Shadows In the Jungle (2 page)

However, after a while, my passion as a writer began to get the best of me and I sought a subject for a second book, fueled perhaps by the many e-mails and phone calls from readers who enjoyed not just
Biggest Brother
but my style of storytelling, and encouraged me to write again. So how could I not? Besides, I've had a lifelong fascination with books and had dreamed of being an author ever since I was twelve years old and my grandparents bought me my first typewriter.

So I began searching for a topic that, if not new and untouched, had at least not been plowed over in countless previous books.

That's how I stumbled across the Alamo Scouts Web site. This site, at
www.alamoscouts.org
, contains a wealth of information on the unit, and includes photos and personal stories, and the more I read, the more I was in awe of these men and their deeds.

The site led me to the only book devoted to the unit,
Silent Warriors of World War II: The Alamo Scouts Behind the Japanese Lines
, by Lance Q. Zedric, published in 1995. Zedric had begun the book as a college thesis, and had the good fortune to link up with the surviving Scouts and preserve many of their stories.

After looking over the Web site and the book, I contacted Russ Blaise, the executive director of the Alamo Scouts Association and the son of the late William F. Blaise, a Scout with the Sumner Team. Russ was more than agreeable to the idea of a new book about his father's unit, and with his valuable assistance, and the support of Zedric, who is now the Alamo Scouts' official historian, I was off and running.

With Russ's invaluable help, I began making contact with surviving Alamo Scouts, conducting both telephone and face-to-face interviews and obtaining much-needed documents and notes. The work went smoothly, not just in putting together the story of the Scouts but in finding the trivia and detail I needed to help bring those stories to life. But something was missing, and it proved to be the personal touch. I needed to actually meet some of these men.

Getting together with Jack Geiger of the Lutz Team proved easy. He lives in New Jersey and we were able to meet personally on two occasions, and his assistance proved vital in putting together the story of his team and its men.

But I needed more of that one on one, which is what drew me to Denver to attend the Alamo Scouts reunion and meet the men I had been researching and reading about for the past year.

* * *

The Alamo Scouts were conceived by Maj. Gen. Walter Krueger in late 1943, in response to a desire by his commander—Gen. Douglas MacArthur—for a reliable reconnaissance unit whose information he could depend on for its accuracy. Suspicious and vain, MacArthur distrusted the Office of Strategic Services for his intelligence, because of the OSS's close ties to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom MacArthur viewed with extreme skepticism and disdain.

The Scouts were an all-volunteer organization formed under the leadership of Col. Frederick Bradshaw. He laid out a six-week training program that was intense and rugged, designed to weed out all but the best candidates. Men were dismissed not just if they failed to make the grade physically but also based on their personalities. Bullies, loudmouths, and individualists didn't last. The men had to like each other and trust one another, because their lives depended on mutual trust and teamwork. They also needed good survival instincts and keen senses. In once instance, Scouts located a Japanese camp by following the scent of a can of sardines opened by an enemy soldier.

For those who graduated from the Alamo Scout Training Camp, life off the line was as good as Krueger could make it. They had first-class accommodations insofar as food, tentage, and other amenities, such as shower facilities, refrigerators, and radios, could be obtained. Hotel Alamo, the men dubbed their camp.

Bradshaw, through Krueger, also made sure the men had the very best in equipment and weaponry. Whatever a man wanted, he was given.

But it was in the field where the Alamo Scouts proved their worth. Working in teams of six or seven men, they operated miles behind enemy lines on missions that sometimes lasted up to seventy days. Moving silently among the Japanese in their camouflage uniforms and painted hands and faces, and communicating mostly by hand signals, they collected data on possible invasion beaches, tides and currents, troop numbers and locations, enemy morale, defensive positions, the availability of roads and fresh water, and other much-needed information. And while their main mission was to collect intelligence and not fight the enemy, they were sometimes called upon to perform raider duties, such as destroying enemy supply depots, and rescuing civilian hostages and prisoners of war from the Japanese.

