The Great Raid on Cabanatuan, page 9
A phony, but plausible, background was needed. Since Kovno was one of the few Lithuanian cities whose name she could pronounce, Kovno became her birthplace. Neither Margaret nor Peggy (as she was known to friends) was a Lithuanian name, so she became Rosena. She painstakingly scoured her apartment and belongings, destroying every scrap of personal identification.
Now, reborn Rosena Utinsky needed a Japanese pass in order to travel to Bataan. Recalling a Filipino acquaintance of her husband who was an expert in penmanship, she paid him twenty-five pesos ($12.50) to forge a pass. The forger was an expert. He even reproduced a precise signature of an authentic Japanese officer.
Masquerading as a nurse, Rosena Utinsky joined a Philippine Red Cross unit, which was working under the direction of the Japanese and was leaving for Bataan to set up emergency clinics for sick and wounded civilians. Along with the real doctors and nurses, she arrived in Bataan in the wake of the Death March and was shocked and sickened by the grotesque sight that greeted her eyes. Massive slaughter had taken place along the road leading northward toward Camp O’Donnell. Hundreds of stinking, often mutilated corpses of American and Filipino soldiers were strewn about—alongside the road, in ditches half-filled with stagnant water, in rice paddies.
For several weeks, while laboring as a Lithuanian nurse in a Bataan emergency clinic, Rosena Utinsky made subtle inquiries about the fate of her husband. Much to her relief, she learned that he had survived the Death March, reached Camp O’Donnell, and later was transferred to the Cabanatuan prison. Shortly after returning to Manila, she opened a note that had been smuggled out of Cabanatuan by a POW, Lieutenant Colonel Edward C. Mack, and was delivered to her by a Filipino courier.
“Your husband died here recently,” Mack wrote. “He is buried here in the prison graveyard.… You may be told that he died of tuberculosis. That is not true. Our men say he died of starvation. A little more food and medicine, which (the Japanese) would not give him, might have saved him.”
Margaret Utinsky, loving wife, shed no tears. She was too numb. Instead, she was gripped by a fierce resolve to save other American prisoners from Jack’s fate. She began to write a note to Colonel Mack and thank him for the news about her husband. But how would she sign the message? If the Japanese intercepted the note—a distinct possibility—and her true or adopted name was on it, her life could be forfeited. After a few moments’ reflection, she signed the message “Miss U.” Thus was born the Miss U underground of southern Luzon. Her goal was to smuggle food, medicine, clothing, shoes, and money to the desperate men inside Cabanatuan camp.
As soon as Naomi Flores (Looter), Miss U’s emissary, reported back from her reconnaissance of Cabanatuan in August, Margaret was stunned by the enormity of the task she had undertaken. Instead of the two thousand POWs she had heard were penned up at the camp, Looter had discovered that there were nine thousand to twelve thousand of them.
Miss U knew that an underground organization would require two things: money and members. So she sold her Spode and Wedgewood china for $200 and her silver service for $400—only a fraction of their true value. Her rings, pearls, and bracelets were bought for $600 by a Manila jeweler, and her apartment’s electric stove went to a Philippine couple for $195.
In the days ahead, the modest treasury dwindled. So items she could no longer afford to buy, she begged for. She had learned many of the Cabanatuan prisoners were barefoot, so she began to round up old shoes. An Irish priest, Father John Lalor, a friendly, silver-haired man fifty-five years of age, joined her in pounding the hot, dusty streets of Manila, pleading with anyone they thought they could trust for old shoes. After collecting several hundred pairs, they were confronted with the need to find storage space until the shoes could be smuggled into Cabanatuan.
Father Lalor came up with the solution. The large garage at the Malate Convent, in a fashionable suburb of Manila, would be used as a warehouse. Lalor and three other Irish priests were in charge of the convent, which also included a centuries-old church of Spanish architecture, a school that had become a part-time medical clinic, and a neatly manicured garden. Japanese suspicions would not be aroused by the loads of supplies going in and out of the garage, Father Lalor pointed out, because the four priests were citizens of neutral Ireland.
Neutral or not, Father Lalor (code name Morning Glory) held no illusions about his fate should his underground role be discovered by the Kempei Tai, the dreaded Japanese secret police. Yet he plunged into the smuggling business with enormous enthusiasm and dedication.
