by Peter Eisner
On special occasions friends of the people trapped in Santo Tomas were allowed to send in extra food. For holidays there still were enough supplies in Manila for a party. People brought ice cream, turkey, roast pork, cakes, and fruit. Claire waited with the rest of them and sent in whatever she could, along with hidden notes whenever she dared, with words of encouragement.
Despite all the celebration, occupation authorities provoked concern and anxiety when they announced they would be moving a portion of the detainees at Santo Tomas to a new facility at Los Baños, about forty miles from Manila. An advance group of male detainees already were detailed there to start building barracks. At the same time, hundreds of elderly Americans and others—including people who had been furloughed from Santo Tomas for medical reasons—were notified they had to rereport and would be among those sent to the new facility. For the first time in a year, Claire missed her Sunday visit to bring food, money, and gifts to Louise at the detention center, assuming that Louise had already moved. However, she found out Louise was still at the camp, although her boyfriend, Bob Humphries, had been sent to Los Baños. Claire resumed her shipments right away. About eight hundred internees were sent to the new detention facility, mostly single or unattached American and British men.
• • •
Tojo was back in Tokyo by the weekend. While his remarks in Manila were upbeat and triumphal, American monitors picked up an interesting subtext. On his return, Radio Tokyo reported that Japanese forces were still fighting in the Philippines, a year after the American surrender. Japanese troops were “carrying on . . . military operations . . . in the establishment of peace and order, while overcoming all manners of hardships and inconveniences on land, sea, lakes and swamps on countless islands where traffic is difficult and in labryinthe [sic] water areas.” Translation for U.S. intelligence and planners at General MacArthur’s headquarters: The guerrillas were successfully harassing the Japanese occupation forces.
Japanese occupation authorities knew—even sometimes admitted—that their “Asia for the Asians” program was a failure. About three weeks before Tojo’s visit, Japanese and Filipino officials mingled on the reviewing stand during another parade, this time on April 11, 1943, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the fall of Bataan. A simpering Filipino official, trying to play to a Japanese counterpart next to him, said: “I think there is little doubt now that the great majority of our people are pro-Japanese. I should say that ninety per cent of them at least understand Japan’s true objectives in fighting for the unification of Great East Asia.”
The Japanese official dismissed the comment and mocked the quisling’s attempt to ingratiate himself. “You are mistaken—I am afraid that forty-five percent of the population continues to be pro-American, five percent are pro-Japanese while the remaining fifty percent are comedians.”
• • •
On June 4 officials followed up on Tojo’s promise by ostensibly turning the process of controlling opposition to the Japanese occupation over to the Filipinos. They created a national pacification committee intended to build support and influence in the provinces. The Manila Tribune was publishing stories about the capture of guerrillas, both Filipinos and American military escapees. All the while the pacification committee had the mandate to coordinate efforts to find the guerrillas and to discourage support for them. The head of the committee was a logical choice: José Laurel, a respected prewar politician with a law degree from Yale who also had been a justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines. Laurel, the interior minister, had rationalized his decision to join the government, as many others had, on grounds he would be able to protect and defend the interests of Filipinos better than were he outside the government or dead for declining to participate. His role and his loyalties were difficult to interpret, but the Japanese occupiers trusted him.
On the morning of Saturday, June 5, the day after his designation as chair of the pacification committee, Laurel headed off with some friends to the Wack Wack Golf Club, north of the Pasig River, a popular spot created by an American businessman in 1930. The name “Wack Wack” could have seemed to Americans to refer to the sound of repeatedly hitting a golf ball, probably not the slang organized-crime meaning of executing someone. Wakwak in Philippine mythology referred to a mythological vampire-like bird that was said to carry humans away to their death. All connotations were apt. Laurel was standing at the seventh hole waiting for his turn at the tee when an unknown attacker shot him three times. Laurel crumpled to the ground. His friends managed to find a car and raced him to Philippine General Hospital. He had lost much blood by the time he arrived, but a six-man medical team, including the chief military surgeon for the Japanese occupiers, managed to save him.
The Japanese facade of “pan-Asianism” and independence had suffered a grave insult. Tojo sent wishes for a swift recovery and Laurel did survive. Within weeks he had an extra job under the occupation—he was assigned to the commission that would draw up a new constitution for a newly independent Philippines. Despite extensive interrogations, the Kempeitai military police did not find Laurel’s attacker. However, they arrested suspected collaborators and threatened and warned others about their behavior in the following months.
Japanese intelligence operatives reported in August 1943 that their efforts had met with some success. After Nagahama’s appeal “for closer cooperation and for the abandonment of any feeling of antagonism and resistance,” more than seven hundred Filipino fighters had surrendered to Japanese forces. Using confidential sources and interrogation, Japanese military intelligence officers mapped out links from MacArthur to the guerrillas and to their underground supporters in Manila.
