The lot of small nations and peoples caught up in the struggles of great powers is never enviable. One has only to think of the Poles, trapped for a thousand years between Germans and Russians, and with Turks on their southern flank for five hundred of those years; or of Balkan peasants of many nationalities enmeshed for centuries in the wars between the Turks and the Holy Roman Empire. The Filipinos were similarly caught between America and Japan from 1941 to 1945.
The whole position of the Filipinos in the modern world has long been ambiguous. By geography and skin color they belong to the Orient: by religion and by four centuries of history and social experience, they belong to the Western world. The latter does not indicate merely a desire to appear “white,” as some Caucasians have assumed. The Philippines never had a well-developed indigenous civilization like those of ancient China, India, and Japan. Thus, when the islands were conquered by Spain in the sixteenth century the victors did not have to displace a deeply rooted alien culture; they had only to impose their own. Spanish civilization and religion colored the Philippines heavily for more than three centuries, and was then succeeded by American civilization for forty years preceding World War II. In 1940 Filipinos were brown-skinned Asians, but their recent ancestors had spoken Spanish, the educated among them now spoke English rather than Tagalog, and their government was modelled on that of America. They were not typical Orientals but half-westernized east Asians who occupied a major outpost of the half-Christian, half-secular Occident.
Another factor that contributed to the Philippine identity problem was the special character of American imperialism. Americans positively encouraged the growth of Philippine nationalism, whereas the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indochina tried to discourage the growth of native nationalist sentiment, while the British in India and Burma were neutral toward it at best. As a consequence, movements to collaborate with the Japanese during the war were far stronger in Dutch, French, and British colonies than in the Philippines. The Filipinos were the only Asian colonial people who refused to capitulate to the Japanese without a fight; the only ones who remained loyal to and friendly with their former rulers; the only ones who called the eventual Allied victory “liberation” rather than “reoccupation.” It was this loyalty that made possible the long stand on Bataan, and that led millions of Filipinos to risk their lives afterward either as guerrillas or to aid guerrillas who would fight the Japanese enemy.
There is no doubt that the character, personality, and deeds of Douglas MacArthur had contributed significantly to the pro-Americanism of most Filipinos, since they idolized the famous general. Sentimental attachment to America and principled admiration for democracy among the educated were also important. Most basic, despite all sorts of errors and injustices, American rule in the Philippines had been more enlightened than that of other imperial powers in eastern Asia. After the war of 1898 and the subsequent “pacification” of the Philippines had passed, there were no more massacres and no more pillage, and no unfairness toward Filipinos in courts. As the years passed, there were successive American concessions that pointed toward eventual Philippine self-government.
The Filipinos were grateful. An eloquent testimonial to the latter, and to the devotion of some of them to democracy, was penned by Tomas Confesor, a prewar governor of Iloilo who refused all Japanese offers to collaborate, took to the hills, organized a Free Philippines movement on Panay, and headed it during the Japanese occupation. He addressed himself thus to a Filipino collaborator:
There is a total war in which the issues between the warring parties are less concerned with territorial questions but more with forms of government, ways of life, and those that affect even the very thoughts, feelings and sentiments of every man. In other words, the question at stake with respect to the Philippines is not whether Japan or the United States should possess it but more fundamentally it is: what system of government would stand here and what ways of life, system of social organization and code of morals should govern our existence. . . .
You may not agree with me but the truth is that the present war is a blessing in disguise to our people and that the burden it imposes and the hardships it has brought upon us are a test of our character to determine the sincerity of our convictions and the integrity of our souls. In other words, this war has placed us in the crucible to assay the metal in our beings. For as a people, we have been living during the last forty years under a regime of justice and liberty regulated only by universally accepted principles of constitutional governments. We have come to enjoy personal privileges and civil liberties without much struggle, without undergoing any pain to attain them. They were practically a gift from a generous and magnanimous people—the people of the United States of America. Now that Japan is attempting to destroy those liberties, should we not exert every effort to defend them? Should we not be willing to suffer for their defense? If our people are undergoing hardships now, we are doing it gladly, it is because we are willing to pay the price for those constitutional liberties and privileges. You cannot become wealthy by honest means without sweating heavily. You know very well that the principles of democracy and democratic institutions were brought to life through bloodshed and fire. If we sincerely believe in those principles and institutions, as we who are resisting Japan do, we should contribute to the utmost of our capacity to the cost of its maintenance to save them from destruction and annihilation and such contribution should be in terms of painful sacrifices, the same currency that other peoples paid for those principles.1
The Japanese had no particular animosity toward Filipinos when the war began. They had attacked the Philippines only because American bases were there. But they always underestimated the desire of the Filipinos for freedom, and they were incredibly inept psychologists. When they stressed the common oriental heritage of Japanese and Filipinos and went out of their way to humiliate white people, this might have cut some ice with Filipinos who remembered “white only” golf clubs, “Christian” schools from which Filipinos were barred, and other subtler forms of American condescension. But the same “fellow Orientals” then killed them, tortured them, raped their women, stole their food, slapped their faces in public, and required them to bow to Japanese privates. For Japanese propaganda to extol the spartan life and decry American materialism was not impressive when Filipinos in any sizable town could see Japanese officers and civilian officials commandeer the country clubs and yacht clubs, move into the finest homes and hotels, and drive around in Cadillacs and Packards. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would have seemed more attractive to Filipinos if its inventors had not closed Philippine schools and businesses, shut off public utilities, halted transport, banned theaters and then radios, stripped the country of so much food that Filipinos starved, tried to make everyone learn Japanese, and manipulated the currency in ways that amounted to ill-disguised plunder. Nothing made ordinary Filipinos so pro-American as the Japanese occupation.2
Filipino loyalty to the United States brought complications in its train that have not worked themselves out yet forty years after World War II. An important element in Filipino psychology is that when one accepts unsolicited favors or gifts from another he thereby incurs an obligation. Because Americans had done so much to promote democracy, public health, and education in the Philippines, Filipinos felt that they were obligated to help the United States resist the Japanese—who had, of course, invaded their homeland too. But then the Filipinos also assumed that their loyalty would be reciprocated; and they could never understand why the United States was lax in its military preparations before 1941, made its major wartime effort in Europe rather than in the Pacific, and did not compel the Japanese to pay war reparations to the Philippines afterward.3
Many thorny questions faced Filipinos in World War II. Was any kind of collaboration with the Japanese dishonorable at best, treasonous at worst? If not, how much or what kind was allowable? Did it make any difference if the collaborator was highly placed, or if he was coerced by the conquerors? coerced how much, and in what ways? Should distinctions be made between the avowed intentions of collaborators and their visible deeds? If so, who should make them? Above all, what should be done about it all when the war was over?
