Shadows In the Jungle

by Larry Alexander

  “Our troops entered the town of Guimba this morning,” White said, pointing to a map pinned to a bulletin board. “That still puts the camp twenty-five miles behind Jap lines. What’s the opposition?”

  “There are about nine thousand of the bastards in and around Cabanatuan City, five miles to the west, and there’s a camp here”—Lapham pointed at the map—“along the Cabu River about half a mile to the northeast. The numbers there vary.”

  “How many Nips inside the camp?” White asked.

  “Depends,” Lapham replied. “The permanent garrison is about seventy-five men, but Japs are frequently moving along this road that runs to Cabanatuan City, and sometimes troops stop at the camp and bivouac. Right now, there are about two hundred and fifty.”

  “Tell me about this road,” White said, pointing to the line passing in front of the camp.

  “It’s a major thoroughfare,” Lapham said. “Convoys often use it. Look, Colonel, I know this is a difficult undertaking, but it is essential. I’m convinced these men will be killed, and soon, if we don’t get them out. The Japs are on edge, and it won’t take much to push them into a homicidal rage.”

  “I agree,” White said. “Let’s go talk to General Krueger. We have several companies of Sixth Army Rangers here, and this is right up their alley.”

  “Can they handle the reconnaissance end, too?” Lapham asked.

  “They won’t have to,” White replied. “We have specialists who can do that admirably.”

  * * *

  Krueger, also aware of the situation, was in full agreement with White, both of the mission’s risk and its importance, and consulted his map. Krueger had known of the camp and had been informed about the Palawan affair, and he shared Lapham’s fears.

  “Our troops should reach Cabanatuan in five days,” he said. “Today is the twenty-sixth—that means time is of the essence. We need to get those POWs out of there before January thirtieth, or there might be none to rescue. Arrange a briefing now. I want Mucci, Dove, Nellist, and Rounsaville there.”

  The summons came that same afternoon. Bill Nellist, Jack Dove, and Tom Rounsaville entered the briefing hut, where they found White and Lapham at the map table. Col. Henry Mucci and Capt. Robert Prince of the Rangers were also present. After introductions, White told Lapham about the success the two Scout teams had had at Cape Oransbari in New Guinea the previous October, in freeing close to seventy hostages from Japanese hands and delivering them to safety. Lapham was suitably impressed.

  “That was a cakewalk compared to this one,” White told them, then revealed the nature of the mission, just as Lapham had laid it out for him.

  “Aside from the fact that you’ll be twenty-five miles behind Jap lines, with as many as ten thousand of the rice-eaters within five miles, your problems will include the prisoners themselves. These are generally men considered too ill or weak to be of any value as workers. Another reason the Japs will likely kill them before our forces arrive.” White straightened up. “Bill, since Tom was in charge at Oransbari, you will be overall Scout leader. Jack, you will be the contact man, and move with the Rangers. Captain Prince will command the Rangers, but Colonel Mucci will go along as overall commander of the mission. You will be supplied with maps and the latest aerial recon photos.”

  Mucci, standing ramrod straight, a pipe clenched in his mouth and a pencil-thin mustache lining his lip under a prominent nose, looked at Nellist.

  “Lieutenant, this mission is strictly voluntary,” he said. “You can decline if you want, and no one will question your guts and dedication. Speak up now.”

  “If I were in that camp, I’d want someone to come and get me, sir,” he replied. “We’re in.”

  “No one gets left behind,” Mucci said. “We take out every single man, regardless of how weak. Even if a man is dead, we bring his body back.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “Colonel Mucci’s men will pull out Sunday morning,” Horton said. “Bill, that means you and your teams will leave twenty-four hours earlier. Get to the camp, get the info the Rangers will need, and get it back to them.”

  “I plan to be in position and ready to attack by nineteen thirty on Monday,” Mucci said. “That’s fifty-three hours from now, so get me as much intelligence as you can.”

  “Bill knows what to look for,” White said. “Are there any questions? If not, go with God.”

