouts moved. The people wrote a letter of tribute about the Scouts’ arrival, with all men signing it on the front and the women on the back.
The villagers also heaped food items on the GIs, especially eggs. Initially, the Scouts appreciated this gesture, but as it was repeated in village after village, they soon had more eggs than they could carry. Littlefield tried to dispose of some by gulping them down raw, but upon cracking open one egg and finding a partially developed chick inside, that culinary experiment quickly ended.
Part of Littlefield’s mission at Tarlac was to contact the three-thousand-man Marking Guerrilla unit under Col. Marcos V. Agustin, and to assess their value as a fighting unit and if they could be relied upon to work with the 6th Army. Littlefield met and talked extensively with Agustin and was convinced by the training and discipline of his men of Agustin’s reliability as a leader. He radioed back a recommendation to the 6th Army that the Marking group be used in conjunction with U.S. units, and soon the guerrillas would be fighting alongside men of the 43rd Division.
Littlefield continued his mission south toward Manila.
Since the Scouts were out in front of the main body of troops by several miles, many of the Japanese garrisons in the area were as yet unmolested. On several occasions, Littlefield and his team had to creep around enemy garrisons. One night, as he lay silently in the underbrush, Littlefield fought the urge to jump or flinch as a Japanese soldier strolled up to the bushes where the Scout leader lay hidden, opened his fly, and urinated. Littlefield remained immobile as he felt the warm liquid splatter on his leg.
Shadows In the Jungle Page 23