Filipinos and I fell in love with each other.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
NATION building—the wrenching process of bringing disparate people together under a new government—is as old as civilization. The very first nation builders were the ancient kings of Mesopotamia and Egypt, who five thousand years ago constructed the first civilizations. Every great conqueror, from Alexander to Napoleon, was in some form a nation builder. The two great victors of World War II—the Soviet Union and the United States—were no different. Each attempted to spread its own form of government and political ideology, different as they were, to new nations being born across Asia and Africa from the debris of old colonial empires.
This was both a heady and a nerve-racking time, with American proconsuls installed in Tokyo and Berlin, and American emissaries fanning out around the world to refashion nations on democratic lines. Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was to title his memoirs Present at the Creation. Many others who were active in those years felt the same way. “We have, and we know we have, the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass—to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire,” said Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress.1
Anything seemed possible at the dawn of the postwar world.
EDWARD LANSDALE’S introduction to the excitement and frustrations of nation building came in the fall of 1945 when he arrived in the Philippines. His first glimpse of the land where he would make his reputation came near midnight on October 9, 1945, only two months after the nuclear bombs had finally stilled the war engines of the Japanese Empire. An electrical storm was raging, and he was exhausted after a sixteen-day voyage from San Francisco along with four thousand other soldiers aboard the USS Uruguay. During the crossing, the titanic transport ship had hit the tail end of a typhoon and everyone aboard thought they were going to sink. They were, in fact, lucky to make it to land.2
The land in which they were arriving was both alien and strangely familiar—the United States refracted through a funhouse mirror. The Philippines was a largely Catholic country where English was the language of government, the upper crust went by nicknames like Babe and Pinksy, Rotary and Shriners and Lions clubs were a well-established part of the social firmament, and Tin Pan Alley tunes were as popular as they were in New York. A young American officer who had arrived in Manila just a few months before Lansdale remarked in wonder, “Why the girls here paint their lips, their finger nails and even their toe nails, just as in the States.”
The Philippines was not, of course, just the same as the United States. As Stanley Karnow was to point out in his book In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, the vast majority of the ordinary people were far less touched by American influences than were the elites. In rural areas, most farmers lived under a quasi-feudal regime, laboring on the estates of a small number of wealthy landowners whose property holdings descended from the days of Spanish rule. Even the more Americanized upper class was bound by extended kinship ties that were alien to the more individualistic Americans and that underlay a pervasive culture of corruption. But superficially, at least, there was much that would have made a newcomer like Lansdale feel at home.3
The transformation of the Philippines into a faraway simulacrum of the United States had begun nearly half a century earlier. While the United States had declared war on Spain in 1898 as a result of American outrage over Spanish abuses in Cuba, the peace treaty that ended the conflict also gave the United States, almost as a lagniappe, sovereignty over another former Spanish colony, the Philippines. The young insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy led violent resistance to American rule in a savage conflict with some similarities to the future war in Vietnam—including the domestic opposition that both wars aroused. The Anti-Imperialist League united worthies such as Mark Twain, Grover Cleveland, and Andrew Carnegie, who were horrified to read that American troops were torturing Filipinos (including the use of the “water cure,” a technique learned from the Spanish, and later called waterboarding) and killing even noncombatants.
Yet while the United States was to lose in Vietnam, it won in the Philippines. An important difference was that North Vietnam was adjacent to the People’s Republic of China, which provided copious weapons and training to the Vietminh and later the Vietcong, whereas the Philippine insurrectos, fighting on islands whose approaches were dominated by the U.S. Navy, had no real outside support. The insurrectos also lacked leaders of the caliber of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap; Aguinaldo made no attempt to win over the bulk of the population by pushing for social and land reforms, as the Vietcong would later do, because such revolutionary steps would have alienated his upper-class supporters.
