Page 43

"No, you didn't, Eric," the Countess said. She walked to von HeurtenMitnitz and put her arm in his, then stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

"Helmut understands that even in the midst of this insanity, people fall in love."

Fulmar looked through them, then chuckled.

"Well, I'll be goddamned," he said.

"The Merry Widow in the flesh."

lONE]

The Maylaybalay-Kibawe Highway Island of Mindanao Commonwealth of the Philippines 4 February 1943

The mountainous center of the island of Mindanao is virtually inaccessible by motor vehicle, and accessible by foot only with great difficulty. It was for that reason that Brigadier General Wendell Fertig Commanding, U.S. Forces in the Philippines, had elected to place his headquarters and the bulk of his force in the mountains: the Japs had a hell of a hard time getting in there, and when they tried it, he was always notified in plenty of time to plan his defensive strategy.

Almost without exception, that strategy was to evacuate his headquarters and, from positions in the mountainous jungle nearby, observe how close the Japanese had come to finding it.

So far they had failed, although on occasion they had come across outposts or villages where he had stationed small detachments of his guerrilla force.

That was, he knew, a somewhat grandiose manner of describing the six, or eight, or a dozen armed men living in those villages and earning their support from the villagers by working in the fields.

When the Japanese had proof (or strongly suspected) that a village was harboring guerrillas, they burned it to the ground. They would have shot the village leaders, had they caught them, but the villagers--men, women, and children, as well as the guerrillas--invariably found safety in the surrounding jungle when Japanese appeared.

Pour I'encouragement deles autres, the elders of several villages that had not been housing guerrillas had been shot, and their villages burned down by the Japanese. The result of this had been to increase the number of natives willing to support U.S. forces in the Philippines. The remaining men would have been happy to enlist in USFIP, but Fertig had neither food to feed them nor arms with which to equip them.

The Japanese had quickly learned, too, that their expeditions into the mountains were very expensive--and did little good. They were almost always engaged by Fertig's guerrillas. Not in pitched battles, not even in situations that could be considered an armed engagement. Although Fertig liked to think that he was doing to the Japanese what the Minutemen had done to the English on their way back from Concord--causing them serious harm by attacking their formations "with accurate rifle fire from the surrounding forests--all he was really able to do was harass the Japanese patrols.

When it was absolutely safe to do so--in the sense that there was a sure escape route into the impenetrable jungle--and when there was an absolutely sure target, two or three or half a dozen shots would ring out from the jungle, and one or two or three sweating Japanese soldiers marching along a trail would be killed or wounded.

With some exceptions-there were some guerrillas who had as much as one hundred rounds of ammunition, which they were unwilling to share), most of Fertig's troops had no more than twenty-five rounds of ammunition for their Model 1917 Enfield.30-06-caliber rifles, or their Arisaka 7.7mm-caliber captured Japanese rifles, or their Winchester or Savage hunting rifles, or their Browning and Remington shotguns.

Fertig's guerrillas were not equipped to engage Japanese forces in battle.

Before long, the Japanese, who were not fools, had for all practical purposes abandoned their expeditions into the mountains. Fertig wasn't posing any bona fide military threat to their occupation. He was contained. And they could live with him until such time as the Filipinos came to understand that it was in their best interest to cooperate with the Japanese, to enter willingly into the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. At that point, they would stop feeding and supporting Fertig's guerrillas, and the threat would be over.

The Japanese had turned to winning the hearts and minds of the people.

Propaganda detachments, protected by company-size detachments of riflemen, began to visit villages on the periphery of Fertig's mountainous jungle area of operations. The propaganda detachments carried with them l6mm motion picture projectors and generators, and gifts of food and candy. They would set up a screen and show Charlie Chaplin and Bugs Bunny motion pictures, along with newsreels of the fall of Singapore, and of Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrendering to General Homma, and of long lines of American soldiers--hands in the air in surrender--entering Japanese captivity.

And then there would be a speech, or speeches, most often by Filipinos already convinced that the future of the Philippine people lay with their Japanese brothers. The speeches would invariably contain sarcastic references to General Fertig and his so-called U.S. forces in the Philippines.

Where were they? If they hadn't already died of starvation, hiding out like rats in the jungle, why weren't they attacking the Japanese?

General Fertig was aware of the problem, and aware that it had to be dealt with. With some reluctance, he had concluded that the only way to deal with it was by doing exactly what he believed he was probably incapable of doing:

engaging a Japanese company-strength unit in a battle. A battle in which there would be a winner and a loser, not just a dozen shots fired from concealment in the jungle.

The Japanese cooperated in two ways that helped Fertig's plans. First, they were methodical. Their propaganda detachments had a schedule. And Fertig obtained a copy of it from a Filipino woman who had been employed by the Japanese as a typist. Secondly, when it had become apparent to the Japanese that Fertig was unwilling to attack the propaganda detachment convoys, they had grown a little careless.

When the first convoys had gone out, fully expecting to be attacked, they had moved slowly and with great caution. They had sent a point ahead and they were prepared to fight at any moment. Now, as a general rule of thumb, the troops in the trucks did their best to sleep when they were on the road.

Their officers indulged them, for they believed that if Fertig were going to attack, he would do so at night. The way to preclude that was to establish a strong perimeter guard. That required the use of wide-awake soldiers. It was better that the troops get what sleep they could when they could, so they would be wide-awake guards at night.

Two highways crossed the main portion of the island of Mindanao, both running north-south, one to the west of the mountains, the other to the east.

There was no highway running east-west through the mountains. The terrain was difficult, construction would be practically impossible, and there was no economic justification to build such highways.

The place Fertig picked for the attack on the convoy was almost exactly equidistant between Maylaybalay and Kibawe on the highway that crossed Mindanao to the west of the mountains. The nearest Japanese reinforcements would be twenty-three miles north in Maylaybalay, or twenty-one miles south in Kibawe. In one possible scenario--where one of the trucks would escape the ambush and run for help--it would be anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours before Japanese reinforcements could reach the ambush location.