…
A Filipino policeman named Luis Morgan had reached a similar conclusion.
Morgan understood that Mindanao would never unite behind any single Filipino leader because the old rivalries ran too deep.
But an American officer could stand above those rivalries and an American could speak for the military that every guerrilla hoped would return.
Fertig said yes, but he had no intention of being a figurehead.
He used what he had learned about the Filipino people and about the politics of the island to take real command of that group and then of others.
Within days, he faced a problem that no engineering school had prepared him for.
He was a lieutenant colonel dealing with local commanders who wanted to know why they should obey him.
In the world he was entering, rank was currency and his was worth very little.
So Wendell Fertig made one of the boldest decisions of the war.
He promoted himself to Brigadier General.
According to accounts of the episode, a Filipino metalsmith fashioned the general’s stars for him.
Fertig pinned them on and an American Reserve Lieutenant Colonel became a general by his own authority.
It was outrageous by any measure.
No president had nominated him.
No Senate had confirmed him.
No War Department order had ever mentioned his name.
By every regulation of the United States Army, he was committing an act of enormous presumption.
If anyone in Washington or Australia had known about it, they would have been horrified.
But Fertig understood something the regulations did not.
In a land where the old government had collapsed, a man needed a title that people could see.
A lieutenant colonel was one officer among many.
A general was a leader.
Believing that no Filipino guerrilla chief would take orders from a lieutenant colonel, he gave himself the rank that the situation demanded.
Army records later dated his command of the Mindanao guerrillas from September 16th, 1942, only 4 days after that meeting.
It was a gamble, and the people around him did not all like it.
The self-promotion would not endear him to MacArthur’s staff in Australia.
Still, it worked because it solved the one problem that mattered most.
It scattered fighters a reason to believe that someone was in charge.
Then Fertig started building, and he built the way an engineer builds.
He started with a foundation of people.
His greatest shortage was not rifles.
It was experienced leaders.
Many Filipino soldiers had been poorly trained and badly equipped when the war began.
Many of their weapons were relics from World War I with worn parts that no longer worked properly.
What Fertig needed were men who knew how to organize, train, and lead.
And he found some of them among the American servicemen who had refused to surrender, or who had escaped from Japanese hands.
On November 20, 1942, a major named Edward McClish and a captain named Clyde Childress met Fertig.
He promoted McClish to lieutenant colonel and gave him command of what became known as the 110th division, responsible for four provinces in northeastern Mindanao with Childress as his second in command.
It was a pattern that Fertig repeated across the island.
Those who stayed and fought received commissions or promotions, even if they had been sailors, marines, or civilians before the war.
His rule, as one writer later summarized it, was that the reward for performance should always be more responsibility.
Competence was the only road to promotion, and no man was denied a chance to prove himself.
In a movement made up of rival groups that had spent months distrusting one another, that kind of fairness was worth as much as ammunition.
Fertig also understood that an army needs more than soldiers.
It needs a government.
So, he began creating a civil administration across the territory his forces controlled, one that allowed ordinary people to feel that the old order had not simply vanished.
Historians still debate how complete that government was and how much of it existed in practice rather than on paper.
But the idea itself was a powerful one.
It told the people of Mindanao that the Japanese flag was not the only authority on the island.
But there was a problem that no title and no organization chart could fix.
Fertig could not talk to anyone outside Mindanao.
To the commanders in Australia, he did not exist.
In the eyes of General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, the Philippines had fallen, and the island of Mindanao was simply enemy territory.
Without contact, there would be no rifles, no ammunition, no medicine, and no recognition.
Without recognition, Fertig would remain nothing more than a fugitive in a general’s stars.
He needed a radio.
The man he gave the job to was not a radio expert.
His name was Gerardo Almendres and he was a Filipino high school student.
Shortly before the war began, Almendres had sent away for a correspondence course on radios from the International Correspondence Schools.
He had never actually handled a radio.
Fertig assigned him the task of building a transmitter anyway.
Almendres had help.
A Filipino traveling salesman who had once sold radios lent his knowledge and so did another Filipino.
Together they scrounged for parts across the island.
Vacuum tubes and other electrical components were pulled from old radio receivers.
Sound equipment came out of an old movie projector.
Pieces were taken from whatever electrical devices could be found and the whole thing was assembled by hand.
To understand how hard this was, remember what a radio of that era needed.
Transmitters and receivers depended on vacuum tubes, fragile glass bulbs that amplify and shape electrical signals.
They could not be made in a jungle workshop and with the old supply chains broken, they could not be bought.
A radio also needs power, a steady source of electricity and an aerial to send the signal out into the sky.
Every one of those things had to be found, borrowed, or improvised.
It was an ugly machine, but it worked, at least in part.
