The Silent Years, Part 2

THE SILENT YEARS

by

Major Geo..O. Hall, USAF (Ret.)

PART TWO

I finally learned that the station I had heard might be at Col. Fertig’s headquarters near Misamis on the far side of Iligan Bay. I heard from a guerilla courier that Col. Fertig was creating an army of resistance from the debris of defeat.

Barefoot, I set out for Misamis. On Christmas eve I attended a torch lit midnight mass in an ancient Spanish cathedral in guerilla held coastal barrio of Aloran. From the church steps a guerilla sentry watched a Nipponese patrol launch chugging in the moonlight along the outer reef. It was low tide and an expanse of water, too shallow for the launch, lay between the reef and the beach. Father Theodore Daigler of New York intoned the mass in cadence, it seemed, with the chugging launch. He gave the Gospel in the local Visayan dialect.

The patrol launch cruised the coast line daily after Christmas but by New Year’s eve I had located a Filipino fisherman who would chance the eighty kilometer crossing of Iligan Bay in his small banca when the weather outlook was better. I was impatient. The weather looked fine to me so I taunted the fisherman with, "Ikao hadluk, tingali?" (You are afraid, perhaps?). It was an unfair accusation which I fortunately lived to regret. The skipper cast a sharp glance at his crew of two and brusquely motioned me into his slender craft.

The evening breeze filled our patched, triangular mainsail and jib and the narrow dugout hull knifed out into the darkening waters leaning first on one bamboo outrigger and then on the other. The sun quickly slipped below the wave scalloped horizon. Unseen clouds shrouded the moon and stars. It was dark.

Sudden winds blasting in from the Mindanao Sea whipped mere waves into black mountains. With only the small jib flying the banca scudded down steep, watery slopes, buried half its length in the boiling trough and staggered up to the next crest only to roller coaster sickeningly down again. It was useless to bail, only the all wood construction kept us afloat. I have never ridden in a faster bath tub.

Beyond the outriggers, the ebony sky merged indistinguishably with black water. The skipper, who never relaxed at the steering oar, could divine direction only by the wind on his cheek. My concern that I would never see new year’s day, 1943, slowly turned to conjecture on where we might land. Under what flag would the beach sentries be?

In early morning darkness we shot over the boiling phosphoresence of the far side reef and dragged the banca onto wave packed sand. Then we became uneasily aware of the silent, shadowy form squatting beside the bole of a coconut palm. In the darkness we sensed rather than saw the rifle leveled at us. Sea water was still draining from my holster. What a ridiculous situation.

"Mayon Gabii" (Good evening), I said and the gun barrel raised. It was a guerilla sentry.

Before saying good-bye to the skipper and his crew I offered them my last few pesos. They refused the wet money with a shrug. They would have refused gold. "Teniente, we fight for the same cause. No need to pay," was the skipper’s reply.

I found Col. Fertig to be a "doer". Under his guidance the unusual became the commonplace. However, his widespread and rapidly growing underground movement had to be coordinated within and had to have the cooperation of "outside forces" if this guerilla venture was to be fully effective. A radio net was needed.

After assigning me to his transmitter station some thirty kilometers distant, Col. Fertig’s parting words were, "We must get out to Australia on that radio."

I remembered this final statement as I slithered barefooted in the rain up the muddy carabao trail to the station.

KZOM’s young crew gave me a warm welcome and dry clothes. We were all in our early twenties. There was Konko and Johnson formerly with Cmdr. Bulkely’s "They Were Expendable" Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron.

Konko and Johnson had crewed the speedy, little PT boats which slipped Gen. Mac Arthur from Corregidor through the Nipponese Fleet to Mindanao, from whence the General flew to assume his Pacific Command in Australia. There was Bob Ball an Air Corps radio operator like myself. Lt. Almendras was KZOM’s Chief Radio Technician. Almendras, working with electronic scrap and bamboo, accomplished weird, technical things that finally made our mission possible.

And there was Mr. Opendo who had been a Philippine Bureau of Postes radio operator in peacetime. Opendo ignored the Conqueror’s edict and buried his station’s equipment. Later he reported in to Col. Fertig and offered his radio and himself to the cause.

KZOM was now off the air. A transformer had burned out and Almendras was struggling to repair it with the junk on had.

I became engrossed in a old volume of "The Amateur’s Radio Handbook" and formed an operational plan to use should we ever get the old rat’s nest of wires, tubes and bamboo fired up again. The gang accepted the plan. Everything else had been tried so why not?

On our next attempt we would use Morse Code which carries further than voice transmission. We would use a directional, long wire antenna. We would answer a specific station on its receiving frequency.

I was particularly intrigued by KFS, San Francisco, which could be heard nightly calling, "CQ, answer on 36 or 48 meters". We received KFS best on 36 meters so that would be the frequency of our replay. Of course, KFS was using powerful equipment in contrast with our puny gear.

CONTINUED