Shadows In the Jungle (31 page)

Christmas 1944 marked a rare moment in Alamo Scout history. For the first time since August, all of the Scout teams were together. On Christmas Day, this elite unit of men gathered in the mess hall for a lavish holiday dinner, and gave thanks that, after forty-nine missions, many fraught with high levels of danger, all of them were there, safe and sound.

Now it was on to Luzon.

CHAPTER 12

 

 

 

 

A
t ten forty-five a.m. on January 4, 1945, 850 ships of MacArthur's Luzon invasion force, including two PT tenders carrying several Alamo Scout teams, sailed out of San Pedro Bay between Leyte and Samar, then steamed south across Leyte Gulf. The next day found them cruising through the Surigao Strait under a sunny, clear sky, then gliding across the Mindanao Sea, bound for the broad expanse of the South China Sea.

Actually, the invasion of the main Philippine island of Luzon had begun on December 15, 1944, with a surprise landing by the Americans on Mindoro, separated from Luzon by the seven-and-a-half-mile-wide Veroe Island Passage. Defended by one thousand Japanese soldiers and some two hundred sailors marooned from sunken ships, the enemy garrison was quickly driven back into isolated pockets of resistance, where they would hold out until being annihilated in late January.

Now the main show was to begin, and the invasion force bound for Lingayen Gulf hoisted anchor and steamed away.

Luckily for the men on the troop transports, they were three days' sailing behind the bulk of Adm. Jesse B. Oldendorf's warships. These heavily armed vessels, nine aircraft carriers and several battleships, including two battle-scarred veterans of Pearl Harbor, the
West Virginia
and the
California
, ran a gauntlet of Japanese air strikes, including kamikaze attacks. On January 4, a kamikaze slammed into the escort carrier
Ommaney Bay
, killing ninety-seven men and creating so much damage the small carrier had to be scuttled. The next day sixteen kamikazes hit nine U.S. and Australian ships, and on January 6, in desperation, daylong suicide raids roared out of the clouds. One plane hit the bridge of the battleship USS
New Mexico
, killing twenty-nine men, including the ship's captain and Lt. Gen. Herbert Lumsden, British prime minister Winston Churchill's personal liaison to MacArthur. In fact, that day proved to be one of the worst in U.S. naval history, with eleven ships damaged, a minesweeper sunk, and hundreds of men killed.

On January 8, a kamikaze nosed into the escort carrier
Kitkun Bay
, and burning aviation fuel and exploding ammo made the ship glow like a red-hot coal. Yet somehow, the ship was saved.

As the Japanese launched strikes, so did the Americans, and planes from the invasion fleet, along with B-25 Mitchell bombers from 5th Air Force airfields on Leyte and, now, Mindoro, plastered the former U.S. base at Clark Field.

Miles behind all of this carnage, the GIs in the troopships sailed unmolested.

MacArthur's landing on Mindoro surprised Yamashita, who had assumed the Americans would rely on air cover from the bases he knew they were building on Leyte. Yamashita had no way of knowing that heavy rains had delayed the completion of those airfields, forcing MacArthur to turn his attention to Mindoro. In response, Yamashita ordered more air strikes, including by kamikazes, this time at the forty-mile-long American convoy of troop and supply ships. While many of these planes, generally flown by inexperienced pilots, did not get through the wall of antiaircraft fire, some did with devastating results. The ammunition ship
John Burke
vanished in a spectacular explosion and another, the
Lewis L. Dyche
, blew up so violently it picked up two PT boats a quarter mile away and dumped them back into the water with heavy damage, while a hail of falling debris, including unexploded shells, rained down on adjacent ships, causing more damage and casualties.

Yamashita was a pragmatist. With the fall of Leyte, he knew he had no hope of stopping an American landing on Luzon and little chance of defeating them once they were ashore. He had lost half of his shipping and thousands of men trying to reinforce Leyte. His naval force now consisted of two submarine chasers, nineteen patrol boats, ten midget subs, and 180 one-man suicide boats, mostly in the Manila Bay area. Perhaps worse, all but about two hundred planes of his air force had been shot down or destroyed on the ground, and by the time the Americans actually came ashore, that number would be reduced to a few dozen.

Luzon is 340 miles long and 130 miles across at its widest. To defend it, Yamashita had six infantry and one armored division, or about 275,000 men, to draw on, but this number was deceptive. Many of his men were not frontline caliber, including convalescing sick and wounded, and most were poorly armed and equipped. There were also about 16,000 naval personnel around Manila, mostly sailors whose ships had been sunk in Leyte Gulf in October, under the command of Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi. But interservice rivalry meant Yamashita had little authority over them.

Unable to prevent a landing, Yamashita ordered that the beaches would not be defended. Instead, he would fight a battle in-depth, making the Americans pay in blood for every yard and to deny for as long as possible the Americans' use of Luzon as an air base to strike at the Japanese homeland. To accomplish this, he broke his defending force into three main elements. His main force of about 152,000 men, called the Shobu Group, were sent into the mountainous regions to the north with orders to tie down the Americans for as long as possible. This would also allow the Japanese to control one of the island's main food-producing areas in the Cagayan Valley. Yamashita remained in command of this unit, setting up his CP in the village of Baguio, a summer mountain resort five thousand feet above sea level.

Another eighty thousand men, called the Shimbu Group, under the command of Lt. Gen. Shizuo Yokoyama, were sent to the south to hold the high ground east of Manila and thus control the city's water supply. The remaining thirty thousand troops, the Kembu Group, under Maj. Gen. Rikichi Tsukada, were to hold the Caraballo Mountains and the west side of the Agno-Pampanga Valley, where the former U.S. bases of Clark Field and Fort Stotsenburg were located, and stretch south to Bataan. They were to hold as long as possible, then retreat to the Zambales mountain range and fight a delaying action.

Manila was indefensible, Yamashita decided, so he ordered his men out except for a small detachment to protect supply routes and blow the highway bridges leading from the city. Iwabuchi decided otherwise and commanded his sixteen thousand sailors to hold the city, which would soon be turned into a charnel house of death and destruction.

* * *

The landings, Operation Mike I, started the morning of January 9. Even though guerrillas onshore had radioed that there would be no Japanese resistance on the beaches, Oldendorf ordered his big naval guns to fire, which they did, needlessly destroying homes and public buildings. At nine thirty a.m., the first of sixty-eight thousand men of the 6th Army came ashore to find, as the guerrillas had said, the Japanese gone. The Scouts landed the next day, setting up their camp near a captured airfield.

As on Leyte, the Scouts were told that their mission on Luzon would mainly be to establish and maintain communications between the various independent guerrilla groups. Information coming from the guerrillas was often exaggerated and sometimes self-serving, meant to boost the prestige of the guerrilla band's leader, and thus was of questionable reliability. The Scouts would also set up observation posts to watch the roads and radio stations, and teach the guerrillas how to gather accurate information, and what to look for, especially numbers of enemy, their armaments, and types of equipment.

The Scouts in the field relied on the natives and often paid them. The teams were issued American dollars or Philippine pesos. When the paper money was gone, they wrote IOUs, which the 6th Army honored. On occasion the Scouts would barter information in return for clothes, food, and ammunition.

Bill Littlefield and his team drew the first Alamo Scout mission on Luzon, a twenty-four-day excursion that began near the town of Tarlac on January 14 and would end February 7 near Manila. Their mission was to reconnoiter southeast of Tarlac, where Highways 3 and 13 intersected. Passing through the American lines and moving well ahead of the advancing army, Littlefield and his men were the first Americans the Filipinos in this region had seen in three years who were not prisoners of war. They responded by giving the Americans flowers and singing songs, including “The Star-Spangled Banner,” that left the Scouts moved. The people wrote a letter of tribute about the Scouts' arrival, with all men signing it on the front and the women on the back.

The villagers also heaped food items on the GIs, especially eggs. Initially, the Scouts appreciated this gesture, but as it was repeated in village after village, they soon had more eggs than they could carry. Littlefield tried to dispose of some by gulping them down raw, but upon cracking open one egg and finding a partially developed chick inside, that culinary experiment quickly ended.

