by Nunilo M. de Leon
It was a Sunday morning in September 1944. Together with other Immaculatans, I was in
church attending Sunday Mass. The hum of
an approaching plane came, a common enough sound, what with Japanese planes regularly
shuttling between Clark Field in the north and Nichols Field in the south. The plane was almost directly overhead when
the sound of its engine was drowned out by the deep-throated and much-louder
roar of other planes, followed by a long and thunderous burst of many large-caliber
machine guns. Then silence. We had to wait till after the Mass to find
out what had happened.
An aerial dogfight had taken place in the skies above
Malolos, the first ever seen there. A lone
Japanese plane had flown from the north, zigzagging at low altitude. Two strange-looking fighter planes, with
large blue and white stars and bars on each wing, dove from a high altitude,
pounced on the Japanese and promptly shot it down. It crashed in Huk territory to the west. The strange-looking planes could not be
anything else but US fighter planes, no longer sporting the star-with-a-red-cheese
ball-in-the-middle, which was their emblem before the war. We did not know that they were anywhere near
the Philippines.
More good news came later via the guerilla-operated
grapevine. The Americans had raided
Clark Field in Pampanga and Nichols Field in Makati and had attacked shipping
in Manila Bay, all of which caused much destruction. [Turo
was in Tia Pacita’s house in Manila when these initial air raids came. He says there was no warning, the US Navy
dive bombers had already completed their passes when the air raid sirens
sounded. Boying, who was then staying in
Pasig with his family, also remembers these air raids quite well. They had built a shelter inside their garage
and they would rush there every time planes flew overhead, and for good
reason. A bomb fragment actually fell
and shattered on their driveway, leaving a small crater.]
We were later to learn that the US fighter planess were from
a carrier task group in the Philippine Sea, off the coast of Eastern
Luzon. They were testing the strength of
the Japanese forces in the Philippines.
They discovered that Japanese air and sea defenses were quite weak and
that the archipelago was ripe for the picking.
The Japanese propaganda press had a different story. They claimed that the US forces were still in
the jungles of New Guinea, thousands of miles away, trapped and being slowly
but surely annihilated by the vastly superior Imperial Japanese “samurais”. They announced that the air raids were acts
of desperation and all the ships and planes that participated in the raids had
been destroyed. They did not bother to
explain how the Americans were able to get so near.
Life became less secure in Manila. The theaters were still open and entertaining
people with stage shows. Tio Amado
continued to appear in them. The
government offices and schools were still functioning and Tio Carlos, Tio Aurel
and Tia Epang were also still working.
However, the guerillas were getting to be increasingly
active and the Japanese were beginning to crack down harder. “Zonas” were frequently resorted to. These were cordons or dragnets set up around
a specific block or community by the Japanese “Kempeitai” or military
police. All males caught inside the
dragnet, looking old enough, or young enough, to be guerillas, were rounded
up. A “makapili” or Filipino informer,
usually wearing a hood fashioned from a large “buri” bag or “bayong”, would
then point out which ones were guerillas.
Those selected would be brought to military garrisons for interrogation,
a.k.a. torture. A few of them were
sometimes later released but most of them disappeared forever. Tia Pacita later narrated that their only
living son, Bebot, who was then only in his early teens, disappeared and was
feared to be one of those caught in one of the “Zonas”. However, they later
learned that he, with other boys from their neighborhood, had gone to the hills
of Montalban, Rizal to join Eleuterio “Terry” Adevoso’s ROTC Hunter
Guerillas. Tio Amado made the danger-fraught
trek to the guerilla lair, convinced the guerillas that Bebot was still too
young to fight and brought him back to Manila.
Some time after this, their entire family returned to their Malolos home
barrio, Barihan.
The government bureau where Tio Carlos worked had ceased to
operate but he and his family chose to stay on in Manila. Tia Helen was operating a store-eatery there
and probably thought that they were better off in Manila than in Malolos. Hearing of what had happened to Bebot,
Cancho, who was only a year older than Bebot but big for his age, was to be sent
to Malolos, for fear that the Japanese might mistake him for a guerilla in one
of their Manila “Zonas”.
Some time afterwards, Tia Epang and her family decided to
move back to Malolos from Pasig. The US
armed forces were nearing the Philippines.
