Did guerrillas in general, and we in the Philippines in particular, contribute significantly to overall Allied victory? If so, was our contribution worth what it cost in money, human lives, and intangibles? I cannot say for certain. Russell Volckmann, both a fellow guerrilla and an adversary of mine, maintains that neither the British nor the Americans ever appreciated the potential of guerrillas and consequently never made the best use of them either in Europe or in the Far East. They were never integrated into the whole military structure (as they were in the Soviet Union), never given proper logistical support, and were usually confined to gathering intelligence. He considers this to have been one of the lost opportunities of the war, on the Allied side.1
My immediate, emotional response is to agree with Volckmann; yet there is much to be said for the claim of B. H. Liddell Hart, one of the major military theorists of the twentieth century, that to encourage guerrilla warfare is a mistake in the long run because its political and moral residues are almost entirely pernicious and poison civilian society long after the war is over.2 There is no question in my mind that what we guerrillas were able to do in the Philippines was of great value to the American army in the latter stages of the war. Moreover, measured in dollars and cents, it was dirt cheap compared to what the United States spent and got in other parts of the world. Yet so many Filipinos were killed, maimed, despoiled, and brutalized either by guerrillas of the outlaw type or by the Japanese in reprisals that I cannot help but believe that the Filipino people would have been better off had neither any of them nor Americans ever formed guerrilla organizations. Certainly, they would have suffered less, though it would also have taken longer to liberate them. Whether the absence of American resistance in the Philippines would have enabled the Japanese to conquer Australia early in the war and then brutalize itspeople, nobody can know. History cannot record catastrophes that timely action may have averted.
Past history provides little guidance. Without the aid they received from Wellington’s army, and lacking the disaster Napoleon Bonaparte suffered in Russia in 1812, the Spanish guerrillas who opposed Napoleon would have been defeated eventually. Their real achievement was political and psychological: they made serious problems for the invaders, prevented them from imposing their will on the whole Spanish people, and provided inspiration to the enemies of Napoleon all over Europe. If one believes the accounts left by Russian partisan leaders who badgered Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow, each one of them defeated him single-handed. Yet the French army in Russia suffered vastly more from heat, cold, and diseases than from military action of any kind. Moreover, Napoleon was not driven out of Russia: he decided to attempt an orderly retreat only six weeks after winning the battle of Borodino, and had he begun perhaps three weeks earlier still he would have gotten most of what remained of his army safely out of the country. As in Spain, the greatest contribution of the Russian guerrillas was to keep up the morale of the civilian population.3
Much the same was true in Europe during World War II. Guerrillas of a dozen nationalities risked their lives to oppose the Nazis in innumerable ways, yet sabotage on the part of transport workers probably did more real harm to the Axis cause than all the activities of all the partisans combined.4 Real guerrillas grossly exaggerated their exploits; and after the war so many latecomers, braggarts, and outright frauds talked so grandly of their deeds in the “Resistance” that an outsider might wonder how their homelands had come to be conquered in the first place. Like their predecessors in the Napoleonic era, their chief importance was psychological: their actions and efforts helped clear the consciences of their peoples, and served as a source of national pride when the war was over.
This was fundamentally true in the Philippines too, yet the resistance there did make a more direct and important contribution to eventual victory than anywhere else. Without the deeds of guerrillas the Japanese certainly would have exacted heavier casualties from the American invaders of the Philippines. It was true that there were feuds among American guerrilla leaders; and true that wartime rivalries between Filipino partisan bands often carried over into postwar feuds and gunfights. But, at bottom, nearly all the Americans subordinated their intramural quarrels to the common need to support MacArthur’s plans to return; and at bottom a large majority of Filipinos spurned the awkward blandishments of their Oriental conquerors and gave the guerrillas the whole-hearted support without which we could not have operated or even survived. How many casualties and how much damage guerrillas inflicted on the Japanese, and how much they and Filipino civilians suffered in return, will never be determined precisely, but both considerably exceeded European norms. At no time during the war did the Japanese ever devise an effective way to deal with partisans, and near the end of the war General Yamashita lamented that the whole Filipino population had become a vast guerrilla system whose intelligence gathering and sabotage had surpassed all his calculations and fears.5 Yet it is in no way denigrating to acknowledge that one of the most valuable services we irregulars performed was simply to keep alive the faith of Filipinos that America had not forgotten them, that our strength would eventually enable us to prevail, that, to paraphrase MacArthur, we would return.
