MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  The Japanese were digging in for a fight throughout the Philippines and particularly in Manila. Leyte was the natural point for Japanese occupation forces to mount a defense against an expected American attack. However, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, now commander of the Japanese Fourteenth Army, focused on a defense line in Luzon itself. Ramsey’s intelligence operation was close enough to military intelligence, even inside headquarters, to report the strategy. Yamashita “was resisting the pressure to shift his forces southward,” Ramsey’s informants told him. “We relayed this information to MacArthur: Luzon, and not Leyte, remained the main enemy stronghold.”

  Welcome Bombs

  Manila, September 21, 1944

  ON THURSDAY, September 21, around noon, people across Manila heard a sound, first buzzing, then roaring—airplanes, then the telltale sound of planes diving in the air—followed by explosions. Antiaircraft fire, more planes diving, more cannon fire. They saw billows of smoke in the direction of Japanese installations and on the horizon.

  Thirteen-year-old Juergen Goldhagen and his parents were huddled in a makeshift shelter in their living room. The Goldhagens had managed exit visas and left Germany in 1937 for the Philippines, escaping the Nazis before the start of the war. Martin Goldhagen, Juergen’s father, was Jewish. Charlotte, his mother, was Christian, but being Jewish, or being married to a Jew, or being the son of a Jew meant the same thing in the Third Reich. Here in Japanese-occupied Manila, though, they were free as German nationals. “We sat on a mattress with a cork on a string around our necks. We would put the cork in our mouths as the explosions drew near because somewhere Mom or Dad had read that a large explosion could cause you to bite your tongue off. I also had an aluminum pot over my head and wished I was a soldier, because they had strong helmets.”

  The prisoners of war, the once vanquished, the victims of the cruel occupation, could only describe the strange sensation of welcoming an attack in which they themselves might die. They cheered whenever and wherever Japanese soldiers could not hear them. In Manila people ventured outside to peer at the airplanes, then retreated quickly when they spotted shrapnel falling from the sky. They saw that American attacks were focused close to Manila Bay, hundreds of planes diving and dodging Japanese fighters and ground fire. The Americans had returned.

  Claire first heard the distant sound the following day, Friday, September 22. She and her cell mates were returning from their weekly shower. The distant hum grew toward a crescendo. They were not sure what was happening, but then they were herded quickly back to their cells. The woman who came in last was able to report details to the rest of them. “Planes! About five hundred or more, I guess,” she reported, “They are so very high that they look like specks.” If there had been any doubt about the origin of the planes, it was put to rest: The Filipino guards were nervous as they locked Claire in her cell, and they told the women to lie close to the ground on their stomachs. The explosions had to be an attack by American planes coming to retake the city.

  The women celebrated, quietly, they thought, but then were punished by not receiving any food that night and reduced rations of only one meal a day after that.

  Guards brought Maria Martinez to Claire’s cell that night; she had been arrested about a week earlier. Maria was code-named Papaya, and she was the other member of the underground who was in touch with John Boone and other guerrillas in Bataan.

  This was potentially dangerous. The Kempeitai had interrogated Claire only about her work as a member of the Cabanatuan supply organization—there still was no sign that they knew about her connections to Boone and the guerrillas. If Maria could be broken, both of them would be in far greater danger. Both women were taken out several times for interrogations. Claire said the interrogators went back over old material and slapped her repeatedly. Maria was also beaten and appeared to be getting the worst of it. Still, neither woman gave any sign that either of them was connected to the guerrillas.

  Meanwhile, Claire told Maria that she felt guilty because she perhaps had accidentally given the Japanese interrogators information that led to her arrest. “I don’t want you to think that I have squealed on you,” Claire said. Maria had just been slapped around during an interrogation session. She was wiping away tears. She told Claire: “I have never asked you whether you did or whether you didn’t. I have never even thought that you had squealed on me.”

