thedrifter
12-05-08, 08:01 AM
Two heroes reunited after 64 years
By Coleman Warner
INQUIRER.net
Posted date: December 05, 2008
This moving story of how the US Marine war hero James Carrington and Jesus Gonzales, the Filipino who saved his life by aiding his escape from Bilibid Prison in 1944, found each other again in their twilight years is a fitting way to remember Pearl Harbor on Dec.8, 67th years ago.
The Filipino visitor, Jesus Gonzalez, began to weep and almost buckled.
When the two men met 65 years ago, James Carrington was a tall, strapping American soldier, and he was leaping off the perimeter wall of the notorious Bilibid Prison in the heart of Manila, bleeding and desperate.
"Please give me a ride!" the stranger, a Marine from New Orleans, blurted toward a cluster of Filipinos in a passing horse cart. Jesus Gonzalez, 11, was among them. The year was 1944.
"Please give me a ride!" said Carrington.
Doing so would place all at risk of arrest and execution by Japanese soldiers occupying the Philippines as World War II raged. But the cart riders, led by Jesus' brother Moises, 20, almost instantly agreed to take Carrington in, hiding the prison escapee under hay on the two-wheeled vehicle's floor.
With a Japanese checkpoint just around the corner, the younger Gonzalez was terrified. He burst into tears.
Now 76, accompanied by his daughter, Gonzalez was overcome with emotion again this week as he arrived at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center, in of Destrehan, just upriver from the city of New Orleans. The retired engineer carried aging photographs and potent memories from the war episode.
"I was crying then, I was scared, " he said. "Now I cry for joy."
A local war hero
Carrington, a Warren Easton High student who left high school to join the Marines in 1939, is a local icon from the steadily disappearing 1940s war generation. At the National World War II Museum, a glass case contains the faded pictures and items he saved from the Philippines: a pistol, a mortar, military rank tabs from dead Japanese soldiers.
As one of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers who fought a tenacious, months-long battle to hold Corregidor, a tiny but strategically vital island, Carrington's experiences have been well chronicled. The battle ended in surrender, imprisonment and torture.
"They hung me up by my thumbs for laughing, " the veteran said in 1992. "They tried to make you beg for mercy, but I didn't. I just put my mind in another world. I just thought about, well, you're a Marine, you're supposed to be tough."
Carrington's later exploits as a guerrilla fighter in the Philippines after his prison escape are captured vividly in at least one book.
But references in historical accounts to the daring role sympathetic Filipinos played in saving the Marine corporal's life when he broke out of Bilibid have been fleeting.
Carrington knows their contributions well. Without the Gonzalez brothers and other strangers who had paid for rides in the horse cart that day, there would have been no guerrilla campaign for him, no shot at marriage and raising a family in Harahan.
"If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here, " he said Monday.
High price for cooperation
At some of the prison camps run by Japanese during the war, escape attempts were rare because of a "blood-brother" edict: If someone escaped, everyone else in a designated group of 10 soldiers faced execution. But that rule wasn't applied at the Bilibid Prison, believed to be escape-proof, surrounded by high-voltage wires, tall fences and Japanese forces.
On the evening of April 14, 1944, Carrington and a fellow Marine, Sgt. Ray Parker, made their break for freedom after a sentry passed, slithering under an electric line that posed the first obstacle. Carrington went first and made it under, but Parker's clothing caught on the line and a power jolt knocked him unconscious.
Carrington kept moving, scaling four walls before landing at the edge of the street, not far from a headquarters building for the Japanese military.
The horse cart, called a karetela by Filipinos, was steps away, and he ran alongside it, pleading for help from the startled riders.
On the cart was Moises Gonzalez, a clandestine member of the Filipino resistance movement. He wanted to help the American, but fearing for his passengers' safety, did so only after they agreed.
At each of two checkpoints, a Japanese soldier jabbed the hay with a bayonet, checking for a stowaway. One of the jabs scraped Carrington's leg, he recalls, but he remained undiscovered.
Jesus couldn't stop sobbing.
"The Japanese soldier was asking me why I was crying, and I cried all the more louder, " Gonzalez said. "I couldn't tell him what was happening."
In hiding
Back at the Gonzalez home, Moises hid Carrington in an area cordoned off from the rest of the family of nine children. Moises served as leader and breadwinner for the family in the absence of his father, who had died years earlier.
Only he and Jesus, for the time being, knew about the soldier's presence. Carrington stayed there about three days, until Moises could arrange a new hiding place at a tuberculosis asylum. Carrington left a cigarette lighter, with his name etched into its side, with the Gonzalez family.
When he was moved, he wore a disguise as he was spirited through streets controlled by Japanese soldiers. Moises Gonzalez later told Jesus that he had borrowed a priest's robe and put it on the escapee.
During his days in hiding in Manila, Carrington said, Filipinos provided him with a .45-caliber pistol, a relic from the Spanish-American War.
The Marine spent two more weeks in hiding, gathering strength, before a band of guerrillas was able to move him out of the city, walking 40 kilometers with him through the countryside before he made contact with American and Filipino fighters operating out of a hidden mountain camp. He would soon become a loyal associate of Army Maj. Edward Ramsey, commander of shadowy guerrilla forces that created havoc for Japanese occupiers, attacking patrols and radioing intelligence to the American military.
