After the Japanese had driven us up to the mountains in extreme eastern Pangasinan and we had then slipped through their lines, we moved steadily back southwestward into Tarlac province once more, a sojourn typical of our harried, nomadic life. Minang had not shared our adventures around Umingan because, earlier, she had gone off northward to look for Maj. Bob Lapham. Now, as we made our way back into Tarlac in June 1944, she rejoined us, bringing with her some splendid news and some that was equivocal. The good news was tangible: .45-caliber ammunition with 1943 dates on the casings, American magazines, boxes of matches, and Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes, all decorated with American and Philippine flags and with the signature of General MacArthur beneath the pledge “I shall return.”
Even better was the story behind it. Robert V. Ball, an enlisted man on Mindoro when Corregidor fell, had, like so many, refused to surrender and taken to the bush. He had fallen under the jurisdiction of Col. Wendell Fertig, who had appreciated his talents and commissioned him a captain. In May 1944 he had been dispatched northward from the island of Samar in a small sailboat carrying one radio transmitter. After many tribulations he had managed to land south of Baler Bay on the east coast of Luzon, unannounced and practically under the noses of the Japanese.
My spirits bounded upward. Here at last was the linkup we had needed so badly for so long. Soon we would have a transmitter of our own to pass on to general headquarters in Australia everything we knew about the enemy.
The jubilation was tempered by some other news. Lapham had decided to reorganize his whole command and had sent along with Minang a written directive for me to assume command of Pangasinan province, leaving Tarlac to Hendrickson. I cannot deny that I was pleased to receive what was clearly a promotion. It was recognition of past services and an expression of confidence in me personally, but at the same time it meant leaving Al, whom I had come to regard as a fast friend despite our arguments and misadventures. Al took the news in stride and told me I could take anyone I liked with me as a bodyguard save his own Little Joe. I asked to keep Gregorio Agaton, and Al released him to me promptly. I then mounted a Philippine pony and set off back north once more into the Japanese-infested province we had just fled. I might be the newly minted commander of an entire province, but my retinue could hardly have been more modest: only Greg and Minang, each also on a pony. It was June 21, 1944, twenty-six months after I had tumbled off the road into a ditch on the Bataan Death March.
Much had happened at USAFFE headquarters in Australia during those two years. General MacArthur had never lost faith in the potential of guerrilla operations all over the Philippines. When his initial radio contacts with Praeger and others gave out or appeared about ready to do so, he began to undertake imaginative remedial measures. On December 27, 1942, he sent the Filipino air ace, Capt. Jesus Villamor, by submarine to the Visayan Islands north of Mindanao. Beginning February 18, 1943, Lt. Cmdr. Charles (Chick) Parsons and Capt. Charles Smith were posted to Mindanao. All were charged to contact prominent local people of assured loyalty and to set up regular chains of communication, preferably by radio, with Australia.
Parsons was a particularly inspired choice for a mission of this sort. Sufficiently short and dark to look somewhat like a Filipino, energetic and imaginative, he had lived in the islands for years before the war and had prospered. Early in the war he had been caught by the Japanese and tortured in Fort Santiago, but unlike most who had undergone such an experience he had been freed and had eventually made his way to Australia, where he had volunteered for special duty. No irregular operation can survive on love of freedom alone. It is also essential to have an overall plan, outside encouragement, leadership, discipline, arms, ammunition, supplies, and synchronization of communications. All this Parsons was to supply, by submarine, for the last two years of the war.1
Villamor, Smith, and Parsons were all told to give specific orders to local guerrillas to gather and communicate information, and to forswear military action that would call Japanese attention to them and bring down reprisals on the heads of civilians who aided them, all before American forces could be in a position to afford them any protection. Anyone who has gotten this far in the present narrative is aware of how casually guerrillas everywhere heeded directives like this one. Finally, Dr. Emgidio Cruz, President Quezon’s personal physician in far off Washington, was brought back to Australia. In July 1943 he was smuggled into the Philippines to find out just what was going on, in high places and low. He secured valuable information and made it safely back to Australia.2
Meanwhile a major organizational shakeup was taking place in Australia. Col. Allison Ind’s Philippine Subsection of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, which had tried for ten months to oversee Philippine guerrilla activity, was replaced in May 1943 by a much larger Philippine Regional Section, which reported directly to general MacArthur and was run by Gen. Courtney Whitney, one of his personal confidants. Whitney had been a regular army officer in the Philippines in the 1920s. He had resigned his commission and pursued a civilian career for years, but volunteered his services to the air corps when the war began.
Few men have been so variously estimated as this prominent prewar Manila lawyer and businessman. Many have agreed with one of MacArthur’s biographers, William Manchester, who calls Whitney a consummate flatterer and an odious reactionary who was a disaster as coordinator of guerrilla operations because he was condescending to all Filipinos save those who, like himself, had big investments in the islands. Some of Manchester’s antipathy may have derived from Whitney’s refusal to allow dissemination of propaganda pamphlets composed by Robert Sherwood that reflected conventional American liberal views circa 1943-45.3 Other American writers, some of whom worked closely with Whitney, describe him as a “splendid gentleman” who was keen, perceptive, energetic, rugged, aggressive, fearless, a natural leader, a masterful interrogator, and a fine judge of men who got on well with others.4
Filipino writers have also offered varied assesments both of Whitney and of the broader question of guerrilla operations themselves. Uldarico Baclagon, for instance, acknowledges that MacArthur appreciated the utility of guerrilla activity, but thinks he did not value it enough. He maintains that if irregular operations had been undertaken on a scale comparable to that of the Russians in Europe—i.e., enlisting the whole civilian population—the Japanese would have had to either abandon the archipelago entirely or tie up the bulk of their forces just to secure communications with their operations farther south. Yet Baclagon seems to have doubts about his own analysis, for he notes how many different Filipino peoples live on Luzon, how numerous were the jealousies and rivalries among the many guerrilla bands, and how little overall direction and planning existed throughout the first half of the war.5 It seems to me that he also fails to consider the truly horrible reprisals the Japanese would have visited on all Filipinos had a policy of wholesale resistance been undertaken at a time when American forces in Australia were still unable to offer partisan groups much more than sympathy.
