Travis Ingham - Rendezvous By Submarine: The Story Of Charles Parsons And The Guerrilla-Soldiers In The Philippines

Copyright

Copyright 2018 by Bowsprit Books.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. All rights reserved.

Published by Bowsprit Books, Los Angeles.

ISBN: 978-0-359-05463-3

Foreword

By

Carlos P. Romulo

I n prewar Manila, before the Japanese made a place of hell out of our city that was the playground and paradise of the Far East, I often saw Chick Parsons through a chukka of polo. He was considered one of the best players in the Islands. To watch the sun-bronzed Chick at play, as if his entire soul were tied into the game, was to observe an American who had in every way fitted into our easy Philippine manner of living.

Chick was one of us in Manila before the war. I saw Chick Parsons in Manila again, after MacArthurs return, after the liberation of the Philippines. It was the biggest moment in both our lives. There was very little left of the Manila we had known; nevertheless, we who in Malacanan Palace that day heard President Sergio Osmena offer his praise and thanks to the American hero, Commander Parsons, realized that Chick had come home.

The American and Philippine flags were flying together over the old palace, and it was the lean, hard-bitten Chick who had helped put them back there.

Because Chick Parsons went in ahead of the rest of us. He led the invasion by a year. For the year preceding the landing of our Allied forces on Leyte Beach, Chick Parsons had been a powerful name that must not be spoken but that was always in the thoughts of eighteen million Filipinos and of the members of General Douglas MacArthurs staff.

It was MacArthur who sent Chick Parsons back into the Philippines.

When, from the captive Philippines, a few faint radio signals came in (proof that Filipino resistance was not dead), General MacArthur selected Chick Parsons to go by submarine into the Jap-infested Islands and help the fighting Filipinos drum up coordinated resistance. He left on this strange and dangerous mission, and the friendly, playful Chick ceased to exist. Commander X took his place in history and in the minds of those who knew of this amazing and daring attempt to co-ordinate and equip an army within a captive country. Chicks American friends, many of them, thought of him as dead. The Japanese hunted him in vain through the Islands and finally announced his death over Radio Tokyo.

But eighteen million Filipinos knew Chick Parsons was alive and in the Islands. He had brought them MacArthurs renewed pledge: I shall return! This was Chicks message to Garcia, and its delivery is one of the strangest epics in fighting history. That slogan moved a nation to resist and held eighteen million suffering people in sublime faith to a single man: MacArthur.

How Chick got through with his message, and how he was aided and protected by the Filipinos, and how he in turn thinks and feels about them, is ably told in this book in Chicks own laconic fashion, as he has told it to Travis Ingham. His tributes to Filipino loyalty touch my heart.

For the Filipino as you see him today stands in rags in his ruined country. He was a proud man before the war. He took pride in his American education, his American clothing, his American standards of living. The ragged, fighting Filipino who met the Allied soldiers on the beaches of Leyte and Luzon was the image of beggary, but there was, and is, no beggary in his heart. He is still the proudest man in the world.

He is proud because he fought for America and democracy and freedom and because with all his limited power he helped beat the way to Allied victory, and in his heart is the sound of drums.

Chick Parsons helped set the beat of those drums.

As MacArthurs coordinator of Filipino resistance, Commander Parsons knows the bloody story of that fight from within as no other American can ever know it.

Every word written here is the truth, as told by a great scout, a good soldier, and a heroic American who knows and loves the Filipinos and the Philippines. It is the story from the inside of the Filipinos life-and-death struggle to stand by America.

Let me in turn speak of Chick Parsons from the Filipinos point of view.

I know how they looked upon him, the emissary of MacArthur, the lone, brave American making his brave way over our mountain trails, always a few steps ahead of the brutal Japanese. I know how they feared for him, guarded him, fought for himeven died for him.

Their love for him was in their faces when they surrounded him on Leyte after the fight was won there, and again in Manila when the exciting game was over and our land was set free. They crowded around him, in trust and admiration, for a great coordinator had returned to the city that again was ours.

On that day of triumph in our shattered Manila, I saw Chick Parsons come into his own. He had risked his life to come back. His contribution to Americans and Filipinos alike was beyond estimate, for we shall never be able to compute how many lives were saved by the careful planning of the invasion, from the inside, by information supplied and assistance rendered by the guerrilla army.

That day in Manila I realized that men like Chick Parsons and the Filipinos who fought with him, and cities like Manila, never die. Our paradise in the Far East will rise again and in it Chick Parsons will be living with that grand family of his, and once again I shall drop over to the Polo Club to see him through a chukka of polo. As long as Manila stands, as long as Filipinos remain proud and free, Chick Parsons will remain one of ours.

V -E Day

Peace Conference

San Francisco

May 8, 1945

Prologue

A ll my trips to the Philippine Islands, for the purpose of contacting and supplying guerrilla-soldiers, have been of a routine and uninteresting nature.

M idnight off Mindanao . March 1943.

A periscope, like the hooded head of a sea serpent, broke the rippled surface of a vast bay and made leisurely reconnaissance. Finding nothing for apparent alarm on the nearby waters or in the dark distant mass that was the shore, the submarine surfaced. The sea slipped silently from its back, a hatch opened, and five figures crawled out on deck.