The Leper Spy (10 page)

In the shadows of the steeples and in the cobblestone alleyways and in the mountains outside the city, though, the guerrillas were plotting, coding, looking for their chance to strike. The boys from the Ateneo, some of them now banded into an outfit called Hunters ROTC, were pulling daring pranks on the Japanese—the best they could do. They'd sneak up to enemy trucks on the corner of Avenida Rizal and Azcarraga and pour sugar into their fuel tanks. The trucks
would run fifty yards and stall out. When sugar got too expensive, they used sand. When they recognized the need for guns, the Hunters raided the University of the Philippines armory in Manila. The trick was avoiding the sentries, which sometimes was just luck. After one raid, a Philippine Military Academy (PMA) cadet named Gustavo Ingles was on a
karetela,
or horse carriage, that was loaded with ammunition. Another cadet named Terry Adevoso was holding a bundle of bullets. The sentry stopped the cart and demanded to know what was in the package.

“Bullets,” Adevoso said. “Bullets and guns.”

The soldier thought it was hilarious. He told them to move along without checking the parcels.

For a raid on the armory at Union College, the Hunters commandeered a truck, loaded it with guns, and took off for Antipolo, the unit's hideout east of Manila. As the truck passed the sentry post, the boys got out and bowed deeply to the guards, who seemed uninterested in checking the contents and waved them along. But the truck wouldn't start again. Their friends, a diversionary group on hand if something went awry, watched nervously from across the street. But the guards found the Hunters to be so courteous and respectful that they helped push the truck down the street until it started.

The boys developed a hatred for their occupiers. The war had disrupted life, but they were also disgusted by a foreign power now ruling a democratic city. They were stopped and frisked in the dark. They heard stories about their female friends being raped or assaulted. Their families were afraid. So they looked for ways, large and small, to strike back.

When Marcos Villa Agustin, who was a cabdriver and boxer before the war and now led a resistance unit called Marking's Guerrillas, heard that the Japanese were using American prisoners of war to build a bridge near Lumban, Laguna, and that the prisoners were so weak from hunger they were falling off the bridge, he organized a raid. Scouts borrowed a guitar and pretended to be strolling
serenaders so they could get an idea of where the enemy was. Marking and forty of his best men raided Lumban Concentration Camp, shooting and hacking to death ten sentries. But only 1 of the 150 prisoners of war, Cpl. George Lightman of the Third Pursuit Squadron, dared to escape with the guerrillas.

The retaliation for the raids and sabotage came swiftly. The Japanese kidnapped two Hunters guards and tortured them until they revealed the unit's hiding place in Antipolo. They also formed a firing squad and shot to death ten American prisoners of war in front of the town's mayor and police chief as a scare tactic. The following morning, soldiers raided the Antipolo camp, killing one of the leaders, Mike Ver, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student from the Mapua Institute of Technology. The boys found him with a gaping hole in the side of his neck. The fight was suddenly real. Many of the young guerrillas gave up that day. The group that had grown to 250 fighters dropped to 30. Those who stayed started looking for vengeance.

They weren't good fighters at first. They had heart and a surplus of guts, but they lacked any real training. So they read books about guerrilla warfare—Mao Zedong and Lawrence of Arabia—and practiced guerrilla techniques in the jungle and figured out their own tactics. They wanted to fight, not wait on the Americans.

Those who remained part of the Hunters went to Pililia, a small town on the eastern bank of Laguna de Bay, east of Manila, where they learned that a Japanese convoy moving from Rizal to Laguna was expected to pass through soon. Sixteen young men and two Igorots, or mountain people, staked out their hiding places along a road that zigzagged through private property, near Kilometer 70. When the convoy came into view, the boys noticed that there were escorts on foot surrounding the trucks, walking as though they were on alert. The gunfire didn't last long. It was the first time Gustavo Ingles, the PMA cadet, ever heard the Japanese crying in pain, and over their dead, and it fueled his soul. They'd meant to take revenge for their friend, and they'd done so with gusto, without a single casualty.

