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One of the hideouts the author used as an intelligence officer during the Second World War was Guintubdan. It is a place with waterfalls, above which is a forested area ideal for hiding. Today, it is a resort popular for conferences and picnics. Photo courtes: www.ivanlakwatsero.com |
Before the war, the elder Eliodoro and the Spaniards had an agreement. In exchange for a share in the proceeds from the sale of the sugar produce, Eliodoro dispatched his laborers to the backbreaking chore of planting the Spaniards’ plantation with sugarcane and tending to the crop until it was ready for harvest. To Eliodoro’s consternation, when the sugarcane was ripe for harvest, the Spaniards reneged on their agreement. In anger, Eliodoro’s son and my friend, Ely (also nicknamed “Baby’), one evening took it upon himself to burn the sugarcane field, laying it to waste instead of letting the Spaniards get away with injustice.
The Spanish hacenderos were remnants of Spanish colonial rule that had ended in the Philippines less than fifty years earlier. They were originally vaqueros from Spain who immigrated to the Philippines, brought there by the original Spanish owners of the land. When Spain lost control of the Philippines, the original owners fled the country, leaving effective ownership of their land to the vaqueros who seized the opportunity to better their own station in life. With their greed, the former vaqueros soon forgot where they came from and turned out much worse than the people they had replaced.
These vaqueros caused some unease among their neighbors on the eve of the Second World War because they displayed Nazi flags on the balcony of their big house in the hacienda. They showed their true colors when the Japanese invasion was in full swing, proclaiming their fealty to the Japanese Imperial Army and refusing to give support to the Philippine Army who came for help.
Naturally, the burning of their plantation was a big financial setback for them and it quickly soured their relationship with Eliodoro. It was no secret that on their orders, their Filipino right-hand man came to harass the family of my friend. Riding on a horse, this man would circle their house with a rifle in one hand. His goal apparently was to scare them so that they would abandon their hacienda, and the Spaniards could take over.
That early morning that I sought refuge at my friend’s house, their Spanish foes sent the man with a rifle and a bandolier slung over his shoulders, apparently this time to start something very ugly. It was by sheer luck that I happened to have arrived that morning. After observing him mouthing invectives at the family and threatening to shoot them, I challenged the man to dismount from his horse. Before I knew it, I found myself wrestling him to the ground and disarming him. He tried to set himself free, biting off a portion of my lower lip. I profusely bled from the injury that would leave a permanent scar on my lower lip but still managed to subdue the man, teaching him a lesson he would not forget for the rest of his life. After weakening his resistance with blows to his head and body (I boxed in high school), I grabbed my pistol and was about to pull the trigger when I heard someone shout, “Don’t!” The voice was that of Eva, Eliodoro’s second child and oldest daughter (he had four sons and four daughters), who would soon after become my wife.
I joined the organized guerrilla movement after the surrender of the Philippines. My now brother-in-law followed my lead, and both of us were eventually assigned in the military intelligence unit covering Central Negros after first being assigned to a fighting unit. One of our main missions was to infiltrate the town centers and to spy on Japanese activities. No detail was ever trivial, our commanders told us. Military planners in Australia made plain to our commanders, led by our main guerrilla leader, Col. Salvador Abcede, that they were relying on our reports to fulfill MacArthur's pledge to return to the Philippines. "I shall return" became our rallying cry. Those drafted into the intelligence service were taught the basics of spy craft, but our training fell short of anything close to the highly sophisticated cloak-and-dagger techniques that we have come to associate with James Bond. It mostly consisted of how to cover our tracks and how to disguise ourselves either as ordinary farmers or fisher folk just trying to ply our wares in wartime. Young men just out of college or high school or anyone who had had no exposure to manual labor were told to develop callouses in their hands to make them look like real farmers or fishermen. The guerrillas had prepared for this from hearing personal accounts of spies whose cover was blown when they failed the "callous test". To the Japanese, soft hands untrammeled by menial labor were an indication that the operatives were lying. Since I never had to engage in extreme physical work, my trainers had me chop woods for many days to toughen my hands, along with some young men who just got out of school when war came.
Around June 1943, I was ordered to report to the headquarters of the district intelligence officer. I brought eight operatives and three enlisted men with me. We rode in a sailboat to Miranda, a village of Pontevedra town. As we were sailing, an enlisted man grabbed my German Luger pistol and shot and killed a long, sea snake the locals called walo-walo. The sea monster oozed with blood as other fish swam around. The fellow affirmed himself as a celebrated marksman. In a depressed and fearful mood, the sailboat skipper remarked: “It is always safe when at sea to avoid talking about land animals and never to kill sea creatures. It is the belief of sailors that if this is not adhered to, calamities will follow. It is also important that the sails be turned downwards touching the water and be kept there until everything goes back to normal.”
