by Peter Eisner
Food was scarce. At first Carling could send his men back to the family hacienda in the dark and move stores of sugarcane, blankets, and whatever they could find up to their mountain hideout. Japanese soldiers now camped in the sugarcane fields of the hacienda. It was dangerous to leave the hills. Many days they had only a small ration of rice, some edible leaves, maybe bananas; meat was hard to find. People took to catching and boiling frogs and mixing them with the rice for dinner. Water supplies were often contaminated. By February 1 malaria swept the Sobreviñas village. Without a doctor, they could hardly identify what other diseases were hitting them—diphtheria, typhoid, beriberi, a lethal cocktail of tropical diseases. Claire counted fifteen deaths that month; many people were dangerously ill, at least one person in almost each of the thirty huts around them. The deaths were awful and agonizing—fevers, vomiting, convulsions, most horrible when she watched children waste away and die. Yet five babies had been born in the village over the same period. Claire helped with the deliveries and struggled to keep the infants alive when she was healthy enough to be on her feet. She, Dian, and Lolita also had bouts of dysentery from bad water and contaminated food.
Filipino travelers who managed to make it back from Manila said things were tough along the route. The Japanese had installed a new government in Manila and occupied every small town between the city and the upper reaches of Bataan. “A Japanese flag [flew] on every hut,” not out of support for the Japanese but on demand and out of prudence. Rumors said that the Japanese soldiers were on the lookout for villages in the interior jungles that they had not yet taken. Eventually a Japanese patrol might find the hidden Sobreviñas settlement in the hills above Dinalupihan.
• • •
Rumors spread quickly via messengers who traveled village to village, carrying food and the latest news on the war. One day one of these messengers brought Claire an offer of hope. Father Eduardo Cabanguis, the parish priest of Maite, a barrio outside Dinalupihan, sent word that he had met an American soldier among several others who were hiding from the Japanese not far away. Was Claire interested in meeting them? Father Cabanguis did not give Claire the names of the Americans, but she had hopes that John Phillips might be one of them, or at least that the Americans might offer hope that Phillips was alive and well. She sent a messenger back to say that she was definitely interested.
Boone’s Guerrillas
Bataan, February 1942
JOHN BOONE, a twenty-nine-year-old American corporal, had lost contact with his army unit in the early weeks of the Japanese invasion and was one of the first men in Bataan to start organizing a guerrilla army. He had been able to evade the Japanese so far through guile and instinct, and now that he was gathering enough men in central Bataan, he was more cautious than ever. In the process of establishing his insurgency, he received word from Father Cabanguis “that there was an American woman loose and moving around up there.” Boone was rightly suspicious: Who was this priest and could he be trusted?
Boone had obvious reason to worry about security. He could not know who might have been recruited or bribed by Japanese intelligence operatives on the lookout for Americans. Boone knew from everything he saw that he was operating in a friendly sea, but it took only one turncoat to cause trouble. An American guerrilla leader would bring a premium from the Japanese. Boone had plenty of security concerns. Aside from the Japanese, he had to worry about a homegrown Filipino communist army, the Hukbalahap—the Army of the Common People, known as the Huks for short. Boone was competing with the Huks for recruits, and they were not particularly friendly to American and Filipino rival guerrillas.
After checking the priest out, Boone came to meet him, partly to find out about the American woman and partly because he had been told that Cabanguis had an excellent radio receiver that would give him news about the wider war. “It was pretty obvious to me that this particular padre was a dyed-in-the-wool pro-American. So I established contact with him and I went in there every night for, I don’t know how long, a couple or three weeks, to listen to the news.” They agreed that the priest would make arrangements for Claire’s meeting with Boone.
• • •
Claire set out for Maite after dark on the evening of February 20, dressed in men’s clothing and accompanied by a team of six guides. The crescent moon was waxing into the first quarter; the weather was not too humid and even a bit cool before dawn in the hills this time of year. A little moonlight would not hurt in the dark of night, but a full moon would have cast shadows that would have revealed them as they scrambled toward town.