Word began to spread about the Hunters and Marking's Guerrillas, and more boys signed on. Recruits came from Cavite, Batangas, Rizal, Laguna, and all the way from Candelaria, Quezon, seventy miles south. Over the course of the war, some five thousand men and women would join the Markings in combat. Even more served as home guards, providing intelligence and supplies when the guerrilla bands passed through town. Peasant farmers secretly brought rice and sugar to the camps. Church groups in Manila began to organize resistance inside chapels, under the guise of Christian worship, because the Japanese prohibited groups gathering in homes. They held rummage sales and collected old clothes secretly destined for the guerrillas. Couriers would arrive at midnight, retrieve the donations, and start the long journey to the mountain hideouts.

One band of young people at Cosmopolitan Church on General Luna Street joined the choir and began holding rehearsals three times a week, at 6:00
PM
. Some engineering students from the University of the Philippines had reworked a radio, fixing it so it received
Voice of America
broadcasts transmitted from California and Hawaii. Choir rehearsal was a front, a chance to simply gather to listen to the broadcasts, which volunteers then typed on onionskins and passed around to friends. Their mission was to encourage their fellow citizens who might be leaning toward acquiescence.

To stunt the growth of the resistance, the Japanese redoubled efforts to convince Filipinos to give up. They tried propaganda, suggesting most of the islanders were cooperating with the Japanese to build that shining hope for the future, the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, but often sent mixed messages that had the opposite effect than intended. One broadcast from Tokyo, for instance, proclaimed, “In central Luzon, 1,300 bandits surrendered in February and were now cooperating wholeheartedly with Japan. American and Filipino bandits, who were active in Northern Luzon are almost wiped out, and the rest—about a hundred—have fled to the mountains, where they will starve to death…. It has become clear that the day is not far away when the whole Philippines will
cooperate wholeheartedly with Japan.” But the guerrillas knew better, and so did many ordinary Filipinos.

When propaganda didn't work, the Japanese tried bribery and treachery. When that didn't work, they began making wholesale arrests, torturing suspects at Fort Santiago and making those who wouldn't break dig their own graves. Thousands of soldiers surrounded Mount Canumay in Tanay, Rizal, for two months, trying to flush Marking out of hiding. But they didn't know the terrain like the guerrillas and eventually realized the native commando had escaped.

Soldiers came for Esperanza Enriquez one morning and took her to a house in the rural northeastern section of Luzon. Her husband was a guerrilla leader, and soldiers had been combing the hillsides, hunting him. Each night the soldiers would bring in a man badly beaten and ask if it was her husband. They forced her to write copies of the same letter, over and over.

Dear Manolo,

Please come home now. The children are missing you very much. The Japanese army are very kind. Peter was very sick and they gave us medicine and plenty of gifts for the children, including school supplies. They promised me they will not harm you. Lay down your arms and come home soon. Everything is fine and normal. Come home and experience the life we are enjoying now. Love, Mommy.

The soldiers dropped the letters all over the mountains, trying to entice Manolo to surrender. A few days later, a servant at the house, who had been fetching water, slipped Esperanza a note. It was from her husband.

Mommy, don't be frightened. I am only four houses away from you. We are taking care of you. If they hurt you, we will come and kill them all.

All the antiresistance effort only deepened the resentment and strengthened the guerrillas' commitment to driving the occupiers mad. Soon they had infiltrated the police department, and the friendly officers would tip off the resistance if the Japanese police were planning a raid.

By August 1944, eighteen million Filipinos lived in the islands, and they were being watched by about four hundred thousand Japanese soldiers. But 180,000 Filipinos—1 in 100—were in some way serving the resistance. The resistance ranks were growing daily, and they would number nearly 250,000 by the spring of 1945.