Part of Littlefield's mission at Tarlac was to contact the three-thousand-man Marking Guerrilla unit under Col. Marcos V. Agustin, and to assess their value as a fighting unit and if they could be relied upon to work with the 6th Army. Littlefield met and talked extensively with Agustin and was convinced by the training and discipline of his men of Agustin's reliability as a leader. He radioed back a recommendation to the 6th Army that the Marking group be used in conjunction with U.S. units, and soon the guerrillas would be fighting alongside men of the 43rd Division.

Littlefield continued his mission south toward Manila.

Since the Scouts were out in front of the main body of troops by several miles, many of the Japanese garrisons in the area were as yet unmolested. On several occasions, Littlefield and his team had to creep around enemy garrisons. One night, as he lay silently in the underbrush, Littlefield fought the urge to jump or flinch as a Japanese soldier strolled up to the bushes where the Scout leader lay hidden, opened his fly, and urinated. Littlefield remained immobile as he felt the warm liquid splatter on his leg.

About four days into the mission, Littlefield and his men were offered transportation by a friendly Filipino via several skinny horses that, Littlefield later said, “hadn't had a square meal since December 7, 1941.” The horses had blankets but no saddles, and within just one day the Scouts were all rubbed raw between their legs.

“It damned near killed us,” Littlefield recalled sixty-two years later.

They unanimously decided walking was better.

Littlefield soon discovered that the horses were the least of his problems. As the mission neared its end, Zeke McConnell was stricken with appendicitis and could not keep up with the team. McConnell insisted that the team go on ahead, and that he would follow at his own pace. With great reluctance, Littlefield agreed, but assigned a guerrilla to escort his Cherokee friend and carry his rifle. However, McConnell snatched the weapon from the man, saying, “No, you won't.” The guerrilla carried McConnell's pack and web gear instead.

The team proceeded on ahead, finally reaching American lines, where, to his relief, Littlefield spotted an ambulance loading up injured men. He hurried up to the driver.

“Hold this vehicle here,” he said. “I have a very sick man coming in.”

The driver, nervous at being so close to the flying lead, said, “I can't wait, sir.”

“Yes, you can, son,” Littlefield replied.

“I have no room, sir,” the man insisted. “The ambulance is full. And the Japs might attack us here.”

“You are not going anywhere until my man gets here,” Littlefield commanded, and the nervous driver waited. Finally, Littlefield spotted McConnell and the guerrilla approaching and ran out to meet them. He helped his friend into the ambulance and the vehicle sped off.

McConnell had surgery, but even the hospital wasn't safe. As McConnell lay recuperating, Japanese attacked the base and the patients in their beds were told to lie still while outside the battle raged as marines held off the enemy assault. McConnell ached to get up and get into the fight, but could not.

While hospitalized, however, McConnell met two POWs released from Cabanatuan prison camp just days earlier, both from his own home state of Oklahoma. He and the skinny, sickly men had a “nice reunion,” he later recalled.

* * *

As Littlefield continued moving south, Bill Nellist was summoned to a briefing. In the mountains east of Lingayen Gulf and the town of Santo Thomas, the Japanese had built an intricate cave and tunnel network stockpiled with supplies, food, and weapons. Protecting the installation were an undetermined number of 240mm howitzers, mounted on tracks so that after being fired they could be rolled, via an elaborate pulley system, back through camouflaged doors into a mountainside cave and hidden from the prying eyes of American spotter aircraft. The tracks also allowed the Japanese the mobility to shift the guns' firing positions.

Seven men gathered in the CP for the briefing that, to Nellist's surprise, was delivered by General Krueger himself.

“Our troops can't get across the Rosario Road because of those goddamned Jap big guns,” Krueger said. “You've got to locate and pinpoint those bastards, Bill. But I have to tell you, the area is crawling with Japs. They have a defensive perimeter running from San Jose south to Urdaneta. You've got a fifty-fifty chance of getting in. And if you do get in, only an act of God is going to get you out.”

Nellist knew this would be a tough nut to crack and that, as a Scout, he could refuse any mission. But that ran against his grain. The Jap guns had to be taken out.