Before the French Revolution (1789-99), in most western countries treason was easily recognized: it was personal disloyalty to a ruler to whom one owed loyalty or homage. In the two centuries since then matters have grown more complex. The French Revolution did more than any other event in modern history to promote the idea that the interests of the “nation” or “people” should take precedence over all other values, though it is often exceedingly difficult to know just what those interests truly are. In totalitarian states anytime, and in democratic states as well in wartime, it does not even require specific acts for one to be regarded as a traitor; mere words, even attitudes or states of mind, suffice, at least for authorities and zealots. Mere lack of enthusiasm for an official ideology is regarded as something close to treason in totalitarian states like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Often it is extremely difficult for a conscientious person to know where his primary loyalty should lie in the modern world: to his nation state, to its leaders-of-the-moment, to the nation itself though perhaps not to its present form of government, to his religious beliefs, to his family? If he is in the armed forces, to his military superiors? It is much easier to ask such questions than to answer them.
The questions are not hypothetical, either. One of the many reasons France fell so swiftly to the Wehrmacht in 1940 was that while many high-ranking French soldiers and politicians, of whom Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval are perhaps the best examples, hated Germany, they also hated their own Third Republic and wanted to see it destroyed. In Yugoslavia, a land of many nationalities, most of whom dislike most of the others, Draja Mikhailovich, the leader of the Chetnik guerrillas, accepted British and American aid and at times used it to fight the German and Italian conquerors of his country, but what he wanted most of all was to insure that when the war was over Yugoslavia should not be communist, so he fought the partisan guerrillas of the communist Tito more enthusiastically than he did the fascist states, and many times he did not fight the latter at all since to do so would bring terrible reprisals down onto the Yugoslav people. Marshal Tito’s Partisans also took Allied aid. They fought the Germans and Italians too, but with little concern for what happened to civilians of any sort. Their main objective was to communize the country, so they ambushed Chetniks and tried to destroy their credibility with the Allies. How could an ordinary citizen of Yugoslavia know where his duty lay in such circumstances, especially when one or both guerrilla groups had leaders or espoused policies inimical to the interests of people of his own nationality or religion? Or consider one individual citizen of that state, Milovan Djilas, who survived World War II and wrote much afterward. His father was shot by an Albanian nationalist, one of his brothers was killed by a Montenegrin militiaman serving under the Italians, another was tortured and killed by a Serb policeman working with the German Gestapo, and a pregnant sister was murdered by the Chetniks. To whom, or to what, should Djilas have been loyal? The whole question of whether one is morally obligated to obey military and political superiors when their orders are perceived to be either immoral or apt to lead the nation to ruin, was especially acute in Nazi Germany in World War II and led directly to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1946). Their utility and wisdom have been debated ever since.
It might be objected that questions of this sort worry only intellectuals and thus were irrelevant to my concerns as a leader of Filipino guerrillas, nearly all of whom were simple, untutored people. Not so. Uneducated people are not necessarily stupid or incapable of understanding abstractions; nor are they less concerned than the educated to act honorably. Most Filipinos regarded their president, Manuel Quezon, as a national hero. He spent most of the war, until his death, in the United States, from where he exhorted his countrymen to remain loyal to America. Meantime other prominent Filipino politicians collaborated with the Japanese and, at least in public, urged their countrymen to do likewise. Still others tried to steer a middle course. Ordinary Filipinos, like most Asians, thought that in a crisis loyalty to one’s own people should supersede loyalty to a particular political philosophy. In the world of deeds ordinary Filipino civilians were in a truly hopeless position, even worse than that of Europeans caught in the maelstrom of Nazis, Soviet communists, British, Americans, and their own divided resistance groups. The Filipinos were trapped, first of all, between the Japanese-sponsored Vargas or Laurel government in their homeland and the Quezon-Osmeña government-in-exile in the United States, each backed by a foreign army and each demanding their total allegiance. If they cooperated with the guerrillas, the Japanese killed them. If they worked with the Japanese, the guerrillas killed them. If they supported the Huks, they incurred the displeasure of all non-communist guerrillas. If they helped us USAFFE irregulars against the Huks, their lives were at once in danger from the communists. Much of the time from 1942 to 1945 large sections of Luzon resembled the State of Nature as envisioned by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: a grim locale where there existed a perpetual war of all against all, and where life was, in consequence, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
An all-too-typical illustration of this melancholy state of affairs once took place in Tayabas province. Guerrillas entered a town, assembled all the people in the village church, read off the names of those deemed pro-Japanese, and shot them. The Japanese soon heard of what had happened, assembled the survivors, and shot all those they considered pro-American. The surviving corporal’s guard fled to the hills.4
Another increasingly difficult problem in the twentieth century has been the credibility of oaths. Most are couched, as they have been for centuries, in religious phraseology. Would religious people regard them as binding if they were not so phrased? But to non-religious people such terminology means little. Indeed, is there any cause that should convince a secular humanist that an oath ought to bind him unconditionally? Worse, in practice, how about oaths taken half-willingly and half under duress, as was the case in Germany when all army officers had to swear a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, following which many of them became convinced that he was leading their nation to ruin?
