Shadows In the Jungle

by Larry Alexander

  One Scout had an even darker forecast when he heard the assignment.

  Pvt. Carl Bertoch of the Adkins Team, which was to land on Kyushu and look for sites where American prisoners were thought to be held, recalled that the men did not consider it a suicide mission. But neither did they expect to make it back.

  Whether that, indeed, would have come to pass would never be tested. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, with Col. Paul Tibbets at the controls, dropped an atomic bomb, leveling the city of Hiroshima. On Sunday, August 9, another B-29, Bock’s Car, dropped a second bomb on the port city of Nagasaki. Three days later, the Japanese capitulated. The next day—Thursday—a message was received by the Alamo Scout teams to cease all hostilities against the Japanese and return immediately to the ASTC at Subic Bay on Luzon.

  * * *

  The first peacetime mission of the Alamo Scouts commenced on September 14, when a team led by Lt. George Derr boarded a ship in Manila, accompanied by General Krueger and his staff. The ship was bound for Japan. After a stopover at Okinawa to pick up General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell at 10th Army headquarters, the ship continued on. It docked at Wakayama on September 19, and Krueger immediately established 6th Army HQ. A day later, Krueger watched the arrival of men from the 5th Marine Division, and witnessed the Japanese signing over to the marines the Sasebo Naval Air Base.

  On September 24, Krueger and his party, including Derr’s team, traveled to Nagasaki to view the ruined remains of the city. Staff Sgt. Clinton Tucker, a member of Derr’s Team, recalled seeing steel girders twisted by the intense heat, and saw where buildings had been swept away, leaving just their concrete foundations. The blast area, Tucker remembered, was “saucer-shaped,” and extended beyond the city and up into the adjoining hills, where it burned thousands of trees and mowed down countless more like blades of grass before a scythe.

  Krueger’s party stopped by a torpedo factory, or at least what had been one. The factory’s metal lathes and other machinery had melted and washed down gutters into culverts, where the molten steel rehardened.

  The few civilians they encountered walked in a dazed fashion, as if just awakening from a bad dream. Makeshift military hospitals were filled to overflowing with victims, many horribly burned, and the most badly injured were evacuated to American hospital ships.

  Leaving the devastation that had been Nagasaki, Krueger and his entourage arrived in Kyoto on September 28, where he set up his headquarters in the government offices in the Daiken building. For his living quarters, he commandeered for himself and his staff rooms at the Miyako Hotel outside of the city.

  * * *

  While Derr’s men guarded Krueger, eight Scouts from the Adkins and Grimes teams, traveling in two jeeps, went in search of Japanese armaments. The Japanese had been told to collect their weapons and deposit them at a central location, after which infantry units came along and, under Scout supervision, destroyed the guns, usually by lining them up and cutting them in half with acetylene torches.

  The Adkins Team, in particular Sgt. William E. McCommons, was also assigned the task of sifting through almost five hundred samurai swords to select the best ones to be given as souvenirs to Krueger and his top staff. For this, McCommons enlisted the aid of a Japanese general, who helped him pick out the six swords of highest quality. These were passed along to 6th Army HQ. He then had the general select the next best sword, which McCommons kept for himself.

  * * *

  The end of World War II found Bill Littlefield in California. He had been given a forty-five-day furlough on the guarantee that he would return to duty in the southwest Pacific. He agreed.

  “I’d have done anything to get back to the U.S., even for a little bit,” he later recalled.

  But now the war was over, and his orders to return to duty never came through.

  For Conrad Vineyard, the war’s end came even before he had a chance to ply his Alamo Scout skills. His class never graduated from the ASTC, and Vineyard himself was returned to the Americal Division, from which he had been selected for Scout training weeks earlier.

  His return happened so fast, he had to leave some of his possessions behind, specifically, his uniform with his new Alamo Scout patch, a round red, white, and blue patch designed in 1944 by medic Harry Golden, which bore the likeness of an Indian superimposed over the façade of the Alamo. He had sent his uniform to be dry-cleaned.