It was a five-mile hike; for safety they trekked across fields, jungle paths, rice paddies, and streams, skirted the main highway, and only crossed the road, always on the lookout for Japanese patrols, when they approached the town of Dinalupihan. By the time they reached Cabanguis’s church in Maite around midnight, Claire’s feet were blistered and her muscles were sore. There was some relief at least in finding cigarettes and matches, although the prices were high—one peso per cigarette and thirteen cents for a penny box of matches.
Cabanguis provided the latest news from Manila and on the war, though it was not good. American forces were in retreat and men were dying. Claire told him she had seen a big fire close by during the trek in from the hills. Yes, the priest said, the Japanese sometimes burned their dead, and there were many of them. He said there were many American casualties as well. The fighting was ever closer and it was inevitable that the Japanese soldiers would occupy the town. The priest gave no details of the upcoming meeting with Boone other than the location, which required another walk to the outskirts of Dinalupihan, several hours away. He suggested that Claire rest and lay low for the night.
At daybreak Claire and her helpers walked from the parish into the Maite valley. The rendezvous point was a high plateau that would provide secure entry from all sides. Boone, traveling with a bodyguard, also had walked through the night. His route also crossed the main road from Dinalupihan to Zambales; as in Claire’s case, the highway was certain to be patrolled by considerable Japanese military traffic. Boone reached the meeting site and waited. The sheltered piece of high ground was hidden by banana trees, part of a plantation on the west side of the valley.
Boone emerged from the tree cover when Claire approached. She saw a slender young man, emaciated, really, appearing older than his age, looking back at her “with friendly twinkling, grey eyes, and a neat Vandyke beard.” Boone extended a hand. “Are you really an American, or am I seeing things again?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m an American,” Claire said. She said she had expected to find Boone traveling with two other soldiers. No, he said, they were Maromis and Henderson and remained back in camp. “What about Phillips?” she asked. “He is my husband.” She had been hearing rumors that he was captured, even dead. Did Boone know Phillips? Claire said that Phillips was a sergeant. Boone laughed to himself. Sure, he knew who John Phillips was, “a buck-ass private, a private in the Thirty-First Infantry, stationed in the same cuartel that I was in in the walled city of Manila.” She realized immediately that Boone would not bring her any closer to finding John Phillips.
Yes, Boone said, he had heard of her husband, but not since the war. Boone said he would try to find out. It would not be easy. He did not get into the specifics of his interest in having a woman working on his side. This meeting was more general—among other things, for Claire it meant enjoying contact with a fellow American; for Boone it was about the pleasure of meeting an American woman. Boone had been a theatrical producer in the United States before enlisting in the army in 1940. That was common ground—Claire was a performer.
When war broke out, Boone was a corporal in the 31st Infantry. Phillips was a private in the regiment’s Headquarters Company; Boone was assigned to Dog Company, a heavy weapons group in the walled city of Intramuros. Dog Company was sent to hold positions in tall buildings in Manila, prepared to shoot when the Japanese att
acked. When Phillips and other elements of his regiment moved to Bataan, Boone’s unit moved out to the Luneta, the downtown commons also known as Rizal Park, named for José Rizal, the Philippine national hero who fought Spanish colonialism. When General MacArthur decided to pull back from Manila, Boone’s Dog Company provided security. “It seems to me we moved to Corregidor on Christmas Eve,” Boone said. After MacArthur was secured at Corregidor, Boone’s company commandeered whatever boats they could find and sailed across from the island fortress to Bataan at Mariveles.
Boone recalled: “The first battalion moved across to Mariveles, north, to the extreme (southern) end of the Bataan Peninsula, where we were dug in . . . a bit north of that—in the Dinalupihan area. And we dug in there, my battalion, with elements of scout outfits, as I recall, on my right and left; I think, the 45th and 57th Philippine Scouts were on our right and left.”
