Corregidor veteran reunited with Filipino who helped

I've been meaning to post this but been busy... very poignant story.

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World War II veteran reunited with man who aided his escape from Japanese prison



Photo by Jennifer Zdon / Times-PicayuneJesus Gonzalez, left, now 76, is reunited with James Carrington, right, at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center in Destrehan, La. Monday, November, 24, 2008 for the first time since saving his life in 1944.

The old man waited quietly in his wheelchair, an oxygen line lacing his face, a military cap atop his head. On Monday just after 11 a.m., a commotion erupted at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center's front door as a slight, somewhat younger gentleman approached.

Reunited

The 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.

Gonzalez, 11, was among them. The year was 1944.

"Please give me a ride!"

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, Gonzalez was overcome with emotion again this week as he arrived at the Destrehan nursing home, accompanied by his daughter. 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, monthslong 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 well their contributions. 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.

'Let's Google him'

The families of Jim Carrington and Jesus Gonzalez for years had heard stories from the war years, and the tale of risks taken to assist Carrington after his prison escape loomed large. But the notion of the two men actually talking and meeting again didn't take form until Gonzalez's daughter, Valerie, a music teacher and former opera singer, began playing reporter with her father, pressing for details.

Jesus Gonzalez moved to British Columbia decades ago with his wife, a wood scientist, and they raised three children.

Valerie Gonzalez, her curiosity aroused by a visit to the Philippines a decade ago, began assembling material for a book about her family. In July, she visited her parents and refined her questions for her father.

"I grew up loving this story" about a Marine, she said. "I grew up loving James Carrington, and I didn't know his name. I knew that there was an American soldier who heroically escaped and Dad helped him, and he was out there in the great beyond, " said Gonzalez, who lives in New Jersey

As her father recalled Carrington hiding in the family's home, he mentioned the cigarette lighter the soldier left -- and that jogged his memory of the soldier's full name. His daughter was stunned at the belated revelation.

"Let's Google him, " she said.

She quickly came up with a reference to a James Carrington, Marine, on a Web site for people seeking Hurricane Katrina survivors. It gave her a lead to someone who knew Carrington. That person got word to Carrington, at the nursing home where he now lives.

In less than two days, Jesus Gonzalez and his daughter got a call from Carrington. They caught up at a distance, then made plans for a visit to Destrehan.

Hurricane Gustav gave new urgency to that plan. During his evacuation to a nursing home in Alexandria, the veteran came down with pneumonia. He nearly died. When he returned to Destrehan, he tired more easily. He remains under hospice care.

Heroic, but deeply sad

In more than a year with the guerrilla forces, Carrington exacted revenge on an enemy that had brutalized or killed many Americans. He became a virtual folk hero in the Pacific theater when, as commandant of a guerrilla forces base in the Luzon mountains, he used a pair of machine guns and several riflemen to repel a large Japanese attack force that had found the base.

"I saved the headquarters, " he said matter-of-factly this week.

Still, his memories of 1944, especially of the prison escape, are steeped in sadness. He learned after his escape that the Marine who tried to join him, Parker, was tortured and executed. And Moises Gonzalez was doomed by his role in Carrington's rescue.

Moises' girlfriend at the time, furious that he would not marry her, tipped off the Japanese to what Moises had done, the Gonzalez family says. About two months after the prison escape, dozens of soldiers broke down the doors of the Gonzalez home in the middle of the night and hauled the 20-year-old away.

Storming the house, slapping around their mother, the Japanese repeatedly demanded: "Where is the boy? Where is the boy?"

They wanted Jesus.

Somehow, the furious soldiers overlooked him, huddled on the floor, covered only by a mosquito net.

The family later got a note from Moises, saying he was in jail, tasked with fixing bicycles for the Japanese. They never heard from him again.

James Carrington, hearing reports that Moises had been executed, sent guerrillas on a mission back in Manila to hunt down and kill the woman who had turned Moises in, the veteran has told his family.

It's not clear whether the mission was carried out.

"If they didn't get her, " Jesus said quietly this week, "she's probably burning in hell right now."

Jesus said he doesn't regret that he and his brother took part in the impromptu rescue so long ago. He would do it again, he said.

And in the wake of the loss of his older brother, the family breadwinner, it was a souvenir of Carrington's visit -- the cigarette lighter -- that became a key to sustaining the family after Manila's liberation.