Many Filipinos, religious or not, were trapped in this morass. Consider the plight of a conscientious Filipino who had taken an oath of loyalty to the Philippine Commonwealth and to the United States before the war, perhaps on the occasion of joining the armed forces of either; after which he was induced to repudiate it and accept the Filipinoled collaborationist regime during the war; then required by the Japanese to swear fealty to Nippon; then compelled to cooperate with the Huks under threat of the torture and execution of his family; after which he escaped and joined an American guerrilla outfit in which he had to subscribe to American and Philippine Commonwealth oaths once more? What could he think of any solemn affirmation of loyalty when so many had been pressured out of him, when he did not know who would eventually win the war, and when he had no idea how his incompatible oaths and changes of front would be regarded by the eventual victors? The lot of ordinary Filipinos from 1941 to 1945 was not enviable.
Historically, the usual response of the Philippine ruling elite to conquest has been to come to terms with the invader in order to retain their own influence and to spare the islands and their peoples. So it had been with the Spaniards before 1898 and with the Americans afterward. In 1941 most Filipinos did not regard the Japanese as a friendly people, or trust them, but they did regard them with respect. The traditional Filipino elite doubtless would have responded to Japanese conquest and occupation as their forefathers had done to Spaniards and Americans if only Japanese propaganda had been less crude and unconvincing, and Japanese conduct less beastly.
Philippine President Manuel Quezon was a complex and “difficult” man. Intelligent, intensely ambitious, egotistical, mercurial, dictatorial, talkative, and flashy, and he was a politician of consummate skill though hardly the great statesman he thought himself to be. Before the war he had been publicly loyal to the United States and had taken American aid to build a Philippine army, but he had also anticipated many a Third World government of the postwar era by taking out some “insurance policies.” He accepted Japanese help in developing the Philippine economy, and he conducted secret talks with Tokyo that were discovered only after the war when American counterintelligence people went through Japanese foreign office files.5 When Quezon was with the beleaguered Filamerican forces on Corregidor in January 1942 and began to realize that the policy of the Roosevelt administration was to give priority to the European war, he flew into a rage and proposed that both America and Japan withdraw all their armed forces and bases from the Philippines and jointly guarantee Philippine neutrality, in return for which he would disband the Philippine army. He was gradually talked out of this by his own vice president Sergio Osmeña, and by General MacArthur, supported by many assurances from President Roosevelt. Quezon then wrote a letter to MacArthur, clearly intended for the eyes of Roosevelt as well, asserting that he had instructed several prominent Filipino politicians to stay behind and do whatever circumstances required of them to spare the Filipino people as much as they could in what would certainly be tough times ahead. Then Quezon and Osmeña went into exile in America, where Quezon broadcast to his people back home, “Do not despair, for your liberation is certain. . . . Keep faith with America, which has kept faith with every nation and especially with us”—a statement quite as embellished with “terminological inexactitudes”—as were many of Roosevelt’s pronouncements in the same era.6
Of course, not all Filipinos were either pro-American or simply inclined to bend with the winds of fortune. In 1941 Emilio Aguinaldo and Artemio Ricarte were still alive. Aguinaldo had led Philippine resistance to the United States after 1898, and Ricarte had been the only Filipino officer involved in that insurrection who had refused to lay down his arms and swear allegiance to the United States. In World War II both acted in ways displeasing to America but not innately shameful. Aguinaldo, who had seemed to have made his peace with the United States, at once became pro-Japanese and helped his new friends keep the Philippines quiet but did so in an effort to secure better treatment for Filipinos under the occupation, a risky course that his countrymen could easily misunderstand and for which they might well consign him to a painful death if Japan lost the war.7 Ricarte had always been pro-Japanese. He had lived much of his adult life in Japan and had been treated well there. He simply remained loyal to his benefactors. He collaborated with them when he came back to the Philippines early in the war, and tried to use his influence with them to make life a bit easier for his countrymen.8
More complex and important collaborators were the members of the Sakdal and Kalibapi movements. In the mid-1930s the Sakdalistas were merely an association of peasants in central Luzon who nourished the same grievances as those who supported the Hukbalahaps. They were led by Benigno Ramos, a frustrated Tagalog poet who hated Quezon, denounced governmental corruption, and demanded distribution of lands to peasants, the abolition of taxation, and immediate independence for the Philippines. The Sakdalistas were repressed harshly by the Philippine government. Ramos, an embittered man, fled to Japan. He returned with the Japanese conquerors and gave them Sakdal membership lists which enabled them to compel anyone whose name was on the list to collaborate whether he wished to or not. Thus, mere membership in the Sakdalistas did not prove that one wanted to be pro-Japanese, though the Sakdalistas and their offspring, the Makapili, at times gave us guerrillas nearly as much trouble as the Huks.
The Kalibapi (Association for Service to the New Philippines) was a political party organized by the Japanese in December 1942 to function in their puppet “Philippine Republic.” Many of its members had been Sakdals before the war, but the Japanese wanted a more impressive leader than Benigno Ramos and so chose as its director general an important prewar Commonwealth official noted for his fiery pro-Japanese speeches, Benigno Aquino. On the local level, the Kalibapi was a Japanese Neighborhood Association, the leaders of which divided every town into ten districts, each district into ten sections, and the sections into units of ten houses or families. The leader of each group was responsible for the conduct of everyone in that group. It was an effort, after the common totalitarian fashion of our century, to turn everyone into spies for the government.