  • • •

  Claire had not seen or heard from Ramón for months and was worried. One day she asked one of the Filipino food carriers if he could find anything out about him. An answer came four days later: Ramón was in the dungeons and had been severely tortured, the young man said. He was paralyzed in one leg and unable to walk.

  The Japanese military authorities eventually told Claire and Maria that the investigative cases against them were complete; they were taken to Bilibid Prison to await court-martial. On November 20 the women were led into a room. Seated before them were three Japanese military judges; a photograph of Emperor Hirohito, draped with a Japanese flag, was displayed behind them.

  Then Ramón was brought in. Claire said that Ramón had been so badly beaten that, when a Japanese interpreter told them to bow before the tribunal judges, he could hardly follow orders. “Ramón was shaking from weakness and pain, and toward the end I doubt if he knew what was being read. When asked if he was guilty, he replied ‘Yes’ in a barely audible voice, and then collapsed in a chair.”

  Marie and Claire were tried next; charges were read in English and Japanese, and they answered as ordered when asked about their pleas. “Guilty,” both of them said. They were led away, one cell for women, another for men. Claire never saw Ramón again.

  Parsons Sets the Table

  Leyte Gulf, October 1944

  AT 4:30 P.M. on the afternoon of Thursday, October 12, 1944, a Catalina “Black Cat” flying boat skimmed the ocean off Leyte, about forty miles south of Tacloban, the southern Philippine island’s capital. As the aircraft slowed to a moderate taxi speed, crew members tossed an inflatable raft out the blister port and dumped in some supplies. Next, Chick Parsons and his partner, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Rawolle of Sixth Army Special Intelligence, dove out headfirst. By the time they had righted themselves and were ready to paddle to shore, the airplane was picking up speed and headed back toward its base in New Guinea. (MacArthur had relocated to New Guinea from Brisbane in April 1944.) Parsons now had four days to survey Leyte before U.S. bombers began to soften up Japanese defenses in advance of the long-awaited invasion of the Philippines.

  Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, commander of the Sixth Army, had summoned Parsons a few days earlier and told him that the invasion was confirmed for October 20. Parsons’s mission was to notify guerrilla leaders in person and ask them for information on enemy positions and their hour-to-hour movements. The guerrillas were expected to deploy and attack Japanese troops when they began to retreat under the frontal U.S. attack. Parsons was also supposed to create an administrative structure on land once the invasion was successful.

  General MacArthur intended the invasion, vast as it was, to be surgically precise in avoiding collateral damage. That meant the guerrillas also had to know that they needed to protect themselves and civilians from the American onslaught. Parsons needed to provide enough information but maintain operational secrecy. That was the conundrum presented by General Krueger: “How to remove loyal Filipinos out of the various areas to be attacked without giving advance information to the enemy is something else again.”

  “Likewise how to coordinate Colonel [Ruperto] Kangleon’s troops with our own, without revealing exact invasion plans.” (Kangleon was commander of guerrilla forces on Leyte.)

  One final thing, Krueger said. “Be sure that the enemy doesn’t get information about our plans, this is one time you definitely must not be captured.”

  “I won’t be,” Parsons said.

  • • •

 
Parsons and Rawolle made it to shore as planned, then sent a coded message to the Pacific Command: “Party Arrived Safely.” They hid their raft and set to work. They first made contact with Kangleon and passed along the orders without providing details of the overall invasion. A mass bombing attack would begin in seventy-two hours, they told him. His fighters were to “seek safety in the hills” and “remain under cover . . . round up every possible guerrilla and surround all [Japanese] retreat routes.”

  That mission accomplished, Parsons remained onshore with the guerrillas. After four days of bombings, a U.S. invasion force of seven hundred ships and 174,000 men converged on Leyte.

  On October 20 General Douglas MacArthur surveyed the initial attack from the bridge of the USS Nashville. “High overhead, swarms of airplanes darted into the maelstrom. And across what would ordinarily have been a glinting, untroubled blue sea, the black dots of the landing craft churned toward the beaches.”

