Behind Japanese Lines

by Ray C. Hunt

  It might be objected that questions of this sort worry only intellectuals and thus were irrelevant to my concerns as a leader of Filipino guerrillas, nearly all of whom were simple, untutored people. Not so. Uneducated people are not necessarily stupid or incapable of understanding abstractions; nor are they less concerned than the educated to act honorably. Most Filipinos regarded their president, Manuel Quezon, as a national hero. He spent most of the war, until his death, in the United States, from where he exhorted his countrymen to remain loyal to America. Meantime other prominent Filipino politicians collaborated with the Japanese and, at least in public, urged their countrymen to do likewise. Still others tried to steer a middle course. Ordinary Filipinos, like most Asians, thought that in a crisis loyalty to one’s own people should supersede loyalty to a particular political philosophy. In the world of deeds ordinary Filipino civilians were in a truly hopeless position, even worse than that of Europeans caught in the maelstrom of Nazis, Soviet communists, British, Americans, and their own divided resistance groups. The Filipinos were trapped, first of all, between the Japanese-sponsored Vargas or Laurel government in their homeland and the Quezon-Osmeña government-in-exile in the United States, each backed by a foreign army and each demanding their total allegiance. If they cooperated with the guerrillas, the Japanese killed them. If they worked with the Japanese, the guerrillas killed them. If they supported the Huks, they incurred the displeasure of all non-communist guerrillas. If they helped us USAFFE irregulars against the Huks, their lives were at once in danger from the communists. Much of the time from 1942 to 1945 large sections of Luzon resembled the State of Nature as envisioned by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: a grim locale where there existed a perpetual war of all against all, and where life was, in consequence, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  An all-too-typical illustration of this melancholy state of affairs once took place in Tayabas province. Guerrillas entered a town, assembled all the people in the village church, read off the names of those deemed pro-Japanese, and shot them. The Japanese soon heard of what had happened, assembled the survivors, and shot all those they considered pro-American. The surviving corporal’s guard fled to the hills.4

  Another increasingly difficult problem in the twentieth century has been the credibility of oaths. Most are couched, as they have been for centuries, in religious phraseology. Would religious people regard them as binding if they were not so phrased? But to non-religious people such terminology means little. Indeed, is there any cause that should convince a secular humanist that an oath ought to bind him unconditionally? Worse, in practice, how about oaths taken half-willingly and half under duress, as was the case in Germany when all army officers had to swear a personal oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, following which many of them became convinced that he was leading their nation to ruin?

  Many Filipinos, religious or not, were trapped in this morass. Consider the plight of a conscientious Filipino who had taken an oath of loyalty to the Philippine Commonwealth and to the United States before the war, perhaps on the occasion of joining the armed forces of either; after which he was induced to repudiate it and accept the Filipinoled collaborationist regime during the war; then required by the Japanese to swear fealty to Nippon; then compelled to cooperate with the Huks under threat of the torture and execution of his family; after which he escaped and joined an American guerrilla outfit in which he had to subscribe to American and Philippine Commonwealth oaths once more? What could he think of any solemn affirmation of loyalty when so many had been pressured out of him, when he did not know who would eventually win the war, and when he had no idea how his incompatible oaths and changes of front would be regarded by the eventual victors? The lot of ordinary Filipinos from 1941 to 1945 was not enviable.

  Historically, the usual response of the Philippine ruling elite to conquest has been to come to terms with the invader in order to retain their own influence and to spare the islands and their peoples. So it had been with the Spaniards before 1898 and with the Americans afterward. In 1941 most Filipinos did not regard the Japanese as a friendly people, or trust them, but they did regard them with respect. The traditional Filipino elite doubtless would have responded to Japanese conquest and occupation as their forefathers had done to Spaniards and Americans if only Japanese propaganda had been less crude and unconvincing, and Japanese conduct less beastly.

  Philippine President Manuel Quezon was a complex and “difficult” man. Intelligent, intensely ambitious, egotistical, mercurial, dictatorial, talkative, and flashy, and he was a politician of consummate skill though hardly the great statesman he thought himself to be. Before the war he had been publicly loyal to the United States and had taken American aid to build a Philippine army, but he had also anticipated many a Third World government of the postwar era by taking out some “insurance policies.” He accepted Japanese help in developing the Philippine economy, and he conducted secret talks with Tokyo that were discovered only after the war when American counterintelligence people went through Japanese foreign office files.5 When Quezon was with the beleaguered Filamerican forces on Corregidor in January 1942 and began to realize that the policy of the Roosevelt administration was to give priority to the European war, he flew into a rage and proposed that both America and Japan withdraw all their armed forces and bases from the Philippines and jointly guarantee Philippine neutrality, in return for which he would disband the Philippine army. He was gradually talked out of this by his own vice president Sergio Osmeña, and by General MacArthur, supported by many assurances from President Roosevelt. Quezon then wrote a letter to MacArthur, clearly intended for the eyes of Roosevelt as well, asserting that he had instructed several prominent Filipino politicians to stay behind and do whatever circumstances required of them to spare the Filipino people as much as they could in what would certainly be tough times ahead. Then Quezon and Osmeña went into exile in America, where Quezon broadcast to his people back home, “Do not despair, for your liberation is certain. . . . Keep faith with America, which has kept faith with every nation and especially with us”—a statement quite as embellished with “terminological inexactitudes”—as were many of Roosevelt’s pronouncements in the same era.6

