Lieutenant Tinnell spent some 7 months on Mindanao, mired in the jungles of the island, overseeing a small team of three other Army Signal Corps enlisted men that came ashore with him. The team tried as best they could to keep to their observation and intelligence gathering duties and avoid engaging with the enemy, but that wasn’t always possible. By virtue of the fact that there was a war going on, they found themselves in frequent fights with the Japanese, regardless of orders.[1]
In one instance, Lieutenant Tinnell tells of working with abandoned Americans who joined the Filipino guerillas to fight the Japanese. One American, whose wife and child were cut off with him when the islands fell to the Japanese, found himself and the Filipino guerilla force he was fighting with surrounded by the Japanese, in a firefight they were destined to lose. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune interviewed Lieutenant Tinnell during the war and quoted him as saying of this forsaken American:
“Ever since the Japanese had forced these Americans out of their homes in 1942, they had lived with Filipino guerillas—always scared—always on the move—never any time to catch their breath—never any feeling of security.
“But there came a time when the wife became sick and couldn’t be moved. The Japs were moving in on the guerilla barrio.
“The guerillas pleaded with the American to save himself and his child and to flee with them. But he refused, without a moment of indecision.
“We never heard from him again, but we learned that when the Japs approached he calmly shot his wife. Then he shot the child. He then took cover and opened fire on the Japs. He killed many before they finally got him.”
Tinnell told the story he said because it typified, in a small way, the courage of thousands of Americans who escaped from the Japanese in 1942, and had been hiding with and fighting beside the guerillas ever since.
- - -
After 7 months on Mindanao Army Signal OCS graduate Lieutenant Leon Tinnell was taken out, again by submarine. Evacuated would be a better phrase than taken out, as by now he had lost 17 pounds and was stricken with malaria.
Still, his orders called for him to be returned to the States for more training, this time to prepare to support MacArthur’s coming re-invasion of the Philippines..
Once his training was completed, he headed back to the Philippines.
On this trip however he was dropped off along with a select group of reconnaissance troops, all of whom landed with a small Ranger unit on Homonhon Island, in the Leyte Gulf. Better still, this time instead of the three men he had on Mindanao, Tinnell had under his command 29 men. They comprised 16 trained Filipino military and 13 Americans. Speaking with a reporter just prior to his return to the Philippines, while a bit full of himself, Lieutenant Tinnell commented on what he had seen to date:
"I've been in every theater of War except China-Burma-India. I used to be a radio gunner on Liberators and Flying Forts. I am used to action, lots of It.
"When I came to the Southwest Pacific and they asked for volunteers for a 'secret assignment' I took the leap. I have the satisfaction of having helped sink some Jap ships and kill some Jap soldiers."
Commenting on how local Philippine guerrillas scare the Japanese, he said:
"I've seen Filipinos wage deadly effective guerrilla war against the enemy. I've seen how they made the Japs so scared of them that they no longer dared to leave their camps to move inland, except in force."
He went on to talk of how the Japanese tried to buy off guerilla fighters… sometimes effectively, but only for a while.
"The Japs worked hard to buy Filipino fifth columnists. I know one case where they paid 1,000 pesos for information. That's a staggering sum to most Filipinos and a few turned traitor, but died regretting It.
"Sometimes the Japs moved Into guerrilla villages, killed every one who didn't escape, and then burned the village to the ground. This only made the guerrillas more deadly.
“The guerrillas were well organized. They lived quite well off the land, but were pinched for ammunition, weapons, and medical supplies. Many Americans were among them, including soldiers who escaped from Luzon and civilians who took to the hills. One American guerrilla leader was an insurance salesman in Manila. There were many like him.
"The women fight right along with the men. Every one fights the best he can. Thousands have been sworn into the United States Army even as they waged guerrilla warfare. Some Filipinos and Americans have been commissioned as high as colonels for their part in guerrilla warfare."
Shows villagers coming down from hiding in the jungles as
Japanese are cleared from towns and villages. No Audio;
00:10:49 in length
In this latter comment Tinnell is referring to the fact that the American soldiers that escaped from Corregidor and other places in the Philippines and joined the guerillas, rather than surrender, often organized the guerilla units they joined along U.S. Army lines. To achieve cohesion, they not only trained the guerillas they worked with, but also assigned them ranks, even to the point of holding formal induction ceremonies making the local guerillas members of the U.S. Army. While Washington and the Department of War may have had no knowledge of this activity, it nevertheless went a long way towards creating a unified fighting force able to take on the Japanese. By the end of the war, some 260,715 guerillas thought of themselves as being members of the U.S. Army.
The reader should remember that in deciding to go rogue and join the resistance movement rather than surrender after the word went out by MacArthur to do so, American servicemen were putting themselves at ultimate risk. More specifically, if an American, whether civilian or military, chose not to surrender, than as a non-indigenous person to the occupied population, the best they could hope for was starvation and unforeseen hardships. The worst would come if they were captured, as the Japanese would not treat them as captured Americans, but spies. More likely than not they were shot on the spot, rather than being sent off to a POW camp.
A research paper by Larry S. Schmidt, Major, USMC, on the guerilla war in the Philippines tells how:
"This occurred because the Japanese dealt with captured guerrillas according to their ancient code of Bushido. Insisting that captured Americans and Filipinos were captives of war, not prisoners of war, they were told that they could expect nothing. This applied to U.S. and Filipino army regulars as well as guerrillas. The Japanese declared that all captives were merely bandits and that they had 'every right to kill all prisoners.'