They had occupied the Marianas in June 1944 and had landed on Peleliu
Island in September 1944, very close to Mindanao. American planes had resumed raiding air
fields in Luzon. Manila was rapidly
being evacuated, as life there was sure to get worse. On the road to Malolos and by fortunate
coincidence, Tio Aurel, who had hired a charcoal-fueled vehicle, saw Cancho
hiking on the national road, also bound for Malolos. They picked him up and brought him to Tampoy,
where he was going to stay.
Tia Epang and her family rented a house near the Malolos
railway station. Josie enrolled in my
Grade 6 class while her brothers Boying and Pio went to lower grades in the
same school. They were previously in
that school and found no difficulty moving back.
Cancho kept himself busy in Tampoy. He was mechanically minded and loved to put
things together. In one of his scrounging
around the silong, he found some bicycle parts which he used to build a
makeshift bicycle and a wheelbarrow or “carretilla”, which was put to good
use. He also usually was one of the
designated “rowers” whenever the household banca was needed for a trip or errand. Cancho had also managed to assemble a crystal
radio set. He kept on trying to operate
it, although it was very unreliable. One
could make out very little because of the static. The radio set was kept hidden away in the
silong and only used there. Having a
shortwave radio was then punishable by imprisonment or worse.
This initial “shock and awe” air raid by the Americans was
followed by a few weeks of waiting, during which life went on as usual, except
for the birth of Tio Toniong’s and Tia Lily’s second child, a girl named
Teresita or “Tessie”. She was born in
the corner bedroom, with the wrap-around porch, with, who else but, Tio Toniong
as attending physician.
In mid-October 1944, another death visited the clan. Lola Merced passed away in her Malolos
home. Because of the perilous and
penurious times, her wake and funeral were hardly noticed. We attended the wake, which was also held in
the Tampoy sala, and her burial at the family plot in the Malolos Catholic
cemetery. These were very much like
those held for Lolo Ramon a year earlier, except for the military-related
ceremonies.
Through all these we continued to go to school, the local
police stayed in the municipio, the Japanese in the capitolio, the Huks in the
rice fields and fishponds to the west and the BMA guerillas in the east. The days were peaceful. The nights were likewise quiet but
deceptively so. During the nightly
curfew, the Japanese, the Huks and the guerillas played their stealthy and lethal
games of hide-and-seek, hunt-and-kill in the streets while the few, unarmed and
intimidated police force simply watched and listened.
Once in a while, our family would visit Tia Epang’s family
in their newly-rented house beside the national highway, only a stone’s throw
from the Malolos railroad station. They
could not use the house which they occupied before the war, as it was inside
the capitol compound which was being used by the military. There was a squad-sized Japanese detachment
next door to their rented house, assigned to secure the nearby stretch of
highway and railway which connected Manila to the provinces to the north. There, we observed the tight, even cruel,
discipline practiced by the Japanese military within their own ranks. Whenever one was summoned by a superior, he
would come running, make a deep bow and wait to be spoken to. If he was slow in responding to the call, or
if he failed to make a deep-enough bow, he would receive a stentorian “bakero”
and sometimes one or two hard slaps on the face. No wonder the Japanese imposed the same
discipline and punishment on the civilian population. Obvious too, was their desire to luxuriate in
hot baths and their strict adherence to their pecking order. Every morning, a steel drum would be placed
on an improvised stove, filled with water and heated. Once the water was hot enough, the fire would
be banked and the detachment sergeant would climb into the tank and enjoy his
bath. When he was through, the non-com
who was next in rank would climb in, then the next and the next. This would go on until the lowliest private
had taken his bath, cleaned up the ashes, emptied the tank and put it away.
Towards the end of October 1944, things heated up
again. There were dogfights in the skies
over Malolos almost every morning. The railroad
and railway station at the edge of town were repeatedly strafed by US planes to
prevent any military traffic and, naturally, the Japanese resisted
fiercely. We watched the daily air shows
from our azotea on top of the air raid shelter, diving into the shelter
whenever the contending planes got too near.
We soon learned the reason for the air battles. The Americans had landed in Leyte. They had returned to the Philippines, as Gen.
Douglas MacArthur had promised.
