The Intrepid Guerrillas of North Luzon

Bernard Norling

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780813137759
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Following the Japanese invasion of the islands in 1942, North Luzon was the staging area for several Filipino-American guerrilla bands who sought to gather intelligence and to destroy enemy military installations or supplies. Bernard Norling focuses on the Cagayan-Apayao Forces, or CAF, commanded by Maj. Ralph Praeger. Their bravery was unquestionable, but by September 1943 all but one member of Troop C had been claimed by combat, enemy capture, or disease. The only survivor, Capt. Thomas S. Jones, remembered, "Defeat is a terrible thing.... It brings down with it the whole structure about which a nation or an army has been built. It subjects men to the most severe of moral tests at a time when they are physically least able to meet them."

Based primarily upon unpublished sources, The Intrepid Guerrillas of North Luzon includes the diary of Praeger's executive officer, Jones, and draws on transcripts of radio communications between Praeger and General MacArthur's headquarters in Australia. The struggles of the men of the CAF tell a harrowing tale of valor, determination, and occasional successes mixed with the wildcat schemes, rivalries, mistrust, and betrayals that characterized the intramural relations of guerrilla forces all over the Pacific islands.

1

The Guerrilla War Begins

On December 8, 1941, Walter Cushing, the American manager of a gold mine in the mountains of the northern Philippine island of Luzon, heard that the Japanese had launched surprise attacks on U.S. installations at Clark Field, Iba Field, and several other places on the island. Always a volatile man, Cushing was both enraged and outraged. Within two days he began to organize a private army and to make plans to attack the enemy. About a month later he sent for two hundred of his assorted followers, then being given rudimentary military training by a footloose American army officer in Abra Province in north-central Luzon. They were to assemble at Baugen in nearby Ilocos Sur Province on January 14 for the purpose of ambushing a large Japanese convoy.

By the middle of the night on January 18 the troops were moving in previously acquired trucks down Highway 3 to Candon, one of the larger towns in Ilocos Sur. There the main highway went through the center of town. All traffic had to move on it because the high, steep Ilocos Mountains rose immediately to the east. The few Filipinos still living there had been persuaded to leave town the evening before. The guerrillas arrived before dawn and Cushing placed them in all the stores, residences, and other buildings for half a mile along the east side of the road. The Japanese were expected to come in two sections some twenty minutes apart. About 9:00 a.m. the northern outpost signaled that a ten-truck convoy was approaching. When the lead truck reached the center of town a prearranged signal initiated the ambush and everyone fired at once from a distance variously estimated at fifteen to thirty feet—point-blank range. The column was almost annihilated. Trucks were hastily pushed out of sight and corpses carried behind buildings, and the trap was reset. The second enemy group was similarly shot up and all the trucks were burned. The few Japanese who escaped the fusillade fled into nearby fields, where they were dispatched by civilians with bolos, the long, heavy knives Filipinos use to cut sugarcane and for other kinds of light chopping and slashing. Other civilians rushed from hiding places to mutilate the corpses lying in the street. Those who took part in the massacre were exultantly unanimous afterward that the most memorable feature of the whole enterprise was the sight of Cushing himself rushing up and down the street, a .45-caliber pistol in each hand and a stick of dynamite in each rear pants pocket, shouting something like, “Give it to ’em boys! They’d do the same to you." The day was a disaster for the enemy. Sixty-nine were killed, fifty-eight of them air force officers, and fourteen trucks were captured or destroyed. Only one guerrilla was wounded. It was a model guerrilla operation, the heaviest blow the Japanese suffered anywhere in North Luzon in the first month of World War II.

Unfortunately for the victors, an enemy bomber returning from the south observed the second attack and reported it to Japanese forces in Vigan, twenty-five miles north. A larger enemy force soon burned the whole town of Candon and began to chase Cushing. The latter waged a skillful delaying action in which the enemy suffered still more casualties and Cushing’s forces escaped with the loss of only one man.¹

The varied responses of the parties involved in the Candon raid are interesting. Radio Tokyo howled about the hit-and-run tactics of the “sons of bitches" as though Cushing had cheated at some sporting event. Cushing himself, impetuous and filled to bursting with nervous energy, wanted to launch another raid immediately, but his subordinates were simply not up to it. Footsore and weary, they wanted only to rest. Cushing had to console himself with devising a system of detachments to be stationed at various points in and near Ilocos. He planned to attack at one point, then hurriedly leave that detachment and rush with one or two hundred hardened natives to another point, then use them to attack there, thus giving his foes no rest physically and no respite psychologically