  The American contingent sailed steadily under cover of darkness. Within the convoy, tank landing ships (LSTs) were always the most exposed to enemy attack as they tried to beach themselves to open their giant hinged forward doors and disgorge tanks, trucks, and soldiers onshore. Many years later, speaking with his son Peter, Ensign Bernard Eisner was to recall that distant morning when he stood watch before dawn on LST 463 as it steamed north-northwest in the convoy at about 8 knots. He rang general quarters, calling all hands to battle stations when they approached within several miles of Red Beach, their objective on Leyte Island. At the same time, he saw a twin-engine Japanese plane, possibly a reconnaissance flight, high overhead. Latimer, the navigation officer, took the watch at 8:00 a.m. Eisner took his battle station, scanning the sky for Japanese planes. At 11:00 a.m. the ship approached land among a dozen LSTs heading toward Red Beach. They encountered heavy mortar and artillery fire and beached so that a battalion of engineers could take smaller craft to shore. Other LSTs were damaged; LST 463 pulled off and took on the first wave of casualties.

  MacArthur decided to go ashore himself on a third assault wave. A landing craft carried him within fifty yards of the beach and he then waded to shore. He was accompanied by aides, other officers, and a committee of Filipinos led by Sergio Osmeña, who had acceded to the Philippine presidency in exile when Manuel Quezon died in August. A mobile microphone had been set up on the beach for the general, who declared as the battle raged on: “People of the Philippines: I have returned.”

  Deadly Passage

  Cabanatuan, November 1944

  WHEN THE POWs at Cabanatuan saw the American planes that first day, September 21, 1944, the starving, sickly men restrained themselves to avoid reprisals from the guards. “No cheers, just grins,” Colonel Arthur Shreve said.

  More flyovers followed, and then there were direct attacks nearby. Shreve saw “our Navy aviators . . . flying high over the mountains in formation. They strafed and bombed the field near here. Sometimes I have felt a little ashamed of the way we took cover in the early days of the war, but my heart glows with pride at our conduct as compared with these Japs.”

  The three thousand men were consumed with keeping up on the latest war news. Enterprising tinkerers among them had jury-rigged radios that they hid under floorboards or in holes in the ground. Months earlier, they had heard about D-Day and the invasion of Europe; Belgium was free; Holland and France were being retaken. In the Pacific the United States was on the march, taking stepping-stone islands and then finally invading the Philippines at Leyte. MacArthur and men were working their way back toward victory.

  Weeks into the American campaign, word began spreading in the camp that the Japanese were planning to start shipping able-bodied prisoners to labor camps outside the Philippines. The Americans hoped the Japanese would not have enough time to organize before the U.S. onslaught that could rescue them. However, in December the order came to start shipping out. Shreve was among a wave of thousands—all but the most sickly and infirm—who were transported from Cabanatuan to Manila itself—and to Bilibid Prison, where Claire and Ramón had been held just a few weeks earlier. Also among this group of POWs were Mr. Threatt and Colonel Mack, both having recovered sufficiently to be considered able-bodied laborers despite having survived almost six months in solitary confinement. As they waited at Bilibid, they received miserable rations, the worst they had suffered in weeks, and now without supplements from the outside—rice, fetid water, and a bit of corn.

  Then, on December 13, Shreve and the others received the order to ship out. He was among 1,619 men who had been in Cabanatuan who now marched under guard out the front gate of Bilibid about a mile to the port. There they boarded the Oryoku Maru, a Japanese transport converted during the war from a passenger and cargo vessel. The men came to call it a hell ship for good reason. The POWs were packed tightly belowdecks in holds so small that no one could lie down; at best they could barely sit with knees hunched up. The air was foul and the food was no better.

  At the same time, the ship carried about nineteen hundred Japanese civilian and military passengers in berths higher up and certainly under better conditions. The Oryoku Maru set sail from Manila harbor, headed southwest, and skirted Corregidor before turning northward toward the Asian mainland. The ship bore no markings as a vessel carrying prisoners of war.