The air raids cut the electrical transmission lines which
supplied much of Luzon, including Malolos, and we were again without
electricity. The water system was
powered by electricity so there was no water too. This did not pose too much of a problem for
us. The new rice husk stove was there
for the cooking although we had to stock up on rice husks because the rice mill
had again ceased to operate. The new
artesian well hand pump could supply all of our water needs, although water
still had to be boiled to make it safe for drinking. For lighting, “gaseras” or small one-candlepower
oil lamps were available, purchased or improvised. These were simply small tin or glass containers,
filled with coconut oil, fitted with a partly-submerged rag wick at one end and
lighted. There was enough supply of
matches, manufactured locally. We had no
other use for electricity; the phonograph was hand-wound and there were large
palm fronds hand fans for cooling. The
house was designed the traditional Filipino way; generously proportioned
windows and “ventanillas”, which provided large floor-to-ceiling openings for
cross-ventilation. If it became too warm
inside, one could always go out, to the breezy porch or to the bamboo “papag”
in the cooler “silong”.
Soon the situation became more perilous, people began to
leave town and schools were closed down. Tio Aurel, Tia Epang and their
children, whose rented house was beside the national highway and just a stone’s
throw from the often-targeted railroad, hurriedly moved to another rented house
near the town center, across the street from the Malolos Elementary School.
Japanese soldiers stopped straying too far from the highways
and main roads. We no longer saw them in
town, which had effectively become BMA territory. Looking back, it was a great blessing that
the Japanese did not commit atrocities in Malolos, as they had done in other
places where the same level of guerilla activity had taken place. They were probably hard-pressed just trying
to protect their main transportation routes and did not have the manpower nor
the time to bother with the guerillas and civilians in Malolos.
In Manila, it was another matter. The interdiction from the sky by US planes
constricted, if not completely sealed up, transportation to and from
Manila. Food from the provinces could no
longer enter Manila. Japanese troops
became more conspicuous and were obviously being reinforced. Fortifications were being built all over the
city and checkpoints had been set up everywhere. More and more “zonas” were being held and these
produced a much greater number of men who were suspected of underground
activities, arrested and brought to either Fort Santiago or Bilibid prison. There they were imprisoned and tortured. Those who were deemed guilty, which was most
of them, were executed. The few others
either managed to escape or had to wait until the US armed forces came and
liberated them.
At first, Tio Carlos and Tia Helen wanted to tough it out in
Manila. They had received a supply of
rice from the last harvest season and were thinking that, by bartering some of
the rice, they could have enough food to see them through to the end of the
war. Soon, however, no more food could
be found to barter for. They returned to
Tampoy, with Turo, Joby, Diana and Bong; leaving Ofelia, their eldest,
behind. Ofelia had gotten married to
David Alegre, a native Manileño whom she
had met during their stay in Manila.
Tampoy had become too close to the air battles. The stub-nosed fighter planes which were the
first ones over Malolos, and which I later found out were US Navy Grumman F-6 “Hellcat”
fighters, were no longer seen in the skies, replaced by other plane types. Most of the newcomers looked like the shark-nosed
P-39 “Aerocobra” fighters I had seen in the pre-war Popular Science but which, I
later discovered, were newer and better North American P-51 “Mustangs” from the
US Army Air Corps. Some were twin-boomed,
twin-engined fighters, Lockheed P-38 “Lightnings” which I had also read about
in Popular Science. There were also more
recent P-47 “Thunderbolt” fighters and B-25 North American “Mitchell”
twin-engined medium bombers. On some of
their strafing runs on the highway and railroad, the US planes passed overhead
at very low altitude and empty 50-caliber casings rained down on the town,
yielding a good harvest of souvenirs. A
P-38 was hit on one of those raids, crashed in a field outside of town and
exploded. While other fighters circled
overhead, some of those who were living nearby, mostly boys, rushed to the
crash scene. The pilot’s body was not to
be found, except for one hairy forearm, which still had a watch attached. We were quite reckless boys.
Tampoy was deemed to be too close to the battle zone and
might have to be evacuated at extremely short notice. It was, therefore, decided to evacuate the
female family members and the smaller boys.
The men and bigger boys were to be left behind as it was believed that
they could cope with any swift exodus that might be needed. A few days after Christmas, when the large
household banca was ready for the evacuation, plans suddenly went awry. Dada Ninay and Tia Monang refused to leave
Tampoy. They did not say so in so many
words, but I think Dada did not relish the inconveniences of farm life and Tia
Monang could not leave her pets behind. Tia Helen did not want to leave without
Tio Carlos so their whole family stayed.