"An indication of the severity and extent of Japanese methods in dealing with the guerrillas can be found in records of trials held for captured guerrillas. The records contain the names of hundreds of Filipino guerrillas who were tried and summarily sentenced to death on charges of "baneful action" and being a guerrilla. The Japanese were particularly piqued by the protection provided by the Filipinos to the Americans still remaining unsurrendered throughout the islands. More than just U.S. servicemen that went rogue, this group included priests, women and children as well as American guerrillas. The continued freedom of the Americans was a testament to the courage of the Filipinos, for any Filipinos found to have sheltered or protected an American were summarily executed after much torture.
"The courage was widely distributed, for there are many accounts of Americans coming down from the hills, having been ordered to appear for public execution by the local Japanese military commander, in order to save entire villages from being put to the sword for having harbored them.
"In December 1943, the Japanese published the following proclamation: The amnesty under which Americans have been guaranteed safety and internment by the Imperial Japanese Government is about to expire. After January 25, 1944, any American found in the Islands, whether unsurrendered soldier or civilian, will be summarily executed.'
"The Japanese were true to their word, for aggressive Japanese patrols hunted down American families hiding in the mountains and killed many prior to the January 25th deadline.
"This proclamation led General MacArthur to drastically increase his efforts to extract by submarine Americans who were not fighting with the guerrillas. This effort, coordinated by Colonel Fertig [2] on Mindanao, for the most part, is generally viewed as one of the most significant contributions the guerrillas made during the war. That the Japanese would become so obsessed with a handful of women, babies and elderly men hiding deep in the mountainous rain forests speaks volumes about their hatred for the Americans and the bankruptcy of their policies to achieve total domination of the Filipinos.
"The extreme actions implemented by the Japanese merely served to increase the bitterness and brutality of the engagements between the guerrillas and Japanese regulars."
The determination of the guerillas was clear, no matter what the Japanese did to them, they fought on, and men like Lieutenant Tinnell supported them. All told, there were some 277 guerrilla units operating along the 1,000 mile long Philippine archipelago, with most of them being led by American servicemen who decided to stay and fight. Officers like Lieutenant Tinnell—a member of the U.S. military assigned to duty in Mindanao after the Philippines surrendered, as opposed to those servicemen that left the military and went rogue during the surrender period—worked to support these groups, even while doing their own intelligence gathering and coast watching.
One research document listed locally inspired guerilla force names like Blackburn's Headhunters, Marking's Guerrillas, President Quezon's Own Guerrillas, Lawin's Patriot and Suicide Forces, and The Live or Die Unit. Some of the units had an informal air about them, while others, as Tinnell said, "were complete and formal organizations, down to training camps, maneuvers, CCS, orders of battle, and the usual military red tape." Either way, they were effective at what they did. As an example, now, long after the war is over, the generally accepted figure for the percentage of Mindanao controlled by the guerrillas is 95 percent. So effective were the guerillas that the Japanese were pretty much confined to the roadways, ports, airfields, open agricultural areas, and the major cities.[3]
What sets superior Officers apart from the average is their sense of mission. Lieutenant Tinnell was nothing if not an outstanding Army Signal Corps Officer, as his sense of mission exceeded all bounds. Regardless of the hardships that befell him—Japanese attacks, failed guerilla movements, equipment failures, communication breakdowns, a constant lack of food and ammunition, total isolation for months on end, and unremitting jungle sicknesses—he soldiered through and did his job.
Daily he focused on gathering the intel needed for MacArthur's HQ to be able to plan the operations required to bring Japan to her knees. In the end, the information Lieutenant Leon Tinnell gathered and radioed home resulted in the sinking of more than 50 ships. His reports on Japanese land movements and where Japanese troops were concentrated, as well as what installations the enemy had and where they were, supported hundreds of bombing missions. When the war was over and he came home, he weighed only 126 pounds and was sick with malaria; but the Japanese never caught up with him.
As a show of force, whether fighting the Japanese or gathering intel, the work Officers like Lieutenant Tinnell did was above the call. Through the clandestine radio stations he and his fellow coast watchers built and operated, and with the info supplied by the guerilla forces they liaised with, these Officers were able to warn the U.S. Navy in sufficient time to allow the fleet to turn on the Japanese navy itself, and win the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944.
Similarly, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was among the fiercest of World War II's sea battles. Had it not been for the unheralded work of people such as U.S. Army Signal OCS graduate Leon Tinnell, and others like him who operated behind Japanese lines, Douglas MacArthur may have had to postpone his walk ashore much longer than he did; and when he came ashore he might have found the path highly contested and much bloodier.
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Footnotes:
[1]
Portions of text in this and the following paragraphs
reproduced from a thesis presented to the faculty of the U.S
Amy Command and General Staff College. The thesis is
entitled American Involvement In The Filipino Resistance
Movement On Mindanao During The Japanese Occupation,
1942-1945.; by Larry S. Schmidt, Major, USMC.
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place in the text, click here.
[2]
Among the many guerrilla units in the Philippines
was the 10th Military District, the Mindanao guerrillas,
commanded by Colonel Wendell W. Fertig. Fertig had been a
United States Army Reserve officer and mining engineer
before the war and had found himself in a position to lead
the guerrilla resistance on the island of Mindanao. - To return to your
place in the text, click here.
[3] Ibidum Footnote [1].
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place in the text, click here.
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