Shadows In the Jungle

by Larry Alexander

  * * *

  Back in the camp, one man remained. Edwin Cherry, an aging British soldier who had been captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942 and sent along with other British prisoners to the Philippines as a slave laborer, had been in the latrine, stricken with severe dysentery, when the raid went down. Almost stone deaf, he had never heard the battle raging outside. When he emerged, he walked back to his hut, aware of the dead Japanese littering the ground and the burning buildings in the guard area, but not knowing what to do. He stepped inside his barracks and he lay down on his bunk.

  * * *

  About an hour after the raid, Jack Dove joined the Nellist team, walking up from Balincarin.

  “Any sign of the Nips?” he asked Nellist.

  “Nope. All’s quiet.”

  “Good,” Dove said. “A British POW told me we missed a guy. Some old Brit whose elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top. I’m going to try to find him.”

  With that, Dove was moving quickly across the river and the field beyond. Arriving at the camp, he located Cherry, roused the man, and brought him back.

  No one is left behind.

  After about a two-hour wait, Nellist and his men pulled back toward Platero. The caravan’s path was easy to follow, with ruts from the cart wheels and human and animal footprints. Local natives were busily shoveling dirt over the tracks in hopes of avoiding Japanese retaliation.

  At the village, the Scouts found about one hundred of the sickest men lounging around the huts. Natives directed Nellist to the hut being used as a hospital. Pushing aside the blanket that covered the doorway to prevent light from escaping, Nellist found Alfonso and Rounsaville lying to one side. On a makeshift operating table, Doc Fisher was being worked on by a local physician, Dr. Carlos Layug, and two former POWs, Dr. Merle Mussleman and Dr. Herbert Ott, the latter an army veterinarian. POW Chaplain Hugh Kennedy stood nearby. Also watching the proceedings was Maj. Stephen Sitter, a Ranger who volunteered to remain behind.

  “You guys OK?” Nellist asked Rounsaville.

  “Yeah,” Rounsaville said. “I’m fine and Al here will be OK, too.”

  “How’s he?” Nellist asked Rounsaville, nodding toward the table. Rounsaville just shook his head.

  Nellist went back outside.

  Around one a.m. Dr. Mussleman and Chaplain Kennedy joined him.

  “How’s the patient?” Nellist asked. “We’ve got to get out of here before the Japs find us. The longer we stay, the more the danger.”

  “I’ve done all I can for him,” Mussleman said. “It won’t matter if we move him or not.”

  “He’s in God’s hands now,” Kennedy added.

  Nellist turned to Kittleson.

  “Kit,” he said. “Get something we can use as a stretcher.”

  Kittleson nodded, and with the help of some other Scouts located the fanciest house in town, which sported a heavy wooden Spanish door. Gently, Fisher was laid on the door, which took six men to carry, and the little column began the three-mile trek to Balincarin.

  The trip took about an hour. When they arrived, Mucci’s column had moved on, but a radio was left behind for the Scouts. Sitter suggested he contact 6th Army HQ for a plane to fly in and evacuate Fisher. Nellist agreed, and the call was made. A plane would arrive around dawn. All through the night, Filipino men, women, and children, with shovels, axes, and by hand, chopped out a landing strip. Meanwhile, a Scout provided Fisher with blood for a much-needed transfusion.

  The landing strip was finished an hour before dawn, but the plane did not arrive. And it might not have mattered if it had, for Fisher rose up on his elbows and said weakly, “Good luck on the way out.” Then he lay back down and died.

  The body was respectfully wrapped in canvas and placed in a hastily dug grave. Kennedy provided the eulogy and led the prayer, something he had grown proficient at after four years behind barbed wire. Then the Americans were off.

  The trek would be easier. With the help of the civilians, Andy Smith had rustled up several more caraboa carts, so the sickest could ride back.

  The sun was up by now, so Nellist led the column toward American lines, keeping them as close as possible to the edge of the forest, or in low-lying drainage areas, to cut down the chance of detection. Once, Kittleson and Sabas Asis, at the point, signaled everyone to get down. A Japanese patrol was moving left to right across their front, through a grassy field. The enemy eventually disappeared into the forest, and after a brief wait the pathetic column resumed its march.