  Of course, not all Filipinos were either pro-American or simply inclined to bend with the winds of fortune. In 1941 Emilio Aguinaldo and Artemio Ricarte were still alive. Aguinaldo had led Philippine resistance to the United States after 1898, and Ricarte had been the only Filipino officer involved in that insurrection who had refused to lay down his arms and swear allegiance to the United States. In World War II both acted in ways displeasing to America but not innately shameful. Aguinaldo, who had seemed to have made his peace with the United States, at once became pro-Japanese and helped his new friends keep the Philippines quiet but did so in an effort to secure better treatment for Filipinos under the occupation, a risky course that his countrymen could easily misunderstand and for which they might well consign him to a painful death if Japan lost the war.7 Ricarte had always been pro-Japanese. He had lived much of his adult life in Japan and had been treated well there. He simply remained loyal to his benefactors. He collaborated with them when he came back to the Philippines early in the war, and tried to use his influence with them to make life a bit easier for his countrymen.8

  More complex and important collaborators were the members of the Sakdal and Kalibapi movements. In the mid-1930s the Sakdalistas were merely an association of peasants in central Luzon who nourished the same grievances as those who supported the Hukbalahaps. They were led by Benigno Ramos, a frustrated Tagalog poet who hated Quezon, denounced governmental corruption, and demanded distribution of lands to peasants, the abolition of taxation, and immediate independence for the Philippines. The Sakdalistas were repressed harshly by the Philippine government. Ramos, an embittered man, fled to Japan. He returned with the Japanese conquerors and gave them Sakdal membership lists which enabled them to compel anyone whose name was on the lis
t to collaborate whether he wished to or not. Thus, mere membership in the Sakdalistas did not prove that one wanted to be pro-Japanese, though the Sakdalistas and their offspring, the Makapili, at times gave us guerrillas nearly as much trouble as the Huks.

  The Kalibapi (Association for Service to the New Philippines) was a political party organized by the Japanese in December 1942 to function in their puppet “Philippine Republic.” Many of its members had been Sakdals before the war, but the Japanese wanted a more impressive leader than Benigno Ramos and so chose as its director general an important prewar Commonwealth official noted for his fiery pro-Japanese speeches, Benigno Aquino. On the local level, the Kalibapi was a Japanese Neighborhood Association, the leaders of which divided every town into ten districts, each district into ten sections, and the sections into units of ten houses or families. The leader of each group was responsible for the conduct of everyone in that group. It was an effort, after the common totalitarian fashion of our century, to turn everyone into spies for the government.

  None of these groups collaborated enthusiastically enough to please the Japanese, so late in 1944 they organized the Makapili (League of Patriotic Filipinos). Nominally, it was headed by Ramos, Ricarte, and Pio Duran, an anti-Western Filipino intellectual, but it was actually answerable directly to the Japanese army. Though the numbers of the Makapili were never significant, the organization was dreaded because the Japanese used hooded individual members publicly to point out suspected guerrillas or Filipino civilians friendly to guerrillas.9

  There were also some collaborators who were mere profiteers, amoral self-seekers of the sort who proliferate in any time of political upheaval.

  Finally, there was a considerable group of educated Filipinos who were essentially fence sitters. They were not uncritical admirers of Japanese civilization, but they were respectful and envious of the accomplishments of modern Japan. They observed how a Nipponese ruling elite had managed to Westernize that nation and make it powerful without either succumbing to Western imperialism or losing their own domestic preeminence. This was impressive to those Filipinos who regarded people like themselves as the only possible rulers of their own country.

  Those Filipinos who eventually collaborated with their conquerors, either willingly or unwillingly, from whatever mixture of motives, have by now been praised, excused, denounced, and dissected in print so many times and in such detail that I cannot presume to add anything significant to the controversies that swirled about them for years. I did know two of them personally, though, Manuel Roxas and Ferdinand Marcos, and I can indicate how their actions and those of their colleagues appeared to me at the time and appear now, long afterward.

  Early in the war Tokyo began to search eagerly for a front man to run the Philippines during Japanese occupation of the islands. Ideally, this would be someone with sufficient brains and public credit to win his people away from their loyalty to the exiled Quezon, and to make it appear to the outside world that most Filipinos welcomed their new Japanese masters. They hoped their man would be Manuel Roxas, the highly intelligent prewar speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, but Roxas proved sly and slippery and for a long time managed to evade the Nipponese embrace.

