The photograph ran on front pages of newspapers across the United States, eventually to become the impetus for the war’s most successful bond drive.
Meanwhile, news of the rescue of twenty-one hundred civilians in the Philippines was buried deep inside the same issues—in some papers, as far back as page five.
CHAPTER 15
“I Wouldn’t Trade the Whole Damned Jap Army for One Alamo Scout.”
Final Operations, January-July 1945
From the moment American troops stormed ashore on Luzon in January until August, when Yamashita and what was left of his army had been pushed back into mountainous pockets of resistance, the Alamo Scouts had more than enough work to occupy them. Teams led by Herman Chanley, Jack Dove, John McGowen, Bill Nellist, Tom Rounsaville, Wilbur Littlefield, George Thompson, Woodrow Hobbs, and Bob Sumner were constantly in the field, their missions often overlapping. In addition, new teams led by Robert S. Shirkey, George Derr, Henry Adkins, and Wilmot B. Ouzts, as well as scratch teams under Vance Q. Williams, John G. Fisher, John A. Roberts, Henry R. Chalko, James Farrow, and Joe Moon, were organized for impromptu assignments.
Combined, these men paved the way for MacArthur’s troops as they carved away at the Japanese defenses.
As January dragged into February, the battle for Luzon intensified. Fighting at Manila had been especially ferocious as Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi, in defiance of General Yamashita’s wishes, ordered his sixteen thousand men to stand fast and defend the city. Fighting in and around Manila lasted from February 4 to March 4, and devastated large sections of the once-exotic city, especially in the Intramuros district, the Walled City, an old Spanish fortress near the port, where many government buildings stood.
When the fighting ended, nearly all of Iwabuchi’s men were dead, and so were as many as 100,000 Filipino civilians, caught in the murderous cross fire.
But even before the fight at Manila had begun, Alamo Scout teams were out in advance of the troops, monitoring Japanese moves and defenses.
On January 22, three days after Nellist’s men returned from spotting the Japanese big guns blocking the advance on Manila, Woodrow Hobbs’s team landed north of the Bataan Peninsula. Their job was to observe Highway 5, the main coastal road, leading from the town of Gapan south to Manila. This included monitoring the roads feeding onto Highway 5, as well as enemy activity in the surrounding barrios and foothills.
By this point in the war, changes had taken place on some of the teams, due to men being recalled by their units or leaving the Scouts for other reasons. Hobbs’s team, for this mission, included Sgt. John Phillips and Irv Ray, both formerly of the Dove Team. Ray had been awarded a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant. Also with Hobbs was Ray Wangrud, formerly of the Reynolds Team, John Hidalgo of the Littlefield Team, and Bob Ross of the Lutz Team.
This homogenous group of Scouts had just the day before returned from an aborted mission to check on Japanese activity between San Miguel and Subic Bay on the northern end of Bataan. It was to have been a very dangerous mission in an area crawling with enemy troops, but the team wanted to go, and were disappointed at the order—it came directly from MacArthur—canceling it.
Now—it was January 23—they traveled by C-47 from 6th Army HQ to Lingayen, a forty-minute flight, escorted by four P-38 Lightning fighters. From there the team was flown, one by one, in L-5 scout planes to a small airstrip at the town of Akle, ten miles south of Sibul Springs. At Akle they were met by Captain Cabangbang, a Filipino officer attached to the Allied Intelligence Bureau, and Captain Santos of the BMA Guerrilla Division.
A command post and radio relay station was established at Akle, and the Hobbs Team remained there for two days. Then Hobbs, accompanied by Wangrud and Hidalgo, traveled north to Sibul Springs, while Ray and Phillips headed south to Angat. Ross was dispatched to Novaliches, eight miles northeast of Manila. Guerrillas escorted the Scouts.
From these locations, the Scouts sent back a steady stream of intelligence on supply dumps, troop movements, and defenses. Throughout the American advance on Manila, the Scout team moved ahead of them, maintaining contact with frontline units.
During this time, Hobbs’s men often had a chance to socialize with Littlefield and his team, who had been out since January 14, watching enemy troop movements along Highways 3 and 13.
