The Leper Spy (12 page)

At my side is your President, Sergio Osmena, worthy successor of that great patriot, Manuel Quezon, with members of his cabinet. The seat of your government is now therefore firmly re-established on Philippine soil.

The hour of your redemption is here. Your patriots have demonstrated an unswerving and resolute devotion to the principles of freedom that challenges the best that is written on the pages of human history. I now call upon your supreme effort that the enemy may know from the temper of an aroused and outraged people within that he has a force there to contend with no less violent than is the force committed from without.

Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on. As the lines of battle roll forward to bring you within the zone of operations, rise and strike. Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! In the name of your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His Name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!

The move was in keeping with what Tokyo had predicted, and war planners were not displeased. They had set a trap, the Americans had steamed into it, and now it could be sprung. The Japanese Combined Fleet launched an attack that became known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The plan was to decoy the US Third Fleet north, away from the San Bernardino Strait, while converging three forces on Leyte Gulf
to attack the landing. But submarines of the US Seventh Fleet discovered the Japanese forces as they got into position southwest of Leyte and sank two heavy cruisers on October 23. Two days later, at the Surigao Strait, battleships and cruisers from the Seventh Fleet destroyed C Force and forced the Second Attack Force to withdraw. The First Attack Force passed through the unguarded San Bernardino Strait and inflicted heavy damage on the Seventh Fleet escort carriers but withdrew unexpectedly just as they seemed ready to attack the landing operations. In the north, off Cape Engaño, part of the Third Fleet sank Japanese carriers while another part moved south, attacking and pursuing the First Attack Force. The decisive victory crippled the Japanese fleet. The invasion of the Philippines was on.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur wades ashore during initial landings at Leyte, Philippine Islands, in October 1944.
National Archives and Records Administration

Guerrillas joined the attack, and reports of slaughters soon spread. Fighters on Leyte hacked drowning, dislodged Japanese sailors to pieces as they tried to crawl ashore. Eriberto Misa Jr. watched as American planes bombed three Japanese navy ships in Balanacan
Bay in Marinduque. When the sailors swam to shore from the burning boats, guerrillas clubbed them to death. They then collected maps and official-looking documents floating in the bay and carried them to MacArthur on Leyte. Patrols at Yamashita's headquarters turned up hidden machine guns and grenades on the property. Frustrated, Yamashita ordered the Kempeitai to comb the city and punish guerrillas. Men suspected of resistance activities were beheaded in the streets.

But the activity didn't stop. Guerrillas attacked supply convoys on the roads entering Manila, and food grew even scarcer. Prisoners at Bilibid and Santo Tomas began to starve to death, but they sensed the coming Americans. Father John Hurley, who had watched his
body weight plummet from 208 pounds to 115, watched an American plane swoop in low and unleash thousands of leaflets, a few of which the internees got their hands on before the Japanese could pick them up. It read like a Christmas card and gave the prisoners a boost.

Two Coast Guard-manned LSTs open their great jaws in the surf that washes on Leyte Island beach as soldiers strip down and build sandbag piers out to the ramps to speed up unloading operations in 1944.
National Archives and Records Administration

The Commander-in-Chief, the Officers and the men of the American Forces of Liberation in the Pacific wish their gallant allies, the People of the Philippines, all the blessings of Christmas and the realization of their fervent hopes for the New Year. Christmas, 1944.

Meanwhile, the Kempeitai was ruthless and started rounding up European civilians and Filipinos who had friends and relatives in prison. They turned up at Malate Church and arrested three Irish priests, Father Forbes Monaghan among them. The secret police took the priests to an old Spanish house on Vito Cruz and tortured them until the priests were able to convince them they knew nothing. Of course, Monaghan knew lots. He knew about Lulu Reyes, who had assembled a truckload of rice, beans, sugar, peanuts, and salted fish for the priests and nuns at Los Baños and secreted in news about Ateneans in the underground who had died and about those who needed prayers. Lulu was friends with Joey Guerrero, too, who still took Mass daily where she could find it, but the petite spy had taken a hiatus from the resistance.

Joey's position had become so perilous that she was advised to disappear for a while. The guerrillas had learned that the Kempeitai had been asking around about her, and they suspected she was being shadowed. But when their interest had cooled, she went back to work.

Joey was lying in bed late one night in December when she heard an engine outside her house in Ermita. She peeked out the window and was startled to see a Japanese officer's car stopped out front with a white flag on the radiator cap. Her heart raced and
she wondered why they had come. Maybe someone had ratted her out. Several female friends had already been rounded up and were detained at Fort Santiago.

Just then, there came a violent knocking at the door. She glanced around the house and quickly began hiding papers and other incriminating material. More knocking thundered through the house. She couldn't keep them waiting any longer, or they'd break the door down. She straightened herself and opened the door. The two officers stood erect in the darkness.

“May we come in?” one asked.