As time passed, Miss U recruited a large number of members to her underground network. They represented a wide array of American sympathizers—Spanish, Swiss, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, and Filipino. To each recruit, she assigned a code name. A group of Ma-ryknoll sisters (code name Angels) salvaged hundreds of pajamas from a closed Manila hospital where they had worked. These garments were cut up, and each one was converted into two pairs of pants and a T-shirt for the Cabanatuan prisoners. Two Manila pharmacists (one Swiss, one Chinese) covertly provided Miss U with quinine and sulfa, as well as the vaccines used to fight cholera, typhoid, and dysentery— diseases that had already killed hundreds at O’Donnell and Cabanatuan. The two pharmacists were code-named Medicine Men.
One entire Filipino family joined up. Joaquin D. Mencarinis was code-named Rocky; his wife, Augustias, was Boots; the couple’s daughter, Elvira, was Little Boots; the older son, Manuel, was Hotshot; and the younger son, Ralph, was Skeezix (named after a popular American comic-strip character).
Curly Top was a jovial, heavyset Swiss named Kurt Gantner, who was a leader among the large number of his countrymen living on Luzon. The Swiss were especially valuable to the network; as neutrals, they could move about freely with minimum danger of being arrested. Gantner’s wife was code-named Screwball Number Two; her sister, Marceline Short, wife of an American major imprisoned at Cabanatuan, was Screwball Number One.
Two Russian citizens, Zenia Jastin (code name Bakala) and Herman Roles (Fancypants) played key roles in the underground. Zenia’s husband, Walter Jastin, was an American civilian penned up at Cabanatuan, while Roles was a cashier in a large Manila restaurant. His tiny office served as a “mail drop” for receiving and sending secret messages. Roles had a remarkable memory and never accepted or dispatched written notes. Instead, he passed along each message to a courier by word of mouth, a considerable feat since his brain might be loaded with up to twenty communications at any given time.
Mr. X was Brother Xavier of De La Salle College in Manila, and his closest helper was Scatterbrain, whose real name was Madeline Cripe. Her husband, an American sailor, was a POW at Cabanatuan. Lovely Nati Ashbom, a young Spanish woman, had been married to U.S. Army Lieutenant Walter Ashborn for only a year when he was captured on Bataan. For weeks, Nati had anxiously awaited word about Walter’s fate. Then she heard through the Manila grapevine that Miss U had compiled a list of American servicemen who had died at Cabanatuan, so she hurried to call on the underground leader. Lieutenant Ashborn was indeed on the list: He had died of dysentery and starvation. Nati fought back the tears, then rolled up her sleeves and went to work carrying messages for the underground. She was given the moniker Trixie.
Middle-aged Elizabeth Kummer was among the handful of Americans permitted to roam Manila at will; her husband, Max, was a German, and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was a Japanese ally. Max had been the German counsel in Manila, but he had been booted from that position after the bigwigs in Berlin learned that he had never joined the Nazi Party.
Through her husband’s connections, Elizabeth Kummer was acquainted with numerous Japanese officers in Manila. One day while walking with Miss U, Elizabeth bumped into one of her Japanese acquaintances, and she introduced her companion as “a Lithuanian nurse, Miss Rosena Utinsky.” Miss U found herself in the strange ritual of smilingly shaking hands with one of her underground’s enemies.
Japanese officers trusted Elizabeth, since her husband Max was an “ally.” So from conversations with them, she was often able to warn Miss U that one of her covert operatives was under suspicion and in danger of being arrested by the Kempei Tai. The underground suspect would lay low or else flee into the rural area to hide out until the heat was over.
Another American, Ernest Johnson, a civilian who had been an executive of the Maritime Service, was confined to a Manila hospital with a serious injury he had suffered prior to the Japanese capture of Corregidor. The Japanese paid no attention to Johnson, presumably believing that he was immobile (which was true) and unable to cause them any mischief (which was untrue).
Ernie Johnson, code-named Brave Heart, conducted his underground business from his hospital room. An outgoing, friendly type, he had many friends in Manila, and each time one would visit him, he would persuade the visitor to make a cash contribution. While the money was being exchanged, Japanese officers often were strolling up and down the corridor outside Brave Heart’s room.
