Behind Japanese Lines (33 page)

The weapons brought to us by the submarines were most welcome, obviously, though not every guerrilla unit got a sample of every type. I was keenly aware of what my organization needed but did not get. There were no artillery pieces, mortars, rifle grenades, mines, or
dynamite, all of which would have been extremely useful to us. Of course, there was no use complaining about this. A submarine can carry only so much, and it cannot carry artillery at all.

Dynamite would have been invaluable for demolition. Lacking it, we once tried to blow up a bridge by attaching thirty-second fuses to some 75-mm. shells we happened to have. All they did was blow holes in the reinforced concrete deck. In fact, more damage was done to two of our own men, Eusebio Membrado and Juan Leal, than to the bridge; and the medical “treatment” they got afterward was worse than their original injuries. It made me sick to watch our company doctor, Fidel Ramirez, probe around in their wounds without an anesthetic, looking for fragments of concrete. When I questioned him about his crude procedures, he said he was a pediatrician, not exactly the medical specialty we needed most just then.

Every gun we got presented problems of some kind. All those in the semi-automatic class had different recoil actions. For each a minimum time had to elapse after firing before the gun would settle back into its original position so it could be fired again with some accuracy. If insufficient time was allowed, each successive shot would hit higher than the preceding one. One had to aim low and fire in short bursts, otherwise most of the bullets would go high and be wasted. Low shots at least had a chance to ricochet into the target. For me, the worst such weapon was the Browning automatic rifle (BAR). When it worked properly, it was a devastating gun; but it was heavy, had large, bulky clips, and jammed easily. I tried firing it from a sling and from the hip, but I could never control it. I practiced by shooting at tree roots. Invariably, within a few seconds I was shooting out treetops.

I liked the semi-automatic M-1 Garand 30.06 better, though it was also heavy and jammed easily if its ammunition clips were dented or dirty. Its sights were also sensitive and could be knocked awry merely by passing through brush. One had to spend a lot of time cleaning and sighting a Garand, but if it was properly kept up it was a fine weapon. Though less accurate than a Springfield, it spat out bullets in a stream.

My sentimental favorite was the Springfield .03. It was an older (World War I) rifle than the Garand but much the most reliable gun we had. It was bolt action, carried five shells individually inserted plus one in the chamber, and had open iron sights that were not easily jimmied. You could drop it in a river and expect it to fire faithfully when it was fished out. Lighter than a Garand, it was easier to carry save in dense brush. Not least, it had a good feel in one's hand, like a
certain cue does to a pool player or a favorite old glove to a baseball player. Under primitive conditions a simple, durable weapon is often the most practical, as the global popularity of the Russian Kalashnikov rifle has demonstrated since World War II.

We got a few tommyguns: heavy, clumsy, short-barrelled .45-caliber blasters that fired either twenty-shot clips or fifty-round drums of bullets, though they were most effective when fired in bursts of five shots. The FBI made tommyguns famous. I used mine sometimes to hunt wild pigs.

We also got three weapons that were brand new, at least to me. One was a carbine, a light, flimsy, tinny sounding thing that looked like it might have been made from a Prince Albert tobacco can. Though its sights were not reliable, it was a good weapon in the brush because it splattered bullets all over the place. The grease gun was another .45, so called because it looked like a grease gun and poured out a seemingly endless steam of bullets. It had a retractable iron stock, and was short, heavy, awkward to carry, and hard to handle. Finally, we got a case of bazookas. We did not know what they were, and no instructions came with them. Not surprisingly, we had a hard time figuring out how they worked or what could be done with them. Filipinos are fond of guns, and many of our men had repeatedly taken apart and reassembled the ancient relics we had been carrying about for many months. Because they had sometimes made mistakes, we had had lot of misfires. Now they had some new toys to tinker with. Before long a couple of adventuresome tyros managed to fire a round from a bazooka by accident, fortunately without killing anyone in the process. I had a couple of narrow escapes myself. Once one of my men reported that his BAR would not fire in the automatic position. I had had so little to do with BARs that I did not realize that the mere force of loading would cause the firing pin to strike the cartridge. Thus, when I took his gun and began to look at it the first thing I did was inadvertently fire a shot that creased the arm of a curious Filipino lieutenant nearby. Another time I was casual with a tommygun inside a house and thereby fired an unplanned burst. This occasion was especially embarrassing, since I had just dressed down my men for being careless about misfires and for shooting when the Japanese were near enough to hear them. In this case, luckily, the walls of the house prevented the racket from reaching enemy ears.