None of these groups collaborated enthusiastically enough to please the Japanese, so late in 1944 they organized the Makapili (League of Patriotic Filipinos). Nominally, it was headed by Ramos, Ricarte, and Pio Duran, an anti-Western Filipino intellectual, but it was actually answerable directly to the Japanese army. Though the numbers of the Makapili were never significant, the organization was dreaded because the Japanese used hooded individual members publicly to point out suspected guerrillas or Filipino civilians friendly to guerrillas.9
There were also some collaborators who were mere profiteers, amoral self-seekers of the sort who proliferate in any time of political upheaval.
Finally, there was a considerable group of educated Filipinos who were essentially fence sitters. They were not uncritical admirers of Japanese civilization, but they were respectful and envious of the accomplishments of modern Japan. They observed how a Nipponese ruling elite had managed to Westernize that nation and make it powerful without either succumbing to Western imperialism or losing their own domestic preeminence. This was impressive to those Filipinos who regarded people like themselves as the only possible rulers of their own country.
Those Filipinos who eventually collaborated with their conquerors, either willingly or unwillingly, from whatever mixture of motives, have by now been praised, excused, denounced, and dissected in print so many times and in such detail that I cannot presume to add anything significant to the controversies that swirled about them for years. I did know two of them personally, though, Manuel Roxas and Ferdinand Marcos, and I can indicate how their actions and those of their colleagues appeared to me at the time and appear now, long afterward.
Early in the war Tokyo began to search eagerly for a front man to run the Philippines during Japanese occupation of the islands. Ideally, this would be someone with sufficient brains and public credit to win his people away from their loyalty to the exiled Quezon, and to make it appear to the outside world that most Filipinos welcomed their new Japanese masters. They hoped their man would be Manuel Roxas, the highly intelligent prewar speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, but Roxas proved sly and slippery and for a long time managed to evade the Nipponese embrace.
As second best they settled on a distinguished ex-Supreme Court justice, José Laurel, whom some guerrillas had tried to assassinate in June 1943. Probably because of this the Japanese assumed that Laurel was both more important and more pro-Japanese than was really the case.
Estimates of Laurel vary widely. Partisans of the Left insist that Laurel was one of the worst of the collaborationists: a man who studied Bushido, expressed admiration for Japan before the war, and sent his sons to Nipponese schools; a hater of democracy who repressed guerrillas, recruited laborers to produce food for Japan, and freely employed the Sakadalistas and Makapili at the behest of his Japanese masters.10
A more moderate vesion of the same basic view holds that, had he been a European, Laurel would have been called a fascist. He was a Filipino nationalist who hated colonialism. He was also anti-democratic: convinced that only a few people of superior character and acumen truly understand popular needs and are capable of ruling wisely. What he admired about the Japanese was much like what the Italian dictator Mussolini admired in the Germans: their efficiency, decisiveness, and authoritarian government; and in the Japanese case, their use of the emperor as a tool of social cohesion. Laurel thought his fellow Filipinos should work harder and accept discipline, regimentation, sacrifice, and service to the state. He overrated the efficiency of totalitarian countries, and assumed wrongly, or at least prematurely, that democracy is destined historically to be superseded by authoritarian governments everywhere. He regarded guerrilla resistance to Japan as harmful to the nation and did not believe it would have any effect on the outcome of the war. He regarded peace, order, and compliance with directives from above as essential to preserve Philippine society during foreign occupation.11
Others, some admirers of Laurel, some merely neutral toward him, have seen him mostly as a victim of circumstances. In their view, to have refused to become president of the “Philippine Republic” would only have insured that someone else more pliable would have taken his place. If he had studied Japanese civilization and culture extensively, that did not necessarily mean that he was an admirer of Japan. He had studied Western philosophy, religion, and government, too. He admired Western technology but preferred Oriental virtues; he feared that American culture and foreign policy would ruin the Philippines; and he overestimated the good will of the Japanese toward Filipinos. He thought that America would eventually win the war but that this would take from five to ten years, and that soon after the war Japan would be strong again. Meantime, someone must protect the Filipino people as much as possible. To this end he implored both Premier Tojo and General Homma to treat Filipinos kindly and used his influence in various ways to save the lives of such prominent Filipinos as Manuel Roxas, Gen. Guillermo Francisco, chief of the Philippine Constabulary, and Gen. Vincente Lim, commander of the Forty-first Philippine Division on Bataan. (To be sure, Lim was eventually executed by the Japanese, but Laurel’s intervention saved him for a time.)
Laurel wrote into the new Philippine constitution provisions that made it difficult for any Philippine government to declare war, and then when the Japanese did at last compel him to declare war against the United States he managed to evade conscripting any soldiers to fight it. He never lived in the Presidential palace. He shared food with his underlings, tried to hunt down bandits and looters, and managed to maintain covert contact with guerrillas. He was a hero, not a traitor.12
Such was the man whom the Japanese in October 1943 made the first and only president of their personal political creation, the “Philippine Republic.”
Whatever the worth of Laurel’s political ideas, whatever his motivation, a combination of misjudgments and bad luck made his task hopeless. Perhaps the fundamental difficulty was that most Filipinos did not share his cool, detached, rational assessment of the overall course of history, or of the Japanese occupation of the moment. Most Filipinos, and all guerrillas, even the Huks, wanted to fight the Japanese and throw them out of the islands forever. Laurel was simply out of touch with the people he sought to reform and protect. Moreover, he always wore around his neck the albatross of collaboration. When the Japanese undertook an extensive campaign of “pacification” against guerrillas in the fall of 1943, and Laurel dutifully urged us all to lay down our arms, some complied. Others complied formally, after which they went right back to the mountains, a solution that pleased everyone save the Japanese. The majority simply redoubled their determination to resist the invaders. Laurel also overestimated the credibility of his own regime in the world at large. The “Philippine Republic” was recognized only by Japan, Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.
