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| Leyte guerilla Leader Nieves Fernandez demonstrating her skills with the bolo to an American soldier |
Among the rank and file, the surrender of their top officials caused a lot of frustration and disappointment. In Tingib, Pastrana, the soldiers encamped in the school building argued heatedly among themselves. This erupted in a near riot and a shooting match between the protagonists. The school building was partly damaged and some soldiers suffered minor wounds. The majority chose not to follow their leaders.
Ormoc had a story different from Tacloban. Here there were no officials to turn over the government to the Japanese. At the local military Camp Downes, no soldiers surrendered. Their commanding officer Lt. Blas Miranda and his troops had earlier decided to leave the camp, taking all the firearms and ammunitions with them to establish his new underground headquarters in “Campo Langit,” the code name of his camp in Brgy. Mahilaum, a mountain village east of the city.
At the time of Wainwright’s surrender, Miranda, who was also a civil engineer, was working on an airfield project together with an American mining engineer Chester Peters. The airfield was a project of the US Army contracted to a certain Mr. Gonzalves. When they heard of the surrender, they hauled all the arms, equipment and supplies from Camp Downes with the trucks used in the construction and transferred these to their new camp in the mountains. Peters, who had an intimate knowledge of explosives being a mining engineer, accumulated a vast supply of blasting powder intended for the airfield.
Miranda, who had cultivated friendship with Ormoc’s elite, used their trucks to haul equipment and supplies from various sources. According to Emiliano Teves, then a student at the Baybay National Agricultural School (the present Leyte State University), Miranda got the school’s generating set for his mountain headquarters. Lathes, welding equipment, drill press and several other machines from private sources were likewise hauled to the camp. Fuel came from the alcohol distillery of the Ormoc Sugar Central in Ipil. In these he was assisted by unsurrendered soldiers like Guillermo Cabacoy, Flaviano Cortes, Rustico Geneston, Margarito Moniesa and others. Miranda and his group would later form the Western Leyte Guerilla Warfare Force.[i]
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| Iphbone 7 plus |
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