  * * *

  As Mucci returned to his Rangers to make his plans and preparations, the Scouts readied themselves. In addition to his personal weapon, each man would carry extra ammo bandoliers, a .45-caliber automatic with spare clips, a trench knife, and three hand grenades.

  Their preparations complete, Nellist, Rounsaville, Dove, and the twelve Scouts climbed into a two-and-a-half-ton truck for the ride to Guimba, the jumping-off point. As the deuce-and-a-half bounced along the dirt roads, the Scouts in the back and Dove riding in the cab with the driver, U.S. fighter planes roared overhead, strafing Japanese positions at the front lines just a few miles away.

  The truck rolled to a halt in a grove of trees just outside Guimba, which was a cluster of nipa huts with tin roofs, set randomly along the dirt road. Lapham was already there, and greeted the Scouts as they climbed down from the truck bed. Nellist, Rounsaville, and Dove followed the guerrilla leader to the headquarters hut while the friendly Filipinos served the Scouts a meal of black beans and rice.

  “Get some sleep,” Nellist told the men. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  They left at nine p.m. under a starry sky lit by a half moon. Dove remained behind as contact, although he would have no radio until the Rangers came up. All messages between himself and Nellist would be relayed by runners, which was deemed safer than possible radio interception.

  Kittleson and two guerrillas took the point as the column moved single-file through the night, their destination being Balincarin, which they had to get to by daybreak. This would be a twenty-four-mile forced march, most of it through rice paddies, now caked and bone-dry, making walking difficult due to the hardened caraboa hoof prints. They also traversed bamboo thickets and fields of tall kunai and cogon grass, the latter an inedible plant whose only use was for thatching, and whose leaves, with their silky hairs, made a man’s skin itch. Filipinos believed cogon fields were haunted.

  When a village was encountered, the column moved around it, giving it wide berth. The last thing they wanted was to rouse the local population. Any tip to the Japanese of the American approach and the mission was off.

  As the Scouts moved through the night, at one point wading the knee-deep Talavera River, the only sound was the occasional barking dog in the distance. Nellist fretted about the noise kicked up by the dogs, worried that they might give away his presence. Mucci shared this concern, and as a result, sent word ahead with the guerrillas to have the dogs muzzled, their snouts tied shut, until he had passed. Once or twice Kittleson thought he heard a different noise, and dropped to a knee. The others followed suit. When he was sure all was safe, he rose and signaled the rest to follow.

  Nine miles into the march, they were approaching the National Highway. Out in front, in the darkness, was the unmistakable clanking sound of tank treads and trucks. Nellist called a halt.

  “Lotta shit up ahead the way it sounds,” Kittleson whispered to Nellist.

  Nellist nodded.

  “Japs use the cover of night to pull their troops back from the Manila area, through Cabanatuan to San Jose,” he said. “Go take a look.”

  As Kittleson, along with the two guerrillas, crawled forward, Nellist and Rounsaville covered their heads with a poncho. Nellist lit his red-lensed flashlight and the officers looked over the map.

  Kittleson and the two Filipinos reached the edge of a ravine that overlooked the roadway. Making his way to the edge, Kittleson saw vehicles rolling along the highway, their headlights gleaming through cat’s-eye slits. At this point, the highway crossed the ravine on a small, thirty-foot-long wooden bridge. On t
he floor of the ravine, about eight or ten feet below the bridge, a small stream flowed. What dismayed Kittleson more than the traffic moving along a road they had to cross were the three tanks that stood by the bridge, one on one end and two on the other.

  Indicating to one of the Filipinos to remain, he and the other man slithered back from the ravine and returned to the column.

  “Those three Fujiyama Flivvers don’t look like they’re gonna move any time soon,” Kittleson concluded.

  Nellist nodded, deep in thought.

  “How high is the bridge?” he asked. “Can we get under it?”

  “We can pass underneath standing up,” Kittleson said. “And we should be able to get through. The ground on both sides is thickly overgrown.”

  Gathering the teams around him, Nellist briefed the Scouts on what lay ahead.

  “We’ll work our way into the ravine and go under the bridge three or four men at a time,” he said. “Once on the other side, keep going about a hundred yards, then stop and wait for the rest.”