Finally, Laurel overrated the strength and abilities of the Japanese. Tokyo professed to be in the process of establishing an interdependent economic sphere in east Asia and the western Pacific, but such an enterprise could be held together only by a huge merchant fleet. By the end of 1944 the Allies had sunk over 80 percent of the prewar Japanese merchant marine. As their ships disappeared, Japanese troops in the Philippines had to get more and more of their food from the islands themselves. This ruined any chance that Laurel’s regime might have had to become popular, since he was no more able to deal successfully with the consequent food shortages among Filipinos than he had been to prevent the Japanese from taxing Filipinos to support the Nipponese war effort. Nowhere in Japan’s new empire were there enough capable technicians, managers, engineers, teachers, even propagandists, to meet the suddenly expanded needs.13 When this limitation was combined with the abominable behavior of so many Japanese troops, the popularity of Japan and any pro-Japanese regime inevitably plummeted.
One episode that illustrates several of these considerations was centered where I happened to be, in central Luzon. The Japanese developed a scheme to grow cotton in the Philippines, and created a Philippine Cotton Association to coordinate plans. When it came to the doing, however, necessary machinery, high yield seeds, and measures to control pests were all lacking. In addition, because of extensive fighting many fields had been burned and work animals killed. Various guerrilla bands, including mine, then gave the whole scheme the coup de grace by appealing to the Filipinos not to cooperate.
Of those prominent Filipinos who collaborated with the Japanese, some seemed to do so with enthusiasm, others with reluctance. All soon discovered that it was easier to begin collaboration than to stop. At the end of the war American Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the American Left, the Huks in the Philippines, and an assortment of American and Filipino political writers denounced all Filipinos who had collaborated with their conquerors and clamored to have them tried for treason. It was alleged that most wealthy Filipinos were fascists, or at least reactionaries; that since Quezon was now dead they could safely pretend that he had asked them to stay behind and defend their countrymen; that they had not, in fact, defended those countrymen but their own financial interest; that they had simultaneously fooled the Americans, the Japanese, and their own people. Now, in 1945, so many of them were claiming that they had always been patriots and resisters that it appeared that “even the Japs in Tokyo are now pro-American.”14
Recriminations about such questions have been endless because the wartime careers of many prominent Filipinos can only be called equivocal. That of José Laurel has already been considered. Laurel seemingly feared American judgment, since he fled to Formosa April 21, 1945, and then to Japan, where he was eventually arrested by the Americans and indicted for treason. He always maintained, however, that the Japanese had coerced him,15 and when he was flown back to the Philippines to face trial, crowds at the Manila airport cheered him when he got off the plane.16 He was to have been tried by a Philippine court but was, in fact, never brought to trial. In 1948 Roxas, by then president of the newly independent Philippine Republic, included Laurel in a general amnesty of all alleged collaborators save common criminals. The Filipino people must have approved the gesture, since they voted Laurel into the national Senate two years later and have since honored him along with other Philippine presidents.
Jorge Vargas, another prominent prewar Filipino politician, who was once Quezon’s secretary, headed a provisional Philippine government set up by the Japanese in January 1942, and appeared to collaborate willingly with his masters as long as they seemed to be winning the war. He even wanted to campaign against Laurel to become the first president of the puppet “Philippine Republic,” and he once urged guerrilla leaders on Panay to surrender on the grounds that the Japanese fleet could always prevent the Americans from landing anything in the Philippines. One of the guerrillas sent him back four Delicious apples, a variety that does not grow in Japan or in the Philippines!17 One of Vargas’s motives seems to have been a desire to shake off American domination of the Philippines. He never opposed the conquerors on any critical issue, while Laurel, by contrast, successfully evaded Japanese pressure to raise a Philippine army to fight the Americans. Vargas eventually tied himself so closely to the Japanese that he could not break connections with them even when it became clear that they would lose the war.18
Even so, fate was kind to Vargas. He returned to the Philippines and in 1947 was indicted on 115 counts of collaboration with the enemy. His trial dragged on for months. It appeared that he would eventually be acquitted on procedural grounds when President Roxas and the Philippine Congress rendered his case moot by amnestying (January-February 1948) all who had not actually borne arms against the Allies or acted as spies or informers for the Japanese.19
One case of alleged collaboration that I happened to know something about personally was that of Manuel Roxas. It was obvious from the actions of General MacArthur at the end of the war that some sort of unrecorded understanding involving himself, President Quezon, Roxas, and probably several other highly placed Philippine political figures had been reached early in the war, most likely when Quezon was still on Corregidor. This was in no way unusual, for in other Southeast Asian lands prominent political figures are known to have made unwritten agreements that some of them would be pro-British, or pro-Dutch, or pro-French, and some pro-Japanese, in order to spare their people as much as possible during the war and to make sure that they had a few spokesmen who would be in the good graces of whichever side eventually won. It was understood that those who had chosen the winning side would forgive those who had thrown in their lot with the losers. In the case of Roxas, for two years he evaded damaging legal entanglement with the Japanese, usually on the plea that his health was poor. This was an excuse, to be sure, and there were rumors that Roxas raised his temperature and made his “illnesses” appear more convincing by putting a piece of garlic in his anus. Even if he did this, his ill health was probably not wholly faked, since he died a few years after the war when he was still a comparatively young man. Supposedly fearing execution, Roxas eventually capitulated to the Japanese and became president of the Senate in the “Philippine Republic.” There agreement about his actions and motives stops.