They were middle-class citizens and even society women whose allegiances were with the Americans. They owned cinemas and worked for the YMCA and made fun of their new masters by mocking them in Tagalog. They talked about underground activities at pretend dinner meetings and funneled food to the warriors in the mountains and messages to General MacArthur. In fact, radio traffic picked up to an unusual clip, with nearly four thousand messages being logged each month at the Australian headquarters for the US Army Forces in the Far East. They sent transcripts of secret executive sessions of the puppet regime, guest lists of visitors to the Manila Hotel, movements of Japanese armed forces. Hundreds of groups sprang to life in the islands, with names like the Civilian Liberation Volunteers and Farmer Labor Auxiliary Service and the Heroes of Democracy. Their loyalty rode with MacArthur and Quezon, and when Quezon died from tuberculosis at a cure cottage in Upstate New York on August 1, 1944, it rode with MacArthur alone.

The general's submarines supplied them with morale in the form of transmitters and equipment and matchbooks that reinforced his promise to return. More and more, they could monitor US troop movements, feel the pulse of the war, and the word spread like prairie fire when, on June 6, 1944, allied troops landed along a fifty-mile stretch of French coastline to fight the Nazis. The bold statistics of the effort, a mighty show of force, were repeated in astonished tones on Calle Real and around Plaza Goiti and on the
quiet corners of Escolta Street: more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft ran support for 160,000 allied troops.

“The eyes of the world are upon you,” they heard Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces, say. “The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere are with you.”

F
ather Fred Julien and the Catholic priests being held at the Los Baños Internment Camp, snug between Mount Makiling and Laguna de Bay, never heard about D-day. Their secret radio was still at the Ateneo, for all they knew. The days of 1944 bled together, and a dismal routine set in among the 126 priests, several nuns, and other missionaries and their families in a barracks they called Little Vatican. They were kept separate from the two thousand or so Americans, British, Australians, Dutch, Norwegians, Poles, Italians, and Canadians, most of them civilians rounded up after the outset of war. They divided themselves into committees and were each assigned simple tasks like mending, carpentry, and policing.

But with each passing month, food rations were diminished. The twice-daily meals were mostly an ice-cream-scoop-sized portion of rice gruel with a little hog grease on top. One man and his wife had volunteered to be part of an experiment—getting weighed every two weeks at the camp hospital—with the hopes that the Japanese doctors might be humanitarian enough to be saddened by their weight loss and order an increase in rations. After a few months of weighing in, the man and his wife realized they were losing twelve to fourteen pounds every two weeks. They stopped volunteering when she dropped below eighty pounds and he dropped below one hundred.

The prisoners were burying two or three of their own per day, deaths caused by starvation or related diseases. Some of the priests took to eating banana peels directly out of the hog slop. They ate dogs, cats, snakes—anything they could catch—and they made up songs like schoolchildren to fight the tedium, hoping against hope that the Americans were on their way.

Oh, we'll all have apple pie when they come

Oh, we'll all have apple pie when they come

Oh, I don't want to die

Till we have that apple pie

Till we have that apple pie when they come

They were exhilarated when the airplanes began appearing in the sky, and they'd squint against the morning sunshine to try to make out the insignia on the tails. They watched, once, as an American plane was blasted out of the sky, and saw clearly the pilot's parachute mushroom as he descended into a thicket of trees. Japanese officers left the camp at Los Baños and rode horses into the jungle but failed to find the pilot. A few nights later, local guerrillas—Hunters, most likely—crawled under the barbed wire ringing the camp's perimeter and told the priests that they had rescued the pilot and needed civilian clothes to help him get back to friendly quarters. It worked.

Forty miles away in Manila, the guerrillas were being called to the hills. Word had reached the islands that the time to fight was drawing near, possibly before June. Filipinos brought their guns out from hiding and sharpened their bolos. Buried caches of artillery were unearthed on Bataan and shipped to fighters in central Luzon. The boy who tended to the pigs at the Ateneo came to Father Forbes Monaghan to resign his job.

“My country needs me,” he told the priest.

Later, Monaghan was riding in a crowded streetcar when a sudden jerk hurled every standing passenger to the rear. One of them
inadvertently tugged the coat of the man in front of him, revealing a shoulder belt packed with bullets. A police officer saw this and tapped the armed guerrilla.