by Peter Eisner
Every week High Pockets sent the men in the mountains the Japanese-controlled newspaper, the Manila Tribune, but also a summary of U.S. radio broadcasts from San Francisco, compiled by Ramón Amusategui and distributed whenever possible. Decker and his allies received the news summary, as did John Boone and other guerrillas. Decker had met Boone early on when they all were attempting to set up their guerrilla operations. Decker, twenty-seven, had been an army private in the 515th Coast Artillery and was now with an outpost of the 155th Provisional Guerrilla Battalion. He had not seen Boone since the days after the surrender and knew nothing about Ramón or High Pockets or anyone else in Manila. All for the better.
High Pockets had become a folk hero among POWs and guerrillas. The Filipino messengers who brought supplies to Decker’s camp told him they knew virtually nothing about her. They knew that she was a guerrilla leader in Manila, that she had messengers who dodged Japanese military police, and that she sent the weekly packets of information despite the danger of discovery. High Pockets was brave. “I think she is called High Pockets because she is tall,” said his Filipino friend and guerrilla liaison, known only as George, after arriving with the latest shipment. “She is rumored to be half American and half Filipino.”
The lack of information was a good thing. So far internal security was working well. If any of these messengers were captured and tortured, they might confess that High Pockets was their contact in Manila. But the most they could say about her was that High Pockets was a tall Filipina; such a description would never lead to Dorothy Fuentes, Madame Tsubaki, the chanteuse/bar owner who was serving drinks to many of the same Japanese agents who were searching for guerrillas and their supporters in Manila. The downside of Claire’s anonymity was that Decker might have been one of the last people to spot her boyfriend, John Phillips, before he was captured. A man named Phillips had wandered into Decker’s camp in May 1942, saying he had been lost for a month since the surrender at Bataan. Decker and the other escaped American soldiers brought Phillips along as they evaded Japanese patrols and sought a safe place to stay. Phillips stayed with the men for a few days, but was weak and sometimes had trouble keeping up with them. The men eventually did find safety in the mountains and split up into other groups; Decker had no more information about Phillips.
Each of the categories of information forwarded by High Pockets had its usefulness. The intelligence reports responded to requests to map the precise location of Japanese military installations and storage facilities, as well as gather details about POWs and detention camps. The news summary came from radio transmissions by KGEI, the powerful shortwave transmitter that was the only independent source of news available. KGEI broadcast directly to the Philippines and carried information about MacArthur’s progress of the war, along with patriotic messages from exiled President Manuel Quezon. The Manila Tribune even had value. Decker and his friends discounted the Tribune’s propagandistic dispatches: The U.S. Navy was reeling; the Japanese were scoring glorious victories in the Pacific; and the Nazis were taking new ground in Europe. George the messenger said that everyone understood. “If you read the paper and it says something can’t happen, it has already occurred. If it declares a great victory for the Japanese, they have lost the battle. If the Americans have been driven off an island, it means they have captured the island.” Moreover, the Americans were interested in seeing where the Japanese were claiming their major victories: on islands progressively closer to the Philippines. They could deduce from such reports that MacArthur was fighting his way back to Luzon.
Climbing the Wall
Manila, Spring 1943
CLAIRE MIGHT HAVE bragged that the work was easy—just supply her with alcohol for enough Japanese officers to get tongues wagging, and then the men would be willing to divulge military secrets to the closest beautiful woman. It was not so easy. The price of being High Pockets was high. Claire had to remind herself that the pressure and the fakery surrounding her life were for the purpose of producing these intelligence reports, of doing anything possible to fight the war and to save lives. Otherwise, she felt she might go insane. The daily routine, the clandestine work right alongside the Japanese, and the duplicity of celebrating Japanese victories were unrelenting. She trusted no one completely, not even Peggy, the only other American woman she saw frequently.
One night she had trouble with a sergeant whom the hostesses had nicknamed Tarzan after he actually climbed up the side of the building, barged drunk into her dressing room on the second floor, and stripped off his clothes. Claire managed to get out of it. Another time he threw a beer bottle and demanded that she give in to him or he would send her to Fort Santiago. If he sobered up the next morning and still wanted to do that, Claire would have to run. He did sober up and did not act on his threat.
Claire still had a succession of Japanese men chasing her, usually more than one man at a time. One officer, Colonel Komina, had made what he considered a formal oath of love to her. The colonel said he could not work, eat, or sleep out of longing for Claire. “Have colonel where I want him,” she wrote in her diary. “Madly in love with me . . . I know he’ll do anything I ask him now.” Claire said she actually liked Komina, but did not betray in her diary or her memoir how far their relationship had gone. It sounded like they were lovers and Claire was mining him for information. They had been walking together in the Luneta one day when Komina had said he would be shipping out soon. Claire started to cry and Komina thought it was at the news of his impending departure. However, she wrote in her diary that she was thinking about John Phillips. She was relieved when Komina finally left town.
Claire’s connections with the Japanese officers continued to be a balancing act and were likely to intensify. Boone had begun asking more detailed questions about intelligence matters. She needed to entice men to keep coming to the club but did not want to entice these men so much that they would force her into a sexual affair.
