Above the Thunder (35 page)

Div Arty established a new base strip near the beach at Aringay. Our tents were set up in a coconut grove, and our situation was very pleasant. Dick Bortz had scrounged from somewhere a silver Aeronca L-3, and the Div Arty HQ pilots used it for strictly administrative business, no combat flights. But the administrative flights included an occasional
one down to Manila to bring back what passed for whiskey—nothing more than water spiked with alcohol and colored with caramel. The taste only vaguely resembled whiskey, but it did have an intoxicating effect on those who drank enough of it. I didn't; however, I did fly the L-3 on the whiskey run one time, stopping at Clark Field en route.

Bortz had the instincts of an Air Force man, as you may already have guessed. He believed in living as comfortably as possible under given circumstances. There at Aringay, he found a rusty old bucket. He'd fill it with sea water and some of the small crabs that swarmed on the nearby beach, and build a fire under it. As soon as the water got hot, the stench would drive the rest of us a hundred yards or so away. And when the crabs were cooked to suit him, he'd make me, at least, sick with the sight of eating them.

And Bortz had built here—using Filipino labor hired with Army funds—a Filipino-style thatched bamboo shack which he named “the Cub Pub.” Inside, there was a nice polished bamboo bar equipped with “glasses” of various sizes, from jiggers on up, expertly fashioned of bamboo sections and polished in the Filipino way with banana peels. From somewhere he obtained a monkey-sized ten-gallon hat to be worn by the bartender, and he ran a roster of pilots for bartender duty in the evenings. Of course, the bar was stocked with Manila whiskey, and those bound and determined to be festive sometimes achieved modest success at the Cub Pub.

I must mention my own contribution to the Cub Pub. I had written an absurd verse titled “Purple Petunias,” which contained the supposed rambling thoughts of an artillery pilot reclining in the shade of an L-4 wing. Fortunately, it is no longer extant. However, Bortz liked it, and he posted a copy of it behind the bar next to his sign that read: “
DON'T FLUB THE DUB IN THE CUB PUB, BUB!
”

The day our infantry pushed on out of Pugo and into the hills, I observed some preparatory fires for them and watched them assault a fairly open piece of ground not far from the town. The enemy withdrew, leaving a large number of dead and wounded on the ground. As our men moved
across the field, I saw them fire several shots from their M-1s into each body, obviously making no attempt to determine whether the Japanese soldier—or marine in this case, I believe—was alive or dead. They took absolutely no unnecessary risks in dealing with the enemy. They shot first and didn't bother with questions.

The generally accepted belief among American troops was that wounded Japanese were suicidal, believing that being made prisoner was a disgrace. And there is no doubt that many of them would, indeed, sacrifice their lives rather than give up. They were dangerous. However, a friend of mine, Kenny Bushong of Findlay, Ohio, who served with occupation forces in Japan after the war, said he spoke with a former Japanese officer who had been a POW. He asked the man how he had reconciled his submission to capture with the bushido warrior code that says suicide is preferable to surrender. The man laughed, and his reply was, “Kill myself? Who? Me? Boo sheet!”

Another story told in those days, but which I am inclined to doubt, concerns an American patrol that surprised a Japanese sentry who was sitting on the ground, his rifle across his knees. When the patrol's point man came into view a few yards away, the sentry leaped to his feet and brought his rifle to his shoulder. Before he could aim and fire, the American merely swung his Garand to the front and triggered several quick shots, never raising the rifle to his shoulder. The Japanese dropped his rifle, and as he sank to the ground he gasped out his last words—in English—“Oh, you hip-shooting Yankee sonofabitch! You've killed me!”

What do you think?

Leaving Pugo, the 123d infantry advanced through a jumble of hills and ravines cluttered with small trees, brush, vines, and cogon grass, that lay between two high, sharp, converging mountain ridges. Ahead, the two ridges came together to form an eminence we called Hill 3000 because its elevation was three thousand feet above sea level—and nearly that far above Pugo. Hill 3000 was our first major intermediate objective on the road to Baguio.

As the infantry worked and fought its way upward through this difficult terrain, it was necessary to control the ridges on the flanks. The tops of those ridges were very narrow, and the Japanese liked to tunnel
from the rear side and fire from well-concealed slits. Such positions can use up a lot of artillery ammunition while suffering little damage, since direct target hits are essential, but Vin and I spent hours searching for hidden machine guns along those ridges. We had little success, and our preparatory fires for attacking objectives on the ridges were pretty much in the blind. Infantry units were stopped over and over again by heavy small arms fire and grenades tossed or rolled down the steep slopes by enemy soldiers concealed and protected in the short tunnels through the ridge.

I recall one instance in which an entire company was halted by fire from at least three machine guns. After a delay of several minutes, I saw one man—a staff sergeant, I learned later, but I've forgotten his name—remove his helmet and extra gear and start rolling rapidly to his left. Reaching a shallow wash that led almost to the top of the ridge, he started crawling up it, having just enough cover to keep the machine guns from stopping him. He reached a point almost on the crest, apparently without being seen by the enemy, and now he was so close that they could not see him from their firing slits unless he passed directly in front of one. He crawled along the ridge, then, just below the level of the firing slits. When he got close to a machine-gun slit, he tossed a grenade inside. As soon as it exploded, he grabbed the barrel of the weapon, pulled it out of the position, and slung it down the hill below him. Three times he repeated that performance, and then the company was able to come up and take that section of the ridge.