  “Can I go pick up my uniform at the dry cleaner?” he had requested when news of his return was handed to him.

  “No,” was the terse reply. “Your orders say you leave immediately.”

  He never saw his Alamo Scout clothes again.

  Vineyard ended up being sent to Japan with his division, coming ashore at Yokohama. He recalled the people were “very gracious” and they traded eggs for cigarettes. This was a far cry from the hostile reception he expected and the possible trap he and other GIs were warned about by their officers.

  * * *

  Terry Santos had been fighting on Okinawa since early June. The 11th Airborne had been dispatched to the island as reinforcements to fill some of the gap left by heavy American casualties. There, amid the bloody fighting at Naha, his friend and commander, Red Skau, had been killed.

  Now the fighting was over, and Santos, who during the course of the war had won two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars with the V for Valor, and a Purple Heart, was called into his regimental commander’s tent.

  “Santos,” the officer said. “You have more than the required eighty-five points to be sent home, but I’d like you to go with us to Japan, to be one of the first Americans to set foot on Jap soil.”

  “Are you crazy?” Santos said. “I’ve been waiting for this chance to go home since I joined the army.”

  The officer tried again to change Santos’s mind, but without success.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you.”

  “I know there’s not,” Santos replied.

  Terry Santos arrived in San Francisco on October 8, two days before his twenty-fourth birthday.

  * * *

  A lot of the Alamo Scouts were in Santos’s position. Two days before Krueger left for Manila, word went out to the 154 Alamo Scouts, staff, and overhead personnel that any man with the needed eighty-five points who wanted to go home could do so. The rest would join Krueger in Japan, or could opt to return to their original units for separation or reassignment. Scouts who wished to go to Japan were reassigned to the 6th Ranger Battalion, while those who were being sent home would await transport in the Philippines.

  On October 10, Red Sumner hauled down the Alamo Scout flag for the last time, and officially closed the Scout training camp.

  “I took down the flag and shut off the lights,” he later said.

  During the twenty-one months since John McGowen’s first mission to Los Negros, the Alamo Scouts had conducted 106 more, for a total of 108. They had killed an estimated five hundred enemy soldiers and had taken sixty more prisoner. But more important, they had provided Krueger and, by extension, MacArthur with much-needed and accurate intelligence that paved the way for victory in the Southwest Pacific.

  The experience they gleaned was valuable, so much so that after the war’s end, the Defense Department conducted interviews with the Scouts and incorporated their techniques and training into new textbooks for amphibious warfare, especially in regards to scouting, patrolling, intelligence collecting, raiding, and guerrilla operations. These firsthand experiences were later taught to fledgling officers at West Point and the Infantry School at Fort Benning, as well as other military training centers.

  But while the army lauded the activities and skill of the Scouts, unlike other elite units, such as the Devil’s Brigade or Merrill’s Marauders, it was not until 1988 that the Alamo Scouts, now reaching retirement age, were granted the right to wear the Special Forces shoulder tab. At that time, they were recognized as the army’s first Long Range Surveillance Unit at a service at the John F. Ken
nedy Special Warfare Center and School, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  On March 13, 2008, a plaque honoring the Alamo Scouts was dedicated at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Fifty people attended, mostly family members. Only four of the aging Scouts, Terry Santos, Bob Buschur, Jack Geiger, and team leader William Barnes, made it to the ceremony.

  The reason for this delay in recognition was because, until the late 1980s, Alamo Scout missions were considered classified. The men, as they were discharged, were basically told to go home, resume their lives, and shut up about what they did during the war.

  Why their missions were classified was never explained, but the abrupt disbanding of the unit without any form of recognition, not even a pat on the back and a “well done,” left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the men.

  EPILOGUE

  Through the Years

  The Alamo Scouts officially disbanded in Kyoto, Japan, in November 1945, almost two years after Krueger first selected Col. Frederick Bradshaw to organize and train the elite fighting unit.

  Now the war was over, and for many, that meant a return to home and family, trying to pick up their lives where they left off. Others, forged by the army in time of war, made the military a career.