Since Dada and Tia Monang were not going, neither were Eya, Abong, Nina
and Turina; only Tio Toniong’s and Tatang’s families evacuated. The destination was again going to be Hagunoy,
which was now Huk territory; this time, not the more-distant barrio Sukol, but the
nearer barrio Carillo, near Iba.
Normally, travel to Carillo by banca over the usual river
route was more than seven kilometers long and took some four hours to
negotiate. However, the “kasamas” had
shown us a shortcut which cut the travel time by an hour. This meant passing through narrow and shallow
creeks, avoiding some of the wide S-curves of the usual river route.
The banca could carry only one family at a time. The first trip had Tio Toniong, Tia Lily and
their two small daughters as passengers with Tio Toniong, Cancho and Turina
paddling. They were to stay with the
family of Ka Iking and Ka Aning, who were not relatives but Tio Toniong’s “inaanak
sa kasal”. He was the main sponsor at
their wedding. Ka Iking and Ka Aning
owned their farm and were relatively well-off.
After lunch, Cancho and Turina made the return trip to Tampoy.
The next day was our family’s turn to evacuate. Tatang did most of the paddling while Tancio
and I helped. Inang, Nestor and Nene
provided the ballast. We made a stopover
at Ka Iking’s place to see how the recent arrivals were doing. We were intending to proceed to the nearby
farm of Tata Tino (Faustino Martin) and Nana Sencia (Paciencia de la Cruz de
Leon y Martin), where we were supposed to stay, but Tia Lily persuaded Inang to
remain with her. Tia Lily was a Manileña
and could not quickly adjust to rural life.
Inang acceded to Tia Lily’s appeal and we stayed with them. Tio Toniong and Tatang paddled back to Tampoy
that same afternoon. They knew we were
safe in Carillo and felt they were more needed in Tampoy.
Nana Sencia was Inkong Tasio’s daughter by his second wife. They likewise owned their farm. That eastern part of Hagunoy was not part of
the delta and had a higher elevation than the western portion where Sukol
was. Rice could not be grown here, the
ground level was much higher than the river’s water level and irrigation would
have been too difficult. The main crops
were sugar cane, corn, pineapple and vegetables, which did not need irrigation,
and which moreover were more profitable than rice, making the farmers here
better off than the rice farmers. Many
of these farmers had been able to buy all or part of their holdings from their
landlords.
Life in Carillo was much like life in Sukol in the early
days of the war, with only a few differences.
The varied crop meant more variety in our diet. Another difference were the air shows over
the national highway and railways which were still visible, although more
distant. There was a third Carillo
feature which we did not have in Sukol, the “squadrons”.
One late afternoon, we saw a line of men in the distance,
walking towards us. Silhouetted by the
setting sun, they looked like farmers coming in from the field with a load of
sugarcane on their shoulders. When Ka
Iking saw them, he said, “Dumating na naman ang squadron”. The men separated into several small groups,
one group going to each of the farm houses.
A group of ten headed for our house.
As they came nearer, we saw that the sugar cane we thought they were
carrying, were actually rifles, 30-caliber Springfields and Japanese “Nambus”
or “pik-bongs”. The Nambu was given that
name because of the ammo it used, which produced two distinct noises when
fired. The primer or fuse of the
cartridge produced the very audible “pik”, followed an instant later by the much
louder “bong” of the main powder charge.
The group stayed some distance from the house while one of them,
probably their leader, approached and respectfully asked Ka Iking if they could
stay for a few days in the farm’s storage shed “kamalig” and rest. Ka Iking responded that they were welcome and
motioned to the others to come in. They
headed for the nearby storage shed and proceeded to make themselves at
home. They went to the river to bathe
and wash their clothes. Ka Aning placed
some uncooked rice in a pot, gave it to the strangers and told them that they
were free to get anything from the vegetable garden for food. They picked some fruits from the “balimbing”
tree and tomato plants, gathered some “camote” and “kulitis” leaves, cooked
them with some dried fish “daing” they brought with them, and had a rice and “bulanglang”
supper.
Ka Iking related that these were members of a hundred-men-strong
squadron of Huks and that it was one of several squadrons which occasionally
dropped in. She said that one of the
young men in the barrio was a Huk and the leader of any passing squadron would always
stay in his house, which was about half a kilometer away. The other squadron members were dispersed
among the neighboring farms. After they
had eaten, the Huks began to entertain themselves with songs; they had a
ukulele with them. Hearing them, Inang
said that they must be Kapampangan. The
Huks seemed to be very much at ease and I do not think they even bothered to
send out a sentry during the night.