That guerrillas played a vital role in the defeat of the Japanese in Luzon after the Lingayen Gulf landings in January 1945 is unquestioned. What will never be settled is how much was contributed by various groups and whether credit for guerrilla achievements has been distributed equitably. The U.S. Army Forces in the Philippines, Northern Luzon (USAFIP-NL), commanded by Col. Russell Volckmann, have been given the lion’s share of the credit. The official U.S. Army history provides a detailed account of how General Krueger originally intended to use Volckmann’s guerrillas to gather intelligence, carry out sabotage, raid isolated Japanese units, relieve regular army units on guard duty, and engage in mopping up operations. It adds that all the guerrilla leaders, but Volckmann especially, interpreted orders and directives as broadly as possible and soon expanded their assigned tasks to such a degree that they were performing as regular troops. Some 8,000-18,000 of them blasted bridges, roads, and trails; ambushed Japanese forage parties; picked off enemy messengers and liaison groups; destroyed untold numbers of Japanese vehicles; killed thousands of enemy soldiers; rendered it difficult for the enemy to move anywhere save in large numbers; captured great quantities of Japanese equipment and supplies; and conquered the whole northeast coast of Luzon. All this vastly complicated enemy communications, drained his resources, and reduced the ability of Yamashita’s troops to live off the land. Indeed, when the Japanese in north Luzon at last surrendered it was guerrillas who had fought their way within five miles of Yamashita’s headquarters, closer than any other Allied unit.6
These exploits caused both General Krueger and MacArthur’s Headquarters to declare that Volckmann’s guerrillas had proved as valuable as a front line division.7 In his own book Volckmann recounts the deeds of himself and his followers at length, though not boastfully.8 He does allege that, given the ruggedness of the terrain in northern Luzon, the familiarity of the guerrillas with it, and the nature of the fighting there, it would have taken twice as many regular troops as guerrillas to have duplicated these feats.9
That Volckmann’s accomplishments were impressive is unquestionably true, but what he and other writers have largely ignored is that the guerrillas of Lapham, Anderson, Hendrickson, myself, and others faced more Japanese in Tarlac, Pangasinan, and Nueva Ecija provinces than his men did in the north and that we cleared out our foes in short order. My own 3,400 highly varied irregulars, scattered all over Pangasinan in groups of 100, 200, or 300 received credit for killing 3,000 of the enemy during the five days immediately prior to the Lingayen landings. Volckmann’s forces, by contrast, were engaged against the Japanese in north Luzon for another five months, though admittedly conditions there made military progress much more difficult than in the lowlands where most of our operations took place.
The three thousand dead Japanese credited to my units is an estimate, and it has always been difficult to offer anything better than rough estimates about how many enemy casualties should be attributed to any particular body of guerrillas. There are reasons for this—apart from the general confusion of war. For one thing, General Yamashita had almost three times as many troops in north Luzon in June 1945 as General Krueger supposed.10 For another, various estimates of both Japanese and Allied casualties are for different groups, different areas, and different periods of time. For example, James gives one set of figures (8,300 American troops and 1,100 Filipino guerrillas killed in combat and 205,000 Japanese deaths in combat) for the whole Philippine archipelago for all of 1945, and another set (400 Americans and guerrillas and 13,000 Japanese killed in combat) for the last six weeks of the war in north Luzon.11 Volckmann says his guerrilla infantrymen killed more than 4,000 Japanese between January and April 1945, and that all the north Luzon guerrillas inflicted 50,000 casualties on the enemy in the last months of the war.12 William Manchester asserts that after the fall of Luzon 820 American soldiers were lost while killing 21,000 Japanese in mopup operations.13 John D. Potter, who admires the military skill of General Yamashita, puts U.S. casualties in the reconquest of Luzon at 10,000 dead, 87,000 in hospitals, and 37,000 “others.” He says nothing about Japanese losses.14 The official army historian gives varying figures for several particular actions.15 It is all like comparing apples, squirrels, and seashells. It is especially difficult for me, since I was personally involved, to assess the value of Volckmann’s guerrilla activity in the context of all Luzon guerrilla operations; doubly so since I had resisted Volckmann’s effort to absorb my forces into his command.
