The Souvenir (20 page)

B
ALETE
P
ASS IS
the lowest point (3,000 feet) in the long, jumbled complex of ridges that make up the Caraballo Mountains in northern Luzon. The highest point of this rugged range, Mount Imugan, crests at 5,580 feet. It is through narrow (75 feet across) Balete Pass that Luzon's main artery, National Highway 5, passes over the Caraballos. “Balete Pass is located at the northern exits of the most tortuous terrain Route 5 traverses on its way north,” states the
War in the Pacific
volume of the official U.S. Army chronicle on World War II. The pass is the gateway to the fertile rice fields of the Cagayan Valley, and during the war, as one salty vet put it, “it was the dividing line, real estatewise.”

In 1944, it was General MacArthur's unalterable belief that the Allies should secure Luzon before moving any closer to an invasion of Japan. This belief put General MacArthur at odds with the Navy High Command, who advocated bypassing Luzon for an assault on Formosa.

MacArthur had political as well as military motives. In 1942, American troops had suffered a historic defeat in the Philippines at the hands of the Japanese. MacArthur's famous vow—“I shall return,” made on March 11, 1942, when he left Corregidor and evacuated to Australia on FDR's orders—was viewed by Filipinos, under Japanese occupation, with quasi-mystical status. MacArthur
considered the reoccupation of the entire Philippine archipelago a “national obligation.”

MacArthur's argument eventually won the debate among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. U.S. forces would bypass Formosa and recapture the Philippines in a consecutive series of advances, just as MacArthur had been planning since March 1942.

As part of MacArthur's overall strategy, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, the United States Sixth Army commander on Luzon, ordered the Twenty-fifth “Tropic Lightning” Division to launch the drive to secure Balete Pass from the Japanese. From General Krueger to General Mullins, Commander of the Twenty-fifth Division; from General Mullins to General Dalton, Assistant Commander of the Twenty-fifth; from General Dalton to innumerable colonels, majors, captains, and so on down the chain of command—MacArthur's strategy ultimately brought infantrymen like my father and his comrades, as well as vets like Sylvan Katz and Peter Lomenzo and Baldwin Eckel, to northern Luzon to put their lives on the line to stop the Japanese.

The objective was to cut off General Yamashita's forces from rice fields in the Cagayan Valley. Since rice was the mainstay of the Imperial Army during the war, the objective was clear: Deprive the enemy of access to the “rice bowl,” and the campaign would be won.

Known as the Tiger of Malaya for capturing Singapore, General Tomoyuki Yamashita was both brilliant and realistic as a military strategist. He did not anticipate winning any major battles, or even driving the Americans away. By ceding Manila and the Central Plains and withdrawing the bulk of his Fourteenth Area Army, a force of more than 150,000 men, into the nearly impregnable Caraballos, he aimed to make the Americans pay dearly for their victory. Yamashita was determined to delay the conquest of Luzon as long as possible in order to pin down as many U.S. divisions
as he could, to slow the Allied advance toward Japan. The longer he could keep the American infantry and its air support tied up in combat, the longer the home islands would have to prepare for the inevitable Allied invasion. (Ironically, this strategy also gave the Americans more time to ready the atomic bomb.)

The Luzon Campaign was the largest of the Pacific War, employing the use of more United States Army ground combat and service forces than those used in operations in North Africa, Italy, or southern France. The victory at Balete Pass severed Yamashita's troops from their food supplies, the fatal blow to Japanese resistance on Luzon. The battle itself set a record for consecutive days of combat in the Pacific War. Radio reports in 1945 termed it a “second Cassino,” in reference to the brutal, decisive land battle in Italy that claimed so many Allied lives in the European theater. Yet, the battle for Balete Pass, vital to victory in the Philippines, is seldom mentioned in most histories of the Pacific War.

In a 1998 issue of
World War Two
magazine, one military historian wrote of the Twenty-fifth Division and Balete Pass, “Its accomplishment is obscured by MacArthur's pronouncement that the Philippines had been secured as early as March. The Twenty-fifth had a victory in a war that trumpeted victories, and yet its dead and wounded remain largely forgotten.”

W
E LEFT
M
ANILA
on a small, crowded plane and flew north to Baguio, in the mountains of northern Luzon. From Baguio, we figured, we could drive to Balete Pass in a day.

Situated at a mile-high elevation among fragrant pine forests, Baguio was designated the summer capital of the Philippine Archipelago by the American colonial government in 1903. It is at least twenty degrees cooler than Manila, which is why it is always crowded with urbanites who have either moved here or can afford to make it their summer destination.

On December 8, 1941, schoolchildren in Baguio lining up for their morning assembly were surprised to hear the sound of planes overhead, and even more shocked when Japanese bombs rained from the sky. Directly in the path of the Japanese invasion of Luzon, Baguio was the Imperial Army's next target after Pearl Harbor, and Japanese troops quickly overran the ruined town. They converted Camp John Hay, the once-verdant park containing American officers' residences, into their garrison and designated part of it as an internment camp for about five hundred Allied citizens—including Americans, Canadians, British nationals, and Australians.

After the Japanese attack in 1941, many Baguio residents escaped into the mountains to join bands of Filipino guerrilla forces, who were later instrumental in helping the Americans liberate the island.

During the short plane ride, we tried to locate Balete Pass on our map. It wasn't there. We pinpointed the area where it should have been. No such place-name existed. The plane began its descent. “Well,” Lloyd conceded, “it's not like going to Gettysburg.”

At the little Baguio airport, cabbies vied for our fare. A pockmarked driver named Joey, the most assertive, quickly loaded our backpacks into his trunk, and in minutes we were lurching toward Baguio in his fender-bent '72 Toyota.