Villamor, the Filipino aviator, thinks the supreme commander would have done more had he not been systematically misled by Whitney and others near him. Villamor claims that the Filipino contribution to irregular activity was always more important than that of Americans but that this has never been properly recognized. One reason was that many Filipinos seemed to think Americans were more intelligent than themselves and so felt more comfortable if Americans were in charge. More important, he says, many around USAFFE headquarters, and Whitney most of all, were unabashed racists who regarded Filipinos as natural inferiors, treated them patronizingly, failed to give them proper support, and then hogged all the credit for Americans. He even asserts that Whitney sabotaged his own (Villamor’s) messages to MacArthur.6
I never knew Whitney, so I cannot pass judgment on his character or alleged lack of egalitarian spirit. Likewise, since I was never at MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, I cannot know for certain whether more could have been done to aid us or whether everything reasonable was done. I can judge only by the official record and by what happened where I was. On these bases, it is clear that Whitney got things going promptly. Even before settling into his new job on May 24, 1943, he managed to find some radio transmitters in England that could be carried on a man’s back (when the best American transmitters weighed a ton), and began to order them by the dozens, then by the hundreds. He persuaded some five hundred men of Filipino extraction from U.S. military units on the west coast and in Hawaii to volunteer for special service, then brought them to Australia, gave them crash courses in such subjects as radio operation and maintenance, weather and plane observation, and sabotage, and sent them into the Philippines. Whitney and his aides devised codes for secret communication, flooded the Philippines with American newspapers and magazines, put the “I shall return” message onto millions of packages of cigarettes, gum, candy bars, matches, and toothpaste, and shipped these into the islands on submarines provided by the navy. Ball’s landing near Baler Bay was the first of many such expeditions, though it was undertaken primarily to establish a communication linkage with Southwest Pacific Area command (SWPA) in Australia. It was also the only one made by sailboat. Guns, ammunition, clothing, other supplies, and the men trained for special services followed soon after by submarine.
At the sight of such commodities, and particularly the message they bore, guerrillas and Filipino civilians alike burst into tears of joy, for at last the aid so long hoped for and expected was coming.7 Panlilio says she and others in Marking’s guerrillas were devastated when they learned that Bernard Anderson, with whom they enjoyed good relations, had burned most of his U.S. magazines, newspapers, and other propaganda lest Filipinos caught with even a scrap of it be tortured and killed by the Japanese.8 My people were overjoyed like the rest, but my troubles were different from those Anderson envisioned. Some of the papers and magazines we received fell into the hands of “paper” guerrillas, really bandits, who used them to recruit followers. A few who persisted after being warned had to be killed.
By the time of the Leyte landings in October 1944, a whole network of 134 clandestine radio stations and 23 weather observation posts had been established all over the Philippines. They supplied MacArthur’s headquarters with detailed information about everything down to which barber shop cut the hair of which Japanese lieutenant.9
Eventually, in July 1944, I got one of these imported transmitters, in my case a set originally built in the Dutch East Indies. It was a strange piece of machinery. It got its power from being pedalled like a bicycle. One had to pump vigorously to receive a message on it, and to build his leg muscles up to Olympic standards if he wanted to transmit. The contraption had other drawbacks as well. Unlike the new English models, this one was too heavy for a man to carry. It had to be hauled over rough roads and trails and across open fields either in carts or on the backs of carabao. In either case it was constantly jiggled and sometimes shaken off. It seemed to me that we spent half our time trying to repair it—usually without spare parts.10 When the instrument did work, we immediately courted trouble of a different sort: we had to change our location after each transmission lest the Japanese locate us by triangulation. Even so, we used our Rube Goldberg transmitter to send much useful information to Australia. More important for us narrowly, though not for the prosecution of the war overall, we were now able to establish rendezvous points with U.S. submarines and thus get consignments of all sorts of sorely needed arms and supplies on a semi-regular basis.
The radio and submarines were the means whereby I soon made a couple of memorable political acquaintances. As soon as I learned that submarines would be landing along the Luzon coast with some regularity, I contacted Manuel Roxas and offered to help him get to a submarine and escape from Luzon. He refused on the ground that the Japanese might retaliate against his family, but he gave me all sorts of valuable information which I at once radioed to Australia. Among those many messages was one from the family of Gen. Carlos P. Romulo, then on MacArthur’s staff. Romulo personally thanked me when I met him for the first time in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco in June, 1945.
Bob Lapham’s letter of June 21, 1944, authorized me to command in Pangasinan province, to enlist personnel there, and to appoint appropriate officers. That would seem to have been clear enough, but in fact trouble began almost immediately. Lt. Col. Russell W. Volckmann, a West Point career officer who had never surrendered on Bataan and who had assumed command of guerrilla forces in north Luzon following the deaths of Colonels Moses and Noble, now sent a runner to inform me that I should place myself and my men under his command. I replied by letter that this was impossible, since I was already under the command of Major Lapham, who had himself earlier resisted being absorbed into Volckmann’s organization. I compared my position to that of a baserunner caught between bases, destined to be tagged out either way I went. Volckmann was not impressed by my baseball metaphor. He repeated his orders. I don’t recall exactly how I phrased my reply this time, but it meant, unmistakably, “No.” Volckmann did not give up easily. Not long afterward two Americans under his command came to see me. My response was typical of the mistrust that existed among so many irregulars. I suspected that their intention was to arrest me, so I told my men to be alert and, if necessary, to seize them, after which I would ship them back north. My fears proved unfounded. The pair had come only to talk. One of them needed glasses badly and I was ‘able to get him some from Manila, so we parted amicably.
A few months later, though, Volckmann threatened to have me court martialled for desertion if I persisted in maintaining my independence from him. This time I consulted Lapham by runner and received a letter from him, October 31, 1944, in which he advised me simply to ignore Volckmann. The latter, he said, had no business giving me orders at all; nor did he have any authority to court martial me for desertion, disobedience, or anything else, since a guerrilla is a volunteer.
My real reason for spurning Volckmann was that I did not want to break connections with Lapham. I had joined his forces willingly, and he had treated me well. Though I had never met Bob at this time, I had already come to admire him as a reasonable man and a fighter. I knew he had not subordinated himself to Volckmann, and I thought my primary loyalty should be to him. Finally, both of us believed we had a better organization than Volckmann, many of whose troops were said to be armed only with bolos.11
To this day I am not sure what Volckmann’s motive was in these transactions. At the time I thought it was mere empire building. There are several other possibilities, though. Volckmann may have genuinely believed he could make better use of Lapham’s men, or mine, than we could ourselves. From all written accounts his own guerrillas performed admirably after the American landings in north Luzon in 1945. Perhaps he wanted our units as sources of supply for his own? Most of his followers were holed up in the mountains of the far north while we operated in the heavily populated, fertile central plain of Luzon, where food was abundant.
