Chemist,
This was the Philippines, in WW2, under Japanese occupation. You might say the environment was a bit... austere. And dangerous. And difficult. Our government could barely even REACH the Philippines during a lot of the war, and could only smuggle in some few supplies by submarine to help the guerrillas. Times were kinda tough in that area at the time. Ever hear of the Bataan Death March, for example?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March
Yes, they fought a war with those things. That was all many of them could GET as far as firearms were concerned. Even a single shot homemade shotgun is better than a blade or a stick, after all. But those shotguns made it easier to kill an enemy soldier, take his rifle and ammunition, and pass the paliuntod along to a new recruit in the guerrilla ranks who could then go harvest his own rifle from the Japanese. They STILL make them in the Philippines in fact. They have been using them there since well before WW2 came along. They are crude but they are cheap and they will shoot. In fact, lucky folks can shoot them more than once without losing any fingers or facial features.
The WW2 history of the Philippines was little short of amazing. There were a good many Americans stranded there who either never got word to surrender- or decided not to, and fought on. Thousands of brave Filipinos joined the guerrilla ranks and fought the Japanese for the duration of the war. No supplies came in for most of them, no support, and little encouragement. They had to fight a make- do war. But they did it. It's easy to be cavalier about WW2 in the here and now. But halfway across the world in the early 1940s when the contest was yet to be decided and victory was not assured, it was an awesomely brave thing to do to join the ranks of the guerrillas. A LOT of people died doing it.
The world well remembers MacArthur's famous "I shall return" speech after he arrived in Australia after departing his dougout (not a spelling error, either) at Corregidor on a PT boat headed for Mindanao, where he boarded a B-17 for the rest of the trip. Yes, the president had ordered him to leave.
A young US Army officer by the name of Russell Volckmann was not terribly impressed with Macarthur's famous remark. He was one of the officers who chose not to follow the orders to surrender at Bataan, and went off into the jungle to take his chances with the guerrillas. When Volckmann wrote his own book about his wartime experiences as a guerrilla leader on the island of Luzon, he titled it _We Remained_ as a jibe at MacArthur's famous remark.
Volckmann went on to serve on the staff of General Robert A. McClure in the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW) at Ft. Bragg, NC in January of 1951. Volckmann was tasked with writing guerrilla warfare doctrine and the first two field manuals for a tiny organization (one officer, one warrant officer and seven enlisted men) that would be stood up in June 1952 under the command of a former WW2 Office of Strategic Services Jedburgh Team leader named COL Aaron Bank.
That organization was (and is still) known as the 10th Special Forces Group, US Army Special Forces. The seeds that grew up to be Special Forces were in large part planted in the guerrilla resistance to the Japanese on the islands of the Philippines in WW2. A number of other American guerrillas with roots in that war led stellar but often little known careers in the world of US Army special operations as well.
http://www.psywarrior.com/mcclure.html
So, please show a little respect- OK? 8^)
lpl/nc (used to teach this stuff to SF guys who didn't know their history either)
There were pump action models back then...
Anyway, thanks again guys