On the 23rd of October 1943, the submarine Narwhal sailed from Cape Morton in Queensland carrying 92 tons of ammunition and stores, ten passengers, and orders from General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters. She was one of the two largest submarines the United States Navy owned, and her destination was the Philippines—an archipelago still firmly in Japanese hands, where no American army had yet set foot. The question of what MacArthur was sending by submarine, month after month, in the long wait before he could send troops, has its fullest answer in a memorandum filed among the Navy’s wartime papers at the National Archives. It is a mission-by-mission list of every submarine run to the Filipino guerrillas, recording the boat, the tonnage, the passengers, and whatever went wrong.
Its entries begin in January 1943 and run past the morning of October 20, 1944, when American troops finally went ashore at Leyte. Everything before that morning was a delivery made with no army behind it. The first entry is dated 21 months before the landing. The submarine Gudgeon sailed from Australia with orders to put a radio party onto the south coast of Mindanao, then carry medicine and ammunition to Panay.
The plan changed at sea on January 14, 1943, when she landed six men and about a ton of equipment on Negros instead. No ammunition and no medicine went ashore. The party belonged to Captain Jesus Villamor, a Filipino fighter pilot MacArthur had already decorated, and its job was to find out who was really fighting in the islands and how supplies could reach them. By the end of January, Villamor had a working radio link to Australia.
Even this first date is not settled—the Army’s history of special operations places his landing in December 1942, while MacArthur’s own reports have him leaving Australia on December 27. The Navy memorandum says January 14. Nineteen months out, the submarine Tambor left Fremantle with orders that survive in the same memo: deliver $10,000, about two tons of supplies, and a party under Lieutenant Commander Charles Parsons to a point at Labongan in Pagadian Bay on Mindanao. She did it on March 5, 1943.
MacArthur’s reports add that the party carried cipher material so the guerrillas could talk to Australia in a code the Japanese could not break. Parsons had run a stevedoring company in Manila before the war. When the Japanese took the city, he stayed out of the internment camp on the strength of his post as Panama’s honorary consul, and he got his family out on a diplomatic exchange ship in 1942. On Mindanao, he met Wendell Fertig, an American mining engineer who had refused to surrender and had become the accepted guerrilla commander on the island.
Parsons carried MacArthur’s terms with him: organize, report, and stay out of open fights until the time comes. Afterward, he wrote to President Quezon in exile in Washington that the effect on the guerrillas had been miraculous. After that, the loads grew, one boat at a time and about two tons at a time. The Army’s history lists what went into the crates: carbines, ammunition, radios, and medical supplies, and then a second category it calls propaganda items—chocolate, cigarettes, chewing gum, pencils, and newspapers, each one printed with MacArthur’s pledge from 1942: I shall return.
On a later run, according to an account built from Parsons’ own reports, the cargo included millions in counterfeit Japanese occupation pesos for the guerrillas to buy supplies with and to unsettle the economy the occupiers were running. Some of what went ashore was never on any order. The memo notes that submarine crews gave away their own gear, food, cigarettes, and toilet articles to the people waiting on the beaches. The pledge on the cigarette packets had been argued over before any of it was made.
Washington had asked MacArthur to change the “I” to a “we,” and he never did. The reason sits with a Filipino newspaperman on Corregidor, and it comes up again before the story ends. The memo keeps a running total, though it cannot agree with itself. Its opening pages say 18 submarines made 39 missions and took out 466 people; the summary table a page later says 19 submarines and 41 missions, with the passenger count running a few higher in both directions.
Both versions agree on the cargo: 1,325 tons delivered, with less than 50 tons going astray, and none of it believed to have reached the enemy. Eleven months out, the Navy stopped treating the Philippine runs as errands for boats already on patrol. In October 1943, it set up a special supply unit of four submarines—Narwhal, Nautilus, Seawolf, and Stingray—with delivery as their main duty. Narwhal’s first cargo run was the one from the opening; Parsons was aboard again.
Near the islands, she fired four torpedoes at a Japanese convoy. All four missed. The convoy’s warships came after her with depth charges, and when she surfaced to get away and ran at full speed into narrow water that looked like a dead end, one of her officers asked Parsons whether he knew the mountains ahead. He did.
Keep going straight, he told them. On the night of November 13, she put half her cargo and a party of radio men ashore in Paloan Bay on Masbate. Then she went to Butuan Bay on the north coast of Mindanao, where a launch came out flying the agreed security signal and Fertig himself came aboard. Heading into Nasipit, she ran aground in the channel but backed off in less than an hour.
When Narwhal tied up at the town dock, a Filipino band on the pier was playing “Anchors Aweigh. ” Forty-six tons came off that night. The memo dates this November 14; the published patrol report says the 15th. Thirty-two people went south with her—eight of them women, two of them children, and one of them a baby.
Radio transmitters came off that dock along with the ammunition, and they raise a question the paperwork can partly answer: did anything those radios sent back ever put an American ship where it needed to be? By mid-December 1943, MacArthur’s staff could draw a map of guerrilla radio stations covering most of the southern Philippines. By the time of the landing, the Army history counts 134 stations set up by the Philippine section of MacArthur’s intelligence staff; the Seventh Fleet memo counts 120. Some were coast watchers on the straits.
Others watched for aircraft. Some were weather posts sending readings from every major island, morning, afternoon, and night. The Navy manned two control stations of its own on Mindanao, whose whole job was to sift the guerrilla traffic and pass anything useful to the fleet. The memo put the number of organized guerrillas at 65,000 south of the 12th parallel by landing day, and headquarters had spent a year and a half telling them to watch rather than fight.