Ellie
By Coleman Warner
INQUIRER.net
Posted date: December 05, 2008
This moving story of how the US Marine war hero James Carrington and Jesus Gonzales, the Filipino who saved his life by aiding his escape from Bilibid Prison in 1944, found each other again in their twilight years is a fitting way to remember Pearl Harbor on Dec.8, 67th years ago.
The Filipino visitor, Jesus Gonzalez, began to weep and almost buckled.
When the two men met 65 years ago, James Carrington was a tall, strapping American soldier, and he was leaping off the perimeter wall of the notorious Bilibid Prison in the heart of Manila, bleeding and desperate.
"Please give me a ride!" the stranger, a Marine from New Orleans, blurted toward a cluster of Filipinos in a passing horse cart. Jesus Gonzalez, 11, was among them. The year was 1944.
"Please give me a ride!" said Carrington.
Doing so would place all at risk of arrest and execution by Japanese soldiers occupying the Philippines as World War II raged. But the cart riders, led by Jesus' brother Moises, 20, almost instantly agreed to take Carrington in, hiding the prison escapee under hay on the two-wheeled vehicle's floor.
With a Japanese checkpoint just around the corner, the younger Gonzalez was terrified. He burst into tears.
Now 76, accompanied by his daughter, Gonzalez was overcome with emotion again this week as he arrived at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center, in of Destrehan, just upriver from the city of New Orleans. The retired engineer carried aging photographs and potent memories from the war episode.
"I was crying then, I was scared, " he said. "Now I cry for joy."
A local war hero
Carrington, a Warren Easton High student who left high school to join the Marines in 1939, is a local icon from the steadily disappearing 1940s war generation. At the National World War II Museum, a glass case contains the faded pictures and items he saved from the Philippines: a pistol, a mortar, military rank tabs from dead Japanese soldiers.
As one of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers who fought a tenacious, months-long battle to hold Corregidor, a tiny but strategically vital island, Carrington's experiences have been well chronicled. The battle ended in surrender, imprisonment and torture.
"They hung me up by my thumbs for laughing, " the veteran said in 1992. "They tried to make you beg for mercy, but I didn't. I just put my mind in another world. I just thought about, well, you're a Marine, you're supposed to be tough."
Carrington's later exploits as a guerrilla fighter in the Philippines after his prison escape are captured vividly in at least one book.
But references in historical accounts to the daring role sympathetic Filipinos played in saving the Marine corporal's life when he broke out of Bilibid have been fleeting.
Carrington knows their contributions well. Without the Gonzalez brothers and other strangers who had paid for rides in the horse cart that day, there would have been no guerrilla campaign for him, no shot at marriage and raising a family in Harahan.
"If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here, " he said Monday.
High price for cooperation
At some of the prison camps run by Japanese during the war, escape attempts were rare because of a "blood-brother" edict: If someone escaped, everyone else in a designated group of 10 soldiers faced execution. But that rule wasn't applied at the Bilibid Prison, believed to be escape-proof, surrounded by high-voltage wires, tall fences and Japanese forces.
On the evening of April 14, 1944, Carrington and a fellow Marine, Sgt. Ray Parker, made their break for freedom after a sentry passed, slithering under an electric line that posed the first obstacle. Carrington went first and made it under, but Parker's clothing caught on the line and a power jolt knocked him unconscious.
Carrington kept moving, scaling four walls before landing at the edge of the street, not far from a headquarters building for the Japanese military.
The horse cart, called a karetela by Filipinos, was steps away, and he ran alongside it, pleading for help from the startled riders.
On the cart was Moises Gonzalez, a clandestine member of the Filipino resistance movement. He wanted to help the American, but fearing for his passengers' safety, did so only after they agreed.
At each of two checkpoints, a Japanese soldier jabbed the hay with a bayonet, checking for a stowaway. One of the jabs scraped Carrington's leg, he recalls, but he remained undiscovered.
Jesus couldn't stop sobbing.
"The Japanese soldier was asking me why I was crying, and I cried all the more louder, " Gonzalez said. "I couldn't tell him what was happening."
In hiding
Back at the Gonzalez home, Moises hid Carrington in an area cordoned off from the rest of the family of nine children. Moises served as leader and breadwinner for the family in the absence of his father, who had died years earlier.
Only he and Jesus, for the time being, knew about the soldier's presence. Carrington stayed there about three days, until Moises could arrange a new hiding place at a tuberculosis asylum. Carrington left a cigarette lighter, with his name etched into its side, with the Gonzalez family.
When he was moved, he wore a disguise as he was spirited through streets controlled by Japanese soldiers. Moises Gonzalez later told Jesus that he had borrowed a priest's robe and put it on the escapee.
During his days in hiding in Manila, Carrington said, Filipinos provided him with a .45-caliber pistol, a relic from the Spanish-American War.
The Marine spent two more weeks in hiding, gathering strength, before a band of guerrillas was able to move him out of the city, walking 40 kilometers with him through the countryside before he made contact with American and Filipino fighters operating out of a hidden mountain camp. He would soon become a loyal associate of Army Maj. Edward Ramsey, commander of shadowy guerrilla forces that created havoc for Japanese occupiers, attacking patrols and radioing intelligence to the American military.
Ellie