Soon, the makeshift set began to pick up transmissions from other radios in the islands.
One of them belonged to an American named Roy Bell on the island of Negros.
Bell traveled all the way to Fertig’s camp and designed a better aerial, the long wire that sends a radio signal out into the air.
But there was a cruel problem.
Fertig’s people could receive messages from others, but they had no way of knowing whether anyone could hear them.
They sent out their call sign again and again into a silence that never answered.
Several American radio operators who had joined the guerrillas, including Robert Ball, William Conco, and Stewart Willever, took over the work of keeping the equipment alive and the signals going.
Then on January 31, 1943, something remarkable happened.
A United States Navy radio monitoring station in San Francisco, more than 6,000 mi away, heard the call sign from the Mindanao jungle and answered it.
A handful of men in a clearing with a radio built by a high school student from salvaged parts and a movie projector had reached across the Pacific Ocean.
But reaching the Navy was only the first step.
Now, Fertig had to convince the American military that he was real.
That was not easy.
MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, General Charles Willoughby, had assured his commander that organized guerrilla resistance in the Philippines was not possible.
According to Keats, the American command in the Pacific first heard Fertig’s name when the Japanese announced that a bombing mission had killed a Major General Fertig.
The Americans dismissed it as enemy propaganda.
The irony was hard to miss.
Fertig had only given himself the rank of Brigadier General.
The Japanese, who were trying to hunt him down, were calling him a Major General.
They referred to him as commander-in-chief in the Philippines, and they even used a Japanese military term for his organization, calling the 10th Military District an army group.
That did not make his life any easier with MacArthur’s staff, who were already uneasy about the stars.
For weeks, American intelligence tried to figure out who this man really was.
Was he alive? Was he really an American? Was he a Japanese agent sending a trap? The last information anyone had was that Lieutenant Colonel Fertig had been on Corregidor when the Philippines fell, and the army assumed he was either dead or a prisoner.
One of the people they turned to was his wife.
Mary Fertig, back in the United States, was contacted for personal details about her husband’s life.
And she had something that no one else had.
Fertig had sent her a letter on the last American plane to leave Mindanao.
In it was a strange phrase, “Pineapples for breakfast”.
To anyone else, it meant nothing.
But to Mary, it was a message.
The couple had spent short vacations on Mindanao, and her husband had loved eating pineapples there for breakfast.
The letter told her that he was alive, and that he was on Mindanao.
It was a small human detail in the middle of a war of armies and submarines.
It was one piece of a longer investigation, but it was a piece that no enemy could have faked.
In February 1943, with a thin line of communication now open, General MacArthur appointed Fertig as commanding officer of the 10th Military District on Mindanao.
It was official recognition, and it was a huge victory.
But it came with a catch.
MacArthur did not allow any American in the Philippines to be promoted to general rank in the field.
As a result, Fertig reduced himself in rank to colonel on paper.
Yet, he continued wearing the stars the Filipino metalsmith had made for him.
The paperwork said colonel, the men in the jungle still saw a general.
It was a delicate compromise, and it would not be the last one.
MacArthur’s headquarters had accepted that Fertig existed.
Now it had to decide what to do with him.
And on March 5th, 1943, off the southwestern coast of Mindanao, a United States Navy submarine rose to the surface.
The submarine was the Tambor.
She had left Fremantle, Australia, on February 18th, 1943, with a special assignment.
On March 5, she surfaced near a place called Labangan on Pagadian Bay and put a small party ashore.
The cargo was modest.
The Navy’s own records describe about two tons of supplies including 50,000 rounds of 30 caliber ammunition, 20,000 rounds of 45 caliber pistol ammunition, and 10,000 dollars in cash.
It was not enough to fight a war, but it was a sign that the outside world was beginning to take him seriously.
The two men in charge of the party were not there only to deliver supplies.
They were there to judge Fertig.
The first was Lieutenant Commander Charles Parsons of Navy Intelligence.
Before the war, Parsons had been a businessman in Manila, and among his many interests, he had served as the legal representative of Panama in the Philippines.
When the Japanese took Manila, he was careful to speak only Spanish and convinced them that he was a citizen of Panama.
The Japanese sent him and his family away by ship, supposedly back to Panama.
Several diplomats in Manila knew his true nationality and never exposed the masquerade.
It was a bluff worthy of a novel and it worked.
Parsons eventually found his way back into American intelligence and he would become one of the most important links between MacArthur’s headquarters and the Philippine resistance.
The second was Captain Charles Smith of Army Intelligence.
Smith was a man with a story of his own.
On December 4th, 1942, he had escaped from the Philippines with two other Americans and two Filipinos by sailing a small boat all the way to Australia.
A voyage that may have been the longest open boat journey since the days of Captain Bligh.
