Conduct Under Fire

by John A. Glusman

  Heavy rains flooded the Bilibid courtyard, backed up the sewage, and caused an outbreak of amoebic dysentery. The resistance to disease was so low that a mere scrape on the heel could lead to infection. As at Cabanatuan, the average daily caloric intake dipped below 1,600. Coconuts were the main source of nutrition. The Japanese pillaged American Red Cross parcels to such an extent, Hayes noted, that it “looks like we are feeding more Japanese than Americans.” Even the pigs were starving. Air raid drills and blackouts were in effect. Sentries stood guard with fixed bayonets. Shelters and foxholes were dug for the Japanese. The roofs of buildings were marked with Red Crosses. Antiaircraft batteries were set up along the Luneta and began test-firing. The message to the POWs was clear, as Hayes wrote in his diary one day before George rejoined Bilibid’s medical staff: “The siege of the Philippines is on.”

  Japanese air force in Luzon must be neutralized at least, and the shipping assailed. . . .We are sitting right on the target.The Japanese know that too and are taking advantage of it, in hopes that our presence here will protect them.We do not believe that this will deter our forces from doing what is necessary for the cause of an American Victory, and all of us are hoping that is the way they feel. . . .

  Come on Yanks! Give us hell!

  At 0930 on September 21, 1944, American carrier-based airplanes from Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet swarmed out of a cloudbank over Manila as they headed east and southwest on bombing missions over Zablan, Nielson, and Nichols Fields. Internees at Santo Tomás huddled in the lobby of the main building, smiling and crying at the sight of the planes from U.S. Navy Task Force 38. “They are here!” one of them said. Up at Cabanatuan, thousands of POWs burst into cheers, and one of them began to sing, in a deep, resonant voice: “Mine eyes have seen the glory—”

  The next day at 1545 the skies southwest of Bilibid Prison turned “black with planes,” Hayes wrote in his diary. Japanese antiaircraft guns fired back, but the guards and POWs alike thought it testo until shrapnel and spent shells began to rain down as the bombers headed for the Port Area and the Pandacan oil district. The raid lasted two hours, during which five runs were made by 80 to 150 planes. Buildings were struck around Bilibid, one dud landed in a POW’s bed, and a bullet bisected a shutter at a forty-five-degree angle, taking a piece of a prisoner’s jaw with it.

  “The Yanks have come!” Hayes exclaimed. The stage was being set for the Battle for Leyte Gulf, the springboard for the liberation of Luzon.

  Some POWs weren’t willing to wait. In the spring of 1944 Jimmy Carrington, the rowdy 4th Marine with the loopy grin who had had a ball on a dime back in Shanghai, decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d worked until his clothes rotted off down at Palawan, where POWs were building an airfield for the Japanese near Puerto Princesa in preparation for the invasion of Australia. When he arrived in Bilibid with malaria, his buddy, Private 1st Class Joseph E. Dupont, a 4th Marine and a fellow Louisianan known as “Frenchy,” didn’t even recognize him. He’d shaved his head and grown a Fu Manchu mustache, and was as brown as a berry. He wanted to look like a Chinaman, he said. He’d also dropped below 100 pounds, but that wasn’t part of his disguise; he’d picked up a parasite on a work detail at Nichols Field.

  Carrington had thought it would be easy to escape from Palawan Barracks; a couple of the boys had already fled the coop. Getting off the island was the hard part. Bilibid was another matter. The Japanese were convinced it was escape-proof, hadn’t even bothered forming POWs into “shooting squads.” A prisoner would have to be crazy to try to escape. Manila was swarming with occupation troops.

  Carrington was undeterred. He broached the idea to Ray D. Parker, a marine from Cedarville, Washington, who was game. Parker had already seen the way out: a gap between the central guard tower and the top of the prison wall that separated the POW compound from the military prison. It was just wide enough for a man to wriggle through on his side, using his elbows as leverage. Then all you had to worry about was hitting the 1,800-volt wire. Carrington had saved a pair of pants and a shirt for the occasion. He borrowed a knife from another buddy. If he was caught, he decided, he’d rush the Japanese so he’d be shot on the spot. Jimmy Carrington wouldn’t be tortured anymore. He was at the end of his rope. Life was so hard; death would be the easy part.

