How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  In short, U.S. empire was being uprooted and Japanese empire laid down in its place. Filipinos no longer celebrated the Fourth of July or Occupation Day; they now observed the Emperor’s Birthday and December 8 (National Heroes Day). Rizal’s birthday, which Manuel Quezon had celebrated as Loyalty Day to the United States, now commemorated the expulsion of “Western imperialism”61 from Asia.

  Filipinos like Aguinaldo were pleased to see the United States finally ousted, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Even those on the U.S. stronghold of Corregidor had ample cause for resentment. As a young man, Manuel Quezon had languished for four months in a U.S. prison without ever facing charges.62 Carlos Romulo remembered how U.S. soldiers had sought to kill his father,63 how they had tortured his grandfather with the “water cure,” and how they had hanged his neighbor from a tree, Southern style. “I made up my mind to hate them as long as I lived,” a young Romulo had concluded.

  Quezon and Romulo eventually made peace with Western empire, but did others? In the late 1930s Romulo had toured Asia. Everywhere he went, he found “a sense of betrayal at white hands.”64 In British-owned Burma, the people he met seemed positively eager for a Japanese invasion. Weren’t they worried about how the Japanese would treat them? Romulo asked. “No change could be for the worse,” they replied.

  Japan latched on to the bitterness of the colonized. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the United States’ long history of empire, starting with the dispossession of North American Indians and moving through the Mexican War, the annexation of Spain’s colonies, and the Philippine War, right up to the scorched-earth policy adopted in the face of the Japanese invasion. “America has wasted your funds in the creation of grand boulevards and exclusive mountain resorts,”65 one Japanese writer added, gleefully rubbing salt into the wounds inflicted in the era of Daniel Burnham.

  Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.”66

  Yet white powers would never allow Asian independence, the Japanese insisted. It had to be seized. Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past,67 in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. With the most idealistic of the Allies unwilling to concede even the principle that all races deserved the same consideration, what were the chances that Asians would ever be accepted as equals?

  *

  A more pressing question was whether the Japanese could accept Filipinos as equals. The onset of Japanese rule did not bode well on that score. Japan’s first official proclamation after taking Manila was a threat: any hostility or resistance from Filipinos and their “whole native land”68 would be turned to “ashes.”

  In the second week, the military government specified seventeen acts punishable by death.69 They included rebelling, giving false information, damaging anything of military value (including clothing), concealing food, speaking ill of Japanese currency, disobeying orders, obstructing traffic, or acting in any way “against the interests” of the military. Even suggesting these acts was grounds for execution.

  “It was as if the Philippines had become one vast military prison,”70 one writer remembered. A diarist described Manila in the second month of Japanese rule: “Every day on my way to the office,71 I run across dozens of Filipinos who have been tied to posts as punishment for some trivial offense which they have committed. Usually the victims are black and blue or bleeding from the terrific lashings they have received.” Public beheadings, carried out on the spot and without a trial, were not uncommon.

  Filipinos quickly saw that Japan had come not to liberate the Philippines, but to ransack it. Just as Germany was caged in by neighboring countries, Japan was hemmed in by empires: the British Empire (Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong), the Dutch Empire (the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia), the U.S. Empire (the Philippines, Alaska, Hawai‘i, Guam), and China, in which every imperialist had a hand. The Japanese called this “ABCD encirclement” (American-British-Chinese-Dutch), and it meant that Japan’s access to oil,72 rubber, tin, and even food depended on foreign markets. The turbulent 1930s, which had shut down international trade, illustrated the danger in this. If Japan wanted its industrial economy to keep growing, it would need to take those colonies itself.

  The Philippines was a particularly plump target in this Japanese quest for Lebensraum. It stood right between Japan and the resource-rich colonies of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, its own large economy could be fed into the Japanese war machine.

  And it was. “The Japanese swarmed all over the Philippines like clouds of termites,”73 a Manila journalist recorded. Purchasing agents scoured the city for war matériel:74 iron, steel, copper, canvas, corrugated sheets, and machinery. Some factories were placed in Japanese hands; others were strip-mined, with their machines carted away—sometimes the entire factories were removed. Cars were confiscated in the cities, tractors in the country. By 1944, the Japanese were tearing down empty gas stations—the fuel had long since run dry—to get the iron rods embedded in their concrete walls.75

  The food was the most worrisome thing, though. Japan instituted a command economy, forcing farmers to sell their produce to the government, which would distribute it as rations. But the Japanese ate first, leaving little for Filipinos. And because the government paid farmers in near-worthless occupation currency, many simply abandoned their fields and fled to the cities. Others hid their crops from the government and sold to the black market. Either way, the consequence was hunger.

  To those with long memories, it must have felt a lot like 1899. Once again, an imperial power was interfering with the colony’s food supply. Once again, cholera struck Manila—a result of the social breakdown and the movement of people. And, once again, Filipinos fought back. Remnants of MacArthur’s surrendered forces and newly formed guerrilla armies harried the Japanese.