He had known Fertig before the war.
Their orders were clear.
They were to find out whether Fertig was truly leading a resistance movement.
And if so, whether it was worth risking men, ships, and supplies to support him.
But they also carried bad news.
MacArthur’s headquarters was willing to provide radios and other equipment.
But the guerrillas were to use them for a single purpose.
Passing information about Japanese ships and troop movements to Australia.
They were ordered not to launch offensive operations against the Japanese.
To Fertig, that order was a serious problem.
He agreed that intelligence mattered.
But he also knew what was happening to the people around him.
The Japanese were committing atrocities against Filipino civilians.
And every village that suffered sent angry young men into the hills.
Fertig believed that the only way to hold a guerrilla force together was to let it strike back when it had a chance of winning.
Giving the Filipinos an outlet for their anger.
If he told his men to stop killing Japanese soldiers, they would simply follow other leaders.
And those leaders might not cooperate with MacArthur at all.
It was a hard argument to make to men who had spent months worrying about whether he was a fraud.
And it was not a point of view that MacArthur’s intelligence chief shared.
General Willoughby believed that giving rifles and ammunition to guerrillas was a waste of resources.
If a regular American army had been defeated by the Japanese in the Philippines, he reasoned, no irregular force could do better.
In his view, the guerrillas existed to provide intelligence.
And perhaps, if armed in time, to fight as regular troops under American officers once the invasion came.
So, the disagreement went beyond tactics.
It was a quarrel over what Fertig’s army was for.
Parsons and Smith spent time with Fertig and saw his organization for themselves.
What they found was an unusual and effective force.
It was real, it was growing, and it was far more useful than anyone in Australia had expected.
Their reports to MacArthur were favorable, though the full reward would not come unt- for months.
Fertig had earned a hearing in Australia, but a hearing was not the same as being equipped.
Supplies were still scarce, and the submarines that had begun to arrive could carry only a small amount each trip.
So, Fertig’s men did what engineers and farmers do when there is nothing to buy.
They made things.
Fertig used his own engineering skills and the skills of the Americans and Filipinos around him to create supplies from scratch.
The stories that survive are almost unbelievable.
Tuba, a drink made from the sap of coconut palms, was turned into alcohol to fuel vehicles that once ran on gasoline.
Batteries were recharged by soaking them in tuba.
A telegraph system was built from soda bottles and fence wire.
Curtain rods were cut into pieces and shaped to make ammunition for 30-caliber rifles.
Steel was shaved from automobile springs and curled into new recoil springs for weapons that had worn out.
Fishermen towed Japanese naval mines to shore, so their explosive filling, a compound called amatol, could be extracted and turned into gunpowder.
Soap was made from coconut oil and wood ashes and then traded for sugar, which was turned into more alcohol for fuel.
A word of caution is in order.
Many of these details come from the book by John Keats, which was based on Fertig’s own papers.
Some historians treat parts of that book carefully because it was partly fictionalized and does not always give sources.
But the spirit of what it describes is supported by other accounts and it fits the kind of man Fertig was.
He saw problems as engineering challenges and he did not accept the word impossible easily.
His most creative solution may have been money.
Mindanao was running short of regular Philippine currency and the Japanese were pushing their own occupation money, which the Filipinos came to call Mickey Mouse money.
Fertig’s organization set up a body called the Mindanao Emergency Currency Board, and the board began issuing paper notes called Treasury Emergency Currency Certificates.
These notes were crude.
They were printed in English and in a local language using wooden printing blocks.
And the machinery that made them had to keep moving to avoid capture.
It became known as the hit-and-run mint because it never stayed anywhere for long.
The notes were stamped with a promise.
They stated that the Commonwealth government of the Philippines would redeem them at full face value after the emergency was over.
And that they would not be devalued or discriminated against.
That promise was the entire foundation of the system.
A piece of paper has no value on its own.
It is worth what people believe it is worth.
The notes circulated widely across Mindanao’s unoccupied areas, helping to keep trade moving and giving civilians and fighters alike a small reason to believe that the old government had not disappeared.
In other words, Fertig was not only building an army.
He was building a country.
With its own officials, its own economy, and its own rules.
And all of it rested on trust.
Trust that MacArthur would return.
Trust that the promises printed on the notes would be kept.
Trust that a colonel wearing a general’s stars would not abandon the people who had followed him into the mountains.
That trust was about to be tested in the worst possible way.
In the late spring of 1943, the Japanese stopped ignoring the guerrillas of Mindanao.
For months, the Japanese had been unable to give Mindanao the attention it needed.
Their best combat troops were fighting elsewhere, and the army was also dealing with resistance movements in other parts of the Philippines.
