Behind Japanese Lines (37 page)

Before the U.S. landings on Luzon, the Japanese had removed most of the stronger prisoners from Cabanatuan and put them on ships destined for Japan. Among those evacuated was my friend Walter Chatham, who had escaped with me on the Death March, spent five months with me in the Fassoth camps, been captured there, and subsequently been consigned to Cabanatuan. As usual, the prison ships were unmarked and so, as usual, several of them were attacked by American planes and submarines. Walter's luck held. His ship made it to Japan. With hundreds of others who landed on Honshu or Hokkaido, he was promptly put to work in a coalmine, from ten to sixteen hours per day, seven days a week. Only about five hundred weak, sick, bewildered men, many hardly able to walk, were left in Cabanatuan by January 1945.

The plan to raid Cabanatuan was worked out by Col. Morton V. White of General Krueger's staff. He got much assistance from Bob Lapham and from Lt. Col. Henry A. Mucci, who was to lead the actual attack by something over a hundred members of the Sixth Ranger Infantry Battalion. The attackers were to be preceded by ten elite Alamo Scouts, who would infiltrate many miles behind Japanese lines twenty-four hours in advance of the main force. The whole venture was to be supported by about four hundred of Lapham's guerrillas, led by two of Bob's Filipino guerrilla lieutenants, Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson. Colonel Mucci tried to impress upon his Rangers the extreme gravity of the enterprise by taking them to a church where he briefed them and then asked each one to take a blood oath that he would die rather than allow any harm to come to the prisoners.

The whole venture was planned with unusual skill. When the attack was launched at 7:30
P.M
. January 30, 1945, complete surprise was achieved. In twenty minutes it was all over. Every single one of the 225 Japanese soldiers in the camp garrison was killed, and 513 prisoners were freed. The cost was remarkably small: one prisoner died from excitement on the way out; two Americans were killed and seven others were wounded; and about a dozen Filipino guerrillas suffered superficial wounds.

What it cost the enemy is less certain. The author of the most detailed account of the operation says more than a thousand Japanese soldiers in the town of Cabanatuan, a short way north of the camp, heard the firing and rushed to aid their comrades. They ran into a guerrilla ambush set by Lieutenant Pajota and were all slaughtered.
⁶
I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of this contention, but perhaps it should be viewed in the context of various claims that my own guerrillas killed three thousand Japanese in the five days immediately preceding the Lingayen landings, and that Tom Chengay's battalion alone killed three hundred then. Al Hendrickson, who certainly had as much experience as anyone of fighting all over Luzon throughout the war, thinks all these claims are much exaggerated.
⁷
Quite likely he is correct, but both my own observation and reports I received from all sides in those days indicate that Japanese were “wall to wall” all over Pangasinan and that a high proportion of them did not live long enough to make it into the mountains.

Aside from saving the lives of five hundred men, the most important aspect of the Cabanatuan raid was symbolic: it showed how much Americans value their own people and the extremes to which we would go to rescue them. In those same weeks Japanese kamikaze attacks were demonstrating how little our enemies valued
any
lives, even their own; how inhuman was their determination to fight on no matter how hopeless the circumstances or how high the cost. The contrast must have helped convince many Americans, if anything further was needed, that
any
measure was legitimate if it could compel the Japanese to surrender and thereby save American lives.

I was overjoyed to learn that one of those liberated from Cabanatuan was my friend and benefactor William J. Fassoth, the civilian sugar planter who had built the “Shangri-la” mountain camps where I had stayed for several months after escaping from the Death March. A year later I felt immensely privileged to write a recommendation that enabled Mr. Fassoth to receive the Medal of Freedom.

