by Peter Eisner
OTHER BOOKS BY PETER EISNER
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence (cowritten with Philip Brenner)
The Pope’s Last Crusade
The Italian Letter (cowritten with Knut Royce)
The Freedom Line
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2017 by Peter Eisner
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
“I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” words by Eddie Seiler and Sol Marcus, music by Bennie Benjamin and Eddie Durham. © 1940, 1941 Cherio Corp. © renewed 1968, 1969 Ocheri Publishing Corp., Bennie Benjamin Music, Chappell & Co. and Eddie Durham Swing Music Publishing. All rights for Eddie Durham Swing Music Publishing administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All rights for Bennie Benjamin Music, Inc. administered by Chappell & Co., Inc. © 1940 (renewed) Bennie Benjamin Music, Inc., Ocheri Publishing Corp. and Eddie Durham Swing Music. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC and Alfred Publishing, LLC.
Photograph credits
INSERT ONE
Here: Courtesy of Joan Bennett Chapman; here, here: Eastern Oregon University; here, here, here, here, here: National Archives and Records Administration; here, here, here: MacArthur Memorial Library and Archives; here: Courtesy of Jeanne Boone; here: Courtesy of Sunshine Lichauco de Leon; here: United States Embassy, Manila
INSERT TWO
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here: National Archives and Records Administration; here, here: Carl Mydans / The Life Picture Collection / Getty Images; here: Courtesy of Jeanne Boone; here: Eastern Oregon University; here, here: American International Pictures; here, here: United States Embassy, Manila
ISBN: 9780525429654 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780698407527 (e-book)
Version_1
CONTENTS
Other Books by Peter Eisner
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
PART ONE: The War
PART TWO: Occupation
PART THREE: Survival
PART FOUR: Fame
PART FIVE: Telling the Story
Photographs
Author’s Note
Sources
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
JUST HOURS after the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese planes launched a second attack 5,300 miles away, bombing and strafing U.S. military airfields surrounding Manila in the Philippine Islands. The attack was less of a surprise but equally devastating. Though many more Americans died at Pearl Harbor, the consequences of the Japanese attack on the U.S. Commonwealth of the Philippines were at least as far-reaching.
The day of infamy was December 8, 1941, across the International Date Line: A single bombing run at Clark Air Base north of Manila wiped out half of the thirty-five B-17 bombers and seventy-five P-40 fighter planes stationed in the Philippines. Two days later Japanese attacks destroyed the U.S. naval base at Cavite. On successive days Japan swiftly wiped out U.S. defenses in the Philippines and then launched a full ground invasion of the 7,107-island archipelago. The United States had about thirty thousand soldiers and was training four times that many Filipinos to defend the islands, all too late.
Less than a month later, on January 2, 1942, Japanese troops marched into Manila unopposed by the U.S. forces commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, who had withdrawn to the Bataan peninsula and Corregidor Island. Tokyo saw conquest of the Philippines as essential to cutting off Allied supply lines and as a stepping-stone in its plan to control all of Asia. By the time they occupied Manila, the Japanese already had seized the U.S. island of Guam, had conquered British Hong Kong, and were moving toward control of Burma and the Dutch East Indies. Japanese leaders, said General MacArthur, knew that the Philippines was “the Key that unlocks the door to the Pacific.”
Manila was a strategic port, a romantic American outpost, and a jewel of a city, dominated and transformed by the United States in the forty-three years since Admiral George Dewey had sailed to victory in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. Manila had become a commercial crossroads for the United States in the southwestern Pacific. At the outbreak of war in Europe, it also was a refuge for hundreds of people who otherwise might have perished in Europe under the Reich, including Spaniards who opposed Fascism and Jews from Germany.
Japan’s quick conquest of Manila was an ominous sign for the future, but its expectations stalled in the Philippines. U.S. forces, mostly based in and around Manila, retreated to Bataan and fought the Japanese there for five months despite hunger verging on starvation, deadly diseases, and lack of reinforcements. U.S. commanders surrendered at Bataan in April 1942 (and at Corregidor a month later)—the largest surrender in U.S. history. The story of what followed—the Bataan death march—is chronicled as one of the cruelest episodes of the war. The victorious Japanese forced 75,000 already suffering U.S. and Filipino soldiers to march for days in the tropical heat to a POW camp north of Bataan. Hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Filipinos died of hunger and disease or were hacked to death or shot in cold blood for falling down or begging for food and water.
Much less known is the heroic saga of resistance that ensued: Thousands of American and Filipino soldiers disobeyed orders to lay down arms and fled to the hills of Bataan. These stragglers formed flexible guerrilla battalions in Luzon, the largest and most populous of the Philippine Islands; they evaded capture for three years, harassed the Japanese, and prepared the way for General MacArthur’s eventual return. How different it was from our perspective in the twenty-first century, when rebels stymie organized U.S. military forces in foreign wars and terrorists snipe and lay booby-trap bombs against them. In the Philippines the Americans were the rebels, planning raids and sabotage against a Japanese occupying army unable to stop them all.