By the time the conflict had mostly ended, in 1902, the United States had lost 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded. Some 200,000 Filipino civilians died as a result of disease and mistreatment from both sides. Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, a future Army chief of staff, extinguished the last resistance on Luzon by herding more than 300,000 civilians into “zones of protection,” similar to the “concentration camps” that British forces were constructing at virtually the same time to defeat a Boer uprising in South Africa, in order to cut them off from the guerrillas. As in South Africa, many in the Philippines died because of the lack of proper medical care and nutrition in these makeshift holding pens.
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that American forces simply terrorized Filipinos into acquiescence. While U.S. troops relentlessly pursued guerrillas, the first civilian governor, William Howard Taft, who arrived in 1900, set up schools and hospitals, imported idealistic young American teachers known as Thomasites (they arrived on the transport ship Thomas), improved public sanitation, wiped out infectious diseases, built roads, and took other steps to win over the population. Lansdale would later cite the efforts of the Thomasites and other well-intentioned Americans as the ideal of the “True American” that the United States needed to inculcate into its representatives abroad to win the Cold War: “a person of integrity, with the courage of his convictions, with competence in some technical field, with devotion to getting things done, and with Christian affection for his fellow man.” (“Admittedly,” he added, in a self-aware postscript, “this is an ideal which human weaknesses make it difficult to achieve.”)4
U.S. rule was paternalistic and racist (Taft referred to Filipinos as “our little brown brothers” and ordinary soldiers called them “googoos” or “niggers”), but it was also in important respects more liberal than contemporary European colonial regimes. Washington did not allow American companies to set up agricultural concerns to exploit local labor and land such as the vast rubber plantations owned by the French in Indochina, the Dutch in the East Indies, and the British in Malaya. There was no need to exploit the Philippines when the American homeland was so abundantly provided with natural resources of its own. The Filipinos elected a national legislature in 1907, and by the 1920s they had taken over most administrative and military posts. In 1935, President Roosevelt created the Philippine Commonwealth, which enjoyed autonomy in its domestic affairs, while promising complete independence in 1946.
Filipino-American ties were tested and ultimately strengthened by the Japanese attack that began within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. While some Filipinos cooperated with the Japanese occupiers, few became enthusiastic adherents of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Filipinos resented the fact that they had to bow to their new conquerors or else suffer “a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, or a blow from a gun butt.”5 By war’s end some two hundred thousand Filipinos had joined guerrilla bands to resist Japanese rule in cooperation with scattered survivors from the defeated American forces. They were inspired, these Filipinos, by the injunction of Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon y Molina, who told his people before evacuating Corregidor, “Keep your faith in America, whatever happens.”6
General Douglas MacArthur kept his own faith in the Philippines even after being evacuated to Australia in 1942. One of the most brilliant and obdurate, vainglorious and controversial figures in modern military history, he was the son of General Arthur MacArthur, who commanded U.S. troops in putting down the “Philippine Insurrection,” and he himself had spent a substantial portion of his life in the Philippines. Although known to American soldiers (including his often exasperated aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower) for his aloof, autocratic, and self-dramatizing ways, MacArthur endeared himself to Filipinos by treating them as equals at a time when racism was still pervasive among Americans in the archipelago. Determined to make good on his pledge to “return,” MacArthur insisted over the objections of his Navy counterparts that U.S. forces had to liberate the Philippines on their island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese mainland. And on October 20, 1944, MacArthur did wade through the surf to a beach on the island of Leyte to proclaim, “People of the Philippines I have returned. . . . Rally to me!”