It was also heartening to learn in due course that other American troops had successfully raided other prison camps. Some broke into Santo Tomas University in Manila on February 3, 1945, and rescued 3,700 American and Allied civilians. Still others, supported by guerrillas, attacked Los Baños prison camp on Laguna de Bay south of Manila on February 24. There they killed the whole Japanese garrison and rescued 2,100 internees at a loss of only two American dead. These brilliant rescues contrasted starkly with the ghastly fate of 140 American prisoners on Palawan Island. On December 14, 1944, these men were doused with gasoline in an underground shelter, set afire by
their Japanese jailers, and then machinegunned as they tried to break out. Only nine escaped.
⁸

Aside from lives saved, fallout from the Cabanatuan raid was mixed. It was appropriate that Colonel Mucci and Capt. Robert Prince should have gotten DSCs for leading the expedition, that the other officers involved should have been awarded Silver Stars, and all the enlisted men and 412 Filipino guerrillas Bronze Stars. But why had two Filipino guerrilla officers, Juan Pajota and Eduardo Joson, been left off the list for Silver Stars when both of them had played leading roles in the rescue?
⁹
It was an ominous foretaste of the injustice and ingratitude shown to many Filipino soldiers at the end of the war.

One feature of the Cabanatuan raid left a particularly bitter taste in my mouth and, I would gather, in that of Bob Lapham as well. It was the part played in it by the Hukbalahaps, the ancestors of the New People's Army of today. When American forces began to penetrate Luzon, all of us expected to see the Huks disarmed and disbanded. Instead, to our surprise and dismay, and over our protests, the U.S. command elected to give them additional arms and treat them as part of the forces of liberation. Though most of us did not think in ideological terms at that time, and hated the Huks merely because they had consistently opposed and fought us for two years, many American writers were then praising them. The Soviet Union was then regarded as a courageous ally in the common war against Nazi Germany. In the view of contemporary “progressives” there was nothing but nobility to be discovered in anyone or anything Left. I recall becoming enraged on one occasion after reading an article in
Reader's Digest
by some ignoramus who obviously knew nothing serious about Huk activities in the war. They showed their true colors anew during the Cabanatuan raid. Guerrilla Captain Joson, who committed eighty of his men to the rescue operation, had to leave the remaining twenty to guard his own headquarters against a possible treacherous Huk attack. Then, after the rescue had been pulled off, some hundred armed Huks tried to prevent the Americans and guerrillas from taking the liberated prisoners through territory under Huk control.
¹⁰

Because it was decided in the higher echelons of our government that the Huks should be supplied with American arms and equipment, and then left entirely to the attention of the new Philippine government, Huk bullets killed many Americans and Filipinos for years after the war was over.
¹¹
The most notable victims of the murderous scoundrels were Mrs. Aurora Quezon, the widow of the
first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, and her daughter, both of whom perished in a Huk ambush. The only beneficent result of this vile deed was that it shocked most Filipinos and deprived the Huks of considerable sympathy and support for a time.

The fate of Japanese soldiers who surrendered in those days was sobering. Now and then one or two would give up and would live long enough to be interrogated by Americans. Occasionally what happened was semi-comic. I have never forgotten one naive prisoner asking during interrogation who was winning the war. He said that if the Americans were winning he wanted to remain a prisoner, but if not he would appreciate it if his captors would return him to his own forces.

Few were lucky enough to voice such sentiments. Not a single Japanese survived either the raid on Cabanatuan prison camp or on the town of Cabanatuan afterward. Almost nobody
tried
to take enemy prisoners, and there were instances of Japanese being shot down in cold blood by American soldiers or guerrillas when they came toward our lines naked, with their hands in the air. Barbarity it was, but the Japanese would not have been treated thus had they not set the tone three years earlier. Even now, near the end of the war, some of them would still booby-trap themselves and feign a desire to surrender in a final desperate effort to kill as many Americans as they could.

Some of the American interrogators of surrendered Japanese were Nisei, American soldiers of Japanese descent who had been imported into the Philippines from Hawaii just before the war to keep the Japanese population of the Philippines under surveillance. They had been trained by the FBI. One could almost feel the hatred between them and the Japanese prisoners. The Nisei tended to be rough questioners.

Generally, those Japanese who were captured and managed to live were meek and cooperative, quite unlike the vicious little beasts they had been in battle. It was this aspect of Japanese psychology that baffled nearly everyone else but which General MacArthur seems to have understood thoroughly when he accepted the formal surrender of Japan and moved about freely in that country at the end of the war, in circumstances that appeared to invite kamikaze attacks.