When Brave Heart had information or money to pass along to Miss U, he would send a Filipino boy with a bottle of rum. This was the signal that he wanted to see her. If the courier were to be stopped and grilled by the Japanese, he could not give away the conspiracy about which he knew nothing. All he knew was that Johnson had paid him a few pesos to deliver the bottle to a Lithuanian nurse, presumably with romantic intentions.
Known in the code book as Per, Enrico Paravino was Italian by birth but had Philippine citizenship. Per collected funds from Italian citizens living in Manila, an especially dangerous act since Benito Mussolini’s Italy was on the side of the Japanese and any Italian he approached might squeal on him. Per also served as a courier of secret messages.
One of Miss Us most effective agents was Ramon Amosategui (code name Sparkplug), a dashing former Spanish naval officer and now a wealthy property owner in Manila. Sparkplug kept in contact with Miss U through Bert Richey, a part-time guerilla, whose peg leg failed to slow him down. Richey’s apt moniker was One Slipper. Also in the network was Sparkplug’s beautiful Spanish wife, whose code name was Screwball Number Three.
In the early weeks of the underground, when it was especially strapped for cash, Sparkplug and his wife invited a large number of Spaniards to a secret meeting at their palatial home so that Miss U could make a pitch for financial contributions. Later, Sparkplug set up a shortwave radio in a Manila cemetery, and each night, he slipped behind the graveyard’s circular stone wall to take down in improvised shorthand the latest news broadcast from San Francisco, California. It was risky business: Detection would have meant the loss of his head.
After a session or two in the blackness of the cemetery, Sparkplug would take his scribbling to Miss U at her apartment (which was codenamed Auntie), where she typed his notes into narrative form on an ancient machine that had belonged to her husband. Then the typed sheets were reproduced by a friendly Filipino printer, and scores of them were sneaked inside Cabanatuan camp. This news pipeline enormously boosted POW morale. “The Cheer” was the name given by the prisoners to the typed news reports.
Soon Miss U dispatched a second operative to Cabanatuan town to assist Naomi Flores in reconnoitering the prison camp. She was Evangeline Neibert (Sassie Susie), a pert young woman who was the daughter of a former member of the Philippines Bureau of Education. Her father had come to the islands years earlier and married a Filipina schoolteacher. Sassie Susie was intensely dedicated to her secret activities: Her American boyfriend was one of the living skeletons in Cabanatuan camp.
Dressed in old clothes with dirty shawls worn over their heads, Looter (Naomi) and Sassie Susie strolled around the marketplace in Cabanatuan town, disguised as roasted-peanut vendors. They also made frequent trips to reconnoiter the gates at the POW camp. As a result of their spying, Miss U had to alter her plans for slipping food, clothing, and medicine inside the enclosure. She had planned to sneak these commodities through the gates in the back of Filipino trucks and ambulances, which she had thought made routine trips in and out of the camp. That procedure was dropped after Looter and Sassie Susie reported that no Filipino vehicles were allowed to enter the compound.
In light of this new intelligence, Miss U concluded that supplies would somehow have to reach the prisoners through native contacts in Cabanatuan town. Her main contact would have to be one already deeply imbedded in the fabric of the town, so that he did not attract undue attention from the Japanese. His job would be coordinator and expeditor for the clandestine distribution of materials to the camp prisoners.
Sassie Susie and Looter singled out a likely prospect, a Filipino named Juan Maluto, who operated several merchandise stalls in the marketplace. Each week, he routinely traveled to Manila in a battered old truck to bring back goods from his warehouse. Secretly, he hated the Japanese; they had brutally murdered his only son.
Cautiously, Looter approached Maluto and told him that “Rosena Utinsky,” a Lithuanian nurse, wanted to talk with him about an extremely important matter. Could he call at her apartment the next time he was in Manila? Maluto was suspicious and hesitated, but finally agreed.
A few days later, the Filipino was seated in the sparsely furnished living room at Miss U’s apartment, listening to her briefing on the work of her clandestine organization and its goals. Then she told him of his prospective role: using his several stalls in the Cabanatuan marketplace as a covert distribution center for smuggling goods, money, medicine, and food to the American POWs.