Nearly three months later, on January 9, 1945, U.S. troops landed at Lingayen Gulf on northern Luzon in order to drive to Manila, 110 miles to the south. The Japanese army commander in the Philippines, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, wanted to abandon Manila, a flat, sprawling city of seven hundred thousand people, because he did not believe it could be successfully defended; he preferred to harass the American invaders from bases in Luzon’s jungle-covered mountains. But Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, the commander of a naval defense force, had other ideas. With twenty thousand soldiers and sailors under his command, he was determined to defend Manila to the last man. He forced U.S. troops to fight for Manila block by block in vicious street fighting accompanied by artillery duels that razed much of the city between February 3 and March 3. After just a week of fighting, one resident of Manila reported that the “view down San Andres [Street] was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Strewn with bloated corpses, wrecked cars, dead animals, piles of rubble, twisted metal roofing, and urban debris, we could not get oriented because there was not a single landmark we recognized.”7
An estimated one million Filipinos perished during the Japanese occupation. Of that total fully 10 percent—one hundred thousand—died in the ruins of Manila when the hour of liberation was at hand. An American general who toured the city on March 3 found that it had all but “ceased to exist.” For days afterward, noted the historian D. Clayton James, “the horrible stench of thousands of unburied corpses pervaded the downtown area.” But then, “like the miraculous appearance of green shoots on the charred earth of a forest recently ravaged by fire, signs of life and activity began to reappear” as Filipinos emerged from “hiding in blasted buildings and homes.”8 Even though American artillery fire had played a significant role in Manila’s destruction—arguably a greater role than Japanese vindictiveness—few Filipinos blamed their liberators and most were grateful for American help in rebuilding. Filipinos and Americans immediately began working together to deliver food, stop the spread of contagious diseases, reopen schools, restart the water supply, and do everything else needed to bring a devastated metropolis back to life. By March 13, 1945, the lights were coming back on across Manila.
EDWARD LANSDALE landed in the Philippines just seven months after the conclusion of the Battle of Manila and only three months after the last Japanese units on Luzon had surrendered. He saw the war’s impact even before setting foot ashore. In Manila harbor, Lansdale counted thirty sunken ships: “There were sterns pointing straight up to the sky out of the water, hulls side up looking like elephants submerged and taking baths, just sticks of masts above the water, and some twisted and buckled rusty plates like reddish warts above the water where ships had been blown apart.”
Lansdale made the trip to a U.S. Army camp outside Manila aboard a crowded troop train. He and the other soldiers were packed like cattle into cars that were normally used to transport sugarcane. As the train chugged along at 15 mph, someone “started ‘moo-ing’ like a lonely cow and the moo-ing was taken up all along the line.” From the “trainload of moos,” Lansdale could see that the “strikingly beautiful” countryside had not been affected by war to the same extent as the harbor. He saw “palm huts on stilts with vivid green banana fronds making a border for a blue, blue sky marbled with towering fluffs of cumulus clouds, and before this background of sky and hut and fronds was spread a rice paddy intersticed with small raised dikes and the green rice sprouts making a staccato vertical pattern broken by big old water buffalo plodding along, with a copper skinned old man, all bent, straw big brimmed coolie hat on his head, following after.”
When the train reached Manila, such bucolic scenes were replaced by further reminders of the legacy of conflict. “Stone walls along the roads were gouged and holed,” Lansdale wrote, “tall apartment houses and hotels and public buildings—the ones that earned Manila the name ‘Pearl of the Orient’ showed gaping holes, sagging concrete floors open to view, and with rusty iron girders all twisted and bent and dangling out of crumbled concrete twenty stories up like dried worms baked in the sun while still wriggling.”
Lansdale and the other troops finally settled into a camp located fifty-five miles outside Manila, near a major air base, Clark Field. There were still many unexploded shells scattered around. “Ordnance teams are blowing them up constantly and I’m writing now [to] the accompaniment of boom-boom-boom,” Lansdale wrote on October 12, 1945. Also loitering about were some Japanese holdouts who either had not heard of their nation’s surrender or who refused to believe it. Lansdale saw fourteen Japanese soldiers—“a very bedraggled group of forgotten men”9—come in from the hills just outside his camp and surrender rather than starve in the jungle.