  As in 1899, guerrillas gathered in the places where governmental control was weakest. This meant the mountains and the island of Negros, where rebels established their own shadow government. They transferred Silliman University to the hills and ran it as a “jungle university”76 (after the war, Philippine universities accepted transfer credits from Jungle University). They established a currency board and printed their own money.

  The Japanese military, for its part, fell back on a painfully familiar set of repressive techniques.77 It blocked movement in and out of towns. It tortured suspects, using among its techniques the infamous “water cure.” And it established reconcentration zones.78

  Yet there was one trick Japan tried that the United States hadn’t. It decided to grant the Philippines independence. Not to promise independence—the United States had done that, eventually—but to actually grant it.

  On October 14, 1943, that’s what Japan did.

  About half a million people attended the celebration that day on the Luneta.79 Emilio Aguinaldo was there, carrying the tattered flag that he had once flown against the Spanish in 1898. So was his old comrade Artemio Ricarte, the Father of the Philippine Army, famous for having chosen exile over surrender. Together they raised a new flag, modeled on Aguinaldo’s original, in front of Juan Arellano’s Legislative Building. It was the first time the Philippine flag had been permitted to fly on its own.

  “The applause was deafening,”80 wrote Antonio Molina, who was in the crowd. Molina doubted that much would change. The Japanese army was staying on in the Philippines, though now technically as an “ally.” Everybody knew that the new government would follow Tokyo’s orders. Still, Molina could not deny an “irrepressible satisfaction upon seeing our national flag flutter alone, at long last.” As it climbed the pole, he wept.

  A new president was sworn in: Jose Laurel, a Yale-educated justice of the Philippine Supreme Court. His f
ather had died in a U.S. reconcentration camp.81 Laurel received a twenty-one-gun salute.82

  *

  Douglas MacArthur watched this unfold with grave concern. Japan’s military economy was nothing compared with that of the United States. In 1941, a year when the United States was at peace, it had produced more than five times as many aircraft and ten times as many ships as Japan had.83 But those aircraft and ships were mainly going to Europe.

  The reason was partly priority—the Roosevelt administration held fast to its “Germany first” strategy. But it was also geography. The distance from San Francisco to MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia was more than twice as far as from New York to England. And, whereas the Atlantic supply lines connected large, long-established ports such as New York and Liverpool, the Pacific lines had to rely on hastily developed ports, some built from scratch, including on far-flung Pacific locales such as Guadalcanal, Tutuila, Kwajalein, and Manus.

  Until all that was built, MacArthur had to make do with what he called “shoestring equipment.”84 He bellowed at Washington for its stinginess, to little effect.85 His air commander, who arrived in mid-1942, was shocked to discover a “pitifully small”86 air force awaiting him, with only six B-17s in operation.

  Allied plans called for a limited offensive against Japan, chipping away at it until Germany had been defeated. Even this was a daunting prospect at first. Japanese forces had not only taken the Philippines, they were expanding southward over the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Australia’s military planners, expecting invasion, prepared to sacrifice the north of the continent.87 MacArthur lacked the resources to roll back the Japanese and retake all the territory the Allies had lost.

  Instead, he became a genius of economy. He stopped playing Risk and started playing Go, leaping his units over Japanese positions. What MacArthur (along with Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific) had grasped was that, in an age of aviation and on a battlefield of islands, you didn’t have to maintain a continuous, football-scrimmage front. MacArthur could bypass Japanese strongholds, snip their supply lines, and leave them “pocketed and cut off from outside aid.”88

  He called it his “hit ’em where they ain’t—let ’em die on the vine”89 philosophy.

  It worked. MacArthur grumbled that it would work a hell of a lot better if Washington would give him a battleship, but his progress on the map was nevertheless steady—Guadalcanal (August 1942), Buna (November 1942), Cape Gloucester (December 1943), Los Negros and Manus (February 1944), Hollandia (April 1944)—as he bounded from victory to victory up New Guinea and the islands of the South Pacific. Nimitz, driving across the Pacific from Hawai‘i, did the same.

  The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in New Guinea. Richard Nixon served in air logistics in MacArthur’s theater. Gerald Ford gamely puttered around nearly every island group in the ocean on a light aircraft carrier. The twenty-year-old Lieutenant George H. W. Bush was shot down over Chichi Jima in the Bonins.90 Bush—the plane’s sole survivor—got rescued by a submarine. He was extremely lucky. Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.

  The point of this two-pronged offensive, however, was not to build presidential résumés. The point was to end the Pacific War by attacking Japan. Yet the island-hopping strategy had raised a vital question. The Allies could reach Japan without conquering every piece of land en route. So, which islands should they take and which should they leap over?

  More important, did they need to bother with the Philippines, where the Japanese had dug in? Why not take the southern Philippines and leave Luzon to the Japanese? Or skip the entire archipelago and take Taiwan, which was, after all, closer to Japan? By mid-1944, the highest-ranking men in the military inclined toward the Taiwan plan: Ernest King,91 chief of naval operations; Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces; and, with some vacillation, George Marshall, chief of staff of the army.

