THE GHOST OF BATAAN:

Captain Arthur Wermuth and the 185 Men Who Refused to Retreat**

0430, January 9th, 1942—The Abucay Line, Bataan Peninsula

Captain Arthur Wermuth crouched in a shallow foxhole, watching the treeline only 400 yards away flicker with movement. Somewhere in the jungle mist, Japanese troops were massing for another assault. His company, once 150 strong, was down to 37 exhausted men. Twelve days of uninterrupted combat had turned the Bataan Peninsula into a charnel house, and the young captain—just 26—had begun measuring time not by hours but by how many soldiers he had left standing.

The Japanese 14th Army had landed 65,000 seasoned troops on Luzon. They moved with mechanical precision—scouts infiltrating by night, artillery at dawn, infantry by mid-morning. American and Filipino forces, short on weapons, supply, and experience, fell back again and again toward the narrow peninsula.

But Wermuth was not wired for retreat.

A graduate of Northwestern Military Academy, a former conservation corps trainer who had learned to live off forest and swamp, he had arrived in the Philippines barely a year earlier to help train the 57th Infantry Regiment (Philippine Scouts). The Scouts were among the finest fighting men in the archipelago—skilled, loyal, and battle-hardened—but they were outmatched in firepower, air support, and ammunition.

Every day, Japanese forces killed three defenders for every Japanese casualty. At that rate, Bataan could not last the month.

Wermuth decided that if holding the line was impossible, changing the rules of the fight was the only option.

One Man Against an Army

On January 5th, after watching another dozen Scouts die in ambushes and mortar fire, Wermuth made the most radical decision of the campaign.

Defense was suicide.
Retreat was capitulation.

The only path left was offense—not in companies, not in platoons, but one man at a time, slipping into the forest like a hunter.

He gathered 185 Filipino volunteers. They had no formal name, but the troops began calling them what they were:

Wermuth’s “Suicide Snipers.”

He taught them what he had learned in the woods of Michigan—how to move silently, how to follow and lose a trail, how to strike without warning and vanish again. Their goal was not to stop the Japanese army.

Their goal was to make it bleed.

On January 6th, Wermuth tested his theory. Alone, armed only with a Thompson, pistols, grenades, and instinct, he infiltrated three miles through enemy lines to an outpost believed overrun. He found twelve Filipino Scouts still alive, holding out without ammunition or food. He stayed only long enough to gather intelligence—Japanese positions, strength, artillery observers—then crawled back the way he came.

It worked.
One man could go where a battalion could not.

But reconnaissance wasn’t enough. Wermuth wanted to hit back.

Kalaguiman: The Operation No One Should Have Survived

On January 9th, headquarters issued a desperate order:
the village of Kalaguiman and its bridge must be destroyed. The village housed Japanese officers, supply depots, and artillery spotters. The bridge was the key to rapid advance.

The mission required a suicide squad.
None volunteered.

Wermuth did.

He loaded 63 pounds of gasoline and TNT onto his back, memorized artillery timing, and entered the jungle alone. Filipino gunners waited for a signal: once smoke appeared, they would wait exactly five minutes—no more, no less—before bombardment began.

At 0652, surrounded by 400 sleeping Japanese troops, Wermuth struck a match and turned the village into a torch.

The Japanese poured into the streets screaming, and artillery shells began falling with mathematical precision.

Now he had to run 340 yards through chaos.

Machine gun fire swept the street. Shrapnel tore through walls. At 20 yards from the bridge, a bullet punched through his thigh. He fell, rose, and kept going. He planted the charges beneath rifle fire, lit the fuse, and crawled away just as the bridge disintegrated in a rising plume of smoke and splintered beams.

Kalaguiman was gone.
The Japanese advance stalled for six full days.

Wermuth’s bloody crawl back into the jungle was as dangerous as the mission itself. Patrols closed in. Dogs tracked the blood trail. When a three-man Japanese squad found him, he killed two with a .45 and forced the third to flee. A Filipino scout patrol discovered him hours later, unconscious, near death.

A doctor later told him the bullet had missed his femoral artery by half an inch.

Becoming the Ghost

On January 15th, barely able to stand, Wermuth walked out of the field hospital—against orders—and went back to work.

The Suicide Snipers now operated in small four-man teams, guided by Wermuth’s maps and reconnaissance. They targeted radio men, machine-gun crews, artillery observers—key points in the Japanese war machine.

By early February, they had killed over 90 Japanese soldiers at the cost of only seven Scouts.

Japanese units became jumpy.
They increased sentries.
They whispered of an American who stalked the forests.

The name spread quickly:

“Bataan’s One-Man Army.”
And among the enemy:
“The Ghost of Bataan.”

American newspapers eventually caught up.
Time Magazine published a story on February 23rd calling him a “one-man blitz”, crediting him with 116 kills. Japanese officers studied the article, horrified to learn the ghost was real.

They issued orders:

“Capture Captain Wermuth alive if possible. Kill if necessary.”

The bounty on his head doubled.

The Battle for Mount Pucat

Wermuth’s greatest ordeal came in March, when Japanese observers on Mount Pucat began directing devastating artillery fire that killed 31 Scouts in a week.

The position had to be taken.

Twelve volunteers joined him. They climbed the steepest, least defended slope. The attack on March 21st was a knife fight in a jungle fortress. Grenades, bayonets, splintered bamboo, close-quarters combat with no retreat paths.

After 36 hours, 65 Japanese defenders lay dead.
Eight Scouts had fallen.
Four others were dying.

A bullet tore through Wermuth’s chest—entering near the clavicle, exiting below the ribs, puncturing a lung.

The descent took five hours under sniper fire. No morphine was left in Bataan. Surgeons boiled their tools between procedures and stitched wounds without anesthesia.

He endured it all.

And eight days later, he walked out of the hospital again.

Collapse and Captivity

On April 9th, Bataan surrendered.
Starvation, disease, and ammunition exhaustion ended the last organized resistance.

Wermuth tried to reach a field hospital but collapsed while crossing a ravine. Japanese soldiers found him. This time, they recognized the beard, the moustache, the scars.

They did not kill him.

They wanted the Ghost of Bataan alive.

He survived interrogations, beatings, untreated infections, and the loss of comrades during the Bataan Death March. Too wounded to march, he was kept separately, moved between prison camps, starved, beaten, and forced into labor.

He lived through the sinking of hell ships, air raids, tropical disease, and torture that killed thousands around him.

When Soviet troops liberated Mukden camp in August 1945, Captain Arthur Wermuth weighed 105 pounds. He had been believed dead for months.

A Hero’s Burden

When he returned home, he refused the title “one-man army.”
He insisted the Filipino Scouts—his partners, his brothers—deserved the real credit.

He received the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, four Purple Hearts, and multiple campaign medals. Reporters asked about the haunted months in the jungle, about the 185 Suicide Snipers.

He answered politely, but sparingly.

No medal could replace what had been lost.
No citation could erase what he had seen.

Many who knew him said the war never truly released him.

Legacy of the Ghost

Captain Arthur Wermuth remains one of the most extraordinary figures of the Pacific War—
a man who, with 185 volunteers, turned defense into psychological warfare,
who infiltrated alone into enemy strongholds,
who destroyed a battalion’s worth of troops in a single morning,
and who kept fighting long after his body began to fail.

His story is not only about heroism, but about the Filipino Scouts who followed him into impossible missions.
About endurance under hopeless circumstances.
About the human will to resist long after resistance seems useless.

Bataan fell.
But the Ghost of Bataan, and the men beside him, ensured the world would remember how fiercely it was defended.