Most American soldiers in the Philippines were eager to depart now that the war was over. “Everything is confusion and indifference here now,” Lansdale noted, “the correct attitude being: the war is over now, so let’s go home.”10 Lansdale possessed a very different outlook. Before he had shipped out from the United States, Ed had a brief conversation with his brother Ben, an engineer in uniform, who had visited the Philippines during the war to study the impact of proximity fuses in artillery shells.
Ben remembered Ed asking him “what musical tunes were popular among the Filipino troops and when I didn’t know, he played a few tunes on his pocket-size harmonica and asked me if I had heard any of those.” Ben said he hadn’t paid attention to what Filipinos were singing because “that wasn’t part of my military duties.” He wondered why Ed cared.
Lansdale replied that he “wasn’t going there to shoot at people or to try to make them change their minds by force, but rather to understand them and to help guide them into a type of democracy that would live and have meaning to the people. And one way to understand and to communicate with the people is by knowing their songs, something they hold dear to their hearts.”11
If we are to credit Ben’s recollection of this conversation, Ed Lansdale was from the start of his sojourn in Asia intensely interested in the people he would meet and how he could help them to build a better nation.
MAJOR LANSDALE was initially assigned as chief of the relatively small intelligence division (G-2) for Army Forces Western Pacific. (Under the Napoleonic staff system adopted by the U.S. armed forces, the personnel staff is designated G-1, intelligence is G-2, operations G-3, logistics G-4, and so on.) In this position he performed myriad jobs. He helped to coordinate security for the 1946 inauguration of Manuel Roxas y Acuña, a close associate of the late Manuel Quezon, as the last president of the American-dominated Commonwealth of the Philippines and the first president of the independent Republic of the Philippines. He helped to train an intelligence division for the new Philippine army. He resolved some “300-odd cases of internees of doubtful nationality,” such as Chinese slave laborers imported into the Philippines by the Japanese. In the latter case, one of his friends, Major O. J. Magee, wrote, “He found the root of the trouble quickly, pulled, kicked and pounded his way through obstacles of inertia, high politics, pomposity and ignorance, and soon had an honest system operating smoothly.”12
All the while, Lansdale was struggling to understand the country in which he now found himself living—something that remarkably few soldiers of any nationality bother to do when deployed abroad. The rare exceptions tend to be celebrated ones. They include the French field marshal Hubert Lyautey in Indochina and Morocco, the British commanders Robert Clive and Frederick Roberts in India, and T. E. Lawrence in Arabia. Only a few contemporary Americans such as Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines and Japan would have made the list; in years past, the most noted American military students of foreign societies had been Indian fighters such as George Crook and Christopher “Kit” Carson. While their fellow officers preferred unintellectual pastimes such as polo or hunting, drinking or card playing, these renegades undertook the difficult and sometimes dangerous work of acquainting themselves with alien cultures and in the process often became alienated from their own societies.
Lansdale followed their example by getting his “staff of home-sick Americans to change their habits of estimating an enemy’s order-of-battle and combat intentions and, instead, to take a hard look at the country where we were. An estimate of the war-ravaged socio-economic conditions in the Philippines, soon to be an independent nation relying on itself, was sorely needed. So we worked on the task, giving the results not only to Washington but also to Malacanan [Palace] where they were of use to the Philippine President and his Cabinet.”13 By the beginning of 1947, Lansdale and his staff had compiled twenty-seven major studies that offered the most thorough survey of conditions in the Philippines during that period. A typical study, completed in June 1946, began by noting, “The situation is far worse than what was envisioned in 1941.” The Philippines faced war damage estimated at $700 million to $800 million, with nearly 80 percent of schools and 60 percent of power plants having to be rebuilt. The citizenry also confronted rampant “lawlessness” and a skyrocketing cost of living, making “many necessities of life . . . nearly impossible to obtain, except through the black market.” “On the other hand,” the survey noted, “the situation is far more encouraging than it was right after the liberation in the Spring of 1945.” “Money and supplies” had poured in from the United States to help alleviate “the first, or disaster, phase of rehabilitation.” The health situation had improved, the ports were again functioning, “transportation is nearly normal again,” and “public water-works are in good shape.”14 Following this summary came page after page of in-depth information, illustrated by striking photographs.