In the last months of 1944, especially after the Leyte landings in October made it evident that American landings on Luzon could not be far off, general headquarters directed us to save our new weapons so they would be a surprise to the enemy when we went into serious
action. We had always had trouble restraining the more impetuous of the Filipinos. Now that the tempo of everything was picking up visibly, and they had new guns in the bargain, I could not always contain them. When the bazooka was fired accidentally, the destructive force of its shell made an indelible impression on everyone nearby. At once my men begged me to let them take it down into the lowlands, well away from where we happened to be just then, and try it out against a Kempeitai outpost. After an argument, I relented. They dashed off, jubilant as six-year-olds at a birthday party. The bazooka was a tremendous success: those in the Japanese outpost never knew what hit them. There were no known survivors.

The whole episode typified a problem that guerrilla leaders had with Filipinos everywhere. Ordinarily they would listen to reason and would not attack Japanese in their own locale because of the reprisals against civilians that would follow. But now and then they would burn to retaliate for some enemy atrocity, or they would just get “antsy” and want some action, so they would go some distance away and attack Japanese there, thus insuring that enemy vengenance would at least fall on civilians under the wing of some other guerrillas.

An unauthorized, and more private, venture by a Filipino lieutenant was comparably noisy but much less successful than the bazooka attack. One day, dressed as a member of the Constabulary and armed with one of our new carbines, he stopped three Japanese riding along a dusty road in a buggy. He asked them to dismount and accompany him, saying he would take them to a village where a party was to be given in their honor. His real intention was probably to shoot them, since we had by then a standing rule that no Japanese prisoners were to be taken. Before long the presumed honored guests noticed the lieutenant's carbine, a weapon they had never seen before. Soon they put two and two together and started to run off. The lieutenant promptly laid down a hail of lead with his new firearm. Though he killed one Japanese, he was such a bad shot that he missed the other two, who of course rushed back to their garrison to tell their compatriots about the new American weapon. I was disgusted. If our man had killed all the Japanese it would have been fine: instead, he had revealed to the enemy a weapon we had planned to conceal. Thus, instead of being commended or decorated for bravery he was reprimanded and disciplined for bad judgment. So fine the line between hero and goat. . . .

As the foregoing incidents indicate, and especially when it became clear that the Japanese anticipated American landings soon,
guerrilla morale bounded upward. Fortunately, there were many ways to keep the men busy, most notably after we were told by SWPA headquarters in Australia to be ready to give all-out support to the invasion forces whenever we received pertinent directives, five days before the landings. We started twenty things at once. We mapped towns and buildings where the enemy had stored supplies so American planes would (hopefully) not do unnecessary damage when bombing. We made plans to cut enemy communications and supply lines, and to sabotage fuel dumps. We picked strategic spots along roads and trails where we could set last-minute road blocks and ambushes. We built storehouses in the mountains and foothills in northern and eastern Pangasinan, and stored rice in them. We made arrangements to rescue and hide downed American pilots; and assigned each company specific duties in all these spheres before the anticipated invasion and during it.
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Morale problems developed in some U.S. units during the fighting in northern Luzon in 1945, but among the guerrillas late in 1944 our main problem was to keep our men cool.

As mentioned before, among my constant vexations was dealing with nuisances who posed as guerrillas, as well as adventurers and bandits who formed “paper” guerrilla organizations as covers for illicit operations of various types. This grew much worse in the last year of the war and in the immediate postwar period. In particular, all the collaborators rushed to join some irregular unit in order to expunge their guilt and appear to returning American forces as fellow warriors in the struggle for freedom.