It may also have been that both natural inclination and experience had convinced Volckmann that everyone should be fitted into a single disciplined organization, albeit with himself at the top. Unlike those of us farther south, Volckmann removed his guerrillas from their barrios, put them in company camps for training, and disciplined them strictly (even to ordering that anyone who surrendered or let himself be captured by the enemy would be shot on sight); after which he broke them into small units and let them attack the Japanese periodically to keep up their spirits.12 These Prussian procedures would have been impossible where we were in the lowlands, but Blackburn, Volckmann’s chief aide, says they were welcomed by guerrillas and civilians alike in the wild, remote north where there had been an urgent need for control and direction for many months. He adds that he and Volckmann received much willing cooperation from wise old Igorot chiefs who were themselves good organizers and who appreciated what was being attempted.13 Villamor, who did not esteem most American guerrillas, calls Volckmann “tough” in an admiring way, and contrasts favorably Volckmann’s centralization of authority with the “useless overlapping” of the many units in central Luzon.14
On the last point I must disagree with both Volckmann and Villamor. Much history is against them. Both in the Spanish resistance to Napoleon, and all over Europe in World War II, efforts to integrate different, competing, and often hostile guerrilla bands into one organization failed completely.
Not the least interesting aspect of the matter is the way Volckmann and Blackburn deal with it in their books. Blackburn barely mentions Lapham; and myself not at all. Volckmann’s book, We Remained, is quite informative generally, and it is calm and measured in tone. Yet in it Volckmann says nothing at all about his efforts to absorb Bob’s command earlier in the war or mine in 1944!
Looking back four decades later, I still cannot see how anything would have been gained by merging our units with Volckmann’s. We would have merely passed under the command of someone from a different area who was accustomed to operating under different conditions, and at a time when none of us, individually or collectively, had enough guns or ammunition to undertake a major battle with Japanese. At the time my main regret about the whole affair was that during it Lapham asked me to give up my bicycle-powered radio transmitter to Maj. Parker Calvert, commander of Volckmann’s First District. The reason was that Volckmann had not yet received his first supplies by submarine and so needed a radio to send his messages to Lapham, who then relayed them to Australia.
While I was fending off the unwelcome attentions of Volckmann, I was also trying to put my new domain in order. Majs. Edwin Ramsey and Charles Cushing had once tried to organize it, but it had since fallen apart. I now went around recruiting leaders and men, some ex-followers of theirs, some new men, and explaining to both what our major objectives should be.
Right off I had what I regarded as a stroke of luck. Many of those whom I recruited were Igorots, mountaineers who inhabit the cordillera of northern Luzon. The diverse peoples of the Philippines vary considerably in native capacity and attitude toward life; and no less diverse were the opinions of various Americans about them. Donald Blackburn, for instance, thought it was useless to try to make soldiers out of Ilocanos. They were hopeless, he said: undisciplined, indifferent, undependable, and brainlessly good natured, in every way inferior to the husky, bright, energetic little Igorots.15 Al Hendrickson, by contrast, rated Ilocanos above Igorots for education, intelligence, and bravery. He disliked Igorots because they were unwilling to venture out of the mountains. Tom Chengay, he said, was the only one of them he ever knew who readily went down into the lowlands to fight. I don’t agree entirely with either Blackburn or Al. I think Blackburn downgraded the Ilocanos unduly, but like him I did think Igorots were better fighters and more loyal than Ilocanos. They were also tough physically, amazingly agile, and strong. Religiously, most of them were pagans; and many, though not all, were still primitive.
Not the least interesting characteristic of Filipinos was their superstitions, those of the pagans being the most picturesque. Both Volckmann and Blackburn lived among Igorots and other pagan tribes, and they relate a number of interesting anecdotes about them. Once Igorot pagan priests sacrificed several chickens and studied their spleens to determine if it was safe for Blackburn and Volckmann to stay in their house. They decided that it was, and no harm befell them. Another time a pagan priest prayed and sacrified chickens when Blackburn was sick. He got better at once. Still another time Volckmann was ill. An old native said it was due to a witch, and that the bewitchment could be undone only by another witch. An ancient one was procured. She decided she needed a consultant. The next day the two of them prayed until they were exhausted. Volckmann’s condition improved promptly.16 Volckmann himself records that he once wanted to leave an area in north Luzon because he had heard that a Japanese patrol was headed in that direction. The leader of a pagan tribe there, a man whom Volckmann trusted, insisted that pagan priests be consulted. Four of these dignitaries then cut open four chickens, their favorite vehicle for divination, studied the spleens, and directed that the legs of the chickens be buried on the trail leading to Volckmann’s camp. They assured him that when the Japanese reached that spot they would grow lethargic and would not continue to look for him. Nothing Volckmann could say or do would move either the chief or the priests from their resolve. They buried the chicken legs. Soon the Japanese came to the burial spot. They stopped, then changed directions and went off down a river valley.17 I’m not sure what the moral is; perhaps that not all the world’s medical expertise is found in high priced American hospitals.
These tales have long reminded me of comparisons that have been made, partly tongue-in-cheek, between healers of different cultures in different historical epochs. The clerical exorcists of medieval and early modern Europe used to try to cure patients by praying over them and casting devils out of them. For centuries, perhaps millennia, African witch doctors, garbed in grotesque regalia, shaking bones and spouting incantations, have tried to do essentially the same thing. In the twentieth-century Western world, psychoanalysts put patients on couches and try to induce them to confront and transform their malign subconscious impulses. Among these varied practitioners, rates of cure appear to have been comparable, but the psychoanalysts are much the most expensive. (Of course, contemporary psychiatrists employ an array of recently discovered drugs to help a higher proportion of their patients than their predecessors could.)
None of my Igorots did anything as striking as Volckmann’s and Blackburn’s consultants, but the beliefs of some of them were intriguing. It had once been the custom among them that a prospective bridegroom should demonstrate his eligibility for matrimony by bringing in the head of a Christian before the wedding. They also had an equally memorable, and considerably more appealing, custom. A man sometimes selected a prospective wife and lived with her for several months. If she did not become pregnant, he returned her to her family and undertook the same experiment with another girl. This must have been a great locale for a young man who was infertile—or would have been for someone who had had a vasectomy.