Although the details were unique to the Philippines, roughly similar conclusions could have been reached about many other places in post-1945 Asia, including China, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, Korea, Thailand, and Indochina—all of which, like the Philippines, would be convulsed by insurgencies that arose out of the chaotic, impoverished, and unsettled postwar conditions. Lansdale recognized the danger before most of his contemporaries. His reports were not focused on tracking enemies, the traditional mission of military intelligence. Rather, he was tracking societal conditions to ensure that new enemies did not arise out of the rubble of old wars.
JAPAN, WHICH in the historian John Dower’s phrase “embraced defeat,” was one of the few Asian nations that did not experience an armed uprising after the end of the war, but U.S. forces stationed there still faced a daunting array of difficulties. Lansdale was to get a firsthand glimpse of the challenges of rehabilitating America’s former adversary in 1946. That summer the military government of the Ryukyus, a chain of islands stretching south from the Japanese mainland toward Taiwan, was to pass from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Army. Okinawa, the biggest of the Ryukyus, was well known to American soldiers as the scene of one of their bloodiest battles of World War II. The other Ryukyus, some of them little more than tiny unpopulated atolls jutting out of the blue-green waters of the East China Sea, were terra incognita to most Americans—or, for that matter, most Japanese. In the spring of 1946, Major Lansdale was dispatched, at his own initiative, to learn more about the thirty-two islands located north of Okinawa, with an estimated population of 190,000.
While his formal mission was simply to gather information, Lansdale was, in fact, part of a larger endeavor on the part of the American armed forces, which were then engaged in one of the most successful examples of nation building on record by converting the Japanese from foes to friends. That process was just beginning when Lansdale set out for the Ryukyus. Assigned to accompany him was an agent from the Army Counterintelligence Corps, James Clark, an Army photographer, Technician Fifth Grade David Greene (addressed as “corporal” or “tech corporal”), and a Nisei interpreter, Technician Fourth Grade Matsue Yagawa (addressed as “sergeant”). No other transportation being available, they had to travel on leaky wooden Japanese boats, first the Koei-maru and then the Taekuku-maru, which were normally used to haul rice and other goods between the islands.
They set off from Okinawa at the end of April 1946 aboard the eighty-foot-long Koei-maru, which Lansdale described as “a sort of overgrown rowboat and a very ratty, dirty and ancient one.” Lansdale had to share the “tiny” captain’s cabin with two other Americans. In addition to the Americans, the boat carried Japanese crew members, a Japanese government official, a Japanese sugar dealer, and the “silver-toothed” Japanese captain and shipowner, who, Lansdale was amused to note, “laughs at everything. If the ship were sinking, he’d probably stand on deck and laugh until the tears came.” Lansdale did not speak a word of Japanese, but still had “quite a conversation” with his Japanese shipmates “using our phrase books.”
As they chugged along, the whole boat shaking from the vibrations of the diesel engine, Lansdale sat early one morning on the “deck” (“boards over the hold with canvas cover”), wearing nothing but shorts, smoking a cigarette (most likely a Chesterfield, his favorite brand), enjoying the “pleasantly warm” weather, and looking out over the endless ocean. Lansdale “started wondering how strange it was to be in a little Jap island boat that the U.S. had been trying to sink not long ago—and going up to look at islands which few people have even heard of.” (His casual use of “Jap” shows that the contemptuous wartime argot had not entirely vanished with the coming of peace.) Along the way, Lansdale saw such natural wonders as an active volcano on the island of Suwanosejima, which had “ruddy flames and plumes of smoke” and “spit up white hot chunks of magma from time to time as we approached it across the strait.” But his primary interest was in the natives, not nature, and he found plenty to fascinate him in these remote and isolated societies. Hanging “onto a bulkhead with one hand” while “writing with the other,” he would produce an extensive report on food availability, public health, government, education, social organizations, and other aspects of the islands. It was not just subjects of military concern that caught his attention and led him to put pen to paper. On Suwanosejima, he was entranced by the locals who “danced and sang for us the other night—old ladies first, beating hard drums and a dry nasal song, then the younger women with kids strapped on their backs—the kids looking wide-eyed at the Americans as their mothers jogged in a circle.”