The company’s next mission was to hold back a Japanese invasion force moving in from the north. A Filipino regiment was sent in to augment the size of the defense force significantly, but reality made the prospects very tenuous: The Filipinos had little if any training and were not battle ready. “We had to go out in front not more than a thousand yards and dig that regiment in and show them how to put their guns in position.” The battlefield training was just about complete when the Japanese launched an attack from the north. It was January 6, Boone’s birthday, around the same time that Claire had last seen John Phillips. Boone showed a flash of emotion and anger as he later recalled what happened. “A military farce is what it was. The Japanese attacked us with this artillery and intense small arms fire and we, in other words, made a very poor showing. I recall that my Baker Company, out of my battalion was hurt badly.”
They were decimated, and Boone and the company scattered. He and two other men cut off to the hills. “I was already an evader of capture and was already up in the high ground in the peninsula of Bataan.” He had no intention of surrendering.
John Boone’s plight after the strategic U.S. retreat was repeated hundreds of times among the soldiers pinned down in Bataan. U.S.-Filipino operations thwarted Homma’s forward progress, but by March the situation was dire. Suffering from bare-bones food rations, the U.S. forces began to starve, surviving on small supplies of rationed water and protein, a few hundred calories a day. When they ate and drank, they risked amoebic dysentery; they contracted every possible tropical infection, insect bites, jaundice, and beriberi and were attacked by rats and lice. When Japanese patrols passed by, they scrambled to hide low in the underbrush; sometimes a weighty snake slithered over one of them and he had to remain still, suppressing fear and the instinct to scream or to run. Boone, among those cut off from the main ranks of his battalion, fled into the hills to join up with other ragtag units that still wanted to fight. Eventually, he realized that he and the men around him were willing and able to mount an organized guerrilla opposition to the Japanese.
• • •
Boone sympathized with Claire about her husband, and for the rest of the war he referred to her as “Mrs. Phillips,” one of the few people who did so. Claire and John Boone agreed to meet again soon. They left the banana field in opposite directions, Boone looking to enlist more guerrilla fighters, Claire still in search of John Phillips. She headed back to the Sobreviñas encampment that evening, the same overnight hike in reverse, five miles in the backwoods and between fields and houses, and then to a sentry line close to the main road. Just as Claire and the men approached the sentry line, a Japanese truck came rolling along the highway and spotted them. She and the others ran back to a collection of empty huts on the close side of the hill, ducked into the front door of one hut, and then ran out the back. Japanese soldiers thought they had them trapped and surrounded; they tossed a firebrand onto the roof of the hut and watched. “They thought they had burned us in the hut,” Claire recalled, “but we stayed in the thicket in the back and we just stayed there until the Japanese drove the truck away.” When it was quiet, they crossed the road and climbed the rest of the way back into their safe haven in the hills.
A few days later Claire and Boone sent notes back and forth through Filipino messengers; on February 27 they met again. This time Claire’s guides were Aeta tribesmen. She had not met members of the Luzon ethnic group before. Sometimes called negritos (“little black men” in Spanish), adult Aeta men averaged no more than about four feet eight inches (1.45 meters) tall. Aeta were sometimes referred to as pygmies and had lived and hunted in the Luzon mountains for ages. They were renowned as mountain guides, a skill especially useful to the guerrillas. The Aeta knew every path through the mountains, even when they had to hack and reopen the way through jungle brush themselves. It had been hard to find guides willing to lead a tall white woman on such a dangerous trek. That was even more the case after a Japanese patrol almost caught an advance team of Aeta who were on their way to pick her up for her second visit with Boone. Nevertheless, a few of the Aeta relented and kept their promise to lead her across the hills. When the time came to leave, she turned around and one of the Aeta was standing behind her smiling, shouldering a bow and arrow and wearing only a G-string. Claire was startled. The man looked up and reached out for a handshake. Carling Sobreviñas, her host in the mountain camp, had come along to introduce her to the Aeta tribesmen; he nudged her to smile in return and shake hands.