  At 2030 on April 15, Frenchy Dupont was sitting outside in an audience of POWs watching Ginger Rogers and Jimmy Stewart in Vivacious Lady projected onto a simple white sheet when suddenly a siren pierced the night. Red lights started flashing from the top of Bilibid’s wall. Guards charged the crowd, rifles in hand, screaming, “Inside! Inside!” Many of the POWs were invalids on stretchers, and many, said Hayes, “were trampled in the wild chaos of the night.”

  The POWs were locked into their barracks. A Japanese officer with two sentries did a head count; the head count was repeated two more times. Then finally, at midnight, the barracks lights were turned off and the men were allowed to go to bed. The Japanese told the POWs nothing about what had happened, but bango revealed they were a man short.

  The next morning the Japanese informed the camp that a marine corporal had attempted escape and that he was dead. The story was only partly true.

  Parker had hit the wire. Jimmy Carrington could smell the smoke from his burning shirt. The shock knocked Parker back into the POW side of the compound, where Lieutenant Commander Marion Wade immediately cut the juice. When Parker tried to climb the fence again, he was pounced on by a gang of guards, and the rampage began. The Japanese beat Parker viciously. Wade and Camp Warden Earl G. Schweizer were caught in the melee. But Carrington had made it over onto the side of the military prison. He jumped another wall and then slipped out through the main gate onto Azcarraga Street and down España, where he flagged a caretela. The Filipino driver, Moses Gonzalez, concealed him in his carriage, then hid him in his own home for several days. Carrington, Gonzalez, and his wife shared the same bed. Gonzalez wouldn’t even tell his mother about their new house guest. If the Japanese found out, they’d slaughter the entire family.

  Gonzalez was associated with a Filipino resistance group called Marking’s Guerrillas after Colonel Marcos Agustin, a former boxer and cab driver. Carrington wanted to join an American unit. He was led to the heart of Bulacan Province, where deep in the jungle, Lieutenant Edwin Price Ramsey of the East Central Luzon Guerrilla Area (ECLGA) had his headquarters camp. Ramsey found Carrington “an able, amiable soldier who adapted easily to guerrilla tactics.” He made Carrington raise his right hand, swore him into the ECLGA, and commissioned him as a lieutenant, responsible for headquarters security forces.

  When the Japanese Army occupied Manila on January 2, 1942, the military administration quickly ordered Jorge Vargas to assume the chairmanship of a reconstructed Filipino government that was responsible to the Japanese, not to the Filipino people. The Japanese even chose its name: the Philippine Executive Commission. As President Quezon’s executive secretary, Vargas was one of the most powerful men in the Philippines. Within a month’s time the Japanese had coopted many of Manila’s most illustrious Filipinos—José Yulo, José P. Laurel, and Claro M. Recto among them—to MacArthur’s dismay on Corregidor.

  But after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, numerous guerrilla organizations in the Philippines—from Quezon’s own guerrillas under Vicente Umali to the Chinese Volunteer Guerrillas—sprang up throughout the archipelago. Some harbored distinctly anti-American sentiments, such as the socialist-communist Hukbong Bayan Laban a Hapon (People’s Army Against Japan); others provided valuable intelligence for the Southwest Pacific Area Command. “The nucleus of intelligence operations” in the Philippines was G-2’s own Military Intelligence Service (MIS), organized in early January 1942 under the command of Brigadier General Simeon de Jesus.

  The groundwork for the resistance had been laid by the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB) in Brisbane, which had established a network of spies covering all of Southeast Asia before the war. Colonel Charles A. Willoughby remaine
d the head of G-2 after MacArthur and his staff fled Corregidor and set up GHQ in Melbourne in April 1942. Jockeying for position was Colonel Courtney A. Whitney, in charge of the Philippine Regional Section of AIB, who convinced MacArthur to lend his support to a squadron of all American and Filipino spies in the islands, known as SPYRON.

  Between 1942 and 1944 as many as 180,000 guerrillas operated in the Philippines. On Luzon alone there were eighteen different units. One of them, Major Robert Lapham’s Luzon Guerrilla Armed Forces (LGAF), numbered 13,000 men. Ramsey’s ECLGA swelled to 40,000.

  Guerrilla units in the Philippines engaged Japanese forces, liquidated informants, acted as coast watchers and plane spotters, and observed troop movements. They raided Japanese garrisons and disrupted supply and communication lines. Eventually they controlled thirty-six of the archipelago’s forty-eight provinces, not including strategically important Manila and Davao.