I gently told him that calamities were not a result of any superstitious belief but merely a coincidence as I tried to keep the morale of my men high. But as if to prove the captain correct, the weather abruptly changed with strong winds and heavy rains lashing upon the sailboat, buffeting us in rough waters. Soon, water encroached upon the boat and threatened to sink it. The boat was loaded with some sacks of polished rice, which I ordered my men to throw overboard to lighten the load. We held on to some bundles of dried fish, which my wife and the families of my men had asked us to bring home. My men and I then proceeded to help the skipper drain the boat with heavy water, which helped stabilize the sinking vessel and kept it afloat.
Torrential rains continued to lash at the water, making us all quiver, cold, and suddenly hungry. The strong winds changed the direction of our boat, making us sail against the wind in the opposite direction. Everyone was handed a paddle, and we pushed hard to turn the boat around towards the shore.
ALMOST ON THE CARPET
As night fell, lightning lit up the sky at regular intervals. I seldom believed in superstitions, but I kept thinking about what the skipper had told us after one of my men had shot the sea snake. We finally reached the shore in the village of Miranda near midnight at low tide, a few distance away from the highway and some houses. At this point, the storm was still raging. Flashes of lightning and the boom of thunder continued as the rain came pouring down without letup. Unbeknownst to us, we were walking right into the hands of a Japanese patrol scouring the area.
As soon as we waded ashore, the Japanese immediately accosted two of my men. The moment of their capture remains etched in my mind; a flash of lightning illuminated that very moment and made it seem like a scene from a war movie. All of us immediately realized the danger we were in and each one scampered in different directions. But two of my men were not fast enough to get out of the spot and were blocked from leaving by some Japanese troops. One tried to evade capture and received a gun butt to his head. I heard him scream in pain. As I was running and crouching for cover, I was clutching a bag of dried fish close to my chest for my wife. Suddenly and unexpectedly I felt the hand of a Japanese soldier grabbing my right arm. He barked unintelligible orders in Japanese. With his gun pointed at me, I slowed down and walked beside him, my right hand in his tight grip. In deep prayer, I thought of my young wife, asking God to save me from captivity and to allow me to safely escape from the enemy's stranglehold. I also vowed to God that if he gave me another chance, I would commit my life to helping anyone without thinking of anything in return.
Although the words that I tried to string together did not make much sense under the circumstances, I mumbled some Japanese stock words (kumbawa, arrigato) to appease my captor as civilians in surrendered areas had been told to do. Much to their resentment, most everyone had committed these words to memory in occupied areas as a sign of obeisance. But he held my right hand even tighter while screaming to my face, "Sape! Sape! Sape!" I realized then that I was in deep trouble for I knew what he meant: he suspected me of being a member of the USAFFE! The scent of his cologne was overpowering, something akin to the smell of incense wafting through the air at benediction. But it was the will of God to save me from the jaws of the enemy. As we were walking, the soldier who I could tell was about my age stepped and plunged into an unfenced well. It happened so rapidly that I was frozen in place for a moment before I could quickly recover to seize the moment to escape. I sprinted as fast as I could ever remember doing in my life. Amid the deafening roar of lightning and thunder and the howling of the winds that came with the torrential rain, no sound could be heard from the Japanese. To this day, I do not know why. Was it because he had died instantly? Or was it because Mother Nature's nasty tantrum that night had simply muted his distressed cry?
I ran to the nearest coconut tree and climbed up to escape detection by the rest of the Japanese patrol. Up in the tree, I gathered my wits and thought of possible alibis in the event I was recaptured. I would deny being a member of the USAFFE and would try to pass myself off as a local fisherman. I tried to get rid of my pistol by hiding it among the leaves of the coconut tree and tying it in place with a piece of my clothing.
While all this was going on, I looked down and watched as my men struggled to escape from their captors. One of them received a second rifle butt, this time to his back, and he staggered for a moment. He showed them an identification card from the Kalibapi, a collaborator group, which changed their attitude towards him and they let him go. But one of them fished out a piece of paper from his pocket and swallowed it. It was a list of some civilians from whom we had commandeered some goods for the Army which we were required to document so that they could be paid by headquarters at a future date. The next thing I saw was the Japanese patrol assembling on a dirt road next to the beach, after which they boarded a truck and left, along with one of my soldiers.