  General Krueger retired to San Antonio in 1946 and bought his first home. There he wrote a book entitled From Down Under to Nippon: The Story of the 6th Army in World War II, which was published in 1953. His life, however, was far from one of peaceful retirement. In 1947 his son James was dismissed from the army for conduct unbecoming an officer, and in 1952 his daughter Grace was convicted of stabbing her army husband to death while he slept. She was tried by court-martial and sentenced to life with hard labor. She was released in 1955 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that military trials of civilians were unconstitutional. In 1962 Krueger Middle School was founded in San Antonio. Krueger died at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on August 20, 1967, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was eighty-six years old.

  Col. Frederick Bradshaw hoped to return to his beloved Jackson, Mississippi, and resume his law career and, maybe, make a run at state government. That dream was cut short in 1946 when he died at his home from a massive heart attack.

  Bradshaw’s executive officer and heir as Alamo Scout commander, Homer Williams, retired from the army in 1950. He died in a car crash in 1993.

  Mayo Stuntz, the Scouts’ ingenious supply officer, retired from the army in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. Afterward, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, from which he retired in 1975. He lives in Virginia and has coauthored books on local history.

  Scout Lewis Hochstrasser left the army in 1945 and worked as a feature writer for the Wall Street Journal for many years before becoming a publicist for the Signal Oil Company. He wrote the first unit history, an unpublished manuscript entitled They Were First: The Story of the Alamo Scouts. He died at his home in California in 1996 at the age of eighty-two.

  Robert “Red” Sumner made the army a career, never considering any other path. While in Tokyo with 6th Army HQ, he met an army nurse named Dorothy during a blind date. After the date, Dorothy told her friends she would not be seeing him again because the young officer was “too full of himself.” In 1947, they were married at Fort Bragg and would eventually have five children. Later, Sumner continued his college education, which the war had interrupted, and earned his bachelor’s degree.

  Always active and with a love of the outdoors, Sumner refused to play golf, saying it was a game for “old men.”

  In 1980, Sumner was instrumental in the formation of the Alamo Scout Association, and served as its director for many years. Under him, the group grew to over sixty members.

  Red Sumner died at his home in Tampa, Florida, on August 3, 2004.

  Philippine-born Rafael Ileto stayed in the army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general and served as ambassador to Iran, and, later, Minister of National Defense under President Ferdinand Marcos. Ileto died in November 2003.

  Robert T. Schermerhorn lived in Pomona Park, Florida, where he worked in the home construction industry. He never had any contact with his fellow Alamo Scouts until the current Alamo Scout Association executive director Russ Blaise called him in November of 2003. Schermerhorn died on May 22, 2005.

  John Geiger became a rigging contractor for his family-owned business in Newark, New Jersey. He met and married his wife, Betty, and they had nine children. The Geigers have been married for sixty years and still reside in New Jersey.

  Aubrey “Lee” Hall, the first Scout to receive a battlefield commission, remained in the army. Demoted back to sergeant after the war, he eventually retired as a master sergeant. He lived with his wife, Maude, in Hawaii until his death on July 19, 2008.

  John McGowen, who led the first Alamo Scout mission and became the “old man” of the unit, left the army in November 1945. He worked for a year on banana plantations in Panama and Costa Rica, and was an assistant professor of economics at Texas Christian University for a year. For the next thirty years, he worked for a U.S.-based oil company, spending time in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. Married shortly after the war, and with two children, his first wife died. He met his second wife, Christine, an Englishwoman, in Crete in 1977 and they married in 1979. They resided in England.

  McGowen had no contact with any of his wartime comrades until he attended a Scout reunion around 1980.

  He died on October 31, 1991, and was buried by his father’s side in Hartley, Texas.

  Hollywood-handsome John Dove remained in the army, retiring as a full colonel. During his career he served in Germany and Saudi Arabia and did one tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967-68. He died at his California home on September 23, 1995.

  Wilbur Littlefield returned to Los Angeles and graduated from law school. He hung out his own shingle for a time, then took a job as a Los Angeles County public defender. He eventually became head of the department with some seven hundred attorneys working under him. He married shortly after the war, and his wife, Vera, died in 1998. Retired now, Littlefield still lives in Los Angeles.