  They had made it no farther overnight than the vicinity of Subic Bay, just west around the Bataan peninsula from Manila, when American warplanes launched their first attack. Waves of attacks followed. A bomb hit the deck and blew a gun over the side. Passengers and crew died in the first blast and many were injured. Strafing machine-gun fire also wounded prisoners in the hold below. The POWs were held on board despite the destruction and mayhem but finally were allowed to abandon ship as the burning vessel began sinking on December 15. Prisoners who could swim helped others who could not. Colonel Shreve was among the survivors. He used a floating piece of a hatch cover to ferry men to the shore. “The Japanese had placed machine guns along the shore and anyone who didn’t come directly from the ship to the shore was immediately taken under fire.”

  Those who made it ashore alive remained at a temporary camp for more than a week; Japanese soldiers marched fifteen of those who were sick or had been wounded by the ordeal to a cemetery, where they bayoneted and decapitated them and then dumped them in a common grave. Colonel Shreve and the other survivors eventually boarded another hell ship bound for labor camps in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan itself. This time they survived the journey. An estimated 21,000 Allied POWs died at sea as they were being transported on 156 Japanese hell-ship voyages around the Pacific, victims of U.S. submarine and air attacks.

  By the end of 1944, the population of Cabanatuan had dropped sharply. In December there were fewer than 900 men at Cabanatuan; then 346 of the remaining prisoners were sent to Puerto Princesa, about five hundred miles south of Bataan on the southern island of Palawan; about 500 men remained at Cabanatuan. The new year brought promise of an American victory, but none of the remaining prisoners or detainees in the Philippines could know what might be in store for them.

  Power of the Spirit

  Manila, January 1945

  AS JAPANESE FORCES prepared for a decisive moment, buoyant rhetoric from their commanders encouraged and reminded them that the Japanese Army could still prevail. Tsuyuo Yamagata, the commander of the Japanese Twenty-sixth Division, counseled wisdom. “This is a real battleground,” he told his assembled officers. Be wise, he said, and recognize your strengths. “You cannot regard the enemy as on a par with you. You must realize that material power usually overcomes spiritual power in the present war. The enemy is clearly our superior in machines. Do not depend on your spirits overcoming this enemy. . . . Devise combat methods based on mathematic precision. Then think about displaying your spiritual power.”

  MacArthur’s forces were advancing on Luzon from the north and the south. Manila residents heard gunfire every day and saw American planes frequently f
lying overhead. The military profile in Manila was ominous and changing. At first the Japanese had been moving troops out of the city and were destroying military installations. That plan changed with the decimation of the Japanese naval fleet at Leyte. The Japanese flew in aircraft from outside the Philippines; instead of destroying bases, they were using Luzon airfields as bases to strafe American positions.

  They also used an airfield at Angeles close to Clark Air Base to introduce a new tactic in the war—they had assembled a corps of suicide pilots—kamikaze—who used their planes as guided missiles to blast American ships. The Luzon-based kamikaze flew their first missions in the waters off Leyte on October 25, 1944. It was a terrifying prospect, and the kamikaze sometimes hit their targets, but American shipboard gunners adapted.

  Manila, meanwhile, was being converted into a fortress. Japanese officials wavered and argued about whether to make a stand here or retreat to high ground in Bataan and beyond. Nevertheless, they continued setting up barricades and pillboxes throughout Manila. If the Japanese staged a last stand in Manila, civilians would be caught in the middle of a major battle.

  As MacArthur’s forces advanced toward the city, Japanese troops mined bridges across the Pasig River and reinforced gun emplacements. Civilians were being pressed into work crews. “The Japanese are obtaining this forced labor in a most haphazard manner. Many sentries are stationed in various parts of the town and every able-bodied Filipino pedestrian who is unfortunate enough to pass before them is seized and placed in a waiting truck. When enough men have thus been corralled, the Japanese take them to the places where they are most needed and there they are put to work.”