The next morning, the Huks were up early and began to
prepare their own breakfast; boiled “camote” sweet potato from the garden,
coffee from over-roasted rice, and “carriba” which they themselves supplied. After breakfast, they began to help in the
farm chores. Some went to replenish the
farm’s firewood and water stocks. Others
pounded palay for rice. Still others
watered the vegetable garden and gathered whatever was ready for harvest, while
others borrowed Ka Iking’s fishing net and began to fish in the river. In today’s terminology, they were trying not
to leave “too large a footprint”.
Their spokesman-leader went to the house and asked Inang,
who was washing clothes, for some laundry soap.
Inang, who could speak Kapampangan and some other languages and dialects
quite fluently, answered the Pampango in his own dialect. He was obviously delighted at finding someone
whom he thought was a “cabalen” and began to converse animatedly with her. The Huks spoke very little Tagalog and during
their short stay one or two of them would always stay close to Inang, chatting
with her, probably trying to dissipate some of the homesickness which they were
feeling. They stayed the whole day in
the farm. When I woke up the following
morning, they were gone.
Tio Toniong, Tatang and Cancho traveled regularly between
Tampoy and Carillo. On one of their
trips, they brought some leaflets which US planes had been dropping. The leaflets advised all Filipinos to stay
alert, to stay away from possible targets of air raids and be ready “to strike
against the enemy”. The island of Leyte
had been liberated and Gen. MacArthur was soon going to land in Luzon.
On one of the later trips, Tio Toniong decided to stay
behind in Carillo. We persuaded Tatang,
who was going to return to Tampoy alone, to let us tag along with him. He agreed and took Tancio and me with
him. Things were very exciting in
Tampoy. Everyone was packed, ready to
leave at short notice. If an evacuation
was going to be necessary, the plan was for everyone to go to Ba Mundo’s farm
in Caingin, two kilometers from Tampoy.
Dada Ninay, Tia Monang, Tia Helen and Eya were to be brought there by
banca, with Cancho, Turo, Joby and Turina paddling. The others were to travel on foot.
Malolos had been completely shut down. The municipio, the schools and the public
market were closed. So were the stores. Although the Japanese were mostly out of it,
occupied as they were with securing the highway, the BMA guerillas and the Huks
were busily contesting the possession and control of Malolos. Shots could be heard day and night, proof of that
initial deadly struggle between Filipinos which, after the war, expanded into an
internecine “war between democracy and communism”, as it became commonly
known. That seven-decade-long conflict
continues to sap the strength of the nation to this day.
Not long after we arrived in Tampoy, news came that the
Americans had landed on the beaches of Pangasinan and La Union. The situation in Malolos turned for the
worse. US planes constantly hovered over
the highway during the day, forcing the Japanese to move troops and supplies
from Manila to the north only at night. The
guerillas would then take over and make nocturnal hit-and-run attacks on the Japanese
truck convoys.
Dada Ninay was finally convinced to leave Tampoy for
Carillo. The others remained in Tampoy ready
to leave according to the original evacuation plan but to be carried out
entirely on foot. We rode one of the
household bancas for Dada’s evacuation. Tancio
and I somehow convinced everybody that we were strong enough to do the rowing
by ourselves. Surprisingly, it was Dada
who least doubted our ability. Our banca
trip to Carillo was uneventful, except for the inevitable string of expletives
from Dada whenever the banca was steered too close, deliberately or
unavoidably, to the many “floaters” which we passed on the way. We brought Dada to her half-sister Nana
Sencia’s house, where she preferred to stay.
Contrary to my initial misimpressions, Dada got on quite
well with Nana Sencia, although they treated one another like aunt and niece rather
than as sisters, probably because of their wide age difference. Nana Sencia was closer to Tia Monang’s
age. Nana Sencia’s siblings, who were
living with their mother, Impong Puling, in another Hagunoy barrio some
distance from where we were, visited Dada at least once during her stay in
Carillo. Dada treated them the same way
she did Nana Sencia. I noticed that they
never talked about Inkong Tasio nor about Impong Puling, who never visited. Once I asked Nana Sencia about this. She replied, “Masama pa rin ang loob nila sa
kanila”. The children from
Inkong Tasio’s first family had not yet forgiven him for having a second
family.