  At first, intelligence was relayed to local commanders of guerrilla organizations by runners who relied on the “bamboo telegraph” and traveled by sailboat and banca between the islands. But to reach Australia, high-frequency radio was required. Guerrilla commander Colonel Marcario Peralta on Panay had contacted MacArthur in Australia with an eye on expanding his command from Panay to the Visayas and Luzon. Then in late 1942, 2nd Lieutenant Robert V. Ball of the Signal Corps pounded out a message on an old cylindrical encoding device for Lieutenant Colonel Wendell W. Fertig, a former mining engineer turned guerrilla leader in Mindanao. Fertig was also trying to lay down a line to Australia. The translated message was vintage Fertig: WE HAVE THE HOT DOPE ON THE HOT YANKS IN THE HOT PHILIPPINES.

  The message was picked up by a U.S. Navy signalman at Radio Station KFS, San Francisco, and relayed to Washington. Once Washington was able to verify Fertig’s identity, the War Department gave Fertig the call sign WYZB and told him, on Valentine’s Day 1943, that he would hear next from KAZ, the net control station for the Southwest Pacific Area Command in Darwin, Australia. One week later, in the first of many radio messages he received from MacArthur, Fertig was appointed commander of the 10th Military District.

  Meanwhile, Major Jesus Villamor arrived in Mindanao via the submarine USS Gudgeon with the first of MacArthur’s espionage teams from Australia, code-named “Planet.” The former commander of the 6th Pursuit Squadron of the Philippine Army Air Corps, Villamor had been evacuated to Australia after the fall of Bataan and was trained in intelligence. Villamor established a network of agents from northern Luzon to southern Negros, from Sorsogon in the east to Panay in the west.

  Mindanao was easier to access than Luzon by submarine, so guerrilla units in the southern Philippines reaped more of the supplies that SWPA was able to send: arms, ammunition, food, medical supplies, 3BZ radio transceivers, currency (both real and counterfeit), and American cigarettes. Colonel Arthur Fischer, who became executive director of the American Cinchona Plantation, was called upon to share with guerrillas his homemade recipe—“as simple as making tea”—for extracting totaquine from cinchona bark by using the juice of wild lemons or guavas as an acetic acid and lye or ashes as an alkaline. Ever modest, MacArthur made sure that two million books of matches in wax-coated covers were distributed, bearing the crossed American and Philippine flags on one side and the motto “I Shall Return” on the other.

  On March 5, 1943, the USS Tambor surfaced in Pagadian Bay, Mindanao, with another load of special cargo from Australia that included intelligence agent Lieutenant Commander Charles “Chick” Parsons, and Captain Charles Smith, who had escaped from Samar after the surrender of the Philippines. One of their objectives was to establish contact with their old friend Fertig and create a chain of command among the other guerrilla organizations. The promise of arms, supplies, and back pay was a strong incentive.

  Fertig had promoted himself to brigadier general of the Mindanao-Visayan Force, USFIP. With his shaved head, goatee, and Moro hat, Fertig had gone native; he looked more Asian than American. After Parsons hooked up with him at his unassuming headquarters in the barrio of Esperanza, he stripped Fertig of his rank and reminded him of his reporting responsibility to GHQ if he didn’t want to be relieved of his command. Then he presented Fertig with two radio sets for intelligence purposes. Per AIB’s plan, a network of coast watcher stations would be established from the Surigao Strait, northeast of Mindanao, to Davao in the southeast, in order to monitor Japanese ship movements.

  The major guerrilla armies had their own radio stations and call signs. Lapham received his radio set directly from Bob Ball, who on Smith’s instructions sailed up the Tayabas coast from the Visayas and into Dibut Bay. Anderson and Major Russell W. Volckmann of the U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines, North Luzon (USAFIP NL) also obtained transmitters. Not until August 31, 1944, did the USS Narwhal slip into Dibut Bay with thirty tons of supplies for LGAF units.

  By then, more than 150 frequencies were in use throughout the Philippines bearing as many as fifty messages each day or more. Guerrilla formations maintained contact with KAZ in Australia and with the War Department through KFS, the radio station of the Signal Intelligence Division of the Western Defense Command in Half Moon Bay, California. If direct communication between the guerrillas and MacArthur was impossible, KFS served to monitor and relay traffic.