  Reaching the ravine, the column descended and hid themselves in the high vegetation. The three tanks were still on the bridge. Kittleson and two guerrillas led the way, walking, stooped over, at first, and then, as the grass got shorter, dropping to all fours. Overhead, the Japanese tankers smoked and laughed over a shared joke. Under the bridge, Kittleson and the Filipinos stopped as a convoy rumbled across the span, knocking dirt and debris down on their heads. They then moved on, making it to the other side and proceeding into the underbrush.

  It took fifteen minutes for Nellist to get all of his men beyond the bridge, and once reassembled, they were off again. The Rizal Road, about seven miles farther on, also carried enemy truck traffic, but it was less heavy and the Scouts were able to leapfrog across it with little difficulty. After crossing the road, Nellist double-timed the column for a mile before calling a halt.

  The Scouts arrived in Balincarin, a poor village of ramshackle huts, at daybreak as scheduled. They were greeted by guerrilla leader Juan Pajota, who immediately informed Nellist of a division-strength column of Japanese moving along the National Highway from Cabanatuan City, four miles from the camp, plus the presence of hundreds of men at the Cabu River, just half a mile northeast of the prison compound.

  Following a meal of rice and beans, the Scouts moved forward, toward the village of Platero, across the wide but shallow Pampanga River, for their first look at Cabanatuan prison camp. As they lay on their bellies in the grass, what they saw was dismaying. The camp sat in an open plain seven hundred yards away. From their position, which was the closest they could get and still remain safely concealed, all they could see was the wire enclosure, guard towers, and rooftops. The terrain all around was grassy plains and cultivated fields with a sprinkling of nipa huts. Clouds of dust from a convoy passing the camp rose into the air. In the far distance, the silent volcanic cone of Mount Arayat loomed four thousand feet into the sky.

  “This is not good,” Nellist muttered.

  * * *

  Twenty-four hours behind the Scouts, Mucci’s column was also on their way to the camp. The column consisted of 121 Rangers, including 107 from Charlie Company under Prince, and a platoon from Fox Company led by Lt. John P. Murphy. On January 29, as the Scouts were approaching the camp, Mucci’s men linked up with guerrillas led by Capt. Eduardo Joson, thought by Lapham to be the most capable guerrilla leader in the area, at the village of Lobong, west of Balincarin. Joson had with him about 80 of his fierce guerrilla band. This brought the number of men with Mucci, including guerrillas supplied by Lapham, to 286 men. This column, bristling with arms and determination, began making its way forward toward the staging area at Platero, just a mile and a half from the prison compound.

  * * *

  Nellist, Rounsaville, and their men had spent most of the day and into the night watching the camp from the tall grass along the Pampanga River. Some members of the teams also counted noses in the Japanese camp along the Cabu River. After obtaining what intelligence they could, the two Scout leaders walked back to Platero, where they found an anxious Mucci, who had been unable to sleep. At four a.m., Nellist and Rounsaville sat down with Mucci, Dove, and Prince and relayed what they had collected so far.

  “I’m afraid it’s a lot of bad news,” Nellist began. “For one thing, you’re going to have to postpone the attack twenty-four hours.”

  That news jolted Mucci.

  “We can’t,” he said. “The longer we stay here, the greater our chances of being spotted.”

  “I know that, sir,” Nellist said. “But a Jap convoy of about division size is passing by the camp. They shut down during the day to avoid being seen by our planes, but at night they are back on the road and the place looks like Main Street in Tokyo. Your attack tomorrow night would run right into them.”

  Mucci clenched his jaw, his lips tightening on his pipe, as he pondered this setback. Pajota had warned him about the convoy, but he had discounted the guerrilla leader’s claim, preferring intelligence supplied by the Scouts.

  “What’s the ground like around the camp?”

  “As bad as we were told,” Nellist said. “It’s a wide-open plain of low grass and cultivated fields. So far, we haven’t been able to get close enough to see a lot of detail. We can’t see inside the camp.”

  “But you’re sure the prisoners are still there?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nellist replied. “Pajota has assured us they are. They’re too weak and sick to be transported.”