(According to an historical account published by the Masonic Lodge, Inkong
Tasio was a founding member of the Masonic lodge called “Logio Kupang”, named
after the barrio in Bulacan town, where the national hero Marcelo H. del Pilar
was born. The leaders of the lodge were
Maloleños; Vicente Gatmaytan, Jose Bautista and Manuel Crisostomo. Many of the Masons, including Inkong who was
elected “Teniente de Granados”, Spanish for Senior Lieutenant, were elected in
November 1894 to serve as municipal government officials of Malolos. The “cura parroco” and the “capitan del
guardia civil” blocked this move, claiming that the Masons were anti-government
as well as anti-religion. Another
election was held in December 1894. The
results were the same and the authorities had no other choice but to allow them
to take over their elected positions, which happened on 1st January
1895. However, six months later, they
were formally charged in court, this time for plotting against the government
and the church, and found guilty. The
leaders, including Inkong, were exiled to various distant parts of the Islands;
Manuel Crisostomo to Sulu, Inkong and Ceferino Aldaba to Palawan, Vicente
Gatmaytan and Valentin Aldaba to Lanao. Some
of them never returned from their exile.
Inkong did, but only after six years.
Later, in 1897, Lolo Ramon was also convicted for sedition and was also
exiled, to Dapitan in Zamboanga. Soon,
Lolo Ramon escaped, returned to Malolos and began to fight with his comrades in
the Katipunan against Spain and then against the Americans. When Inkong Tasio finally returned from exile
in 1901, he was elected to be a delegate in the first town council organized by
the Americans in Malolos. Subsequently,
the second town council elected Lolo Ramon as the first mayor of the town. In 1918, Lolo Ramon became a founding member
of the first Masonic lodge in Malolos, the “Logio Malolos 46”, different from
the older “Logio Kupang”.)
In Malolos, the situation soon became very serious. The US forces which had landed in Pangasinan had
consolidated their initial beachheads and were making steady progress across
the plains of central Luzon. As the
Americans came closer, the guerillas and Huks grew bolder. More hit-and-run raids were made on Japanese
military installations, culminating in an ambush of Japanese soldiers on the
national road on the outskirts of Malolos.
The news that the ambush resulted in two Japanese killed and many others
wounded panicked the Malolos residents.
It was believed that the Japanese were sure to retaliate against the
civilians. The Tampoy residents decided
to evacuate, not to nearby Caingin as originally planned, but to the more
distant barrio Iba in Hagunoy. Tio
Carlos’ and Tia Helen’s family, except for Cancho and Turo, fled to one of the
De Leon’s tenanted farms in Iba. Turo,
with Tia Monang, Nina and Turina joined Dada in Nana Sencia’s farmhouse in
Carillo while Tatang, Cancho and Abong opted to continue staying in Tampoy with
Eya. Tia Pacita’s and Tia Epang’s
families stayed in Malolos, not in Tampoy but in their own homes. So did the Robleses.
A family banca, always manned by two rowers from Tampoy
would shuttle to and from Carillo and Iba, bringing supplies or passengers and
news. One morning, it came with the
shocking news that Cancho had been kidnapped.
Cancho and Abong were then on a shuttle trip to Iba. While passing through one of the creek
shortcuts mentioned earlier, they were stopped by armed men. Cancho, who spoke Tagalog brokenly and with a
heavy Pangasinan accent, was suspected of being a spy, either of the guerillas
or the Japanese. The armed men, who
turned out to be Huks, kept the banca and Cancho. They sent Abong, a Kapampangan and “cabalen”,
back to Tampoy on foot. That was all
Abong could relate, when he arrived back in Tampoy. He did not know what the Huks planned to do
to Cancho. A week or so later came the
sequel to Cancho’s kidnapping. From Iba,
Tio Carlos sent word to us in Carillo that we were not to worry, that Cancho
was safe with them in Iba. Only after we
had all returned to Tampoy did we get the rest of this story.
Two weeks passed by with nothing unusual happening. No more Huk squadrons dropped by, no more
news about kidnappings, no more dogfights. The US planes patrolling at high altitude,
dominated the skies. Even the occasional
sound of gunfire had stopped.