Writers whose sympathies are predominantly Left say Roxas was a slicker who cultivated MacArthur before the war and both Laurel and the Japanese during it. They say he flattered them all and took them all in. They say that he pretended to have contacts with guerrillas, but that his only true loyalties were to himself and to the wealthy Filipino collaborators with whom he habitually associated.20 It should be added that Al Hendrickson, an observant man who was active with the Luzon guerrillas throughout the war and whose philosophical and political sympathies were not Left then or at any other time, was likewise convinced that Roxas was a shifty rascal and a consummate self-seeker. One of MacArthur’s abler biographers sums up the anti-Roxas case by asserting that no guerrilla ever attested to any noteworthy anti-Japanese deed of Roxas.21
The last is untrue. I had several contacts with Roxas and know he did aid guerrillas. In fact, near the end of the war MacArthur told Roxas that to receive public approval he must secure a statement, signed by American guerrilla leaders, attesting to his pro-American sentiments and actions. I was one of those who signed it, and I did so gladly. Marking’s guerrillas thought enough of Roxas that they offered to hide him in the mountains, and to supply and feed him. Their chronicler and co-leader adds that Roxas told her that he and Laurel kept in close contact, that they disagreed in public just enough so that the Japanese would take Laurel’s advice rather than his own, that Laurel was a master at stalling, and that he (Roxas) regularly kept Laurel informed of much that the Japanese never told him. She added that she had no trouble believing him because she had played the same game with Vargas, Quezon’s secretary, in February 1942 when she had been a broadcaster for station KZRH in Manila.22
When Quezon was preparing to leave Corregidor, he issued an executive order naming Roxas as his successor should he and Osmeña be killed. A few days later he added detailed instructions to Roxas about how to deal with every branch of the administration, including organizing, directing, and coordinating resistance to the Japanese.23 In July 1943 Quezon sent his personal physician, Dr. Emgidio Cruz, on a secret mission to the Philippines to see how things were going generally, and specifically to see Roxas. The two held daily conversations about which public figures had been forced to bow to the will of the Japanese, and to what degree, who were true collaborators and who were merely shamming, and who could be counted on to rally the people to anti-Japanese action when the time came for a final military and political showdown. Cruz made a lengthy report of his odyssey to General Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, which Willoughby subsequently published in his book, along with much other evidence that Roxas was essentially a mole in the Laurel regime who collected valuable information for USAFFE headquarters and gave much aid to guerrillas.24
At the end of the war, though MacArthur ordered the arrest of some other top Filipino leaders, he promoted Roxas to brigadier general and put him on inactive status. He explained that he knew Roxas was of good character, that he was innocent of collaboration, and that he had done much to aid guerrillas. Most of the Filipino people must have agreed, since they elected Roxas the first president of the independent Philippine Republic on April 23, 1946. Once in office, Roxas granted amnesty to all guerrillas who had fought against the Japanese during the war, and to the great bulk of those accused of collaboration with the Japanese. His enemies have always interpreted these actions as an endeavor to cover his own tracks, but there is a plausible alternative explanation. Just as the first Bourbon king of France, Henry IV, welcomed to his standard those of all political and religious persuasions in an effort to bind up the wounds of a long generation of savage civil wars (1559-98), and just as a later ruler of the same country, Napoleon Bonaparte, pursued a similar policy in an effort to weld France together again after the nation had been fragmented during the French Revolution, so any statesman of intelligence and good will would have tried to reunite the shattered Filipino people in the aftermath of World War II. In the case of amnestying guerrillas, moreover, a legal point needed settlement. Any Filipino who had taken arms in violation of the orders of the Japanese-sponsored “Philippine Republic” was, after all, formally a criminal since international law prescribes that citizens of an occupied country have a duty to cooperate with the occupying forces.
At the end of the war, mostly because of American pressure, 5,603 accusations of collaboration with the Japanese were legally filed. Only a few hundred of the accused were ever tried, only 156 convictions were secured, and only one of them was of a prominent person, Teofilo Sison, a prewar governor of Pangasinan province. All the other cases were dismissed or concluded with an amnesty.25
One of those put on trial was Claro M. Recto, a former member of the Philippine Senate and for a time foreign minister in the Laurel regime. Recto was a remarkably intelligent, far-sighted man. Long before the war he had perceived Japanese and Russian intentions in the Orient, had come to believe that domination of the smaller Asian peoples by other Asians would be worse than Western domination, and had urged that the Philippines must become strong militarily because the United States would never regard it as more than an expendable military outpost.26
During his trial Recto delivered an eloquent speech on his own behalf that summed up the general position of the collaborators. Those who, like himself, now stood accused, he said, had not fled to ease overseas where they could safely preach “defense of freedom” to their countrymen languishing under Japanese despotism. Only those who had stayed behind and tried to defend the lives and interests of the Filipino people could know what those people had faced, and how much temporizing and evasion they had been compelled to practice in order to live. No Americans were ever treated the way the Filipinos had been. No American cities were smashed either by barbarous conquerors or by the planes and bombs of “liberators.” The American countryside was not laid waste; no American civilians were insulted, tortured, or bayoneted by a cruel enemy. How many Americans, he asked, would have collaborated if the Japanese had followed up Pearl Harbor with landings in California? How would they now be regarded?
Whatever the war might cost the Philippine people, Recto said, was only incidental to Americans, for the American objective was overall victory; but no civilized Filipino public official could consider the matter with such objectivity. Philippine political leaders, even in the Laurel government, had turned a blind eye to much aid that had gone to guerrillas, had protested to Japanese authorities about atrocities against Filipinos, and had refused to raise an army to aid the Japanese even when pressed hard to do so. He added that the American government had known that it was pathetically unprepared to defend the Philippines, yet the Filipinos had remained loyal to America. And what of America’s own “collaborators”? Washington had not merely excused Wainwright, Sharp, Cushing, Hilsman, Baker, and others who had surrendered to the enemy or had been compelled to make pro-Japanese statements, but had positively honored them on the ground that they had been victims of circumstances, casualties of American unpreparedness.27 Was not exactly the same true of those Filipino leaders now accused of collaboration?