One intelligence request, she said, anticipated the impending arrival of a damaged Japanese aircraft carrier at Manila harbor. Claire recalled: “I was told when to expect it, find out where it would be repaired, how long the reconditioning would take, and send if possible, the exact date and hour of its departure, plus its destination.”
With the club’s proximity to the port and its reputation among the troops, the carrier’s captain and crew did come to Tsubaki Club when they came ashore. Claire said the captain’s name was Arita; both she and Fely developed a warm relationship with him. “Anyone could see that he was mad about Fely,” Claire said. “He brought her many gifts, and was at the club every night to hear her sing.” Arita took Fely one day to the Metropolitan Theater across the Luneta, inland from the bay. In a photograph taken that day, they made a striking couple: Arita in uniform, head tilted slightly with a slight smile; Fely, a bit shorter, was lovely, with black curled hair brushed back and falling at her shoulders, long earrings, and pearl-like beads over a shawl or tunic. However, her intense gaze toward the camera was impassive, revealing nothing.
Arita was not the typical officer on shore leave—he drank only soft drinks and the innocent lemonades usually served to the hostesses. Claire remembered him as “a really fine chap. He told us of his home and family in Japan; how he would be glad when the war was over, so he could join them. He hated war, and was quite an anomaly for the commander of a fighting craft.”
After repairs were complete, Claire staged a farewell party for Arita and the crew. “I even cried real tears when he left, as I knew I was sending him to his doom,” Claire said. “Yes, I cried real tears when he left, but war is war. As he and his staff departed by the big front door, my runner left by the back door.” She hoped the message would help target him for attack—Arita was sailing from Manila to Singapore and on to Rabaul in New Guinea.
Consorting with an occupying soldier was unacceptable to the majority of Filipinos, who hated the Japanese presence. It was also dangerous—people had b
een killed for siding with the enemy. Women had taken up with Japanese officers, lived in fancy hotels, and were reviled for it. Claire had also seen that her old friend Mona was living with her Japanese boyfriend, a civilian close to the occupation army. Claire wanted nothing of it, but she had to play the part. Despite her caution, she had to keep up her charade, and she and Fely were known and seen to be spending time with Japanese officers. Claire was sometimes shunned on the street. How could anyone know what she was really doing? Sometimes she fretted and thought about closing the nightclub. She was drinking, she was smoking, she was tense all the while, and she had the pressure of caring for Dian, now three years old. She would walk in the park with Dian sometimes, knowing the Japanese soldiers would usually smile and treat them kindly. Other times the only refuge was a stolen moment to scribble a few lines in her little date book. “Fear for my sanity, really. My book is a comfort. Can let my hair down to it and it alone.”
The Japanese officers came and went. One colonel who loved her shipped off and she heard a few months later that he might have been killed. She hoped it had something to do with the information about him and his unit that she had been sending up to the hills. On a personal level she could not help caring about some of the men she spoke to at the club. Nevertheless, she was taking down the name of every Japanese officer she could find. She was fighting a war.
Claire knew that Fely and the other hostesses at Tsubaki Club had the same trouble she did as they gathered information. They deceived the Japanese as they served them, laughed at their jokes, toasted straight-faced to their victories over the Americans. Later in the night the Japanese would get drunk, using their hands and whips and scabbards at times to show their superiority. Filipinos young and old were subject to petty brutalities without recourse, even when they bowed and averted their eyes. It was obvious that Japanese officers were not honoring Colonel Nagahama’s entreaty not to slap people. It was a constant indignity and sometimes worse. “I don’t know how long I can take this face slapping. Twice tonight.” Someone also had hit her with a rubber hose. “Leg better today. But still swollen. God how I hate them.”
Claire converted her anger and hatred into a compulsion to stay busy all the time, gathering supplies and writing reports during the day, operating the club and gathering bits of information at night. The goal was to send more support than ever before, even when prices were going up and beer was sometimes hard to buy. Without beer and other alcohol, business and receipts dropped. She decided to tackle high expenses by giving up her apartment at the Dakota. It would also help avoid the excess contact with military police caused by having to race home every night before midnight curfew.
“The Japanese curfew was a nuisance and some nights I had not been able to reach home. It only took a friendly carpenter a couple of weeks to convert some of the smaller rooms into a four room apartment, in the rear of the club.” That also meant that Dian would be with her more of the day, cared for by her nanny, Ah Ho, the Chinese woman who had taken over when Lolita went home pregnant with her own child. The new quarters included an extra space with a bunk in case any American stragglers had to be hidden from sight.
Everyone in Manila was economizing these days. Grocery stores were running out of staples like sugar, flour, beef, and even fruits and vegetables. Rationing was supposed to provide bare necessities, but people were forced to turn more and more to black marketeers who gouged them and became rich. Claire, now living at the club, cut back on her budget even more, avoiding expensive food and diversions such as movies and books and eating out. “Only bare necessities now,” she wrote in her diary. “Everything stay[s] high. Hard to make both ends meet.”