Early one morning, we awoke to excited voices. Ka Doming, the ex-USAFFE “kasama” who had
fought in Bataan and was in the Death March, was the source of the
commotion. He was coming from his farm
in Sapang Munti, where he had heard that the Americans had crossed the Pampanga
and Angat rivers, between the towns of Macabebe and Calumpit, and were already
in Bagbag, a riverside barrio not far from Iba.
Together with many other farm folks, Tio Toniong, Tata Tino, Ka Iking,
Turo, Tancio and I eagerly went with Ka Doming.
We brought along some tomatoes and boiled chicken eggs, which Ka Doming said
was always a welcome present for combat soldiers. We hurried to Bagbag which we reached after an
hour hike.
The Americans we saw in Bagbag did not at all look like the
soldiers we had seen before the war.
Gone were the shallow-basin steel helmets, replaced by bigger ones which
resembled those worn by German troops.
Gone too were the trim-looking khaki-colored uniforms; loose-fitting,
baggy-looking olive greens were worn instead. Nowhere were the knee-high wrap-around canvas tape
leggings, with strapped-on leather combat boots which reached to mid-calf
taking their place.
A pontoon bridge, good only for foot traffic, had already
been built and was in use in Bagbag. The
spearhead infantry and armor had crossed the river at dawn that morning, using
amphibious vehicles. They were said to
be already at the Tabang road junction, five kilometers past Malolos, and were
expected to be in Manila by nightfall. Mopping-up
operations were still going on at the capitol grounds in Malolos but, on the
whole, the US forces were meeting little resistance, thanks to the Huks and
guerillas, who had helped clear the way.
The troops we saw in Bagbag were army combat engineers. They had built the pontoon bridge and were
building a steel bailey bridge which could take heavy wheeled traffic. We watched the engineers, marveling at how
speedily they worked. They had lots of
tools and equipment, including unwieldy-looking amphibian trucks, which I had
never seen before, and which were busily ferrying loads of soldiers and
supplies across the river. I also saw
jeeps, weapon carriers, personnel carriers, command cars and 2-1/2 ton
“six-by-six” trucks all of which I had seen in the Popular Mechanics and
Popular Science some years back. The
Americans had enough men, materiel and supplies. They did not need any help from the people
who had come to welcome them and offer their aid. What they welcomed were the fresh food
brought for them. They popped the
tomatoes into their mouths right then and there but kept the eggs for later. In exchange they gave the civilians M &
M, Baby Ruth and Mars, B and C ready-to-eat meal packs plus Camels,
Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. We did
not spend too much time in Bagbag. We
hurried back to Carillo to enjoy our GI presents. We shared our haul with the others in Carillo
and made sure that they lasted as long as possible. It had been three years since we had a taste
of these treats. For the new-borns,
Inday, Nene and Tessie, it was their first.
Upon learning that Malolos had been liberated by the
Americans, the De Leons in Iba decided to go home. Tia Monang decided to go with them, together
with Turo. She was probably worried
about her many pets. The others in
Carillo, including Dada decided to wait a while before going home. Tio Carlos’ family, plus Tia Monang, tried to
ride a banca home but were stopped by the Huks who claimed it was still unsafe
to travel. The entourage got off the
banca and walked, taking the route the American soldiers were using; overland
to the national highway, past the capitol building to the crossing and then back
to Tampoy. Nobody tried to stop them.
A few days later, Tatang and Cancho came from Tampoy, riding
a banca which had been borrowed from a Tampoy neighbor, the Tiongsons. We went back to Tampoy the same day, riding
on the borrowed banca, big enough to accommodate all the remaining evacuees. The Huks were no longer around to stop us.
Back in Tampoy, when he had the chance, Cancho related the
still undisclosed details about his kidnapping.
After Abong had left, the Huks continued to ply him with questions. He told them that he knew people from Iba and
gave them some names. One of those he
claimed he knew, “Ba Piliong”, turned out to be the Huk coordinator in
Iba. The Huks told Cancho that they
would take him along and check on his story when they were supposed to go to
Iba after several days. When they
eventually reached Iba, Cancho’s story checked out so they released him to “Ba
Piliong”, who then brought him to the house where Tio Carlos and family were
staying. Ba Piliong said that the Huks had
found out that Cancho was from a landlord family and wanted to know if he was
from the “good” or the “bad” ones. They probably
decided that he was “good” so they released him. However, they kept the banca, probably as
payment for Cancho’s “board and lodging”.