Years afterward, when World War II came to be seen in a somewhat different perspective, and particularly when I had occasion to make short trips to Japan during the Korean War, my former hatred of the Japanese gradually turned into respect. They were obviously bright, industrious people with a distinctive culture, who were fast
clearing away the rubble of the big war and making Japan a clean, beautiful place again. They made no trouble at all for our occupation troops. No doubt my change of mind owed something, too, to the crudeness, poverty, destruction, and general disarray that characterized unfortunate Korea in those years.

Why a person chooses a certain course of action at some crossroads in his life, he often does not know for sure. In war, when personal feelings frequently conflict with what seems to be duty, one is often hard put to explain afterward just what impelled him to do a certain thing and not something else. In January 1945 I could have returned to the United States. I wanted to come home, especially after all the tough experiences I had had, and I remember thinking at the time that I must be crazy to turn down the opportunity.

But turn it down I did. I stayed in the Philippines for another five months, and several times came as close to death as I ever had when a guerrilla. Why did I do it? Perhaps the most elementary reason was that I wanted to stay and see the final defeat of our ruthless enemy. Another consideration was the fate of the Philippines. There were only a handful of us to lead many thousands of guerrillas. If we left our Filipino troops, it was anyone's guess what they might do. Quite possibly they would be overcome by their hatred of the Japanese and would openly go to war with the invaders, a course certain to bring disaster to Filipino civilians. Maybe they would dissolve into twenty antagonistic factions who would fight each other, or the Huks, to determine the postwar political destiny of the islands.

Pride influenced my course too. At first guerrillas were not even included in American plans for the reconquest of Luzon. Then as our contributions as guides, sources of information, guards for bridges and ammunition dumps, and fighters alongside regular U.S. troops became better appreciated, commendations from American officers began to pour into guerrilla headquarters. An American, Colonel
Cleland, even asked if he might keep Capt. Tom Chengay and his men indefinitely. This was flattering to both Tom and myself, though I hated the prospect of losing my best officer. Since I knew nothing about the red tape involved in such transfers, I finally told the colonel I would let Tom suit himself. He joined Cleland's unit.
¹
I also learned that General Yamashita had remarked that he could regain control of Luzon if he could capture four American guerrilla leaders, one of whom I would like to think was myself. Of course, Yamashita was grotesquely wrong, for by then the American juggernaut was truly invincible, but his observation touched my pride nonetheless.

I also wanted to stay behind because I knew I was needed to coordinate our guerrilla forces with American regulars. I had led my men for many months and so was better suited for this function than any newcomer could be. Simplest of all, my Filipino followers had always been loyal to me, and I considered that I owed them loyalty in return.

Finally, I wanted to do what I could to insure that those who had served faithfully with the guerrillas were properly recognized and rewarded when the war was over. The guerrillas had always fought without official authority, recognition, or pay. Nobody seemed to know anything authoritative about their status, or whether their families would be compensated if they died fighting the enemy. Any guerrilla leader would also know something about Japanese soldiers and Filipino collaborators who had committed crimes against American and Filipino servicemen, a matter of much conern to American CIC (Counterintelligence).

Developments in the last months of the war were not auspicious in any of these areas. The Philippine government established a pay scale for guerrilla forces that was highly unrealistic and unfair. Officers were to be paid the same as American officers of equivalent rank, but enlisted men were to be paid according to the Philippine scale, a paltry seven dollars per month. Worse, if anything, great numbers of Filipinos were now trying to join guerrilla bands or were claiming that they had been guerrillas all along. No doubt many of them had sympathized with real guerrillas throughout; quite a few had probably aided guerrillas covertly. Now, at last, they felt it safe to indicate their sympathies openly. But it was equally obvious that many were mere eleventh-hour opportunitists, rascals who had never risked anything in the whole war but who now wanted to pose as heroes to further their postwar careers, or to claim back pay, or to gain benefits for their families. I have always admired those Filipino men and women who risked their lives to aid us, either with guns in their
hands or in less ostenatious ways, but for these eleventh-hour frauds who lacked both valor and shame, and who sought to curry favor and gain honors by trailing in the wake of their dead countrymen, I had, and have, profound contempt.