Free Behind Japanese Lines by Ray C. Hunt, Bernard Norling Page A

entered the house. He was Vincente Bernia, a Spanish mestizo (half-Spanish, half-Filipino). Vincente and his brother Arturo were wealthy sugar planters who lived nearby. Vincente was soon to take me to William Fassoth. He and Fassoth were two of the finest, most selfless men I have ever known. Between them they saved my life.
    Fassoth came from a family of Hawaiian sugar planters. In 1913, as a young man, he went to the Philippines where he purchased a 1600-acre rice and sugar plantation. Soon after the war began in December 1941, Japanese planes bombed his house, sugar mill, andrice mill, and shot all his cows. With his family, his twin brother Martin, and a number of Filipino employees and friends, William Fassoth retreated about ten miles back into the foothills of the Zambales Mountains and built a camp. At first this was intended only to be a refuge for the Fassoth family, who had sufficient food and medicines for their own use. Soon, however, American soldiers began to arrive, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes. Some of them had escaped from Bataan before it fell; some, like myself, had escaped during the Death March; a few had simply wandered aimlessly in the jungle ever since the initial Japanese invasion of Luzon.
    Before long the sanctuary became so crowded that Fassoth and Vincente Bernia decided to build a bigger camp some six miles farther back in the mountains. It would be a semi-permanent rest camp for stray Americans. Fassoth would do the building while Bernia expressed assurance that he could get enough money and supplies from his wealthy friends to help maintain it.
    This was not an idle boast. Long afterward, William Fassoth’s son Vernon acknowledged that without the help of the Bernias maintenance of the Fassoth camp would have been impossible. 1 Moreover, during the first few months of the war, before the Japanese occupation could be consolidated and made systematic, the Fassoths themselves could still purchase ordinary foods and medicines in nearby villages. The Bernias stimulated the whole operation by offering fifteen pesos to any Filipino who would bring an American into the camp.
    I was one of the first to arrive at the first camp. I started toward it riding a horse, with Vincente walking beside me and holding me aboard. Eventually I grew so weak I could no longer sit on the horse, so I had to be carried the last three hundred yards on the back of a Filipino.
    The camp itself was built astride a small stream, completely concealed under tall trees. The only guests when I arrived were a few escapees as sick and exhausted as myself. Some of them had suffered such agony from tramping barefooted or in disintegrating shoes on the Death March that they had begged Japanese guards to shoot them and relieve their misery. The Japanese, usually only too glad to oblige in such cases, had refused, apparently in the belief that the Americans would soon die anyway and that they might as well do so painfully. The men had subsequently been rescued by Filipinos and now lay in the Fassoth camp with their raw feet swelled so badly that they could not put on shoes, much less walk.
    Vincente spoke to us expansively of his plans. After we had beennursed back to health, he was gradually going to form an army of irregulars from people like us and carry the fight to the enemy as guerrillas. He talked of his contacts in Manila that would enable him to get food and medicine through Japanese lines, and of the cruel invaders whom he longed to destroy. I yearned to fight and kill the Japanese as much as he did, and certainly welcomed the food and occasional medicine I received, but for five months I could do nothing but try to recover my health. I was cursed throughout with malaria, beri beri, and jaundice. At times the beri beri was so severe that I was partially blind. It was in this state that I was told that Corregidor had surrendered. I thought grimly of old Mike Ginnevan’s assurance to me that the Rock