The captured soldier was a private who made everyone in my unit crack up with his jokes. Dark skinned and stocky, everyone called him "Decóng", his nickname. My wife liked him because, besides making everyone laugh, he was always ready to lend a helping hand around the house. He volunteered to cook for everybody and kept our kitchen well-stocked with chopped woods to fuel the stove for cooking. He was taken to town for interrogation, he would later tell us after his daring escape, and subjected to torture to elicit information. He was water boarded, a favorite technique of the Japanese Imperial Army in my sector, long before the phrase became prevalent in the media in the current war on terror. When his captors grew a little tired of their cruelty, they placed him in a holding cell in a nipa hut. The hut doubled as a common restroom for the garrison, where they fashioned crude holes to serve as latrine by removing bamboo slots off the floor. They framed these wide holes with wooden planks on which they could steady themselves as they squatted to relieve themselves. This portion of the hut sat on a creek that served as a natural sewer for human wastes.
One night while it was raining, Decóng asked his guards to use the latrine and dunked himself into the cesspool of excrement through the hole while no one was paying any attention. The Japanese soldiers in this garrison were known for drinking and for consorting with women collaborators, some of whom became steady mistresses of Japanese officers. In the tropics and in such a remote outpost, it was easy to lower one's guard during lazy rainy nights and to engage in drinking and carousing. Once Decóng fell into the pool of feces, he waded out of the cesspool and made his getaway through the creek. The heavy and unrelenting rain aided him in washing off the ordure from his body and clothing as he ran for dear life in darkness. A couple of days later, he found his way back to our hideout in Mampunay using secret guerrilla routes. Due to the torture he received, his stomach became bloated for a few weeks until he fully recovered with the help of herbolarios and cirujuanos who lived in our midst for protection during the war.
After the surrender of Japan in 1945, he volunteered to be part of the occupying forces in that country. First deployed to Guam, he was later transferred to Okinawa where he stayed for a few years. It was the same offer by my American commanders that I declined after the war because I did not want to be separated from my newly-born son and my wife who needed my presence and support. Years after the war, while I was already teaching, he would come home to La Carlota and would visit my village of Haguimit. Despite the years, we knew Decóng was back home from Mindanao. His presence was always preceded by gales of laughter as he stopped by the houses of people he knew and traded jokes and stories with his old friends.
The Spanish hacenderos were remnants of Spanish colonial rule that had ended in the Philippines less than fifty years earlier. They were originally vaqueros from Spain who immigrated to the Philippines, brought there by the original Spanish owners of the land. When Spain lost control of the Philippines, the original owners fled the country, leaving effective ownership of their land to the vaqueros who seized the opportunity to better their own station in life. With their greed, the former vaqueros soon forgot where they came from and turned out much worse than the people they had replaced.
These vaqueros caused some unease among their neighbors on the eve of the Second World War because they displayed Nazi flags on the balcony of their big house in the hacienda. They showed their true colors when the Japanese invasion was in full swing, proclaiming their fealty to the Japanese Imperial Army and refusing to give support to the Philippine Army who came for help.
Naturally, the burning of their plantation was a big financial setback for them and it quickly soured their relationship with Eliodoro. It was no secret that on their orders, their Filipino right-hand man came to harass the family of my friend. Riding on a horse, this man would circle their house with a rifle in one hand. His goal apparently was to scare them so that they would abandon their hacienda, and the Spaniards could take over.
That early morning that I sought refuge at my friend’s house, their Spanish foes sent the man with a rifle and a bandolier slung over his shoulders, apparently this time to start something very ugly. It was by sheer luck that I happened to have arrived that morning. After observing him mouthing invectives at the family and threatening to shoot them, I challenged the man to dismount from his horse. Before I knew it, I found myself wrestling him to the ground and disarming him. He tried to set himself free, biting off a portion of my lower lip. I profusely bled from the injury that would leave a permanent scar on my lower lip but still managed to subdue the man, teaching him a lesson he would not forget for the rest of his life. After weakening his resistance with blows to his head and body (I boxed in high school), I grabbed my pistol and was about to pull the trigger when I heard someone shout, “Don’t!” The voice was that of Eva, Eliodoro’s second child and oldest daughter (he had four sons and four daughters), who would soon after become my wife.