Volckmann came out of World War II much decorated by both the American and Philippine governments, and I heard many laudatory comments about his organization in the spring of 1945. Yet their postwar renown unquestionably owed much to the concern of their leader for what would become the historical record. General Whitney, MacArthur’s overseer of Philippine intellligence, says Volckmann came to his headquarters only forty-eight hours after the American landings in Lingayen Gulf and delivered a full report on what he and his guerrillas had done during the preceding thirty months, and what they could do henceforth.16 No other leader of irregulars got there so soon or could report so fully.
A severe critic of guerrillas in Volckmann’s locale acknowledges that most of Volckmann’s men were able and civilized, and that they fought valiantly; but he denounces a minority among them, some Americans and some Filipinos, as cruel and egotistical scoundrels, drunk with power, who murdered, pillaged, and raped as wantonly as any of the Japanese. He does not accuse Volckmann of approving, much less authorizing, such conduct, but he does maintain that Volckmann did not do enough to restrain these savages.17
How much Volckmann knew about the deeds of some of his subordinates, and what he could or could not have done about it, I have no way of determining, particularly so many years after the events. As indicated earlier in this narrative, there were times when I had to swallow the unauthorized and exceedingly distasteful conduct of some of my underlings. Perhaps he did too.
Col. Robert Arnold, who commanded the ill-trained, ill-equipped, and understrength Fifteenth Infantry, had a low opinion of Volckmann’s whole operation. He relates that he once visited Volckmann’s headquarters where he found some of Volckmann’s chief subordinates not merely in good health but positively overweight, and more interested in the good-looking girls who frequented the premises than in anything connected with the war. After a sumptuous dinner a Filipino company commander told him that there were no Japanese within twenty-five miles of the camp and that they had not been bothered by the enemy for months.18 Yet a few things must be remembered. Arnold had a sour nature; he regarded guerrilla operations as senseless; and when he stumbled into Blackburn’s camp in the spring of 1943 he was weak and sick. Blackburn says that after a week or so of rest, good food, and good treatment Arnold’s spirits rose visibly.19
There are other indications that guerrilla life was not always filled with hardship and danger for Volckmann and his associates. His number one aide, Blackburn, describes supplies of quinine as plentiful, notes that they sometimes received gifts of whiskey, Coca-Cola, and fried chicken, and mentions matter-of-factly that they bought a good deal from an ordinary Philippine grocery store.20 He says he hated to move out of his own mountain hideout near Ifugao in September 1944 because it was safe: he was surrounded by friendly Filipinos, there was plenty of food, and he dominated all the officials nearby.21 He relates that Volckmann, who sometimes became depressed, seldom strayed from the heights of virtually inaccessible mountains; but that when he happened to meet him at Tuao in the Cagayan Valley early in 1945, after they had been separated for nearly a year, his superior looked healthy and dapper. A Spaniard gave them a bottle of whiskey, and a Chinese cook fixed them a fine lunch.22
All this may be true, but it hardly proves anything noteworthy. Only a fool would live precariously if he could live safely: only saints and mountain climbers actively seek hardship and suffering. Nowhere does the effectiveness of a military organization depend crucially on the standard of living of its commanding officer.