This scheme never got off the ground, but news of the Candon massacre spread rapidly It made Cushing a hero to Americans and Filipinos alike all over North Luzon, and greatly impressed Col. John P. Horan, who had begun the war as commandant of Camp John Hay at Baguio—the summer capital of the Philippines located high in the mountains 125 miles north of Manila—and who was attempting to establish a guerrilla organization of his own. Horan immediately proclaimed Cushing a major in his guerrilla troop-to-be. Cushing soon began to travel all over Ilocos Sur, Abra, and La Union Provinces, rallying the populace, restoring disrupted local government, and recruiting more guerrillas.

The Japanese, concluding that they must act decisively, launched a four-pronged offensive into Mountain Province to capture the subprovincial capital of Bontoc. One drive was to go through the town of Cervantes in Ilocos Sur. Cushing scouted the town alone at midnight. After learning that several hundred enemy troops would soon be billeted in several concrete buildings, he sat down to await dynamite he had thoughtfully ordered from the Lepanto Mine and which he planned to bury under the buildings. But, before the trap could be sprung, the Japanese underwent one of those puzzling changes of mind for which they were renowned and pulled their troops out of all Mountain Province except Baguio on February 15, 1942. In this case they may have needed the troops to strengthen their forces in New Guinea or the East Indies.

Undaunted, Cushing rushed back to the coast, dynamited some previously destroyed bridges that the Japanese had subsequently repaired, and drove up and down the main highway at times and places when only Japanese military transport ordinarily used the road—all to pick a good place for another ambush. He decided on a stretch of road near Tagudin on Highway 3, well south of Candon. The site seemed ideal: along a high bank covered with tall grass that would hide men easily, between two curves in the road. There, before sunrise on February 19, Cushing placed sixty Filipinos and fifteen Americans in hiding. The men had barely settled when the lookout signaled that three cars were approaching. A murderous rain of fire destroyed the little caravan. To their elation, the guerrillas discovered that they had massacred an enemy command group headed by no less a dignitary than Major General Hara. Hara leaped out of a car during the attack and started to run across a field, where a farmer at work quickly grasped what was happening and killed him with a bolo. Cushing personally bagged two of the enemy.

Because of the eminence of some of the victims it is not surprising that some important papers were found on their bodies and in the wreckage. Other documents were merely enigmatic. Among them were U.S. fire control maps of Bataan and Corregidor, plus a detailed map of Fort Lewis, Washington, and the nearby Puget Sound! Acquisition of these strange documents was merely an introduction to a series of postvictory incongruities reminiscent of a comic opera. Exulting in his personal victory over General Hara, Cushing henceforth wore the yellow patch and silver star of a Japanese major general. Colonel Horan, comparably enthused at the feat of his newly proclaimed subordinate, recommended Cushing for a DSC for the Candon attack and promotion to major for the Tagudin ambush. Two months earlier, HQ USAFFE, then still in Manila, had offered Cushing a commission in the Philippine army as a reward for a minor ambush he had staged only a few days after the war began—but subject to the condition that Cushing come to Manila to get it! It was a ridiculous proposal since the Japanese controlled all of Highway 3 from Manila to Tagudin in Ilocos Sur. Now, in February 1942, Horan was insisting that Cushing had always been a member of the U.S. Army, a stance USAFFE had neither formally affirmed nor disapproved. What to do? MacArthur’s headquarters did not fall between the proverbial two horses. Instead, it resolutely mounted both: It rejected a DSC for Cushing because he was a civilian, then made him a captain because he hadn’t been in the army long enough to be a major.

Happily, Cushing’s men fared better than their leader. Many of them were barefoot and all of them were short of clothing. After the Tagudin ambush they were allowed to replenish their wardrobes by looting the vanquished and their vehicles.

The author of these spectacularly successful ambushes was the most flamboyant of all the guerrilla leaders in North Luzon in World War II and, for the first nine months of the war, the most successful.