I joined the organized guerrilla movement after the surrender of the Philippines. My now brother-in-law followed my lead, and both of us were eventually assigned in the military intelligence unit covering Central Negros after first being assigned to a fighting unit. One of our main missions was to infiltrate the town centers and to spy on Japanese activities. No detail was ever trivial, our commanders told us. Military planners in Australia made plain to our commanders, led by our main guerrilla leader, Col. Salvador Abcede, that they were relying on our reports to fulfill MacArthur's pledge to return to the Philippines. "I shall return" became our rallying cry. Those drafted into the intelligence service were taught the basics of spy craft, but our training fell short of anything close to the highly sophisticated cloak-and-dagger techniques that we have come to associate with James Bond. It mostly consisted of how to cover our tracks and how to disguise ourselves either as ordinary farmers or fisher folk just trying to ply our wares in wartime. Young men just out of college or high school or anyone who had had no exposure to manual labor were told to develop callouses in their hands to make them look like real farmers or fishermen. The guerrillas had prepared for this from hearing personal accounts of spies whose cover was blown when they failed the "callous test". To the Japanese, soft hands untrammeled by menial labor were an indication that the operatives were lying. Since I never had to engage in extreme physical work, my trainers had me chop woods for many days to toughen my hands, along with some young men who just got out of school when war came.
Around June 1943, I was ordered to report to the headquarters of the district intelligence officer. I brought eight operatives and three enlisted men with me. We rode in a sailboat to Miranda, a village of Pontevedra town. As we were sailing, an enlisted man grabbed my German Luger pistol and shot and killed a long, sea snake the locals called walo-walo. The sea monster oozed with blood as other fish swam around. The fellow affirmed himself as a celebrated marksman. In a depressed and fearful mood, the sailboat skipper remarked: “It is always safe when at sea to avoid talking about land animals and never to kill sea creatures. It is the belief of sailors that if this is not adhered to, calamities will follow. It is also important that the sails be turned downwards touching the water and be kept there until everything goes back to normal.”
I gently told him that calamities were not a result of any superstitious belief but merely a coincidence as I tried to keep the morale of my men high. But as if to prove the captain correct, the weather abruptly changed with strong winds and heavy rains lashing upon the sailboat, buffeting us in rough waters. Soon, water encroached upon the boat and threatened to sink it. The boat was loaded with some sacks of polished rice, which I ordered my men to throw overboard to lighten the load. We held on to some bundles of dried fish, which my wife and the families of my men had asked us to bring home. My men and I then proceeded to help the skipper drain the boat with heavy water, which helped stabilize the sinking vessel and kept it afloat.
Torrential rains continued to lash at the water, making us all quiver, cold, and suddenly hungry. The strong winds changed the direction of our boat, making us sail against the wind in the opposite direction. Everyone was handed a paddle, and we pushed hard to turn the boat around towards the shore.
ALMOST ON THE CARPET
As night fell, lightning lit up the sky at regular intervals. I seldom believed in superstitions, but I kept thinking about what the skipper had told us after one of my men had shot the sea snake. We finally reached the shore in the village of Miranda near midnight at low tide, a few distance away from the highway and some houses. At this point, the storm was still raging. Flashes of lightning and the boom of thunder continued as the rain came pouring down without letup. Unbeknownst to us, we were walking right into the hands of a Japanese patrol scouring the area.
As soon as we waded ashore, the Japanese immediately accosted two of my men. The moment of their capture remains etched in my mind; a flash of lightning illuminated that very moment and made it seem like a scene from a war movie. All of us immediately realized the danger we were in and each one scampered in different directions. But two of my men were not fast enough to get out of the spot and were blocked from leaving by some Japanese troops. One tried to evade capture and received a gun butt to his head. I heard him scream in pain. As I was running and crouching for cover, I was clutching a bag of dried fish close to my chest for my wife. Suddenly and unexpectedly I felt the hand of a Japanese soldier grabbing my right arm. He barked unintelligible orders in Japanese. With his gun pointed at me, I slowed down and walked beside him, my right hand in his tight grip. In deep prayer, I thought of my young wife, asking God to save me from captivity and to allow me to safely escape from the enemy's stranglehold. I also vowed to God that if he gave me another chance, I would commit my life to helping anyone without thinking of anything in return.