Still, I think Volckmann’s achievements have been magnified; or, perhaps more accurately, that those of some of the rest of us have been slighted by comparison. William Estrada justly praises his countryman Tom Chengay as a fearless man and an excellent leader of a band that performed splendidly late in the war,23 and he praises Lapham,24 but he says little about any of the rest of us, and in any case his work had an extremely limited circulation. Bob Lapham could have made an outstanding military career for himself by trading on his fame as a guerrilla leader, but he was indifferent to glory or even to credit. In the spring of 1945 he broke his arm, fell sick, resigned his command, and went back to the United States. Thereafter he pursued a civilian career with the Burroughs Corporation. He never wrote anything about his wartime experiences. Lt. Col. Bernard L. Anderson likewise left the army. So far as I know, he wrote nothing about his wartime deeds. I was the only major guerrilla leader in north central Luzon who stayed and fought alongside my men through most of the spring of 1945, but until now I have never published anything, either. Thus, some of the credit for guerrilla achievements in north Luzon in 1945 fell to Volckmann’s units by sheer default.
But more was due to foresight. Astute and ambitious, Volckmann seems to have been the only American guerrilla commander on Luzon who kept detailed records, diaries, and rosters of troops. As a result, most of his exploits became part of recorded history. If the rest of us had kept similar records, it would now be much clearer who were authentic guerrillas and who were mere poseurs, which families of fallen irregulars deserved to be compensated, and how much credit ought to have been given to various guerrilla leaders and their groups for their contributions to final victory. But many of us did not keep such records lest they fall into the hands of the enemy, who would not only gain much useful information thereby but would also certainly use them to take murderous vengeance on the families of guerrillas.25 Yet there is no denying that when decades have passed and memories have failed, “official” history is written from records, and these inflate the importance and immortalize the deeds of those who kept them.26
The Philippine government eventually tried to straighten out the historical record but abandoned the effort in the face of insuperable obstacles. Those guerrillas who had once been soldiers in the Philippine army were part of USAFFE, and so their personal records can be found with U.S. military records. As for their compatriots who were civilians, there exist somewhere in Philippine army files official rosters of civilian Filipino guerrillas, but the names thereon may be those of anyone from true partisans to mere rascals who knew somebody important near the end of the war. Whether authentic or phony, few such guerrillas ever got either recognition or financial benefits from the U.S. Army after the war. Most of them simply scattered to their homes and farms in the wake of victory. Soon it became virtually impossible to trace them or to distinguish true from spurious guerrillas. By now the vast majority of them must be dead.27 Thus, it appears impossible that anyone can ever determine accurately how much which irregular bands contributed to the ultimate triumph of Filamerican forces on Luzon in 1945, and which individuals indubitably served in those bands.
Does it matter? In the grand context of history, not much: to those of us who are still alive and were personally involved, it still burns a little.
In late spring I left the battle zone, moved southwestward to Rosales, Pangasinan, and set up a headquarters there from which to coordinate the activities of my guerrillas. Shortly afterward I went down to Manila for some purpose I no longer recall. While there, I went to see a Filipino writer, Lt. F.M. Verano, whom I had come to know when he had served as liaison between my headquarters and that of Gen. Manuel Roxas. Verano told Roxas I was in town, and almost immediately we were invited to a party at the house of Roxas’s brother. There I encountered one of the most remarkable personalities I have ever known. Manuel Roxas was a politician par excellence. As the thirty or so guests prepared to leave, he called each of us by his right name and spoke to us in a moving, personal manner. He also seemed to me to be an unusually humane man. I once watched tears stream down his cheeks as he listened to tales of the tortures suffered by his countrymen at the hands of the Japanese. Such sentiments can be faked by ambitious politicians, I know, but in Roxas’s case I felt sure they were genuine. He was a born leader with an exceptional facility for inspiring others. Though the Japanese had pressured him to serve as president of the Philippine Senate in their wartime puppet government, he did as little as he dared and aided the guerrillas and Allies all he could. At the end of the war he surrendered his military commission and was soon elected president of the Philippine Republic. Though published estimates of Roxas vary markedly, depending mostly on the ideological orientation of the writer, I thought his early death from a heart attack was a grievous loss to the Philippine people.