There were no run-ins with Japanese on the second crossing. But as they walked, they flanked a deserted battlefield and Claire saw dead soldiers and horses splayed about; in the distance she saw smoke and thought it was a Japanese funeral fire. On this visit Boone laid out his plan. He was committed to fighting a guerrilla war for the duration, no matter how long it would take. He was now a guerrilla officer in a widespread organization of Americans and Filipinos. His mission was to organize in this section of Bataan, gather forces and supplies. It would have to be a highly mobile force capable of harassment raids and sabotage. What Boone needed was a Manila connection. If Claire was willing to help, she could be that connection. “We could make a deal,” he said. If Claire “was interested in going to the city of Manila, if she was willing to carry out some sort of military intelligence mission for me, that I might be able to help her get there.”
The Chances of Survival
Bataan, March 1942
CLAIRE REALIZED SHE was just one more among the many desperate denizens of the hills of Bataan. Every day she treated the sick people around her, nursed their babies and children as best she could, and cried along with them as they all confronted death. Despite her precautions, Claire figured it was a matter of time and chance before she and Dian succumbed to some sickness or other. Added to that danger, they faced deteriorating food supplies and the precarious shelter of their jungle village. All the while the war was coming closer. Cannon fire was keeping them awake at night. Life in the hills meant more sickness and increasing danger as the Japanese marched on. In short, Claire had every reason to want to get back to Manila.
Emilio V. Reyes, the ex-mayor of Dinalupihan, the nearest town, helped Claire weigh her options. He received word that Japanese convoys were moving into the vicinity, which meant soldiers might stumble upon their settlement. At the same time, some families were taking the chance to move down the hill, back to Dinalupihan, on word that people would not be punished when they came back to town. If Carling and the rest of his family made that decision, as an American Claire could not go along with them and would be stuck on her own.
If she went back to Manila, she might be able to hide from the Japanese. She also figured that she would have a better chance of tracking down John Phillips if she was in the city. However, Emilio Reyes and Carling warned that sneaking back to Manila was still too dangerous. Carling himself had made the trip and so had his friend Reyes. People still were able to go back and forth to Manila, carefully, as long as they did not appear to be white Americans.
More people in the hillside settlement were dyi
ng of malaria. Claire was not surprised when she came down with malaria symptoms herself and was laid up for several weeks. She mostly stayed in bed, with just enough energy to drink a bit of water. At night as she lay there, she listened to thunder and explosions in the distance, played solitaire, and read the Bible, the only book left to read.
For the time being, thoughts of life and fear of death overwhelmed any thought of escape. The Sobreviñases’ youngest child, Ronny, was running a high fever. Carling hurried to Manila on March 9 in frantic search of a doctor and some medicine. It was too late. Ronny died four days later; Carling had not returned and almost did not make it back at all. Along the way Japanese guards opened fire with machine guns on the road and he narrowly avoided being hit. He arrived at the camp on March 19 to find his wife and family already in full mourning. Claire participated in the four-day period of mourning, staying up all night to offer prayers and songs in remembrance. Nine days after the death, as was the custom, the Sobreviñases observed a night of ritual feasting.
Ronny’s death was frightening, especially when Claire considered Dian’s fragile health. The child had been sick frequently and was not getting enough nourishment. A two-year-old’s reserves and resistance to disease and hunger were limited. Carling warned again that Claire had poor chances of making it to Manila and that Dian would suffer the consequences. From what he could see, Japanese sentries would be sure to catch them and there would be no way to explain why an American, woman or man, had been in the fighting zone.
If all that was true, there was only one obvious alternative. As an American she herself couldn’t go, but maybe Dian and her nurse could make it, since they both had Asian features. Three days later, on March 25, sadly but with resolve, Claire sent Dian to Manila accompanied by now-pregnant Lolita and several guides. She gave Lolita a letter of introduction to Judge Roxas, who would remember that this was the child she and Manuel Fuentes, his wife’s cousin, had adopted. Claire gave Roxas stark details about life to the north and the suffering of the people of Bataan. She also asked his opinion of the danger she might face in trying to reach Manila herself. She enumerated the problems of staying in the mountains. The hunger and pestilence in the village were overwhelming. “We all have head lice and fleas. . . . There are rats, also snakes.” Snakes and rats, when caught, were becoming the only possible protein to blend with rice (when they had it), tropical leaves, and snails.