Lansdale’s observations were part of a long history of American fascination with the islands of the Pacific stretching at least as far back as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Herman Melville’s first book, which was based on his experiences as a deserter from a whaling ship in the Marquesas Islands. Interest in the region only increased with Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853–55, the clipper trade with China, and the fin de siècle acquisition of Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island, followed four decades later by the island-hopping campaign in World War II. A naval lieutenant just a year older than Lansdale was even then writing a collection of short stories that would come to define Pacific island culture for most Americans. James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific would be published in 1947 and, after rocketing to the top of the best-seller list, would win the Pulitzer Prize and become the basis for the popular musical South Pacific. Lansdale’s experiences could have made a fitting sequel—“A Tale of the North Pacific.”
In a journal he kept, Lansdale recounted how his party made landfall at the town of Naze, capital of the island of Amami Oshima, on May 2, 1946. He observed “dark masses of high hills on each side, above was alive with stars, and nearby in the waters, were rowboats and sampans with fishermen using copper-colored flares to attract the fish.” The boat’s engine was shut off, and they “glided along silently over the batches of copper reflections.” Nearly all of the Ryukyus had been bombed or strafed regularly by American warplanes between March and August 1945. These attacks destroyed a third of the fishing fleet and roughly half of all standing structures. “The business section of Naze was wiped out,” one of Lansdale’s reports noted, and farmers were unable to work their fields “because of the frequency of the air raids.” Although fishermen were going out once again and farmers were planting sweet potatoes, Lansdale noted, “the islands are existing on a bare subsistence level.” The inhabitants were reduced to eating grass soup.
The crisis, as in many other places in Europe and Asia, was compounded by the kind of corruption that the director Carol Reed and screenwriter Graham Greene would memorably depict in the 1949 film noir classic The Third Man, set in a seedy and decrepit Vienna. In a village on Amami Oshima, Lansdale discovered the local version of the black marketeer Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in the movie. His name was Kinoje Degushi, and his position was subgovernor (or mayor). Misusing his authority, he had stolen substantial supplies of rice and sold them on the black market. Lansdale did not bother to notify his headquarters and ask for instructions. He took matters into his own hands by confiscating all of the rice and redistributing it to the residents. Then he convened the people in the schoolhouse, which he converted to a makeshift courthouse, to sit in judgment on their subgovernor.
With Kinoje sitting forlornly beside him, Lansdale, speaking through his Japanese American translator, Matsue Yagawa, delivered an indictment of the subgovernor, saying he wasn’t doing his job, because he was letting the people go hungry. As Lansdale was speaking, Matsue whispered to him that Kinoje was trying to inch open the drawer of the school desk in front of him to grab a gun. The army counterintelligence agent and photographer were getting nervous; they asked for, and received, Lansdale’s permission to prepare their rowboat for a hasty departure. Lansdale, who had a .45-caliber automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, told Matsue to tell the subgovernor, “I know he’s got a gun in there and I’m waiting for him to get it . . . and take a shot at me so I can kill him right in front of the people.” Upon hearing this, Kinoje jumped up to show that he had no gun and surrendered on the spot.
Lansdale and his small team marched their prisoner down to the boat to transport him to jail, one of the few buildings that remained standing in Naze. As they were leaving, Matsue asked Lansdale how fast he was on the draw. Lansdale had to admit that he’d never taken his pistol out of its shoulder holster. On examining the gun, he discovered it was lodged so tightly in the new holster that he couldn’t even “tug it loose.” “Oh Geez,” Matsue said nervously. “I thought you were lightning fast. I was getting ready to duck and everything but you’d just have been creamed on the spot.” Lansdale was no gunfighter, but he was a master of psychology and had just tricked the subgovernor into submission.
While they were sailing back to Naze with their prisoner, Lansdale and his men passed a small copse of Japanese fishing boats. The fishermen had already heard of how Lansdale had arrested the corrupt official, and they were yelling thanks. In Naze, local people came up to express their gratitude and to offer gifts. The mayor gave him a scroll, and the local prostitute, “the one bad girl for all these islands,” gave him “a little handkerchief with dirty pictures on it, all nicely folded up.”
Lansdale, naturally, found the trip to be “exciting.” He exulted, with the typical pride of the Western imperialist or nation builder, “In some places, I was the first white man people had seen—in most places, the second white man.” “And,” he added excitedly, “coming in on a Jap boat, I learned more about the islands than anyone previously. . . . I’m the only officer above the grade of 2nd Lt. or Ensign who ever rode a rice boat in these waters.” While on the move, he wrote, “I’m really having the time of my life—except I seem to stink of moldy rice by now.”
Helping the people of these exotic, faraway islands while advancing the interests of his own country was a heady tonic for a thirty-eight-year-old former advertising man who only five years before might easily have imagined that he would spend the rest of his life peddling consumer products—Levi’s jeans and Wells Fargo bank accounts and Swiss Colony wines—while living in the comfort of Northern California. His initial success in the Ryukyus confirmed Lansdale’s conviction that, by getting involved in their internal affairs, he could help the people of Asia as they confronted the challenges of the postwar world. “Look where I am,” he thought. And look at what I can do.15
BACK AMID the wartime damage and tropical beauty of the Philippines, Lansdale continued his efforts to learn as much as possible about the archipelago. “I have always felt that if you are going to report on something,” Lansdale later said, “don’t take the word of other people, go out and eyeball it and see and then talk to people. You get a far different feeling for the problem and the situation.”16 He made it a point to get out of Manila as often as possible to explore the countryside. Usually he went on Sundays, a day of rest for many of his fellow soldiers but not for him. In a journal he kept intermittently, he described a typical Sunday—October 27, 1946—which illustrated not only how widely he traveled but also how many friends he had accumulated in such a short time.
“I was glad to get away from Manila,” Lansdale wrote, which he did by borrowing a jeep to pick up his friend Engracio Fabre, recently appointed commissioner of immigration by President Roxas. Together they “drove over to a house in the Santa Cruz district just off Rizal [Boulevard]” to pick up Congressman Fortunato Suarez from the city of Lucena. “When Suarez came out finally in a rumpled white pongee suit, complete with shirt and tie, his packages piled on top of all Fabre’s packages, we then set off again and picked up a Congressman from Samar at a nearby house.” Their next destination was yet another congressman’s house, where they were surprised to find a political meeting in progress at 7:30 a.m. on Sunday. “So I sat,” Lansdale wrote a few days later, “and looked wise while speeches in Tagalog sputtered all around me.” After an hour of this, “we all shook hands and swore eternal friendship and the four of us who went in then went out and drove to . . . breakfast at the Selecta, which consisted of thick doughy hotcakes and coffee.”
By 11 a.m., Lansdale and his three friends were on the highway heading south toward Quezon Province, a narrow isthmus wedged between the Sierra Madre mountains to the north and the Sibuyan Sea to the south. The drive in the topless vehicle was bumpy and uncomfortable. Soon it started to rain. “In seconds we were working through mud and a passing truck threw a big gob of it into my face,” Lansdale wrote. “Suarez, dozing in his white pongee in the rear seat, let out a wild yell and I turned and saw that he was covered with mud. He and the others then started laughing at the fun of getting splattered with mud, so I just kept on going. We entered the coconut country and my good humor came back, with the sight of green trees again.” By 1 p.m., with the rain still falling hard, they stopped for lunch “at a fairly clean looking panciteria,” where they sat in their “muddy and soggy clothes and ate a sourish pancit soup and rice and a strong-tasting fish and washed it down with coffee.” When they got on the road again, “the rain suddenly turned into a regular S.E. monsoon, with sheets of water blowing in horizontally. I strapped my raincoat tightly about my wrists, but even then the rain blew up my left sleeve where my arm was raised to the steering wheel and I was soon sopping wet inside my rain-proof.”