On this particular occasion Roxas asked me to stay in Manila for a time, but I became impatient and drove back to Rosales. I had hardly alighted from my car when Verano drove up behind me and wanted to know why I had left. He said General Roxas wanted to see me at once, and virtually dragged me into his automobile for the return trip. Back in Manila we met Roxas and rode grandly with him in a chauffeured army car across the wrecked metropolis to the headquarters of General MacArthur. Here I was ushered into the private office of the supreme commander. Already present were fellow guerrillas Lt. Col. Anderson, Majors Lapham, Edwin P. Ramsey, Harry McKenzie, and John P Boone, and Capt. Alvin Faretta. General MacArthur delivered a short speech. My main recollection of it was that it was not at all of the “I have returned” genre: the general stressed, rather, that we had remained, that we had represented our country well by staying on and struggling to erase the stain of the defeats of Bataan and Corregidor. Then he pinned on each of us the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest award for valor. My feelings, as was so often the case in those years, were mixed. Naturally, I was pleased and proud, but I was also so taken by surprise that I had to ask someone what the award meant. Moreover, I felt out of place, even faintly foolish, for I was dressed in issue khaki and combat boots, lacked a tie, and had crossed rifles and captain’s bars on my collar when I was still officially a staff sergeant in the air corps.
My particular DSC cited me for materially aiding American operations on Luzon; specifically for providing intelligence, raiding the Japanese garrison at San Quintin, and carrying on propaganda work among civilians. Three months later I received the Bronze Star for staying with my troops when I could have gone home. I was also honored by a Philippine congressional citation. I heard a story that I had been recommended for the Philippine Distinguished Star, an award equivalent to our congressional medal of honor, but if so nothing ever materialized. It was probably just the nine millionth “latrine rumor” of the war. The anomaly of my rank was clarified a few days after the audience with General MacArthur. I was appointed a captain AUS from USAFFE headquarters, with rank from December 11, 1943.
Of the many guerrilla organizations in the Philippines, Bob Lapham’s was the only one whose officers were not reduced in rank at the end of the war. The highest rank in the whole outfit was Bob’s own: major. That we were not reduced seemed to me proper recognition of our accomplishments, but not less an acknowledgment of Bob’s sense of proportion. Some other outfits had as many backwoods “colonels” as rabbits have descendants.
The saddest memories I retain from World War II are those related to our postwar treatment of Filipinos. Seldom in history have one people been so loyal to another or suffered so much for another as the Filipinos did for Americans. We had built no serious defenses in the Philippines when the war began, yet throughout the struggle the Filipinos shared our hardships, fought beside us, and risked their own and their families’ lives for us. Those of us in the central plains of Luzon could not have survived at all without regular aid from local civilians. Many such civilians lost everything they had for trusting us too much. We owed them protection and defense, yet when the war was over we expected them to be grateful to us for having at length rescued them from further disasters of our making, disasters that had already cost them perhaps a million dead from battle casualties, internecine slaughter, the bloody oppression of civilians, and the merciless scourges of disease and starvation. Yet, despite it all, most ordinary Filipinos were overjoyed when the American army returned.
What ought we have done? In my opinion, we should have made the Philippines a forty-ninth state. Contrary to most of what is written in books, contrary to everything “progressive” people are supposed to believe, I am convinced that in a free election most ordinary Filipinos would have voted to retain or strengthen their ties with America.28 Of course, this was not true of those prominent Filipinos who hoped to become the rulers of an independent nation. Sadly, it is also a fact that race and nationality consciousness are the foremost mass passions of our century, and that in every part of the world ambitious politicians have been able to inflame multitudes by clamoring for “freedom” and “independence.” Perhaps they would have done so in the Philippines too had we retained our control there. But at least we could have offered our wartime allies a choice.