In those early months, Fertig’s forces were often able to repel attempts to re-take territory the guerrillas held.
Fertig even raided Japanese posts to capture the supplies his men could not get any other way.
But in the late spring of 1943, the Japanese began operations on a large scale.
Columns pushed into areas the guerrillas controlled, and Fertig’s forces had to retreat.
They gave up land.
They gave up camps.
They gave up pieces of the government they had worked so hard to build.
A conventional commander would have called that a disaster.
Fertig did not.
He had hoped for something like it, and he had a name for what happened next.
He called it the pillow effect.
The idea was simple, and it came straight from an engineer’s way of thinking.
Press your fist into a pillow, and it gives way.
Pull your fist back, and the pillow returns to its original shape.
Fertig’s plan was to give the Japanese no hard surface to strike.
When a strong Japanese column marched into an area, the guerrillas did not stand and fight a battle they would lose.
They dissolved.
Companies broke up into small groups and melted into the countryside, and the Japanese were left holding empty ground.
The effect on the Japanese was just what Fertig hoped for.
Because they could not find a large force to destroy, they began breaking their own units into smaller and smaller groups, down to squads, to track down the scattered guerrillas.
And that was exactly the mistake he had wanted them to make.
Without any orders from above, first two or three guerrillas, then 10 or more, then platoons, then whole companies came together again and struck back at the small Japanese units that had strayed far from their bases.
According to Keats, the result was hundreds of small firefights with heavy Japanese casualties.
The Japanese responded by pulling their men together into battalion-sized units.
But units that large need towns to feed and supply them.
So the pattern settled into place.
The Japanese, using perhaps 15 to 18,000 troops on Mindanao for this purpose, held the large towns along the coast.
The guerrillas held most of the rest of the island, about 95% of it by one commonly repeated estimate.
In some places, local Japanese commanders even arranged quiet truces.
The guerrillas agreed not to attack Japanese troops, and the Japanese agreed to stay out of their areas.
It would be easy to tell this part of the story as a clean triumph.
It was not one.
Every guerrilla attack carried a price, and the price was often paid by civilians.
When the guerrillas struck, the Japanese frequently struck back at the nearest village.
Ferteg knew this.
He issued orders that his men should avoid actions that would bring reprisals down on innocent people.
But the Japanese were often so brutal toward local populations that reprisals happened anyway.
That was the grim arithmetic of occupation.
Ferteg could not prevent it.
He could only try to make the sacrifice mean something.
In August 1943, with the pillow effect holding, the recognition Ferteg had wanted finally arrived.
MacArthur promoted Ferteg to the full rank of colonel, an official rank at last, though still not the general’s stars he wore on his collar.
He also awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor.
On August 23, Ferteg received a message congratulating him on his service to his country and to the Filipino people.
President Manuel Quezon of the Philippine Commonwealth, then living in exile, sent his own congratulations on the promotion.
MacArthur’s staff did not always approve of Ferteg.
One member of his staff, Lieutenant Colonel Courtney Whitney, who handled Filipino civil affairs, advised against approving Ferteg’s promotions of other officers.
But MacArthur eventually approved all of them.
Recognition was welcome.
But what would really help him make the sacrifice mean something was supplies.
And in the second half of 1943, those supplies began to arrive in a very different form.
The early submarines had carried only small cargoes.
The Tambor had landed about two tons.
Many of the boats that followed could bring in only a few tons at a time because a submarine is a warship, not a freighter, and every crate has to be squeezed in among torpedoes, fuel, and crew.
Then the Navy sent a very different kind of boat.
The Narwhal was one of the largest submarines in the American fleet, and her size meant she could carry a staggering amount for a vessel of her type.
She could deliver about 100 tons of supplies in a single trip, many times the load of the smaller boats.
The Narwhal reached Mindanao in November 1943.
According to one account, when her crew came ashore, they were greeted by a uniformed band playing Stars and Stripes Forever.
After months of hiding in the jungle, the guerrillas wanted the American sailors to know exactly who they were dealing with.
The Navy’s records show how big the change was.
On November 15th, 1943, the Narwhal landed 46 tons of supplies at Nasipit on Butuan Bay and took away 32 people.
Less than 3 weeks later, on December 10th, she landed 90 tons at nearby Cabadbaran.
The Navy had also set up a special supply unit in October 1943 to handle the growing demand because the work had grown beyond what submarines on regular war patrols could manage.
The Narwhal and boats like her did more than carry weapons and ammunition in.
They carried people out.
They evacuated guerrillas who needed urgent medical care and American civilians, mostly women and children, who had been hiding in the islands and were suffering from malnutrition and disease.
They also took away American prisoners of war who had escaped from Japanese camps and reached Fertig’s territory.
