Shadows In the Jungle (38 page)

The shooting was over in less than twenty minutes and Santos yelled for McFadden to bring the wounded men forward. As he did, the amtracs began rumbling into the camp.

The next problem was getting the internees onto the vehicles. Many refused to go without their personal possessions, and some wanted to drag extra clothes and other articles with them. The order was given to torch the barracks buildings, cruelly, but out of necessity, burning out the prisoners and forcing their evacuation.

As each of the fifty-four amtracs was loaded with internees—only about half, primarily the sickest, along with women, children, nuns, and twelve U.S. Navy nurses, could be taken on the first trip—the armored vehicle drove back to the lake and chugged across the water.

After the last amtrac had departed, the GIs herded the rest of the people toward the lakeshore to await their return. As they neared the beachhead, the distant rumble of tracked vehicles could be heard. Fearing it might be approaching Japanese reinforcements, panic swept the internees as the Americans yelled for them to “scatter and take cover.” All sighed with relief as the first of the returning amtracs rolled around a bend in the road.

Time was of the essence. While the Americans had killed many of the Japanese garrison, another ten thousand men were less than ten miles away, and might even now have been alerted and were racing toward Los Baños.

Even as the GIs were loading internees into the amtracs, gunfire was heard in the distance, off to the north. The fire was part of the 188th Glider Infantry Regiment's diversion. Elements of the diversionary force had rolled out Highway 1 and attacked Japanese positions just across the San Juan River. Heavy fighting took place around Lechería Hills, some of it hand-to-hand, and troopers J. C. Doiron and Virgil McMurtry were killed, as were two guerrillas, Pfc. Atanacio Castillo and Pfc. Anselmo Soler. Despite the losses, by mid-morning the troopers had cleared the area and were marching toward Los Baños, thus cutting the road between the Japanese Tiger Division and the internment camp. From his position on high ground, the commander, Colonel Soule, the expedition leader, could see the amtracs loading the internees and heading across the lake like water bugs. When the last vehicle had cleared, he ordered a defensive withdrawal back across the San Juan River.

At lakeside, a Japanese machine gun, which had somehow reached the LZ, opened fire on an amtrac, its 7.62mm slugs bouncing off the vehicle's steel sides. Cpl. Dwight Clark of the 672nd Amphibian Tractor Battalion, manning the amtrac's .50-caliber machine gun, spotted the enemy position inside a wooden hut and opened fire. The heavy lead slugs tore the shack apart and silenced the gun before it could inflict any casualties.

Santos and the recon platoon boarded the last amtrac to leave Los Baños. His four-man team had suffered the only American casualties among the men who had raided the camp. The number of Japanese killed was not known, although it was probably between eighty and one hundred. No internees were killed or injured.

The raid at Los Baños had freed 2,147 internees, including Lois Kathleen McCoy, who had been delivered three days earlier in the prison infirmary by U.S. Navy nurse Dorothy Danner and was now being carried to safety by her mother, Mildred, an American schoolteacher who had been working in Manila, and her father, Oscar, who had been the Philippines representative of Republic Steel of Ohio.

Santos was awarded a Silver Star for his actions during the operation, the first of two he would win.

One objective was left unaccomplished. Los Baños's supply officer, Lt. Sadaaki Konishi, had been especially brutal to the internees. Orders had gone out to capture the man if at all possible, but despite rumors that he had been killed, he had, in fact, managed to escape into the jungle.

However, sometime later he was observed working as a Filipino laborer by a former Los Baños internee. The internee notified the local police, who jailed Konishi. After the war, he was tried for war crimes and sentenced to prison.

The raid at Los Baños, one of the most successful rescues in American military history, went almost unnoticed by the public back home in the States. That was because on the very same day, February 23, 1945, hundreds of miles to the north on the stinking, steaming volcanic island of Iwo Jima, five U.S. Marines and a navy corpsman raised a flag atop an extinct volcano called Mount Suribachi. That image, captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, became a powerful symbol of the war effort in the Pacific.

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

 

 

 

 

F
rom 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.