Sort of courteous for a Japanese officer,
Joey thought. Without waiting, the men barged in. The second man looked too tall to be Japanese. When they entered the living room, the moonlight fell through the blinds onto the face of the tall man. He didn't
look
Japanese. Joey switched on the light and turned again to look at him. One man was clearly Filipino, and she recognized him as an officer in the underground. The other fellow was clearly Caucasian.

“You're an American!” she said.

When they closed the blinds, the guerrilla introduced Joey to the American. “This is the man you and I have been working under,” he said. He gave her his alias; “Major Nicholson of the Eleventh Airborne,” he said. She never knew who she had been working for, and she never learned his real name. The major congratulated her on her fine map of the gun emplacements on the waterfront. He had another request. The two men had brought along spare tires, which were actually crude incendiary devices. “Can we leave them here?” the American asked. Joey nodded, and the two took turns lugging the explosives in from the car and then disappeared again into the night.

The city was on edge, with new Japanese troops arriving every day. Hovering over the city was a grand sense that something big was about to happen. The guerrillas, meanwhile, were emboldened. While most sabotage had been confined to the provinces outside Manila in the past two years, daring resistance fighters had begun
testing the Japanese inside the city limits. They fetched the spare tires from Joey Guerrero's house and set fire to a tanker in Manila Bay. Then they used more tires to torch Piers 5 and 7 at the port. After that, they set alight a steamer on the Pasig River that was loaded with rice and crude oil.

Joey feared the Kempeitai would track the sabotage to her house, to her. She felt like she was being followed, but she was never stopped for questioning. Near the end of January, she was summoned again by her superior. He had one more mission for her.

T
he map was crudely drawn but explicit enough. It clearly identified Blumentritt Railway Station and the Chinese Cemetery and the wide field in which the guerrillas had the day before discovered turned earth and freshly buried land mines, a last desperate attempt by the Japanese to end American lives. The previous maps the underground had supplied to the American soldiers advancing on the city from the north had indicated every mine and tank trap on the north side of the capital but did not include the new mines, which were buried between the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division and Santo Tomas, where the internees were beginning to drop from starvation.

The soldiers of the Thirty-Seventh Division were weary, even if they'd enjoyed shore leave on Manus Island over the Christmas holiday. Their division commander, Gen. Robert S. Beightler, a citizen soldier and veteran of World War I, had predicted the Japanese would put up a desperate fight “since they have no place to which they can retreat.” He was tired of issuing orders that he knew would result in the loss of life, but his orders were to hit the beaches and advance.

When the first of the Sixth Army's two hundred thousand troops landed on January 9 at Lingayen Gulf, 120 miles north of Manila, there was practically no resistance. The Japanese had been
distracted in the south and now the Japanese troops positioned in Manila were set to be snared between armies moving toward the capital from the south and north. Rumor spread through the underground that that the Japanese were planning to slaughter the thirty-seven hundred captives at Santo Tomas before abandoning the city to the Americans.

When MacArthur got to the headquarters of the First Cavalry Division at Guimba, one hundred miles north of Manila, on January 31, he gave startling orders to the division's commander, Maj. Gen. Verne Mudge. “Go to Manila. Go around the Japs, bounce off the Japs, save your men, but get to Manila!” he said. “Free the internees at Santo Tomas! Take Malacañan Palace and the Legislative Building.”

Word spread that MacArthur wanted the former horse cavalry division to be the first US unit to enter Manila. But Beightler felt his unit deserved that honor, and had it not been for delays in repairing a bridge on the Pampanga River blown by the Japanese, he could well have made it first.

Sensing his disappointment, MacArthur draped an arm around Beightler and, as Beightler would later recall, told him that the cards were stacked against him. He thought it would be much easier for the First Cavalry, which was motorized and had seen little fighting on Luzon, to slash into the city and save the civilians at the university.

Beightler saw it as a challenge. The orders prompted something of a race between the First Cavalry Division, which was one hundred miles away, on the east flank, and the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division, which was just twenty-five miles north of the city but on foot, on the west flank. The First Cavalry formed two flying columns and began racing to the city while avoiding large, lengthy battles with the enemy. The idea was to surprise the enemy, to push through with as many men, tanks, and artillery as quickly as possible, to stop the annihilation of all thirty-seven hundred internees at Santo Tomas. The great machines of war moved forward in the
moonlight, and the Americans were greeted at each new village by crowds of Filipinos cheering and singing with hysterical fervor. They banged church bells with rocks and kissed the boys' necks and tossed flowers at their tanks.

The “Manila Derby” made sense tactically, but speed brought the danger of rushing headlong into a trap set by the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army, commanded by Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita. And the guerrillas who had discovered the fresh mines saw what was taking shape. Thousands of soldiers would walk right into death if they didn't get the new map in time.

Joey taped the map securely between her shoulder blades, over the leprous pox that had spread to her neck and face and arms. Over that she slipped on an inconspicuous blouse, then a knapsack with shoulder straps. Her superior didn't mince the danger. “You had better go to confession and make a good act of contrition,” he said, “for you will not be coming back.”