An American Guerrilla

THEY FOUGHT ALONE by John Keats. 425 pages. Lippincott. $6.95.

Rice farmers by day, they fought by night. Their bullets were chunks of brass curtain rod, which the women had sharpened by whetstone; the cartridges were loaded with a mixture of dynamite, amatol, and the flash powder from Chinese firecrackers. For every two men, there might be one obsolete rifle and 15 rounds of ammunition; with luck, a platoon would also sport several carbines or an automatic weapon. Yet these ragtag guerrilla forces, scattered across 36,000 square miles of mountain and malarial jungle, were able to tie down a large number of enemy units, kill 7,000 Japanese troops, and secure intelligence of the highest value. And here is one modern guerrilla insurrection that was led by Americans--for this is the story of Colonel Wendell Fertig and his men in the struggle for Mindanao during the occupation of the Philippines by Japanese troops.

Fertig and his men were rank amateurs at the start. After Corregidor fell, U.S. units left on Mindanao were ordered to surrender. A few officers and men refused to obey that order. By twos and threes they slipped into the jungle, as did several American civilians and some Filipino soldiers and constabulary. At the same time the more warlike local tribes, including the Moslem Moros, whose mountains the Americans had more or less pacified, dug their weapons out of the thatch and resumed their ancestral feuding, bushwhacking Japanese as a useful sideline. But there was only hostility among the rival groups until Wendell Fertig (a mining engineer in civilian life, and the ranking American officer still loose) succeeded in imposing on them the all-important unity of command.

Under Fertig's inventive leadership, the guerrillas governed entire provinces, printed their own money, ran their trucks on alcohol distilled from coconut beer, even maintained a miniature but useful navy. Most important was probably the coastal watch that one day spotted the Imperial Fleet making its sortie toward the Mariana Islands, intelligence that was radioed to Australia and Pearl Harbor, helped win the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Fertig's forces, never more than 40,000 men, forced the enemy to commit more than 150,000 troops in its final effort to clean up Mindanao just before MacArthur's return.

John Keats, a critic of suburbia and the auto business (The Crack in the Picture Window; The Insolent Chariots), might seem an improbable chronicler of this episode in wartime bravery. For many readers, his superslick style and self-confessed "literary license" ("Dona Carmen looked up at Fertig, the candlelight glinting in her dark hair") is about as fitting as chrome brightwork on a Jeep. Nonetheless, working with official records and with Fertig himself, who lives today in Colorado, Author Keats has produced a compelling and rewarding tale of endurance and character.

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