After the war our government was remarkably stingy in its treatment of U.S. guerrillas. The War Claims Act provided that prisoners of war or civilians who had been held by an enemy government and not fed up to standards prescribed by the Geneva Convention should be paid $1 for every day spent in captivity, plus an extra $1.50 per day if they had been treated inhumanely or forced to perform unpaid labor in violation of the Geneva Convention. Al Hendrickson tried for ten years to persuade Congress to amend the act to include guerrillas, with the money to be taken out of Japanese war reparations. He got nowhere. Leon Beck battled in U.S. courts for twelve years to finally keep $992 which our government claimed had been wrongly paid to him as compensation for being a prisoner of war, because he had spent only thirteen days as a prisoner before escaping on the Death March, after which he had been a guerrilla for nearly three years. James P. Boyd, whose personal hegira resembled Beck’s, was less successful. He was officially classified as a prisoner of the Japanese for only one day, April 9, 1942, after which he escaped, and so he was sent a check for one dollar—which he still cherished, uncashed, in 1984!29
Such treatment of American guerrillas was grotesque. That we never properly compensated many of those Filipinos who served with us, or the families of those who died doing so, was truly shameful. To be sure, obstacles in the way of justice were numerous and daunting, and some effort was made to cope with them. For instance, Bob Lapham went back to the islands early in 1947 as a consultant to the Guerrilla Affairs Section of the U.S. Army. He stayed about six months, working with his own guerrilla officers and with American regular officers to reconstruct records and rosters that would be as complete and accurate as possible for Tarlac, Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, and Nueva Vizcaya provinces. He tried to secure back pay and military status for deserving men and to insure that some assistance would be forthcoming to the families of those who had died fighting alongside ourselves against our common enemy. Sorting out the legitimate claims from the more numerous false ones was always difficult and often impossible. Bob said afterward that he believed something approaching justice had been done for most of his men,30 an estimate more optimistic than most. For me the whole business has always been intensely disheartening.
It has often been alleged that Filipinos came out of World War II demoralized. I have always found this hard to accept, since the vast majority of those whom I saw or dealt with were elated, jubilant at the return of American troops and the prospect of imminent victory. But save for the brief trip to Manila to be decorated, described above, I was always out in the hinterlands. The demoralization was said to have been much worse in cities, and especially in Manila. That it existed cannot be doubted, since it has been attested to by numerous American and Filipino writers of several ideological persuasions. They also agree that some of it was inevitable and some was not; and for that which was not, responsibility is divided between Americans and Filipinos themselves.
The descent commenced right at the beginning of the war. The U.S. Army threw open its storehouses in Manila to let Filipino civilians carry away what they could rather than allow it to fall to the invaders. Not satisfied, the recipients plundered Chinese shops and grocery stores for good measure. The police could do nothing since they were too busy elsewhere, they had had their firearms taken away a couple of days earlier, and too many people were involved anyway.31 The wholesale looting of Manila followed. This set the pattern for the future. Before long agriculture broke down, food shortages developed, prices of everything soared while wages remained low, and poor people starved to death in the streets while profiteers and collaborators lived grandly. Under such pressure gangsters and rascals of every stripe flourished. Some were spectacularly shameless. There were Filipino doctors who sold quinine and sulfa drugs at high prices while Filipino survivors of the Bataan Death March died from want of such medicines. Some rascality was bizarre. Graves were robbed to steal fancy clothes and to knock the gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. Some thievery was incredible in its boldness. One robber lifted a Japanese officer’s sword in a theater; another stole a machinegun off a Japanese truck parked in front of a restaurant.32
Japanese occupation forces soon contributed heavily to the economic and moral debacle. They elbowed their way into every Philippine industry of any consequence and manipulated the currency in ways that steadily drained the country of its raw materials and movable wealth.