• • •
I had written two other books about World War II when I started this story. One focused on Bob Grimes, a twenty-year-old American pilot shot down over occupied Belgium who was saved by a young people’s brigade running an underground escape line through France into Spain. The other book was about Pope Pius XI (not to be confused with the more controversial Pope Pius XII) and an American Jesuit journalist, John LaFarge, whom the pope drafted in his little-told attempt to fight Hitler and Mussolini before the war. The life and times of these lesser-known historical figures told a larger story about war.
I had every reason to turn to the Philippines and the war in the Pacific this time. My father, Bernard Eisner, was a twenty-five-year-old officer on LST 463, part of the U.S. armada that fought throughout the South Pacific and then accompanied MacArthur back to the Philippines in late 1944. Like most members of the Greatest Generation, he hardly spoke about it. More broadly, the details of the Pacific war were less told than the many stories surrounding the fight against Hitler in Europe from the Battle of Britain to D-Day. Less known still was the battle for Manila, one of the bloodiest encounters of World War II. As I explored personal accounts to tell the larger story, a friend suggested that I read Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides’s classic account of the m
ission in 1945 to rescue survivors of the Bataan death march. One chapter describes the men and women who provided life support to the Bataan survivors, American and Filipino civilians who smuggled medicine, food, clothing, and money to the Cabanatuan POW camp, about seventy miles north of Manila. “The most fascinating of all of Cabanatuan’s clandestine enterprises,” Sides writes, was “operated by a mysterious woman known to the prisoners only as ‘High Pockets.’”
• • •
I set out to learn more about the mysterious High Pockets, nom de guerre of an American who came to call herself Claire Phillips. She had opened a popular nightclub in occupied Manila in 1942 so she could spy on Japanese officers, collect intelligence, and then send the information to American guerrillas in Bataan. It of course sounded like Casablanca East. Claire’s nightclub was a gathering spot for officers, Japanese businessmen, visiting Nazis, top musicians, renowned actors, and artists. Virtually everything known about High Pockets up to now has come from Claire Phillips’s own account in her book, Manila Espionage, published in 1947. On closer scrutiny I realized that most of the book was a fictionalized version of her life written by a Hollywood ghostwriter with the aim of making a movie. The story indeed became a film in 1951—I Was an American Spy, starring Ann Dvorak. It is a trite and obvious jingoistic romance made on a back lot, a bad imitation of Marlene Dietrich running after Gary Cooper in the film Morocco. The Japanese characters are drawn with racial stereotypes, complete with bad dialogue in fractured English; Claire herself is turned into a demure housewife thrust into war, bravely trying to keep her small nuclear family together single-handedly in a fight against evil. Claire as I found her was indeed brave and bold, but demure she was not.
Claire Phillips was famous for a while after the film’s release; General MacArthur recommended her for the Presidential Medal of Freedom; she was embraced in Hollywood, danced with actors, was praised by Louella Parsons, was interviewed by Chet Huntley, became popular on the veterans’ and women’s club circuits, and even had her day on the program This Is Your Life. After she died in obscurity in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, biographies and eulogies emerged from time to time; the U.S. embassy in Manila honored her posthumously by naming the embassy conference room after her.
The problem was that Claire had embraced and adopted her own fictionalized story. There was a better story to be told, yet she remained that mysterious woman. Firsthand information was scant. Survivors could not be found. It took me several years after reading Ghost Soldiers to find new information that would as closely as possible tell the real story of High Pockets. Intelligence files, guerrilla operational reports, and military histories helped piece things together. Claire’s ability to shift and obscure her personal background made the search difficult. She used multiple aliases and name changes. Finally I came upon an index card at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, that indicated there should be information on a lawsuit Claire filed against the U.S. government after the war. Cross-referencing was difficult, because after the war Claire married a former prisoner of war in the Philippines, Robert Clavier, and she was using that name in the early 1950s. Thus, Claire’s claim for restitution from the government for the money she spent feeding the guerrillas and prisoners of war was hidden under the unassuming title Clavier v. United States. That took me from the National Archives annex in College Park to the original National Archives building in Washington, DC.
• • •
Two sculptures by Robert Ingersoll Aitken—Future and Past—flank the entrance to the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue. Facing the building on the left to the northeast is Future, a woman dressed in classical garb, holding an open book on her lap. An inscription on the pedestal beneath her is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE.
• • •
At the right corner of the building is Future’s bearded male counterpart, Past, who holds a scroll in his right hand but whose left hand covers a closed book under the inscription: STUDY THE PAST.