Although the words that I tried to string together did not make much sense under the circumstances, I mumbled some Japanese stock words (kumbawa, arrigato) to appease my captor as civilians in surrendered areas had been told to do. Much to their resentment, most everyone had committed these words to memory in occupied areas as a sign of obeisance. But he held my right hand even tighter while screaming to my face, "Sape! Sape! Sape!" I realized then that I was in deep trouble for I knew what he meant: he suspected me of being a member of the USAFFE! The scent of his cologne was overpowering, something akin to the smell of incense wafting through the air at benediction. But it was the will of God to save me from the jaws of the enemy. As we were walking, the soldier who I could tell was about my age stepped and plunged into an unfenced well. It happened so rapidly that I was frozen in place for a moment before I could quickly recover to seize the moment to escape. I sprinted as fast as I could ever remember doing in my life. Amid the deafening roar of lightning and thunder and the howling of the winds that came with the torrential rain, no sound could be heard from the Japanese. To this day, I do not know why. Was it because he had died instantly? Or was it because Mother Nature's nasty tantrum that night had simply muted his distressed cry?
I ran to the nearest coconut tree and climbed up to escape detection by the rest of the Japanese patrol. Up in the tree, I gathered my wits and thought of possible alibis in the event I was recaptured. I would deny being a member of the USAFFE and would try to pass myself off as a local fisherman. I tried to get rid of my pistol by hiding it among the leaves of the coconut tree and tying it in place with a piece of my clothing.
While all this was going on, I looked down and watched as my men struggled to escape from their captors. One of them received a second rifle butt, this time to his back, and he staggered for a moment. He showed them an identification card from the Kalibapi, a collaborator group, which changed their attitude towards him and they let him go. But one of them fished out a piece of paper from his pocket and swallowed it. It was a list of some civilians from whom we had commandeered some goods for the Army which we were required to document so that they could be paid by headquarters at a future date. The next thing I saw was the Japanese patrol assembling on a dirt road next to the beach, after which they boarded a truck and left, along with one of my soldiers.
The captured soldier was a private who made everyone in my unit crack up with his jokes. Dark skinned and stocky, everyone called him "Decóng", his nickname. My wife liked him because, besides making everyone laugh, he was always ready to lend a helping hand around the house. He volunteered to cook for everybody and kept our kitchen well-stocked with chopped woods to fuel the stove for cooking. He was taken to town for interrogation, he would later tell us after his daring escape, and subjected to torture to elicit information. He was water boarded, a favorite technique of the Japanese Imperial Army in my sector, long before the phrase became prevalent in the media in the current war on terror. When his captors grew a little tired of their cruelty, they placed him in a holding cell in a nipa hut. The hut doubled as a common restroom for the garrison, where they fashioned crude holes to serve as latrine by removing bamboo slots off the floor. They framed these wide holes with wooden planks on which they could steady themselves as they squatted to relieve themselves. This portion of the hut sat on a creek that served as a natural sewer for human wastes.
One night while it was raining, Decóng asked his guards to use the latrine and dunked himself into the cesspool of excrement through the hole while no one was paying any attention. The Japanese soldiers in this garrison were known for drinking and for consorting with women collaborators, some of whom became steady mistresses of Japanese officers. In the tropics and in such a remote outpost, it was easy to lower one's guard during lazy rainy nights and to engage in drinking and carousing. Once Decóng fell into the pool of feces, he waded out of the cesspool and made his getaway through the creek. The heavy and unrelenting rain aided him in washing off the ordure from his body and clothing as he ran for dear life in darkness. A couple of days later, he found his way back to our hideout in Mampunay using secret guerrilla routes. Due to the torture he received, his stomach became bloated for a few weeks until he fully recovered with the help of herbolarios and cirujuanos who lived in our midst for protection during the war.
After the surrender of Japan in 1945, he volunteered to be part of the occupying forces in that country. First deployed to Guam, he was later transferred to Okinawa where he stayed for a few years. It was the same offer by my American commanders that I declined after the war because I did not want to be separated from my newly-born son and my wife who needed my presence and support. Years after the war, while I was already teaching, he would come home to La Carlota and would visit my village of Haguimit. Despite the years, we knew Decóng was back home from Mindanao. His presence was always preceded by gales of laughter as he stopped by the houses of people he knew and traded jokes and stories with his old friends.
Photo courtesy: www.backpackboy.com
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La Carlota City, which was still a town during World War II, was a focus of guerrilla spying activities against the Japanese, being centrally located in the province of Negros Occidental. Shown above is the present city square with the City Hall in the background. Below is the Spanish-era Roman Catholic Church.
Photo courtesy: fromfrommybeutifulmind.blogspot
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Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
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