Tokyo had already ordered a change in command at Manila occupation headquarters, in part a reaction to the ongoing opposition throughout the Philippines. General Masaharu Homma, who had led the invasion and conquest of the islands, was marginalized for failing to make quick work of defeating the Americans on Bataan and had been forced into retirement. He was replaced by General Shizuichi Tanaka and then in May 1943, just after Tojo’s visit, by Lieutenant General Shigenori Kuroda. Kuroda in turn ordered Colonel Nagahama and the Kempeitai to increase pressure on Filipino resistance and on the American guerrillas hiding in the mountains. That was no easy task. While Nagahama continued to advocate the velvet-glove approach, at least in public, Kuroda ordered that he pursue a new crackdown on the guerrillas. Following orders, Nagahama announced on the radio and in the newspapers that Americans or other insurgents who turned themselves in would be guaranteed their safety and treated fairly. But after a deadline they would be shot on sight. Nagahama had only a few takers.
Parsons on the Move
Manila, March–July, 1943
CHICK PARSONS’S WANDERINGS during his first trip back to the Philippines between March 4 and July 8, 1943, became a matter of folklore and speculation that could never be resolved. He was spotted around Manila several times, but the dates were contradictory. Claire noted in her diary entry of July 3, 1943, that he had arrived and that she had to make special efforts to get material to him, but he was apparently back in Mindanao by then waiting for his submarine ride back to Australia. Claire’s bartender, Mamerto Geronimo, said that he had seen Chick disguised as a peasant walking along the waterfront not far from where his mother-in-law, Blanche Jurika, was staying at the convent of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Intramuros.
John Rocha, a five-year-old boy, was walking hand in hand with his father in the Malate neighborhood of Manila one afternoon when a priest rode up on a bicycle. Without stopping, the priest looked at father and son, smiled, and dropped a package containing American magazines and candy. “That was Chick Parsons,” Rocha recalled his father saying. “Do not mention that you saw him.”
One of the most intriguing sightings involved General Roxas, who had been brought to Manila and was under house arrest while authorities sorted out what to do with him. One day Rox
as’s Japanese protector, Colonel Jimbo, was at the house when a priest arrived. The priest greeted those present and then took confession from the general, in private of course. “The visitor was attired in missionary’s clothes,” Jimbo said years afterward. “Several years later I came to know that the visitor was Chick Parsons.”
The fake priest could have spoken fluent Spanish and Tagalog, possibly avoiding speaking English at all. Though Chick did not have Asian features, he was only around five foot six, so he would not have been as suspicious as a tall American might have been. Chick Parsons was brazen enough that he might have actually come to see Roxas more than once—taking advantage of priestly prerogatives. Those who knew him could imagine seeing him smile calmly, then exchange pleasantries with the Japanese guards and officers as he came and went.
The conundrum about all the sightings was that Parsons was definitely on Mindanao for much of June and was on the southern island in early July waiting for his submarine ride back to Australia. It is not clear that he could have traveled clandestinely so far, so quickly. It was more than six hundred miles from the submarine staging point to Manila. “We all know that Chick was a fast mover all over the islands; and he was very resourceful,” said Peter Parsons. However, he said he could not determine with certainty when and in which year—1943 or 1944—his father made it to Manila.
In any case, in 1943 Parsons was not yet the subject of a manhunt—Japanese intelligence did not know that the man who had once been in their custody and detained at Santo Tomas was now General MacArthur’s chief aid in organizing and supplying guerrillas around the country and the flourishing intelligence network in Manila. One Japanese intelligence report did mention the name “Parsons” but claimed that this was the nom de guerre of one of the American guerrilla commanders, Captain Ralph Praeger, who was operating in Kalinga Province in northern Luzon.
Parsons was not only eluding detection by Japanese military intelligence but also operating off the grid part of the time after he arrived in Mindanao by submarine in March 1943. He spent some time during June meeting and staying with Senator José Ozamiz, a friend of Juan Elizalde who, in turn, was in touch with Claire and Ramón. MacArthur had expected Parsons to avoid engagement with the Japanese and to stay away from secret communications with Manila, let alone personally going there. Parsons’s son, Peter, analyzing his father’s mid-1943 mission to occupied Philippines, was almost certain that his father had been in Manila for at least a week. Chick wrote a report from the military command in Mindanao dated June 1, 1943, focusing on guerrilla progress around the islands. Chick’s whereabouts were not traceable for about two weeks after that, which was characteristic of a man who was willing to buck authority and operate on the front lines. He filed a report on his mission so far to MacArthur and then went off the grid. “I think that Parsons wrote the report (possibly even postdated it) and hightailed it . . . to Manila,” Peter Parsons said of his father. After the war, Peter Parsons was certain he had overheard his father admitting that he disguised himself as a priest, but he had no evidence that it was true.