Across the entire Philippines, the Navy’s submarine runs delivered a total of 1,325 tons of supplies between January 1943 and the start of 1945.
They landed 331 people and evacuated 472.
Of the 41 resupply missions, 16 were directed to Mindanao.
In the grand scheme of the Pacific War, those were small numbers.
For the people who received them, they were the difference between a movement that could survive and one that could grow.
The relationship between Fertig and the rest of the American effort was never entirely smooth and it would be unfair to leave that out.
The friction ran through the whole period and some of it began before the Narwhal ever arrived.
Some of the escaped prisoners who found their way to Mindanao in 1943 did not leave with kind feelings.
Major Steven Melnick and Navy Lieutenant Commander McCoy both described their first meeting with Fertig as strange, evasive, and almost hostile.
They asked for transportation by submarine to Australia and Fertig eventually arranged it.
McCoy later concluded that Fertig was not used to dealing with equals.
Fertig could also be hard on the Americans who served under him.
Many of the younger men had disobeyed orders to surrender or had escaped from prison camps and they were fiercely independent.
Some resented taking orders from a civilian engineer turned soldier even though he had lived in the Philippines longer than they had.
Some wanted nothing more than to be sent back to Australia.
Fertig told them they would be returned when a way was found but he was not always understanding.
A few were removed from duty when it became clear they lacked the leadership skills he needed.
Many of those men reached MacArthur’s headquarters with unflattering reports about him.
The tensions ran inside his own command as well.
Luis Morgan, the Filipino policeman who had helped persuade Fertig to take the lead in ’42, became his chief of staff.
But over time Morgan became disenchanted.
On August 10th, 1943, he resigned claiming that Fertig was undermining him and other Filipinos by showing favoritism to Americans.
Fertig sent him to Australia by submarine that September.
It was a sad ending to a partnership that had helped create the movement in the first place.
Edward McClish and Clyde Childress the two officers Fertig had put in charge of the northeast also clashed with him.
Fertig considered them disloyal and ineffective.
They had their own opinion of him.
Both asked for transfers to regular American units once the United States invasion of the Philippines began.
And at their request, Fertig relieved Childress on December 29th, 1944 and MacLeish on January 23rd, 1945.
More than half a century later, after reading Fertig’s papers at the MacArthur Memorial, Childress wrote that the Keats book on Fertig was a fictional autobiography.
Those criticisms deserve a place in the story.
They do not erase what Fertig built.
But they remind us that he was a man with strengths and faults.
And that his guerrilla army was a human enterprise with all the tension that comes with that.
With the supplies arriving, the guerrillas built something even more surprising than a currency.
They built a navy.
Fertig’s men took small merchant vessels and armed them.
The boats were used to protect convoys of small craft that carried supplies brought in by the submarines and to attack Japanese shipping, mostly small coastal vessels and patrol boats.
The weapons came from wherever they could be found.
Machine guns were salvaged from downed American bombers.
Cannons were made by hand.
Mortars were mounted on decks.
Later, the navy supplied some 20-mm cannon.
One vessel was even armored with the large circular saw blades used in forestry work taken from abandoned plantations.
Some of the stories that came out of this little fleet are astonishing.
One small ship fought a running battle with a large Japanese steamer.
Another, a sailing ship armed with a 20 mm cannon, fought off Japanese aircraft and actually shot one down, a Japanese medium bomber.
It was perhaps the only sailing ship in history to shoot down an airplane.
The crew pulled a new Japanese bombsight from the wreckage and it was sent out to Australia on the next submarine.
The skippers were a colorful lot.
One of the most daring was Waldo Nevelling, a German civilian and soldier of fortune, technically an enemy alien whom Fertig commissioned into the United States Army.
Another was an Australian named Jock McLaren, who had escaped from a Japanese prison camp at Sandakan on Borneo.
McLaren commanded a 26-ft whaleboat known as the bastard.
He would sail into Japanese-held ports in broad daylight, shoot up supply ships and piers with machine guns and a mortar, and then turn around and run.
Fertig also thought ahead to the day the Americans would return.
He had air strips built and disguised in the countryside.
One was as long as 7,000 ft and took more than a year to complete.
Once finished, each strip was covered with topsoil and planted with crops.
All it needed was a bulldozer to scrape off the dirt and it would be ready for aircraft.
Some of these strips were later used by Marine Corps squadrons to give close air support to the invasion.
Then there was information which may have been the guerrillas’ most valuable contribution of all.
MacArthur’s headquarters had asked for coast watchers and Fertig delivered.
His organization provided information on Japanese ship movements that according to one army study contributed to American victories in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.
The reports were remarkably precise.
Guerrillas crept up to Japanese artillery and made pencil rubbings of the serial numbers on the guns to prove that their information was accurate.
