Behind Japanese Lines (15 page)

MacArthur had even made highly optimistic plans for an American-Filipino counterattack near the end of the Bataan campaign. If Japanese lines were breached, Allied troops would then be able to operate on the rich central Luzon plain where food was plentiful. From here they could protect the north approaches to Bataan and Corregidor. Even if they failed, he considered, many of them could escape into the Zambales Mountains and could undertake guerrilla warfare in conjunction with Filipino forces already operating there. In the event, nothing came of this scheme because all the Allied troops near the end of the Bataan campaign were too sick, starved, exhausted, and dispirited to attack anyone.

Also before the fall of Bataan, General MacArthur had directed Maj. Claude Thorp to lead perhaps twenty Americans and Filipinos through Japanese lines to Mt. Pinatubo in extreme northwestern Pampanga province. Here they were to gather arms, form local Philippine Constabulary men into a guerrilla force, disrupt the enemy from behind and, when American reinforcements arrived in Bataan, fight their way out. Of course, the expected reinforcements never
arrived and Bataan surrendered, leaving Thorp and his associates abandoned. Still, he had at least been sent out by MacArthur, which was more than any of the numerous free lance operators on Luzon then could say, so for a short time Thorp assumed command of all irregular forces on Luzon, though his real authority was shadowy. He had with him Lt. Robert Lapham, Sgt. Everett Brooks, Capt. Ralph McGuire, Maj. Charles M. Cushing, Sgt. David Cahill, Pvt. Earl L. Baxter, Sgt. Alfred D. Bruce, Cpl. Stafford, 1st Sgt. Slutsky, Sgt. McCarthy, nine Filipino Scouts, and Herminia “Minang” Dizon, a remarkable Filipina ex-schoolteacher with whom I subsequently became intimately acquainted. Various other American and Filipino escapees from Bataan, Corregidor, and the earlier fighting in north Luzon joined this group from time to time.
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Estimates of Thorp's character and abilities vary widely. William H. Brooks, who had escaped from Bataan and who knew Thorp, said he was one of the finest men he had ever encountered and that he deserved a Silver Star for his deeds. Clay Conner, who was closely associated with Thorp, concurred, alleging that “he did a staggeringly great job in a very short time.” Robert Lapham, who came out of Bataan with Thorp, accepted an appointment from him, and understandably felt a sense of loyalty to him, respected him as an American career officer of the traditional sort. Others have depicted Thorp as cold, aloof, slow of thought, unwilling to take advice, and prone simply to hide out much of the time.
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If there was any truth in the last, it was only partial. Perhaps ten days after they had made their way through the Japanese lines, Thorp and his followers were holed up somewhere east of Olongapo in the foothills of the Zambales Mountains. They had run low on food and equipment but had also observed that every day a Japanese truck convoy passed over a winding mountain road nearby. Thorp decided to ambush one of the convoys, partly to punish the enemy but primarily in hope of replenishing his depleted supplies. A “Captain McIntyre” (almost certainly Capt. Ralph McGuire), who understood demolition work and who had brought several sticks of GI dynamite with him from Bataan, buried his explosives forty to fifty feet apart along a level section of the road. Before long a Japanese staff car was sighted coming up the winding dirt track. It was followed by three trucks carrying Japanese troops.

McIntyre (or McGuire) had rigged his dynamite expertly, and he lit the fuses at just the right times. The first explosion blew up the first truck and killed most of the Japanese troops in it. The others overturned the staff car and the other two trucks, spilling their
occupants both onto the road and into the ditches beside it. A wild gun battle broke out immediately. Several Japanese shot the Filipino driver of the staff car as he tried to flee up the side of a hill. An American, Corporal Jellison, narrowly escaped death when a Japanese officer missed him with a pistol at point blank range. Reprieved, he shot the officer in the head with his M-1, and for good measure killed several Nipponese soldiers floundering in the road, too crippled or too shocked to run away. Sgt. Everett Brooks grabbed his tommygun and killed all the half-dazed enemy soldiers who had been blasted or thrown out of the second truck. Thorp himself fired one burst from his tommygun only to have it jam, but he stayed cool and directed his men as they shot the Japanese who had been blown from the third truck. There were no known enemy survivors.

