Some might have seen leaving the hill to the Americans as retreating, but not Ikeda. He planned to fight another day.
While dying for the Emperor was honorable, Ikeda saw no honor in dying like a cowering rat, deep underground, without taking at least some of the enemy with him. Deciding that his men needed a reminder of that fact, he called for a halt. Looking one by one into the faces of his small band, he said to them, “Each of you may die only after you have killed at least ten of the enemy. Then you may die with honor. Is that clear?”
“Hai!” they responded as if with one voice.
Morosawa offered a grim smile. Clearly he agreed with Ikeda’s strategy.
Ikeda gave a nod of satisfaction and moved on.
He had no real plan of action or any destination. He knew only that the fighting in the vicinity was far from over, and they would lend a hand where they could.
They soon found that they were not alone in their intentions. Ikeda and his men joined a company of stubborn Japanese defenders who were making their way toward Palo, located at the base of the hill, eager for any chance to strike back at the Americans. The commanding officer accepted them readily, glad to have more men.
Until now, Palo had largely been left out of the defensive equation as having little strategic importance, but that changed as the Japanese became aware that American troops were using the bridge in Palo to carry supplies from the beach across the Bangon River to the interior of Leyte.
Japanese defenders had wired the bridge to be blown up, but the contingent tasked with destroying the bridge had been killed in a firefight with lead elements of the US invasion before they were able to carry out their mission. Palo had become a vital target for the Japanese, if only to deny the Americans use of the bridge.
“Hurry up!” said the Japanese officer in command of the unit that Ikeda and his men had joined, urging them toward the outskirts of town. “We must be in position by nightfall.”
“Hai!” Ikeda replied as he and the other troops began pouring along the road toward town.
The Japanese troops were not the only ones using the road. Throngs of refugees were fleeing the town, which had been a hapless victim of the earlier naval bombardment. With their homes destroyed, and fearful of more shelling, groups of civilians were heading into what they hoped was the relative safety of the countryside. They would return once the shelling stopped for good. They were sure that the Japanese had fled the area, but they were soon proved wrong.
“Out of the way!” Ikeda shouted, shoving a Filipino family off the road. The father kept his gaze downcast meekly, even as the soldiers pushed his wife and children into the roadside brush. He did not dare to raise a hand or utter a word of complaint.
There was a good reason for that. The few men who had defended their families from the Japanese now lay dead at the roadside. Many of the refugees were now widows or even orphans.
From the look in Ikeda’s eyes, it was clear that any protest on the father’s part would have brought instant death to the villager and his family. If the father recognized Ikeda from his frequent visits to search for guerrillas in Palo, the man gave no indication of it.
Watching what was taking place, the man’s young son seethed with anger. He hated to see his proud father forced to act like a coward, although he understood why. He followed his father’s example and kept his mouth shut, hoping that the Japanese troops would pass over them like a rogue wave and be gone.
If only he had been older, he thought, he would have joined the guerrillas who were fighting for their freedom from the Japanese. He saw his younger sister, scratched and bleeding, pick herself up from a patch of thorns alongside the road. For a moment the boy glared defiantly at Ikeda, but lucky for him, the Japanese sniper did not notice.
Although it was daylight and US aircraft kept a close eye on any enemy ground forces, the fact that the Japanese had mixed with the refugees gave them a certain measure of protection. The US planes flying overhead would not fire on the Filipinos, even when they knew a few Japanese must also be using the road. The refugees provided the Japanese troops with perfect cover as they advanced toward the town.
So far they had not encountered any American troops on the road. The Japanese took it as a good sign that the Americans had not pushed this deep into Leyte. The fight for Hill 522 and other strongholds had bogged them down, keeping American forces close to the beach. Some of the Japanese soldiers took it as a sign that they might still be able to push the Americans back into the sea.
Ikeda smiled as a sudden thought came to him. “Stop!” he shouted at the Filipino family moving in the other direction. “What is your hurry? Where are you going?”
The father of the family could only stare mutely because he did not understand a word of Japanese.
“You are coming with us,” Ikeda said. He turned to his men. “Do not allow any more refugees to escape. Turn them around. They are going back to Palo with us.”
It didn’t matter that the fleeing townsfolk could not understand Ikeda. The gesturing by the Japanese, along with the bayonets and rifle muzzles pointed at them, needed no translation. The soldiers forced the refugees to head back in the direction of Palo, prodding them at gunpoint.
If the townspeople had no idea what Ikeda and the other Japanese were planning, they would soon find out.
For the unfortunate people of Palo, the long-awaited liberation from Japanese occupation had turned into a nightmare of war and destruction, starting with the shelling by the US fleet. The shells that rained down on their town had been intended for Hill 522 and other Japanese defensive positions, but some had fallen short and struck the town, wrecking houses and businesses. Some of the townspeople had been killed. The Filipinos had been caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The town itself had a long history that had mostly been peaceful until the arrival of the Japanese. Even the Spanish-American War had resulted in a quiet transition to the American era that had lasted for four decades.
In other places, especially closer to Manila, the initial American occupation after the 1898 Treaty of Paris had not been peaceful. Some Filipino leaders fought for independence. More than four thousand US troops had died during the conflict against Filipino freedom fighters just after the turn of the century. The vast majority of those US casualties had been from tropical diseases rather than combat.
However, the insurrection had lost steam by 1906, in large part because of military defeats suffered by the insurrectionists and the fact that the US kept a light touch in governing their new territory. The Philippines had autonomy and self-rule — as long as they stayed friendly to the United States government. The guerrillas lost any popular support.
Long before that the Spanish had colonized the islands in the fifteen hundreds. This town had been one of the first where Spanish Jesuits had celebrated Mass in the Philippines, making it among the oldest Spanish outposts.
The years of Spanish influence gave the town architecture a vaguely European air. The buildings were modest but stately, many covered in stucco and accented with colorful wooden shutters. A few green palms or coconut trees growing along the streets added a tropical flair to the old-world charm.
The town was laid out around a central square, with the river forming the western boundary. Several businesses and residences lined the road leading to the bridge across the winding, muddy Bangon River, which flowed into San Pablo Bay.