  As second best they settled on a distinguished ex-Supreme Court justice, José Laurel, whom some guerrillas had tried to assassinate in June 1943. Probably because of this the Japanese assumed that Laurel was both more important and more pro-Japanese than was really the case.

  Estimates of Laurel vary widely. Partisans of the Left insist that Laurel was one of the worst of the collaborationists: a man who studied Bushido, expressed admiration for Japan before the war, and sent his sons to Nipponese schools; a hater of democracy who repressed guerrillas, recruited laborers to produce food for Japan, and freely employed the Sakadalistas and Makapili at the behest of his Japanese masters.10

  A more moderate vesion of the same basic view holds that, had he been a European, Laurel would have been called a fascist. He was a Filipino nationalist who hated colonialism. He was also anti-democratic: convinced that only a few people of superior character and acumen truly understand popular needs and are capable of ruling wisely. What he admired about the Japanese was much like what the Italian dictator Mussolini admired in the Germans: their efficiency, decisiveness, and authoritarian government; and in the Japanese case, their use of the emperor as a tool of social cohesion. Laurel thought his fellow Filipinos should work harder and accept discipline, regimentation, sacrifice, and service to the state. He overrated the efficiency of totalitarian countries, and assumed wrongly, or at least prematurely, that democracy is destined historically to be superseded by authoritarian governments everywhere. He regarded guerrilla resistance to Japan as harmful to the nation and did not believe it would have any effect on the outcome of the war. He regarded peace, order, and compliance with directives from above as essential to preserve Philippine society during foreign occupation.11

  Others, some admirers of Laurel, some merely neutral toward him, have seen him mostly as a victim of circumstances. In their view, to have refused to become president of the “Philippine Republic” would only have insured that someone else more pliable would have taken his place. If he had studied Japanese civilization and culture extensively, that did not necessarily mean that he was an admirer of Japan. He had studied Western philosophy, religion, and government, too. He admired Western technology but preferred Oriental virtues; he feared that American culture and foreign policy would ruin the Philippines; and he overestimated the good will of the Japanese toward Filipinos. He thought that America would eventually win the war but that this would take from five to ten years, and that soon after the war Japan would be strong again. Meantime, someone must protect the Filipino people as much as possible. To this end he implored both Premier Tojo and General Homma to treat Filipinos kindly and used his influence in various ways to save the lives of such prominent Filipinos as Manuel Roxas, Gen. Guillermo Francisco, chief of the Philippine Constabulary, and Gen. Vincente Lim, commander of the Forty-first Philippine Division on Bataan. (To be sure, Lim was eventually executed by the Japanese, but Laurel’s intervention saved him for a time.)

  Laurel wrote into the new Philippine constitution provisions that made it difficult for any Philippine government to declare war, and then when the Japanese did at last compel him to declare war against the United States he managed to evade conscripting any soldiers to fight it. He never lived in the Presidential palace. He shared food with his underlings, tried to hunt down bandits and looters, and managed to maintain covert contact with guerrillas. He was a hero, not a traitor.12

  Such was the man whom the Japanese in October 1943 made the first and only president of their personal political creation, the “Philippine Republic.”

  Whatever the worth of Laurel’s political ideas, whatever his motivation, a combination of misjudgments and bad luck made his task hopeless. Perhaps the fundamental difficulty was that most Filipinos did not share his cool, detached, rational assessment of the overall course of history, or of the Japanese occupation of the moment. Most Filipinos, and all guerrillas, even the Huks, wanted to fight the Japanese and throw them out of the islands forever. Laurel was simply out of touch with the people he sought to reform and protect. Moreover, he always wore around his neck the albatross of collaboration. When the Japanese undertook an extensive campaign of “pacification” against guerrillas in the fall of 1943, and Laurel dutifully urged us all to lay down our arms, some complied. Others complied formally, after which they went right back to the mountains, a solution that pleased everyone save the Japanese. The majority simply redoubled their determination to resist the invaders. Laurel also overestimated the credibility of his own regime in the world at large. The “Philippine Republic” was recognized only by Japan, Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

  Finally, Laurel overrated the strength and abilities of the Japanese. Tokyo professed to be in the process of establishi
ng an interdependent economic sphere in east Asia and the western Pacific, but such an enterprise could be held together only by a huge merchant fleet. By the end of 1944 the Allies had sunk over 80 percent of the prewar Japanese merchant marine. As their ships disappeared, Japanese troops in the Philippines had to get more and more of their food from the islands themselves. This ruined any chance that Laurel’s regime might have had to become popular, since he was no more able to deal successfully with the consequent food shortages among Filipinos than he had been to prevent the Japanese from taxing Filipinos to support the Nipponese war effort. Nowhere in Japan’s new empire were there enough capable technicians, managers, engineers, teachers, even propagandists, to meet the suddenly expanded needs.13 When this limitation was combined with the abominable behavior of so many Japanese troops, the popularity of Japan and any pro-Japanese regime inevitably plummeted.