To avoid starvation and to survive the counterpressures on them from the Japanese on one side and competing bands of guerrillas on the other, ordinary Filipinos were forced into the sort of moral compromises their political leaders faced when serving in the Japanese-sponsored “Philippine Republic.” Everybody stole from everybody else, both to live and to sell the loot to the Japanese. It soon seemed that any noteworthy transaction required an agent, a go-between, or some “sharpy” taking a cut.
Black marketeering flourished; “protection” was routinely sold to railway shippers; hijacking became commonplace; ticket scalping proliferated; ersatz foods multiplied; dogs and cats in various guises appeared on restaurant menus; local government broke down to such a degree that garbage and even unburied corpses lay in the streets of tropical cities for days on end; and shortages of everything were so bad that if one went to a hospital he had to bring his own bandages and medicines. At the war’s end stevedores systematically looted American ships at temporary piers, and the streets of Manila teemed with hawkers of everything salable.33
Worst of all was the growth of eleventh hour “heroes” and of violence, especially in 1945. Many who had done nothing save pray that MacArthur would return soon now swaggered about carrying .45s. They talked loudly about what fearless guerrillas they had been, shouted orders at civilians, and confiscated food in the name of “military law.” They kidnapped and robbed or murdered the wealthy, or merely the unlucky, on the ground that the victims were “collaborators.”
During the war thoughtful Filipinos, viewing current destruction and what they knew was certain to come, and knowing that eventual reconstruction would be difficult, expressed the hope that when the war was over America would not forget Filipino bravery in the common struggle and would provide the aid the Philippines would need so sorely.34 Things hardly turned out thus. In 1945-46 hordes of American soldiers flooded into the Philippines, many of them interested primarily in un-Christian living. Filipinas flocked to them, and venereal disease rates soared. Though Bob Lapham thought the American officers with whom he worked to investigate Filipino guerrilla war claims were generally conscientious, others have portrayed them as preoccupied primarily with playing golf or “investigating the anatomy of local women.”35 Perhaps worst of all, a swarm of “fast buck” types followed apace, taking advantage of wartime privations and general disorder.
Such irresponsible conduct indicated a fundamental inadequacy: in 1945-46 the U.S. government had no clear-cut Philippine policy. While Washington did follow through on the highest level of general policy, in that independence which had been promised to the Filipinos in 1934 was granted on schedule in 1946, when it came down to particular deeds the islands were treated with a mixture of muddle and neglect. In Manila, meanwhile, members of the new Philippine Congress, not to be outdone in either folly or venality, voted themselves back pay even though their national treasury was empty. In Washington years passed, senators and congressmen grew older, memories of the war receded, and interest waned in either Philippine claims or American obligations. With that strange perversity that seems to overcome us periodically, we adopted the policy that some Europeans have described wryly as “treating neutrals like friends, enemies like neutrals, and friends like enemies.” Filipinos could never understand why their idol, General MacArthur, went off to promote and preside over the recovery of Japan rather than the Philippines; why in the first year after the war their country received only about $3 million in UNRRA aid while Yugoslavia got $300 million;36 or why Americans seemed more solicitous about the condition of Nisei in the United States than that of ex-allies.
Small wonder that so many in the Philippine generation that has grown up since 1945 have become anti-American. They never experienced the warm comradeship of Americans and Filipinos in the war years. Their memories are, rather, of stolen war property, American and Filipino profiteers, endless squabbles over veterans’ benefits, and those tawdry features of our civilization that so often impress foreigners more than American qualities of which we can justly be proud. Those Filipinos, old now, who do remember the war years have been saddened by these developments. I have received letters from some I knew and some I did not, and clippings from Philippine newspapers, referring to me as a “grateful American” and praising me in terms that are embarrassing, all because I have done such small things as keep in touch with some wartime Filipino associates or refer to Filipinos favorably in occasional letters to American magazines.37
How little we, as a people, appreciate the intangibles in human affairs; how heedlessly we threw away so much good will in the Philippines that could have been preserved merely by curbing a small number of swine among our own people and by treating more generously those who struggled and suffered with us. A remark attributed to the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer seems apropos here: “If God saw fit to limit human intelligence, it hardly seems fair that He did not also limit human stupidity.”