These idle speculations aside, the most valuable of the Igorots I had was a highly intelligent, tough and absolutely fearless little fellow named Tomas Chengay. Tom had worked in the gold mines of the north before the war. Here he had become familiar with Americans and had grown to like them. Early in the war he had served under Volckmann, and he had been with Al Hendrickson when Al raided the Itogon mine in north Luzon in October 1942. When Tom and I met, he commanded a small detachment of his fellow Igorot guerrillas. He joined our forces readily and became one of my most trustworthy officers. He hated spies and collaborators passionately and did an excellent job of clearing them out wherever we went. He had a particularly mercurial temperament. If enraged at someone bigger than himself, he would leap straight up in the air and strike at the taller man. Because of his attitude toward enemies of any sort, he was sometimes called “No Retreat.”
Two of our recruits, Joseph and William Henry, are worth mentioning by name because their cases illustrate why it was never hard to fill guerrilla ranks. Their father was an American, their mother a Filipina. Their father had died in 1942, and the Japanese had laughed when they viewed his body. For the brothers this was a deadly insult. They sought revenge, and so joined my guerrilla band. Many recruits had some personal motive like this; most often either they or some member of their family had been brutalized by the Japanese in some sickening way.
Before long a large part of Pangasinan was unified, at least on paper. I then divided the province into four sectors and placed a captain over each: Tom Chengay over the north district, Antonio Garcia over the west, Emilio Hernandez over the central, and his brother Antonio Hernandez over the east. For my headquarters staff I selected Maj. Severino M. Obaña of the Philippine army as my second in command; for supply officer, a former newspaperman and writer, Jimmy Galura; and for chief of intelligence, a college graduate named Juan Utleg, who proved to be an inspired choice. The whole organization, while impromptu, was patterned as closely on regular American army tables of organization as circumstances permitted. We had doctors and nurses of sorts, Protestant and Catholic chaplains, demolition experts, an elite fighting company composed exclusively of ex-Filipino Scouts, a special sabotage squadron, and a squadron of military police. One of the main duties of the last was to handle the complaints of civilians. So dominant had guerrillas become in the Philippine countryside by 1944 that if a peasant’s carabao was stolen or some comparable crime was committed against him or his family, he would not ordinarily take his grievance to either the Japanese or some representative of their puppet Philippine Republic, but to the local guerrillas. In our unit the military police would then deal with the matter as best they could.
All our units had experienced leadership. The official army history (Robert Ross-Smith, Triumph in the Philippines) refers to several of our units combined as the Buena Vista Regiment, a body that gave an excellent account of itself fighting in tandem with the Thirty-second (Red Arrow) Division along the Villa Verde Trail in the northern mountains in the spring of 1945, where I myself spent my last days in the Philippines.
I tried to pay equivalent attention to the civilian and diplomatic sectors. I sought out Alfred Balingao, the governor of Pangasinan, explained our circumstances and problems to him, and offered him our cooperation in return for his loyalty. He agreed readily, and put no obstacles in the way of our recruitment. One of my particular objectives was to gather into our organization as many men as we could from the Constabulary. If we were successful, we could bleed the Constabulary white, and could add trained and armed recruits to our own forces. To this end, I took a professional printer, his family, and his equipment; hid them; took care of all their needs; and put him to work printing leaflets to circulate among civilians and to call on Constabularymen to come over to us. Undoubtedly, some of these missives fell into the hands of the Japanese, but we were feeling our oats by now, growing stronger every day, and simply did not care any longer. The effort itself, I must admit, was not much of a success. We gained the sympathy and cooperation of many members of the Constabulary, but few of them actually joined our ranks.
Picking Captain Juan Utleg to head the intelligence section proved to be the best appointment I made, even though the man eventually forced upon me the most agonizing decision I have ever had to make about anything. Juan was a neat, personable Filipino with a college degree in forestry. When I first met him, I found that his beliefs and sympathies were close to my own. I talked to him many times and finally asked him to join our organization. He declined at first because he had a family, then abruptly volunteered. Juan proved to be an excellent organizer and showed uncommon practical sense in his job as well. He recruited all sorts of people and paid them to gather all sorts of information. Soon he designated specific assignments to specific persons who had demonstrated expertise at particular tasks. He worked their varied findings into intelligence briefs, and thereby produced reliable intelligence summaries for me. In short order he collected an impressive amount of information about Japanese installations, troop strength, movements, and plans. Later reports showed it to have been remarkably accurate.
The most significant of Utleg’s accomplishments was to map Japanese installations at San Fernando, La Union, north of Lingayen Gulf on the west coast of Luzon. In the latter part of 1944 all signs pointed to American landings somewhere on Luzon before many more months. But where? The Japanese did not know, but it was clear that they regarded the coast around San Fernando as a likely locale, because they steadily moved heavy American guns from as far away as Corregidor and fixed them in strongly fortified tunnels dug into the hillside above Poro Point. Lingayen Gulf itself, a few miles south, was also a possible landing site but a risky one because of unfavorable tides. We discovered afterward that the information our operatives gathered about the Japanese gun emplacements was studied carefully by General Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2 in Australia. On the basis of it the original landing plans were changed and the uncertain tides and surf in the gulf were risked. As a consequence, the Japanese were surprised and not well situated to resist the landings save by kamikaze attacks, and untold hundreds of American lives were thereby saved. Overall, it was a clear vindication of the dictum of the British military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart that obstacles of nature should always be accepted and combatted in preference to undertaking a frontal assault against an enemy in a prepared position. For me personally, if I had never accomplished anything else in the whole war I would have regarded my time as having been spent profitably.
Juan Utleg’s value as an intelligence officer eventually forced me into the most excruciating dilemma I have ever confronted, even worse than dealing with the killer of Dolores. As described above, Juan had learned all about Japanese defensive preparations near San Fernando. Moreover, his counterespionage people had enabled him to catch several Filipinos who were spying for the Japanese. Of course, it did not take the enemy long to learn who was responsible for this or to find out what his position was in my outfit. As an example of how fast such news got around, the governor of Pangasinan once told me that the local Japanese Kempeitai commander had asked him if he knew Capt. Ray Hunt. The governor replied that he had heard of me but did not know me. The Japanese then remarked that the governor must know I was in his area, and added with an understanding smile, “When you see him, tell him I said ‘Hello,’ and that some day we will get him.” The governor relayed this message to me, adding that the Japanese knew my exact description, even to the color of my hair and eyes.