On February 12, their mission over, the Hobbs Team reassembled at Novaliches and entered the smoking ruins of Manila with the U.S. forces.
* * *
As fighting in Manila subsided, Philippine-born Scout leader Rafael Ileto’s team spent the ten days between February 17 and February 27 organizing guerrilla units in the Pantabangan-Caranglan area, and set up road watches between Guimba and Gapan on Highways 15 and 5, to the north of Cabanatuan City.
On February 28, they were out again, this time bound for Camarines Norte province aboard a PBY Catalina. It was the start of a seventy-one-day mission, the longest ever for an Alamo Scout team.
The seaplane landed just offshore, and Ileto was met by Maj. Bernard L. Anderson, a guerrilla leader and army air force officer who had been in the jungles since the fall of the Philippines.
Anderson supplied the team with a thirty-foot sailboat, and the next day the Scouts were gliding across the deep blue water toward Cabalete Island. They were diverted, however, to the town of Perez on Alabat Island. A guerrilla leader, Captain Areta, greeted them there, and the Scouts set up a radio station and organized the movements of Areta and his four hundred men. Working with Thompson’s team near Mauban via radio, the Scouts monitored Japanese troop movement and coastal activity. On March 26, the team coordinated an airdrop by two C-47s. The planes droned over the barrio of Bagasbas, dropping 250 ’03 Springfields, 50 Thompson submachine guns, ammo, rice, salt, flour, cigarettes, money, and medical supplies.
* * *
The Littlefield Team returned from their twenty-four-day Tarlac mission on February 7 and were back out the next day. Boarding L-5 recon planes, they were flown one by one to the town of Malolos, where they landed on a crude airstrip hacked out by natives, who, between them, had just one pick and one shovel. While they did not know it yet, the men would be in the field for sixty-eight days.
For this mission, Littlefield would have with him Lee Hall, a graduate of the ASTC’s first class and formerly of the Barnes Team; Ben Mones, an American-Filipino radio operator from San Francisco who had accompanied Littlefield on several other missions; and Zeke McConnell. The mission was to set up watch stations and an intelligence network along Highway 5 from Malina north to Malolos.
Originally, Littlefield was to take with him an American captain, but he refused. He knew the officer and considered him “kill crazy.” The man had three Japanese skulls mounted on his jeep’s bumper, and Littlefield suspected he wanted to go along just so he could kill more of the enemy.
Littlefield and his men passed through the 1st U.S. Cavalry lines at dawn on February 7 after first coordinating their movements with U.S. artillery so they would not get American shells dropped on their heads.
About a mile from American lines, they spotted a farmhouse in a clearing inhabited by an aging farmer and a girl of about twelve, whom Littlefield learned was the man’s granddaughter. A small village lay beyond in the distance. There were no Japanese to be seen, yet as they watched, three U.S. planes roared in and began strafing the town, dropping hundred-pound bombs from under their wings.
When the planes departed, Littlefield and his men moved forward. The farmer and girl were rattled by the nearby air raid, but unharmed, and Littlefield tried to convince them to leave by either going into the jungle or to American lines, but they refused. Littlefield knew that, stuck between the lines as they were, the two were in extreme danger, and tried again to get them to leave. He warned that the Japanese may come back.
“No,” the old man said. “My home. Stay here.”
As an American artillery barrage began to walk its way across the landscape, Littlefield decided it was time “to
get the hell out.” He hurried his men across the rice fields and to the town, where he found a number of the inhabitants had been wounded by the navy planes. There was no sign of the Japanese. Fortunately, some American deuce-and-a-half trucks came rattling along the road passing through the village and Littlefield flagged them down. He got the most seriously wounded villagers put on board the trucks. The farmer and his granddaughter still refused to leave their farm. Littlefield later learned that the Japanese did return to the area, accused them of spying for the Americans, and beheaded both.
The wounded villagers, meanwhile, were taken to the American hospital at the University of Santo Thomas, where, as they lay recuperating, the hospital came under Japanese artillery fire. The injured villagers were again moved out of harm’s way.
Littlefield’s lengthy mission continued. As the team drew near the village that Mones originally hailed from, Littlefield granted him a two-week furlough to visit family, even though he had no authority to do so.