There were other Japanese troops not far off, though. They heard the explosions and subsequent shooting, and soon directed light artillery and mortar fire into the area. Thorp and his men at once fled northward farther into the mountains.

Despite this sweeping, if small, victory, and whatever his character or native talents, Thorp was soon trapped in near-hopeless circumstances. He succeeded in establishing his headquarters near Mt. Pinatubo, and he tried to bring some system into guerrilla operations. Unquestionably, his most inspired action was to appoint Lapham inspector general of various groups in central Luzon. Lapham eventually became the commander of guerrillas in Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and northern Tarlac. In the opinion of a Filipino historian of irregular operations in that part of Luzon, Lapham did more than anyone else there to “further the cause of freedom.”
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Otherwise, things went badly for the whole group. Thorp himself was captured by the Japanese in the fall of 1942. According to some tales told afterward, he was taken to a Manila cemetery in the dead of night, where his captors cut off his head; according to others, he was decapitated in Old Bilibid prison. Several of those who had been with him were also soon caught and executed.

These developments were heavy disappointments for General MacArthur in Australia. As soon as he had arrived there after his celebrated escape from Corregidor, he had begun to plan the eventual reconquest of the Philippines. To facilitate it he would need regular, accurate information about the size of enemy ground forces and their disposition, the number and location of Japanese ships, the activities of the Japanese military administration, the temper of the Filipinos, and a thousand lesser matters. Well-organized guerrilla units would be ideal collectors of such intelligence. The commander in chief gave
the job of coordinating guerrillas for such purposes to his own G-2, Gen. Charles Willoughby, who in turn put Col. Allison Ind in immediate charge of Philippine affairs, a position known among staffers as “the ulcer factory.”
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Things went reasonably well in the southern islands, where Japanese control seldom extended beyond a few coastal towns. By November 1942 Maj. Macario Peralta had assumed control of all guerrillas (about eight thousand men) in the Visayan Islands and was regularly relaying information of all sorts to Australia. On Mindanao Col. Wendell Fertig gradually established his authority and began to send similar information. On Luzon, by contrast, after the capture and execution of Nakar, MacArthur heard nothing until January 3, 1943, when a radio message came from the Cagayan Valley in the far north. It was signed by Capt. Ralph B. Praeger, who had escaped when Corregidor fell. He had salvaged a radio transmitter from a mine, and with a Filipino communications worker who had been persuaded to join Willoughby's prewar underground intelligence network, had managed to make halting radio contact with the outside world.
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Praeger said he was running a local sub rosa government and could organize five thousand Filipino trainees, ROTC students, and intelligence operatives if only he could get arms and ammunition. He received much encouragement from Australia but no material aid, since MacArthur was then short of everything for his own campaigns in the swamps and jungles of New Guinea.
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In any case, MacArthur wanted the guerrillas to confine themselves to gathering intelligence so as not to provoke the Japanese to wreak reprisals on helpless civilians; but many guerrillas, and civilians as well, were anxious to ambush enemy soldiers and to liquidate spies and Japanese sympathizers. Ultimately the guerrillas did much in all these realms, though gathering information was their most important activity since it enabled American forces to know where to land and what to expect from the enemy when they began the reconquest of the Philippines late in 1944.

Though only Thorp, Lapham, and a few others had instructions from USAFFE headquarters to undertake guerrilla operations, this did not dissuade a varied array of Americans and Filipinos from organizing their own private armies in 1942.

Around Manila two odd, though not bloodthirsty, bands evolved who quarrelled a good deal among themselves: the Hunters, composed heavily of ex-ROTC students, and Marking's guerrillas. The latter were named after their nominal leader, a Filipino ex-boxer and ex-bus driver, Marcos Augustin; though the brains of the outfit was
clearly Marking's mistress, a sharp, energetic, and tenacious mestiza who bore the picturesque name of Yay Panlilio. Before the war she had been a newspaperwoman. During the conflict she displayed sufficient ability and personal magnetism that Marking's guerrillas called her Mammy and named one of their regiments after her, while no less a figure than General Willoughby paid tribute to her contribution to the Allied cause. After the war she wrote one of the most informative and interesting books done either by a guerrilla or about irregulars.
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The personal relationship of Panlilio and “Marking” was quite as tempestuous as the guerrilla life they led. Marking respected her talents and knew she was vital to his organization, but he could never stand to be bossed by a woman. As a consequence, they quarrelled incessantly. At the end of the war she left him and came back to the United States, only to succumb eventually to his repeated entreaties and marry him.