Juan knew the Kempeitai were looking for him too. One day when he was home he saw some Japanese troops approaching the house. He slipped out a rear window into a bamboo grove. The visitors then questioned his wife. She said Juan was not at home. The Japanese then took Mrs. Utleg and their young son, and left a message with villagers that the two would be retained as hostages and would be killed if Juan did not surrender.
Juan was a brave man as well as an able one, but, like most Filipinos, he treasured his family above all else. He came to me with tears in his eyes and begged me to let him surrender. I excused myself and went out to consult Greg. When I came back, I had the first of several long talks with Juan. Finally, I told him I absolutely could not let him go. He knew all the leading members of the guerrilla forces in Pangasinan, all our strengths and weaknesses, all our battle plans, all our spies, informers, and sympathizers, and everything about how we were now getting occasional reinforcements from submarines. He promised over and over that he would never reveal anything to the Japanese. I reminded him quite as often that the enemy was familiar with every means known to man of extracting information from even the bravest and strongest, and that they would stop at nothing when dealing with someone as valuable as himself. For this reason we simply could not let him go to them. All our plans to aid the returning American troops might be destroyed. Juan knew this, of course, but it simply reminded him afresh of what the Japanese might do to his wife and son if he did not surrender. He unfolded his whole life to me, told me how much he loved his family, and begged me to relent. I simply could not. Heartless though it must seem, I had to weigh the lives of Mrs. Utleg and her son against those of many hundreds of guerrillas and civilian supporters of ours. I had Juan placed under arrest, sedated, and guarded heavily. For several days I prayed with more fervor than I had ever done before—or have since. A few days later a light appeared in Juan’s house again. His wife and child were home unharmed. Why, I don’t know. Sometimes the Japanese simply acted in legendary “inscrutable” Oriental fashion. Whatever their reasons, and even though we still had to keep Juan in hiding, the way things turned out lifted from me the most terrible burden I have ever had to bear. What I would have done if Juan’s wife and child had been killed I cannot imagine.
It has sometimes been asked rhetorically what kind of job requires the keenest intelligence and the highest level of general ability: research scientist, medical doctor, manager of a big business, president of a university or school system, political leader, army commander, or what have you? I cannot pretend to know the answer, and anyone in any prominent position has difficult decisions to make occasionally, but I don’t believe anyone in any civilian occupation ever has to face dilemmas as cruel as some of those that crop up in wars. The case of Juan Utleg was Exhibit A in my experience.
Governor Balingao of Pangasinan, who had conveyed to me greetings from the local Kempeitai commander, also told me a story about a macabre incident of a different sort that he had witnessed. The Japanese had set to work to build a crude wooden bridge over a river near Umingan. When it was almost finished, the river flooded and the bridge was carried away. They rebuilt it, only to have another flood sweep it away again. Then they built it a third time. When they were finished, two Japanese soldiers sat down cross legged, one at each end of the bridge, and their companions piled wood about them. Then all the Japanese began a ceremonial prayer. In the midst of it the wood was lighted and the two soldiers were burned to death without making a movement or a sound. Such actions illustrate the impassable psychological barrier that separated Japanese from Westerners. It also availed them little: a few weeks later we burned the bridge to the water’s edge.
Fortunately for our sanity, life was not always as sordid as a recital of these grim episodes might indicate. In fact, once I got things reasonably well organized in Pangasinan I began to think, for the first time since the war began, that I might survive it. We even had some good news of a conventional sort occasionally. Nine months after he had become my bodyguard, Greg Agaton surprised us all by revealing that he planned to get married. Of course, we were all pleased for him personally. We found a minister, I loaned him some clothing, and he and his bride Petronia M. Ruiz, were properly wed in our camp on September 15, 1944. My own feelings were mixed, since I had come to respect, trust, and rely on Greg a great deal. I assumed that once married he would quit the guerrillas and I would have to find a new aide. But he did not: instead he sent his new wife back to her home in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, near where we were now encamped, and continued as my number one man. The wedding did produce a break between us eventually, though. Before this I had promised Greg that if I lived through the war I would take him back to the United States with me, if he wanted to go. I extended the offer again after the war, but by then he and his wife were in the process of acquiring a family of five sons, and he felt that their collective future was in the Philippines. We did finally meet once more, but it was decades later, in Honolulu, in December 1984. The reunion was tearful.
In 1943 we had had a lot of trouble either getting information to Australia or securing supplies for our own troops. As indicated earlier, many of our arms were secured by capture from the enemy. Things improved in 1944 when submarines began to land periodically near Baler Bay in Tayabas province on the east coast of Luzon. The site was close to a Japanese naval base, but it had to be chosen since the water was too shallow for submarines anywhere else along that coast. Prior contact had been made with Bob Lapham, who had already established a system of coast watchers in the hope that they might spot a submarine. Both Bob and Al Hendrickson sent many of their guerrillas over the Sierra Madre Mountains to contact the submarines and haul away their cargo. Neither I nor any of my men ever unloaded a submarine, but beginning in June 1944, when Minang came back from her trip to see Lapham, bearing my promotion to commander of Pangasinan, we began to get supplies from submarines.
Because the whole operation was exceedingly risky, the guerrillas involved were not told where they were going or for what purpose until they actually arrived and were put to work building bamboo rafts to unload submarines. After dark there would be an exchange of coded light signals, following which the sub would slip into shallow water, where it would be temporarily helpless: unable to submerge quickly and escape in case of detection. For this reason the captain and crew of a submarine always wanted to unload their cargo as fast as possible. This made problems. The deck of a submarine loomed eight feet above the bamboo rafts. The natural bobbing of the rafts in the sea combined with the haste of those unloading sometimes caused crates of arms to go to the bottom of the bay. We discovered that many destined for us must have contained .50-caliber machineguns, since we got enough .50 ammunition to shoot at everything that moved for the next several months, but no equivalent number of machineguns. We did receive many small arms of various types: carbines, “grease guns,” tommyguns, M-1 Garands, and sidearms. Also included were various medicines and surgical instruments, radio transmitters, propaganda materials, money, and the usual assortment of cigarettes and candy. Gradually the subs began to appear more often to augment these supplies and to drop off specially trained men of various sorts: Filipino radio operators and repairmen, teams of demolition experts, and weather observers. Some fifty tons of commodities were sent to Lapham’s headquarters; more intended for him was landed with shipments for Anderson.18 How much of it I got, I do not know exactly: quite a bit.