Between December 27, 1943, and September 2, 1945, 325 officers and men would graduate from the Alamo Scout Training Camp, but only 138 would be assigned to one of the twelve Alamo Scout teams. Yet the Scouts, as a unit, never numbered more than 78 men—65 men and 13 officers—on active duty at any one time.

By the war's end, the Alamo Scouts had conducted 108 missions, all of them fraught with danger. Working miles behind enemy lines, they are credited with killing more than five hundred Japanese soldiers and taking about sixty prisoners, and while they suffered a dozen or more men wounded, no Scout was killed in combat.

In the course of their work, the Scouts were awarded forty-four Silver Stars, two with Oak Leaf clusters; thirty-three Bronze Stars, eleven with Oak Leaf clusters; and four Soldier's Medals. Three men were recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross and two teams, under Lts. William Nellist and Thomas Rounsaville, won Presidential Unit Citations for their part in the POW rescue at Cabanatuan in January 1945.

After the war, the Pentagon ordered that the missions of the Alamo Scouts be classified, and the Scouts were basically told to go home, resume their lives, and shut up. That, along with the fact that the unit was deactivated without fanfare, ceremony, or any degree of recognition, left a bitter taste in the mouths of many of the men who so proudly wore the Alamo Scout patch.

Around 1988, most of their missions were declassified, and the rest were done so a few years later and finally the veterans, now men into their sixties, received the coveted Special Forces shoulder tab.

By the time I caught up with them in Denver, they were all old men, gray-haired and, in some cases, in poor health. Indeed, only seven Scouts were slated to attend the reunion, and only five actually showed up.

Just as it was difficult for me to imagine the Dick Winters I know today as the twenty-three-year-old paratrooper who jumped out of airplanes in 1944, so too was it hard for me to picture these aging men as the soldiers who crept so close to the Japanese that an enemy soldier actually pissed on one of them without seeing him. But the youthful gleam in their eyes as they spoke to me about those days told me differently.

I wasn't completely comfortable with the idea of meeting the Alamo Scouts there in Denver. Although they knew I was coming, I felt less like a visitor and more like an intruder to these men who played such a key role in General MacArthur's victories and who, now in their twilight years, were gathering to share their memories and relive the days of their youth with their comrades.

I fretted needlessly.

The first Scout I caught up with was Terry Santos, who declined to join a team back in 1944 and returned to his original unit after Alamo Scout training. Terry was lead scout on the Los Baños internment camp raid, helping to free over two thousand civilian prisoners, and he won a Silver Star for knocking out three Japanese machine-gun emplacements.

Still spry at eighty-six, Terry was talkative and outgoing. He seemed to have a drive that made him the obvious leader of the group at the reunion, taking charge of meetings and allocating responsibility for activities.

Wilbur Littlefield, one of the surviving team leaders, soon arrived from Los Angeles. I had interviewed him on the phone and now had the chance to meet him and talk further. He made me feel at ease and seemed to enjoy reliving his experiences with me.

Aubrey “Lee” Hall was there, too. As a temporary member of the team led by John Dove, he took part in a perilous mission in New Guinea. I had interviewed Lee on the phone prior to meeting him, and I had the chance to continue our discussions in Denver.

Likewise, Bob Buschur and Conrad Vineyard, two Scouts who never had the chance to serve on teams, were most helpful, as were the families of the deceased Alamo Scouts Irv Ray, Harold Hard, Bill Nellist, John McGowen, William McCommons, and Zeke McConnell.

I went away from Denver not just with a wealth of information and a further appreciation of what these men did but with a group of new friends.

Only about a tenth of the 325 men who qualified as Alamo Scouts are known to remain. Many have passed on, some taking their untold stories with them. It is because of this, plus their decades of government-enforced silence, that so few people are familiar with their names and deeds.

Making those names and deeds known is the goal of this book.