Walter Cushing was born in 1907 in El Paso, Texas, the son of an American mining engineer. His mother was of Spanish descent. From her came his distinctively Mediterranean appearance (five-foot-five with a swarthy complexion) and his fluency in Spanish, which made it possible for him to pass for a Filipino many times early in World War II. He spent his early years with his family around mines in Mexico and Texas, then moved to Los Angeles, where he was a good high school athlete. Energetic, imaginative, adventuresome, and utterly fearless, he spent the latter part of the 1920s roaming the United States and working at such unorthodox occupations as parachute jumper for a barnstorming pilot, rivet bucker on a skyscraper, and diver on a Mississippi River pier and bridge construction project. He eventually applied for pilot training in the U.S. Army Air Corps but was washed out because he had secretly gotten married. At the bottom of the depression he worked at odd jobs around Los Angeles, even entering a boxing tournament to make a few extra dollars. In 1933 he used his last fifty dollars to bribe a steward on the SS President Hoover to take him on as a waiter, but jumped ship in the Philippines and joined an older brother who had earlier gone there to take part in the mining boom. Enthusiastic as ever, totally honest, and increasingly fond of drinking parties, Walter Cushing soon made a host of friends.²

His hyperactivity came to an abrupt halt for a time in the late 1930s when his wife divorced him. Despondent, he began to drink more heavily. One night he joined the French Foreign Legion, but the next morning he sobered up sufficiently to jump his enlistment and thereby barely avoid being shipped to Saigon. Friends soon revived his interest in mining and, in 1940, he became a partner with Maurice B. Ordun in the Rainbow Mine, a gold-mining operation in Abra. Ordun knew Cushing well, both as a mining partner and from being in the same military unit with him during the early months of the war. They went through all kinds of experiences together, and Ordun came to admire Cushing greatly.

When the Japanese in Ilocos Sur Province occupied Vigan on December 10, 1941, Walter Cushing’s immediate instinctive response was to fight back. Within two days he organized some two hundred volunteers from among his mining employees, collected arms and ammunition from nearby hastily abandoned Philippine army training camps, hauled it all into his mine, and began to personally scout the coast around Vigan in an effort to detect enemy movements. At Bangued, the capital of Abra, he met two Philippine army officers in charge of the cadre there. He tried to convince them to move their arms, ammunition, and equipment into nearby mines, and also to permit him to destroy the bridges on Highway 3 south of Vigan. The officers, suspecting that Cushing might be a fifth columnist, refused to cooperate. Disgusted, he resumed his trip to the coast, intending to blow the bridges on his own. It was only with considerable difficulty that his friend and partner Ordun, who was with him, was able to dissuade Cushing by pointing out that General Mac Arthur might well have his own plans for dealing with the Japanese in Vigan. If these required the American army to use bridges Cushing had blown, he might well be executed by American forces, Ordun feared.

No doubt sobered somewhat by this consideration, Cushing contented himself with rescuing two American pilots who had been shot down over Abra Province and leading them over the mountains to a place where they could get transportation to Baguio. He would have been less than human, too, if he had not derived a certain rueful satisfaction from seeing the Japanese push south from Vigan on December 21. They used the bridges Cushing had wanted to destroy to roll up the right flank of Allied defenders in the Lingayen Gulf region. Meantime, back in Bengued, the Philippine officers who had denied him permission to destroy the bridges were sufficiently frightened by the sight of an advancing column of enemy troops that they hastily deserted their post, leaving men and supplies behind. Some of their cadre, having more courage and presence of mind than their superiors, managed to carry the arms and equipment into the hills, where Cushing’s men eventually recovered them.

Now Cushing decided to head for the coast again. On the way he encountered Lt. Robert Arnold and thirty-two hungry, bedraggled men of the U.S. air warning unit stationed at Cape Bojeador on the northwest tip of Luzon. They too had refused to surrender, and took to the mountains and jungle in the vain hope of somehow getting to Bataan. The two groups gladly joined forces. Cushing, who had no formal military training, at once turned his men over to Arnold to give them such training.

With five Filipinos, Cushing continued to reconnoiter the Ilocos coast. He soon heard that the Japanese had murdered and raped on an appalling scale in Vigan. Enraged, he and his men set an ambush for a truck loaded with Japanese troops near Narvacan in Ilocos Sur Province. Twelve of the fourteen Japanese on board were killed. Two survived to report the ambush to their garrison commander at Vigan on New Year’s Day 1942. It was his elation at the success of this operation that led Cushing to plan the more extensive Candon and Tagudin massacres.