Recto then cited such political figures as Sukarno in Indonesia, Ba Maw in Burma, and Scavenius in Denmark, all of whom had collaborated with Japanese or German occupation forces but had been taken back into the good graces of the democratic nations as if nothing had happened. He concluded by insisting that in any case the spirit of democracy and self-government which infused the American constitution required that Filipinos, not Americans, should try their own accused collaborators.
It has always seemed to me that Recto’s position is unassailable. War imposes hard necessities. Just as we guerrillas could not tolerate Japanese agents in our midst and survive, so the Filipino people as a whole could not have survived had not many of them cooperated at least passively with their conquerors. We Americans are in many ways the spoiled children of history. Though the Northern occupation of the Old Confederacy, 1864-76, was bitterly resented by Southerners, we have never had to endure the experience of being overrun and occupied by cruel foreign enemies and to make the compromises that necessarily follow such an experience. It was all very well for Franklin Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, and others ten thousand miles away to talk bravely and to denigrate Filipino officials who had to struggle and live with enemies who gradually killed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. So-called collaborators had little choice. On May 7, 1942, the Japanese executed Philippine Chief Justice José Abad Santos for refusing to serve under them. After that few Filipino leaders declined to take office. Once they were in office, their conquerors did not scruple to take the sons of some of them and send them to Japan to insure the good behavior of their fathers.28 What good purpose would have been served had all of them emulated Abad Santos? They would have been killed and replaced either by real pro-Japanese like Benigno Ramos, Benigno Aquino (father of the Philippine opposition leader assassinated in 1983), Pio Duran, and General Ricarte, or by amoral self-seekers. Would ordinary Filipinos have been better off then? Or would the United States, for that matter? Prudence is often the better part of valor. Heroism is not only fighting and dying. Death ends man’s problems: staying alive increases them. Those who stayed behind and tried to make the best of a terrible situation served their people quite as much as did Quezon and Osmeña in far off Washington.
Perhaps the best indication of how tepid and unwilling so many collaborators were is that the Japanese never fully trusted them, and with good reason. Thousands of lower level “collaborators” were merely people who happened to hold some public office at the time of the Japanese conquest and had to keep their jobs to support their families. Few were seriously touched by Japanese indoctrination. Whether their true motives were a noble desire to serve their people or mere fear of reprisals, some aided the guerillas when they could; some sabotaged their conquerors in small ways when they thought it safe; most simply waited and hoped for better days. President Sergio Osmeña understood this, as he indicated in a speech made from Leyte a few days after the American landing there on November 23, 1944. He took note of the compromises that had been made under pressure, and promised to deal with accusations of collaboration justly and with dignity, on an individual basis.29
We Americans should be lenient in judging the Filipinos for other reasons too. Fundamentally, what was the correct policy for a Philippine government to follow in the war when its people had been promised independence by a colonial power that had brought war down upon them, then proved too weak to protect them, and might never return? Yet those victimized people had suffered and died alongside our own soldiers, and their civilians had risked the lives of themselves and their families to help Americans on innumerable occasions afterward. That many sat on the fence waiting to see who would win the war is true: it is also likely that Quezon, Osmeña, and Romulo would have done the same had they stayed in the Philippines instead of going to the United States. But what does this prove? We welcomed those Filipinos who accepted American hegemony after 1898. No stigma of “collaboration” was ever attached to them or to the Japanese who passively accepted American victory and domination after 1945. After the American Revolution most of the Tories were eventually absorbed into the new United States of America, as were the rebellious Confederates after the Civil War.
Finally we need to think of what the situation in the Philippines would have been like in 1945 had not some politicians tried to cushion the impact of the Japanese occupation on the Filipino people. Philippine politics would have been polarized between pro-Japanese Filipinos backed by the Japanese army, and the Huks and their sympathizers. Extremists on both sides wanted this. Had they gotten their wish and had the United States pushed the collaborationist issue hard in 1945-46, it is quite possible that the Huks would have ridden to power and the Philippines would have become another Soviet republic.30
The whole issue of collaboration, which seemed so explosive and fraught with menace near the end of the war, evaporated rapidly afterward. President Roosevelt died in the spring of 1945. Those American politicians most interested in Philippine affairs, men like Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Senators Millard Tydings and Paul McNutt, were either in disagreement or distracted by other problems. The new president, Harry Truman, was less avid to pursue collaborators than Roosevelt had been. By 1946, too, it was growing evident that the menace of the future would be Soviet Russia. This at once made the Huks, with their cries for vengeance against “the elite traitors of Manila,” less attractive, and made it seem more important to check communist global expansion than to pursue old feuds from World War II. Thus, the whole issue faded away, and those who had dominated the Philippine Commonwealth before 1942 soon dominated the Philippine Republic that was established in 1946.
As noted earlier, one of the by-products of guerrilla life was that I became aquainted with several Filipino politicians who were either well known in the 1940s or rose to prominence after World War II. One of the latter, whom I happened to meet in 1944, was Ferdinand Marcos, later to become a famous and embattled president of the Philippines. One day he showed up at my headquarters barefooted and unarmed, accompanied by a Filipino writer, F.M. Verano, who sometimes assumed the alias “Lieutenant Winters” and acted as a liaison man between Manuel Roxas and my organization. Marcos was then a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who already had an interesting past. Years before the war a political adversary of his father had once put a dummy in a coffin and draped it with a sign indicating that it ought to be Marcos’s father. Outraged at the insult, the son hired the family chauffeur to shoot the offender. At the last moment the chauffeur could not go through with the act, so young Marcos grabbed a rifle and shot his father’s foe himself. He was then tried for murder and convicted, but the case was appealed to a higher court. While it was still pending, young Marcos was admitted to the bar. A second trial was ordered, and in it he defended himself so skillfully that he was acquitted.