Finally they reached the town of Lucena, the capital of Quezon Province nestled precariously on the edge of Tayabas Bay, where, Lansdale wrote, he “delivered Suarez to his wife, who gave me a glass of tepid beer which I drank while my clothes kept a steady drip-drip on the living room floor.” Then on to Fabre’s hometown of Sariaya, “where I discussed the local copra situation with [Rufino] Rodriguez, the local big-shot planter, then I met the governor and was invited to a banquet.” At Fabre’s house, “suddenly the strain of the . . . week and the long drive hit me, so I went in and lay down on his parents’ bed, on a straw mat, and ‘took a nap.’ Fabre tried to wake me later to attend the governor’s banquet, but without luck. I slept right on through until 5 the next morning, when I woke up, had a cup of coffee and drove the 150 km. back to Manila for a conference with the general at 9 a.m.”17
LANSDALE DID not spend all his time hobnobbing with influential politicos. He was just as eager to meet the Negritos, Stone Age hunter-gatherers living on Luzon and other islands across Southeast Asia. Existing apart from other Filipinos, the Negritos had little interest in the quarrels between the Japanese and the Allies or later the Communists and the government, but with their knowledge of the rain forests of central Luzon they could be invaluable scouts and intelligence collectors for whichever side won them over. They occupied a cultural and geographical niche somewhat similar to that of the Montagnards, the hill tribes of Vietnam, which the French were then employing against the Vietminh and which the Americans would later employ against the Vietcong.
In October 1945, shortly after his arrival in the Philippines, Lansdale set off to find out what had happened to a Japanese armored column near Clark Field. Some Negritos, only three to four feet tall and clad in loincloths, showed up at his camp. Lansdale cooked them dinner while trying to figure out how to communicate with them since the only word of English they knew was “okay.” They didn’t even speak Tagalog, only their own tribal dialect. “This problem was finally solved by each of us drawing pictures in the sand and acting out parts,” Lansdale recalled. In this way he figured out that the Americans had done something to the daughter of the tribal chief and specifically something to her belly. At first Lansdale assumed she had been abducted and raped by GIs. But “after three or four hours of talk,” he finally figured out that the chief’s daughter had been hit accidentally by an American artillery barrage meant to stop a Japanese armored column from escaping into the Zambales Mountains. “With that,” Lansdale concluded, “I took off my GI watch that I had and I strapped it on the wrist of the tribal president as an expression of an American’s sympathy about his daughter. He seemed pleased. I showed him how to wind the watch and how to listen to it. He didn’t know how to tell time but I showed him.”18
Thus began a long process that eventually resulted, with Lansdale’s encouragement, in the Philippine armed forces utilizing some of the Negritos as intelligence gatherers and scouts against the Communist rebels known as the Huks.
THE NEGRITOS were not the only Filipinos won over by Lansdale. So was practically everybody he met. One of his Filipino friends later said, “Ed had a way, he could make a friend of everybody except Satan, I think. And he was the one American that was liked by practically every Filipino.”19 An American correspondent in the Philippines noted that “he had a good way of talking with the Filipinos on the basis of man to man, no condescension, no talking down. They appreciated that after so many years of the Japanese and American colonials.”20
Lansdale amply returned their affection. “Filipinos and I fell in love with each other. Almost everything I did there was done with tremendous brotherly love,” he later said.21 But some Filipinos—and, more to the point, Filipinas—he loved more than others.