Up in north Luzon, when the Japanese landed at Lingayen Gulf in December 1941, nearby Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippines, was declared on open city. Whether for this reason, from bad judgment, or from mere timidity, Col. John P. Horan, who commanded a U.S. battalion nearby, withdrew in great haste southeastward toward Balete Pass, intending to join other American forces in central Luzon. He destroyed most of his equipment along the way but was still beaten to the pass by the Japanese. He then simply disbanded his tired and demoralized troops, and he and they fled into the mountains. Horan himself was lucky not to be killed by Al Hendrickson, whose guerrilla detachment I later joined. Hendrickson had laid an ambush for the Japanese near Balete Pass. Horan narrowly missed being bagged by mistake, only to be ordered by General Wainwright to surrender to the Japanese. Horan's conduct has been described by one stern judge
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as heartbreaking evidence that much peacetime army experience sometimes seems to ruin men for war. Nonetheless, his actions did indubitably spread the sparks of guerrilla resistance all over north Luzon.

Meanwhile a baroque character named Walter Cushing had raised his personal guerrilla force. Cushing was a small, hard-drinking, cocky mining engineer from Texas who had come to the Philippines in 1933 in a mining boom. Fearless to the point of foolhardiness, energetic, imaginative, self-sacrificing, capable of joining the French Foreign Legion when drunk and then jumping enlistment when some friends got him interested in a new mining venture, Walter Cushing was the sort of man about whom legends grow. Only two days after the Japanese landed in Lingayen Gulf, he left his mine and began to
train his erstwhile Filipino miners to be soldiers. Soon after, to the mingled disgust and admiration of their commanding officer, Lt. Robert Arnold, Cushing simply commandeered thirty American soldiers who had been operating an air warning station on the north Luzon coast and who had been cut off when the Japanese swept through central Luzon.
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The flabbergasted Arnold went along, helped Cushing train the men Cushing had just taken away from him, and cooperated enthusiastically when Cushing began to ambush Japanese detachments. Once they even captured an enemy general and his whole staff. Though Arnold performed with such bravery in these endeavors that he was eventually awarded a Bronze Star, he was disgusted when Cushing claimed all the credit and so deserted him to join Nakar's outfit after the fall of Bataan.
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Un-discouraged, Cushing then made common cause with Colonel Horan, who reciprocated by commissioning the civilian Cushing a “captain.”

These transactions involving Cushing, Arnold, Nakar, and Horan were all too typical of guerrilla relationships on Luzon. Some of the guerrillas were soldiers and some were civilians; the soldiers came in many ranks; some of them had, or claimed, authorization from MacArthur's headquarters, but most did not or could not; they cherished widely differing plans; and most of them wanted to boss some of the others.

Sometimes obscurity and confusion approached infinity. This was especially the case with guerrillas of the lone wolf genre. One such unaffiliated operator was Henry Clay Conner, who allegedly organized no fewer than three thousand guerrillas and was active in several parts of Luzon for three years. He was sufficiently well known and respected that an assemblage of guerrilla veterans of Luzon was convened in his honor in Indianapolis in September, 1984. Several of those who attended publicly paid tribute to his achievements and memory. Conner was even in the Fassoth camp at the same time I was.
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Yet I never knew Conner existed, and I wonder if General Willoughby in Australia did either, since he does not mention Conner a single time in the seven hundred pages of materials he assembled and published under the title
The Guerrilla Resistance in the Philippines
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Be all that as it may, after Corregidor fell Walter Cushing decided that further resistance was useless and so disbanded his organization, though he did not surrender personally. Instead he began to publish a news sheet to counteract Japanese propaganda. Soon he was travelling all over Luzon, even into Manila, to contact other guerrilla groups and
to solicit money from wealthy Filipinos in order to buy U.S. weapons and ammunition that the Japanese had captured and were now selling on the black market. He took the weapons back north with him in a truck, but the Japanese caught up with him in Isabela province.