Maluto was frightened. His hands trembled. Detection by the Kempei Tai would mean unspeakable torture and eventual beheading. His wife and daughter might undergo the same harsh fate. Despite his deep fears, Maluto agreed to become the underground’s key operative in Cabanatuan town. Miss U told the Filipino that his code name would be Savior.
Now Miss U and Father Lalor were confronted by yet another vexing problem: how to get the supplies from the Malate Convent garage to Cabanatuan town. A wealthy Filipino, Juan Elizalde, owner of a distillery, was approached, and he agreed to contribute a truck and alcohol (in lieu of gasoline) to power the vehicle. Code-named Ezy, the Manila businessman was a thoughtful intellectual, and he hated the barbaric nature of Japanese rule. Anything Miss U needed, Ezy would provide it.
Several times each week, Elizalde’s truck made the round trip from the Malate Convent garage and Juan Maluto’s stalls in Cabanatuan town. There were no stumbling blocks. The Filipino drivers were officially licensed by Japanese authorities, and there were no restrictions on their moving about Luzon. On each trip, the truck was loaded with shoes, clothing, drugs, sweet potatoes, canned fruit, and mongo beans.
Periodically, groups of POWs from the camp, accompanied by Japanese guards, were allowed to drive bullcarts into town to purchase small amounts of goods from their ten to twenty cents per day pay. On the day before the undergrounds truck was to make its run, Miss U’s contact in Cabanatuan town slipped word to the Americans about the kind of relief supplies that were coming.
Early in the morning, the Americans going to Cabanatuan town moved through the camp gate in a line of solid-wood-wheeled, low-slung bullcarts pulled by huge-shouldered, waddling carabao. Usually, the cart’s only occupant was the driver. On reaching the Cabanatuan marketplace, the POWs shopped several stalls first before reaching Juan Maluto’s bins, a tactic intended to divert Japanese suspicions from Miss Us main contact.
When the Americans began pawing Maluto’s merchandise in search of something they could afford to buy, loud haggling erupted over the price the proprietor was asking, a scenario scripted for the benefit of the Japanese guards. Maluto always made it a point during the arguments to damn the Americans as “filthy pigs.”
While the guards were ogling a few young Filipina women, who were deliberately flirting to distract the Japanese, the purchased items were loaded into the bullcarts. Then, making certain they were not being watched, Maluto and a few helpers rapidly slipped drugs, medicine, food, and clothing underneath the sacks of goods. These supplies had arrived only that morning from the Malate Convent. Back to camp went the carts, where they trundled past the bored guards at the gate. This primitive secret shuttle service between the camp and Cabanatuan town was known to the POWs as the “Carabao Clipper.”
Among the items sneaked into the carts by Juan Maluto would be a bag marked with large red letters. On his arrival back in camp, a POW would take this bag directly to Lieutenant Colonel Ed Mack, one of Miss U’s primary contacts. Inside the sack was a large amount of pesos for distribution to POWs in particular need.
Prisoners always needed money with which to make purchases in the Cabanatuan marketplace, in what passed as the camp commissary, and, on occasion, to bribe guards for a needed favor—perhaps a new toothbrush. Miss U and her conspirators hit on a scheme to keep a modest flow of money dribbling into the camp. Looter and Sassie Susie, carrying their product in baskets balanced on their heads, casually circulated among the Americans in the marketplace, selling bags of roasted peanuts to the POWs for one centavo (a few U.S. pennies) each. When the POWs returned to camp and opened their peanut sacks, they found inside as much as three hundred pesos, currency that had been tightly folded and inserted by Miss U’s workers in Manila.*
Looter and Sassie Susie had narrow escapes from being unmasked as underground operatives. One afternoon the two women and a few friends were walking back to Cabanatuan town after selling peanuts and bananas to the barefoot Americans toiling in Farmer Joness Garden. Actually, their mission had been slipping notes and messages to the POWs. A truck drew up alongside the Filipinas and a Japanese soldier leaned out of the cab and motioned for Looter to climb in with him. She dared not refuse or show fear.
Smiling broadly, Looter scrambled aboard and sat between the two Japanese. Her heart was pounding madly, and her palms were perspiring. She felt her covert activities had been discovered and she was being taken to a Kempei Tai station for grilling. She chatted amiably, however, and the truck finally halted in the center of Cabanatuan town.