  Irvin Ray left the army and tried different career paths. With his brother Stanley, who was also color-blind, he tried his hand at house painting. They abandoned this idea when, on a job, it was discovered they were using two different colors.

  Ray joined the National Guard in 1947 and was called up during the Korean War, but was not sent overseas. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and retired from the Reserves in 1983 as a major general. Ray married his wife, Terry, whom he had known since high school, in 1949. The Rays had three children, and when their son Michael completed his ROTC training for the National Guard, his dad pinned on his new lieutenant bars.

  Irv Ray died on April 24, 2004, while Michael was serving in Iraq; Michael did not make it back for the funeral.

  William Blaise was discharged from the army on October 3, 1945, and reenlisted the next day. He was assigned to Company A, 703rd Military Police Battalion and did military burial details at Arlington National Cemetery, where his job was to help carry the caskets to grave sites and fold the flag. In 1946 he married Elaine Haas and they had two sons.

  Blaise left the army on February 28, 1947, and moved to Merrick, Long Island. There he took a job as assistant paint foreman for Plant 3 of Grumman Aerospace in Bethpage. During the Apollo moon mission days, Blaise helped work on the lunar modules. He retired in 1980 and moved to Port Richey, Florida. Bill Blaise died on July 26, 1997.

  Medic Dominck Cicippio left the Scouts in February 1945 and returned to his unit. That April he was shot through the leg by a Japanese sniper. Infection set in and he nearly lost the leg. Both he and the leg recovered, and he returned to Norristown, Pennsylvania, and took a job with Valley Forge Sheet Metal. He met Rose Chiccarine and they married in 1950 and had two sons. The younger, Jimmy, contracted leukemia and died in 1980. Cicippio used his medic skills to help his son through his final days. Cicippio di
ed on March 16, 2004.

  Scout team leader Robert Shirkey went to law school and became a lawyer in 1950. Recalled during the Korean War, he served with the 5th Regimental Combat Team. Discharged in 1952, he resumed his law career, but remained in the Reserves. He retired in 1984 as commanding general of the 89th Reserve Command, making him the last remaining general officer to have fought against the Japanese. He lives in Missouri.

  William F. Barnes served as head coach of the UCLA Bruins from 1958 until 1966, and is a member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. He lives in Los Angeles.

  Terry Santos attended college under the GI Bill at San Francisco State University. He became a hydraulic engineer. Retired, he remains active with the Alamo Scouts Association and still lives in his native San Francisco.

  William Lutz became a Methodist minister after the war and has since lost contact with the Scouts.

  Oliver Roesler returned to college and became a logging engineer. His neck wound earned him a 10 percent disability, and the thirteen dollars a month he got from that helped pay his tuition. With his two brothers and his father, he started a lumber company. He still lives near Seattle and enjoys salmon fishing. He said he is not sure he’d join the Scouts again, but said, “I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.”

  He still carries the shrapnel in his neck.

  William E. Nellist, a man who was not big on taking orders, remained in the army for a while. On three occasions the CIA tried to recruit him, but he said no, worried that it would interfere with his hunting and fishing. Instead, when he left the army, he became a plumber, saying he did not want a desk job. Nellist and his wife, Jane, had two sons. He died on September 5, 1997.

  Thomas Rounsaville spent thirty-two years in the army, serving in the Korean and Vietnam wars. In 1965 he commanded the ground forces that freed white captives being held by rebels in the Congo. Rounsaville retired in 1973 as a colonel, and died on April 16, 1999.

  Galen Kittleson also stayed in the army, joining the Special Forces in 1961 with the rank of command sergeant major. In 1970, at the age of forty-five, Kittleson was in Vietnam, where he was part of the raid at Son Tay to free American prisoners in North Vietnam. That action, plus another POW rescue mission later, made him the only man in U.S. military history to take part in four POW raids in two wars. He retired to Iowa, and died on May 4, 2006.