Joey had big plans for our visit. He would be our personal chauffeur and tour guide deluxe. He would take us to special nightclubs and private cockfights. On a lark, Lloyd asked, “Can you take us to Balete Pass?” Joey looked puzzled for a moment, then brightened up. “Ah! You mean Dalton Pass!” he exclaimed, pulling deeply on a Marlboro. “They changed the name after that general got killed.”

Brigadier General James L. “Rusty” Dalton II, the popular Assistant Division Commander of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, was on a reconnaissance mission at Balete Pass on May 16, 1945, when he was felled by a sniper's bullet to the back of the head.

Just thirty-six years old when he was killed, Dalton had been one of the army's youngest generals. In a published interview, General Stanley “Swede” Larsen, Dalton's fellow officer in the Twenty-fifth, remembered him as “a hell of a nice fellow.” After Dalton's untimely death, his soldiers, still in their combat garb, honored their general with a Requiem Mass and then buried him in an emotional ceremony at the army cemetery near Santa Barbara, Luzon.

Dalton's death stunned the entire division, and, according to Peter Lomenzo, it inspired the bone-weary men of the Twenty-fifth to fight even harder. For even with Balete Pass finally secured, the division faced more combat. Not until the last day of June did the Twenty-fifth Division complete their final phase of the Luzon Campaign, “eliminating” (less euphemistic than “mopping up”) the last concentrations of “fanatically resisting” Japanese.

Dalton Pass was not on Joey's list of hot spots around Baguio, but he was excited at the idea that we might hire him to take us there. At least he tried to convince Lloyd that he was the man for the job. “It's an all-day trip,” he said. “But I'll take you to see faith healers, too … for a little extra.”

Neither Joey's dervishlike driving style nor the absence of shocks in his cab inspired confidence as we careened up the twisting roads to Baguio. The cab shuddered to a halt in front of our hotel, a rustic inn on a side street.

Joey lingered in the lobby until we started up the staircase toward our room, carrying our bags. “I come back in morning,” Joey told Lloyd confidently. “I take you to Dalton Pass. One hundred dollars for whole day. I am yours.”

I gave my husband a not-so-subtle elbow in the ribs. It was true—we did want a driver. Three days in Manila had convinced both of us that we were not cut out to drive in the Philippines. We could barely make it across the street. But I did not want Joey to be “ours” for the whole day; I did not want us to be “his.” Joey
was insistent. “I'll be here early in morning,” he yelled, rattling off in a cloud of noxious fumes.

The hotel staff recommended someone named Arnel Fetilano as a potential driver and guide. Arnel operated a fledgling travel service out of Baguio. He came over, and in the Chinese restaurant adjacent to the hotel, we spread our maps out on the table. Arnel assured us that we'd made the right choice in deciding not to do the driving ourselves. Large portions of the road to Balete (Dalton) Pass were damaged by earthquake, others by a recent typhoon.

I told Arnel, a slender young man with a studious air, that we wanted to go to Dalton Pass because my father had fought a battle there. He nodded. “My mother lived in the forest near Dalton Pass during the war,” he told me. “My grandfather was with the guerrilleros.” We made a plan: Arnel would pick up his friend's Dodge Caravan and be at our hotel the next morning.

That night, anxious about the next day's expedition, we tried to sleep as a light summer rain tapped on our windows.

A
ROUND NINE A.M.
, Arnel pulled up in a large, boxy van and we set off. What would take us nearly fourteen hours to traverse round-trip (about 140 miles) took the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, beginning in January 1945, 165 days, one way.

We drove northward through a deep, sharp-sided river valley. On the side of the road, old women sold bananas, peanuts, and mangos. Brightly painted jeepneys, packed to capacity, clattered by in the opposite direction. We passed a boy herding piglets, groups of children playing, women sitting in chairs under stilted, thatched huts grooming one another's hair.

We emerged from the valley onto a flat plain, with fields stretching far off into the distance on both sides. The landscape of the Luzon plain had changed little from my father's descriptions of it half a century ago. The solid shapes of carabao, the ubiquitous ox
of the Philippines, dotted the dry rice paddies. “A carabao is as strong as an elephant,” Arnel informed us proudly. Inside the air-conditioned van, we rode in cool comfort. Outside, the temperature rose steadily.

On the night of January 18, 1945, on the same open plain, my father lay awake in the foxhole he shared with Morrie Franklin, another GI, trying not to move at all.

A jungle night bird rapping on a tree trunk put my father's nerves on edge. It could be the enemy knocking out a code on bamboo sticks. He startled at the sound of leaves rustling, his finger on the trigger of his rifle. What felt like an hour passed. He glanced again at his watch. Just a few minutes had elapsed.

My father wished he could write by the light of the moon, but he knew that “no one is safe if he moves about.” He waited until morning to write.

Today four of us came across a native home and sent a little boy up a coconut tree. Gosh it was tall. Up he went like a monkey and we had juice and the shell. They really treat you friendly. And then they bring out bananas and offer apologies when we ask for eggs and they don't have any to give us.

When we're on the move, they stand along the road and yell “Victoree” and something that sounds like “Ah bouhai.” That means Hurrah.

Not until the final paragraph does he confess his nervousness:

During combat, when he wasn't on the line, his job was in the Message Center, operating phones and switchboard. The Message Center, within half a mile of the most forward troops, was exposed to fire and sneak attacks, but the rifle companies (they handled machine guns and mortars only) had it far worse.

Some days during combat, the Message Center was just a hole in the ground: “This is being written while sitting in a hole just taking telephone messages and waiting for the phone to ring.” Sometimes
he operated the machine “that codes and decodes our messages.” He liked cryptography, “especially when the messages are tricky and I have to figure out the mistakes in them too.”