Above the Thunder: Reminiscences of a Field Artillery Pilot in World War II

7 Sashaying Around Up North

253 General Clarkson set up his headquarters in the old Baguio Country Club building, and for the first time since Hawaii the air section people got inside a real house. It was a small frame schoolhouse near the Kennon Road and within a couple of hundred yards of the west end of Loacan Field. A shell had collapsed one corner, and the roof there touched the floor, but we made ourselves at home with great pleasure, thanking our stars that we were not infantrymen out there in the hills in the chilly wind and rain. Over in the corner where the roof was down sat a young Filipino man holding in his arms a very small baby. A little girl of about three also huddled against him, coughing almost constantly, and the baby had cried until its voice was nearly gone. Seldom have I seen so pitiful a little group. I wondered what had happened to the mother, and I was glad they had found even this poor shelter, for thousands of local citizens were homeless, living in tunnels left by the Japanese along the roads or huddling under trees and in the wreckage of buildings. And then in strode an officer who, with a wave of his hand, told me, “Get them out of here.” I tried to defend them, arguing that the baby, at least, was obviously sick and probably would die if taken out into sAshAyIng Around up north – Seven – 254 above the thunder the cold rain. I realized, of course, that it was not good to have civilians inside billets occupied by troops, but we had tents we could quickly pitch, leaving the building to this poor family and others wandering in the night. The Filipino listened hopefully, but my arguments were futile. When the officer saw that I was not going to send the people away, he did so himself, coldly, without apology or apparent sympathy. One night during the late stages of the Baguio campaign, I visited a POW interrogation station. One of the men I saw questioned was a very young Japanese soldier who had been captured when flushed out of a small tunnel by a white phosphorous grenade only hours before. He was quite pale, obviously ill, coughing frequently, his lungs probably pretty well seared by the heat and fumes of the grenade. He looked as if he could barely stand, as he was required to do while being questioned. He said that he was a truck driver. Although I knew a few words of Japanese, I could not understand the questioning or the replies, but I did gather that something unusual was going on. The POW seemed to be extremely frightened, while the interrogators were searching for something in a book. After he was taken away, I asked what the problem was and was told that the interrogators had suspected that the leather belt the prisoner wore was not an authorized item of Japanese uniform. If it had not been, even though the rest of his uniform was regulation, he would have been accused of being a spy and taken to Manila to be shot, in which case the escort would have been able to bring back some whiskey for the interrogation unit. Unfortunately, they said, the belt had proven to be an issue item for cadets at the Japanese military academy. They were disappointed. I think General Sherman was not entirely correct when he said that war is hell and you cannot refine it. War certainly is hell, but there are some respects that we can refine—if our hearts are so inclined. Nevertheless, so long as leaders and nations remain ambitious, greedy, callous, uncaring about human beings, the wars, with all their inhuman cruelties, will come. As Sherman further observed, “You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm.” We tied down our planes and set up a few tents in a space at the northwest corner of Loacan, and after that first night we moved the sashaying around up north 255 pilots into new billets in Baguio proper. The new place was the former summer residence of the U.S. commissioner, a fine big frame house with a fireplace in the living room and a screened porch off the kitchen. Out by our front gate lay one of the hundreds of dead Japanese soldiers that were scattered all over Baguio and had already become very hard to...