Few important things in life go smoothly; certainly few things in the army do. A week after I had received my DSC I said goodbye to all my friends and put in for air transportation home. At once I hit a snag. I was informed that everyone in my category (Project J, “Recovered Personnel”) had long since been flown out and that only seagoing transportation was now available. I protested that this policy was both absurd and unfair since I had remained in the service for additional months of my own volition. Was I now to be penalized for it?
I got nowhere with the middle-range military bureaucrats who deal routinely with such matters, so I asked to see Major Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s G-2. The next day I was leaning over a desk in his outer office writing something when a massive man came up alongside me and asked if I was Captain Hunt. Momentarily startled, I gazed upward at the giant who loomed over me and then downward as his huge hand engulfed mine. General Willoughby then asked how old I was. When I told him I was twenty-five, he said he had read some of my dispatches when he was in Australia and from them had envisioned me as a much older man. Then he asked me what he could do for me. I told him my troubles. He said he thought I should take an ocean liner; that three weeks or so of lounging in deck chairs with attentive nurses about struck him as an especially pleasant way to travel for someone who had been in a war zone for three years. I replied that I had not seen any of my family for more than six years and would like to get home as soon as possible. He shrugged at what clearly seemed to him my invincible irrationality. Then he wrote me an endorsement for air transportation, phrased so generously that it might have served as a commendation, and wished me well.
Two days later I boarded a C-54 at Nichols Field, where I had been at the outbreak of the war. My earthly possessions consisted of a couple of GI uniforms, some underwear, a few toilet articles, and my ornate 9mm. German Luger. Looking over my shoulder through the window of the plane, I watched the shores of the Philippines gradually disappear into the trackless sea. I had seen the whole war on one of those islands, and by the grace of God I was still alive. It seemed improbable.
Now, long after, I seldom think about the war or my part in it, save for the recollection and study that were essential to write this book. Its composition has been, for me, an emotional experience. I undertook it with several hopes: to add a bit to the historical record of World War II; to apportion credit a little more equitably among Americans and Filipinos who struggled and endured so much together; and to pay a final tribute to the many Filipinos who did so much for me.
When the book is finished, I shall read it and then put the war behind me, but I will never forget the lessons World War II taught me. When I look now at fields, trees, birds, mere clouds in the sky, I see beauty and feel content. It seems so easy to imagine that henceforth peace will engulf the earth because that ought to be the case. Yet, on the intellectual level, I have to agree with Margaret Utinsky, who endured worse things at the hands of the enemy than I ever did. She points out that people do not change much. We Americans read history, if we do so at all, as if it had no relation to us, no messages for us. The same terrible things—war, starvation, torture, execution—continue to happen, as they have for ages past, and each time we act surprised. Years pass, people visit places where ghastly crimes were once committed and shameful indignities inflicted, but where museums now stand. They pay admission, acquire a few superficial impressions, and learn nothing from having seen one more “historical shrine.”38 Perhaps there truly is an unbridgeable gulf between different kinds of human experiences and different categories of knowledge. When men contend with material substances, inanimate objects, and natural forces, each generation can build on what has been achieved by its predecessors, and we witness humanity’s visible progress in engineering, medicine, agriculture, the natural sciences, and the multiplication of wealth. Yet in such realms as the relationship of individuals to each other, of individuals to governments, and of governments to other governments, areas where people are on both sides, domains where human vanity, obstinacy, and ambition prevail, knowledge seems noncumulative. Here, each generation seems doomed to repeat the crimes and follies of its predecessors, and we still wrestle with most of the same problems that vexed the ancient Greeks.