A story of some sort went with or soon became attached to most of these items. A case we got marked “Money” was interesting in the sense that on the first submarine it was not broken open. On subsequent trips, however, it was discovered that whiskey and pesos tended to disappear en route. Finally some imaginative soul had an inspiration and took to marking these containers “Military Rations.” None was molested thereafter.19
The medicines proved invaluable. In preceding months Al Hendrickson and I had occasionally gotten hold of a few quinine tablets or other medicines that happened to be already in the Philippines. With these meager supplies we had tried to doctor tropical ulcers, malaria, and other native maladies, as well as an array of ordinary cuts and bruises, especially those of children. How badly medical care was needed is indicated by tales related by other guerrillas. Col. Robert Arnold describes how he had a terrible stomachache which a local pastor, in default of a doctor, diagnosed as appendicitis. With no doctor, no operation was possible, but some natives suggested an alternative. The lining of a chicken’s gizzard contains juices that will dissolve anything less formidable than an anvil, so all the dried chicken gizzard linings that could be found were boiled to make an incredibly bitter broth which Arnold forced himself to swallow twice a day. Eventually he recovered.20 Illif David Richardson, a guerrilla on Leyte, once faced an even more bizarre medical problem. There the Japanese had bayoneted a Filipino in the stomach, ripping such a gash that the man’s intestines hung out. Incredibly, the victim managed to run three miles without pushing his intestines back inside his body cavity, or even trying to hold them close to his stomach. Richardson consulted a medical book and decided nothing in it was applicable to present circumstances, so he cut the wound larger, stuffed the poor man’s intestines back in, gave him all the sulfa drugs he happened to have, and stitched up the wound with abaca fiber, the only thread available, only to have his hapless patient die after all. Of the whole disheartening experience he said, “It is only in the storybooks that hard work, effort, trying and trying again come out to have a happy ending. Working in the guerrilla has taught me that much.”21 Most likely Richardson was just momentarily, and understandably, disheartened. I don’t think a congenital pessimist could have lasted out the war with irregulars. Though I long thought, as a betting proposition, that I would not survive the war, I never acted on that assumption on a day-to-day basis.
One useful by-product of the periodic submarine contacts was that Hendrickson was able to send off to Australia five Americans whom he had fed and doctored for weeks but who were obviously too sick or dispirited, or both, to be of any value in battle. They were Captain Lage, Lieutenants Kiery and Naylor, and Sergeants Jellison and Bolstead. As narrated in chapter 4, above, Kiery refused to hike through a jungle and over a mountain to reach the submarine, choosing instead to row a rubber boat around a point of land. It capsized and he was drowned. One of the others told Al flatly that he was “sick of the God-damned war” and only wanted to get away from it, though he stayed in the army after 1945 and eventually attained considerable rank.
Of course, it occurred to us that if submarines could bring in supplies and take away the sick, they could also take away men liberated from Japanese prison camps, not to speak of ourselves. The last temptation was hard to resist. We American guerrillas had all been in combat zones for three years, we all wanted to save our skins, and doubtless we would have been permitted to leave had we asked. Nonetheless, Lapham, Hendrickson, and I stayed on longer, for reasons that will be explained later.
The weapons brought to us by the submarines were most welcome, obviously, though not every guerrilla unit got a sample of every type. I was keenly aware of what my organization needed but did not get. There were no artillery pieces, mortars, rifle grenades, mines, or dynamite, all of which would have been extremely useful to us. Of course, there was no use complaining about this. A submarine can carry only so much, and it cannot carry artillery at all.
Dynamite would have been invaluable for demolition. Lacking it, we once tried to blow up a bridge by attaching thirty-second fuses to some 75-mm. shells we happened to have. All they did was blow holes in the reinforced concrete deck. In fact, more damage was done to two of our own men, Eusebio Membrado and Juan Leal, than to the bridge; and the medical “treatment” they got afterward was worse than their original injuries. It made me sick to watch our company doctor, Fidel Ramirez, probe around in their wounds without an anesthetic, looking for fragments of concrete. When I questioned him about his crude procedures, he said he was a pediatrician, not exactly the medical specialty we needed most just then.
Every gun we got presented problems of some kind. All those in the semi-automatic class had different recoil actions. For each a minimum time had to elapse after firing before the gun would settle back into its original position so it could be fired again with some accuracy. If insufficient time was allowed, each successive shot would hit higher than the preceding one. One had to aim low and fire in short bursts, otherwise most of the bullets would go high and be wasted. Low shots at least had a chance to ricochet into the target. For me, the worst such weapon was the Browning automatic rifle (BAR). When it worked properly, it was a devastating gun; but it was heavy, had large, bulky clips, and jammed easily. I tried firing it from a sling and from the hip, but I could never control it. I practiced by shooting at tree roots. Invariably, within a few seconds I was shooting out treetops.
I liked the semi-automatic M-1 Garand 30.06 better, though it was also heavy and jammed easily if its ammunition clips were dented or dirty. Its sights were also sensitive and could be knocked awry merely by passing through brush. One had to spend a lot of time cleaning and sighting a Garand, but if it was properly kept up it was a fine weapon. Though less accurate than a Springfield, it spat out bullets in a stream.
My sentimental favorite was the Springfield .03. It was an older (World War I) rifle than the Garand but much the most reliable gun we had. It was bolt action, carried five shells individually inserted plus one in the chamber, and had open iron sights that were not easily jimmied. You could drop it in a river and expect it to fire faithfully when it was fished out. Lighter than a Garand, it was easier to carry save in dense brush. Not least, it had a good feel in one’s hand, like a certain cue does to a pool player or a favorite old glove to a baseball player. Under primitive conditions a simple, durable weapon is often the most practical, as the global popularity of the Russian Kalashnikov rifle has demonstrated since World War II.
We got a few tommyguns: heavy, clumsy, short-barrelled .45-caliber blasters that fired either twenty-shot clips or fifty-round drums of bullets, though they were most effective when fired in bursts of five shots. The FBI made tommyguns famous. I used mine sometimes to hunt wild pigs.