* * *

With the exception of the Scouts' role in the famous prisoner-of-war rescue at Cabanatuan, where five hundred Allied POWs were saved from certain death by a small force of 6th Army Rangers, the missions related in this book appear not based on their significance or level of excitement but solely on the amount of information available. Teams like the one led by Lt. Robert “Red” Sumner loom large in this work, not because Sumner did anything the other Scout teams did not do, but due to the wonderful memoirs left behind by Sumner and made available to me by Russ Blaise, Lance Zedric, and Ann Sumner.

Likewise, interviews and memoirs by other Scouts, some deceased and some still living, make the missions of the Dove, Nellist, Rounsaville, Lutz, Littlefield, and McGowen teams appear most often throughout this text.

That is not intended to negate the work of the other five teams.

The work of the Alamo Scouts—all of them, including those who were not on teams, such as Terry Santos, whose story also appears in these pages—deserves the recognition and honor so long denied it. Their contribution toward American success in the southwest Pacific has never been fully acknowledged.

Again, that is a goal of this book.

* * *

Today, the surviving Alamo Scouts stay in close contact and gather once a year for a reunion. And while their numbers, sadly, are constantly diminishing, the spirit of camaraderie that I saw in 2007 does not fade.

In wartime, these men depended on each other with their lives. Their souls were forged together in ties stronger than family. This will continue so long as one Alamo Scout remains.

For just as surely as Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company were forever bound together, the Alamo Scouts, too, are a Band of Brothers.

CHAPTER 1

 

 

 

 

“
W
e're there,” the skipper of PT-363 said in a hushed voice as he slowed the eighty-foot Elco, nicknamed by her crew the
Aces Avenger
, to a complete stop.

Lt. John Dove nodded, gazing toward the dark mass eight hundred yards away that was the coast of New Guinea.

“Fine,” he said. “We'll get off.”

“Water's pretty rough tonight, Jack,” the PT commander cautioned. “You sure you want to try it?”

“We're going,” Dove said, his usual boyish sense of humor giving way to an all-business attitude. He turned, left the boat's cockpit, and headed toward the stern, where his six team members waited, sitting on the deck between a torpedo tube and the 20mm antiaircraft gun.

Compared to the PT boat crewmen in their blue dungarees, Jack Dove and his men looked frighteningly fierce. Their uniforms were camouflage, topped off with a soft baseball cap in place of a helmet, which could make noise or reflect a stray beam of light. Their faces and hands were smeared with grease paint. The men carried either M1 carbines or Thompson submachine guns, and each was armed with a .45-caliber automatic pistol. In addition, each soldier toted binoculars, one hundred rounds of ammo, a knife, two canteens, three days' rations—a peanut-raisin mix—packed in small rubber bags, flares, and compasses.

Dove and his men were members of America's smallest elite fighting force, the 6th U.S. Army Special Reconnaissance Unit, nicknamed the “Alamo Scouts.” The name Alamo was derived from their attachment to Maj. Gen. Walter Krueger's 6th Army, code-named the Alamo Force in honor of Krueger's hometown of San Antonio, Texas, where the famous Spanish mission stands as a monument to the Americans who died there 108 years earlier.

The Scouts had been gleaned from hundreds of volunteers and trained for one purpose: to infiltrate Japanese lines, gather intelligence, and get the hell out in one piece.

“We believe the Japs are pulling back from in front of our lines at Hollandia, westward toward Wakde,” Dove had been told by one of Krueger's G2 intelligence officers earlier that day. “We're going to put you ashore near the Taorum River just west of the village of Armopa, about midway between Hollandia and Wakde. We want you to confirm that the Japs are pulling back, estimate troop strength if possible, as well as their overall condition, meaning are they capable of regrouping and launching a counterattack.”

Dove, a six-foot-tall, ruggedly handsome two-hundred-pounder who looked like a college all-American football star, nodded. A long way from his home at 153 West Norton Avenue in Hollywood, Dove was a deeply religious man who did not drink or smoke, and often led his men in the singing of hymns. This would be his team's first mission, and as he contemplated the possibility of going into battle, he prayed for himself, his men, and even the Japanese.