You see, we had some daring men on our side, too, and very often it was such a man, all alone, who moved us forward.

Among the hills on the approach to Hill 3000 I discovered a village of the mountain people known as Igorots. It was a double row of grass-thatched shacks along a foot trail across a grassy hillside, and a group of the people stood on the trail and watched as I flew over. Thinking of the danger of their being hit by artillery fire or caught in crossfire between American and Japanese infantry, I decided to see if I could get them out of the way. Although Vin and I had no instructions regarding such matters, and although I didn't know whether anyone there could read English, I carefully printed a note:

GO TO PUGO. AMERICANS AND JAPANESE MAY FIGHT WHERE YOU NOW ARE. GO TO PUGO AND YOU WILL BE SAFE.

AMERICAN ARMY

I dropped the note, and they did go to Pugo, the entire population of the village. The note was returned to me through our message center, and I think I still have it somewhere. I was happy to find that the higher command approved of my action.

The Igorots are members of an ethnic group that then inhabited—and, I suppose, still inhabits—the central mountain range of northern Luzon, and that chose to live in the traditional primitive style of their ancestors rather than join mainstream Filipino society. They were handsome, intelligent, and in many cases financially well off, thanks to their mining of gold. In at least one mine, Igorot men had to swim under subterranean water for some distance, then surface and work in a tunnel sealed off by the water. I was told that some Igorot leaders were college graduates, and in later years the tribal peoples slowly started assimilating into the general population.

Although combat engineer troops followed as closely as possible behind the infantry, building a supply road, supplying the most forward elements became a serious problem in the rugged mountain terrain. To help solve the problem, the 33d Division hired a number of Igorot men to serve as water carriers for the troops. That didn't work very well. First, many an Igorot bearer arrived at the front having consumed—or poured out—a good part of his five gallons of water. Worse still, when fired on by the enemy—and ambushes or isolated snipers were not uncommon—the men tended to drop their loads and head for home. They lost the job.

But the Igorot women—the wives and daughters of those same men—now stepped forward and offered to take over the task. And they did. Each carrying an American five-gallon can of water, escorted by a few American riflemen, they became a familiar sight on the trails leading to the most forward positions. They drank only the water designated for their use, and when the bullets started flying, they merely hit the dirt and trusted the soldiers to protect them.

While the Div Arty airstrip remained at Aringay, Vin and I established a new forward strip at Pugo. Since it was at the foot of the rugged terrain in which there was no place to safely land, we operated from there for quite a while. A couple of our boys drove over there daily in the weapons carrier, taking fuel and tools for the day. After the last refueling, the men took off for home, and each pilot terminated his last flight at Aringay. There the men who had rested during the day did our deeper maintenance during the night. I think we almost never had an unflyable plane during daylight hours.

The terrain in this area made maintenance of a continuous line of contact impossible. Instead, the line was composed of a series of defensive perimeters of company or smaller size. In spite of numerous patrols operating between these perimeters, it was not difficult for the Japanese to infiltrate our territory and give us a hard time in a small way. For example, they mined our newly built supply road almost every night. The small antipersonnel mines did little damage to vehicles, but they were a distinct nuisance.

Infiltrated Japanese snipers hiding in bamboo thickets on nearby hills occasionally fired at people, airplanes, and vehicles on our forward airstrips, but although they sometimes kept our ground crew lying in ditches when not busy, they never managed to do us any harm. In fact, it almost seems as if they must have tried not to hit anything important.

At one of our forward strips—I've forgotten which one—I was resting by a tree one day while the men were lying on the ground in deference to one of these snipers. A pilot from I Corps landed his L-4 and walked off a few yards to take care of some personal business, yelling imperious orders at me to refuel his plane. Apparently, he didn't see that I was an officer, but his manner angered me. I never moved, and I told the men to stand fast as well. He turned back toward his plane, looked closely at me, and then helped himself to a tank of gasoline. I don't think he realized that the sniper fired at him a couple of times. We didn't worry about him. The sniper had never hit anything of importance. I think he must have been a volunteer they felt they could well do without up in the lines.

A little later, this same corps pilot—a skinny guy whose appearance reminded me so much of myself that I didn't like him—had an engine failure and crash-landed several miles out in enemy country. He managed to evade capture and spent two weeks making his way through the mountains. During that period, he had nothing to eat but some rations he found on the bodies of Japanese soldiers killed by artillery fire. He finally made contact with a patrol of the 25th Division, far to the east of us, and came home safely. After the war, I became acquainted with an Ohioan named Lynn Jones. Exchanging war stories with him, I learned that he, as a sergeant, had led the patrol that brought in our lost corps pilot.

The bulldozers the engineers used on the road job became prime targets for Japanese suicide squads.
¹
That brought trouble for some of the infantry companies within whose perimeters the dozers were parked at night. Enemy soldiers carrying demolition charges would try to sneak into the perimeter, and when discovered they would charge for the bulldozers, creating pandemonium among the defenders. During one of these attacks, my friend Lt. Raymond Utke, firing his carbine at a Jap racing toward him, detonated the demolition charge the man was carrying. The explosion disintegrated the Japanese, of course, and it was just about the last straw for Utke. The concussion left him punchy like a boxer who has taken too many blows to the head. I never saw or heard of him after that; I hope his recovery was complete.