Both images were appropriate. As I dove into the history of the role of Americans at war in the Philippines, I would have a unique picture of the little-known guerrilla war under Japanese occupation—the reverse of America’s insurgency wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the Philippines during World War II, the Americans were raiders in the hills, and the newly imposed government—propped up by an occupying army—sought to win hearts and minds but never managed to conquer the spirit of those who fought them. This was a central part of Claire’s story.
Archivists could find no match for the court case, explaining that not every index entry that should be in the archives actually can be found. Then Robert Ellis, an archivist who specializes in federal judicial records, decided to do his own search. He asked me to wait in the ornately domed reading room of the revivalist building designed by John Russell Pope in 1931. Civilians are rarely able to go back to the archival shelves; one imagines the endless storage room in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. After a while Ellis returned wheeling an oversized cardboard box. Fortunately, he knew the arcane filing system in ways that a computerized index could not. Within the box were a number of fat court transcripts and a scuffed taupe file folder wrapped with a red ribbon. It appeared that the ribbon had not been undone since it was tied in a bow one day in 1957 when Claire Phillips was awarded $1,349.21 after a five-year proceeding, about $11,000 in 2017 dollars but a fraction of what she claimed she was owed. Clavier v. US was closed and its file placed in the National Archives by the U.S. Court of Claims. This federal court, originally established in 1855 to rule on the monetary claims of Native Americans, was abolished in 1982. The Clavier v. US folder contained depositions, court filings, and sworn courtroom testimony from Claire and the people she worked with in the underground. In some cases witnesses had never spoken publicly about their wartime experiences. It was a gold mine of information about the anti-Japanese underground and about how Claire and her allies supported both guerrillas in the mountains and prisoners of war who were starving and suffering in camps scattered around Luzon Island.
Another piece of evidence that had been tossed into the court file slipped out of the folder as I examined the container: a small leather date book that Claire had kept to make diary entries during the war and which she had not seen since making her last entry in 1944. The diary depicts in miniature the life and times of a woman who maneuvered her way through Japanese occupation in the Philippines, suffering through deadly disease, indignities, and imprisonment while concealing her efforts to spy on the Japanese. It is scribbled, sometimes crudely coded, not always decipherable, but has every sign of being genuine to the moment it was written. In all, the federal case file included about two thousand pages of transcripts and exhibits never before made public.
This discovery significantly changes the historical record about Claire Phillips and the people who worked with her. The present book, MacArthur’s Spies, is the result. The exclusive material led to a reexamination and retelling of her story using these previously unpublished contemporaneous accounts. The Claire Phillips story is quite different from what has been told until now. Claire was indeed an American spy and provided comfort to guerrillas in the mountains and prisoners of war around Manila. Her diary and accompanying documents establish her connection to major Philippine leaders. Claire’s guardian and protector during the war, Judge Mamerto Acuña Roxas, was the elder brother of Brigadier General Manuel Acuña Roxas, the most admired man in Philippine politics and a future president. The general was a former top aide to General Douglas MacArthur and a key opponent of the Japanese occupation.
My introduction to Claire and the search for her story led me to the larger Manila underground and the guerrilla network that she was involved with. Two players stood out: One was John Boone, a U.S. Army corporal who was separated from his men in Bataan and defied an order to surrender to the Japanese. The other protagonist was Charles
“Chick” Parsons, a businessman in Manila and a U.S. Naval Reserve officer before the war. Parsons became MacArthur’s greatest espionage asset in the Philippines. The files I found at the National Archives provided new information about these men and the largely unsung, organized U.S. and Philippine opposition to the Japanese occupation.
Claire also was a victim of confining social mores and the double standard for women in the mid-twentieth century. And yes, she was willing to lie and deceive whenever it served her purposes. That quality made her a natural intelligence operative who knew how to use men when she could and when she needed to before, during, and after the war; undoubtedly she was able to carry some of her deepest secrets with her unresolved and untold for all time.
What emerges is the story of a valiant though not angelic American woman who brought unique skills in deception to the war, skills well suited to an underground fighter that helped her serve the war effort and survive. Her story also revives a little-known chapter of time when American guerrillas were the marauders in the hills. Moreover, in the course of researching the story of High Pockets, I learned about the role of the tens of thousands of Filipinos who fought and died alongside their American allies. More than 500,000 Filipinos died in World War II, most of them civilians; 100,000 of those deaths occurred during the one-month Battle of Manila, February 3 to March 3, 1945. I dedicate this book to them all.
Visit bit.ly/2ofstq8 for a larger version of this map.
Visit bit.ly/2nk8TUQ for a larger version of this map.
PART ONE
■ ■ ■
The War
World on Fire
Japanese-Occupied Manila, Philippines, January 1, 1943
THE WOMAN THEY CALLED Madame Tsubaki sashayed onto the nightclub floor after dark in a spotlight that cast her exotic silhouette against creamy drapes. She began to sing a tune from America, a song of love and longing:
