I remember tying KIA tags to some bodies that day. My mind wondered while tying those tags thinking how the families back home were going to get terrible news. It only lasted a moment as the sounds of war and the effort going on around me snapped me right back. I still had work to do. Some other guys took the dead bodies and placed them on a litter by some trees. They would be taken care of later. We needed the space for the living. Casualties kept coming. Our surgeons worked around the clock. We had to dig foxholes to sleep. Everyone tried to sleep, but there were night duties as well. We slept when we could. To keep the company safe, we strung wires around the perimeter and attached bells to them. Anyone approaching would set off our signal. I slept fully clothed, rifle always at hand. My helmet was my pillow and my carbine my mate. One morning I awoke to a lot of commotion. It seems that a Jap strapped with dynamite had broken through the lines and attacked an artillery outfit that was active next to us. Somebody shot him, and the explo- sives he was carrying blew a three-foot hole in the ground. We were safe. Oddly, I hadn’t heard a thing during all of that commotion. I must have been dead tired. I saw terrible things among the wound- ed. Once, I walked up to a cot with a soldier laying on it, his face covered with a piece of gauze. I lifted the bandage and saw that he had lost half of his face! Everyone around us, including all the Fili- pinos, were suspect. It took a while to trust any native. We soldiers always had an unfor- tunate name for the locals wherever we went. We called them Gooks; it was sometimes said as a degrading slur, very unfair, but we all used the term. After a few months of action in Northern Luzon, we moved south through Manila on a truck. I’m not sure what we were doing that day, but the city was said to have been retaken from the Japanese. Indeed, I had seen newspa- pers proclaiming: MACARTHUR TAKES MANILA
So it seemed, as I rode through streets teem- ing with people. Hundreds of buildings were leveled. But we felt safe because it was a thriv- ing metropolis. We drove past St. Thomas University; its doors were wide open, signi- fying freedom. Everyone was in a jubilant mood. The university was once a prison camp for Americans. The further we drove into the city, the fewer and fewer people we saw until finally there were no people, just soldiers with mortars. Mortars are short-range weapons, which meant the enemy was close. Turning a corner, an enormous Amer- ican tank was coming towards us. I saw bodies of Japanese all over the street. Some of those were giants. That is when I learned one strain of Japanese is very tall. We drove up to a G.I. hiding behind a telephone pole. He looked up and asked, “Are you our replacements?” We were in our khaki shorts as if on a field trip. The headlines obvi- ously did not match the facts on the ground! Our driver stepped on the gas and hightailed it out of there post haste. The following day, another one of our jeeps had business in that area and got a bullet through the windshield. Note - Jan. 11th - Feb. 14th, 1945 - 637th Clr Co is in Rabon Area, Luzon, In Operation. Herman earns his second battle star.
TAGAYTAY AREA / CAVITE / LUZON 2 WEEKS - 24 FEB ‘45 - 7 MAR ‘45
Our destination was south of the city in a town called Cavite. We occupied what I think must have been a burned-out school building. I recall that the Japanese had abandoned it so fast that they left food on the table. Near- by was a large lake surrounding a dormant volcano. This would be the scene of my worst experience of the war, a night of unimag- inable fear. I don’t know why, but there was a general uneasiness about this place. We couldn’t just occupy it without first making sure it was safe. At one point a group of us had our bayonets out, and we were chopping in the dirt. Some- one hit something metallic, and we all hit the
164
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease