Guerrilla Pilot: Alex Vraciu in the Philippines

On December 14, 1944, Alex Vraciu, one of the leading U.S. Navy aces in the Pacific, flew two missions with Fighting Squadron 20 from the USS Lexington near the former American airbase Clark Field in central Luzon in the northern Philippines about sixty miles from the capital of Manila. With no Japanese planes in the air, Vraciu and his fellow pilots concentrated on destroying enemy aircraft on the ground.

Pulling away from a low strafing run on his afternoon mission, Vraciu realized that his plane had been hit by enemy fire in its engine’s oil tank. “I knew that I’d had it,” he remembered. “Oil was gushing out and going all over my canopy, and my oil pressure was rapidly dropping. There was no way I’d be able to get back to my carrier.”

Pilots on the Lexington had been warned by the ship’s intelligence officers that if they were hit and had to bail out of their aircraft over Luxon to head westward away from the lowlands, an area that held the majority of Japanese troops in the Philippines. The hilly western section of the island, which included Mount Pinatubo, an active volcano, included dense forests from which several guerrilla forces fighting the enemy and gathering intelligence were active. Also, it was possible for downed pilots to make their way to the coast for possible rescue by an American submarine. “It’s hard to head away from the direction of your carrier,” said Vraciu, “but it had to be!”

Following the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese earlier in the war, some of the American and Filipino troops had escaped and fled to the jungle or hills to continue to fight the enemy, particularly in Luzon, as U.S. Army Forces in the Far East guerrilla groups. According to historian William Manchester, by the end of 1944 more than a hundred and eighty thousand Filipinos had fought with or aided the guerrillas in some manner. These groups included former members of the Philippine army, sometimes led by American soldiers that had escaped the Bataan Death March, and the Hukbalahap (Huks), the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines.  

Preparing to bail out of his stricken aircraft, Vraciu opened his canopy and began throwing out any items he did not want to have with him if he happened to be captured by the Japanese (any information that might be useful to the enemy). “When I dared not wait any longer, I climbed out on the wing of my plane and impulsively held on to the side of the cockpit and trailing edge of the wing—waiting—so I could get farther out of the lowlands and get into the hills,” he noted. “It probably was just for a matter of a few seconds, but it sure seemed like a long time.”

Jumping free of the plane, Vraciu had only a short time to think before he hit the ground. “I remember coming down, saying to myself, ‘Alex, what have you got yourself into this time!’” He landed about a half a kilometer away from the city of Capas in the Tarlac province. A member of the Filipino guerrilla force who lived in Capas remembered hearing Japanese anti-aircraft guns “barking furiously” as he cultivated his garden. Looking up, the resistance fighter saw a lone American aircraft flying over the city to the west and Japanese soldiers gathering to follow to see if the pilot would survive the crash.

Vraciu had made up his mind that he would not allow himself to be captured by the enemy, and snatched his .45-caliber gun from his holster when he noticed about eight men running toward where he had landed. A slightly dazed Vraciu heard the group shout: “Filipino! Filipino! No shoot!” In a short time, the men had changed the pilot’s oil-soaked flight suit and helmet for a straw hat, shirt, and pants he could only button the bottom two buttons on. “A couple of the men gathered in my parachute and picked up my backpack, and then they said we had to leave quickly because the Japanese would be converging in ten minutes because they had an encampment nearby,” Vraciu said.

The group headed off in the direction of the nearby hills, passing through a small village along the way. After going by the village, the group entered a field of tall grass. They were led by a young Negrito boy who could see the path through the vegetation. “They picked me up a couple of times along the way and then put me down again,” said Vraciu. After this happened to him the second time, the pilot asked what was going on. The guerrillas showed him that they had set bamboo traps in the tall grass to discourage the Japanese from following them. “One of these traps could rip off the whole calf of your leg, they said,” Vraciu noted.

Because he did not know where he was being taken, Vraciu felt some concern about his would-be rescuers. His worries ended, however, when a couple of the young men in the group came over to him as they were heading into the hills and asked him two questions. “They wanted to know if movie star Madeleine Carroll was married the second time and whether Deanna Durbin [a Hollywood actress and singer] had any children yet,” said Vraciu. “Now, I half smiled and thought to myself, ‘Why am I worrying if this is all they were concerned about?’”

There remained, however, one nagging concern for the downed airman. Vraciu could not help but worry about how his new wife (they had married in August) might take the news that he had not returned to the Lexington. Back in East Chicago, Kathryn Vraciu told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune that the last time she had heard from her husband had been in a December 10 letter in which he had written: “You won’t be hearing from me again for a long time.”

Fred Bakutis, commanding officer of Fighting Squadron 20, wrote a letter to Kathryn on December 18 in which he noted that although Vraciu had been with the group only a short time, “his friendly, cheerful personality had already contributed much to the morale of the squadron. Moreover, he was a most competent pilot and a real asset to us. His missing status has been a great shock to all of us even though we hold considerable hope for his eventual recovery.”

After explaining the circumstances of how Vraciu was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire and offering some hope of his safe return, Bakutis cautioned Kathryn that was not “beyond the realm of the possible, that he may, or already has fallen into enemy hands.” Later, on Christmas Day, Kathryn received a dozen roses her husband had earlier ordered for her.

For several weeks Vraciu stayed in a guerrilla camp headed by Captain Alfred Bruce, a gaunt and thin survivor of the Bataan Death March who commanded the forces in the South Tarlac Military District. “I got there a couple of days too late for these guerrillas to take me over to the west coast of Luzon to be picked up by an American submarine,” Vraciu noted, “but I was lucky because that submarine was sunk by a Japanese submarine.” 

Vraciu and a couple of other American pilots rescued by the guerrillas stayed in a hut built over a chicken coop. Visitors to the camp could always tell how long the pilots had been in the Philippines by the length of their beards, he recalled. On December 17 Bruce appointed Vraciu as a brevet major in the guerrilla forces and gave him the job as administration officer.

Food, a scarce item in the Philippines, became an important part of what the pilots thought about as they waited for American troops to invade Luzon. They soon became sick of constantly eating rice (upon his return to the United States, Vraciu banned rice from his family’s dinner table for three years). For a change of pace, the Americans happily dined on what the Filipinos said was wild duck, but turned out to be fruit bats. “It wasn’t too bad,” Vraciu remembered. For their Christmas dinner, the pilots were lucky enough to have turkey. A rookie chef, Vraciu did not cook the turkey long enough, but the pilots were so hungry they ate the meat practically raw.

To help keep his mind occupied during his weeks with the guerrillas, Vraciu befriended a monkey he and the other pilots named Dugout Doug, an unflattering nickname that had been given to General Douglas MacArthur by American troops. Vraciu also kept notes on what was happening on Japanese airfields in the valley below. When his frustration level at not being in combat built high enough, he took a potshot with his .45-caliber pistol at a low flying enemy airplane. He learned, however, that his freedom came at a price. One day a visiting guerrilla told Vraciu that Japanese soldiers had killed twenty-two men from the village “near where I landed, trying to get them to tell them where I had been taken.”

On the morning of January 9, 1945, approximately sixty-eight thousand troops from the U.S. Sixth Army landed on the coast of Lingayen Gulf and began the long march to retake Manila from the Japanese. News of the landing reached Bruce’s guerrilla camp through another downed pilot who had been brought there. Bruce decided to send 150 members of his force north to hook up with the U.S. military. The guerrillas hoped to pass along to their allies information on the strength of Japanese troops in the area and to obtain arms and ammunition to continue their fight.

The activity aroused Vraciu’s interest, and he received permission from Bruce to join the small guerrilla group. Before leaving, Vraciu asked Bruce if there was anything he wanted, he would try, when he rejoined his squadron, to fly over his territory and drop it to him. Bruce thought about what he wanted for a moment and replied: “Two cans of beer.”

Just prior to starting out, the guerrilla force’s leader, Major Alberto Stockton, suffered a recurrence of malaria. “Just like that, I found myself in charge—a navy lieutenant,” laughed Vraciu. “I was called major and had an aide I called Wednesday.” For the next week, the group, armed only with a few pistols and rifles with no ammunition, evaded Japanese patrols and made its way toward the U.S. lines, growing larger and larger in size as they passed through various villages. “They [the Filipinos who joined] wanted to get in on the action with the Americans coming in,” he noted. “Some called them ‘sunshine patriots.’”