Shortly before the Philippine presidential election of 1965 a “campaign biography” of Marcos appeared in which it was claimed that Marcos had performed with exceptional valor during the defense of Bataan, that he was nearly tortured to death by the Japanese in Fort Santiago, that after his release he devoted months to an unsuccessful effort to band together all the guerrillas on all the Philippine islands, that he formed his own northern Luzon guerrilla band, the Maharlika (Free Men or Noble Ones), that late in the war he helped Volckmann clear all the bandit irregulars out of north Luzon, and that he played a key role in the reestablishment of civil government on Luzon in May 1945. For these heroic deeds Marcos came out of the war the most decorated man in Philippine history.31
For a long time I assumed offhand that most of this was true, maybe all of it. The principal reason was that I had little occasion to think about Marcos at all. To me, he would have been no more than one more barefoot Filipino had not Verano told me that he had once killed a foe of his father. Then, incongruously, twenty years later this man had become president of the Philippines. In fact, when the latter event took place I had to do some research to assure myself that the new ruler of the islands was the same Marcos I had once met during the war.
When Marcos eventually became the center of furious controversies at home and abroad, books and articles began to appear claiming that his wartime heroism had been grossly exaggerated and that many, perhaps most, of his medals had been manufactured after the war to commemorate exploits that had never taken place.32 This evolution came to a climax shortly before the Philippine election of February 7, 1986, when many accounts appeared alleging that most of Marcos’s war record was fraudulent. The stories were based on hundreds of pages of documents found in the U.S. National Archives by an American scholar, Dr. Alfred McCoy.33
I was drawn into this whole controversy because two of the documents bore my signature. They called for the arrest of all unauthorized guerrilla organizers in Pangasinan, and one of them mentioned Marcos specifically. Within a few days newspaper and television journalists descended on me from all points of the compass. I was interviewed repeatedly and my responses circulated broadly. It soon became evident that, for whatever reason, perhaps mere unaccustomed excitement, I had not chosen my words with sufficient care. I was widely quoted as having said that Marcos had never led any guerrilla organization of significance, and that I had either arrested him or had ordered his arrest for unauthorized solicitation of funds and for efforts to recruit guerrillas.
The best I can do now, after the event, is try to sort out the truths from the half-truths, and both from the falsities. At the risk of boring readers I must emphasize that the events in question took place more than forty years ago, that they did not then seem to be of much importance, and that it was a time of great stress and tumult. Consequently, my memory of the precise details is inexact. I do not recall that either Verano or Manuel Roxas, both of whom I knew fairly well, ever said anything to me about Marcos being a guerrilla. I know he did not command an armed guerrilla organization in Pangasinan province, but it is possible that he did organize guerrillas elsewhere. I do not recall ever ordering his arrest, and I believe the document purporting to show this is a forgery.34 Of course, it is conceivable that some of my subordinates might have arrested him for a brief time without telling me about it, or that I might have been so informed but forgot about it merely because I attached little importance to it and had other matters on my mind.35 To repeat yet again: in 1944 Ferdinand Marcos was not a famous man, and we had had so much trouble with so many would-be guerrillas that one more of the species was not likely to linger in my memory.
To be sure, General Willoughby attests that Marcos did command his own guerrilla unit and that it numbered over 8,000 men, 3,800 of whom were supposedly in Pangasinan.36 Perhaps so, but it was and is always difficult to say with any precision how many people there are in any irregular outfit or resistance movement. If one counts only those who are actively engaged on a full-time basis, the number is almost always small. If one counts those who normally follow some civilian pursuit but regularly provide aid, information, and support, the number is considerably larger. If one counts all those who are basically sympathetic and who occasionally perform some service useful to the movement, the number is much larger. With “paper guerrillas” estimates are the merest guesses; and my own surmise (not unimpeachable knowledge) is that most of Marcos’s followers were “paper guerrillas,” particularly in Pangasinan.37 In 1944-45 a “paper guerrilla” was a person who possessed a piece of paper identifying him as a member of a guerrilla organization, even though he did not have a gun. Some such people really wanted to be guerrillas. Others were former collaborators with the Japanese who wanted to cover their tracks. Others were fence-sitters who now judged that the Allies were going to win the war. Still others were out for personal gain of some kind. It did take some courage to become even a “paper guerrilla,” and a bit more to organize a unit of such people, since anyone whose name was on such a list was likely to get short shrift if he was ever captured by the Japanese, though in 1944-45 this was a steadily diminishing risk. Whatever their intentions, and whatever the risks involved, “paper guerrillas” did little good and much harm. Sometimes they collected intelligence of some value, but this was vastly overbalanced by their interference with the recruiting efforts of genuine guerrillas, and by the disrepute they, as conspicuous johnny-come-latelys, brought down on the heads of genuine guerrillas whom they outnumbered by at least two to one near the war’s end.
Wherever the truth lies between the claims of Marcos’s admirers and adversaries, I tried to reestablish contact with him in 1982 when he paid a visit to the United States. I wrote him a letter reminding him of the circumstances under which he and I first met. He did not reply. In January 1986, Bob Lapham visited the Philippines. In the course of his stay he had a ninety-minute conversation with President Marcos. He told me afterward that Marcos had inquired about me.38 Interestingly, prior to his meeting with Marcos in the Malacanang Palace, Bob was told by a close associate of Marcos that “bad blood” existed between Marcos and myself. No such feeling ever existed on my part; if it did (or does) on Marcos’s side, the only reason I can imagine is that perhaps back in 1944 one of my men really did arrest the future president of the Philippines.