  By noon, the caravan was about ten miles from American lines. The Scouts tried to cheer the suffering men.

  “It’ll be steak and ice cream for supper this evening, then a clean bed and a pretty nurse,” Smith told the men. “Both at the same time if you’re real lucky.”

  That brought a smile to men who had had little to grin about since 1942.

  As the column approached a fork in the trail they found the pathway blocked by about twelve Filipino guerrillas. The men were members of the People’s Army to Fight the Japanese, known simply as Hukbalahaps, under the overall command of Luis Taruc, whose communist ideology often put him at odds with both the Japanese and the Allies. On a number of occasions the Huks, as they were dubbed by the GIs, skirmished with Lapham’s guerrillas and had even shot the American’s executive officer. The Huks also had no qualms about plundering native villages, and torturing or murdering those who resisted.

  The group that now blocked Nellist’s way was led by a squat man wearing jeans and a cast-off U.S. Marine blouse. The scar on his face, the Garand in his hands, and the crisscrossed bandoliers of .30-cal ammo over his shoulders made him look especially fierce.

  “This is Hukbalahap land,” he said, gesturing menacingly with the Garand. “You cannot pass.”

  Nellist glared at Scarface. To either side of him, Kittleson and Cox tightened the grips on their Tommy guns.

  “Let us through, you little sonofabitch,” Nellist snarled. “We’re the goddamned U.S. Army and we’re going through, so get the hell out of the way.”

  The Huk leader gave Nellist a hard stare and did not budge. Kittleson cocked his Tommy gun and tilted the barrel toward Scarface.

  “Move aside, Bill,” Kittleson said. “I’ll cut ’em all to hell.”

  Scarface glanced at Kittleson, then back at Nellist, an uneasy look coming into his eyes. He shifted his gaze to Cox, who also had his Thompson pointing at him. No one moved and tensions kept rising. Then Scarface, realizing that if gunfire erupted he’d be the first to die, angrily stepped aside. Nellist gestured for the column to move forward. As it did, Cox and Kittleson remained stationary, guarding its passage through the Huks. When all of the men had passed, Kittleson gave Scarface a mock salute, then he and Cox followed the group, keeping a wary eye on the Huks until they were out of sight.

  About an hour later, Nellist’s caravan reached American lines at Talavera.

  * * *

  On February 5, Jack Dove returned to Cabanatuan, now in American hands following the 6th Army’s advance. Wandering through the now-abandoned camp, he sifted through the wreckage of the buildings with Lt. Charles Hall of 6th Army G2, looking for intelligence documents, maps, and other items. In one prisoner hut, Dove found makeshift death certificates kept by prison doctors. They were written on the backs of milk can labels and hidden. Dove filled a sack with documents.

  Dove returned again three days later, this time with money. All of the farmers who lent their caraboa carts received five pesos.

  * * *

  Back home, word of the raid at Cabanatuan was big news and filled the front pages of newspapers everywhere. GIs had freed 516 prisoners—489 Americans, 23 British, 2 Norwegians, 1 Dutch, and 1 Filipino—and gotten them all out safely, although 2 died of heart attacks on the trek to freedom.

  As Americans read the reports, a new name came to their attention: Alamo Scouts.

  So much excitement was generated by the raid that twelve Rangers, including Prince, and two Scout
s, Harold Hard and Gil Cox, were returned to the United States to take part in a nationwide bond drive. Prince and Hard made an appearance on NBC’s popular radio program We the People, where, after Kate Smith sang “God Bless America,” they performed a dramatization of the raid.

  On March 7, the men were in Washington, D.C. Whisked to the White House, they were ushered to the Oval Office, where they were greeted by FDR. With the president was Lt. Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell, whose own exploits in the China-Burma-India theater were legendary, and crooner Bing Crosby.

  Without rising from his chair, the president said, “I want to shake hands with everyone. You men did a fine job.”

  The tour ended in Minneapolis on April 22, and after a thirty-day leave, the men returned to their units.

  “I was damned glad to get back,” Cox recalled later.

  And the war went on.