On its journey, the group stopped for lunch (rice) in the village of Mayantoc. While there, Vraciu met the local mayor and an American woman married to a Filipino who lived in the village. While together the three of them read leaflets dropped by U.S. planes and signed by Sergio Osmeña, president of the Philippines. The leaflet called upon Filipinos to rally behind General MacArthur “so that the enemy may feel the full strength of our outraged people.”

Suddenly, a member of another guerrilla group came face to face with Vraciu and half pointed a rifle at the pilot. “He could see that I wasn’t a Filipino, and he appeared to be a little puzzled about what to do,” said Vraciu. At first, the guerrilla mistook Vraciu for a member of the Hukbalahap, saying, “You Huk!” The pilot told him he was an American and, realizing what he was about to say sounded like a scene from a bad Hollywood film, told him: “Take me to your leader.”

As the two men went down the trail, one of Vraciu’s men ran toward him for protection. Members of the other guerrilla group, under the control of an American survivor of the Bataan Death March named Albert Hendrickson from the North Tarlac area, fired and killed one member of Vraciu’s band and seriously wounded another man. Visibly outraged, an angry Vraciu ordered the shooting to stop and yelled at the opposing force’s commander that while the Americans were trying to wrest control of the Philippines from the Japanese, they were spending “more time killing each other than you were fighting the Japs!” The shooting ended, and the two groups combined forces and agreed to travel to Hendrickson’s camp.

On the nighttime journey to Hendrickson’s camp, Vraciu traveled in style, riding on the back of a small horse. Unfortunately, the horse was none too pleased at having a rider, and attempted to bite him whenever he could. About two hundred yards from the entrance to Hendrickson’s camp, the horse finally got the better of the American pilot. “He just laid down and wouldn’t go another yard,” Vraciu recalled. “He made me walk the rest of the way.”

After a few days of inactivity, Vraciu, anxious to connect with the advancing U.S. forces, told Hendrickson he would be taking his guerrilla group and leaving the next morning. Hendrickson seemed reluctant to have his group leave, telling Vraciu that if the American army planned on coming into his territory, they should report to him. When Vraciu indicated he planned on leaving no matter what, Hendrickson changed his mind and agreed to have his men go as well.

That evening, the camp was on alert for a possible Japanese attack from across the river to the west. Someone gave Vraciu a carbine and he lay out that night with the others waiting for the enemy to strike. As he peered through the darkness, Vraciu remembered asking himself: “What is a good fighter pilot doing laying on his stomach in the middle of this God-forsaken country?”

Late the next morning, Vraciu participated in what he called the “strangest join-up of forces on the American side during the war.” Both guerrilla groups marched together up the Philippine National Highway and were led by a bugler and three men displaying the flags of the United States, Philippines, and the guerrilla forces. “Following the flags came twelve of us ‘chosen few’ on horseback,” said Vraciu. “This horse was a little bigger and didn’t try to bite me.”

As the group passed through villages on its way north, it picked up small groups of women, children, and dogs, who joined the march. This strange procession drew the attention of an American Avenger aircraft attempting to figure out who they were. “We’d just wave at the plane and wonder what kind of thoughts the crew may have had about us,” Vraciu noted.

The group finally came upon an advance outpost manned by what Vraciu remembered as a six-foot, eight-inch-tall private who did not know what to do with what he saw. The soldier decided to let someone else deal with the problem, telling Vraciu: “Da sergeant’s down da road.” The group continued and finally came to the outskirts of the 129th Infantry Regiment, a former National Guard outfit from Illinois. “When they found out I was from the Chicago area,” said Vraciu, “there were warm feelings all around. They quickly broke out coffee, wafers, and beans.”

After visiting for a short time, the pilot mentioned that he had valuable information that he had to turn over to the commanding general. “They called somebody right away,” said Vraciu, who while waiting said goodbye to his guerrillas.

In no time at all, a one-star general showed up with an aide, and Vraciu joined them for a trip to the city of Camiling in an American Jeep. The general drove and Vraciu sat beside him in the right seat. The two men talked on their way to General Robert S. Beighter’s headquarters in Camiling.

During a lull in conversation, the aide sitting in the back seat said, “You’re Vraciu, aren’t you?” It turned out that both men had attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, at the same time, but Vraciu could not remember what class the aide had been in. At Camiling, Vraciu had lunch with General  Beightler and remembered devouring an entire loaf of bread, which the general “got a big kick out of.”