Jesus said that his mother, using the lighter and Moises' jail letter as evidence, persuaded U.S. authorities that the family had suffered a death because it helped an American serviceman. As a result, his mother received a U.S. military pension.

Drinking it all in

Less than an hour had passed since the nursing home visit began, and James Carrington was fading. The pauses between his responses to Jesus and Valerie Gonzalez grew longer.

"Do you want some oxygen, daddy?" asked Carrington's son, Jim Carrington Jr., an oil and gas attorney living in Houston who had driven in with his wife for the unusual reunion.

As the center's staff prepared to wheel the celebrated but weary resident back to his room, Carrington reached out and touched Gonzalez.

"The Filipinos are wonderful people, " he said.

With that, Gonzalez promised he would return again and again in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, eager to draw closer before time runs out.

 

A sad follow-up story...

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Veteran dies days after reunion with Filipino man who helped save his life in WWII

by Coleman Warner, The Times-Picayune
Tuesday December 09, 2008
Posted by vmfacian December 09, 2008 07:54AM

James Carrington, 88, a highly decorated World War II veteran, had his life saved when a group young Philippines driving a horse and cart hid the escaped prisoner under hay. One of the young men, Jesus Gonzalez, now 76, was reunited with Carrington at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center on Nov. 24. Carrington died Sunday, just 11 days after the meeting.

Eleven days after his emotional reunion with a Filipino man who helped save his life during World War II, American veteran James Carrington died quietly Sunday at the Destrehan nursing home where he resided. He was 88.

One of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese after the fall of the island of Corregidor, Mr. Carrington, a Marine who grew up in New Orleans, escaped from the notorious Bilibid Prison and was given refuge by a group of Filipinos in a passing horse cart.

He later help lead guerrilla fighters based in a mountain hideout who created havoc for the Japanese military before American forces retook the Philippines.

Mr. Carrington's son, James Carrington Jr., said he believes his father rallied in recent weeks to stay alive for a Thanksgiving week visit from Jesus Gonzalez, a native of the Philippines now living in Vancouver.

"It took every bit of strength he had," the veteran's son said. "It kept him alive, in my opinion. That's all he was looking forward to."

Gonzalez, who was 11 years old at the time, was among those who hid Mr. Carrington after the Marine scaled a prison wall in April 1944. His older brother was later arrested by Japanese soldiers for his role in the episode and is believed to have been executed.

Gonzalez's daughter Valerie, a musician who lives in New Jersey, had tracked down the ailing former Marine after her father, a retired engineer, recalled a cigarette lighter left behind by Mr. Carrington that bore his name.

Mr. Carrington had visited with Jesus and Valerie Gonzalez, along with immediate members of his own family, for a few days prior to Thanksgiving Day. He died Sunday morning at the Ormond Nursing and Care Center.

"I'm very glad that we made the effort to go and see him," Jesus Gonzalez said Monday from Canada. "I didn't expect that it would be the last one with him. It was such a joyful moment with me to have met him at last after all those years. I'll see him again somewhere, somehow, up in heaven perhaps. He was a great man. He did a great service to the United States and to the Philippines."

Mr. Carrington, a former Warren Easton student, left high school to join the Marines in 1939. After the war, the man who had been dubbed the "Cajun guerrilla" made a living as an excavating contractor, and he and his wife, Joyce, raised two children in Harahan.

Mr. Carrington's survivors include his son, who lives in Houston; a daughter, Suzanne Hodge; two brothers, Leon Carrington of Hahnville and Thomas Carrington of River Ridge; and three sisters, Ella Rufin, Anna Smith of Folsom and Betty Trosclair of Terrytown.

A wake will be held Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Tharp-Sontheimer-Tharp Funeral Home, 1600 N. Causeway Blvd., with a funeral Thursday at 10 a.m. at the funeral home. Burial will follow at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Slidell. A Marine honor guard will participate in the burial ceremony.

Coleman Warner can be reached at cwarner@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3311

 

Yes it is. I posted about this back in November.

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-today/27942-wwii-vet-reunited-filipino-who-saved-him.html

 

Oh sorry, didn't see that. I did add a sad follow-up story in December.

 

Np prob. As you can tell it looks like no one noticed back then .

 

I'm reading this story again for the second time and it still gets to me. Thank you for posting this. Really sad to hear that the old gentleman passed away shortly after, but at least he was able to reunite with the youth who helped to save him. A wonderful story...much thanks!