Aerial reconnaissance flights were often canceled before attacks so that the Americans would not warn the Japanese by flying over their targets.
At one point, the Japanese issued an official statement claiming that the Americans had perfected a new aerial bomb that was attracted by concentrations of ammunition and fuel.
There was no such bomb.
There was only accurate information about the location of Japanese installations passed along by Filipino guerrillas.
The guerrillas also saved American lives.
As American planes began raiding the Philippines, pilots shot down over Mindanao often found Filipino guerrillas waiting for them before they hit the ground.
Pilots who landed in the water were picked up by small fast boats.
Within a day or two, many of them were telling their debriefing officers how grateful they were.
Fertig eventually ordered that pilots could not go on patrol with the guerrillas since a few enthusiastic flyers had been doing exactly that and he wanted them in the air.
General Robert Eichelberger, who commanded the American 8th Army, was generally skeptical of guerrilla intelligence across the Philippines.
But about Mindanao, he was willing to say that the guerrillas there were the most effective and best organized in the islands.
By the autumn of 1944, the machine was built.
The question now was whether it would hold when the Americans finally came.
On October 20th, 1944, American troops waded ashore on the island of Leyte, just north of Mindanao.
When General Douglas MacArthur had left the Philippines in March 1942, he had promised the Filipino people that he would return.
Now he had kept that promise and the long road back to liberation had begun.
For Wendell Fertig, the landing changed everything.
For 2 years, his army had lived on the edge of extinction, surviving on small deliveries, homemade supplies, and the loyalty of civilians.
Now the war was coming to him.
By late 1944, estimates of his strength ranged from about 25,000 to 40,000 men with most sources settling near 36,000.
About 16,500 of them were armed.
That made his command roughly the size of an army corps built from nothing by a man who had once been a civil engineer in the mining country of Colorado.
He commanded it from a jungle headquarters and he was running a civilian government at the same time.
Against him stood some 50,000 Japanese soldiers on Mindanao, most of them garrisoned troops in towns and cities.
But after Leyte, the Japanese army began pulling men out of Mindanao to defend other parts of the Philippines.
The soldiers who remained were stretched thin and cut off from help.
Then the Japanese made one last attempt to settle the matter.
Early in 1945, they launched another campaign against the guerrillas and it nearly worked.
Their earlier offensives had failed because they could not find the guerrillas.
This time, they went after something else.
They tried to cut off the guerrillas’ supplies.
By strangling the flow of food, ammunition, and equipment, the Japanese came close to destroying the movement not by killing its men but by starving it.
The campaign ended abruptly when the Americans arrived.
In January and February 1945, in preparation for the return of regular American forces, Fertig’s guerrillas seized the airstrip at Dipolog in northern Zamboanga and held it even though Japanese forces surrounded them.
It was a bold move.
The guerrillas had also been destroying supplies, blowing up bridges, and making even small Japanese truck convoys and patrols nearly impossible for for months before the American landings began.
On March 10th, 1945, the American Eighth Army began its campaign to retake Mindanao with a landing at Zamboanga at the western tip of the island.
It was not easy.
The next day, American troops met strong resistance when they attacked Japanese positions in the hills above the coastal plain.
Marine aircraft soon moved into Zamboanga to support the fight.
The next landings were planned for the western coast in the region of Malabang and Parang on the shores of Illana Bay.
And that was where Fertig’s years of preparation paid off in a way that few other guerrilla leaders in the Philippines could match.
Beginning on April 3, Fertig’s guerrillas attacked the Japanese garrison at Malabang.
Marine pilots flying from Dipolog gave them air support.
Working from targeting information that the guerrillas provided.
By April 11th, the last Japanese troops had fled toward Parang and the guerrillas controlled the entire Malabang region.
On April 13th, Fertig sent a message to Eighth Army headquarters.
The American forces, he reported, could land unopposed at both Malabang and Parang.
After Marine reconnaissance planes confirmed his report, Army planners changed their plans.
Only one battalion of the 24th Infantry Division would go ashore at Malabang.
The rest of the division would land directly at Parang, much closer to the main highway that led to Davao, the biggest city in the south.
Fertig had also told the Americans that no bombardment would be necessary.
The Navy fired anyway.
On the morning of April 17th, 1945, naval guns began pounding the shoreline a little after 7:30.
Then the landing craft ran in toward the beach at Parang.
And there was nobody there to shoot at them.
The landing was unopposed.
The Japanese had not seen the Malabang and Parang region as a likely place for an American landing, and even the guerrillas operations there in March and early April had not worried them enough to change their minds.
The official Army history of the campaign ranked it a poor third among the places the Japanese expected to be attacked.
By the time the first soldiers of the 24th Division stepped onto the sand, the Japanese garrisons had been destroyed or driven away.