  “What about Jap troops?” Mucci asked.

  “The Dokuko 359 Battalion is bivouacked at the Cabu River, half a mile away to the northeast,” he said. “Inside the camp itself, we figure about seventy guards and maybe another one hundred to two hundred transients who stopped for the night. Four tanks went into the camp, none came back out.”

  Mucci sat quietly for a few moments.

  “All right,” he said firmly. “We’ll reschedule the attack for nineteen thirty on Tuesday. But the info you’ve supplied me with is not good enough, Lieutenant. I need more, a lot more. I need to know the number of sentries, how many guard towers they have and their location, are there any machine-gun emplacements, where are the prisoners housed, where are the guards housed, are there tanks, how is the fence constructed and does the gate swing in or out. That is vital information. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nellist acknowledged. “We’ll get it.”

  * * *

  Nellist had made that pledge to Mucci without knowing how he would go about delivering on it. For the rest of the night, the Scouts watched the stream of Japanese vehicles roll by the camp, moving north in the direction of Bongabon. At dawn, as expected, the traffic stopped. The Scouts also watched for any sign that the Japanese were about to kill the prisoners, but Nellist felt that, with just the few guards, and the fact that the main gate remained closed, this seemed unlikely.

  Nellist discussed the challenge of gathering more information with Rounsaville.

  “There’s only one way I can think of,” he said, watching a few farmers work the fields between him and the camp. Then he pointed to a solitary nipa hut, mounted on stilts, that sat some two hundred yards from the camp’s main gate, just on the other side of the highway. “We need to get into that hut.”

  “Well, you can’t go out there dressed like that,” Rounsaville said. Then he turned to one of his men, Rufo Vaquilar. “Pontiac, see if you can borrow some farmers’ clothes.”

  While the American-born Filipino went about his assignment, Nellist informed Pajota of his plan. The guerrilla leader assured them that word would be gotten to the farmers to ignore the two strangers and added a warning that should there be any betrayal, the guilty person would have more to fear from him than from the Japanese.

  A short time later, two farmers slowly walked across the fields, making their way to the lone hut, where, they had been told, farm implements were stored. The two—Nellist and Vaquilar—wore peasant garb, baggy to help co
nceal the Colt .45 automatics hidden underneath, and large, wide-brimmed straw buri hats. Nellist also had slipped his carbine inside his trouser leg, causing him to walk with a limp that he hoped would not attract attention.

  The two men kept about a hundred yards distance between them to avoid the appearance of being together. Nellist, who was taller than the average Filipino, walked stooped and would occasionally stop and bend down, as if inspecting the crops growing around his feet. As promised, the other farmers kept working, not acknowledging the men walking past them.

  Reaching the hut, first Nellist, then Vaquilar, they climbed the ladder. Inside, both men collapsed to the floor briefly to rest their taut nerves. They expected at any time to hear warning shouts, but none came. A battered rocking chair stood by an open window that faced the compound just two hundred yards away. Nellist drew the carbine from his trousers and sat in the chair, carefully peeking out the window. His eyes lit up as the entire camp was spread out before him. Beyond the wire he could see weary prisoners shuffling around and could count the number of guards at the gatehouse and in the guard tower at the northeast corner of the camp.

  “Yes, Pontiac, there is a God,” Nellist beamed.

  Referring to an aerial photograph of the camp, Nellist began using his carbine to sight in on various buildings as a means of gauging distances and elevations. By that means, he drew a rough map of the camp in his notebook. When he identified a building, he labeled it with a number on the aerial photo, with the building’s description written on a paper overlay.

  Pajota helped the Scouts collect more detail. A number of his guerrillas, also dressed as farmers, moved freely around the fields near the camp, observing and making mental notes. Then they meandered into the “tool hut” to report. One young boy mounted on the back of a hulking caraboa rode the beast around the entire perimeter of the camp, noting terrain features and Japanese defensive positions. Vaquilar, meanwhile, left the hut and located some of the Filipino farmers who had worked inside the camp. He questioned them in detail.