Our forces now held all the airfields on the island and we had plenty of planes. A great force of bombers raided Ormoc, but the enemy in the hills was almost indestructible from the air. What got them was artillery. The little spotter planes — our mighty cavalry air force, the “PC70’s” (Piper Cub, 70 miles per hour) — were in the air almost every hour of daylight, picking up bullet-holes from Jap ground machine guns and rifle fire every day, dodging the Zeros from Negros island by flying at treetop height and maneuvering so close to the ground they got muddy. The flight officers and lieutenants who flew them, without parachutes, armed only with a pistol or a carbine, really rated respect from both the foot soldiers and the Air Corps. Every time they saw more than two Nips close together they called for a 105 to drop a shell there. It paid off, I guess.
As it was a few guys from the 12th lived through the war. If they had had to go after all the Nips by hand more would have died. By the end of the Leyte battles at least two of the troops (companies) of the 12th had less than 30 men left. I do not mean 30 of the original men, I mean 30 men, period. Not many replacements went into action in the cavalry after the first week of the invasion, and as the weeks passed men fell out not only due to battle casualties but also to diseases, other injuries and such strength-reducing causes.
The camp was isolated in a way because of the terrain. A lot of useful items could not get up and a lot of wounded could not get down. From the combat zone about two to three miles away to our small hospital facilities was a three-hour trip for an able-bodied man, unburdened. A stretcher required not less than 10 men to handle it and a day for the trip. It had to be raised and lowered and handed along the steep and rough spots over the trails and only emergency cases were brought out. Most of the wounded stayed up where they were until they could move out under their own power and with the help of a couple of Filipinos, or soldiers. Very few dead were carried back. I remember seeing only one blanket-wrapped bundle coming down, tied to a pole.
One man came down on a stretcher for an emergency operation. A Mexican-American, he was one of the division’s famous fighters and had been shot in the stomach. The division surgeon came up that night riding a cat and operated, but the boy died four days later. A lot of men suffered and died because they did not or could not receive prompt attention.
[...]
We gathered up what loot we had acquired — bolos traded from the Filipinos, a Jap rifle or two, a couple of knee mortars and bayonets. The Jap stuff came from souvenirs sent back from the line troops for safekeeping. We would keep it and take care of it, and when an owner was reported killed, we would take the item over ourselves rather than destroy it. Nothing could be sent home, so all anyone could do with it was play with it personally or maybe find a sailor or marine to trade it to, if he ever got to the beach. The naval forces could get things home we could not.
[...]
Japanese planes made fewer and fewer daylight flights, and those only in fast planes for observation only. One day I saw two single motor fighters make monkeys out of a pair of P-38’s. The Japs would flip around in a tight turn and the Lockheeds would swing out two miles. Neither set could harm the other and finally the Nips decoyed the P-38’s into a diving turn, cut back past them and streaked for their home base somewhere northwest. By the time our planes got straightened out, the Japs were long gone. This was late in December, 1944, over Tunga, in the northwestern section of Leyte.