“I made it sound official,” he said years later.
Near the end of the sixty-eight days, Littlefield was staggered by a severe bout of dysentery, and it happened at the worst possible time. Alerted of the Scouts’ presence, a large body of Japanese troops were on their trail. Littlefield, his guts churning, could not keep up with the men as they slogged through the jungle on their way toward the American lines. He emptied his bowels thirty-two times in one day, mostly passing blood.
“It was terrible,” Littlefield recalled. “I was sick as a dog.” Consequently, the men slowed to his pace. Finally, Littlefield ordered them to move on without him.
“The Japs are about an hour behind us,” he told them. “I’m slowing you down and I won’t sacrifice all of you for my sake. Get moving. I’ll be coming along.”
Naturally, the team was hesitant to leave Littlefield, or any member, behind.
“I said go, goddamn it,” Littlefield ordered.
They departed. Once out of sight, though, Zeke McConnell dropped back and hid behind a tree, keeping an eye on Littlefield. After a great deal of struggle, Littlefield reached McConnell’s position and the Cherokee stepped out.
“What the hell are you doing here, Zeke?” Littlefield said, somewhat startled. “I told you to keep going.”
McConnell smiled.
“You didn’t think I’d leave you behind to take care of all those Japs alone, did ya?” he said.
With that, he accompanied his friend to safety.
* * *
On February 17, Herm Chanley, who had been on the Hobbs Team originally but was given a team of his own the previous December, landed near the coastal town of Baler. Chanley’s job was to perform a reconnaissance of Casiguran Sound to see if it would provide an adequate anchorage for ships of the 7th Fleet.
Once ashore, Chanley’s team, consisting of Staff Sgts. Glendale Watson and Allen H. Throgmorton, Sgts. Juan D. Pacis and Juan E. Berganio, and Pfcs. Bobby G. Walters and Nicholas C. Enriquez, contacted the 103rd and 205th guerrilla squadrons. Chanley and his men quickly discovered that the weaker unit, the 103rd under Lieutenant Ilipio, with five hundred men and just fifteen miscellaneous weapons, was extremely valuable in helping the Scouts accomplish their mission, while the 205th under Captain Bautista, with five hundred men and fifty-two weapons, proved unreliable.
After learning that the one hundred Japanese who had been in the Baler area had been forced to leave due to incessant harassment from the guerrillas, Chanley and his men relocated, conducting reconnaissance excursions around the barrio of Dinadiawan and the Dilalongan River, with the aid of agents from the Allied Intelligence Bureau, who now joined them.
Picked up by a destroyer on March 1, the team was back onshore the next day, this time accompanied by four naval officers, two AIB agents, and nine guerrillas. Hacking their way through the jungle in three groups, with Chanley and eleven men in the center, Throgmorton and four guerrillas guarding the left flank and Watson and five guerrillas on the right, they proceeded to a Japanese airfield two miles south of the Dilalongan River to see if it was usable. They found the runway overgrown with razor-sharp kunai grass, and the navy men were unhappy with it, so the search continued. A new, more satisfactory site was located a mile farther on, and the men returned to the beach, where an LCVP picked them up.
* * *
Even before Manila fell, MacArthur began making plans for his return to that tadpole-shaped rock in Manila Bay, Corregidor. Here, even more than Bataan, was the burning source of his humiliation thirty-two months earlier. It was a sore his pride could not endure.
The problem was, intelligence sources estimated that as many as 5,670 Japanese troops, including 800 Japanese civilians, mostly men who escaped from the fighting on the mainland, were defending the island. The 1st Battalion of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment along with the 3rd Battalion of the 34th Infantry Division were being prepped for the initial assault, but first more information was needed. To get that, 6th Army HQ tapped the Sumner Team, temporarily under John McGowen, after Sumner came down with jaundice.
On January 26, as Nellist and Rounsaville were preparing to push off for Cabanatuan, McGowen and his men boarded a PT boat in Subic Bay and headed across the dark water into Manila Bay and toward Corregidor. Manila, aflame from the raging fight, burned in the distance, the glow from the fires lighting up the entire horizon. Tracers arced through the night sky, and the dull boom of artillery like a drumbeat out of Hell rolled across the bay.