  Orders to guerrilla leaders were issued over KAZ or via Fertig. In June 1944 alone Fertig’s unit sent over 1,076 messages and received 1,057. Thirty-two code men were required to monitor five separate frequencies eighteen hours a day, and one was manned around the clock. Colonel Willoughby considered the “air, ground and naval intelligence data . . . efficiently correct and, therefore, of great value in the preparation and successful prosecution of Allied plans in the Philippine area.”

  The ECLGA covered five districts: Manila, Bataan, Bulacan, Pampanga, and Pangasinan-Tarlac. Each district had its own regiment and commander who reported to Ramsey. Aircraft warning and naval observation posts were perched on Mt. Balagbag where, with the aid of a telescope, Ramsey claimed, enemy activities were watched with “pinpoint” precision. To evade American submarines, Japanese merchant convoys hugged the coast. But many were unable to escape detection by American and Filipino coast watchers.

  Guerrilla radio operators faced the danger of having their location pinpointed by Japanese radio direction finding (DF) stations. First, each Japanese DF station would determine the direction, or line bearing, of an active guerrilla radio transmitter from its own location. When these stations obtained sufficient bearings, a Japanese controller would draw the bearings on a map. The point at which all the bearings intersected was the location of the guerrilla radio station. This technique was known as triangulation.

  Japanese counterintelligence in the Philippines closely monitored guerrilla wireless communications and at various times penetrated guerrilla codes. They eavesdropped on Peralta on Panay, Fertig on Mindanao, and Major Ralph Praeger of the Cagayan-Apayao Forces (CAF) in northern Luzon, and they intercepted plain-language messages transmitted from MacArthur in Australia. They even intercepted messages concerning submarine movements, though they admitted “it is very difficult to decipher the meaning because of the especial codes used.” “Generally speaking,” said one Japanese report documenting guerrilla messages in the first ten days of February 1943, “the growth in frequency of communication is a phenomenon which must be noted as an indication of effective action based on liaison between the various enemy guerrilla groups and AMERICAN contact with the PHILIPPINES.” Another report of April 28, 1943, made the barbed comment: “While maintaining close liaison with each other by wireless and other means, they report information to AMERICA and AUSTRALIA, especially to MACARTHUR, deluded by belief [sic] in the arrival of a relieving force.” On August 30, 1943, Praeger was captured by the Japanese, and the CAF was dissolved.

  The radio at Ramsey’s camp was set up behind headquarters on “Signal Hill” and operated by Lieutenant Leopoldo Guillermo. But initially Ramsey couldn’t reach SWPA directly. To d
o that he first had to obtain a navy codebook from Peralta, the designated head of the 6th Military District in Panay. Then he had to encode the messages before they could be sent from Signal Hill to WYZB, which became the major control station in the Philippines. The messages were decoded by Fertig’s cryptographers, analyzed by Fertig, recoded, transmitted to AIB in Brisbane where they were decoded, and finally delivered by courier to MacArthur’s headquarters in Melbourne. Or they were sent via Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Andrews, a close friend of Villamor who took over Station 4E7 after Villamor was recalled to Australia.

  According to Jimmy Carrington, several of Ramsey’s Filipino guerrillas witnessed the loading of American POWs onto unmarked Japanese transport ships in Manila and actually counted the number of prisoners departing. Carrington himself had seen the hand clickers they used. He guessed that “at least” five or six Japanese merchant vessels were surveilled with POWs on board. Ships were unnamed, but in May 1943 training for the Philippine Regional Section included four and a half hours of ship and aircraft recognition. In February 1944 GHQ issued the “Philippines Intelligence Guide,” which was illustrated to facilitate identification of Japanese aircraft, and war and merchant ships. Ship tonnage was estimated by the bridge, stack, and mainmast design, and the number and placement of lifeboats.

  G-2 remained oddly uninterested in the increasing surveillance of the Port Area, where “American POWs were exclusively employed on piers,” Fertig reported on December 21, 1943. There was a wonderful opportunity, he proposed, to obtain information on shipping by using Filipino agents as dock hands, which would eliminate any danger posed to American POWs, who were closely watched by the Japanese. But at the bottom of Fertig’s message, Courtney Whitney remarked at GHQ/SWPA:Action taken: None.