The guerrillas had given the Army a free beachhead.
Anyone who knew the history of the Pacific War understood how much that mattered.
A landing is among the most dangerous operations in war because soldiers crowded into small boats cannot shoot back until they reach the shore.
At Tarawa in November, 1943, and at Iwo Jima in February 1945, American troops paid a terrible price for beaches defended by a well-prepared enemy.
At Parang, the beach was empty.
It is one of the clearest examples in the entire war of what a resistance movement can do for an invading army.
The Americans did not have to fight their way off the beach.
They did not have to guess where the enemy was waiting.
They only had to come ashore and start moving, and move they did.
The 24th division turned north and raced across Mindanao toward Davao.
Its soldiers covered about 140 miles in roughly 15 days.
On May 3rd, 1945, the first American combat troops entered Davao City against less opposition than anyone had expected.
The Japanese had spent their last energy destroying as much of the city as they could before they withdrew into the interior.
It would be easy to end the story there with the guerrillas and the Americans marching together to a quick victory.
But that is not what happened, and an honest account must say so.
The fighting on Mindanao was far from over.
The Japanese retreated into the mountains, and they could still put up a ferocious defense.
In a clash from May 6th to May 12th, which became known as the Battle of Colgans Woods, lead elements of the 31st Infantry Division ran into a strong Japanese position and paid for every yard.
The battle for Davao and the country around it went on until June 10th.
A chronicler for the 24th division later wrote that the operations after the fall of Davao were the hardest, bitterest, and most exhausting of all the divisions island campaigns.
By the end of May, American troops had linked up with a regiment of the 40th division that had been sent to secure a foothold on the northern coast.
Together with the guerrillas, they pushed the Japanese deeper into Mindanao’s rugged interior.
And the campaign did not officially end until August 15th, 1945, when the Japan announced its surrender.
On that day, soldiers of the 31st division’s 167th infantry were still fighting on a jungle path called the Kibawe-Talomo Trail.
Throughout those months, Fertig’s guerrillas fought alongside the regular American forces.
They guided units through country that few maps showed.
They provided intelligence on Japanese positions.
And they fought in some places with enough strength and skill to hold ground on their own.
When the campaign was over, they disbanded.
On September 15th, 1945, the 6th infantry division of the Philippine Army was reactivated, and veterans of Fertig’s command filled its ranks at every level of command.
An army that had begun as a few frightened men in the mountains had become the foundation of a new one.
The war was over.
Now came the question of what it had all meant.
When the guns finally went silent, historians and soldiers began adding up what the guerrillas of the Philippines had accomplished.
Some of the numbers are solid.
Others are estimates.
And a few come from sources that should be handled with care.
But taken together, they paint a striking picture.
After the war, an examination of Japanese records showed that Japan’s high command had worked out how many soldiers it would need to guard its rear areas against guerrillas once the American invasion of the Philippines began.
The answer was 24 battalions.
Seven Japanese divisions were slated to defend against the invasion itself, which meant that for every three men at the front, the Japanese needed another man behind the lines watching for guerrillas.
The Japanese concluded, in the plain language of military planners, that it was impossible to fight the American enemy and suppress the guerrillas at the same time.
Across the whole Philippines, one estimate holds that the guerrillas tied down a Japanese force of about 288,000 troops.
On Mindanao alone, somewhere between 43,000 and 60,000 soldiers were committed, depending on the time period.
That was a large force that could not be used anywhere else.
John Keats, whose book remains the best known account of Fertig’s war, credited the Mindanao guerrillas with killing about 7,000 Japanese soldiers.
That number comes from a source that some historians question.
So, it is best treated as an estimate rather than a fact.
But there is no real doubt about the larger point.
The guerrillas bled the Japanese on Mindanao.
They kept the island’s resources from being fully used for the Japanese war effort.
And they gave the American army a head start on an island where the enemy held the coast, but the countryside was largely in friendly hands.
The honors came, though not always quickly and not always in the form Fertig might have wished.
He received the Distinguished Service Cross in 1943, as we have seen.
In May 1946, the army awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal for his command of the Mindanao guerrillas.
The citation said that while constantly engaged with vastly superior enemy forces, he had given the Filipino people faith in their eventual deliverance, instilled in them the will to resist, and united them in the cause of freedom.
It concluded that his courage, determination, and leadership had made an inestimable contribution to the liberation of the Philippine Islands.
He also received the Legion of Merit twice, the Bronze Star, and the Air Medal.
But there was one honor he never received.
The army never made him a general.
His rank in the official records remained colonel to the end.
Some scholars have asked why, when he commanded a force the size of an army corps, men who never saw combat were promoted to brigadier general as the army grew.