  CHAPTER 14

  “If I Don’t Make It, It’s Up to You.”

  Rescue at Los Baños, February 23, 1945

  Terry Santos was one of the more than 50 percent of graduates from the Alamo Scout Training Center who did not serve on a team. For some, it was because they had simply not been selected. For others, it was at the request of their former commanding officers, who were reluctant to part with their best-trained men. In the case of Santos, it was at his request.

  Santos enlisted in the army in his native San Francisco in January 1942. After completing his basic training at Camp Roberts, California, the twenty-year-old went to his first sergeant and requested permission to volunteer for the air corps. His sergeant put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Son, you’ll live and die in the infantry.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Santos thought.

  A short time later the eager recruit was back with another request. Responding to a poster on the bulletin board seeking volunteers for the U.S. Airborne Forces, Santos thought, “What the hell. If I can’t fly all the way, I’ll fly part of the way.”

  He made the request to his first sergeant, who asked, “Are you nuts?”

  “No, Sergeant,” Santos replied. “I just want to try something different.”

  After trying without success to talk Santos out of it, the sergeant said, “It doesn’t make sense that anyone would want to leap out of a perfectly good airplane.”

  “It’s something I need to do,” Santos replied.

  “OK,” the sergeant said. “If that’s the way you feel.”

  Getting the OK to volunteer was just the first hurdle Santos had to clear. The next was, at 128 pounds, he was 2 pounds under the required minimum weight for the airborne.

  “I lost weight during training, sir,” Santos told the doctor during the physical.

  The doctor stared at Santos, then said, “Do you really want to go that badly?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Santos replied.

  “OK,” the doctor said. “I’ll put you down at one hundred and thirty. But when you get to the training camp, you’d better weigh a hundred and thirty.”

  “I will, sir,” Santos answered.

  About a week later, Santos, assigned to the fledgling 11th Airborne Division, stepped down from the train at the small terminal in Toccoa, Georgia, a rural hamlet tucked away in the Blue Mountains. There, he and some other airborne candidates climbed into the rear of a deuce-and-a-half truck for the trip out Highway 13, past the Toccoa Casket Company, to the airborne training camp. After stowing his duffel bag in one of the barracks, Santos reported for the check-in physical. There, not only did he find that he had not kept his promise to gain the needed two pounds, but had actually lost two more. Santos quickly came up with an explanation.

  “You know, you’re supposed to weigh one thirty,” the doctor said. “You weigh one twenty-six.”

  “I must’ve lost weight on the train, sir,” Santos said. “The food was terrible and I had no appetite and it took me a week to get here.”

  The doctor looked at him quizzically, then said, “All right.”

  Since there was no organized class currently going through training at Camp Toccoa, Santos took on the job of keeping himself fit. Looming twelve hundred feet above the camp was Mount Currahee, a Cherokee Indian term for “Stands Alone.” Every morning, Santos jogged the winding dirt road that wended its way “three miles up and three miles down” the mountain.

  Santos was at Toccoa just two weeks when he saw another flyer calling for volunteers; this one, he recalled, was for “a special unit.” Rather than wait for the 11th Airborne to train and be activated, Santos volunteered and was transferred. The “special unit” turned out to be the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was as tough as Santos had expected, and included qualifying parachute training—four night jumps and one day jump, the opposite of the airborne.

  Upon graduation, the men were offered commissions as second lieutenants. Santos turned it down.

  “As an officer, you have no latitude,” he explained in 2007. “As an enlisted man, I had all sorts of latitude. I could tell them to go shove it if I wanted to.”

  He instead wore corporal stripes, although he was considered by the OSS to be a sergeant.

  His transport to the war in January 1943 was an old converted four-stack, World War I-vintage destroyer, an aging hulk with open gun mounts instead of turrets. When Santos boarded the ship at San Francisco’s Treasure Island with five of his buddies from OSS training, the ship’s skipper insisted the five lieutenants go to the officers’ quarters, while Santos rode with the enlisted men.

  “If he goes down, we go down,” one of Santos’s friends told the skipper.

  But the argument was futile, and the ship captain won.