Paranoia
Manila, July 1943
ONE MORNING in July, Peggy called Claire, in a panic for no obvious reason. She said she needed to clean house; there was incriminating evidence all around her apartment and she had to do something about it. She was coming right over to the club. Peggy was tightly strung—even calling and saying this on the phone was a danger. Phones were routinely tapped. Claire could do without someone else’s panic attacks or Peggy breaking security and showing up at the club to dump a pile of papers and messages in Claire’s lap. What if she was stopped on the street?
Tsubaki Club was the best and the worst hiding place. Claire said that Japanese officers sometimes wandered into her room—she never said why these men were in her room. They loitered about talking to her, not exactly searching but laying hands on everything. Madame Tsubaki seemed to be immune; but beneath the surface, she was scared too. Peggy’s papers added to the cache of material she already had—the lists of prisoners in Manila and at Cabanatuan, unexplained papers destined for Boone, and Claire’s little date-book diary. That was not all. “I was terribly worried as I had a contraband radio concealed in my dressing table. They sat right by the table and admired all the lipstick and other things but never thought to look under all the fancy trimming.”
Claire imagined that the military police, some of them her evening visitors, had plainclothes operatives and snitches all around. She never saw them. Until this day the danger had been only theoretical—Claire had not seen any signs of actual trouble. However, later that same day the phone rang. Claire answered and no one was there. Her stomach turned. She could not know whether it was a coincidence, whether Peggy had set off an alarm, or whether Peggy herself had turned snitch. She could do nothing, say nothing, only write in her diary that night that the hostesses saw that something was wrong. “The girls think I’m nuts.” Nothing happened.
Worse still, as if Peggy had had a premonition or advance warning, the Kempeitai staged a sudden lockdown. Claire had just swept the apartment clean, removed any incriminating papers from plain sight. Soldiers did come to the club, but the search produced nothing. “We were not allowed to leave that area of four square blocks for one solid day, 24 hours” while they searched.
Over the next month, Claire sped up her activities to make as much money and gather as much information as possible. But money was tight for everyone, business was unsteady, and prices were ever higher. She did what she could to support Boone and Louise—who was still at Santo Tomas, although many people had been shipped off to Los Baños—to send supplies to the prisoners at the Park Avenue School, and to ship whatever she could to Cabanatuan. The POW network in the north was still working with Evangeline Neibert, coordinated either by Peggy or, more and more frequently, by Ramón Amusategui. One day Carling Sobreviñas, Claire’s friend and protector in the hills of Bataan, came to the club with documents he had hidden for her: her passport, insurance certificates, and other papers that had been buried in the hills. Claire hid them again and was always hiding her little date book with notes about the passage of days.
• • •
Fear, suspicion, and terror had become the ever-present reality on the streets of Manila. Beatings, torture, and death became commonplace, so much so that people just stepped around dead bodies they encountered on the street. Newspapers avoided the subject of the random killings. A silent war left bodies sometimes floating overnight on the Pasig River: collaborators executed by the guerrillas or guerrilla sympathizers killed by the Japanese. People did not always know. One of the more prominent and brazenly killed victims was seen by many as a collaborator with the Japanese—Alejandro Roces Jr., manager of the Manila Tribune and the son of its owner. Roces had originally been an ally of the now-exiled president, Manuel Quezon. Quezon had given him the ceremonial title of captain in the city police force, although he was no policeman. He stayed on in the force under Japanese control and now was said to be leading the investigation into the assassination attempt of José Laurel. A young man on a bicycle approached Roces’s car just after the newspaperman had dismissed his bodyguard for a few moments as they approached his father’s house. The young man “whipped out a .45 caliber pistol and fired point blank at Roces and his wife. Then he calmly got onto his bicycle and pedaled off.�
�
Alejandro Roces Sr. heard the shots and came running. His son and daughter-in-law lay dead on the ground. News spread around the city, but the newspaper, which had been avoiding stories of violence that put the occupation in a bad light, neglected to tell the real story of the killing on its pages the next morning. The Tribune printed a picture of the younger Roces, reporting that he had died of a heart attack. The lesson taught by unseen hands was clear to collaborators, and it gave Claire something else to worry about. She knew that some freelance assassin might target her as a courtesan serving the Japanese. When one colonel left town, another officer was romancing her and causing trouble. She did what she had to do.
It was a sad month. Claire observed July 27 as the anniversary of John Phillips’s death. She commemorated the day by working harder, quietly packing supplies and food for the POWs at Cabanatuan. She said she had gathered fifty pairs of shoes for Cabanatuan and about two hundred pesos’ worth of medicines, including quinine, sulfa drugs, and emetine, used to treat the amoebic dysentery that was rampant at Cabanatuan and the other camps. She dedicated her time to the memory of John Phillips, “a quiet day gathering money, clothes etc for your remaining friends. That’s the best I could do to commemorate your memory.” Mixed with that were recriminations—perhaps if she had been faster to start her club and to get her relief operation working, she thought, torturing herself, she could have done something to save Phillips. “My only regret is: that I did not know how to do it a year ago. It might have saved you. But I know you’re waiting for me. And as soon as my duty is finished here, I’ll join you. So please wait for me.”