Another common type was the ambitious opportunist who wanted to be able to claim guerrilla service in order to promote himself in postwar Philippine politics. Men of this sort were forever raising imaginary armies which they invariably “commanded.” One particular rascal of the political type I ordered arrested. One of my men, in ordinary Filipino dress, apprehended the man in broad daylight in a village full of Japanese troops, and told him “Captain Hunt wants to see you.” The aspiring politician tried to offer some excuse to depart, but the guerrilla replied that he had orders to deliver the man alive or leave him dead in the dust. This information clarified the troublemaker's understanding marvellously, and he walked briskly in the direction of my current hideaway with the guard right behind him. Quite likely his thoughts were on an incident he had recently witnessed in his home village. There a guerrilla, like the present one tailing him, had simply opened a hollow gourd, pulled out a gun, and shot two Japanese at point blank range.

When the pair reached my abode, I let the prisoner wait a considerable time. When I came to see him at last, his forehead was covered with beads of perspiration. Probably he thought this day was going to be his last. I spoke to him quietly, asking him only about his recruiting efforts and whether he was in contact with American forces outside the Philippines. To the latter he replied eagerly that he did indeed have such contacts and that only a few days before he had received some smuggled American magazines which he now planned to distribute. I listened to this for a time, then asked Greg to bring me a new .45 grease gun. I pointed it out the window and shot some bark off a nearby tree. The man's eyes widened. Then I asked him if he knew what kind of gun it was? All he could answer was that it was new. I then asked him which he thought would do more harm to our common enemy, the magazines he proposed to distribute or the gun? He assured me profusely that he understood my meaning and that he would never do anything that would in any way interfere with the activities of true guerrillas. So I let him go. Similar pests got similar warnings, or else they were invited to take guns and become guerrillas on the spot. With most, that ended the conversation and we had no trouble from them afterward.

One day late in 1944 I was standing outdoors when I heard a long, low rumble. As I strained my eyes southward I saw something I had dreamed about for two and a half years; columns of smoke climbing into the sky, in this case from the direction of Clark Field in Pam-panga. It indicated that American planes had bombed an enemy stronghold. All of us burst out with cries of joy and pummelled each other on the back with wild abandon. Every guerrilla on Luzon must have responded just as we did. Clay Conner called the bombing “the most beautiful sight imaginable.” Frank Gyovai said it was the grandest sight he ever saw. Yay Panlilio wrote that even Marking's dog succumbed to the hysteria: whining, barking, and quivering with excitement as their guerrillas whooped and hollered and cried.
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A few days later we actually saw some American planes of a new type; P-38s, as it turned out. Then we saw occasional dogfights. Unlike those in the early days of the war, these invariably ended with the P-38s downing or chasing off their Japanese opponents. Soon navy planes began to fly over regularly. I thought of their pilots who would sleep between white sheets that night, with no fear of the Japanese. This, in turn, brought back thoughts of home, of seeing my parents and younger sisters again, of sleeping in a soft bed without either the
company or the buzzing of insects, and of ice cream, cake, cheese, a cold bottle of beer, white bread, white women, merely the companionship of ordinary Americans again.

Those last three months of 1944, blurred in my memory now after the passage of four decades, were a strange mixture of matters of the utmost gravity, some bizarre personal adventures, and some mere frivolity. The serious part was that I knew time was growing short, and I worried about the accuracy of the intelligence we had gathered and whether I had drawn the proper conclusions from it.

Other concerns were less vital. One day on my way to our regular headquarters near San Quintin, I received an invitation to visit the home of a Spanish mestizo named Juan Bautista. Juan owned 7,500 acres of fine rice land, and from the standpoint of our guerrillas was an admirable fellow since he had once given us ten thousand pesos. To be sure, he had given it in Japanese scrip and now wanted a receipt indicating that he should be repaid one day in sound Philippine or American money. While I had to turn him down politely on that score, he must not have expected anything else, since he treated me royally to drinks and a feast of barbecued pig, followed by a siesta, and then a dance to a string band. The whole performance stretched over many hours in a beautiful house and was seasoned with pleasant conversation on a variety of topics.