We also got three weapons that were brand new, at least to me. One was a carbine, a light, flimsy, tinny sounding thing that looked like it might have been made from a Prince Albert tobacco can. Though its sights were not reliable, it was a good weapon in the brush because it splattered bullets all over the place. The grease gun was another .45, so called because it looked like a grease gun and poured out a seemingly endless steam of bullets. It had a retractable iron stock, and was short, heavy, awkward to carry, and hard to handle. Finally, we got a case of bazookas. We did not know what they were, and no instructions came with them. Not surprisingly, we had a hard time figuring out how they worked or what could be done with them. Filipinos are fond of guns, and many of our men had repeatedly taken apart and reassembled the ancient relics we had been carrying about for many months. Because they had sometimes made mistakes, we had had lot of misfires. Now they had some new toys to tinker with. Before long a couple of adventuresome tyros managed to fire a round from a bazooka by accident, fortunately without killing anyone in the process. I had a couple of narrow escapes myself. Once one of my men reported that his BAR would not fire in the automatic position. I had had so little to do with BARs that I did not realize that the mere force of loading would cause the firing pin to strike the cartridge. Thus, when I took his gun and began to look at it the first thing I did was inadvertently fire a shot that creased the arm of a curious Filipino lieutenant nearby. Another time I was casual with a tommygun inside a house and thereby fired an unplanned burst. This occasion was especially embarrassing, since I had just dressed down my men for being careless about misfires and for shooting when the Japanese were near enough to hear them. In this case, luckily, the walls of the house prevented the racket from reaching enemy ears.
In the last months of 1944, especially after the Leyte landings in October made it evident that American landings on Luzon could not be far off, general headquarters directed us to save our new weapons so they would be a surprise to the enemy when we went into serious action. We had always had trouble restraining the more impetuous of the Filipinos. Now that the tempo of everything was picking up visibly, and they had new guns in the bargain, I could not always contain them. When the bazooka was fired accidentally, the destructive force of its shell made an indelible impression on everyone nearby. At once my men begged me to let them take it down into the lowlands, well away from where we happened to be just then, and try it out against a Kempeitai outpost. After an argument, I relented. They dashed off, jubilant as six-year-olds at a birthday party. The bazooka was a tremendous success: those in the Japanese outpost never knew what hit them. There were no known survivors.
The whole episode typified a problem that guerrilla leaders had with Filipinos everywhere. Ordinarily they would listen to reason and would not attack Japanese in their own locale because of the reprisals against civilians that would follow. But now and then they would burn to retaliate for some enemy atrocity, or they would just get “antsy” and want some action, so they would go some distance away and attack Japanese there, thus insuring that enemy vengenance would at least fall on civilians under the wing of some other guerrillas.
An unauthorized, and more private, venture by a Filipino lieutenant was comparably noisy but much less successful than the bazooka attack. One day, dressed as a member of the Constabulary and armed with one of our new carbines, he stopped three Japanese riding along a dusty road in a buggy. He asked them to dismount and accompany him, saying he would take them to a village where a party was to be given in their honor. His real intention was probably to shoot them, since we had by then a standing rule that no Japanese prisoners were to be taken. Before long the presumed honored guests noticed the lieutenant’s carbine, a weapon they had never seen before. Soon they put two and two together and started to run off. The lieutenant promptly laid down a hail of lead with his new firearm. Though he killed one Japanese, he was such a bad shot that he missed the other two, who of course rushed back to their garrison to tell their compatriots about the new American weapon. I was disgusted. If our man had killed all the Japanese it would have been fine: instead, he had revealed to the enemy a weapon we had planned to conceal. Thus, instead of being commended or decorated for bravery he was reprimanded and disciplined for bad judgment. So fine the line between hero and goat. . . .
As the foregoing incidents indicate, and especially when it became clear that the Japanese anticipated American landings soon, guerrilla morale bounded upward. Fortunately, there were many ways to keep the men busy, most notably after we were told by SWPA headquarters in Australia to be ready to give all-out support to the invasion forces whenever we received pertinent directives, five days before the landings. We started twenty things at once. We mapped towns and buildings where the enemy had stored supplies so American planes would (hopefully) not do unnecessary damage when bombing. We made plans to cut enemy communications and supply lines, and to sabotage fuel dumps. We picked strategic spots along roads and trails where we could set last-minute road blocks and ambushes. We built storehouses in the mountains and foothills in northern and eastern Pangasinan, and stored rice in them. We made arrangements to rescue and hide downed American pilots; and assigned each company specific duties in all these spheres before the anticipated invasion and during it.22 Morale problems developed in some U.S. units during the fighting in northern Luzon in 1945, but among the guerrillas late in 1944 our main problem was to keep our men cool.
As mentioned before, among my constant vexations was dealing with nuisances who posed as guerrillas, as well as adventurers and bandits who formed “paper” guerrilla organizations as covers for illicit operations of various types. This grew much worse in the last year of the war and in the immediate postwar period. In particular, all the collaborators rushed to join some irregular unit in order to expunge their guilt and appear to returning American forces as fellow warriors in the struggle for freedom.
Another common type was the ambitious opportunist who wanted to be able to claim guerrilla service in order to promote himself in postwar Philippine politics. Men of this sort were forever raising imaginary armies which they invariably “commanded.” One particular rascal of the political type I ordered arrested. One of my men, in ordinary Filipino dress, apprehended the man in broad daylight in a village full of Japanese troops, and told him “Captain Hunt wants to see you.” The aspiring politician tried to offer some excuse to depart, but the guerrilla replied that he had orders to deliver the man alive or leave him dead in the dust. This information clarified the troublemaker’s understanding marvellously, and he walked briskly in the direction of my current hideaway with the guard right behind him. Quite likely his thoughts were on an incident he had recently witnessed in his home village. There a guerrilla, like the present one tailing him, had simply opened a hollow gourd, pulled out a gun, and shot two Japanese at point blank range.
When the pair reached my abode, I let the prisoner wait a considerable time. When I came to see him at last, his forehead was covered with beads of perspiration. Probably he thought this day was going to be his last. I spoke to him quietly, asking him only about his recruiting efforts and whether he was in contact with American forces outside the Philippines. To the latter he replied eagerly that he did indeed have such contacts and that only a few days before he had received some smuggled American magazines which he now planned to distribute. I listened to this for a time, then asked Greg to bring me a new .45 grease gun. I pointed it out the window and shot some bark off a nearby tree. The man’s eyes widened. Then I asked him if he knew what kind of gun it was? All he could answer was that it was new. I then asked him which he thought would do more harm to our common enemy, the magazines he proposed to distribute or the gun? He assured me profusely that he understood my meaning and that he would never do anything that would in any way interfere with the activities of true guerrillas. So I let him go. Similar pests got similar warnings, or else they were invited to take guns and become guerrillas on the spot. With most, that ended the conversation and we had no trouble from them afterward.