“He was likely in that city for a week to ten days.” Then he returned to Mindanao by the same means, in reverse, probably with a guerrilla courier.
“We have no documents to work on to determine the deeper purposes of Parsons’s penetration into Manila,” Peter Parsons said. “Nor do we know if he was able to see General [Vicente] Lim [a Philippine brigadier general and underground operative] and tell him that General MacArthur had not granted him permission to board a submarine. I am supposing here but with pretty strong conviction that Parsons’s main purpose was to contact [General] Roxas and set in motion the process of extracting him from the Philippines. [Roxas did not leave the country.] It is fascinating to me that Jimbo himself focuses on this crucial event as central to the whole resistance movement. He proved himself to be a shrewd observer.”
Meanwhile, Claire wrote in her diary on June 30 that a man named Sam Wilson had arrived, and she said a few days later that Wilson was traveling with Parsons. “Will be very busy for four days” gathering “all news,” she wrote. On July 3 she wrote that Wilson and Parsons had arrived and that she “must get all to them.” The notations were cryptic as they had been since Claire had started keeping the diary in December 1942. Now she had begun using a crude, jibberish code with misspelled words and added syllables. The annotations were brief, but contained a significant amount of information. They confirmed that Claire was an integral part of the underground operation that Parsons had established in Manila with all the players they both knew—including Juan Elizalde, who supplied her with alcohol so she could keep entertaining Japanese officers and gathering information; Ramón, who had almost daily meetings with Judge Roxas; and through that connection, General Roxas.
On the record Chick Parsons gave no indication to his superiors at U.S. command headquarters in Australia of having gone to Manila on that trip in June 1943 or having engaged in attacks or knowing anything about attempted assassinations. Doing that could have been a court-martial-level offense. MacArthur had directed that the guerrillas and insurgents focus on pure intelligence and organization. If an organized guerrilla force had dared to launch blatant attacks, Filipino fighters knew that “their wives and children would suffer” reprisals and MacArthur would be in no position to help.
Whether or not he was physically present in Manila, Parsons was definitely in touch with the underground. Ramón Amusategui was in touch with Juan Elizalde, and that was a potential link to reports from Claire. Through his Manila contacts Parsons knew that the Japanese were stripping the Philippines of resources—automobile parts, scrap metal, agricultural equipment, melted-down nickel and copper coins for bullets and weaponry. Japan was also rumored to be planning to move American POWs from the Philippines to work camps in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, desperately seeking new ways to feed the war machine.
• • •
With Parsons’s successful trip to the Philippines, MacArthur and his intelligence staff now had a reliable communications link from Manila via Mindanao couriers. The guerrillas with Parsons’s help set up radio and coast-watcher stations at Davao, the largest city on Mindanao, and at Panaon, a small island between Leyte and Mindanao. This meant the underground had a relay network to headquarters in Brisbane. One way or another, Claire’s information was getting through. The immediate reports arriving at Pacific headquarters were a compilation of intelligence gathered from various sources including her dispatches. If Claire had not provided the intelligence reports herself, they certainly sounded like whoever had written them knew about Tsubaki Club, Claire, Fely, and their colleagues.
On June 30, the same day Claire was gathering information to send to Parsons, a dispatch went out directly to MacArthur: “Filipinos employed to serve and entertain guests in night clubs. Manila Avenue Hotels also frequented by Nips.” A dispatch the following day went along the same lines: “Hotel and club employees are Filipinos recommended by Jap civilians. It looks better if agents know a few common words and tunes. Some agents report that Filipinos required to bow when passing sentries and addressing Japs.” Then there was one more point: “As to whether high-ranking Japs susceptible to women, that depends on kind of woman. For example, it is rumored that former beauty carnival queen Paquita de los Reyes was for some months the common law wife of a Jap officer.”
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence reports from the street gave an idea of how American operatives might be able to circulate.
White men are common in Manila streets but in suburbs and country roads they are rare and would attract immediate attention. Currency in Manila nearly all Jap Military notes. Flashing a twenty peso old Philippine bill would excite attention probably cause investigation. In Manila, doctors may use cars and travel after curfew which is between twelve midnight and six a.m. Curfew not very strictly enforced. Patrols consist of Jap plainclothes men in addition to uniformed groups and neighborhood patrol.
Who Is She?
Mount Pinatubo, Bataan, Spring 1943
AT HIS HIDEOUT in the mountains about sixty miles northwest of Manila, Doyle Decker received the latest weekly shipment of news, newspapers, and intelligence reports from High Pockets. Who was this High Pockets? Nobody exactly knew, other than assuming that High Pockets was a woman, which was enough to have him daydreaming at his post on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo.
