If they told him, for example, that they had five hundred troops just waiting for the arms and food that would permit them to engage the Japanese, he took them at their word, even if it looked to him as if the five-hundred-man force consisted of a couple of officers and maybe sixty Philippine Scouts.
He had added up all the Philippine forces he was told were anxious to place themselves under his command and come up with a figure just in excess of six thousand officers and men.
His “requisitions” for arms and food and gold coins had been based on this strength figure.
MacArthur, according to the radio message from San Francisco, had been made aware of this troop strength.
Fertig wondered how Douglas MacArthur was going to react to learning that, after he had reported his forces had fought to the last man and the last bullet, there were six thousand troops under a brigadier general still fighting on Mindanao.
When Second Lieutenant (formerly Private) Robert Ball of USFIP came to report that MacArthur (or at least KAZ, his radio station) was finally being heard from, Brigadier General Fertig, a Thompson submachine gun beside him, was drinking a cup of tea on the shaded veranda of his combined headquarters and quarters. The tea was Lipton’s. It had been grown in the Far East, sent to the United States, blended, put in tea bags, and then sent back to the Far East. How it had passed into the hands of the Moro tribal chief who had given it to Fertig, Fertig didn’t know.
All he knew was that Lipton was putting out a better product than he had previously suspected. The tea bag that had produced the tea he was now drinking was on its fourth brewing cycle. (Brew, dry, brew again, dry, etcetera.) He knew this because he was a methodical man, and each time he drenched the tea bag in boiling water, he tore one of the corners of the tea bag-tag off. The tea-bag-tag drying on the bamboo railing beside him was corner less
He felt that it behooved him to conceal from his subordinate staff the excitement he felt now that MacArthur was finally being heard from.
“Thank you. Ball,” he said, with as much savoir-faire as he could muster.
“How long do you think it will take Captain Buchanan to decrypt the message?”
“About thirty minutes, Sir,” Ball said.
“Fine,” Fertig said.
“I expect to be here in half an hour, when Captain Buchanan is finished.”
Forty-five minutes later, Captain Horace Buchanan handed Brigadier General Fertig the two sheets of paper on which he had neatly lettered (Signal Section, HQ, USFIP, did not possess a typewriter) the decrypted message. From the look on Buchanan’s face–disappointment and embarrassment–Fertig knew that there was little good news in the radio message.
“Thank you,” Fertig said, and read the message:
KAZ FOR MPS
ONE LT COL WENDELL W. FERTIG CORPS OF ENGINEERS US ARMY
RESERVE DETAILED INFANTRY
TWO COLONEL MARCA RIO PER ALTA PHILIPPINE SCOUTS DESIGNATED
MILITARY GUERRILLA CHIEF OF TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED ENEMY
TERRITORY
THREE THE ISSUANCE OF MILITARY SCRIP IS EXPRESSLY
FORBIDDEN REPEAT EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN
FOUR COMMAND OF GUERRILLA FORCES WILL BE EXECUTED ONLY BY
OFFICERS PRESENTLY IN DIRECT COMMAND OP SAME
FIVE THIS HEADQUARTERS WILL ENTERTAIN REQUISITIONS FOR
SMALL IN SIZE URGENTLY NEEDED EQUIPMENT ONLY
BY COMMAND OF GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC COMMAND
WILLOUGHBY BRIGADIER GENERAL USA
Fertig looked up and met Buchanan’s eyes.
“I took out the ‘stops’ and stuff, General,” Buchanan said.
There had been a faint hesitation, Fertig noticed, before Buchanan had called him “General.”
It wasn’t only a little bad news, it was all bad news.
As far as MacArthur was concerned, he was a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Corps of Engineers, not a brigadier general in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines.
Colonel Marcario Peralta was “military guerrilla chief of temporarily occupied enemy territory.” Fertig did know Peralta. Peralta had been a successful lawyer in Manila before the war. The last Fertig had heard, just before the surrender, Peralta had been a major. Now he was a colonel, which meant that Fertig was supposed to be subordinate to him.
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