One day late in 1944 I was standing outdoors when I heard a long, low rumble. As I strained my eyes southward I saw something I had dreamed about for two and a half years; columns of smoke climbing into the sky, in this case from the direction of Clark Field in Pam-panga. It indicated that American planes had bombed an enemy stronghold. All of us burst out with cries of joy and pummelled each other on the back with wild abandon. Every guerrilla on Luzon must have responded just as we did. Clay Conner called the bombing “the most beautiful sight imaginable.” Frank Gyovai said it was the grandest sight he ever saw. Yay Panlilio wrote that even Marking’s dog succumbed to the hysteria: whining, barking, and quivering with excitement as their guerrillas whooped and hollered and cried.23
A few days later we actually saw some American planes of a new type; P-38s, as it turned out. Then we saw occasional dogfights. Unlike those in the early days of the war, these invariably ended with the P-38s downing or chasing off their Japanese opponents. Soon navy planes began to fly over regularly. I thought of their pilots who would sleep between white sheets that night, with no fear of the Japanese. This, in turn, brought back thoughts of home, of seeing my parents and younger sisters again, of sleeping in a soft bed without either the company or the buzzing of insects, and of ice cream, cake, cheese, a cold bottle of beer, white bread, white women, merely the companionship of ordinary Americans again.
Those last three months of 1944, blurred in my memory now after the passage of four decades, were a strange mixture of matters of the utmost gravity, some bizarre personal adventures, and some mere frivolity. The serious part was that I knew time was growing short, and I worried about the accuracy of the intelligence we had gathered and whether I had drawn the proper conclusions from it.
Other concerns were less vital. One day on my way to our regular headquarters near San Quintin, I received an invitation to visit the home of a Spanish mestizo named Juan Bautista. Juan owned 7,500 acres of fine rice land, and from the standpoint of our guerrillas was an admirable fellow since he had once given us ten thousand pesos. To be sure, he had given it in Japanese scrip and now wanted a receipt indicating that he should be repaid one day in sound Philippine or American money. While I had to turn him down politely on that score, he must not have expected anything else, since he treated me royally to drinks and a feast of barbecued pig, followed by a siesta, and then a dance to a string band. The whole performance stretched over many hours in a beautiful house and was seasoned with pleasant conversation on a variety of topics.
The only puzzling aspect of the whole splendid evening was that at various times during it Juan introduced me to five fine looking young Filipinas, each one of whom he identified as his wife. Eventually curiosity got the better of good manners, and I asked him how he could possibly have five wives in a Christian country where divorce was illegal. He said it was really quite simple: they were all common-law wives, the daughters of various of his tenants, all of whom acquiesced in the arrangement since it made possible a better life for the girls and also for their families. Still curious, I asked him if the women ever became jealous. He said this was rare, since he treated them all equally, setting aside one night per week for each one; but if one became dissatisfied or made trouble she was simply returned to her parents and the arrangement with her was cancelled. He added that he also owned a fishing fleet and that on weekends he often fished. He probably did so in self-defense, from need of rest. I also noticed that despite the five wives there were no children on the premises. Juan admitted ruefully that he had none. Perhaps his exceptional romantic exertions had rendered him infertile. To top off the evening, Juan suggested that I stay in the Philippines after the war. He said he would give me some land to cultivate, build me a house, and help me collect five wives just as he had. For a young man it was a hard offer to turn down.
Some guerrillas have written that many of their people were hungry and sick much of the time, especially in 1944-45 when the Japanese began to strip the islands of much of their food to maintain their own troops. As my visit to Juan Bautista indicates, that forlorn condition was not universal. Where I was during the last half of the war, we had about the normal amount of sickness, malaria primarily; and we were always handicapped by lack of medicines and medical supplies and by a scarcity of trained doctors; but we were never seriously short of food. This was made evident to me again on December 11, 1944, one of the happiest days of my life. This was not merely because it was my twenty-fifth birthday, nor because it would be my last birthday in the Philippines (something I could not know); but because five hundred guerrillas and the poor farmers of the village of Pantabangan, near San José, gave me a tremendous party. There was much food and even a children’s string band that delighted me by playing a lot of American numbers I hadn’t heard since the war began. Everybody ate and drank and danced, and for a night forgot the war. It indicates how self-confident, not to say reckless, we had become by now, that the whole soiree took place with a Japanese garrison only three miles away. I remember the day distinctly for another reason as well. For the first time in three years, when Filipinos asked me when the Americans would return, I no longer had to put them off with “six months.” Now I could honestly say it would be a good deal sooner.
It was about this time, too, that I had my last confrontation of the tempestuous sort with Minang. An outsider would doubtless say that this one, like some of our earlier squabbles, was my fault. In general, Filipinas make good wives. Most of them are used to work and hardship, and they ordinarily remain faithful to one man. Of course, Minang and I were not married, but she had been for some time my common-law wife. My attention span was somewhat short in those days, though, and one day when she was gone I was having a private tête-á-tête with a pretty young Filipina when Minang returned unexpectedly. Greg tried to intercept her, but she was suspicious, and when she came into the room her eyes were blazing. My new friend fled at once, and Minang proceeded to deluge me with a torrent of unladylike language. I have seen signs in taverns to the effect that one might as well have another drink since his wife can get only so mad, but in Minang’s case this was not true. She still berated me that night after we had gone to bed, and everything she said seemed to intensify her outrage. For some time I closed my eyes and tried to tune her out. Then I became dimly aware that she was moving beside me. Next I heard the creak of leather. I sprang awake at once and grabbed in the dark for Minang. I caught her by the hand just as she was pulling my .45 from its holster. For the rest of that night I kept track of all the guns—and did not sleep much. I have often wondered since whether Minang intended to shoot me, herself, or both of us. Whatever the case, it would have been a helluva way to get a Purple Heart—or a funeral.
In retrospect, I believe I was attracted to Minang more because of her fiery, indomitable spirit than by romantic considerations of the usual sort. On one occasion—when we were not quarrelling—she had told me quietly and deliberately that if I left her and went back to the United States when the war was over she would be sad but would understand; but that if I ever left her for another Filipina she would kill the other woman. She added that if I was killed by the Japanese she would personally kill the Japanese commander responsible if she had to sacrifice her own life in the effort. It was hard not to take a woman like that seriously.
In truth, I owed Minang a lot, as did all our guerrillas. Near the end of the war I was able to get her commissioned a lieutenant in recognition of her wartime services. It was a position that secured for her some much needed money but, more important, she deserved it, and it pleased me greatly to get it for her.