Author William Manchester suggested that MacArthur and his staff may have had their own reasons for minimizing the role of the guerrillas because MacArthur wanted to be remembered as the liberator of the Philippines.
Whatever the reason, the stars that a Filipino metalsmith had made in the jungle in 1942 were the only general stars Wendell Fertig ever wore.
After the war, he returned to civilian life and his engineering career, but he kept his reserve commission.
For 4 years, he served as the officer in charge of the Reserve Officers Training Corps Detachment at the Colorado School of Mines, the same school where he had studied mining more than two decades earlier.
He was now helping prepare young engineers to be officers.
Then came Korea, and the army remembered what the man from Colorado had done in the jungle.
During the Korean War, Fertig was called back to active duty at the Pentagon, where he served with the army’s psychological warfare staff.
From July 1951 to June 1952, he was the Special Forces Plans Officer in the Office of the Army’s Chief of Psychological Warfare.
From June 1952 to August 1953, he served as the Deputy Chief.
It was during these years that he helped establish the Army’s Psychological Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
That center would later become the John F.
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, the home of Army Special Forces.
Fertig was one of three men whose wartime experience helped shape the doctrine of unconventional warfare that became the cornerstone of the special forces.
Today, he is considered one of the founding fathers of the Army’s special forces.
The idea that a small group of trained soldiers could go behind enemy lines, organize local people, and turn them into a fighting force is not a modern invention.
Fertig had done it with little training, no official authority at first, and almost no outside help in the early months for 3 years in the Philippines.
From 1954 to 1955, he served in South Korea as deputy director of the joint staff for a provisional military assistance advisory group.
In 1956, he left active duty for good.
He returned to Colorado, and for the rest of his life, he ran a successful mining company.
Yet, the Philippines did not forget him.
In June 1958, Fertig and his wife Mary traveled to Mindanao on a business trip.
As the inter-island freighter was pulling into the harbor at Cagayan de Oro, the ship’s captain walked over to him.
The captain said that he thought some friends were waiting for him.
Small boats full of shouting men surrounded the ship.
On the waterfront, stood thousands of people who had come from every corner of Mindanao.
There were crowds of women in the white uniforms of the Women’s Auxiliary Service.
There were men wearing the caps of the Philippine Veterans Legion, and Moros wearing red fezzes.
Men were shouting, and women were singing.
Above the pier hung a huge banner that welcomed an indomitable patriot who had lessened human suffering on Mindanao.
It is one of the most moving scenes in the whole story.
The man who had been told by the highest levels of the American army that he was not a general had come back to an island that thought of him as something much greater.
They had called him Tat Father in the war.
13 years after the Japanese surrender, they still did.
In September 1963, the television game show To Tell the Truth brought on a man named Wendell Fertig along with two impostors and asked a panel of celebrities to guess which of the three was the real guerrilla general.
It was an odd footnote for a man who had spent the war being underestimated.
But it showed that his story had reached the American public.
Wendell Fertig died on March 24th, 1975 at Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.
He was 74 years old.
Not everything about Fertig’s story is settled.
Some of its best-known details come from a single book which several veterans who served under him have criticized.
Several people who served under him found him hard to work with.
Some of his Filipino and American officers felt he played favorites.
Some left his command angry.
Historians still argue about how fully the civil government he created actually functioned.
But the main outline is not in doubt.
A reserve officer who refused to surrender in May 1942 had organized a guerrilla army on a hostile island.
He had built a radio that reached California.
And by early 1943, he had established contact with MacArthur’s headquarters.
He had won official recognition, and he had received supplies by submarine.
He had held most of the island’s countryside against a much larger enemy until the day the Americans came ashore.
And when the Americans did come, he gave them a beach.
One of the best summaries of Fertig’s achievement came from the writer John Keats, who argued that the real triumph was not military.
It was that Fertig gave the people of Mindanao a growing reason to believe in themselves.
In his command, competence was rewarded with responsibility, no matter who you were.
And that idea, Keats said, built a nation in North America and built another on Mindanao.
So, how does a man with no army build one? Wendell Fertig did it the way an engineer builds a bridge across a river that everyone says cannot be crossed.
He studied the ground first.
He found the keystone, which in his case was authority, and he put it in place, even if he had to forge it himself.
Then he added one piece at a time.
A radio built from old receivers and a movie projector.
Money printed from wooden blocks.
Fuel from coconut palms.
A boat armored with saw blades.
A government of people who would not give up.
And in the end, the structure held because it was built on something stronger than steel.
It was built on the belief of thousands of ordinary people that the war was not over, that America would return, and that a stubborn man from La Junta, Colorado, would still be standing there when it did.
That is the story of Wendell Fertig, the mining engineer who would not surrender.