As the PT closed on the island, its radar picked up echoes of two Japanese destroyers. They spooked the PT skipper, who stopped his boat.
“This is as far as I dare go,” he told McGowen. “You’ll have to go the rest of the way on your own.”
“It’s seven goddamned miles,” McGowen fumed. “We can’t take rubber boats that distance.”
“That’s your decision,” the skipper said. “But I go no farther.”
Angrily, McGowen, who hated leaving a job undone, polled his men.
“We decided to get the hell out of there,” Bill Blaise later wrote. “It would have been suicide.”
It was the first and last mission the Scouts ever aborted on their own.
* * *
On February 8 McGowen, again at the head of the Sumner Team, with Lawrence Coleman, Bill Blaise, Bob Shullaw, Harry Weiland, Ed Renhols, and Paul Jones, accompanied by Filipino Sgt. Vincent Quipo of the Philippine Message Center, were back in the bush.
This time their mission was to establish a radio station on the coast of Zambales province, which borders Bataan to the north. Traveling by native bancas, they landed at Loclocbelete, a barrio near the city of Palauig, a few miles north of the airfield at Iba. Setting up the radio in a house, the team began patrolling north along the National Highway from Santa Cruz, checking out roads and bridges, as well as Iba Field, which they found to be usable.
Although they saw no Japanese, they were informed by guerrillas of the Montalla command that as many as one thousand of the enemy were in the area, mostly operating in small foraging groups three miles east of Santa Cruz. The guerrillas also said between three thousand and six thousand Japanese were strung out over a two-mile stretch east of Botolan along the Capiz Trail.
The team continued patrolling the area for the next week, before being recalled by 6th Army headquarters.
* * *
After Cabanatuan, Nellist and his team did a stint bodyguarding MacArthur and his staff on Bataan. On February 19, Nellist and his men, with Sergeant Quipo, just back from the McGowen expedition, boarded a Mariner seaplane in Lingayen Gulf and were flown to Magallanes on southwest Luzon. There they were to contact the Escudero guerrilla group, a large but poorly equipped unit under the Sorosogon province governor Escudero. It was 6th Army HQ’s belief that if the guerrillas could be resupplied, they would be of great use in the upcoming invasion of Ligaspi in March, so the team boarded native bancas for the trip to the town of Casiguran. Things got off to a bad start. While the team was unl
oading the generator that powered the SCR-694 radio, it fell overboard and was lost.
Out of communication, Nellist led his men on foot toward Escudero’s headquarters at San Juan. There, Nellist requested use of the guerrillas’ radio to ask that a new generator be airdropped. Escudero agreed, provided they also drop ammo for his men. The drop was done, after which Nellist instructed Escudero to meet him at the village of Bulan, where they would link up with the Lapus guerrilla band. Nellist was unaware that Lapus and Escudero were adversaries.
Arriving at Bulan on February 23, the Scouts conducted reconnaissance forays and captured one Japanese soldier and several Formosan laborers. They also took depth soundings of the water and analyzed beach conditions. Six days later, Escudero, with about two hundred men, and Lapus, with about sixty guerrillas, both arrived in camp, and the air of hostility between the two men could have been cut with a knife. Nellist headed off trouble by stepping in to act as mediator. Neither Escudero nor Lapus would serve under one or the other, but both agreed to take orders from Nellist. A potentially violent confrontation was avoided.
On March 9, Nellist assumed authority over all the guerrillas in the area, about one thousand men in all. It was a precarious command, since the guerrillas came from various organizations and fiercely bickered among themselves. As a means of separating them, Nellist assigned each group to a specific sector. Each was also given a radio, enabling them to communicate through the Guerrilla Net Control, a network that had been established on Luzon. Since the guerrillas were not professionally trained soldiers, adept at conducting major assaults, Nellist instructed them to snipe at the enemy and harass their patrols and outposts. At this they excelled, and the Japanese withdrew to an area ten miles west of Legaspi known as Little Bataan.
Shadows In the Jungle Page 29