After the Tagudin ambush, the indefatigable Cushing traveled all over northwestern Luzon to personally dynamite bridges. For good measure he terrorized the Japanese garrison in Bangued by throwing dynamite through the windows of the men’s sleeping quarters, forcing them for a time to spend their nights in foxholes. The enemy never knew how many men he had at his disposal, but since he vexed them in so many places, they were sure the number must be great. In response they sent as many as seven thousand troops to comb Abra Province for him during April 1942.³

Cushing’s ingenuity was remarkable. “When … [he] heard that the Japanese had stored a lot of captured arms and ammunition in an Ilocos Norte warehouse, he had several Igorot tribesmen … crawl thru the line of Japanese guards, get under the warehouse, cut thru the bamboo floor with their bolos and lower 124 cases of ammunition thru the hole. Others would put the cases on their chests, lie on their backs and crawl back thru the line of guards. Others would then place the cases on their heads and carry them back into the mountains. About 150,000 rounds of Cal. 30 amm." were thus secured.⁴

One of Cushing’s most spectacular coups took place on April 17, 1942, when he ambushed a company of the Japanese 122nd Infantry near Balbalasang in Kalinga Province. Although the regular guerrillas who operated near Balbalasang were off gathering supplies in the lowlands, some rifles were available. These were given to mere boys of twelve to fourteen. Cushing did not want to use them but the local strongman, “Captain" Puyao, insisted that by tribal standards they were fighting men and promised they would perform well. Each of them had about ten rounds of ammunition, mostly Japanese. The ambush was laid at night. The enemy, overconfident and unheeding, as they often were early in the war, marched into a defile in a column of fours. The ambushers opened fire, inflicting substantial casualties on the leading elements. Meanwhile, a Japanese company in the rear tried to outflank the guerrillas but became confused in the dark and opened fire on its own advance guard instead. Cushing then had his “men" withdraw. When Cpl. Louis G. Heuser, who played a prominent role in the operation, ordered the boys in his squad to pull out, one of them objected stoutly that he still had two rounds of ammunition left. The intramural battle among the Japanese continued until an estimated 160 of the enemy were killed. If the whole engagement demonstrated anything, it was the accuracy of an observation by Lt. Robert Arnold that half the casualties in war are due to mere blundering.⁵ The aftermath also illustrated the psychological gulf between Japanese and Occidentals. Their propaganda section promptly issued a warning that all persons involved in the Balbalasang ambush would be executed—not because they had fought the Japanese but because they “were cowards who had run away,” thereby causing the Japanese to fight among themselves!⁶

After the fall of Corregidor Cushing realized the futility of further hit-and-run operations for the time being, so he scattered his officers among several camps in the mountains of Abra, Ilocos Sur, and La Union Provinces and turned to propaganda warfare. Cushing had three radio sets salvaged from mines. These he used to pick up news daily from San Francisco, which he then published in a daily typewritten newspaper, The Echo of the Free North. The paper circulated widely, served to keep his now scattered followers in touch with his headquarters in Abra, and counteracted much enemy propaganda for the rest of 1942.

By June, a combination of restlessness and ambition set him off, alone, on his travels once more. This time he intended to go all over central and southern Luzon, contact other guerrilla outfits of whose existence he had only recently heard, and promote cooperation among them. His bravado in travel was equaled only by his resourcefulness. He crossed Lingayen Gulf in a small sailboat at night, hitched a ride on an alcohol tank truck across Tarlac Province because the vehicle was seldom checked at sentry posts, hid under a truckload of mangos as it passed several sentry posts in Pampanga, and everywhere employed his knowledge of Spanish to smooth his way with Spanish speakers, who were dependably pro-American. Once, while he was having tea in the house of a friendly Spaniard, the latter had a sudden unexpected visit from four Japanese officers. Cushing hastily hid in a bedroom. News that there was an American nearby had already gotten onto “the world’s fastest means of communication, the Philippine bamboo telegraph." Soon twelve little girls arrived to sing “God Bless America" for him in front of the house. Fortunately, the Japanese did not know English. Assuming that the serenade was for them, they applauded heartily.

When he at length reached Manila, Cushing procured three sets of identification papers that showed him to be—as occasion might require—a Filipino of Spanish extraction, an Italian mestizo, or a priest. Relying on these plus his generally Latin appearance, he brazenly traveled all over the Philippine capital in public conveyances, greeting people he knew and being recognized by many others. Once his hotel was raided and he escaped only by hiding for two da...