The Army’s historians later judged the guerrilla reports, exaggerated as many of them were, the single most important source of intelligence American forces had in the islands. MacArthur answered the radio question himself in a statement issued after the Leyte landing. He said the submarines had carried in “driblets at first” arms, ammunition, and medical supplies, and that four boats had ended up committed to nothing else. He claimed the guerrilla network had helped sink enemy shipping of enormous tonnage and that the warning of an enemy fleet gathering west of the Philippines during the Marianas operation had come through that same net.
Some of it the Navy’s own paperwork supports. The Seventh Fleet memo says its control stations passed guerrilla items of operational importance straight to its ships. In May 1944, the submarine Crevalle picked up a packet of captured papers from the south coast of Negros, papers the memo rates of the highest value. But the Marianas claim is shakier.
The Navy’s own accounts credit its submarines with reporting Admiral Ozawa’s carriers leaving Tawi Tawi, and no Navy account names a guerrilla report as the first warning. In 1944, the entries get longer. In March, Narwhal was unloading at Tawi Tawi when Japanese warships came into view. She pushed the rest of her deck cargo over the side and left, finding two passengers aboard afterward whom nobody had authorized.
In August, Stingray was depth-charged off northern Luzon and got her men ashore with only 60 percent of their supplies before two dozen armed Japanese coastal boats came past the landing spot. Twenty-five days out, Nautilus unloaded cargo and drums of gasoline on the coast of Cebu and then ran onto a shoal. The memo says the crew lightened the ship, burned the secret papers, and made ready to blow her up and take to the boats. On the last try, she came off the next day.
Four days later, she was at Panay taking on 47 passengers, more than half of them children. The unit’s remaining boat had been doing well. In August, the task force commander in Australia had sent her a signal the memo copies out word for word: “Well done, Seawolf, for snappy work on first two jobs. ” She sailed from Brisbane on September 21 with 17 army men and cargo for Samar.
At 7:56 on the morning of October 3, she and Narwhal traded radar recognition signals at sea. Later that day, a Japanese submarine sank the destroyer escort Shelton in the same waters, and every friendly submarine nearby was told to report its position. Seawolf did not answer either call. The destroyer escort Richard M.
Rowell, working with an aircraft, attacked a contact in that area, and her report says the boat below sent long dashes and dots that bore no resemblance to the existing recognition signals. The Navy’s Book of Losses, published in 1949, says only that friendly fire was possible, while Rowell’s own ship history says she sank the boat by mistake. About a hundred men were aboard, the 17 soldiers among them. Narwhal sailed with her next load eight days later.
As for the printed pledge, the answer comes from William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur. On Corregidor, the chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, had told the Filipino journalist Carlos Romulo that the slogan for the islands ought to be “We shall return. ” Romulo said no. His point was that America had let the Filipinos down and would not be trusted—but Filipinos still trusted MacArthur himself, so the promise had to carry his name.
Who later asked for the change is disputed. Manchester says the Office of War Information suggested it; the Roosevelt Library says the White House asked; a historian writing for the anniversary names the president and the Joint Chiefs. All of them agree that MacArthur said no. A promise from a government that had just lost the islands would have been one more piece of paper.
A promise from one man was something people could hold him to. Eight days before the landing, on October 12, 1944, a Navy flying boat set down in Leyte Gulf about 40 miles south of Dulag, and Parsons and an Army intelligence officer paddled ashore in a rubber raft. His Navy Cross citation dates the action at October 13 and says he went through the Japanese lines alone at night to reach the guerrillas. He stayed with the Leyte commander, Colonel Roberto Kangleon, telling people to pull back from the shore without saying why.
Parsons came through the war, returned to his stevedoring business, and the Philippines made him a citizen. His mother-in-law, who had stayed behind in Manila, had been arrested and killed by the occupation’s military police in 1944. In an oral history he gave in 1981, he said, “I think I’ve been lucky. ” He died in Manila in May 1988 during his afternoon nap, aged 86 or 88 depending on which birth year is right.
Fertig stayed on Mindanao until the Americans came in 1945, then went home to Colorado to run a mining company and died there in 1975. Villamor returned to Australia in October 1943, served on, and died in 1971. The Philippine Air Force’s main base in Manila now carries his name. Frank Lada, the first captain on those Narwhal runs, took the new submarine Lagarto to the Gulf of Siam, where she was lost with all hands.
In May 1945, Narwhal’s own last run came under a third captain. Two days after sailing, a Navy patrol plane came in to attack her, recognized her as American at the last moment, signaled good luck, and flew off, having very nearly supplied the bad luck itself. She landed ten tons at Tawi Tawi on May 17. Then one night out on the 19th, she put 50 tons of cargo and a small party ashore on the southwest coast of Negros—21 months after Gudgeon’s six men had landed on the same island with no ammunition at all.
The next morning was October 20, 1944. The first troops went ashore near Dulag at about 10 o’clock, and MacArthur came in with a later wave. As the landing craft went in, Kangleon’s guerrillas went to work on the bridges inland, blowing them to keep enemy reinforcements away from the beaches, and Parsons was with them. Narwhal was already well to the south, heading for Brisbane.
The memo lists who she was carrying: 20 women and children, a mess boy for Nautilus, and five prospective mess boys. The delivery runs were finished. The army they had been supplying had finally arrived.