  To say that MacArthur disagreed would be putting it lightly. He was outraged. For him, the decision about which route to take was not merely military; it was moral. The Philippines was “American territory,” he fumed,92 where seventeen million people were “undergoing the greatest privations and sufferings because we have not been able to support or succor them.” So impassioned was MacArthur on this subject that Marshall felt compelled to warn him against allowing “personal feelings”93 to interfere with strategic decisions.

  The issue got thrashed out at a conference with Roosevelt in Honolulu in July 1944. MacArthur gave his all. Bypassing the Philippines, he insisted at great length, would be militarily wrong, psychologically wrong, politically wrong, and ethically wrong. He reminded Roosevelt of the Bataan soldiers languishing in enemy camps. He reminded him that Asians were watching how the United States treated its largest colony. And he reminded him of his pledge to pour the “entire resources” of the United States into rescuing the Philippines. “Promises must be kept,”94 he told the president.

  “Douglas, you win,”95 Roosevelt said. The question was not entirely put to rest at Honolulu—war planners would argue Taiwan versus the Philippines for another two months—but MacArthur had gotten through. He would, as promised, return to the Philippines.

  *

  What might that return look like? When Japan invaded the U.S. Pacific empire in 1941–42, the surrenders had come quickly—Guam gave up within hours, the westernmost Aleutians were taken without a fight. But there were two reasons to think that things might not be so easy going the other direction. First, Japan, unlike the United States, had fortified its frontline colonies. Second, Japanese military culture did not exactly encourage surrendering in the face of superior force.

  A hint of what awaited MacArthur could be had in the smaller Pacific territories the United States reconquered before reaching the Philippines. Under U.S. rule, Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians had been barely populated, treeless outposts, far from war planners’ machinations. Japan, by contrast, had turned them into battle stations. Hundreds of buildings—bases,96 workshops, bunkhouses, factories, a hospital, a bakery—supported thousands of troops. They were dug in and ready to fight.

  On Attu they did. When Allied forces moved to reclaim the island in 1943, the ensuing battle killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and wiped out nearly the whole Attu garrison of more than two thousand Japanese soldiers,97 who fought to the death. It was a high price to pay, on both sides, for an island whose prewar population had been less than fifty.

  U.S. commanders expected Kiska, which housed thousands of Japanese troops in its elaborate tunnel system, to be even worse. It turned out not to be. The night before the invasion, Japan’s forces had quietly abandoned the island and escaped. The only casualties were Allied soldiers who tripped mines or accidentally shot one another in the fog.

  No such escape was feasible from Guam, which the U.S. Marines attacked in the summer of 1944. The invasion was prefaced by thirteen days of aerial and naval attacks, a bombardment that reached “a scale and length of time never before seen in World War II,”98 as the Marine Corps’ official history put it. The alternating naval assaults and air raids struck Guamanians and Japanese alike.

  Fearing imminent death and worried that Guamanians might aid the enemy, the Japanese troops turned on the populace. Beheadings, rapes, and indiscriminate shooting were common. Japan’s soldiers marched the whole local population of some eighteen thousand to the south of the island, massacring many there. In the aftermath, a marine recalled encountering a pile of decapitated corpses: “The heads lay like bowling balls all over the place.”99

  Some fifteen thousand Japanese soldiers and hu
ndreds of Guamanians died. In retaking Guam, the U.S. military laid waste to Guam’s capital, bombing and shelling every major structure in the town: the museum, the hospital, the governor’s residence, the courthouse. The war destroyed some four-fifths of the island’s homes.100

  The United States then interned thousands of “liberated”101 Guamanians, over their objections, in camps while the navy tore down what remained of the capital to build a military base. It was yet another occasion when the United States interned its own people during the war.

  *

  The bloody fighting on Attu and Guam offered a worrying foretaste of what MacArthur might expect in the Philippines, the United States’ great abandoned colony. Things there were already rapidly falling apart. Nineteen forty-four was the year when the Japanese army stopped paying for food with its depreciated scrip and started seizing it outright.102 President Laurel declared a food crisis and ordered every adult under sixty to work eight hours a week increasing food production.103 By September, a diarist recorded “a noticeable decrease in the cat population”104 of Manila. By December, starved city dwellers were dropping dead in the streets.105

  As Japan’s imperial forces scraped the bottom of the barrel, the violence worsened. Claro Recto, the Philippines’ minister of culture, wrote a daringly frank letter to a Japanese general about it. He noted the routine military practices of “slapping Filipinos in the face,106 of tying them to posts or making them kneel in public, at times in the heat of the sun, or beating them—this upon the slightest fault, mistake or provocation.” Beyond these daily torments, there were “thousands of cases” of people “being either burned alive, killed at the point of bayonet, beheaded, beaten without mercy, or otherwise subjected to various methods of physical torture, without distinction as to age or sex.” Recto mentioned a massacre of one hundred in his hometown—part of Japan’s ongoing quest to extirpate guerrillas. But there were many other such events he could have mentioned, including a punitive expedition in the Sara district on Panay that killed twenty times that number.107