  Bound for the China-Burma-India theater, the first stop for Santos and his OSS team was Noumea, on New Caledonia. After a brief stay, they were off for Australia, but the ship was diverted to New Guinea. Their stay there was even briefer. Informed that OSS teams were on the ship, MacArthur sent a staff officer to meet them. MacArthur strongly mistrusted the OSS and its ties to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he wanted none of them within his command area. He wished to maintain absolute control over all the intelligence-gathering work done within his sphere of influence.

  “Those of you who wish to remain with the OSS and go on to the CBI will remain on the ship,” the officer said. “If you don’t want to go on, you may transfer to the 6th Army.”

  Three, including Santos, opted to remain, and, soon catching wind of the Alamo Scouts, all three volunteered.

  “I volunteered to see if I’d be accepted, because the requirements were quite stringent,” Santos said years later.

  The only one of the three selected, Santos joined the ASTC’s fourth class with Bill Nellist and Tom Rounsaville.

  Santos excelled at the rugged conditioning, and his ASTC team was the only one in almost two years of training to get into a firefight with an enemy patrol during their pregraduation reconnaissance exercise, killing several Japanese soldiers.

  Upon his graduation, Santos heard that his former unit, the 11th Airborne, was put on alert for a combat jump. Eager for action, Santos went to see Red Williams, commander of the Alamo Scouts, and requested to be returned to the airborne forces.

  “You’re a first-rate Scout,” Williams said. “Why do you want to go back to the Eleventh?”

  “I think they’re in for a big airborne operation, and I want to be part of it,” Santos replied.

  “I hate to lose you, but if that’s your wish, OK,” Williams said, and released Santos.

  He returned to the 11th Airborne, but the “big operation” never materialized, and, with his recon training, he was assigned to the newly formed Provisional 11th Airborne Reconnaissance Platoon, twenty-six privates and three noncoms under the command of Lt. George Skau.

  In the military, “provisional” means the unit did not technically exist. The Alamo Scouts, for example, were a provisional branch of the 6th Army, its members being carried on company rosters as being on “d
etached duty.”

  Similar to the Scouts, the recon platoon was the brainchild of the division commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph Swing. Like Krueger, he wanted a small, highly trained, all-volunteer unit that he could deploy as he wished, no questions asked, as he deemed necessary, without explanations. Thus the platoon was not an authorized part of the 11th Airborne. On paper, the men were assigned to other duties within the division, when, in point of fact, they were the division’s ghosts or “snoopers,” men who were there, yet were not.

  * * *

  Allied intelligence had known about the Japanese internment camp near Los Baños for quite some time. The camp, located forty miles south of Manila, just beyond Luzon’s largest lake, Laguna de Bay, and twenty-four miles behind enemy lines, held some twenty-one hundred prisoners, almost all civilians.

  Ever since the Americans stormed ashore at Lingayen Gulf and Nasugbu, Batangas, on January 9 and January 31, respectively, to retake Luzon in a two-prong assualt, the Imperial Japanese Army was being relentlessly pushed back. Subsequently, the Japanese high command was becoming increasingly desperate, and news began filtering down to Allied commanders that the Japanese had begun killing innocent civilians and prisoners of war as they retreated.

  MacArthur was deeply concerned about the plight of thousands of prisoners in various camps on Luzon. Aside from the horrific conditions under which most were held, there was the fear that they would be murdered by their captors. By February 1945, several POW rescues had been carried out, including Cabanatuan, and at the University of Santo Tomas and Bilibid Prison, these last two during the height of the battle of Manila.

  Now it was the turn of Los Baños.

  The camp was located on the Philippine Agricultural College and Forestry Campus, now called the University of the Philippines at Los Baños. The sixty-acre tract was tucked between the foothills of Mount Makiling and the northern edge of Los Baños facing Laguna de Bay.

  Surrounded by barbed-wire fences, the camp was a cluster of barracks and huts. Inside were 2,146 captives, including 1,527 Americans, 329 British, 133 Australians, 89 Dutch, 30 Norwegians, 22 Poles, 16 Italians, and 1 Nicaraguan. There were also 12 U.S. Navy nurses and a few servicemen, but the balance of the internees were businessmen, teachers, bankers, and missionaries.